I wonder though if this framework helps explain the difference between "progressive" and "woke". The former is a spectrum that most westerners are somewhere on, the latter is where you reach a highly dogmatic, highly self-assured spot on the spectrum.
Most people, even a supermajority of ideological conservatives, want social progress in some form. Anyone can see things aren't perfect and want things to be better. It's when you know exactly what needs to be done and it makes you a better person than everyone else and anyone standing in your way is the devil that it becomes (to use a bad term in context) problematic.
Most people, even a supermajority of ideological conservatives, want social progress in some form. Anyone can see things aren't perfect and want things to be better. It's when you know exactly what needs to be done and it makes you a better person than everyone else and anyone standing in your way is the devil that it becomes (to use a bad term in context) problematic.
You touched on a paradox I found, that in a lot of ways wokeness is deeply, deeply conservative. There's an orthodoxy, and all that matters is that you follow the orthodoxy. Everything outside the orthodoxy must be rejected and silenced, and anyone who isn't strictly following orthodoxy must be rejected and silenced regardless of their alignment otherwise.
If progressivism is truly about challenging norms and fostering dialogue, then an orthodoxy should not exist. Instead, the rigidity undermines progressiveness by creating a new form of conservatism: a defense of the orthodox beliefs and existing hierarchies within the movement itself.
The foolish justification for this behavior they came up with of Popper's paradox of tolerance relies on answering a paradox with one answer or another without realizing that the nature of a paradox is such that there is no cut and dry black and white answer.
My criticism here of paradox also applies to the paradox I recognized, by the way. You can't change anything to resolve it in a simple black and white manner because the components that make up the paradox are required to have the thing in the first place and thus the question is complicated. Without some form of orthodoxy, progressive ideology that questions societal norms would immediately have to start questioning the societal norms it successfully installed, potentially just resulting in paralysis.
If progressivism is truly about challenging norms and fostering dialogue, then an orthodoxy should not exist. Instead, the rigidity undermines progressiveness by creating a new form of conservatism: a defense of the orthodox beliefs and existing hierarchies within the movement itself.
The foolish justification for this behavior they came up with of Popper's paradox of tolerance relies on answering a paradox with one answer or another without realizing that the nature of a paradox is such that there is no cut and dry black and white answer.
My criticism here of paradox also applies to the paradox I recognized, by the way. You can't change anything to resolve it in a simple black and white manner because the components that make up the paradox are required to have the thing in the first place and thus the question is complicated. Without some form of orthodoxy, progressive ideology that questions societal norms would immediately have to start questioning the societal norms it successfully installed, potentially just resulting in paralysis.
"Aru you makingu zu babies Turumpo?"
damnit Abe I told you last week I already have lots of kids.
"Maku zu baaabiiieessssuuuu"
damnit Abe I told you last week I already have lots of kids.
"Maku zu baaabiiieessssuuuu"
"And thus we powered our civilization for a thousand years just on redditor body fat"
Arguably most societies over millennia existed without financial products, particularly the current conception of them in forms like bitcoin and global prediction markets. Financial products in our current conception of them are, at the most charitable, only about 400 years old when the Dutch invented stock markets. Before that we might have had banks, loans, currency, and contracts, but that's when modern (in a literal sense) financial products were invented. Since World War 2, we've seen the invention of postmodern financial products; financial products totally disconnected from creating any sort of tangible good or service.
Bitcoin in particular is a poster child for this problem. You have a currency with a multi-billion dollar market cap that you can't use to buy most tangible goods and services in existence today.
Tesla is another example. While you might be tempted to believe that Elon Musk's Tesla is a company that became valuable by making cool things, you'd be mistaken. Tesla is the smallest car company on a public stock exchange by sales, and while most companies have multiple product categories, Tesla became incredibly valuable selling only passenger cars. Only in the past year did they even get a pickup truck model. Despite that, it's a company more valuable than the rest of the auto sector combined. Elon Musk didn't create an auto company, he created a financial instrument that routinely goes up.
When money ends up chasing games that play money instead of things that produce tangible goods and tangible services that people require, and actually starts to become a cancer, eating up good people and good resources that could have been spent on real wealth. Money going into things because they make money and nothing else is like an ouroboros trying to grow fat by eating its own tail. It may feel sated because it's belly is full, but in reality it slowly starves itself to death because while it consumes itself it uses up resources that are no longer being added to the system.
For this reason, a society that is so focused on financial products and so derisive of real manufacturing or other forms of production of tangible goods or services cannot last the Long haul, and I think we're seeing that right now because the actual quality of life of individuals is worse today than it was 25 years ago. Real incomes have been stagnant for a very long time, but moreover the lack of real tangible productivity has meant that the tangible things that we have left has become increasingly expensive. Because we have entire industries full of people working at desks pushing piles of beans around metaphorically, we aren't building enough homes and so an entire generation, arguably multiple generations of people are completely priced out of the housing market for the rest of their lives. Food is going up in price, which has caused instability in developing nations. Energy has become scarcer, and people always focus on the idea of energy as frivolous but people need to eat their homes or they die. Perhaps most importantly, the spiritual toll that comes from a civilization that knows that they don't actually do anything is cataclysmic.
