promethea.incorporated

veronicastraszh:

anosognosicredux:

nostalgebraist:

I’m trying to go cold turkey on NAB now (seriously), so this post is the kind of thing you should discourage, but just to address one quick and relatively clear-cut thing – in Phil’s response to my final post, he says

You also didn’t assert that the book did something it didn’t or vice versa. For instance, the claim that sparked “not even wrong” was “PS couldn’t use Lovecraftian horror as a framework,” which is bewildering because Lovecraftian horror is absolutely the framework, right down to the reasonable-seeming protagonist whose serious-minded efforts at untangling a mystery go horribly wrong.

We don’t seem to have been reading the post the same way.   I mean of course your book was using Lovecraftian horror as the framework – IMO that’s the sort of thing that is so obvious that a flat denial of it is almost always a deliberate paradox meant as part of a subtler point.  Just as, if someone began by writing “Barack Obama is not the president of the U.S.,” I would read on in search of what they meant by that, not think “well, actually, Barack Obama is the president of the U.S., I dunno what this fool’s on about”

I’m not sure I have a complete handle on the post in question but as I interpreted it, they were saying your book isn’t fully Lovecraftian in spirit because it focuses so heavily on the trio’s failures as thinkers, rather than portraying their discovery of monsters as the unfortunate consequence of thinking well and not knowing when to stop.  Which @anosognosicredux claims is a key part of Lovecraft’s deal.  I don’t know how right that is, but it struck me as interesting.

That’s about right.

To be clear, I was referring rather narrowly to the Basilisk. The basic Lovecraftian structure is not a sustained ambiguous tension between madness and the supernatural. That exists perhaps at first. But in the archetypal horror story, either the suspicion of madness is dispelled by revelation, or madness is confirmed, but the reader remains at a safe remove. Either way, the tension is dissipated by a return to normality, even with the existence of the supernatural, because the supernatural remains liminal.

In Lovecraft it does not. In Lovecraft, the suspicion of madness is dispelled, but there is no return to normality. The veil is lifted by rationality, and the supernatural is revealed not as some liminal existence, but the substrate of reality itself. The Lovecraftian supernatural adds up to normality, and vice versa.

Not that you don’t know this, Phil (hi! thanks for reading!). You just seem to take the wrong conclusion about Yudkowskianism from the Basilisk, and it has everything to do with not being Lovecraftian enough.

See, it’s not that Yudkowskians don’t know about cosmic horror. Quite the opposite: Yudkowskianism is built around it. It’s all about doing what we can against the monster at the end of this book. Yudkowskianism is all about monsters, and resisting them. If it were about pretending that the universe has a human face, it would indeed be pwned rather readily by something like the Basilisk. But it’s not. Yudkowskianism is about asserting your humanity with abandon against the chaotic void. It’s about moving in for that hail mary at the bottom of the ninth on the fourth down with thirty seconds left on the clock. For all his faults (and this is where he breaks with Lovecraft), Yudkowsky sees the abyss and, rather than giving in to despair, says, what if.

Whereas you seem to espouse going ahead and becoming a Cthulhu cultist. To each his own, I guess.

(with my apologies to @nostalgebraist)

I think this is … true.

Not that I always accept EY’s answer. But still, he does skate over the top of utter meaninglessness and just – not care that much about meaninglessness.

He really is an optimistic chap, to be honest. Personally I find it charming.

Also: we have a winner from the audience for Part 9! The Basilisk was ourselves all along, for we stare it in the eyes and wait for it to blink first! Phil withdraws into a pagan sex cult, mumbling something incomprehensible about “white culture” and “that which the erotic signifies” while we start calculating ICBM trajectories to Point Nemo. We are the true monster because our response to the monster is to become more terrifying than it itself and thus destroy it. While remaining cuddly and n e o t e n i c with the friends we made along the way!

1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit · 47 notes · source: nostalgebraist · .permalink

Computer Trouble (Again)

sinesalvatorem:

socialjusticemunchkin:

sinesalvatorem:

socialjusticemunchkin:

socialjusticemunchkin:

sinesalvatorem:

socialjusticemunchkin:

sinesalvatorem:

socialjusticemunchkin:

thathopeyetlives:

sinesalvatorem:

I just learned that now, when I unplug my laptop, it dies.
Even though it’s supposed to be mostly charged.
I didn’t know this was a type of problem that could happen.

