too dumb to read

checks out

Most sensible comment in the thread, thread shoulda probably ended here.

Most greens are very wierd. They claim to be against malnutrition and vitamin deficiency, but when it comes to solutions, they are against them(see golden rice). They are also mostly vegans, but when it comes to insulin, they would rather kill lots of pigs instead of scary-scary GMO yeast. Or when it comes to energy production, they rather would choose one with guaranteed dangers(coal has very nasty byproducts of burning) instead of potential.

I think this is probably because they represent a more dangerous and legitimate opposition to the powers that be, and, as a result, tend to be one of the most astroturfed groups on the planet. Couple that with a kind of extremism, where they will oppose golden rice or GMO yeast on the basis of evergreening IP laws (a fair complaint, imo), and then you can kind of see why they keep opposing things that are presented as solutions and keep getting hit with the terminally annoying “well, why don’t you have any solutions, then?” style of criticism.

then you’re just a bot.

I mean to be fair you do make it pretty easy to discredit your entire argument, when you’re just gonna say that anyone calling you out on this very obviously stupid idea is a bot. Like that’s the same thing again.

Maybe I’m a victim of Poe’s law, but I’ve seen “launch nuclear waste into space” get way more repute than it deserves as an idea from people who have no clue about the actual issues with, even just normal aspects to do with energy generation. It’s a shorthand signal that lets me know that someone’s had all their thinking on it done for them by shitty pop science and shitty science journalism. It’s like if someone believes in antivax, or something. I’m probably not going to really think they’re a credible source, after that. This is also bad if the shit they’re saying is itself lacking in external sources which I can rely on outside of them.

I’m also flexing my brain right now because none of the shit you said at all really backs up the idea the nuclear energy is the future. Like, if you think it’s inevitable that more plants collapse and it’s inevitable that nuclear power plants get destroyed by missiles in times of war (also a great idea, on par with disposing of it in space, let me irradiate the exact area I’m trying to capture for miles and miles around), then you wouldn’t want nuclear power. If you believe in that and then you also believe in the overblown problem of nuclear waste, then there’s not really a point, there’s no point at which the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

The reason people aren’t going to accept nuclear if they believe it has cons is because like half of those cons are, albeit overblown, catastrophic for life on the planet, and the other half are failures to conceptualize based on economic boogeymen, just the same as with solar power. Political will problems, rather than problems with physical reality or core technologies. But still, problems that conflict with the existence of the idea itself.

You’re not going to convince people to go in on nuclear power, your stated idea, if you only point out it’s flaws, and then also post ridiculous shit.

This, this should be common sense, and I don’t understand why it’s not.

Okay, so, say I need some energy that’s pretty dense in terms of the space that it takes up, say I need a large amount of constant energy draw, and say that I need a form of energy that’s going to be pretty stable and not prone to variation in weather events. I.e. I seek to power a city. This isn’t even really a far-fetched hypothetical, this is a pretty common situation. What energy source seems like the best for that? Basically, we’re looking at hydropower, which generally has long term environmental problems itself, and is contextually dependant, or nuclear.

Solar also makes sense, wind energy also makes sense, for certain use cases. Say I have a very spread out population or I have a place where space is really not at a premium, as is the case with much of america, and america’s startling lack of population density, that might be the case. But then, I kind of worry that said lack of population density in general is kind of it’s own ongoing environmental crisis, and makes things much, much harder than they’d otherwise need to be.

I think the best metaphor for nuclear that I have is the shinkansen. I dunno what solar would be, in this metaphor, maybe bicycles or something. So, the shinkansen, when it was constructed, costed almost double it’s expected cost and took longer then anyone thought it would and everybody fucking hated it, on paper. In practice, everybody loves that shit now, it goes super fast, and even though it should be incredibly dangerous because the trains are super light and have super powerful motors and no crash safety to speak of, they’re pretty well-protected because the safety standards are well in place. It’s something that’s gone from being a kind of, theoretical idiot solution, to being something that actually worked out very well in practice.

If you were to propose a high speed rail corridor in the US, you would probably get the same problems brought up, as you might if you were to plan a nuclear site. Oh, NIMBYs are never gonna let you, it’s too expensive, we lack the generational knowledge to build it, and we can patch everything up with this smaller solution in e-bikes and micromobility anyways. Then people don’t pay attention to that singular, big encompassing solution, and the micromobility gets privatized to shit and ends up as a bunch of shitty electric rental scooters dumped in rivers and a bunch of rideshare apps that destroy taxi business. These issues which we bring up strike me as purely being political issues, rather than real problems. So, we lack generational knowledge, why not import some chinese guys to build some reactors, since they can do it so fast? Or, if we’re not willing to deal with them, south korean?