Now I don't want you to get me wrong here, I'm not saying that we don't need financial products or that I want Bitcoin or prediction markets to disappear, and certainly not just because they're part of a certain product category. What I am saying is our priorities are completely misplaced. I think that it will mean the end of our society and our civilization if we don't course correct. We're already starting to see it where other civilizations that aren't like ours are starting to be much more dominant culturally and in terms of tangible power of us. The amount of sleep lost over the island of Taiwan (that actually manufactures important stuff) should be an eye-opener for all of us.
The realignment would require focusing less on postmodern financial products that are removed entirely from tangible goods or services, and instead focus on financial products which enable efficiency, innovation, or risk mitigation in ways that indirectly support tangible industries. In the case of something like bitcoin, it would require actually solving the problems it has to make it a viable alternative to fiat or commodity currencies in day to day use. This would inherently free up resources tied up in postmodern financial products and would lead to a reallocation of resources towards things with tangible productivity, which ought to be the final goal of financial products in general.
There are two types of change we need to see: Cultural and legislative.
Culturally, we need to see a move away from valuing making money by making money and towards making money by doing something of tangible value in the world. Bitcoin's current market cap is based entirely on people gambling that they will own a piece of all the money on earth when more people use bitcoin, and that's not a healthy attitude or a moral one. The reason China is so powerful and Taiwan is so important is that they make tangible goods people around the world use, and that's because of a cultural philosophical difference in the way Confuscian thought which even in Communist China dominates the mindset in the region. That philosophy holds doing real stuff as important for a harmonious society. We need the same viewpoint in our society or the ouroborus will starve eating its own tail.
Legally, we need to make moves to reintroduce natural forces that would limit the size of a company. Part of the reason everyone is trying to create monopolies they can price as if they'll own the market always and forever is that huge megacorps are so competitive despite being so damn inefficient. Eliminating corporate personhood would be one good step, as well as setting up fines or punishments for crimes to be proportional to the size of the company's market cap so as your company's size grows the risk of gaps in compliance and the like grow disproportionately. We might want to consider for particularly heinous crimes a "corporate jail sentence" where all the assets in a company are frozen and cannot be used for a certain period of time, and a "corporate death sentence" where a corporate charter is revoked entirely and the company assets are individually put up for auction. The idea would be that as companies grow, the risk of running the company grows so much that it doesn't make sense to bother taking on multiplied risk for additional gains.
In a sane world, Tesla should be priced for what it is -- a barely profitable lower tier auto manufacturer. In a sane world, Bitcoin should be priced for what it is -- a rarely used computer science experiment whose actual utility is fairly minimal -- I'd be surprised if more than a few million dollars a year in bitcoin is used as an actual currency, so its market cap should reflect that reality, not the guess that one day it will be all the money.
Bitcoin in particular is a poster child for this problem. You have a currency with a multi-billion dollar market cap that you can't use to buy most tangible goods and services in existence today.
Tesla is another example. While you might be tempted to believe that Elon Musk's Tesla is a company that became valuable by making cool things, you'd be mistaken. Tesla is the smallest car company on a public stock exchange by sales, and while most companies have multiple product categories, Tesla became incredibly valuable selling only passenger cars. Only in the past year did they even get a pickup truck model. Despite that, it's a company more valuable than the rest of the auto sector combined. Elon Musk didn't create an auto company, he created a financial instrument that routinely goes up.
When money ends up chasing games that play money instead of things that produce tangible goods and tangible services that people require, and actually starts to become a cancer, eating up good people and good resources that could have been spent on real wealth. Money going into things because they make money and nothing else is like an ouroboros trying to grow fat by eating its own tail. It may feel sated because it's belly is full, but in reality it slowly starves itself to death because while it consumes itself it uses up resources that are no longer being added to the system.
For this reason, a society that is so focused on financial products and so derisive of real manufacturing or other forms of production of tangible goods or services cannot last the Long haul, and I think we're seeing that right now because the actual quality of life of individuals is worse today than it was 25 years ago. Real incomes have been stagnant for a very long time, but moreover the lack of real tangible productivity has meant that the tangible things that we have left has become increasingly expensive. Because we have entire industries full of people working at desks pushing piles of beans around metaphorically, we aren't building enough homes and so an entire generation, arguably multiple generations of people are completely priced out of the housing market for the rest of their lives. Food is going up in price, which has caused instability in developing nations. Energy has become scarcer, and people always focus on the idea of energy as frivolous but people need to eat their homes or they die. Perhaps most importantly, the spiritual toll that comes from a civilization that knows that they don't actually do anything is cataclysmic.
