‘The more I see of what you call civilisation, the more highly I think of what you call savagery.’

  • 21 Posts
  • 53 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Feels like there’s an increasingly strong idea that racism is ok as long as it’s targeting at undesirable people, as if that’s a new concept and isn’t how racism has always been justified.

    To racist it’s always justified and their target deserves it. It has never been any other way. Same with any other kinda hate and dismissal. They will always deserve it. I do a shit take, anybody who thinks it shit think I deserve the hate and ridicule. The difference is just that black man can’t stop being black, but an idiot can recant their words. The logic behind them is always the same.
    Aren’t there also fanatical kamala supporters that unironically think that Kamala was the only way and anybody who thinks otherwise at least deserves to be called an idiot or maybe even deported or other things done to them. That is what it does when one falls into the idea that their deeply held subjective worldview is actually the objective truth, especially things that are fundamentally passionate and subjective like politics. From there it’s not a very long leap to think that if you are objectively right then everybody else is just wrong and they are either ignoramuses who are unwilling to be thought nor can be reasoned with, or they know the truth but are full of some malice and act against the truth anyway because of some selfish or dark reason. Both cases will logically lead into escalating violence against those who you disagree with, once you have crossed that bridge form subjectivity to objectivity. Even in things like democrats becoming the thing that many blamed the republicans were when they start to feel pressured.












  • I really do wonder why they ended up in this. It can’ be that hard to make even a hacky DIY system to do it automatically. The navigation system just had to have some digital or even analog output, then it would be just the problem of interpreting the signal with some script and writing it into a file.

    When Wilby recommended the company use standard software to process ping data and plot the sub’s telemetry automatically, the response was that the company wanted to develop an in-house system, but didn’t have enough time.




  • How secure something is an spectrum. Sure self hosted matrix is a lot safer than sending your messages through meta servers for example. It’s about what is the threat levels of what one is doing. Total tinfoiling like writing your own quantum proof multi encryption ciphers and sending that over an tamper proof usb stick with self destruct mechanism by a carrier pridgeon is not necessary or practical for average people who just want privacy, but for critical government applications and especially the military it might be. That is what we are talking about here.





  • A truly free market have a high likelihood of self-correcting once one group gets too influential.

    It never will. You libertarian types say that it will, but it never has and never will. First there are no mythical pure free market and also when you have a lot more capital, resources and bulk. They can comparatively throw endless amounts of money towards a problem and RnD. They can afford to fuck up and have a money buffer, they might just generally stagnate and be ok. When your potential challengers can only usually have one chance and, when they fail they will get bought out and usually by the same monopoly that they were trying to challenge and thus enforcing that monopoly with whatever innovation that the up with, or they just take the patent just so that nobody else gets it. And what has alphabet for example doing. it’s been shopping smaller tech and IT companies all around the world and it integrating them into itself.

    Or the alternative: lower the barrier for others to compete.

    how will you lower the capital cost that would be required to challenge google/alphabet? Servers, battalions of code monkeys and engineers and RnD don’t just drop from the sky for free you know. That is the biggest problem of challenging any monopoly, it’s just too damn expensive to try when it reaches a certain point. There comes a point when you can’t just anymore get into the market with two shovels and some elbow grease and you need massive loans for fleets of excavators and trained crews to run them just to be competitive. There is also the problem that at some point nobody will fund your venture to dethrone the market leader, because A) it’s expensive as fuck B) there is 1% chance that you will succeed and the investment will provide 100x return and 99% chance that failure awaits and the money will be lost. No sane bank or financier takes that bet and nobody does that kinda things for charity.

    Government is most effective as a police to shut down bad behavior, it’s really ineffective at actually providing services

    Again, your government just sucks. You draw the incorrect conclusion that therefore every government must suck as badly as yours.


  • Google is basically a government in itself regarding it’s resources, GDP, personnel and the power that it wields, and they can do it just fine. Actually they are doing it so well and smoothly, that nobody notices being fucked by them. Your government just sucks in general, we know this. Instead of demanding less government, singing praises of private companies and people as fixes to everything, and then watching everybody getting railed by private interests twice as badly as before, you should instead demand better government.

    Following any “let’s chop up google” replace it with another platform is just a game of fools whack-a-mole. No matter how small you would chop up google the same monopoly would still form under a different name, maybe in a little different configuration. We have been in this moment before in the past. You can’t kill monopolies, no matter the field because free markets internal logic will create monopolies no matter what you do and then it seizes to be a free market and you get all the anti-consumer, anti-competition, gatekeeping, general parasitic behavior that you got before. it’s not that google is run by bad people or is inherently evil now. it’s current tricks are what is required by the market and it’s investors because they want every single cent out of it’s customers. It’s that maximizing profit no matter the cost that is combined with cornering market on several sectors that is the real problem and creates that anti-user behaviors. You wouldn’t have that with a government institution.

    With monopolies it’s either suffer or make them work for you. That is what a nationalization would be, since even a sham democratic control and following of social goals would be improvement on private interests doing the same and worse. If you are worried about governments spying on you, then don’t be. They already pay google to do that for them already. the real problem really is that companies like google and Microsoft are so big and influential that global politics would enter into play if US did anything to their pseudo independence from the state, no matter how benign their intentions.