as alive as you need me to be
Its because most people have a childish understanding of complex issues that basically boils down to 'thing either bad or good', 'thing either perfect or evil'.
Fanboy/girlism applies to sociopolitical idologies too.
Its easier to perform purity testing to establish yourself as a morally/logically consistent person, its easier to criticize flaws...
... than it is to realize the fundamental strategy that has to be involved in achieving any kind of change from the world as it is, to the world as you'd prefer it to be.... than it is to think about broad patterns underlying decision making, as well as what those broad patterns could lead to, in a complex world with other actors who have other ideologies/behavior patterns.
You can argue that this kind of fast-food opinion/judgement formation is itself a personality aspect caused or exacerbated by the instant gratification of modern digital hypercapitalism.
Like, I don't think Valve or Gabe are perfect moral actors, I don't agree with literally everything they do or espouse.
Lootbox gambling is in fact bad, and that system needs to be at bare minimum, seriously reformed or reimagined. IMO, any game that a kid is capable of playing should not directly resemble the inconsistent reward structure of a slot machine, when real money can exist as either an input or output.
Of course ... if you applied that principle consistently, all gacha games should either be destroyed or massively reworked, which is literally half of the video game industry's revenue. I hold that position... if you criticize Valve on these lines, as I do... you should also hold the position that your gacha waifu pull is a moral abomination.
But... on net? In the big picture? Nearly every other major or even notable actor in the space is morally atrocious in comparison to them, and many things that Valve does are effective counter pressures to those much more atrocious things.
Yeah that's a whole insane aspect of this to me:
So many people will have whatever set of values, and then also a 6 or greater figure salary... from one of the main causes of the problem.
Now in most instances it would be stupid to criticize a low income wage slave for Walmart or Starbucks for being a low income wage slave. You should do the opposite, sympathize with them, help them form a union, etc.
But the tech industry?
These people are much more likely to actually have the means to exit gracefully, downsize their life a bit, and not be a hypocrite.
'Just following orders' didn't work at Nuremberg, and it doesn't work for me either.
We are so far beyond 'the people who did this have names and addresses'.
The people who fucking did this are the most famous people on the planet, at this point.
Stop being afraid.
Stop acting like anything they can bring on you is legitimate or justified.
Like Howard Beale, I want you to get mad.
Stop complaining on the internet, and start protesting loudly at every single physical place these people ever are.
You'll get arrested. You might end up put away for weeks or months... but those penalties will only get worse, the more power they accumulate, while we all just sit back and bitch about, uselessly.
They are the system.
There is no 'safe' way, according to the system, to meaningfully challenge it.
Actually become ungovernable, instead of just being fucking catty on Twitter!
Yep.
Dumb idiot fundamentalist white racists continue to be dumb idiot fundamentalist white racists.
They are not very hard to please, because their brains operate on 100 unspoken and unexamined double standards... you just need to not trigger any of their massive 'icks', and their brains will default to allying with you, GodFearing White Christian Man, because they are taught to conform and do magical thinking to justify their actions.
They have no moral problem doing horrible things for God. They'll tell you the terrible things are terrible, but they're less terrible than a world that doesn't have Republican Jesus in charge.
They don't actually believe in democracy, they never have, they just pretend they do, when either they need to, or thats a useful rhetorical angle in an argument.
No, no he's not.
JD has been a slimy political creature the entire time, nothing that is currently happening is surprising to him.
He'll be cast as the competent one, the reasonable one, in contrast to Trump, the well-intentioned but mentally declining GodKing.
The Republican talking heads will all say they're not MAGA anymore, not even Republican anymore, some of them.
But, most of them, by the time 2028 comes around, will rally around JD the competent and reasonable one, in contrast to... whoever else, the insane radical trans communist that hates God and white people, and kills babies.
This shit is amazingly predictable, works like this everytime... they'll always fall in line or make a show of holding their nose, and vote for the person that will be pro-white, pro-christian, anti-abortion, and pro-business.
All JD has to do is perform a semi convincing, semi-classy/polite framing of Israel as an ungrateful, wasteful, reckless ally.