Now I don't want you to get me wrong here, I'm not saying that we don't need financial products or that I want Bitcoin or prediction markets to disappear, and certainly not just because they're part of a certain product category. What I am saying is our priorities are completely misplaced. I think that it will mean the end of our society and our civilization if we don't course correct. We're already starting to see it where other civilizations that aren't like ours are starting to be much more dominant culturally and in terms of tangible power of us. The amount of sleep lost over the island of Taiwan (that actually manufactures important stuff) should be an eye-opener for all of us.
The realignment would require focusing less on postmodern financial products that are removed entirely from tangible goods or services, and instead focus on financial products which enable efficiency, innovation, or risk mitigation in ways that indirectly support tangible industries. In the case of something like bitcoin, it would require actually solving the problems it has to make it a viable alternative to fiat or commodity currencies in day to day use. This would inherently free up resources tied up in postmodern financial products and would lead to a reallocation of resources towards things with tangible productivity, which ought to be the final goal of financial products in general.
There are two types of change we need to see: Cultural and legislative.
Culturally, we need to see a move away from valuing making money by making money and towards making money by doing something of tangible value in the world. Bitcoin's current market cap is based entirely on people gambling that they will own a piece of all the money on earth when more people use bitcoin, and that's not a healthy attitude or a moral one. The reason China is so powerful and Taiwan is so important is that they make tangible goods people around the world use, and that's because of a cultural philosophical difference in the way Confuscian thought which even in Communist China dominates the mindset in the region. That philosophy holds doing real stuff as important for a harmonious society. We need the same viewpoint in our society or the ouroborus will starve eating its own tail.
Legally, we need to make moves to reintroduce natural forces that would limit the size of a company. Part of the reason everyone is trying to create monopolies they can price as if they'll own the market always and forever is that huge megacorps are so competitive despite being so damn inefficient. Eliminating corporate personhood would be one good step, as well as setting up fines or punishments for crimes to be proportional to the size of the company's market cap so as your company's size grows the risk of gaps in compliance and the like grow disproportionately. We might want to consider for particularly heinous crimes a "corporate jail sentence" where all the assets in a company are frozen and cannot be used for a certain period of time, and a "corporate death sentence" where a corporate charter is revoked entirely and the company assets are individually put up for auction. The idea would be that as companies grow, the risk of running the company grows so much that it doesn't make sense to bother taking on multiplied risk for additional gains.
In a sane world, Tesla should be priced for what it is -- a barely profitable lower tier auto manufacturer. In a sane world, Bitcoin should be priced for what it is -- a rarely used computer science experiment whose actual utility is fairly minimal -- I'd be surprised if more than a few million dollars a year in bitcoin is used as an actual currency, so its market cap should reflect that reality, not the guess that one day it will be all the money.
I will say, really depends what that bolt is.
In heavy industry sometimes something can be insanely pricey because it's very specific and made of exotic materials. 45 dollars seems like a lot for a bolt, but if it's for a particular aerospace application maybe it actually makes sense?
In heavy industry sometimes something can be insanely pricey because it's very specific and made of exotic materials. 45 dollars seems like a lot for a bolt, but if it's for a particular aerospace application maybe it actually makes sense?
Ah, I see now. I have a gold version of the same reproduction hanging on my wall at work. The silver ones look way more like the actual thing.
What good is a post apocalypse when you're living in the ruins of a once great civilization brought low by hubris where people eke out survival in a barren world where you have to expect you'll be stabbed in the back by anyone you meet before you strap on the VR goggles?
Excuse me, I will happen to inform you that I am in fact a multi trillionaire in Zimbabwe dollars already. I have every denomination from $1 to $100 trillion. I can buy not one, but one and a half loaves of bread!
I remember reading an article around 1999 about evidence of all kinds of people in the America before the proto-siberians came across and basically took everyone else out.
It seems obvious that Polynesians would absolutely have had the capacity to get to America at some point. A man in a boat who only planned to go fishing for the evening ended up spending 438 days drifting across the pacific ocean and landed on an island in oceana, so for a seafaring civilization should have been able to make the same journey over thousands of years, even if only by accident.
It seems obvious that Polynesians would absolutely have had the capacity to get to America at some point. A man in a boat who only planned to go fishing for the evening ended up spending 438 days drifting across the pacific ocean and landed on an island in oceana, so for a seafaring civilization should have been able to make the same journey over thousands of years, even if only by accident.
Progs who want to ban unpopular speech should beware: many of the things they say are deeply unpopular so the sword would cut in your direction first.
I managed to find one place on the Internet that still had copies of some recordings of an Austrian band that I'm pretty sure has been broken up for 20 years and was never well known to begin with.
Kind of a blast from the past finding the music. I used this song as one of the intros to a QBXL Audio edition back in the day.
Kind of a blast from the past finding the music. I used this song as one of the intros to a QBXL Audio edition back in the day.