Brainsploosh @ Brainsploosh @lemmy.world

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Joined

2 yr. ago

I'm not sure what you mean is hard? Besides uprooting and establishing a new life in a different culture ofc.

To my country a travel visa of three months is automatic/not needed from the US.

A work visa requires proof of employment at a more than minimum wage job, something like a skilled chef, contractor or entry level college grad job qualifies. After two years you can job hop, four years you get a permanent visa, after five you can apply for citizenship.

Requirements at each of these steps is that you can show you have a valid passport, the means to support yourself (and family) financially, are following laws and regulations, and remember to file the paperwork. No tests, no language requirements, just bureaucracy, patience and making a new life.

If you're in a high demand profession, a work visa takes 90 days to get and is valid for at least two years.

This is for my country, you can typically check with the consulate for whatever country you're interested in and they will happily inform you.

I've already covered this earlier in the thread

Profit, price pressures, inflation are not necessarily meaningful terms in a different system.

What exactly do you mean by that?

In a circular or planned economy, those aren't really significant measures, neither in a subsistence living context. Which are strategies that have housed all of humanity until the last few hundred years.

In a post-capitalist economy, we might be able to provide the human necessities without exploitation. I don't know how, but I know it's not through more capitalism.

Homes have been built for many thousands of years longer than we’ve had those as concepts.

If you include cedar bark as a major construction material then sure. Not knocking cedar bark here - it's great. But not quite the same investment in time or durability.

As mentioned in the last reply, the Palace of Knossos, as well as the Petra were marvels of craftsmanship and engineering, staggering investments, and have stood for over 2000 years. Would probably have survived longer if maintained properly.

The pyramids, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassos, the Taj Mahal, all are landmark (literally) feats for the contemporary technology and societies.

You comparing them with modern construction methods necessitated by capitalism, and with modern technology seems an unfair comparison, as well as circular reasoning.

Profit, price pressures, inflation are not necessarily meaningful terms in a different system.

Homes have been built for many thousands of years longer than we've had those as concepts.

Agreed.

But also in groundbreakingly advanced multiresidential complexes, condos, and palaces for thousands of people.

The world will indeed be different if we have different priorities. Capitalism requires high density to sustain the economic engine, other systems might not.

Under capitalism, capitalisming harder is indeed the only solution. I don't know how to get you to be able to imagine something without assuming capitalism, but humanity and society did indeed thrive even without it.

My point is, if you read "aunt" as "landlord", my comment is not about the landlords as much as the system.

Without landlords, we'd not have a housing crisis. There would be enough housing for everyone, we have plenty of resources and land to build them. The US, not to mention the world, is still big enough for everyone to have their own plot of land and housing.

How did people live before Capitalism? I've read that housing existed before even banking was invented. Somehow there wasn't a housing crisis back then, until/unless we had exploitation.

You're not wrong in what you're saying though. The basic difference of perspective between you and I, I believe, is that you're viewing this from inside the capitalist system, where landlords do indeed provide a function. But if we'd not have capitalism, we'd still have housing, and with less value extraction/parasitism.

As for the obscure anecdote, let's instead use the simile of marketing. They add no value to you as a consumer, and if there weren't so many marketers finding what you need would be easier and cheaper (as there would be no marketing cost). For the capitalist they add value, for the rest of us they're an ever increasing drain on resources - a parasite.

I don't know if I'm leftist, but the US spectrum is well right of most of the world.

The question is multi-layered. Your aunt may or may not be a bad person, I don't know her. Them renting out property may or may not be for good reason, even if they're doing it to "survive" in the capitalistic economy.

The real issue is that capitalism itself is exploitative, and (depending on where you draw the line) participating may fall under being complicit.

My understanding of parasitism is extracting resources for their own benefit, with little to no benefit for the exploited/system.

The first hint of parasitism is amassing resources they aren't using for living. Your aunt and husband made surplus money to be able to afford buying the properties. Unless they did that by extracting resources, refining them, working them and making provisions for them to be recycled and ecologically compensated - others will have had to pay the cost. Either by working harder than them, or suffering more than them, for example due to an imbalance of ecology. This is one form of parasitism.

Another perspective of parasitism is inserting themselves as a middle party. Your aunt almost certainly isn't providing the housing at cost, where rent barely covers their labor and property upkeep. That means they are keeping someone from a home, unless they pay extra to your aunt. Just like a bully.

Now, this doesn't mean that your aunt has any malicious intent. The point is that the system itself is evil, like a pyramid scheme of bullies, where each layer extracts something from each underlying layer. This is useful for making ventures, but at the cost of ever increasing exploitation and misery. Especially when capitalists are allowed to avoid paying for restoring the exploited, or incentivised to do it more. I'm sure you've heard of enshittification.

Now, example time!

I'm sure you've thought that air is important for you to survive. And maybe you've ever worried that traffic or other pollution might make your air less good for you?

Enter the capitalist! For a small premium we'll offer your personalised air solution, a nifty little rebreather loaded with purified air you carry with you all day. The price is so reasonable as well, for only $1/day you can breathe your worries away!