That's it.
I'm from his kind of people. White, male, raised on Rush Limbaugh on AM radio in the truck, everywhere, all the time.
Fortunately for me, I was more curious about the world and fundamentally kind to other people than the vast majority of those I grew up around.
... But this is what will happen, they'll 'rehabilitate' JD so well that they'll look at you like you're crazy if you think that was even a thing that happened.
Holy shit Mitnick is such a legend, goddamn.
You can just aggressively shame them, its fine.
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Jokes on you, the universe only has one extremely busy electron.
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That goddamned orbiting teapot.
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Yeah haha!
I had to uh, frame shift my context for vocab... yes, that makes much more sense than... attempting to create a philosophically perfect example of a swiss chocolate, in a lab, hahaha!
How do we empirically measure a qualia, anyway?
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... Ok.
That ... actually makes sense.
I must note that, not being a chemist or lab tech of any kind, my initial read of 'ideal substance' was platonic ideal... and I was going to ask some questions about that, but... not what you meant.
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bounces grimy rubber mouse ball off the back of your head
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Wait.
Is... does your lab setup just include this as, like... you're just in very fancy box with a treat dispenser for when you perform well?
Or is management maybe using the paradigm of treats are always available at regular intervals, unless you fuck something up, then, no treats?
Are we running a negative punishment or positive reward kind of lab here?
I mean yeah, it would/could just be the inverse of what millenials/zoomers grew up with: 'you have to
go to collegelearn a skilled trade if you want to have a decent living!'Hard to forecast precisely how strong the effect would be, but absolutely yeah, if a bunch of people flood into a specific category of labor... they will on aggregate depress their own wages.
... This is why the luddites smashed things.
Partially because the machines actually produced inferior output products, mostly because their proliferation caused mass unemployment/immiseration.
A society that wants to technologically progress must also socially progress, otherwise, you're just building a tinder box.
Oh I mean, I was trying to use the grammar you used but ok then sure.
So in warfare, and really just most of life in general, there's this concept called proportionality.
If somebody mildly slaps you, pulling out your CC pistol and shooting them in the face is ... a disproportianate response.
Hamas has no capacity to summon hundreds of aerial bombing sorties and hundreds of cruise missile strikes, a day, repeatedly, in an ongoing basis.
Uh ok, next... states do not voluntarily disintegrate themselves, because they do things you don't like.
Next next... part of the MOU was the US would lift its blockade. So, if the US reverts to enacting a blockade, that... will make it so that a ceasefire and peace cannot happen, because thats part of the MOU that the US and Iran agreed to 48 hrs ago.
If you think that's Trump's actions have been consistent, uh frankly you are a total idiot who does not know what that word means... and how often in the past 3 months, Trump has said and done near totally opposed, opposite things, every other day.
He has only been consistent in that he consistently flip flops in the extreme.
We are starting the war to overthrow the regime!
We're doing this for America!
The Kurds are gonna revolt!
Peace is almost here!
We're energy independent so oil being blocked is no big deal!
I'm gonna destroy an entire civilization!
Look, I'm Jesus!
Praise be to Allah!
The same regime is in place but we also did regime change.
Peace is almost here!
I'm double blockading the blockade of the Strait!
Actually we started this because Israel told me to.
Peace is almost here!
We have 4 months untill we run out of oil reserves.
... etc.
If you think that is 'consistent', you're either developmentally delayed, or schizophrenic.
He's literally now said 'we are on the verge of a peace deal' at least 39 times now.
Iran close strait because Israel+US launch massive, persistent, unprovoked assault.
Unprovoked assault kills many civillians, much civillian infrastructure, much war crime.
Now, Trump want quit, go home, maybe, because strait closed mean world economy die, and US is part of world.
Trump try make Israel stop attacking place Iran not want Israel attack. Israel not listen, get big mad.
Trump get big mad that Israel big mad.
Trump now say 'strait closed by ME, actually.'
Trump maybe change mind in 24, 48 hrs, who know, he very erratic, not have plan.
