WoodScientist @ WoodScientist @sh.itjust.works

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7 mo. ago

Your wish is granted. Half of you will be mailed to Ireland, the other half to Scotland.

They're not going to be on US soil. There's a reason the Nazis built there's in foreign soil as well. If people are being rounded up into camps, they really have nothing to lose at that point. If you build them on US soil, you legitimately have to worry about crowds of heavily armed Americans showing up to liberate people from them. If you're going to get sent to a camp anyway, you have nothing to lose taking up arms against them. It's a lot more difficult to try and liberate a concentration camp in El Salvador.

Does it really boost productivity? In my experience, if a long email can be written by an AI, then you should just email the AI prompt directly to the email recipient and save everyone involved some time. AI is like reverse file compression. No new information is added, just noise.

No, he's not worried. And he has good reason not to be. He knows history. Obama didn't hold the Bush administration officials responsible for their crimes. In fact, he happily kept using many of those illegal powers himself. And Biden didn't hold the first Trump administration accountable for their crimes.

Liberal Democrats have a core character flaw. They don't like confrontation. It's the same impulse that causes them to reflexively seek out compromise with Republicans at every turn. They have this narcissistic trait that makes them think they can achieve their place in history by being a grand peacemaker. They always seek reconciliation without accountability.

I guarantee you, if another centrist Dem manages to win in 2028, their very first official act will be to come before the nation, try to be the grand peacemaker, and announce, "it is time for the nation to move on, all is forgiven!"

They can't help themselves. They're cowards to their core.

I suggest you read The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow. Suffice to say, the actual history of the invention of farming was anything but this nuclear explosion type event. This model was created as a hypothetical, scholars trying to imagine how it actually happened. The real archaeological and ethnographic record paints a very, very different picture.

https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2022/07/13/book-review-the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-humanity/

How long do you think it will be until he's laying hands on you?

Oh yeah, you were there too! It was a great get together. Remember all that fun stuff we did?

Whoever it was and whatever they were planning, they're innocent. They were actually hanging out with me at the time on the other side of the country. All the eye witnesses there were just high on ayahuasca and hallucinated the whole thing.

Yeah, people forget that there are some real hard limits on how far population can fall. What people fail to realize is that our level of technology is actually a function of our population. Mass production and industrial society requires a certain minimum population level and population density. If things fell so far that there were only 100 million humans on Earth, that would have profound implications on the level of technology we able to deploy and maintain. Past certain points, you by necessity start regressing technologically. At a population of 100 million, we would probably end up with a technology level more like the early to mid 19th century. You just can't maintain complex supply chains with so few people. Economies simplify, and you end up back in an agrarian state. At that point, most of the population is working on farms again. Suddenly children become an economic boon for a family farm, a source of labor as they were historically. Then the birth rate soars again. And of course at some point you can't maintain factories that turn out millions of birth control pills.

I don't think we will actually hit these kind of hard limits. I think cultural factors will cause the birth rate to recover long before we start seriously regressing technologically. But it shows that we're not at any risk of extinction here. Even if cultural factors never cause the birth rate to recover, eventually technological regression will serve as a hard limit.

I can't predict what exactly those numbers are where these limits kick in, but it's pretty intuitive they exist. If your population density falls so far that you're back at hunter-gatherer population levels, well you're going to be living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

The truth is the US is essentially invincible when it comes to its actual physical security. The US dominates the North American continent. To the north and south it borders (until recently) friendly nations that have a fraction of our population and economy. Canada and Mexico could put up a good fight and insurgency if the US tried to invade and annex them, but the idea of either starting a war of aggression against the US is comical. It would be downright suicidal for either to voluntarily start a war to try and conquer territory from the US.

To the east and west, the US has two vast oceans. No Eastern Hemisphere power is ever going to be able to build a sufficient force to try to directly invade the US mainland. Not only does the US have a vast navy, the distances involved are simply insane. The only way an Eastern Hemisphere power would ever have hostile troops on US soil is if there were some civil war within the US that a foreign power involved itself in.

And to top it all off, the US maintains the most powerful nuclear arsenal on the planet. A nuclear bombardment is really the only threat to the US's physical security, and the US would make sure that this was an act of suicide on the part of its attacker.

Oh, and just for fun, the US is absolutely awash in civilian firearms. We can't even keep our children from getting a hold of them and shooting up schools. And that's just a handful of troubled kids. Imagine what it would look like if some foreign power actually tried to put troops on the ground in the US. We literally have enough guns to put a firearm in the hands of every man, woman, and child in the country. We're a nation of gun nuts with a cultural that celebrates and fetishizes militant independence and resistance.

The only real threat to the US's physical safety is internal. If the US ever falls, it will be because of our own internal instability, not because of some hostile invasion by a foreign power.

Frankly, if there is any country right now that needs an invasion, El Salvadore seems to be at the top of the list. You running a gulag where you dump people with indefinite sentences and no due process? Yeah, I think it's time to coup your ass.

I think it's time the US invade El Salvador and depose this bastard.

There is zero chance this personality test doesn't isn't also biased based on ethnicity, gender, and disability status. It is absolutely certain that it is. All opaque personality tests like these always are.

Because all forms of poverty are not the same. It's only confusing if you insist on measuring things in dollars instead of stability. If they own their own land, a subsistence farmer in rural India has a much more secure and stable life than a precarious retail worker in the US. Yes, the precarious retail worker might have more trinkets and consumer goods than the Indian farmer, but the Indian farmer owns their own livelihood.

