Who said a nation can only be wealthy with oil?
A nation requires access to energy, but you can access energy using methods other than just having oil. Free markets are useful for that.
Unfortunately, the USA, China, and Japan are also all inconvenient examples of economic success, since they all became "rich" in part by overwhelming deficit spending and central economic planning.
The problem is that eventually the amount of growth you get for the money slows and you're in a situation like Japan -- they're 30 years into a "lost decade", rates stuck at 0%, and the national debt is massive.
A nation requires access to energy, but you can access energy using methods other than just having oil. Free markets are useful for that.
Unfortunately, the USA, China, and Japan are also all inconvenient examples of economic success, since they all became "rich" in part by overwhelming deficit spending and central economic planning.
The problem is that eventually the amount of growth you get for the money slows and you're in a situation like Japan -- they're 30 years into a "lost decade", rates stuck at 0%, and the national debt is massive.
Thanks!
It's nuts thinking about how quickly time goes. I published that right before my son was born (which was a good thing because I now realize finishing the publishing with a newborn baby in the house was never going to happen), he's almost 4 now.
It's nuts thinking about how quickly time goes. I published that right before my son was born (which was a good thing because I now realize finishing the publishing with a newborn baby in the house was never going to happen), he's almost 4 now.
My first book is called The Graysonian Ethic: Lessons for my unborn son. It's a book of different essays with life lessons for my son (who is now born, of course).
My second just got released this month, it's called Future Sepsis. It's a speculative fiction/science fiction book about four people from 2024 who wake up in 2124 and have to navigate a world that's different than ours. Two examples of the changes are that (at least in this location) religion is once again a much more central part of social and civic life, and education has been totally rewired to try to form virtuous people rather than people with diplomas, but there's a lot of differences that are revealed over time.
My third book was mostly completed during the second, it's the philosophical underpinnings of the second book. I don't have a title for it yet, but the working title is "Meditations on post-metamodern superpositional epistemology". It started off as some appendixes to the second book, but I realized I had almost generated as many words in that as in the book proper and I didn't think that made sense to include by itself since a lot of people wouldn't be that interested in a bunch of esoteric discussions about a potential system of thought that might surpass postmodernism or metamodernism. I'm adding some work that's going to tie into a Future Sepsis sequel.
My second just got released this month, it's called Future Sepsis. It's a speculative fiction/science fiction book about four people from 2024 who wake up in 2124 and have to navigate a world that's different than ours. Two examples of the changes are that (at least in this location) religion is once again a much more central part of social and civic life, and education has been totally rewired to try to form virtuous people rather than people with diplomas, but there's a lot of differences that are revealed over time.
My third book was mostly completed during the second, it's the philosophical underpinnings of the second book. I don't have a title for it yet, but the working title is "Meditations on post-metamodern superpositional epistemology". It started off as some appendixes to the second book, but I realized I had almost generated as many words in that as in the book proper and I didn't think that made sense to include by itself since a lot of people wouldn't be that interested in a bunch of esoteric discussions about a potential system of thought that might surpass postmodernism or metamodernism. I'm adding some work that's going to tie into a Future Sepsis sequel.
We don't talk about this enough.
Daycare can have a place in society, but the idea you'd work full time so you can afford to pay for childcare so you can work full time is insanity.
Daycare can have a place in society, but the idea you'd work full time so you can afford to pay for childcare so you can work full time is insanity.
One of the most interesting things in contemporary discourse is there a discussion of capitalism.
When the concept of capitalism came about, it was in the throes of the industrial revolution. Employers really did have disproportionate power over the people working for them, and at the time the state was extremely weak. These ideas first began being discussed in an era where the French revolution had started and ended, and it looked as if the concept of an aristocracy was going away forever to be replaced by business owners.
The problem is, time moves on and it isn't like that today.
Among the things that have happened since the French revolution: the holy Roman empire collapsed and was replaced by a nation state called Germany. The concept of nationalism Rose. It was a century of relative peace in Europe. Those are Russia was murdered and the Communists took over that country. Nationalists from the Balkans murdered a German aristocrat causing a series of alliances to collapse upon themselves, resulting in a World war. That World war ended. Soldiers who were promised things during that World war ended up having major effects on the world including the bonus army who marched on Washington and German soldiers who ultimately took over the German government to form the third Reich.
