Once the Human Brain-Machine Interface tech matures, we will be able to have just-like-the-real-thing sex with virtual women and zero risk of pregnancy, as much as we want without having to pay the women (or buy dinner for them) since they aren't real.
Physics simulation is nowhere near level anything remotely approaching realistic close-contact interaction with anything solid would require, and that's not even getting into AI. But if having sex with the ghost of a love doll is your thing, you're set.
Simply recording and replaying a first-person all-senses-included sex act should work just fine, though. Or having remote sex via the Internet. I guess online brothels will become pretty popular.
"Homophobe" is one of those "I don't like what you believe, but I can't actually debate on merit, so I'll toss an Ad Hominem attack instead" retorts.
I couldn't care less about what you believe.
I care about what you do.
If your actions - including speech - indicate a consistent pattern of fear towards homosexuals as individuals, group or a conspiracy ("The Homosexual Agenda") then you are a homophobe and it is not an Ad Hominem to call you that.
I tend to only see this in leftwing SJW types who are really nothing short of totalitarian socialists dressed up in faux righteous indignation.
And yet these totalitarian socialists are defending consenting adult's right to marry even if it upsets some third party's sensibilities, while the homophobes are trying to take for themselves power to decide who can marry who. Given that homophobes are asserting more authority over other people's lives than totalitarian socialists, what does that make them?
This is an excellent point and one most anarchists would agree with, which is why we support balkanization or localization and refer to Dunbar's number as supporting evidence why societies should be organized as a bunch of small communities which cooperate and trade with each other.
How do you stop balkanization from producing something like the Balkans?
I just don't get what people have against the contractor paradigm. I personally LOVE doing it. I'm responsible for myself, I set my hours (for the most part)...I write so many things off to save on taxes, I make sure to set aside enough money for taxes, retirement, etc.
It's not the paradigm itself, it's that there's a lot of shady employers out there who want to call their employees "contractors" simply to shift all the risk - and none of the benefits - to them.
and if you don't want to do it, don't.
If you can afford to pick your jobs, good for you. Most people do whatever is available, and that means anything that makes it easier to screw them - such as getting called a "contractor" rather than an employee - is a threat and gets treated that way.
Anyone sufficiently competent in the tech industry can improve him/herself and get a better income over time - far faster than the typical Union could ever get you.
Anyone can be better than average, yes. Everyone can't, any more than everyone can be a better than average driver. But that doesn't stop them from deluding themselves, or listening to a flattering scam artist who tells them they're a special little snowflake who'd only get held back by the unions.
Just goes to demonstrate, once again, that pride is a mortal sin for a reason.
Overall, why would I (for example) want to chain myself down to the disadvantages of a Union
And this is another thing: If consumers don't earn money, then consumers can't spend money, and the economy grinds to a halt, as it's currently doing. But every single actor in that economy has an incentive to stay in their local optimum and ignore the consequences, thus nothing can be done about it. So we continue to stumble helplessly towards another economic collapse - and like last time, various more or less openly fascist parties are already making inroads.
I guess those who just want to watch the world burn are going to get their wish.
What way of thinking can bring you to the point where you think evolution is possible without death?
Humanity's entire success is based on us figuring out how to do just that. Our behaviour has an instinctual aspect but is mostly dictated by surrounding society, and can be "updated" within our lifetime. Death became obsolete as soon as nature invented evolutionary Turing machines. We can only hope it'll become nonexistent, too.
Whatever the reason may be, despite the fact that infrastructure projects would not only have short-term employment benefits but the much more important benefit of actually keeping the stuff your entire economy depends on to function working past the end of the decade - they aren't being done.
The reason they're not being done is precisely because they'd employ people. It's a lot easier to abuse your employees and the lower classes in general if they're desperate. McDonald's and Wal-Marts have every incentive to keep unemployment high; how else would they charge employees for receiving their pay yet still have employees? Heck, the entire payday loan industry depends on there being a steady supply of people who have to sacrifice tomorrow to survive today.
Our economy continues being horrible because people on top benefit from horrible economy in the form of greater relative power. They'll go too far eventually and spark a revolution, but until then, they'll resist any improvement - because improving your situation would make it harder for them to play your masters.
Just look at history: the Victorian-era hardcore capitalism was somewhat humanized to halt the spread of Communism, and neoconservatism rose as Soviet Union fell and the threat was perceived to have passed. And now society is starting to come apart at the seams again. The cycle will likely repeat as long as Capitalism exists, since to end it would require abolishing social classes entirely.
If MS made their software easy enough to use that a low skilled person can do it, isn't that a good thing?
