Labor-based production is such 20th century thinking. Modern companies don’t try to make products, they try to acquire capital. Intellectual property, industrial capacity, housing, utilities access, etc. Cornering a market is so much more profitable than trying to compete in it.

Why do you think there’s so much money going into AI? They can’t wait to rid themselves of their human workforce so that humans starving to death won’t affect their production targets.

If capitalists get their way, capitalism will outlive humanity. Inefficient humans and their annoying ecosystem dependency will be left to boil to death or something while Von Neumann probes owned by AI-managed corporations spread across the universe. Just imagine, one share in SpaceX would be worth several galaxies. You won’t find a better ROI anywhere in the universe!

I feel like this post is going to be interpreted very differently depending on what the audience is.

For left-of-centrists, this seems like a decent wake-up call. Stop being depressed about there being no solutions in your narrow overton window, and embrace the necessity that society adapts to reality.

For conservatives, “pessimism” is an odd phrase, but they’ll be glad to hear you’re warming up to signing up for lifeboat defense duty - maybe if you work hard you can get to be in it.

For realists, “abandon” is an worrisome phrase. It has always obviously been about both. Is this another excuse to keep consumption high?

Right now we’re clearly still making more steps in the wrong direction than the right one. Militarization, abandonment of climate research and (already too lenient) climate goals, continued investments in fossil fuels, planned obsolescence, neocolonialism, etc.

With the US turning fascist and the rest of the world massively increasing military expenditure, I’m pretty sure even the ratio between steps in the right direction and steps in the wrong direction is worse this year.

I briefly stayed at a multi-millionaire’s place. They did have a herb garden. Nice planters and automated watering systems. All provided and maintained by the groundskeeping company, of course. I sincerely doubt they ever planted anything, they just grabbed herbs when they needed them and instructed people what herbs they wanted.

I imagine richer people might similarly have food gardens maintained by waitstaff. Maybe not around their primary residence, but what if the desire to cosplay as or claim to be a farmer or plantation owner strikes them?

Unauthorized government cheese.

That literally is the opposite of a comedy.

The movement is stronger than ever. The coverage has disappeared, but there are more and more people willing to seek out every right answer and give up every privilege.

Centrists and right-wingers keep pretending that solidarity and radicalism makes movements weak, when it has always made them stronger. The moment Labor parties abandoned radicalism and chose the Third Way, their voter share dropped off a cliff. The moment movements abandon their most radical left-wing contributors to appeal to the lowest common denominator they collapse from in-fighting and the hardest workers moving off.

There is no Schelling point for less-than-complete justice. Nations, religions, ethnicities, even capital is just one of countless different ways to slice the pie and pretend that the hurt you suffer is more urgent and in-scope than someone else’s. If you morally accept rallying to one subgroup, then you have no defense against others you depend on from rallying to another subgroup and coming into opposition with you. There is no way around it:

None of us are free until all of us are free.

Conservatives are perfectly capable of understanding positive-sum games when they expect the privileged in-group to be the benefactor. What is a labor contract, if not a positive-sum game where the corporation sucks up all the positive gain?

Game theory as a cental tenet of the human condition is a liberal concept, which conservatives will happily discard if it doesn’t suit them. Conservatives may cloak their disapproval in the guise of liberal concerns so that they’re in a stronger debate position in liberal-dominated social circles, but what they’re really upset by is the negation of the conservative world order - a strict hierarchy with narcissistic men at the top of clearly delineated nations, struggling for dominance through pettiness and violence.

They will accept any negative sum game, they will ruin their own livelihoods and their own lives, if only it helps sad little kings of sad little hills.

It can and it has done creative mathematical proof work. Nothing spectacular, but at least on par with a mathematics grad student.

Why is a baseline bulk level of education the goal? People are different, people live in a society where they can ask others for help. People don’t retain most of what has been crammed into their heads, and the fact that they were threatened with social exclusion if they didn’t cram it in gives many of them an unhealthy attitude towards knowledge that will take them decades to unlearn. Many subjects are propagandistic or taught in a way that makes them irrelevant for the rest of one’s life.

People learn how the mitochondria work but not how to recognize a stroke. How to write a formal proof about triangular equalities but not how to untangle a legal document. How to recognize a baroque painting but not how to make art you enjoy. How to compete at sports but not how to listen to what your body needs. How to memorize what an authority says but not how to pick apart lies.

So sure, let everyone follow a completely different education. Let them learn things at their own individual pace, let them focus on the things they care about and let them use their own interest as a guide. Maybe some will be functionally illiterate, but that is already the case.

That’s really not true. Paper production takes a lot of (often non-renewable) energy, ink usually consists of non-renewable chemicals, paper is often harvested from nonrenewable destruction of forests (especially in the US with Trump’s plans to cut down national forests), paper production belches a lot of pollution into the air and pollutes a lot of water, etc.

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Get in the van, no using pronouns here >:(

No true Scotsman would ever lie about Chinese spy technology.

Reuters is citing “two people familiar with the matter” and people in the US federal government not even speaking through an official announcement. While I trust Reuters not to have made up those people’s words, this does mean that so far the only source is semi-random US government employees.

So it literally is just the word of people working for Trump we’re going on.

And for context, it is quite common for reputable news agencies to misreport things, or to take the word of a government employee as final when they really shouldn’t. I personally saw a video of a car running into a climate action protest¹, only for the ‘reputable’ Dutch state news agency (NOS) simply going by the police spokesperson’s statement that the climate activists had scratched the car before it hit them². But the NOS just said the spokesperson said it, so reputation-wise they were in the clear.

Now I’m not saying the genocidal dictatorship known as the People’s Republic of China is not putting spyware on devices shipped to the west. I’m just saying that we need more than an unofficial statement by an employee working under Trump, even if that statement is being signal boosted by Reuters. Skepticism is warranted.

¹: At 48:50 in this livestream, in the left part of the splitscreen. Luckily it was at walking pace so nobody was injured as far as I know.

²: This article, in Dutch.

No matter what system you have, the luck of the draw will give some people more powerful hands than others. If that is enough to destroy your system, then your system can never be implemented in reality.

The self-managing community would have inequality, but its organisatory principles would address that inequality in the same way that they would address an inequality that is caused by natural randomness. If that method of addressing inequality is more empowering for the community than capitalist democracy, then the community would gain in power relative to capitalist communities. This inspires other communities to likewise empower themselves, and either together or alone they can fight off police action and start a revolution.

Sorry, I was trying to make a reference to an image macro. What I was trying to express is that I didn’t understand the explanation.

I’m not American, and no.

The worst HOAs are in low density American suburbs. The most healthy communities are always high density working class neighborhoods - the sort that keep getting gentrified into oblivion because everyone wants to live there.

It’s easier to make passenger jets now than in the bronze age. Automation reduces the necessary amount of labor even if it doesn’t eliminate it entirely.

Besides, better working conditions for the team means more mentally healthy workers means a better and more creative product.

Burnout and depression are natural responses to a disconnect between what you do and what you care about. Their psychological/physiological purpose is to get you to stop and rethink your life at a deep level. There are many questions that you don’t typically think about, like “why am I still participating in this economy”, “is it ethical for me to pay taxes”, “do I need to prepare for civil war”, or “how do I build up contacts in underground railroads” that your body knows have non-trivial answers in this scenario.

Chimpanzees have politics and tyrants, which means that our ancestors have had to deal with tyrants for at least 10 million years or at least 400,000 generations. We can feel in our blood when other tribe members are scrounging for sharp rocks to bludgeon us to death in the night, and it is only natural to withdraw from business as usual and rethink our options.