There was a world war triggered over that. A coalition of Germany, Italy, and Japan lost that war. The world economy and world political system was fundamentally rewritten. There was a cold war between the two remaining superpowers, and the communists ultimately lost. China became communist then became more like authoritarians with some markets. The entire labor movement happened fundamentally changing the role of labor.
Meanwhile, people keep talking like the same capitalism that existed immediately following the industrial revolution was still in effect. It's absurd when you realize the entire world is different than back then.
In Marx's time, the state was almost non-existent, and capital controlled our lives (and by the way capital was not a very nice benefactor of the working class), but more importantly the state was tiny -- 3-5% of GDP, providing essentially no services besides basic police and military.
As well, the economy of that era largely no longer exists in the west. Factories are generally a relic relegated to developing nations. Company towns no longer exist. Cities like Sheffield which used to be titans of industry simply don't have those factories anymore. I have cutlery from the factories of the 1970s, which no longer exist. England is in fact a poorer country outside of London, the seat of government.
Some people point to corruption like the relationship between politicians and businessesmen as evidence capital still dominates. This is ahistorical and gets it backwards: in eras that were definitely not capitalism, the power you needed to convince was the government, not capital. You try to corrupt where the power lies. Today, that is the state.
It's always important to remember that virtually every one of the richest people on earth today isn't rich because they sold a great product everyone loved, but because they got in bed with government and did what government asked. Elon Musk may have 250 billion in net worth, but virtually nobody owns his cars. He got rich doing what the state told him to do. Bezos and Zuckerberg are both products of a massive public works project, the internet. Oil magnates sell to governments (the US government is the largest purchaser of fossil fuels on Earth, and the military industrial complex works to secure their military supplies). When half the economy is the state, it's a gravity well that pulls everything in.
The people still talking about capitalism as if such a beast still exists today are tilting at windmills. They will ultimately be just as successful as Don Quixote, since just like that character, it is no longer an era of dragons and knights, of damsels in distress and quests. The world has moved on, and those models no longer apply.
I can't get too deep into it because I'm still working it out for my next book, but today's system to me is either a modernist liberalism where previous iterations were more pre-modern, or postmodernist liberalism. No matter what, it went from a part of a more pluralistic world to a totalizing system that tears down anything else. This new form of liberalism doesn't try to protect existing rights but give new rights to people by taking from others, and in so doing the leviathan of the state grows more powerful.
When the concept of capitalism came about, it was in the throes of the industrial revolution. Employers really did have disproportionate power over the people working for them, and at the time the state was extremely weak. These ideas first began being discussed in an era where the French revolution had started and ended, and it looked as if the concept of an aristocracy was going away forever to be replaced by business owners.
The problem is, time moves on and it isn't like that today.
Among the things that have happened since the French revolution: the holy Roman empire collapsed and was replaced by a nation state called Germany. The concept of nationalism Rose. It was a century of relative peace in Europe. Those are Russia was murdered and the Communists took over that country. Nationalists from the Balkans murdered a German aristocrat causing a series of alliances to collapse upon themselves, resulting in a World war. That World war ended. Soldiers who were promised things during that World war ended up having major effects on the world including the bonus army who marched on Washington and German soldiers who ultimately took over the German government to form the third Reich.
There was a world war triggered over that. A coalition of Germany, Italy, and Japan lost that war. The world economy and world political system was fundamentally rewritten. There was a cold war between the two remaining superpowers, and the communists ultimately lost. China became communist then became more like authoritarians with some markets. The entire labor movement happened fundamentally changing the role of labor.
Meanwhile, people keep talking like the same capitalism that existed immediately following the industrial revolution was still in effect. It's absurd when you realize the entire world is different than back then.
In Marx's time, the state was almost non-existent, and capital controlled our lives (and by the way capital was not a very nice benefactor of the working class), but more importantly the state was tiny -- 3-5% of GDP, providing essentially no services besides basic police and military.