Everybody likes to talk about how we shouldn't worry about the effects of the automobile on buggy whip manufacturers. Nobody wants to be the buggy whip manufacturer going out of business. Especially if they've spent their time in the sun talking bad things about all those mediocre people who need unions and the government to look after them because individually they lack power, just like those former whip experts do now.
The flame of progress melts special little snowflakes just like all others. It can be a rather rude awakening for some of them.
And this isn't welfare. They opened a food pantry, had a shelter for homeless kids, and a clinic for kids whose parents couldn't afford to take them to a doctor. How are any of these actions bad?
Dude... that's pretty much the definition of welfare. And it isn't bad.
I'd love it if all copies of The Communist Manifesto came pre-Fisked. It would help people from getting confused their first year in college.
As long as they come out of college with tens of thousands of dollars of debt they'll likely be stuck with their whole life they're going to be "confused" by a system which promises free education.
As long as you have social classes the cycle of the topmost class looting those below it until they go too far and cause a social or economic collapse is going to repeat itself. Banning books won't change that. The idea of a better world is inherent in an imperfect one.
But I suppose we could call it "Capitalism 2.0", if it helps.
If you truely believe in the principle of free speech you need to engage with this fact honestly and say "I am comfortable with the danger".
I am not comfortable with danger, which is why I'm trying to minimize it. And that means not giving the next Hitler wannabe a fully functional censorship machine to silence any opposition with.
Others (especially minorities) might take a different view.
They're free to do so, but in the light of the entire human history that makes them either idiots or Hitler wannabes.
No, it's not. It's bullying. And it's usually the popular kids who do the bullying. The ones with social development issues tend to be victims, not perpetrators. But anyone who's in the minority for any reason - such as having a gender that's unusual in a group - will do.
Some people are assholes. They behave themselves only if forced to, for example by peer pressure. Many Internet communities - and, to be fair, many offline communities - don't currently have sufficient pressure to make them act like a human rather than a chimpanzee. That's all there is to it.
There will always be people who will seek power for their own benefit.. That is why we ought never to give government any more trust or power than is absolutely necessary.
1) There will always be people who will seek power for whatever reason. The less power government holds, the more they can gather before trying to take it over. A weak central government has harder time tyrannizing me, true, but also makes easier for the local strongmen to do so instead.
2) My definition of "absolutely necessary" includes free healthcare and education and is starting to include a generous unconditional citizen wage, does yours?
In the end, that was what fell the Communist regimes.
What fell the Communist regimes is that Lenin got the brilliant idea of trying to build a post-capitalist economy in a country that had not actually gone trough - or even started at - capitalism yet, and that the ideals of classless society, democracy and even basic human decency could and should be sacrificed for this goal. Of course the end result was an utterly delusional dictatorship which had as much to do with Communism as Religious Right has with Jesus.
A government that does not have the support of its people is eventually doomed to fail. When a request like "Don't ask what your country can do for you" is met with a "yeah, right, fuck off", you have a problem.
You have a problem if anyone ever makes such a request. It implies someone fancies himself ruling by divine right, not managing public affairs with the consent and approval of said public.
Every system will favor the powerful. That's life.
That's a naturalistic fallacy and complete nonsense besides. Our societies are ordered like army camps because they descend from warlike empires and haven't yet have had a chance to fully shed that legacy. The whole concept of an owning class is merely the shadow of aristocracy, which is obsolete. Evolution will cull away useless organs in time, especially if they're actively harmful.
That's no excuse per se for not succeeding yourself, and joining the owning class.
How does one outcompete the powerful in a system that favors the powerful? One doesn't. However, one's attempts to do so perpetuate the axioms and patterns of the system, which is why the system would very much want you to try. This can take the form of various get rich quick schemes, myths about getting rich through hard work, or some form of literal lottery.
It's telling that you seem to think one needs an excuse not to play. That's a fine example of the internalized model of the system coloring your perceptions. If conditions don't improve soon for a lot of people, the system is going to lose that first and most effective line of defence against change - sheer desperation will make its usually invisible due to being background structures and mechanisms visible and thus vulnerable to judgement.
Seeing how the Man is the anthropomorphic personification/symbolic representation of those who are powerful within our current system, he should be blamed for all the ways said system is skewed in his favour.
You don't actually understand why capital gains are taxed at the rate they're taxed, do you? The percentage can, arguably, be discussed but first you should understand the reason that the rates are as low as they are. The reason they're low is because you want me to keep my money invested and you want me to do so in the long-term area.
Capital gains are taxed at a low rate because the owning class has used their money to succesfully lobby low taxes for themselves. Since they're also destroying the middle class, the poor have little income to tax, and a modern society simply cannot function without expensive infrastructure, the end result is a country headed for bankruptcy.