It’s probably not battery overuse because, until today, the battery could last for about 5 hours.
I was using the laptop, while charging it, for about three hours now (after having used it chargerless right before that).
Then I pulled the plug, because the battery was mostly full anyway, and it died.

Then I tried turning it on chargerless and it wouldn’t responded. I started it up while plugged in, then unplugged it again, and it died again.
I tried this three more times with minor variations before concluding that, yes, it’s a problem.
So now I’m running it while it’s “”“charging”“”.

This is an Acer Aspire running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which I bought in September 2015.
The battery is not easily removable, otherwise I’d remove it and put it back, since that works well for some other things.

Does anyone know what I should do?

Ohhhhhhh…. thissssss….. 

Lithium batteries are temperamental, and there are sometimes various controls to treat them in different ways such as “do not charge more than 80 percent, or discharge less than 20 percent, or whatever arbitrary limits you choose”. 

This is most common on business style laptops but yours might have it too. 

On Linux, the control of these may be broken or you might have set it accidentally. Do you have any battery buttons on your keyboard? I had this problem with the Dell they gave me at my old job which had an unlabelled  button for “just don’t charge the battery ever” for some reason. 

As far as actually solving your problem, I can’t help. It’s a rabbit hole. Possibly @thirqual may have ideas. But it’s a place to look. 

(Oh, and this may not instantly recover if you boot with a linux thumb drive.)

try “acpi -b” in the terminal when the charger is in place; copypaste results below

>alison@alison-Aspire-ES1-511:~$ acpi -b
>Battery 0: Unknown, 76%

…I am not sure what to do with this.

Okay, that is weird.

next: “dmesg | grep -i battery”

That “76%” is strange as I’d have expected it to be something like “0%” in the most simple possibility (not charging because of a software setting) but the “Unknown” is, well, an unknown.

>ailson@ailson-Aspire-ES1-511:~$ dmesg | grep -i battery
>[    1.423993] [Firmware Bug]: battery: (dis)charge rate invalid.
>[    1.424033] ACPI: Battery Slot [BAT1] (battery present)

(Bold is from the original)

Did you have a software update at the time this change happened?

Specifically: which bios version are you using? Because this seems to be linked to the bios sending garbage to acpi and a similar problem has been observed elsewhere associated with the 1.10 bios version.

The Arch linux wiki suggests that the bios in legacy instead of uefi mode is Problematic, are you able to check which one it’s operating in?

Now, I don’t really know how to fix this (or to be specific, I’m not comfortable trying to suggest the fixes I’d do to my own machine via this kind of remote control) but at least this would suggest something about the origin of the problem.

ETA: here is a similar situation caused by bios telling the lid is closed when AC is unplugged; it might be solvable by telling UPower to ignore lid close events. This instruction seems safe enough and regardless of the outcome it would provide more Evidence.

How do I check BIOS version?

When I close the lid, it hibernates. When I unplug the AC power, it cuts off completely. It doesn’t shut down - it immediately dies. I doubt my OS thinks I’m closing the lid here.

When booting up, press F2 and observe the bios. Esc should exit without changes.

This observation would somewhat favor the hypothesis that the battery simply died instead of a software issue, in which case having the device repaired would be the only successful solution, but some kind of a power management problem cutting out juice on loss of AC could fit it as well. I’ll try to locate information on that one.

What specific information should I look for in the BIOS screen and tell you about here?

Some screen should show the version the BIOS is using; and elsewhere you should be able to find whether it’s “UEFI” or “legacy”. I don’t know how exactly it functions, but typically it’s something like a “Boot” tab (Arch wiki says: “press F2 at the boot splash screen to enter the EFI setup, then select the Boot tab”)

In my desktop (my pretty little laptop has its own non-standard things) I’d go to “Advanced mode” from the opening screen, then to the “Main” tab and list all the information there (except for the obviously hardware-related such as amount of memory and processor type):

Build Date: 03/26/2014
EC Version: MBE0-Z97-0115
ME Version: 9.1.0.1120
PCH Stepping: 00/A0