As well, the economy of that era largely no longer exists in the west. Factories are generally a relic relegated to developing nations. Company towns no longer exist. Cities like Sheffield which used to be titans of industry simply don't have those factories anymore. I have cutlery from the factories of the 1970s, which no longer exist. England is in fact a poorer country outside of London, the seat of government.
Some people point to corruption like the relationship between politicians and businessesmen as evidence capital still dominates. This is ahistorical and gets it backwards: in eras that were definitely not capitalism, the power you needed to convince was the government, not capital. You try to corrupt where the power lies. Today, that is the state.
It's always important to remember that virtually every one of the richest people on earth today isn't rich because they sold a great product everyone loved, but because they got in bed with government and did what government asked. Elon Musk may have 250 billion in net worth, but virtually nobody owns his cars. He got rich doing what the state told him to do. Bezos and Zuckerberg are both products of a massive public works project, the internet. Oil magnates sell to governments (the US government is the largest purchaser of fossil fuels on Earth, and the military industrial complex works to secure their military supplies). When half the economy is the state, it's a gravity well that pulls everything in.
The people still talking about capitalism as if such a beast still exists today are tilting at windmills. They will ultimately be just as successful as Don Quixote, since just like that character, it is no longer an era of dragons and knights, of damsels in distress and quests. The world has moved on, and those models no longer apply.
I can't get too deep into it because I'm still working it out for my next book, but today's system to me is either a modernist liberalism where previous iterations were more pre-modern, or postmodernist liberalism. No matter what, it went from a part of a more pluralistic world to a totalizing system that tears down anything else. This new form of liberalism doesn't try to protect existing rights but give new rights to people by taking from others, and in so doing the leviathan of the state grows more powerful.
I don't know anything about any of those things, but I do know that it's unbelievably hard to get drugs approved for use on pregnant women because it's actually really hard to ethically test drugs on pregnant women. A lot of people don't seem to realize that, and think that you can just give pregnant women whatever and forget that there could be consequences 45 years down the road.
"wait... Is this what you feel like when I talk about my feelings? No... It's the children who are wrong."
Such is the path to wisdom.
CHA stat permanently drops by 1, WIS stat permanently rises by 1
CHA stat permanently drops by 1, WIS stat permanently rises by 1
Tbf, a lot of the time nobody is having more abortions than black women. Something like 40% of all abortions in some periods.
They got shut down because they're scary and horrible, but that's because being surrounded by people with mental illness is scary and horrible.
Anyone who has worked with the chronically and particularly violently mentally ill has absolute horror stories. My girlfriend a long time ago I worked at an old folks home and even just the violently demented ensured she constantly came home covered in bruises. She's not alone, and 80 year olds with dementia are far from the most dangerous.
Problem is that a lot of time the postmodernists mistake the system containing the horror for the horror itself. They thought that containing the insane in asylums was causing the conditions around the insane to be bad, but often it's the insanity itself that causes the conditions and the difference is whether you contain the horror or force it into the streets.
The postmodernists criticized the asylums as "social control" or places that "crush individuality" and they were both. But the dangerously mentally ill need to be socially controlled, and if your individualistic impulse is to destroy yourself and hurt others in the process, then or course that form if individuality needs to be suppressed. The guy who murdered that Ukrainian refugee recently; let's assume he was actually mentally ill. Maybe he was. He was arrested for violent conduct 14 times before committing murder. I tend to think his 15 victims would be prefer that guy have been socially controlled and had his individuality suppressed.
They would argue that asylums existed to protect society from having to confront madness, and they were probably right, but the thing is that's actually a public good in many cases. Of course things get blurry where maybe someone is just a harmless eccentric, and maybe some people who end up in those institutions are just harmless eccentrics and would be better off living at home with their families. That's more a problem of implementation than the problem of fundamental constitution.
Some people might claim that the problem is that it would take too much money to build a mental health system that includes asylums to lock up the sickest individuals. I don't think so it all because fortunately we are living in an era of unprecedented government spending. The mental asylums were totally possible and in fact implemented back when the government represented 3% to 5% of gdp, so the money is there. Moreover, if we end up locking up people like please individuals who end up getting arrested 100 times for violent crimes, think about all of the different public services who will require less money because they aren't having to do the job of the mental asylum poorly.