But that's okay, the rich parasites will simply suck another host dry once the current one dies.
But for charging cars, you don't need base load. You can use a smart charger that charges the car battery when, and only when, cheap power is available.
I need my car to be ready to go at morning when I'll leave for work. That means the battery needs to start charging as soon as I'm home. And that means for an electric car to be a viable option for me, the grid will need to provide power when I need it, not when it happens to be available.
Seriously â" rich people shall be free to do whatever they want with their own money,
Fill a swimming pool with your scrip and make like Scrooge for all I care, just don't expect me to accept monopoly money as payment nor shoulder by myself all the costs of running a modern society which gives euros, dollars etc. their value and lets you have that swimming pool and enough free time to indulge in your bizarre hobby in the first place.
but before taxpayers are compelled to finance travel to other planets, we need to colonize this planet we have right here.
The point of a Mars colony is having a backup if and when this one goes down in nuclear flames, gets hit by an asteroid, Black Death v2.0, etc. Obviously the colony will need to be fully self-sufficient indefinitely to meet this goal, but you have to start somewhere.
Geeks really like to dream big about space, and the hate the bullshit conventional human institutions provide; but the problem is that the only sources of big-level funding for space have to be large-scale human institutions. Which means dealing with bullshit.
More importantly, any space colony is going to require a level of authoritarian collectivism that'll make anything that has ever existed on Earth to seem mild. The colony needs to micromanage and coordinate everything since it'll have a shortage of pretty much everything, and imports are months away at the very least. That means you'll be assigned a (shift in a) bed in communal barracks, a job and working hours, and food and other resources. Personal property? Waste of precious resources (especially cargo space) - you'll be assigned temporary possessions when you need them Leisure time? That's "personal maintenance" and will be too scarce to risk anyone being less than 100% efficient about, so scheduled and supervised. Breeding? When the colony tells you to, and most likely with whom it tells you to, and the children will be raised, educated and indoctrinated by the colony itself. Education? If the colony needs you to learn new things, otherwise you're just wasting time you could be using to clean toilets.
Life in space colony will be utterly collectivist with no room whatsoever for individual goals or desires. At best, it'll be an army camp meets hippie commune, at worst how Ayn Rand would describe communism while on a bad trip. Also, there will be a heavy emphasis on religion, since that's what it takes to make people give up their individuality and submit to the group. It's not gonna be a new Wild West, it's gonna be a new Soviet Union, except far more extreme.
In short, a Mars colony will by necessity be an ultra-collectivist fanatical cult. It's biggest challenge will not be the environment, but managing its own social structure and keeping it humane and democratic under such circumstances. Anyone who dreams of a new frontier free from government interference should just do themselves and everyone else a favour and stay home, at least until technology advances a lot.
Every adult is responsible for the consequences of one's choices.
So if the owner shuts down a department, will he have to find new equivalent jobs for the people who worked there? They lost their jobs as a result of his choices, so is he responsible for for those consequences?
Um, wouldn't "them" in this case be the local government which means the local community, i.e. people who are paying taxes in that town?
You mean the people who ultimately set the standards of police behaviour in said community? Sounds like the right address.
Best case the police department is insured and the insurance company would pay any settlement and then just jack up insurance rates on the rest of their customers to make the money back.
Insurance companies set the rates on each client individually based on estimated risks. If insuring jackbooted thugs is riskier, then jackbooted thugs will pay more. And that's exactly how it should be. Perhaps the market will succeed where appeals to conscience have failed.
Yeah, good idea.
And obviously so. Unless, of course, you're secure about never being personally subjected to this kind of shit, presumably because you're not a Sikh, and think oppressing them will help boost your relative position.
Slashdot Mirror
Physics simulation is nowhere near level anything remotely approaching realistic close-contact interaction with anything solid would require, and that's not even getting into AI. But if having sex with the ghost of a love doll is your thing, you're set.
Simply recording and replaying a first-person all-senses-included sex act should work just fine, though. Or having remote sex via the Internet. I guess online brothels will become pretty popular.
I couldn't care less about what you believe.
I care about what you do.
If your actions - including speech - indicate a consistent pattern of fear towards homosexuals as individuals, group or a conspiracy ("The Homosexual Agenda") then you are a homophobe and it is not an Ad Hominem to call you that.
And yet these totalitarian socialists are defending consenting adult's right to marry even if it upsets some third party's sensibilities, while the homophobes are trying to take for themselves power to decide who can marry who. Given that homophobes are asserting more authority over other people's lives than totalitarian socialists, what does that make them?