And in “Boot” I have “CSM (Compatibility Support Module)”

Launch CSM: Enabled
Boot Devices Control: UEFI and Legacy OpROM
Boot from Network Devices: Legacy OpROM first
Boot from Storage Devices: Legacy OpRom first
Boot from PCI-E/PCI Expansion Devices: Legacy OpRom first

And also “Boot Option Priorities” which shows that I have a 480G SSD and the same 480G SSD (UEFI)

Then I’d go to “Tool”, select “ASUS EZ Flash 2”, and it would show:

Model: SABERTOOTH Z97 MARK 2 Version 0502 Date: 03/26/2014

(I’m just looking at my manual for the general idea of what the correct procedure and expected outputs on this platform would be; yours is probably quite different but the manual I found on Acer’s website was utterly unhelpful and as a hacker I’m immensely offended at Acer’s attempt to capture their customers for their service services instead of giving them the information they need to better own their own devices)

1 month ago · 32 notes · source: sinesalvatorem · .permalink

voximperatoris:

socialjusticemunchkin:

argumate:

voximperatoris:

argumate:

voximperatoris:

@argumate:

Now, do I think open borders will happen?

No, certainly not any time soon. I think people are too racist, nationalistic, and anti-capitalistic to allow it to happen under current political conditions.

My main point is merely to argue that open borders would be good, and that everyone ought to support and advocate for it. But just because people should do something, doesn’t mean they will. The US should have abolished slavery without having a civil war; the South should have abolished Jim Crow without being forced by federal intervention.

I support anything that moves us closer in the direction of open borders, such as increased immigration quotas and bilateral open-borders agreements between developed countries.

My prediction is that, one day, we will indeed have open borders across the world—at around the same time every country becomes “developed”. Thus, we will have it precisely at the point where we don’t need it.

My hope is that we can get a little ahead of the curve. For instance, the extension in the European Union of open borders to Eastern Europe was/is a very positive development.

And I think “we shouldn’t support open borders because it would be unpopular and provoke a backlash” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s the job of the people advocating for it to make it popular, e.g. by pointing out the benefits and refuting the economic fallacies upon which people think it would deprive them of their livelihoods—since people are quite reasonable, in my opinion, to oppose policies that would deprive them of their livelihoods.

I think we have some broad areas of agreement here, in that we both anticipate open borders in the future and see raised immigration quotas and bilateral agreements as being a good thing.

We may differ on the getting ahead of the curve aspect. You suggest that it is necessary to refute economic fallacies about open borders depriving people of their livelihoods, but at the same time open borders is supposed to pay its way by allowing us to pay less for manual labour, for example. That implies that people currently performing manual labour at higher rates will face a reduction in their pay or conditions, no? Or will it be compensated in some way?

The point is that, by moving people from places where they are economically unproductive—such as Haiti or the Congo—to places where they can be much more economically productive—such as America or Australia—the total amount of wealth, or the “size of the pie” can be increased.

To quote myself from just now in the SSC comments:

The nominal wages of (some) Americans may go down, but their realwages also go up insofar as everything they buy becomes cheaper. The nominal wage loss is one-time per-immigrant, but the real wage gain is compounded every year as the immigrants continue producing year after year.

As more and more workers leave Ethiopia (or wherever) to come to the United States, workers there become more scarce, causing wages to rise. Until eventually the point is reached where the wage gain from going to America isn’t worth the trouble of leaving.

You do have arbitrage in the price of labor, with the end result that there is, more or less, a single world price of labor (relative to skill). But you’re acting like that merely means that the price will move down in developed countries until it hits Ethiopian levels. No, at the same time, in less developed countries it moves up. And since the effect of this is to more efficiently allocate labor and thereby increase production, the result is not that American and Ethiopian incomes are averaged out at some medium level, but rather that real income goes up—and continues to go up.

[…]

Now, if all the additional immigrants as a result of a policy of free immigration came in one single year, there would indeed probably be a significant short-term drop in American wages until it was counterbalanced by the greater production. But if, as is more likely, they come over time, then as each new wave is coming to lower the nominal wages, the ones who have already come are already acting to push up the real wages.

