Vraxx

>We're still losing the distinction between privatizing more things and privatizing everything. I'm not aware of any federal-level US politicians who want to privatize, say, the military.

That's because we've already privatized the profitable bits of the military in the Defense Industry. There's a phrase I've heard that goes something like "Privatize the profits and socialize the losses". Human life loss is extremely expensive, especially for a private industry, so it doesn't surprise me one bit we haven't privatized that aspect of it.

>Personally, I'm not interested in the standards we pretend to hold the government accountable to. I'm interested in actual outcomes. If privatizing some service can vastly improve outcomes, then great, if government can do it, then great.

I agree with this somewhat, but the reason I mentioned it is because corporate accountability is only effective at keeping leadership accountable to profits not to morals and profits don't care one bit about whats right or wrong. When a company does something wrong most people say "they are a company, only idiots expect them to do the right thing, they did this because it is profitable", at least with a government we haven't given up all hope that that organization can do the right thing because it is the right thing. The fallback on profits serves as an excuse to not even need to pretend to do the right thing that at least the government is held to. Though you are correct that the accountability there varies and is dependent on the population, but I still argue it's better than hoping profits will suddenly start doing the moral thing.

It seems a ridiculous opinion to say privatize everything, but I've seen more and more politicians in the US who support that, or at least that's what I hear when they talk about privatizing education, healthcare, and even the FAA.

I agree that, as you point out, some government services are terrible for certain groups of people (poor and minorities), but I don't think that's an argument for privatization because at least we try to pretend we hold the government to those standards. Nobody pretends that we do or even can hold corporations to any sort of standards. Sometimes there's regulation to help with that, but it's fought kicking and screaming the whole way from the regulated industry and is followed by constant lobbying to repeal or relax said regulation.

That's just not true though when you consider that these platforms have algorithms that will determine which posts get more visibility than others (trending is the most obvious of these). I don't think this would be even half as much of a debate if we had an electronic platform that could actually be the modern public square of the US, but instead we have only private entities attempting to provide this, and they are decidedly not protectors of free speech (that would be our government). The extension of this is that even if the government did provide such a platform, there would likely still need to be rules because as much as you like to think we have unfettered free speech, you still can't stand in the middle of the public square and call for the death of another individual or you can't shout "FIRE" in a movie theater when there is none.

If we actually had a government run system, we could ensure things like accountability for your ideas that you self publish in such a public square because the government itself would have the servers that contain the data. The constitution would limit the government from censoring this platform, but it wouldn't limit the government from implementing more effective methods of processing abuses of free speech such as libel by having an immediate record of what was said. My main point here is that it's easier to agree on what if any free speech limitations should apply if there isn't this proxy layer of "Well corporations can do whatever they want with their servers" and "Well these laws don't apply to what they said because nobody is speaking in the domain that freedom of speech applies to"

I think you're making some pretty good points overall about the benefits of state and city governments, but one thing I still have questions with is what we do as a country when one part of our country adopts some set of practices but other states refuse to do so. The clear example in this case is the abolishment of slavery, there were a ton of states that didn't want to do that. The answer isn't as easy as "just move if you don't like the conditions in your state" because the residents don't always have the means to move (especially the case in the slavery example). Nor can we afford to just ignore it "until they catch up" because there is no guarantee that they will catch up if the smaller governments are caught in a local maximum (in the mathematical sense, no pun intended) where the group that receives the most benefit at the expense of the oppressed has 0 reason to seek change.

Essentially, I think that the increasing power of the federal government comes (in some part) from a desire from the citizens of the country to have things be more uniform across the country. I personally think that based on some of the points you have made that more effective small government operations could help rebuild trust and the social fabric. The problem is that I'm not sure I'm willing to condemn the role of the federal government and stop trying to help those in states that would seek to oppress them.

As a side note, as far as I'm aware, the state's rights argument in recent history has largely been used as a dog whistle to signal racism [0] and other forms of systemic oppression for just this reason. "Let all the states decide for themselves" is coded language for "You know you're part of the majority in your state and we won't tolerate the Fed. Gov. mandating that we abolish slavery/legalize abortion/legalize gay marriage etc."