I’m not saying we can’t also do solar and renewables as well, sure, those also have political issues that we would need to deal with, and I am perfectly willing to deal with them as they come up and as it makes sense. If you actually want a sober analysis, though, we’re going to need to look at all the different use cases and then come up with whichever one actually makes sense, instead of making some blanket statement and then kind of, poo-pooing on everything else as though we can just come up with some kind of one size fits all solution, which is what I view as really being the thing which got us into this mess. Oooh, oil is so energy dense, oooh, plastic is so highly performing and so cheap and we don’t even have to set up any recycling or buyback schemes, oooh, let’s become the richest nation on the planet by controlling the purchasing of oil. We got lulled into a one size fits all solution that looked good at the time and was in hindsight was a large part in perhaps a civilization ending and ecologically costly mistake.

And I say just launch the waste into space

This immediately discards like, everything you’ve said up until now, though. It matters if it explodes on the way up challenger style and irradiates half of the continent with a massive dirty bomb of nuclear waste. It’s way more cost effective, efficient, and safer to just put it somewhere behind a big concrete block and then pay some guy to watch it 24/7, and make sure the big concrete block doesn’t crack open or suffer from water infiltration or whatever.

You know, as long as their management structure stays relatively similar to what it is, I think I’d be more fine with them being the big evil, compared to basically anyone else.

Edit: and also as long as they stay a private company, that would also be a big concern, but I guess that’s maybe the same as saying their management structure stays the same

For an example of bad competition, just look at streaming sites. We went from everything being on Netflix to everything being divided among dozens of shitty platforms, each of which costs more, and the prices keep going up, especially if you don’t want ads. Nothing was improved for the consumer when Netflix lost its defacto monopoly. Which isn’t to say that Netflix is great, only that the competition for marketshare has only made things worse for the consumer.

Not to sound like a ancap idiot or whatever, but I’d imagine that has to do with the fact that streaming services don’t actually compete with one another. Exclusivity deals mean they don’t actually compete in terms of user experience, features, ease of use, higher video or audio quality than their competition, improved bitrate, whatever. Instead, they just compete based on who can snap up what IPs for the cheapest, which is just a game of whoever has the most money, whoever can outbid their competitors. Then, you’re not going to netflix or hulu or disney+ because of the features of the platform, you’re going to them because they have some IP that the other platforms just straight up don’t, and if you want to watch both IPs you gotta pay for both. So, it’s not really competition, in the conventional sense.

The idea is less that someone makes a competitor and then they actually compete. The idea is that a competitor service is able to lock away one or several big titles, like, say, overwatch, league, fortnite, or whatever else, behind exterior launchers that are maybe more free to do data harvesting. Then, that competitor theoretically eats away more and more of the largest market share, and tries to drive those users from just using their platform for a single game, to maybe using multiple games, maybe with something like a games pass or with free weekend deals or whatever. Once they have that market share, they can give developers better margins, since they’ll be selling customer data at a profit and steam won’t be, maybe with some sort of exclusivity contract baked in, purposely undercutting steam. Then, steam’s been put on the back foot, and the rest is just kind of what has happened to streaming services.

It’s a market, markets trend towards short term gains strategies over long term gains strategies because having faster short term gains means you can more easily crush your competition. It’s like age of empires 2, the first couple minutes of the game is the part that matters the most. That being said, steam has been around for quite some time, and has a good amount of brand loyalty and goodwill built up, and that doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon as they keep one-upping their competition with actual improvements to their platform, like family sharing, screencasting, big picture mode, increased controller support and reassigning, and a full standalone version of linux, that basically all their competitors seem incapable of. So maybe steam has enough of a headstart that, even with a long term gains strategy, even with a, basically, non-evil mentality, they can stay afloat. Who can say.

I mean it’s not as though that’s not a problem in normal companies. It’s just that normal companies can sort of use the guise of structure or professionalism to harangue whatever employees the clique ends up disliking. The cliques are baked in, in a normal company.

I mean the government pretty much already has a death note, of a kind. If you’re not Gary Webb, then they could always just slip some shit in your water main or whatever, or otherwise just kinda kill you however they want. So it’s not all that useful for them to have, other than being cheaper and maybe making some political assassinations much easier.

You know I do kinda wonder what effect that would have culturally, especially if that became a kind of trend or mainstay. Like, obviously a big investigation would take place as to the cause of death. Doubt they would come up with anything, but obviously, huge scandal. After that, do the successors keep getting killed since they’d probably be the same or worse, or what happens? What would happen in response to that? Would they rename the party, launch further investigations, would they attempt to dissolve the party? Would they attempt to believe in different ideals out of a kind of fear or natural selection, or what? Would they all just devolve into extremely conspiratorial thought as they desperately tried to ward it off?

I mean, if they figured it out, then they might even just start putting them out under aliases or fake names or something.

cause it’s cool and I like it, which should be reason enough. more practically it works for cases when you lose your remote, maybe cases where you want to change the channel on some TV in a pub somewhere, shit like that. it’s fun.

Every time it comes up I must lament the switch to screens too tall to watch content, the decision to remove wired 3.5mm jacks in order to drive sales of wireless headphones, the switch to increasingly fewer physical buttons. No more IR blaster.