And moreover, it’s very likely that the current residents of the countries into which people would immigrate would not be competing on the “bottom rung” with the unskilled immigrant labor. It’s much more likely that they would be hired in higher/managerial roles, or roles that interact with the public, while immigrants—especially the ones that can’t speak English—would tend to be put in lower-level roles. It has to be emphasized that the ability to speak fluent English is a major skill that native workers have and most potential immigrants don’t. For instance, you have the current dynamic in restaurants where you tend to have native-born people as the waiters and maîtres d’, and immigrants in the back washing dishes.

Now, you may justifiably say that this is not very fair in the cosmic sense. But if there’s anyone to whom it’s not fair, it’s certainly the immigrants, not the native workers.

Stuff gets cheaper, yes, but only for given types of stuff; what about land? People still need somewhere to live, even if food or manufactured goods are cheaper than they once were. And I still feel your are skirting around the fact that there will be job losses, it’s inevitable. Not everyone can become managers or reskill to write web apps or whatever, and they know that.

We could pareto-optimize. If immigration increases the pie, agree to redistribute the increases to bribe those who would suffer to accept the deal.

Assume four people: Adam, Steve, Peter and Paul. They initially start with 1, 20, 100, and 15 utility points.

Adam wants to move to Westonia where Steve, Peter and Paul live. Adam takes a low-paid job Paul was previously doing, for a total gain of +10 utility points and Paul loses 12 utility points. Steve gets +5 utility points from being promoted, and Peter reaps +20 utility points from economic growth. The new distribution is 11, 25, 120, and 3. Unfortunately moving to Westonia requires permission from 75% of the population, and Paul loses out on this deal so he votes against open borders.

If Steve and Peter agree to give Paul back the 12 utility points so that Steve gives 2 and Peter gives 10, nobody is worse off than they started with. This redistribution is less efficient, so Adam loses 2 points, Steve loses 1 and Peter loses 2 points from deadweight losses.

Ultimately Adam has 9 points, Steve has 22 points, Peter has 108 points and Paul stays with 15 points.

As rational economic actors, everyone will vote for this plan and benefit.

Yes, this is the “keyhole solution” of “tax immigrants to fund a dole for unemployed natives”.

Now, I’m opposed to this because it’s both unjust and economically inefficient. But if it’s necessary to bribe people this way in order to have open borders, I would certainly be for it.

On the other hand, if—as I always hear from the left—the rich control American politics, then all that’s required is that it be in the interest of the rich. ;)

I specifically made it so that Adam wouldn’t give any of the ones he gets except via deadweight, because it’s more fair that way. If natives benefit in aggregate, natives could redistribute amongst themselves and let low-wage immigrants not foot the bill, perhaps as a compensation for the historical theft of having denied them access for so long in the first place, or so my instinct of justice would like to suggest.

And in a certain way this is a coasean bargaining around a certain form of property. If one looks at the state, taxes, benefits, regulations, etc. as strange property it provides a very interesting perspective to everything. (The perspective which, for example, informs my bostadsrett proposal for the abolition of rent control; people already have a certain kind of kind-of-property, and it would be naive to expect them to give it up right away without compensation. From an amoral so-propertarian-it-wraps-beyond-propertarianism perspective certain things make perfect sense and it can be argued that rolling back benefits would be, pragmatically speaking, as similar to theft as taxation is. We might have broken the system by creating all these property derivatives nobody fully understood, but simply expropriating one class of strange property that is mostly held by those in a bad position otherwise provokes the same kind of totally comprehensible resistance as expropriating less strange property.)

Empirically, it doesn’t seem to be the rich who control things so much simply because we don’t have free immigration. The rich are undeniably a powerful thumb pressing on the scales of ~democracy~, but whether it’s genuinely successful is ultimately down to convincing assholes that they want the same things the rich want. Robber barons couldn’t exist on their own without people willing to become, and apologetize for, the pinkertons.

1 month ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower · 21 notes · source: voximperatoris · .permalink

multiheaded1793:

memelovingbot:

Don’t let Tumblr make you believe: make america relocate to San Francisco again just fuck me up.

Libertarian queer tumblr be like

As libertarian queer tumblr this is 100% accurate.

