The thing I find most funny is that if you're trying, we're living in one of the least advertiser-friendly periods in a century.
You can watch streaming that has no ads, you can read websites with adblock or with paid subscriptions or just use websites that don't have ads, social media can be stuff like the fediverse that's ad-free, you spend a lifetime consuming patreon content -- both free stuff, and stuff that's behind the paywalls -- that lack advertisements for anything but itself.
It's kinda strange when you think about it, how much of our brains are filled up with stuff like advertising jingles. Meanwhile, we don't watch either cable TV or OTA TV, or even the radio.
You can watch streaming that has no ads, you can read websites with adblock or with paid subscriptions or just use websites that don't have ads, social media can be stuff like the fediverse that's ad-free, you spend a lifetime consuming patreon content -- both free stuff, and stuff that's behind the paywalls -- that lack advertisements for anything but itself.
It's kinda strange when you think about it, how much of our brains are filled up with stuff like advertising jingles. Meanwhile, we don't watch either cable TV or OTA TV, or even the radio.
If you want to piss literally everyone on the road off, drive the speed limit.
But I'm not gonna stop. that's the limit, I'll drive the limit. Even if I do have a convoy of 100 vehicles behind me waiting for the road to split again.
But I'm not gonna stop. that's the limit, I'll drive the limit. Even if I do have a convoy of 100 vehicles behind me waiting for the road to split again.
When people were going around going "What is the fed going to do to help address social justice?" I'm like "What interest rate on interbank deposits would best serve the black community?" And the obvious answer is that it's a stupid question.
The fed's sole purpose is to act as a lender of last resort for banking institutions, and to help try to maintain maximum employment and low inflation. Within that mandate, their job has nothing to do with anything that really matters.
Looser monetary policy may lower unemployment, but it also causes money to trickle to the top. Tighter monetary policy may raise unemployment, but it also reduces the ability of the rich to use leverage to increase their share of the pie.
Tighter reserve requirements mean banks are less likely to go out of business due to shocks, looser reserve requirements man that banks are more likely to issue new loans to borderline individuals.
The fed's sole purpose is to act as a lender of last resort for banking institutions, and to help try to maintain maximum employment and low inflation. Within that mandate, their job has nothing to do with anything that really matters.
Looser monetary policy may lower unemployment, but it also causes money to trickle to the top. Tighter monetary policy may raise unemployment, but it also reduces the ability of the rich to use leverage to increase their share of the pie.
Tighter reserve requirements mean banks are less likely to go out of business due to shocks, looser reserve requirements man that banks are more likely to issue new loans to borderline individuals.
We're so stupid we voted for this government because Trump said what every American tourist has said for 50 years and what us presidents have been saying for 100.
I really hate minetests new name.
Luanti sounds like a hedge fund or boner pills.
"Ask your doctor if Luanti is right for you. In some cases luanti may cause irritable bowel syndrome, heart attacks, stroke."
Luanti sounds like a hedge fund or boner pills.
"Ask your doctor if Luanti is right for you. In some cases luanti may cause irritable bowel syndrome, heart attacks, stroke."
I've started playing the Paradise Lost and Paradise Found poems for my son. The audiobook starts with a biography, and it's really interesting. I never knew anything about John Milton, certainly not that he was a Puritan, labeled a heretic, and an English Republican. He married some lady who he really shouldn't have and wrote about the reasons divorce should be legal.
Completely ignoring anything relating to AI, it's crazy that for those people in the cockpit of our economy, so many alarm bells are ringing but we just keep on hearing about how everything is fine.
I watched that video yesterday. Thing is, there's nothing new in there for anyone who is paying close attention to the state of education in the west. There are entire high schools that don't put out a single literate graduate. There are hundreds of videos on the topic.
The university system was never intended for what it's being used for.
I'm working on a bit of a history for my next book, and all of this kind of goes back to the first world war and its immediate aftermath.
You see, after WW1, one of the problems is that you had militarily mobilized virtually every able-bodied fighting age man. And that's exactly where you saw a lot of the problems immediately after the first World war. We all know what ultimately happened in Germany, but in the United States they had an event called the bonus army, where all of the forgotten soldiers of World war I marched on Washington demanding benefits.
That's one of the reasons why you saw so much work done with respect to making sure that their opportunities for soldiers when they got home. They sent everyone to University, they made sure that there were houses for everyone, compared to the era before World war I, there was a step change in the size of government. Before World war I it was 3 to 5%, after World war I was close to 20%. Today it's around 30 to 50% with some countries being well over 50% such as Italy which is around 60%.