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics

Ahhhh this makes more sense with your previous objections and I wasn't understanding it as well before. I always took little tidbits of the scenario that pointed to "lazy-eval" to be indicative of it being more likely to be a simulation because lazy eval is popular among programmers. Obviously when I write it out like that I can see where I lean on the same logic I argue against in other scenarios which is that we can't make any assumptions about intentions/motivations/etc. of the simulation creators, and the assertion that they would have similar programming paradigms is a pretty big assertion for sure.

Sorry if I was unclear, I didn't mean to imply a link between "real time" in the game/simulation and the real world, because you are completely correct in noting that there is no specific relation between game time (ticks) and "real" time (seconds or w/e units you want).

The link in the "time" that I am describing is one where the game graphics are rendered in 60 frames per second. If the computation cannot be completed within 1/60th of a second, the frame is delayed because it took too long to render.

My comment was largely in response to your assertion

"If you have enough resources to lazily simulate the entire observed universe, you probably have enough resources to consistently simulate the entire observable universe."

First, assuming that it requires less resources to "lazily" simulate something than to fully simulate it, then no, I do not believe that just because you can do the first means that you can 'probably' do the second. If you had enough resources for the first and not the second, but the first was good enough, why not do the first?

In response to: "With that said, why would you simulate something so ridiculously large and detailed if you only had the resources to run a small portion of it at a time? It's like buying an 8K 3D monitor and hoping your 3DFx Voodoo 2 will do the trick."

The reference to animation was largely in response to this, because that is exactly what the purpose of animation is. They have enough resources to render the animation in whatever length of time it takes to render, but they can't do it quickly enough to just render it frame by frame for the viewer.

I do not believe it is accurate to say that what I am positing would only simulate a mind and not the world. It is simply saying that detail below a certain level is insignificant to the simulation of the world as a whole. The entire purpose of minimizing error isn't specifically to avoid detection, it's so that the error cannot be propagated between interactions and end up simulating something that is significantly deviant from the thing you're trying to simulate.

If I were to use the kinematic equations to simulate throwing a ball through the air, but my simulation only used 1 significant digit, rounding errors would quickly add up to produce a path for the ball that would significantly deviate from the path if we were to make the same calculation except treating the ball as made of quarks/atoms/molecules and painstakingly analyze forces on every single atom until the collection of them being the ball reached the end of the throw. It is that deviation from the result that we need to avoid for our simulation to retain enough fidelity to be said to be simulating throwing a ball, otherwise we're just simulating some other interaction that doesn't really match what we would observe.

Your post also makes the assumption that the simulator even cares if we notice that we're in a simulation. I don't think that this premise as a whole includes any assumption as to the motivation for our simulation (if we indeed were to be in one). For all we know, it could be a simulation to determine how long it takes to develop sentient life to a point that it can observe inconsistencies in its environment and deduce that it is in a simulation.

We just don't know anything about the 'real world' in this instance and I think guesses in that realm venture into the realm of being impossible to verify. It can still be fun to think about, but it can't really be based on any experimental evidence unless it were deliberately placed there by a hypothetical simulator.

You might do this if you didn't have the computational power to simulate the thing you wanted in real time. Games are hard locked to require the computation to be performed within the frame time of the gameplay, but much more detailed and complex computations are done all the time to pregenerate an animated movie or video that can then be "played" in real time. The generation of the content often takes many times as long as the content actually is, but the purpose of doing it this way is to generate more detail per frame than you would be able to compute in the time between each frame when played at the ideal speed.

Hmm, I mentioned in another comment that I'm not even sure how much I "believe" this premise, but for the sake of discussion let's assume I do as I find it fun to think about from time to time.

Your post sounds very condescending, but I'm interested in what sounds like a completely different take on the topic than I've seen before. I don't know anything about semiotics and had to look up what the term meant before posting. What would be your abbreviated and distilled thesis for how semiotics relates to this topic and to your first paragraph? Phrase differently, if I were to study semiotics, what part of it in particular would be the most relevant to changing my answer/ideas related to the question "am I living in a simulation"?

That's an interesting thought for sure, I hadn't made the direct connection that essentially the simulation creator would be "God".

I think at least for me personally, I think the reason for "less trouble having faith" in this premise is the implications of believing it. Religion asks things of you to subscribe such as Sundays, cognitive dissonance with scientific findings (not all religions, I recognize generalizations are dangerous), tithing (again, some not all), and any number of social "requirements" of belonging to the community.