Another part of the reason it was assumed mental asylums could go away was a modernist belief in "better living through chemistry" -- that the new anti-psychotic drugs would be powerful enough that people who previously needed to live in a mental asylum could we let go to live as they pleased. Sometimes the models just don't work out and that's what happened here. We know that many people who might be able to live normal lives end up not taking their medication because some of the side effects are horrible and without the drugs everything comes back in full force.
In the famous novel and movie One flew over the cuckoo's nest, nurse ratched is portrayed as being purely evil. But consider this: how many bones did she have broken over the course of her career? How many bruises? How many times did she see the grim reapers blade at her neck? Of course under such a situation such a person would become hard. It's not because they are a bad person or that they started off as wanting to hurt anyone, it's because they know full well if you don't keep such people under strict control you're going to lose control and you might lose your life. Someone coming in with their liberal arts education might think that if they just come in and treat the psychopaths like a human for the first time they will be magically cured -- and that might be the case for some of the fringe cases, but in reality virtually everyone who ends up in the system has had someone that cared about them once and had to make a tough decision to let them go because the alternative was facing the violence alone.
I really want to double down on this one idea: people will go into a mental asylum and hear the screaming and hear the moans and assume that the problem is that the institution is evil. In a sense, it is actually the mental illness that is evil. Many of those people who wail in a padded cell just end up wailing in the street. Many of those people who end up attacking their nurses would end up attacking innocent people in the street. The sounds of a mental asylum sound like hell because to live with extreme and chronic mental illness is hell. The people who do that service for society shouldn't be judged as inhuman for the sin of being around people whose mental illness has made them inhuman, they should be elevated and honored for the undignified, dirty, dangerous, horrible work that they would end up doing to protect the rest of society from the hell within the walls of the asylum. We honor firefighters who run into a burning building in spite of the fact that the burning building is a little slice of hell that causes indescribable harm to the people caught within, we don't ban firefighters because we blame them for the destruction of the fire.
I have a 3-year-old. The person who was watching him the other day saw him trip and scrape his leg, and chose not to clean out the wound because when you clean out the wound on the three year old the three year old screams bloody murder and you feel terrible about it. As a direct result, the three year old now has a moderately infected scrape on their skin that is not healing as well as it would have and is causing constant pain. To be a good parent or to be a good caregiver for a child, there are times that you need to do something that is going to cause them to scream bloody murder in the short term but sometimes as soon as a few minutes later they'll be just fine. This isn't to say that someone with chronic mental illness and a toddler who scraped his knee are the same, but is this society we have decided to live in the aesthetic world where we can pretend anything that looks uglier must be the worse thing to do. Our society would prefer we don't clean the wounds of our toddlers with a scraped knees, because it keeps the toddlers quiet in the moment. It's not healthy in the long term though, and you could end up with an infected wound that could end up scarring forever.
In the end, it is true that there are multiple competing truths that are in some ways mutually exclusive but must be navigated nonetheless. On the balance, I think that it makes perfect sense for us to bring back insane asylums, and make that investment in dealing with an uncomfortable but very real part of our society rather than choosing not to.
Anyone who has worked with the chronically and particularly violently mentally ill has absolute horror stories. My girlfriend a long time ago I worked at an old folks home and even just the violently demented ensured she constantly came home covered in bruises. She's not alone, and 80 year olds with dementia are far from the most dangerous.
Problem is that a lot of time the postmodernists mistake the system containing the horror for the horror itself. They thought that containing the insane in asylums was causing the conditions around the insane to be bad, but often it's the insanity itself that causes the conditions and the difference is whether you contain the horror or force it into the streets.
The postmodernists criticized the asylums as "social control" or places that "crush individuality" and they were both. But the dangerously mentally ill need to be socially controlled, and if your individualistic impulse is to destroy yourself and hurt others in the process, then or course that form if individuality needs to be suppressed. The guy who murdered that Ukrainian refugee recently; let's assume he was actually mentally ill. Maybe he was. He was arrested for violent conduct 14 times before committing murder. I tend to think his 15 victims would be prefer that guy have been socially controlled and had his individuality suppressed.
