Readit News* Donald Trump is revealed to be the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto
* President Nelson (prophet of the LDS church) dies and is replaced by Dallin Oaks
* Dugin writes a sequel to The Fourth Political Theory, titled The n+1'th Political Theory
* New microscope finds the words "God was here" etched into every molecule in the universe
* People become at least 5% cuter as estrogen/testosterone ratio continues to tip in that direction
Once we start tacitly approving of extrajudicial killings, it doesn’t stop with just those you dislike or even just the outspoken figures. Consider how many completely innocent civilians died during the Troubles or the French Revolution, or how easy it would’ve been for someone completely innocent to get harmed here.
It’s easy to approve of this in a vacuum, it’s just a path full of extreme cognitive dissonance.
Looking at the numbers: low unemployment, strong consumer spending, average income increasing at a rate higher than inflation, I'd say the majority is doing better than most years. They might not feel that way though, and we've been in a continuous vibes-cession since COVID.
I'm reminded of this excerpt from 1984:
But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.
---
Of course, I'm sure none of that would ever apply to our numbers, only to those of our opponents.
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A virile map has monsters, and beckons a boy to grab his stick (gleaming steel) and hop aboard the patio (great ship with full sails) and set the neighborhood alight in delight fighting pirates.
He devises elaborate dilemmas and improvises wilely against his barbarous captors, even as the governors of his native country conspire against him, or wonders what strange countries lie just beyond the edge of the words "the known world".
Or maybe the sea is made of stars, and he envisions gayly springtime planets, or dark winter stars that become dragons across the nebulae.
Idk, even then, maybe there's a frontier beyond the final one - where consciousness melts between the fabrics of little realities, each with their own cutely crafted logic, and he drifts to a new dream where 1 + 1 is 3 and it only makes sense that way.
Idk. ChatGPT raised me and I'm afraid I'm becoming my father, who then will I raise to look like me? If only I had a map of the ages to not fear myself.
In fact, I think I really enjoy specialized notations. I care about how ideas are expressed, sometimes even more than the ideas themselves. Sheet music, SQL, creating DSLs in Lisp, Hoon code (controversial here).
There are counter examples. For example, I adore coding in SQL, but ORMs always feel super gross. And isn't Paul Graham's adoration of Lisp kind of a programming version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis?
Whatever, and in Sapir (and Whorf)'s defense, how "debunked" is linguistic relativity anyway?
Whatever, I'll keep accruing beautiful new symbols and vocabularies and aesthetics for saying things that were previously unsayable and discovering new ideas to put together elegantly.
>They are under attack because the archive belongs to the USA, and as we all know, this horrendous and hypocritical government supports the genocide that is being carried out by the terrorist state of “Israel”.
source is in the thread I linked to
That's a generic problem with corporatism and monopoly, not "tech".
It shows up in "tech" because "tech" scales so well and has such strong network effects. But the US's tolerance of monopoly is the real cause. There need to be about four major players before markets push prices down. The US has three big banks, two big drugstore chains, etc.
Tough antitrust enforcement would help. Google should be broken up into Search, Browsers, Mobile Devices, Ads, and Services, and the units prohibited from contracting with each other.
Tough labor law enforcement would help. No more "gig worker" jobs that are exempt from labor law. No more "wage shaving". No more unpaid overtime. Prorate medical insurance payments based on hours, so companies that won't pay people for more than 30 hours a week pay their fraction of medical insurance. A minimum wage high enough that people making it don't need food stamps.
I admire the general spirit of your comment, but this specific example seems off to me. Search and browsers, for example, don't make sense as independent businesses. Rather, they are products based off of Ads.
Maybe the idea would be for Ads to pay Search to include their ads, and for Search to pay Browsers to be the default search engine?