Before all that happened, University was just a fancy finishing school for the rich and powerful. That's the reason why it has the structure it does: a vocational school has no need to teach you English literature or philosophy, but a finishing school for the rich and powerful does. Universities effectively took on this roll because there was unbelievable amounts of money being poured into it, but never fully gave up on their previous purpose.
A couple things happened as a result of the elevation of the University. One is that because it was so universal companies felt that they could use it has a sorting mechanism. The post-war boom was never sustainable. Particularly in the United States, the country was basically untouched by the war, a whole bunch of it's prime working age men that just died, it had some of the only factories left on Earth and only farms left on Earth, and there were a bunch of infrastructure projects that could go in that would unlock previously unseen economic development. By the late 1960s that economic miracle was sputtering, and by the 1970s it was over. In a lot of ways the 1970s make the 2008 financial crisis and even the aftermath of the COVID pandemic look like nothing. Not to mention, women were starting to enter the workforce in larger numbers. Pair that with globalization, and companies didn't have a problem of not having enough people to do the jobs -- they had a problem of too many people applying for each job.
As that squeeze happened, the cargo cult started to form. They saw that the people who are most successful from the period immediately following the war to the end of the economic boom had higher levels of education, and so they foolishly began to try to increase the number of people who had graduated. At the beginning of my post I said that people who could not read were graduating from high school. This should not be possible. If you can't read you shouldn't be able to graduate from high school. They just kept on lowering the standards until you could though, because the numbers told them that a high school education makes you better off. Moreover, they wanted to get everyone into University because of the numbers showed them that people who graduated from University were better off. So you had standards falling, and the amount of money available rising. The standards falling I think had multiple effects. Yes it resulted in the students coming out being worse students, but it also meant that the individuals going through needed a lot more maintenance. Previously, if one of the Rich and powerful kids who came to University was unhappy, they were just drop out. After that, you couldn't have that because so much was increasingly on the line and so you needed to bring in all these new offices to micromanage. Same resources going to teachers, much more for bureaucracy.
It's a system always bound to fail.
The university system was never intended for what it's being used for.
I'm working on a bit of a history for my next book, and all of this kind of goes back to the first world war and its immediate aftermath.
You see, after WW1, one of the problems is that you had militarily mobilized virtually every able-bodied fighting age man. And that's exactly where you saw a lot of the problems immediately after the first World war. We all know what ultimately happened in Germany, but in the United States they had an event called the bonus army, where all of the forgotten soldiers of World war I marched on Washington demanding benefits.
That's one of the reasons why you saw so much work done with respect to making sure that their opportunities for soldiers when they got home. They sent everyone to University, they made sure that there were houses for everyone, compared to the era before World war I, there was a step change in the size of government. Before World war I it was 3 to 5%, after World war I was close to 20%. Today it's around 30 to 50% with some countries being well over 50% such as Italy which is around 60%.
Before all that happened, University was just a fancy finishing school for the rich and powerful. That's the reason why it has the structure it does: a vocational school has no need to teach you English literature or philosophy, but a finishing school for the rich and powerful does. Universities effectively took on this roll because there was unbelievable amounts of money being poured into it, but never fully gave up on their previous purpose.
A couple things happened as a result of the elevation of the University. One is that because it was so universal companies felt that they could use it has a sorting mechanism. The post-war boom was never sustainable. Particularly in the United States, the country was basically untouched by the war, a whole bunch of it's prime working age men that just died, it had some of the only factories left on Earth and only farms left on Earth, and there were a bunch of infrastructure projects that could go in that would unlock previously unseen economic development. By the late 1960s that economic miracle was sputtering, and by the 1970s it was over. In a lot of ways the 1970s make the 2008 financial crisis and even the aftermath of the COVID pandemic look like nothing. Not to mention, women were starting to enter the workforce in larger numbers. Pair that with globalization, and companies didn't have a problem of not having enough people to do the jobs -- they had a problem of too many people applying for each job.
As that squeeze happened, the cargo cult started to form. They saw that the people who are most successful from the period immediately following the war to the end of the economic boom had higher levels of education, and so they foolishly began to try to increase the number of people who had graduated. At the beginning of my post I said that people who could not read were graduating from high school. This should not be possible. If you can't read you shouldn't be able to graduate from high school. They just kept on lowering the standards until you could though, because the numbers told them that a high school education makes you better off. Moreover, they wanted to get everyone into University because of the numbers showed them that people who graduated from University were better off. So you had standards falling, and the amount of money available rising. The standards falling I think had multiple effects. Yes it resulted in the students coming out being worse students, but it also meant that the individuals going through needed a lot more maintenance. Previously, if one of the Rich and powerful kids who came to University was unhappy, they were just drop out. After that, you couldn't have that because so much was increasingly on the line and so you needed to bring in all these new offices to micromanage. Same resources going to teachers, much more for bureaucracy.