Playing around with this idea asks nothing but idle brain cycles and maybe some funny looks for saying crazy sounding things. Every time this debate comes up for me I think "Oh fun, I'll go play around with this some more and see if I find anything new" and then I forget about it until next time. I don't shape my life around it, I don't make any decisions based upon it, I don't get upset if other people dismiss it or don't "believe" it, and I don't even necessarily engage with the topic every time I see it.

Based on all of the last paragraph I'd say it's even a fair question how much I do "believe" this premise at all. My answer to that is that I don't believe in it in any sort of meaningful way, it's fun though.

why not both? Why can't we be a Boltzmann brain that happens to spontaneously configure in such a way that we make measurements confirming our existence to be the result of a simulation?

Is that really any different/less likely than a Boltzmann brain with any other "understanding" on a topic? It seems just as likely to me as a Boltzmann brain spontaneously forming that understands our existence to be the result of religion or any other origin story.

And ultimately I think Boltzmann brain doesn't get talked about all that much because it's unfalsifiable by its very definition (as some might argue this hypothesis is), but it doesn't have all that much to talk about other than "yeah, I guess that can happen".

Similarly if it were "proven" true in any instant that a Boltzmann brain were to exist it would be inconsequential because the brain would cease to exist in the very "next" moment, there would be no purpose for the observation.

I'm not sure if that's entirely true. My analogy here would be how we observe classical mechanics or even just regular objects. We can predict the path a ball will take through the air in painstaking and incredibly accurate detail (more detail than we have tools to properly measure), but that doesn't require that we simulate all of the component pieces that make up the ball. We compress that by just calculating what the whole lot of atoms will do on average and substitute that in when we have millions of them and the error is negligible. That's essentially the basis of statistical mechanics. Why could we not make a simpler simulation of a life form (that its 'direct' real implementation) with similar processes of compressing information on component pieces and making approximations where the magnitude of the error is smaller than the accuracy of the measurement?

It seems to me that there is also a similar analogy to be made in the methods that we can use to compress information. Is there a functional difference between a compression algorithm that is lossless and one that would maybe corrupt 1 rgb value a tiny nudge in an entire image with millions of pixels if our only tool for examining it for corruption were our eyes? What if we then used that compression algorithm only in situations where we know the tools used to examine the results wouldn't be able to identify the losses, and used a lossless compression only when such tools were available?

All this is to say that I believe you could feasibly create a perfect simulation of something more complex than the thing performing the simulation with proper optimizations, but it would require certain stipulations like knowing when to use various optimizations to avoid contaminating fidelity of the simulation. Simple example would be simulating human history before a microscope was invented would allow us to constrain all approximations to have less error than would be visible to the most precise observer's senses of measurement.

good point, I think GP's counter is a counter only if you accept as a premise that you must find fulfillment in your work. Otherwise this point undercuts it by attacking that implicit premise.

It's tough because I think the group mentality is part of what can really make a company able to produce the value it can (more than just the sum of its parts and all that), so I feel that mentality can come from a genuine place, but it is also used manipulatively. How we tell the difference is a problem I'm currently incapable of solving.

Isn't there public available data sources for geographic information as it pertains to socioeconomic classes available through the census? Why use a proxy if the actual variable is available?

I'd venture a guess based on B) that GP believes that inequality happens in part due to tax laws that support the idea that wealth trickles down, while GP believes (as do I), that it absolutely does not. A proposed fix would be to stop giving tax cuts to the rich/businesses in hopes that the not rich will somehow magically get some trickled down benefit and instead do things that actively benefit the lower economic classes.

While amusing, I'd like to point out that the accuracy stated for this law doesn't meet the precision that the parent poster stated (0.1°C).

They might not be expanding, but I wouldn't call it shut down. I have an active account and they're providing my internet service in KC. This was set up this past February.

Counter-Counterpoint: My group of friends has a slack channel that we use essentially as an IRC chatroom where we organize long term events, plan evening activities, and chat about an assortment of topics. Nothing about Slack makes it less useful as a personal communication tool as opposed to business communication.

Hmmm.. I think your first link is to the wrong hack. If everything were as you claim, the hack would need to precede the bank freeze in order for it to be in any way causal. I was originally writing this reply to refute your claim on that basis, but while investigating it I found that there was indeed another hack where bitcoin was stolen from bitfinex rather than Tether being stolen by Tether. Your article 2 cites the bitfinex hack as well. Furthermore, the IOU issued wasn't Tether, but rather some other token "worth" $1 called BFX. The rest of the story seems plausible, but it seems you have a mixup in your buildup and snag phases of the hypothesis (I'm not saying that it is outright wrong because of this though)

It seems our means of communication have grown beyond our ability to organize through those means. This seems to be a trend with the Internet in general where arguments like gamer gate etc. are fractured into two sides, but even on each side you won't find a coherent set of ideals that unifies.