How do you stop balkanization from producing something like the Balkans?
It's not the paradigm itself, it's that there's a lot of shady employers out there who want to call their employees "contractors" simply to shift all the risk - and none of the benefits - to them.
If you can afford to pick your jobs, good for you. Most people do whatever is available, and that means anything that makes it easier to screw them - such as getting called a "contractor" rather than an employee - is a threat and gets treated that way.
Anyone can be better than average, yes. Everyone can't, any more than everyone can be a better than average driver. But that doesn't stop them from deluding themselves, or listening to a flattering scam artist who tells them they're a special little snowflake who'd only get held back by the unions.
Just goes to demonstrate, once again, that pride is a mortal sin for a reason.
And this is another thing: If consumers don't earn money, then consumers can't spend money, and the economy grinds to a halt, as it's currently doing. But every single actor in that economy has an incentive to stay in their local optimum and ignore the consequences, thus nothing can be done about it. So we continue to stumble helplessly towards another economic collapse - and like last time, various more or less openly fascist parties are already making inroads.
I guess those who just want to watch the world burn are going to get their wish.
Humanity's entire success is based on us figuring out how to do just that. Our behaviour has an instinctual aspect but is mostly dictated by surrounding society, and can be "updated" within our lifetime. Death became obsolete as soon as nature invented evolutionary Turing machines. We can only hope it'll become nonexistent, too.
And by "serve" you mean "rubber stamp whatever the people who actually run the legislature put before them."
The reason they're not being done is precisely because they'd employ people. It's a lot easier to abuse your employees and the lower classes in general if they're desperate. McDonald's and Wal-Marts have every incentive to keep unemployment high; how else would they charge employees for receiving their pay yet still have employees? Heck, the entire payday loan industry depends on there being a steady supply of people who have to sacrifice tomorrow to survive today.
Our economy continues being horrible because people on top benefit from horrible economy in the form of greater relative power. They'll go too far eventually and spark a revolution, but until then, they'll resist any improvement - because improving your situation would make it harder for them to play your masters.
Just look at history: the Victorian-era hardcore capitalism was somewhat humanized to halt the spread of Communism, and neoconservatism rose as Soviet Union fell and the threat was perceived to have passed. And now society is starting to come apart at the seams again. The cycle will likely repeat as long as Capitalism exists, since to end it would require abolishing social classes entirely.
Everybody likes to talk about how we shouldn't worry about the effects of the automobile on buggy whip manufacturers. Nobody wants to be the buggy whip manufacturer going out of business. Especially if they've spent their time in the sun talking bad things about all those mediocre people who need unions and the government to look after them because individually they lack power, just like those former whip experts do now.
The flame of progress melts special little snowflakes just like all others. It can be a rather rude awakening for some of them.
Dude... that's pretty much the definition of welfare. And it isn't bad.
As long as they come out of college with tens of thousands of dollars of debt they'll likely be stuck with their whole life they're going to be "confused" by a system which promises free education.
As long as you have social classes the cycle of the topmost class looting those below it until they go too far and cause a social or economic collapse is going to repeat itself. Banning books won't change that. The idea of a better world is inherent in an imperfect one.
But I suppose we could call it "Capitalism 2.0", if it helps.
I am not comfortable with danger, which is why I'm trying to minimize it. And that means not giving the next Hitler wannabe a fully functional censorship machine to silence any opposition with.
They're free to do so, but in the light of the entire human history that makes them either idiots or Hitler wannabes.
No, it's not. It's bullying. And it's usually the popular kids who do the bullying. The ones with social development issues tend to be victims, not perpetrators. But anyone who's in the minority for any reason - such as having a gender that's unusual in a group - will do.
Some people are assholes. They behave themselves only if forced to, for example by peer pressure. Many Internet communities - and, to be fair, many offline communities - don't currently have sufficient pressure to make them act like a human rather than a chimpanzee. That's all there is to it.
1) There will always be people who will seek power for whatever reason. The less power government holds, the more they can gather before trying to take it over. A weak central government has harder time tyrannizing me, true, but also makes easier for the local strongmen to do so instead.
2) My definition of "absolutely necessary" includes free healthcare and education and is starting to include a generous unconditional citizen wage, does yours?
What fell the Communist regimes is that Lenin got the brilliant idea of trying to build a post-capitalist economy in a country that had not actually gone trough - or even started at - capitalism yet, and that the ideals of classless society, democracy and even basic human decency could and should be sacrificed for this goal. Of course the end result was an utterly delusional dictatorship which had as much to do with Communism as Religious Right has with Jesus.
