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sj_zero | @sj_zero@social.fbxl.net

Author of The Graysonian Ethic (Available on Amazon, pick up a dead tree copy today)

Admin of the FBXL Network including FBXL Search, FBXL Video, FBXL Social, FBXL Lotide, FBXL Translate, and FBXL Maps.

Advocate for freedom and tolerance even if you say things I do not like

Adversary of Fediblock

Accept that I'll probably say something you don't like and I'll give you the same benefit, and maybe we can find some truth about the world.

Ah... Is the Alliteration clever or stupid? Don't answer that, I sort of know the answer already...

Sometimes when I'm depressed, I just enjoy the smell of some cocaine and I feel great!

You son of a bitch!!!!

I know it's molten rock, but I wonder how hot it actually is on top of the lava?

Huh. "Show me your octopussoir"

The big question is... It was strange, but was it effective...?

https://killedbygoogle.com/

The google graveyard. Why would anyone buy into any non-core part of their ecosystem?

I have a bad habit of drafting and redrafting posts long past the point that it's beneficial to do so, and in the process I end up cutting a lot of good ideas that probably should have stayed in.

The big thing that I didn't mention before that I should have is that we need to be very careful not to throw out something that's good because it can be used for evil. It is inarguable that there's a massive disconnect between the productivity of the common worker and the wages of the common worker. There is a graph that whatifalthist on YouTube routinely shows that shows the disconnect between wages and productivity that shows that despite being more productive than ever before, the common worker is getting wages that are not commensurate with that. So it's inarguable that the common man is getting screwed and inappropriate amounts of wealth and power are going to a tiny number of people.

That being said, that is the evil but the fact that something can result in evil doesn't make it inherently evil, especially when that same thing can and has resulted in some of the greatest good in history.

Proper capitalism is almost communistic. People only make money when things are working properly when they do something or provide something that other people want more than they want that money themselves. That's the only way to make a profit in such a situation is to help others.

A few of the wealthiest people on the face of the planet actually did get to their position at least initially by doing that. Jeff bezos for example really was instrumental in changing the world for a lot of people around the world. There's a lot of stuff that simply wasn't available to purchase at any price in a lot of areas, and suddenly with the help of Amazon it's a very reasonable price and two days shipping away.

On the other hand, there is an old saying that you can become a millionaire through honest hard work and innovation, but you can't become a billionaire. A lot of the people who became Rich beyond imagination were relying on systems that aren't fundamentally fair. The rules for a megacorp and a rules for startup, not to mention the rules for startup that isn't part of the blessed caste out of silicon valley are all quite different. I won't get into it because this post is already getting too long, but that unequal treatment is dangerous, and results in winners and losers being picked separately from merit. You end up with a sort of modern feudalism, with all powerful deities at the top, and abused serfs at the bottom, and God help you if you aren't even in the system.

Our society is one of the safest in the history of the world, and also one of the most paranoid in the history of the world. It's intuitive, but at the same time seems like a paradox: Why would we worry so much more when the risk of something happening is so much less?

I think it comes down to those incredible predictive brains we have. We have the world that is that we react to, then we have the world we predict that we can react to ahead of time. For those predictions to be acted upon, we need to consider the future more strongly than the present, or we'll just act on the present reducing the benefit of our predictive brains. As for how this happens, if we predict all the pain that a bad outcome would have, we can predict all that pain in a second, whereas if we experience that pain, it will be drawn out over a period of time.

That's how we end up with our overdeveloped sense of empathy as well. We care think about all the bad feelings of someone being mean to us in an instant instead of it being actually felt over a period of time.

The fact that we don't actually get hurt only makes things worse, because we continue to build and build and build how bad pain must be in our minds, anticipating a slap that will never come and becoming more terrified of it every moment. Meanwhile, 100 years ago kids dying was commonplace yet people just had more kids and were significantly less risk averse with each one.

It's almost like a reverse skinner box, the low random chance of pain causing us to go crazy like the low random chance of pleasure does.

🤔

So you're saying that by taking exlax I can improve my mental health?

I'm willing to give it a shot!

[6 months later]

Huh, it worked.

Something seriously fucked when a military that spends more than the next 20 combined runs out of bullets for a tiny war like this one.

Never say never.

There are cases where it's happened, but admittedly it's super rare.

If you expect everything I post is 100% serious, then you're going to be deeply disappointed.

Did you know that God didn't actually DDOS my servers?

Sorta seems like they should have seen that one coming, given what theogapp does...

The fact that both are crazy and making shit up doesn't mean facts don't exist.

Not really.

Not really. Especially given the post I made about 5 minutes ago about beliefs and testable predictions.

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