I believe cases like these are just spotlights on how different we as humans tend to think while assuming those grouped around us tend to be more similar than in actuality.

I agree with you if the content is actually stretched out (like filler episodes), but I find a lot of TV made for streaming is lacking filler content and is just telling a longer story. It's to the point now where when I watch a 90-120 minute story a lot of the plot development feels seriously rushed because it has to fit that 90-120 minute timeline.

One example that springs to mind is in the first Thor movie. I didn't even realize the love interest was actually supposed to be that because it felt like they met and interacted for a grand total of 30 minutes (in their world, not screentime) before the climactic ending with Thor and love interest kissing.

I watched iBoy on Netflix as well (90 minutes) and despite any other criticism of the plot or production value, it just felt like things escalated incredibly quickly without any time for character development or fleshing out any plot details.

Carrier is a fine example of promised government grants for not moving jobs. The grants were just in the form of tax breaks [0] (spending the tax revenue before it ever gets to congress).

[0]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-trumps-carrier-deal...

I really dislike Curse for gaming, the UI is the most unintuitive thing I've used in ages, showing me the same information on 5 different looking screens, but not having a single screen that shows me a list of all of my friends. I don't use any of their addons as well because I don't want to bundle myself into a glorified chat app that can't even handle that correctly. I've had to restart not only curse, but my entire machine multiple times in order to get it to register a microphone switch or a switch in playback devices.

I agree with your main point of steam's slow movement, but the other thing is that steam is a very large incumbent with pretty high switching costs. I don't see them going away because a different platform offers twitch integration, because I can already stream twitch with my steam library that has hundreds of games in it. And if twitch limited that somehow, I think the pull of the user's library would overpower the pull of one individual streaming platform. It costs a lot more to switch the library after all.

That has been my worry, but I figured I'd just buy new foam pads from HTC at worst. It does say not to get them wet in the manual. To alleviate this, I just purchased replacement pads that were machine washable from a 3rd party supplier.

Ohhh, I actually bought one of the replacement foams. Here were the two I was considering, I bought the first of the two I linked and will be getting it tomorrow.

https://vrcover.com/product/htc-vive-memory-foam-padding-cot...

https://vrcover.com/product/htc-vive-memory-foam-padding-cot...

I recall reading in most places that you are not supposed to get the HTC default foam pads wet and that it causes them to degrade quicker. Anecdotally, my wide face cushion has way less definition and is squishier than my narrow face cushion. This is definitely in part because the narrow one gets used less often, but I figured sweat was definitely a factor

Which VRCover did you buy specifically for sweat? I bought the memory foam soft cotton one (it's supposed to come in tomorrow" because I wanted to to be washable, but also comfortable in other scenarios, though I very much have the same experience as you described and I'd like to make exercising with VR games a much bigger part of my routine.

Edit: I'm mostly curious about the "leather" ones as they sounded uncomfortable for other usage, but specifically aimed at physical exertion.

I don't think that displacement alone is a reason to avoid an action necessarily. I say this because while it may not be increasing their income, even if they were displaced they would get more money for being displaced (when selling the property). I'd also argue that the status quo of letting the area languish is hardly a better alternative for your stated goal (increasing the affluence of it's residents). It seems to be a dichotomy, but I don't think it's a decision between displace everyone or do nothing and displace nobody. Given the tools that a municipality actually has to increase the affluence of it's residents, I think making their living area nicer probably has the best shot at doing so because it might attract better opportunities than might normally frequent the area.

Last thought, what do you think these municipalities should do instead of minor QoL improvements that might modestly increase average property value (as stated in the article)?

I don't think that's how the typical gentrification process goes though. I think it usually starts with developers increasing surrounding property values which attracts more affluent residents, who demand improvements from the municipality.

The difference I see here is that the developers and new residents are the ones who reap the benefits of the increased property values from gentrification, whereas if the city makes modest improvements before it's current residents are forced out by increasing prices/taxes, then the current residents reap the increased value. Even if they move because they don't want to pay taxes on higher property values, their property is still worth more when they sell it.