You have a problem if anyone ever makes such a request. It implies someone fancies himself ruling by divine right, not managing public affairs with the consent and approval of said public.
And human history is a grim testament to the bloody results. Perhaps it's time to just admit this "enemy" thing isn't working and try something else?
That's a naturalistic fallacy and complete nonsense besides. Our societies are ordered like army camps because they descend from warlike empires and haven't yet have had a chance to fully shed that legacy. The whole concept of an owning class is merely the shadow of aristocracy, which is obsolete. Evolution will cull away useless organs in time, especially if they're actively harmful.
How does one outcompete the powerful in a system that favors the powerful? One doesn't. However, one's attempts to do so perpetuate the axioms and patterns of the system, which is why the system would very much want you to try. This can take the form of various get rich quick schemes, myths about getting rich through hard work, or some form of literal lottery.
It's telling that you seem to think one needs an excuse not to play. That's a fine example of the internalized model of the system coloring your perceptions. If conditions don't improve soon for a lot of people, the system is going to lose that first and most effective line of defence against change - sheer desperation will make its usually invisible due to being background structures and mechanisms visible and thus vulnerable to judgement.
Seeing how the Man is the anthropomorphic personification/symbolic representation of those who are powerful within our current system, he should be blamed for all the ways said system is skewed in his favour.
Capital gains are taxed at a low rate because the owning class has used their money to succesfully lobby low taxes for themselves. Since they're also destroying the middle class, the poor have little income to tax, and a modern society simply cannot function without expensive infrastructure, the end result is a country headed for bankruptcy.
But that's okay, the rich parasites will simply suck another host dry once the current one dies.
I need my car to be ready to go at morning when I'll leave for work. That means the battery needs to start charging as soon as I'm home. And that means for an electric car to be a viable option for me, the grid will need to provide power when I need it, not when it happens to be available.
Fill a swimming pool with your scrip and make like Scrooge for all I care, just don't expect me to accept monopoly money as payment nor shoulder by myself all the costs of running a modern society which gives euros, dollars etc. their value and lets you have that swimming pool and enough free time to indulge in your bizarre hobby in the first place.
The point of a Mars colony is having a backup if and when this one goes down in nuclear flames, gets hit by an asteroid, Black Death v2.0, etc. Obviously the colony will need to be fully self-sufficient indefinitely to meet this goal, but you have to start somewhere.
More importantly, any space colony is going to require a level of authoritarian collectivism that'll make anything that has ever existed on Earth to seem mild. The colony needs to micromanage and coordinate everything since it'll have a shortage of pretty much everything, and imports are months away at the very least. That means you'll be assigned a (shift in a) bed in communal barracks, a job and working hours, and food and other resources. Personal property? Waste of precious resources (especially cargo space) - you'll be assigned temporary possessions when you need them Leisure time? That's "personal maintenance" and will be too scarce to risk anyone being less than 100% efficient about, so scheduled and supervised. Breeding? When the colony tells you to, and most likely with whom it tells you to, and the children will be raised, educated and indoctrinated by the colony itself. Education? If the colony needs you to learn new things, otherwise you're just wasting time you could be using to clean toilets.
Life in space colony will be utterly collectivist with no room whatsoever for individual goals or desires. At best, it'll be an army camp meets hippie commune, at worst how Ayn Rand would describe communism while on a bad trip. Also, there will be a heavy emphasis on religion, since that's what it takes to make people give up their individuality and submit to the group. It's not gonna be a new Wild West, it's gonna be a new Soviet Union, except far more extreme.
In short, a Mars colony will by necessity be an ultra-collectivist fanatical cult. It's biggest challenge will not be the environment, but managing its own social structure and keeping it humane and democratic under such circumstances. Anyone who dreams of a new frontier free from government interference should just do themselves and everyone else a favour and stay home, at least until technology advances a lot.
So if the owner shuts down a department, will he have to find new equivalent jobs for the people who worked there? They lost their jobs as a result of his choices, so is he responsible for for those consequences?
You mean the people who ultimately set the standards of police behaviour in said community? Sounds like the right address.
Best case the police department is insured and the insurance company would pay any settlement and then just jack up insurance rates on the rest of their customers to make the money back.
Insurance companies set the rates on each client individually based on estimated risks. If insuring jackbooted thugs is riskier, then jackbooted thugs will pay more. And that's exactly how it should be. Perhaps the market will succeed where appeals to conscience have failed.
And obviously so. Unless, of course, you're secure about never being personally subjected to this kind of shit, presumably because you're not a Sikh, and think oppressing them will help boost your relative position.
Except you aren't, because you weren't driving, because the autopilot was. That's what it's for, after all.