Now, producing the apparatus means mining and logging upstream of your town, removing natural air filtering and permanently damaging your environment, but they only charge for the machines and labor. Restoration is Future You's problem. Selling and refilling the apparatus happens to also produce pollution, making the air worse for everyone. But that makes the apparatus more valuable! Price rises to $2/day.

Competitors arrive, some more successful than others, all leaving ecological devastation and pollution that can't be naturally filtered. Air gets worse. One brand rises to the top, air is more valuable and lack of competition makes it so that air is now $4/day.

Then an unethical capitalist figures that if we just make the air slightly worse, profits will go up! They don't want to be evil, but cutting corners when upgrading the production facility means the pollution gets worse. Other adjacent capitalists see that they also can pollute more without consequences. Air gets worse and price increases to 6$/day.

Air is starting to get expensive, rebreather sharing services, one-use air bottles, and home purifyers crop up, increasing pollution and raising costs, air is now $8/day for most people.

People start dying from poor air, new regulations on apparatus safety and mandatory insurance come up, driving prices further to $10/day. You now also need a spare apparatus and maintain it in case your main one breaks down.

Etc.

The point of the example is that through a series of innocuous steps, all making perfect sense within capitalism, you are now paying $300/month more to live than before capitalism, with little real benefit to you, and no real choice to opt out.

Each and every step is parasiting on your life, by requiring you to work harder for that money, and/or suffer more due to pollution and ravaged environment.

The only solution to not work/suffer into an early grave is to have others work on your behalf, perpetuating the parasitic pyramid scheme. This is where your aunt is, is she evil? Probably not. Is her being an active part of an evil system bad? Yes, yes it is. Capitalism bad.

Source on median income pls?

US Census seems to put it at ~42k/year

Why can't a complex number be described in a Banach-Tarsky space?

In such a case the difference between any two complex numbers would be a distance. And sure, formally a distance would need be a scalar, but for most practical use anyone would understand a vector as a distance with a direction.

They're about as imaginary as numbers are in general.

Complex numbers have real application in harmonics like electronics, acoustics, structural dynamics, damping, regulating systems, optronics, lasers, interferometry, etc.

In all the above it's used to express relative phase, depending on your need for precision you can see it as a time component. And time is definitely a direction.

Found their youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCptVxepFtou5eXf0mQQK2VA

See other comment for early video. It's also available on the tubes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCDMizuHG-k

It is apparently from 2008, a spinoff of a Hikune Miku nod to Leekspin (ancient era Internet meme).

This is fantastic, does anyone have a link to the dancer's video?

Yeah, we seem to misunderstand each other at every turn, it may be that we have too little common ground for this to be a productive exchange.

Let's chalk it up to cultural differences and see if we can meet in a forum more conducive to nuance and building understanding.

I'm saying that sometimes it's not fixable. We've been at this for about 200 000 years, almost nothing has been long term solved yet.

Besides, your perspective is iffy. From what you're saying in the reply, you've ignored the suffering of the rest of the world until it affected you personally, and now you claim to speak for everyone affected? Seems like quite a douchebag thing to do.

The world will be different, this will probably not be what ends us all. We will more probably survive as a species only to put ourselves in a bind with even higher stakes. Our base social instincts are wired this way as long as there's resource scarcity or inequality.

Bold words from a country built on the failure of other empires.

In English yes, but not in closer languages like Aramaic, Hebrew (יְהוֹשֻׁעַ (Yehoshua)) or Greek (ἰησοῦς (ioesous)).

Source (a little long but interesting read)

Should it more accurately be Yesus?

Science fiction is in it's essence the exploration of a situation when all the confounding factors have been magicked/scienced away.

Not uncommonly it explores the requirements of the technical solution, what would the machine need to do for this to work out? And/or What happens if it doesn't?

Take for example "Do androids dream of electric sheep" by Philip K Dick, it's about finding androids advanced enough not to know they're artificial and how to identify and relate to them when the only diagnostic is slow, clumsy, and suspect. It's more an exploration of what makes a person than it's around the marvels of The Machine™.

During the 1900s the vehicle for science to magick with had been machines, computers and AI. Remember that space travel, fission power, psychology, modern medicine were all new, hope inducing breakthroughs just this same period.

There's also the issue that the definition of the genre came after it becoming large enough to matter. The edges between scifi, punk/cyberpunk, speculative fiction, isekai and even to fantasy are all made after the fact, meaning modern machines go into scifi, old machines go into steam-/diesel-/etc-punk. The main difference between Science, Magick, and Eldritch horror is how detailed the mechanics of the solution are described, and speak to different people.

But on the topic of the story not being centered around a machine: try the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons.

Or go the entirely other way with Ring World by Larry Niven. There's plenty of machines-did-it in the fringes, but the central theme is to figure out what would be needed for a Ring World to exist, what would happen on it, and how would it be managed. It's an exploration of physics more than anything - more "what is the machine" than "machines-did-it".

And the Foundation series (Asimov) famously explore the premise "what if sociology works", and the other details solved by throwing machines at them.

You also have The Culture (Iain Banks) series that center on/around post-scarcity society and explore that.