Ukraine war is the third proxy war IMO, after Vietnam and the Middle East. It was never about Ukraine, the Western world does not give a flying fuck about Ukraine specifically. It’s just a power play like in the years of the cold war. Just that this time, Russia started it, instead of the US, so everybody is losing their minds over it.

It’s especially interesting as a high birthrate causes a crisis for the future economy when AI replaces a lot of workers and company’s will have to finance a large number of unemployed people.

thanks for that :D

living with their family and hoping that food stays cheap, i guess

I would be surprised if there was not

I think the point is more to filter out people quickly who you couldn’t be in a sustainable relationship with anyways.

I don’t mind it as much as i used to anymore. But ten years ago, i consistently associated “small-talk” people with people who were superficial and wouldn’t comprehend important issues should they ever come up anyways.

Also i’m not sure how right i was about that.

Uh i didn’t know you could grow servers. I assumed they were assembled in factories, being machines and all.

Does anybody have experience with this process? Where do you get the seeds from? What soil do they grow in? Should you water them, or not (considering them being machines and all)? Do they need sunlight exposure? And if yes, how much of it?

Thanks for your comment :)

I feel that you’re trying to be honest about this discussion, though realistically, many of your points have flaws in them.

One of the issues i see is that you’re acting as if society was one, coherent blob. In reality, you have a bunch of people more-or-less (often less) willing to cooperate with one another.

That’s because value is created by labor, if your labor isn’t needed and you don’t have a job, then you’d still produce value if you had one. And when you can’t afford something, that disadvantaged labor might produce it. OK, I’m a shitty explainer, what I mean is that, if there are no regulations directly preventing it, there’s a feedback of creating another bucket of demand and thus jobs to fulfill it. Not an economist.

I think somehow, herein lies the fallacy, though it’s completely non-obvious. In the last 200 years, we’ve lived in times where “bigger population” always implied more workers and thus more work getting done.

But that is not, in general, the natural way. Consider, as an example, the medieval ages. Most people were farmers, and basically all farmable land at that time was distributed among farmers. If you had more people back then, that did not mean that more work got done. You can only plow and harvest so-many hectares. Once that is done, you’re running out of work, and the additional people are mouths-to-feed, but they don’t really produce any extra. I’m worried that as automation advances, we’re nearing similar terms. More people would not mean more productive output, but rather, people sitting around with not much to do, aka. unemployment. And that creates a psychological toll where people get dissatisfied with their living conditions, as they’re looked down on as “useless eaters”, and that creates a negative situation. I think that the number of people should not hugely exceed the number of jobs that actually should get done, i.e. jobs that actually pay at least a living wage.

The irony. I bet most MAGA have sub-median IQ. But apart from that:

That stance of mass-sterilization is quite a hefty turnaround from “people should have more children”, which we heard just a few months ago.

I don’t want to be a doomer, but the economic prospects are bad. Lots of people already struggle to make end’s meet, and if the mass layoffs of white collar workers due to AI are real, it will be even worse. Notice that it doesn’t matter whether you think that AI can replace people, it only matters whether companies think that AI can replace people. Now, having children costs a lot of money, at least $100K, depending on where you live, and i understand people being reluctant about having children.

I also think that it’s politician’s job to improve the living conditions of the people, and GOP might actually for once be doing its job if it starts educating people about the socio-economic implications of having kids.

I also advocate for UBI (universal basic income), but the way i see it today, there’s a high likelyhood that it will come, but will be too little to actually cover cost-of-living costs. I.e., it might be a “support”, providing $400/month no-strings-attached and it would definitely improve the living conditions of many people, especially in low-income households. But it would still not solve all problems.

luanti mod dev?

yeah, i agree, there are assholes everywhere. capitalism has just formalized and streamlined how-to-be-an-asshole. but there are other bad systems as well, of course.

Ah, i see now that i was simply defining the word “shame” a bit differently, as i’ve observed it used in everyday life:

I’ve held shame to mean “a painful emotion caused by group-pressure that indicates guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety”.

What you’ve been describing as “shame”, i’ve called it insight in practice. Insight is a good thing because it bring with itself reflection and thought, which i also like to call meditation and contemplation. That’s what society needs.

What society does not need is group-pressure, because it leads to people behaving right, but for the wrong reasons. Such behavior is short-lived and tends to bite you in the ass when you’re most vulnerable. Compare that to college kids who have always been told “no alcohol”, and then at college the first thing they do is to enjoy the absence of their parents and drink so much alcohol they go into a coma and to the hospital. Had they been taught the implications that alcohol has on your near-term health and consciousness instead, they might have been wise enough to not drink too much out of themselves. :)

To capitalists, humans are nothing but tools to enrich themselves. That’s why it’s called “Human Resources”. To them, you are literally nothing more: A resource to be exploited, like fruit from a fruit tree. They squeeze out the lemon to sell the juice and then throw the dry shell of the fruit to the composter.

What many rich people have is sociopathy, which means an absence of empathy and understanding for what it means to be human. We must remember to be human, whether you name that “socialism” or just better laws that are made for the people.

In my experience, shame is not a natural emotion at all.

Rather, i’ve observed shame exclusively stems from somebody saying “shame on you, you shouldn’t do that”. Thus i infer that shame is a social construct, similar to gender.

Shame should be abolished after all. It is irrational. If there is a good reason for/against something, we should use that reason instead, and create a culture of habits around it.

it also works the other way around, interestingly:

• future is shit
• no vision
• nobody wants to have kids anymore
• women abstain from dating
• we have a loneliness crisis?!?

I had the same thing.

Turns out the charger was too weak. Getting a 2A (Ampere) charger fixed it.

you’re joking but birthrate in china is falling as well.

step 1: send your men to a pointless war
step 2: potential mothers realize their sons would only be meat in the meat grinder
step 3: nobody wants to have children anymore
step 4: be confused??

Note that what matters seems to be (at least to me) not so much wealth but stability.

If there is a social safety net that provides for you in cases of need, that reduces the worries a lot.