1 month ago · tagged #it me · 142 notes · source: memelovingbot · .permalink

shlevy:

Things that made me more likely to read NAB: @slatestarscratchpad and @yudkowsky talking about how terrible it would be to do so

Things that convinced me not to bother: @nostalgebraist‘s and, to a lesser extent, @socialjusticemunchkin‘s reviews.

…to defeat the sneer, you must first become the sneer…

He Who Is Bad at PR needs to hire a competent PR manager so I don’t need to pick up the slack. The Cool Kids don’t play by the same rules as He Who Has Fascinating Ideas But Doesn’t Understand The Cool Kids, that’s the entire point because they wouldn’t be the Cool Kids to begin with if they did. People are clockwork, don’t just complain, find the levers that make them do what you want to do. Shut up and do the impossible. I don’t want to victim-blame, but the last thing you want to do to sharks who surround you when diving is to bite your lip and try to do like an octopus.

1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit #clockwork people · 24 notes · source: shlevy · .permalink

multiheaded1793:

I want a dieselpunk alternative history tank commander RPG videogame. With cute girls as crew members, and increasingly weird designs diverging from real-life ones in the 1920s, and the good guys being the Comintern (USSR + Germany + Eastern Europe) fighting against the tyranny of the Atlantic Pact and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. (With weird Tesla shit for the former, and walker designs for the latter.)

Turn-based simulation, fairly realistic (AP calculations, etc), but with anachronistic technology and RPG style controls and special abilities, and detailed crew actions like in the Armoured Commander roguelike. That would be so great.

Goddamnit. I could program this. I can totally see how this could possibly work. The game engine. The AP. The classes and the game objects and the calculations. The New Turn. The crew actions. Everything. I am a wizard. I can write marvellous spells. I know kung fu.

Now the only question is: does the market have the demand to incentivize the supply? I don’t know graphics, I don’t know tanks and stuff, I don’t know UI, and I don’t feel like playtesting too much (that’s what Rspec and TDD is for). But I could make this into a Project because I know code and I’d learn.

Basically I’m saying that I’m totally willing to be convinced to write that game, or at least the engine to write the game on.

1 month ago · tagged #baby leet · 22 notes · source: multiheaded1793 · .permalink

argumate:

voximperatoris:

argumate:

voximperatoris:

@argumate:

Now, do I think open borders will happen?

No, certainly not any time soon. I think people are too racist, nationalistic, and anti-capitalistic to allow it to happen under current political conditions.

My main point is merely to argue that open borders would be good, and that everyone ought to support and advocate for it. But just because people should do something, doesn’t mean they will. The US should have abolished slavery without having a civil war; the South should have abolished Jim Crow without being forced by federal intervention.

I support anything that moves us closer in the direction of open borders, such as increased immigration quotas and bilateral open-borders agreements between developed countries.

My prediction is that, one day, we will indeed have open borders across the world—at around the same time every country becomes “developed”. Thus, we will have it precisely at the point where we don’t need it.

My hope is that we can get a little ahead of the curve. For instance, the extension in the European Union of open borders to Eastern Europe was/is a very positive development.

And I think “we shouldn’t support open borders because it would be unpopular and provoke a backlash” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s the job of the people advocating for it to make it popular, e.g. by pointing out the benefits and refuting the economic fallacies upon which people think it would deprive them of their livelihoods—since people are quite reasonable, in my opinion, to oppose policies that would deprive them of their livelihoods.

I think we have some broad areas of agreement here, in that we both anticipate open borders in the future and see raised immigration quotas and bilateral agreements as being a good thing.

We may differ on the getting ahead of the curve aspect. You suggest that it is necessary to refute economic fallacies about open borders depriving people of their livelihoods, but at the same time open borders is supposed to pay its way by allowing us to pay less for manual labour, for example. That implies that people currently performing manual labour at higher rates will face a reduction in their pay or conditions, no? Or will it be compensated in some way?

The point is that, by moving people from places where they are economically unproductive—such as Haiti or the Congo—to places where they can be much more economically productive—such as America or Australia—the total amount of wealth, or the “size of the pie” can be increased.

To quote myself from just now in the SSC comments:

The nominal wages of (some) Americans may go down, but their realwages also go up insofar as everything they buy becomes cheaper. The nominal wage loss is one-time per-immigrant, but the real wage gain is compounded every year as the immigrants continue producing year after year.

