You could require that all acids are also dyed pink
1,691 karma · joined September 6, 2024
I have been considering options and it seems like 4G has coverage pretty much all over the USA. If that isn't an option, I would consider hughesnet, it seems like they have a cheaper lowest plan than starlink. What do you think?
Just use grapheneOS or calyxOS or postmarketOS or whatever.
When we look at an animal that does such a thing, we characterize it as a strange and suicidal act of a disturbed creature hurtling it's life force into the abyss. But when man does the same thing, it is a heroic and uniquely human act of exploration.
If you go onto an island or some mountain range or some other type of isolated pocket of the world, you may be surprised to find that life exists there. But there is only one way in which this is possible: at some point in time, some living thing had to abandon its old world with little regard for its personal survival.
When you factor in the probability of survival in the new world, and the requirement of finding a sexed pair on the other side you realize that this takes many living things, integrated over a long period of time.
Life pushes boundaries and explores new environments. It has to start from something. Clearly some amount of mania is a requisite for success in the long term in order to overcome reason in the short term.
Secondly, it must scale. If the list of perceived enemies is great, you must have great scale to execute violence. If it is small, you must have great scale to execute surveillance. If your surveillance is violent, such as shaking people down for their computers and passwords, then you need scale to attack both large and small enemies.
This is why mass surveillance (and prevention thereof) is a meaningful hurdle. The alternatives are physically challenging.
The application of the XKCD comic is misleading. It is like saying, why lock your doors at night when a burglar can just bust down your door or pick your lock or break in through a window. The purpose of a locked door or encrypted computer or any form defense is to force your enemy to engage in more expensive and limited measures in attacking you.
This is one such example.
This sort of utilitarian nitpicking over the convenience of a "median" user is like maximizing the happiness of a cow on a factory farm. The cow would be better off if it did not exist at all. It is a matter of freedom and dignity.
I would describe the current state of disaster, where reproduction is limited by sexual competition and not by resources as similar calhoun's rat utopia. In the western world, it is also driven by market factors such as land ownership and cultural expectations around that. Whereas in china there are population limits resulting from the one-child policy (anti-malthusian policy). I maintain that my position in my previous comment is true in the large despite these local effects.
In countries where you have a welfare system, you tend to see new strategies emerge after a couple of generations. In the USA, a significant number of african-american households are dependent on EBT. In Israel, the population of "Haredi" ultra-orthodox subgroup is subsidized and has grown year over year (https://youtu.be/ST_eZwBIMDA). I suggest that it is largely a social effect, because it is effected by the rate of cultural diffusion between the welfare/reproduction maximizing subgroup and the broader society. But it still represents an adaptation.
Humans don't reproduce like e. coli, but in a UBI world that is the kind of human you are artificially selecting for. Ordinarily, bacteria aren't antibiotic-resistant, but exposure to antibiotics generation-over-generation changes them.
Show me the incentives, and I will show you the man they create. Like it or not, Humans are animals. We have the same primal motivations as other animals, just a more complex expression of those motivations. I think you focus on the details of that expression to lose the big picture, which is incongruent for your personal desires of being free from material constraints.
Life, like art, is defined by constraints. The meaning of our lives is to heroically struggle against them until we fail. To remove the constraints is to denature mankind. The process of evolution is nessisarially actuated through suffering. We naturally struggle against constraints like hunger, disease, and so on in an individual scale because this is what gives us meaning. But it would be a mistake to overcome these on a systematic scale, as it would rid of us of meaning. The future you propose is mankind wireheading itself.
How would this be bred out without artificially controlling reproduction? What is the action here? The idea that individual pressure for resources would trickle down inter-generationally is lamarckian!
Under a regime of UBI and Reproductive "Freedom", the most successful genes will simply be the ones that choose to reproduce the most, because there are no longer any social or resource limitations on reproduction. You get a totally opposite effect, where the reproductively greediest are the most successful at reproduction. It is a tragedy of the commons.
When you just have one guy cloning himself with government subsidy, there are totally different dynamics at play.
The system of UBI changes the incentives to create this behavior. I am not even saying it is rat-like; In my previous comment I discussed the differences between our world and the rat utopia. In the rat utopia, reproduction is still limited by the interplay of sexes and you eventually get failure of the system through a breakdown of reproduction. It would be more accurate to describe the most successful strategy under UBI as "tumor-like", where the failure mode is based on a strain in resources.
The richest, safest societies don't have infinite welfare because they have cemented a culture which rejects welfare, and reproduction is currently limited by either culture (women's expectations of their partners) OR resources (look at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-chinese-billionaire... or what elon is doing). What happens when reproduction is limited by neither? We already see the effects of this in say, Africa where you have a massive population explosion caused by aid.
With infinite welfare, the dominant culture will be the one that is able to reproduce as much as possible, perhaps through cloning? We are already seeing IVF, surrogate mothers and other sorts of cloning/eugenics sexual strategies emerge, just not on a dominant level yet.
If it wasn't for cloning, I would say it would look more like Calhoun's rat utopia due to sex-based competition.
>The anti-freeloader impulse is one of the easiest ways to spur people to action.
I would say this depends on culture. Only industrious countries tend to have culture with this impulse.