They would argue that asylums existed to protect society from having to confront madness, and they were probably right, but the thing is that's actually a public good in many cases. Of course things get blurry where maybe someone is just a harmless eccentric, and maybe some people who end up in those institutions are just harmless eccentrics and would be better off living at home with their families. That's more a problem of implementation than the problem of fundamental constitution.
Some people might claim that the problem is that it would take too much money to build a mental health system that includes asylums to lock up the sickest individuals. I don't think so it all because fortunately we are living in an era of unprecedented government spending. The mental asylums were totally possible and in fact implemented back when the government represented 3% to 5% of gdp, so the money is there. Moreover, if we end up locking up people like please individuals who end up getting arrested 100 times for violent crimes, think about all of the different public services who will require less money because they aren't having to do the job of the mental asylum poorly.
Another part of the reason it was assumed mental asylums could go away was a modernist belief in "better living through chemistry" -- that the new anti-psychotic drugs would be powerful enough that people who previously needed to live in a mental asylum could we let go to live as they pleased. Sometimes the models just don't work out and that's what happened here. We know that many people who might be able to live normal lives end up not taking their medication because some of the side effects are horrible and without the drugs everything comes back in full force.
In the famous novel and movie One flew over the cuckoo's nest, nurse ratched is portrayed as being purely evil. But consider this: how many bones did she have broken over the course of her career? How many bruises? How many times did she see the grim reapers blade at her neck? Of course under such a situation such a person would become hard. It's not because they are a bad person or that they started off as wanting to hurt anyone, it's because they know full well if you don't keep such people under strict control you're going to lose control and you might lose your life. Someone coming in with their liberal arts education might think that if they just come in and treat the psychopaths like a human for the first time they will be magically cured -- and that might be the case for some of the fringe cases, but in reality virtually everyone who ends up in the system has had someone that cared about them once and had to make a tough decision to let them go because the alternative was facing the violence alone.
I really want to double down on this one idea: people will go into a mental asylum and hear the screaming and hear the moans and assume that the problem is that the institution is evil. In a sense, it is actually the mental illness that is evil. Many of those people who wail in a padded cell just end up wailing in the street. Many of those people who end up attacking their nurses would end up attacking innocent people in the street. The sounds of a mental asylum sound like hell because to live with extreme and chronic mental illness is hell. The people who do that service for society shouldn't be judged as inhuman for the sin of being around people whose mental illness has made them inhuman, they should be elevated and honored for the undignified, dirty, dangerous, horrible work that they would end up doing to protect the rest of society from the hell within the walls of the asylum. We honor firefighters who run into a burning building in spite of the fact that the burning building is a little slice of hell that causes indescribable harm to the people caught within, we don't ban firefighters because we blame them for the destruction of the fire.
I have a 3-year-old. The person who was watching him the other day saw him trip and scrape his leg, and chose not to clean out the wound because when you clean out the wound on the three year old the three year old screams bloody murder and you feel terrible about it. As a direct result, the three year old now has a moderately infected scrape on their skin that is not healing as well as it would have and is causing constant pain. To be a good parent or to be a good caregiver for a child, there are times that you need to do something that is going to cause them to scream bloody murder in the short term but sometimes as soon as a few minutes later they'll be just fine. This isn't to say that someone with chronic mental illness and a toddler who scraped his knee are the same, but is this society we have decided to live in the aesthetic world where we can pretend anything that looks uglier must be the worse thing to do. Our society would prefer we don't clean the wounds of our toddlers with a scraped knees, because it keeps the toddlers quiet in the moment. It's not healthy in the long term though, and you could end up with an infected wound that could end up scarring forever.
In the end, it is true that there are multiple competing truths that are in some ways mutually exclusive but must be navigated nonetheless. On the balance, I think that it makes perfect sense for us to bring back insane asylums, and make that investment in dealing with an uncomfortable but very real part of our society rather than choosing not to.