As more and more workers leave Ethiopia (or wherever) to come to the United States, workers there become more scarce, causing wages to rise. Until eventually the point is reached where the wage gain from going to America isn’t worth the trouble of leaving.

You do have arbitrage in the price of labor, with the end result that there is, more or less, a single world price of labor (relative to skill). But you’re acting like that merely means that the price will move down in developed countries until it hits Ethiopian levels. No, at the same time, in less developed countries it moves up. And since the effect of this is to more efficiently allocate labor and thereby increase production, the result is not that American and Ethiopian incomes are averaged out at some medium level, but rather that real income goes up—and continues to go up.

[…]

Now, if all the additional immigrants as a result of a policy of free immigration came in one single year, there would indeed probably be a significant short-term drop in American wages until it was counterbalanced by the greater production. But if, as is more likely, they come over time, then as each new wave is coming to lower the nominal wages, the ones who have already come are already acting to push up the real wages.

And moreover, it’s very likely that the current residents of the countries into which people would immigrate would not be competing on the “bottom rung” with the unskilled immigrant labor. It’s much more likely that they would be hired in higher/managerial roles, or roles that interact with the public, while immigrants—especially the ones that can’t speak English—would tend to be put in lower-level roles. It has to be emphasized that the ability to speak fluent English is a major skill that native workers have and most potential immigrants don’t. For instance, you have the current dynamic in restaurants where you tend to have native-born people as the waiters and maîtres d’, and immigrants in the back washing dishes.

Now, you may justifiably say that this is not very fair in the cosmic sense. But if there’s anyone to whom it’s not fair, it’s certainly the immigrants, not the native workers.

Stuff gets cheaper, yes, but only for given types of stuff; what about land? People still need somewhere to live, even if food or manufactured goods are cheaper than they once were. And I still feel your are skirting around the fact that there will be job losses, it’s inevitable. Not everyone can become managers or reskill to write web apps or whatever, and they know that.

We could pareto-optimize. If immigration increases the pie, agree to redistribute the increases to bribe those who would suffer to accept the deal.

Assume four people: Adam, Steve, Peter and Paul. They initially start with 1, 20, 100, and 15 utility points.

Adam wants to move to Westonia where Steve, Peter and Paul live. Adam takes a low-paid job Paul was previously doing, for a total gain of +10 utility points and Paul loses 12 utility points. Steve gets +5 utility points from being promoted, and Peter reaps +20 utility points from economic growth. The new distribution is 11, 25, 120, and 3. Unfortunately moving to Westonia requires permission from 75% of the population, and Paul loses out on this deal so he votes against open borders.

If Steve and Peter agree to give Paul back the 12 utility points so that Steve gives 2 and Peter gives 10, nobody is worse off than they started with. This redistribution is less efficient, so Adam loses 2 points, Steve loses 1 and Peter loses 2 points from deadweight losses.

Ultimately Adam has 9 points, Steve has 22 points, Peter has 108 points and Paul stays with 15 points.

As rational economic actors, everyone will vote for this plan and benefit.

1 month ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower · 21 notes · source: voximperatoris · .permalink

ilzolende:

chroniclesofrettek:

another-normal-anomaly:

chroniclesofrettek:

Controversial positions I had to defend on facebook: “Involuntary servitude is bad” and “I can be against foreign wars AND trade wars.”

WTF happened with the involuntary servitude thing?

Someone linked an image of Jon Stewart saying everyone should have to work a year doing military/infrastructure building/whatever to build national sense of togetherness.

I have heard that a lot.

Mostly from middle-aged people saying it should be imposed on people when they graduate from HS.

Methinks they want the work to be done without them having to pay for it, and have noticed that they can set things up such that when the proposal is voted on, it will only apply to people unable to vote in that election.

Yes, that’s usually exactly how it works. A shameless power grab and piece of oppression, and also economically really fucking inefficient.

If I were to spend a year doing something 80% of the population is able to do, society doesn’t get the benefit of me instead doing something 1% of the population is able to do, and the people who can only do well things 80% of the population is able to do will find their jobs being taken away by hipsters which as I’ve understood usually upsets the hard-working salt-of-the-earth people pretty badly, and for a good reason.