Having a child is ultimately an act of selflessness and generosity. People have children when they are fairly confident that they will be able to ensure those children will enjoy a quality of life that they find acceptable. And "acceptable" is context dependent. If they own their own land, a subsistence farmer in rural India can have a couple kids and guarantee that their children will have a secure future. If nothing else, they can pass the farm onto their children. At the worst, the farmer's children will have the same standard of living as the farmer. Most such farmers would hope their children would get an education and do even better than they did. But if nothing else they can always just take over the farm. The same isn't true for a wage slave working for Walmart. The Walmart worker knows their existence is incredibly precarious. If rents spike again and wages don't keep up, they will be living on the street. Their existence is precarious, and few people want to bring children into such a precarious life.

Stability is the key to birth rates. It has nothing to do with dollars earned. A US retail worker makes far more dollars in wages than the market value of the Indian subsistence farmer's crops. But the US retail worker has to live in a much, much more expensive country. And the Indian subsistence farmer owns their own land, a plot that's been in the family for generations. They don't have to pay rent. They don't have to worry about getting fired. The only thing they have to worry about is crop failures. But farmers have had to worry about those since the dawn of time.

The market. This is why I'm really not too concerned about falling birthrates. There's a lot of bullshit jobs out there. Consider the typical office. It's damning that despite all the increases in efficiencies of computer technology we've had over the last several decades, work hours haven't changed at all. If anything, they've increased. And the number of people working in offices hasn't declined. The efficiencies of digital technologies didn't decrease work hours, the work simply expanded to fill the available space. Items that in generations past would have been resolved with a one page memo written on a typewriter have been replaced with 50 page reports full of charts and graphs. We have huge numbers of people preparing documents that no one ever reads. There is an absolutely absurd amount of fat and inefficiency in the modern workplace.

Or consider corporate vanity projects like RTO. Workers are on average more productive at home. But executives tend to be sociopathic narcissists who simply need people to constantly praise and validate them in person. They just don't get the same narcissistic supply from remote work, so they demand thousands of people waste colossal amounts of resources to come into an inefficient office just to appeal to their depraved egos. Oh, and for many executives, the ability to coerce sex from their employees is a primary job benefit, and that goes away with remote work.

Oh, and don't forget credential inflation. We demand people have bachelors and masters degrees for positions that 50 years ago would have been handled by someone with just a high school diploma. I'm all for education for those who want it, but the fact that you need a bachelors for anything other than food service and retail is a massive drain on our society's productivity.

As birth rates decline and the population ages, the market value for the labor of the workers that remain will soar. They will be able to demand higher wages. Think the equivalent of a $100k salary for someone with a high school diploma. This will force companies to either adapt or die. Those that insist on inefficient workflows, require excessive credentials, or demand employees come into the office for the sake of executive egos will simply go bankrupt. They will be replaced by companies that are run more rationally.

Anyone who has ever worked in an office can tell you just how stupidly inefficient corporate America is. And Japan's business culture is even worse.

I don't think we're going to have any problem getting by with a declining population. We can maintain our standard of living quite well just by squeezing the fat and inefficiencies out of our existing systems. There won't be some grand government bureau deciding what jobs are "made up." Companies that insist on hiring people for bullshit jobs will simply be driven into insolvency. And the world will be better for it. Working a pointless bullshit job is not good for anyone's mental health. People need a sense of purpose in their lives.

And while apoplectic doomsayers might say, "where does this end, won't the population eventually collapse to zero?" This isn't a realistic scenario. Cultures are not a monolith. Different groups have different birth rates. Over time, those groups and cultural practices that encourage higher birthrates will be selected for through natural selection.

For example, in many countries, the general misogyny of the population is a major reason young women don't want to get married and have children. They don't want to lose their careers and end up the stay at home wife to a salary man who arrives home drunk every night at midnight. They want a more equitable sharing of parental responsibilities. Some men are better at providing this equitable arrangement to their partners than others. Those that are will be more successful at finding wives. And those couples will pass their egalitarian values onto their children. Misogyny will be evolutionarily maladaptive and will be removed from the cultural gene pool. Those that insist on their wives doing all the child rearing will not find partners and will not be able to pass on their outdated beliefs to the next generation. In time, the birth rates will recover.

Or, alternatively, countries will move more back towards multi-generational households instead of the atomistic couple+kids that has become the norm today. Multi-generational housing was the historical norm, and it may be again in the future. It could be selected for through similar cultural evolution. Regardless, below replacement birth rates will not be maintained indefinitely. Eventually things will stabilize. If nothing else, eventually your population gets so disperse that you can't mass produce effective birth control anymore, and well things take care of themselves at that point.

TL:DR: how I learned to stop worrying and love the declining birth rate.

IDK how to feel about rising video game prices. On the one hand, prices were stagnant for decades. On the other hand, companies can sell far more copies of games than they could back in the 1980s and 1990s. The cost of games is all in the development. The more you sell, the cheaper the price can be. They cost next to nothing to package and distribute (or are distributed digitally.)

On one hand, games are a lot more complex and expansive than they were back in the day. On the other, game devs now have tools the creators of old couldn't even dream of. No one is hand coding the next Mario game is assembly.

There's a lot of variables here. And it's really just hard to make a fair judgment about it.

I mean, there's always small beer.

Mutual aid works well as an exchange of small favors, goods, and monetary assistance. Your alternator breaks down and you have no money. 10 people chip in to help pay for the part. Someone who knows cars donates their time to install it. That's how mutual aid works in the real world.

Something like the Black Panthers existed in a very specific historical circumstance. They existed in a handful of dense black neighborhoods with deep social roots going back generations. It doesn't really translate to the way most people in the US live, in low density sururban sprawl.

If ICE knocks on your door, there isn't going to be time to call for aid. And setting up checkpoints on roads? You're living in a fantasy world.

I'm telling you, don't mess around with magical tricksters. If you can't pay OP back, he'll probably take your soul, your first born child, your name, or some other demonic shit like that. Don't make a deal with Rumpelstiltskin, he will find a way to collect!