I think that's a common scenario in historical fiction depicting conflicts between upright barbarians and decadent empires. The empire could easily crush the barbarians, but it's too preoccupied with internal politics and power struggles to do so.
997 karma · joined January 31, 2009
[0] "robots" made from criminals/clones since AI is banned
That said, have any of these predictions ever managed to stop the cycle? As far as I know, both Turchin and Ibn Khaldun (who Turchin calls out a lot in his books) felt that such cycles were inevitable. The more common response to these predictions seems to be some variant of "this is cherry-picked data, our society is different!"
Or are such predictions instead intended to speed the advent of the next cycle? Perhaps we should be like King Wen Zhou in pre-imperial China, watching the skies for a sign from heaven to bring about the new age.
> If you want to keep the empire unified, you need a civilian government and civilian institutions to keep the military under control.
But then you run into another classic political science problem: how do civilian institutions keep the military under control? Why can't the military simply shoot the civilians and institute a junta?
That's because from the perspective of an authoritarian state, there is no meaningful difference between political activists and ransomware gangs. Both are dastardly cybercriminals.
On one hand, you could argue that grade inflation is actually a good thing: if pedagogical methods are getting better over time, then you should naturally expect grades to rise if standards stay the same. After all, we no longer expect literacy to be limited to the rich and/or highly educated.
On the other hand, grade inflation makes it harder to filter above-average students from below-average students. You could combat this by grading on a curve or by making exams harder, but this risks driving students into deleterious zero-sum behaviors - see Asian "cram schools" or American "tiger parenting".
On the gripping hand, maybe grades are the wrong thing to focus on. There does exist the argument that all social classes need smart people, not just the upper-middle/upper classes. Perhaps we should be focusing on improving living standards across society rather than attempting to brain-drain the working class. But this sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would be used to justify aristocracy.
Sometimes I wonder if the folk wisdom that "money doesn't buy happiness" is an attempt by the poor to make themselves feel better about their own life situations.
After all, humans can't produce lysine either, and we propagate in the wild just fine!
It's hard to see how this could be done without heavy transfer payments/subsidies or restricting careers/promotions based on family size. These will of course generate all sorts of adverse side effects.
As a result, the general solution is to use immigration to blunt labor shortages and hope that natural selection will eventually favor natalist psychologies/cultures. This too has a lot of negative side effects.
That said, the article focuses on people who have two jobs (their day job and also social media influencing), so I wonder if this sort of stuff is an overcorrection: romanticization of blue-collar jobs with little discussion of its health risks and working conditions.
My impression was that Luke's X-Wing was his reward for saving Leia - in the same scene we see Han leave the Rebels while carrying a sizeable amount of money.
That said: I was shocked to walk by an anti-NATO "hands off Ukraine" protest shortly after the 2022 invasion. I delved into it a bit and there seemed to me to be at least two kinds of people who would have such a point of view.
* People with an extremely deontological morality: if they saw a runaway trolley, then they would never pull the lever. Some of these folks seem to have their beliefs so tied up in anti-Americanism, pacificism, and/or isolationism that they refuse to accept exceptional situations.
* Fanatical socialists who think that global unity among socialists is more important than national interests or human life - they usually point out how the First World War caused the demise of the Second International[0]. This reminds me of a reprehensible argument apocryphally attributed to Lenin: socialists shouldn't try to make peoples' quality-of-life better under capitalism (indeed they should try to make life worse) because doing so would slow the coming of the Revolution.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_International#First_wor...
Unfortunately the simulated classical humans in your Matrioshka Brain will want to mine Bitcoin, which means that our digital descendants will have to become a true interstellar species anyway in order to convert the Laniakea Supercluster into coin-mining computronium.
I thought that the Model 2 had been canceled?
Assuming exponential growth and assuming 20% utilization, that gives us
A fully solar economy in ~13 years * Kardashev Type 1 in ~59 years * Kardashev Type 2 in ~272 years * Kardashev Type 3 in ~381 years
Pandemics are an edge case: it's socially acceptable to violate political and ethical norms during an emergency.
Spicy! How does that compare to metallic hydrogen and metastable helium?
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php...
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php...
On one hand, if you stop to appease every stakeholder, then you will end up in an eternal quagmire like the California HSR project. On the other hand though, if you make a practice of expedited construction, then you could end up copying the PRC and stomping on anyone that dares to dissent against national prestige projects.
Couldn't this just be combated using shrinkflation? I'm sure that rice, beans, ramen, and other grad student fare is still cheap yet provides enough nutrients to study.
After all, these are supposed to be institutions of the mind, not institutions of the stomach.