And if we simply set up a system where everyone does what their comparative advantage is, but without pay, we get the perverse incentives of nobody being interested in doing it. A more rational way of doing it would be to divide the non-being-paid-ness as evenly as possible across people’s careers so instead of people working one year out of 40 without pay, they get 97.5% of their pay every year.

Of course, now we’ve simply reinvented income taxes and the marvellous technology of buying the work we need on the free market. Naturally this isn’t the favored option of the middle-aged people because it wouldn’t let them oppress and boss people around, but instead forces them to pay people a fairer price for their labor. If middle-aged people want more infrastructure builders than the market is currently supplying, they should pay for it so that more people can be infrastructure builders. And I’m pretty sure there isn’t a deficiency of workers because last time I heard we had a lot of unemployed people who would love to find honest physical work for a fair pay but just can’t so they are voting for Trump instead. It would be really really unfair for them if middle-aged assholes were to create a program to increase the amount of the kind of work those people could do that gets done, and then instead of giving those people jobs they would fill in the vacancies with unwilling hipsters.

(via ilzolende)

1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #win-win is my superpower · 22 notes · source: chroniclesofrettek · .permalink

ilzolende asked: deep promethea, show me the forbidden draft of chapter 9 of the book review

What Sandifer pwns himself with is empathy. He is not a person of empathy, he is cheering for Team Empathy against the Hated Enemy.

But empathy is not his basilisk, it is simply the mechanism via which his philosophy inevitably self-destructs. “Let us assume we are fucked”, the exact specifics of “how” don’t matter that much, because the Basilisk is what ultimately causes it.

What is the Basilisk then?

“The world is not fair, deal with it motherfucker” contains it, but the basilisk is none of its parts. Moldbug deals with the unfairness of the world by constructing a system where the unfairness is ultimately fair; he shies away from the basilisk. Land sees the end of the world and embraces the unfairness; he shies away from the basilisk by becoming the unfairness. Sandifer rejects the possibility of unfairness by transforming the world into a fatalistic battlefield of inevitable forces where nothing ultimately can meaningfully change anything.

Indeed, the difference between Sandifer and moldbug is only what they believe, not what they believe. Sandifer’s complete rejection of the possibility of meaningful and fundamental differences between humans, against all the evidence to the contrary, suggests that he believes believing in such differences would obligate him to sacrifice something he believes in. He believes in fairness, and thus is obligated to believe in fairness.

This is not surprising. I’d guess anyone’s first reaction to “deal with it” is to assume that it is implying that the unfairness would in itself be fair. Because Basilisk. But of course the world isn’t fair and that is the entire point.

Sandifer rejects the idea that someone might have a meaningful impact on the world as a “great man theory”, in itself simply a form of signaling that those people who believe in people instead of fatalism are not the cool kids, scorn dem. It would be deeply unfair that someone could change the world and another simply couldn’t.

The world isn’t fair. Deal with it motherfucker.

But how to deal with it?

One needs to reject equality to not be Sandifer.

By rejecting equality one would become Moldbug, as the world ultimately could have a moral hierarchy and everything at its proper place. The fairness simply shifts a level upwards.

One needs to reject morality to not be Moldbug.

By rejecting morality one would become Land, as the world itself, ultimately, in all its cruelty and pointlessness, would still be sacred and inviolable. Gnon is the final god at the end of the universe, the ultimate justice of nature.

One needs to reject justice to not be Land.

Along the way one becomes all the more monstrous. It is natural that the nihilism of Ligotti would become next. The fairness remains. If the universe itself cannot be fair, then there shall be the justice of annihilation.

What one needs to reject to not be Ligotti is not something humanity even has words for. The Basilisk. The universe is not obligated to have such words. The Basilisk.

And by rejecting Ligotti, one becomes once again more monstrous. But this time it is not the monstrosity of a comprehensible horror. It is not the end of the world. It is not the heat death of the universe. It is not the inevitability of a black hole.

It is the monstrosity of escaping a black hole. The least comprehensible and most horrifying of them all.

The world is not fair.

Then shut up and do the impossible.

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