It's a system always bound to fail.
I thought a lot about this, let's say hypothetically that before the sun goes red giant, we get out to Europa and we also find a way to keep it from evaporating away during that phase. So now humanity is stuck under the ice of Europa. There's very little energy because the primary source of energy is the orbit around Jupiter, and there's really very little danger because there are no predators there's no weather there's no geological events.
Intelligence would be maladaptive at some point. It would make way more sense for any given life form to dramatically reduce the amount of energy it burns thinking of things because there's probably only about four things you need to do, and if you don't do those four things you're probably going to die, and there's nothing you can do that's actually going to be more positive than doing those four things.
Now the point here isn't to look into this deep dark future under the ice of Europa as a direct prediction. In this case, it is to look at the utility of intelligence and find out where the limits are. As the amount of energy available goes down and the number of options available goes down and the likelihood that an intelligent decision will be materially better than an unintelligent decision goes down then the utility of intelligence goes down.
Therefore there would have to be an upper limit to intelligence because there is a point where additional intelligence doesn't have the additional evolutionary utility to justify it.
Intelligence would be maladaptive at some point. It would make way more sense for any given life form to dramatically reduce the amount of energy it burns thinking of things because there's probably only about four things you need to do, and if you don't do those four things you're probably going to die, and there's nothing you can do that's actually going to be more positive than doing those four things.
Now the point here isn't to look into this deep dark future under the ice of Europa as a direct prediction. In this case, it is to look at the utility of intelligence and find out where the limits are. As the amount of energy available goes down and the number of options available goes down and the likelihood that an intelligent decision will be materially better than an unintelligent decision goes down then the utility of intelligence goes down.
Therefore there would have to be an upper limit to intelligence because there is a point where additional intelligence doesn't have the additional evolutionary utility to justify it.
ScummVM is an absolute monster now.
The latest version supports way more than just Scumm. It apparently even supports The ultima games, but shockingly it also supports a free basic game someone made back in 2005 (and a lot of other freeware)
I think it's something like 600 different titles.
The latest version supports way more than just Scumm. It apparently even supports The ultima games, but shockingly it also supports a free basic game someone made back in 2005 (and a lot of other freeware)
I think it's something like 600 different titles.
Its interesting to me that the "media literacy" people dont know about their own postmodern form of media literacy called "death of the author" in which the intended message of the work is subordinate to the interpretation from the audience.
Let's say that some dutch idiot made a movie set up like war propaganda because he assumed all war propaganda is fascist, then some people like it at face value because war propaganda isn't always fascist especially if you're fighting giant bugs.
Under postmodern critical analysis, the viewer is correct regardless of their intentions.
Let's say that some dutch idiot made a movie set up like war propaganda because he assumed all war propaganda is fascist, then some people like it at face value because war propaganda isn't always fascist especially if you're fighting giant bugs.
Under postmodern critical analysis, the viewer is correct regardless of their intentions.
The rich aren't necessarily the problem, but they definitely are recipients of the benefits of the problem.
Of course wages did stagnate because the labor pool grew massively, but the government wants you to own assets in part so that they can count the assets that you own. To incentivize this, they print a bunch of money and that money almost immediately ends up in the markets. Even when it doesn't end up in the markets, it basically ends up in the hands of government because a good chunk of it goes into bonds.
So you have three different things going on at once: because the labor will grows the value of an individual worker goes down. Because of inflation caused by debt and monetary policies, just giving workers fairly low wage increases is actually a huge pay cut, and most of that money that gets printed ends up in financial assets so people who own assets instead of selling their labor and up wealthier.
So once you reach a critical mass of assets, at that point basically you just keep getting richer and richer even though you're not actually doing anything productive.
Elon Musk is my favorite example of this. Earlier this week he had hit $500 billion of net worth. The fuckin guy doesn't have any successful businesses. Tesla is a barely profitable car company, SpaceX is a barely profitable space company, Twitter is a barely profitable social media site, but he's learned how to play the game and so all of that excess money has to go somewhere and a lot of it seems to be going to his companies.