What do you mean 'deal with Baulmol's cost disease'?
You mean general, broad inflation, right?
You're worried that non-automatable low wages jobs will continue to be non-automatable low wage jobs, but slightly less low wage?
You're worried that jobs tend to need to be done by people who can afford to be alive?
He is desperately rhetorically flailing, trying to pitch the idea that temporary demand in construction of data centers = job creation.
Despite that the entire point of an AI data center is to automate away 100x to 100,000x as many jobs, permanently, as will actually exist for maybe 18 months, to build the thing.
Its a nakedly bad faith line of bullshit, literally insultingly stupid to anyone that's taken a year of macro econ.
Even if you build the datacenters, ... the amount of power needed for them would be roughly equivalent to building the entire electrical power infrastructure of Germany, and that would need to be done in 18 months.
Conpletely impossible, that's like 10 years of the world's current production rate of power transformers, in 18 months.
These guys would need a top down command economy and 5 year plans to do this, and they do not have that, so they're basically just pretending they do. When it becomes evident that they were bullshitting, they'll try to say 'well thats how things should have been the whole time, with me in charge of everything!'
Delusional.
Hope everyone is ready for tens of millions of people to starve to death next year.
Modern agriculture needs fertilizer.
Something like 1/4 of the world's fertilizer currently isn't moving through the Strait.
Trump and Bibi are going for all time mass murder high scores.
Honestly, I don't see how this outcome can be avoided without Trump dying, one way or another... he is literally too much of a demented, senile, petulant man baby to do anything other than throw temper tantrums and demand praise.
He's predictably unable to admit an actual mistake, allow an insult to his ego.
JD on the other hand is proving to be an actually more competent fascist, and is currently laying the groundwork for media-spinning Israel as an out of control, ungrateful ally, to the MAGA base.
You know, basically the same shit he's done with Ukraine, NATO, etc.
If Trump can be prevented from publically existing, saying things... President Vance at least probably could figure out how to reorient the situation into...
'yep uh sure we uh, yep, mission accomplished, god rest Trump's soul, his final amazing plan was in fact awesome, so awesome that its done now, now its time to come home. but! israel is not satisfied with the glorious victory of dear leader trump, and now threatens to undermine the hard fought and well won new foundations of peace and stability in the region, so we must now ask ourselves, as Americans... of what benefit is continued conflict?'
Something like that. He's slimy enough and well composed enough that he could sell something like that.
But its almost certainly impossible to do this if Trump is still alive / allowed to make basically any decisions and also say things outloud.
Like really, this is pretty much Soviet era inner party politics around the time of Stalin's death.
EDIT:
And, seemingly on cue, to help further my argument...
Some hours after I made this comment originally, Vance and Kushner are in Switzerland, at the 'peace summit'... and Trump makes some comments about how the Iranian delegation better 'shape up', or they 'won't even fucking making it back home'.
Yep, international peace summit in the world famous neutral zone of Switerzland, and Trump is threatening to assasinate the Iranian delegation.
In response to this, the Iranian delegation reportedly left the premises of the building the negoations were taking place at, in protest.
So uh yeah... yep... pretty sure Trump needs to die, as a prerequisite for any possible actual end to this entire situation.
And, perhaps ironically... that's kinda part of the point.
Valve literally presents the Steam Machine as a possible gaming device for the open ecosystem they 'religiously' believe in.
But not the only possible gaming device.
The original idea of the Steam Machine, over a decade ago, wss that it would basically be a performance and component spec standard, basically just a known quantity of kinds of hardware that they could say 'Steam and most games on it will run on something that meets these standards!'
There actually were a number of pc builders that did their own attempt at making their own version of a 'Steam Machine'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine?wprov=rarw1
Valve is here, now, doing basically the same thing, they just... literally built their own benchmark as an exemplar device, and also now have an operating system to actually center the entire concept around.
I think they'd be greatly pleased if this new Steam Machine, version 2, actually spurred on other manufacturers to make their own... just like how Valve keeps working to make SteamOS work well on other handheld PCs, made by other manufacturers.