There are bears in my area.
Turns out, that whole "man vs. bear" thing from before is completely different when we're talking about actual bears in your neighborhood right now.
Turns out, that whole "man vs. bear" thing from before is completely different when we're talking about actual bears in your neighborhood right now.
The scandal is a joke, which is why I used the phrase "shall be". The first half is true though apparently.
Gen z overthrew the government in Nepal because they were threatening to take social media away.
New elections held through discord.
First scandal shall be that it turns out the president is a furry and had some really bad looking DMs with a 13 year old he thought was 8.
New elections held through discord.
First scandal shall be that it turns out the president is a furry and had some really bad looking DMs with a 13 year old he thought was 8.
The one thing is that atproto as designed is effectively centrally managed and top down.
For fun, we can think about three different protocols in the way that they function. ActivityPub, atproto, and nostr.
Nostr would be the most decentralized and most individualist. You don't even pick a single server, you pick on number of different relays which will accept your messages and provide messages to you. It really doesn't matter if in the end which individual relays you pick because in practice it's just a ledger with all the messages that it received, and the protocol itself handles identity through your secret key. If the relay that you were using goes down, your user experience doesn't even notice because there's probably 10 others.
ATproto would be the least decentralized and most collective. It is hypothetically possible to host your own instance, but in practice user management and a lot of other stuff is Central to the main Bluesky organization. Getting banned or getting blocked or whatever, it's not that different from Facebook in that regard. If the main Bluesky service goes down, it will effectively mean the end of bluesky.
ActivityPub would be somewhere in between. You have individual servers that people will pick one or multiple, there is a centralized point where your identity lives, and each server has its own moderation policies and administrator team. If one server goes down, everyone on that server loses access to the fediverse on that server and they also lose their identity from that server, but they can very easily go somewhere else. If mastodon.social goes down, a lot of accounts will become inaccessible but the broader fediverse will be unaffected.
Bridges are obviously possible between the three because we see it, but I tend to think that the three are mutually exclusive and mutually incompatible in their aims and technical details such that integrating any two immediately means giving up some of what that protocol is trying to do.
For fun, we can think about three different protocols in the way that they function. ActivityPub, atproto, and nostr.
Nostr would be the most decentralized and most individualist. You don't even pick a single server, you pick on number of different relays which will accept your messages and provide messages to you. It really doesn't matter if in the end which individual relays you pick because in practice it's just a ledger with all the messages that it received, and the protocol itself handles identity through your secret key. If the relay that you were using goes down, your user experience doesn't even notice because there's probably 10 others.
ATproto would be the least decentralized and most collective. It is hypothetically possible to host your own instance, but in practice user management and a lot of other stuff is Central to the main Bluesky organization. Getting banned or getting blocked or whatever, it's not that different from Facebook in that regard. If the main Bluesky service goes down, it will effectively mean the end of bluesky.
ActivityPub would be somewhere in between. You have individual servers that people will pick one or multiple, there is a centralized point where your identity lives, and each server has its own moderation policies and administrator team. If one server goes down, everyone on that server loses access to the fediverse on that server and they also lose their identity from that server, but they can very easily go somewhere else. If mastodon.social goes down, a lot of accounts will become inaccessible but the broader fediverse will be unaffected.
Bridges are obviously possible between the three because we see it, but I tend to think that the three are mutually exclusive and mutually incompatible in their aims and technical details such that integrating any two immediately means giving up some of what that protocol is trying to do.
I don't use an unreliable power supply because they're unreliable.
Part of me wants to try a li ion one instead of lead acid, since the batteries are usually the thing that dies.
Part of me wants to try a li ion one instead of lead acid, since the batteries are usually the thing that dies.
All that time they're spending around radical Muslims is rubbing off on them
Press secretaries must wear burqas on the beach!
Press secretaries must wear burqas on the beach!
My man whatifalthist, over Christmas does a public 8 hour Ayahuasca binge, just keeps plugging out content like nothing happened, totally avoids any and all cancellation.
Good on you bro. Hide your steam key before the next trip.
Good on you bro. Hide your steam key before the next trip.