You can't get that mad at him, if people kept throwing money at you what are you going to do, not take it?
Of course wages did stagnate because the labor pool grew massively, but the government wants you to own assets in part so that they can count the assets that you own. To incentivize this, they print a bunch of money and that money almost immediately ends up in the markets. Even when it doesn't end up in the markets, it basically ends up in the hands of government because a good chunk of it goes into bonds.
So you have three different things going on at once: because the labor will grows the value of an individual worker goes down. Because of inflation caused by debt and monetary policies, just giving workers fairly low wage increases is actually a huge pay cut, and most of that money that gets printed ends up in financial assets so people who own assets instead of selling their labor and up wealthier.
So once you reach a critical mass of assets, at that point basically you just keep getting richer and richer even though you're not actually doing anything productive.
Elon Musk is my favorite example of this. Earlier this week he had hit $500 billion of net worth. The fuckin guy doesn't have any successful businesses. Tesla is a barely profitable car company, SpaceX is a barely profitable space company, Twitter is a barely profitable social media site, but he's learned how to play the game and so all of that excess money has to go somewhere and a lot of it seems to be going to his companies.
You can't get that mad at him, if people kept throwing money at you what are you going to do, not take it?
It's a shame none of these young commies ever ask about LGBT representation in the Soviet Union. Because it would be really funny if they found that out.
Imagine: there isn't enough money to run courts, despite courts working fine back when the state was 3-5% of GDP and now it's 30-50% of GDP.
New York City was denied twice the cost of the entire federal judiciary for just the second avenue subway and hudson tunnel projects.
Most of the judiciary isn't even mandatory spending like judge salaries, which only take about 800 million per year.
Annual payments to bondholders represent 100 times more money spent than the entire federal court system.
The state court systems which adjudicate most crimes are individually smaller than the federal court system, with even a state like California only paying about 3 billion per year for their courts, but together puts the vital role at about 25 billion per year nationwide. Including the federal judiciary that's less than 35 billion, which is still 1/1000 of the federal debt and 1/30 of federal debt maintenance, about the same as NASA, about the same cost as 3 aircraft carriers.
It's pretty strange when you think about it. Unlike NASA, the courts are a core function of government, but they struggle to "find money" for this core function while there are many non-productive things they can magically find lots of money for. The reliance on plea deals is certainly in part justified by the incongruity.
New York City was denied twice the cost of the entire federal judiciary for just the second avenue subway and hudson tunnel projects.
Most of the judiciary isn't even mandatory spending like judge salaries, which only take about 800 million per year.
Annual payments to bondholders represent 100 times more money spent than the entire federal court system.
The state court systems which adjudicate most crimes are individually smaller than the federal court system, with even a state like California only paying about 3 billion per year for their courts, but together puts the vital role at about 25 billion per year nationwide. Including the federal judiciary that's less than 35 billion, which is still 1/1000 of the federal debt and 1/30 of federal debt maintenance, about the same as NASA, about the same cost as 3 aircraft carriers.
It's pretty strange when you think about it. Unlike NASA, the courts are a core function of government, but they struggle to "find money" for this core function while there are many non-productive things they can magically find lots of money for. The reliance on plea deals is certainly in part justified by the incongruity.
It'd be really straightforward, if not necessarily easy.
Minds implemented ActivityPub and nostr support, not much different here I'd suspect.
Minds implemented ActivityPub and nostr support, not much different here I'd suspect.
It's funny -- that "past performance is not indicative of future returns" is a common bit of legalese used to say "hey don't just assume because something went up yesterday it'll go up today", but in reality we've based our entire modernist epistemology on the idea that past performance is in fact indicative of future returns. That's the fundamental concept behind science and technology. The idea that you can measure a thing, build a model, then use the model to predict the future specifically enough to design stuff that's super complicated but not only works on paper but in the real world (like the CPUs we're all using that perform billions of instructions every second of every minute of every hour of every day) is not the way previous humans thought.
It's a revolutionary idea and it's right -- but not entirely. We know that even scientifically we have to set within our models the reality that we can't predict things perfectly, and often we can't even measure things perfectly or they get predictably unpredictable. Which shows that modernist rationalism and empiricism is just one superposed truth among many.
It's a revolutionary idea and it's right -- but not entirely. We know that even scientifically we have to set within our models the reality that we can't predict things perfectly, and often we can't even measure things perfectly or they get predictably unpredictable. Which shows that modernist rationalism and empiricism is just one superposed truth among many.