You know, as much as I do like this website, I do find it kind of tiring how the top posts tend to just be like. Like this is an NPC meme, you know? This is a chad vs virgin type of meme. This is about a step away from choosing to portray your opposition as a soy wojack. Sometimes I find that kind of funny because of how absurdly idiotic and brainbroken it reveals the creator of the meme to have been, but I dunno, something about the mainstream adoption of this kind of thing is just kind of incredibly depressing. It’s like I am seeing the mainstream consciousness break apart in real time.

Can we go back to advice animals and rage comics, guys?

I think that most of the criticisms directed at the industrialization and mecha stuff is mostly just a byproduct of the worldbuilding in korra broadly not being very good. Not even necessarily bad a lot of the time, but just not as good as avatar.

Bending styles became more homogenized and choreography is worse, everything became a kind of 1920’s hong kong steampunk, and lots of the city shots, there’s basically nobody walking around. You have things like tasers and huge mechas, but huge mechas and tasers without explanations for how they’re getting such dense energy storage, or circumventing some real world problems with those technologies in a 1920’s context. With various forms of bending, you can kind of get around the energy density problem a little bit, since it’s just straight up magic that seems like it violates conservation of energy, but with korra’s stuff, that doesn’t apply a lot of the time.

Lots of little things like that kinda give the impression that the world is made of paper mache, or that a lot of things are just kind of done because they’re a cool idea, rather than because they’re both a cool idea and make a little bit of sense. I’m not really opposed to the idea of a car in the setting, but it strikes me as quite a bit easier to power a car if you have a mobile human power plant that can produce large amounts of energy. I think it’s also kind of a shame to disconnect the tech from this for a different reason, as well, and that’s because it means that the bending is kind of, less broadly useful and applicable. It takes up less space in the setting, it has less utility, it’s not as cool, and the show doesn’t really end up giving many good replacements for it as time goes on.

That’s really nitpicking, though. I think the broader point is just that there wasn’t much done in the series to really show the continuity between ATLA and korra (do not mistake this for fanservice), and they really feel like different shows. Feels kind of like about a quarter of the reason why people didn’t like the last jedi, but that’s kind of a whole other deal. Anyways, that being the case, korra’s more of a stand alone kind of deal, and I think it kind of falls flat on it’s own, because it just isn’t very good and I don’t like it as much as the OG.

You also get a lot of people that will blame all the problems on the show that it kept getting renewed season after season without any real knowledge of the future viability of the show, but I think I would still just blame the writing, in that respect. You can make a good, contiguous series of media based only on good improv, only on good setup and payoff, external to the idea that the show has multiple locked-in seasons. I don’t think it matters too much, if you’re good enough. Main example there is probably just venture bros, though.

If the military and police are the right leaning ones who agree with the greasy brainwashed boomers, I’d think more that said military and police are the major problem in that circumstance, and not the greasy brainwashed boomers.

Whoever keeps throwing in the shit about law enforcement in these stories, which I think was actually a security officer for the embassy, drawing a gun, is doing a pretty good job of distracting from the main issue of what this guy lit himself on fire and died for. Doing a much better job than all the whinging about how he was mentally ill, and how this won’t change anything, and how there’s no clear cause, that mainstream news outlets are doing when they cover this type of stuff, if they cover it at all.

I would also like to kind of point out here, that “this won’t change anything, this guy was mentally ill, he killed himself for nothing”, is really only true if you decide it to be true. We get to decide whether or not this motivates us to do something or not. We get to decide whether or not we let this affect us. Whether or not we do something, to make sure this doesn’t happen again, you know? And that’s mostly, in my mind, the purpose of this kind of protest.

Maybe it makes the institutions think about what they’re doing, probably not, since, if they were gonna think that, they should’ve probably thought that about the 20,000 or so palestinians that have been killed. This protest is mostly engineered to get you mad, and sad, and to make you, the viewer, think about why this is happening, and think about what you can do to stop it. Not just deflecting immediately to whether or not it was effective, because by doing so, you let it not be as effective.

Brings to mind the discourse against, really any form of protest that I’ve seen. You could take the george floyd protests, for example. So, sure, the government throws in agent provocateurs, in order to turn what would otherwise be peaceful protests, which would shut down any traffic into and out of the city, and would choke off any economic activity (puts pressure on businesses, utilities, puts pressure on local government, which needs to please these people who don’t really care about the protest but want things to go back to normal).

But by doing so, right, by causing those passive forms of damage, but also by causing active forms of damage, say, burning a big box store down, right, the public showcases that, if a certain legal decision to, say, let derek chauvin off, occurs, then there will be potentially more protests and more destruction, which provides great incentive against that decision occurring.

Now, in this case, there’s not as clear of a process, because there’s not as clear of repercussions if they decide to do nothing. About the only thing that might happen is that this might happen again, which, might, by some process of media coverage, put enough pressure on politicians to cause this to stop, if it becomes a political issue. The same thing is happening with mass shootings, which aren’t a greatly impacting issue, by the numbers, right, they’re much less than that of road deaths, heart disease, other forms of gun violence.

But they are so horrifying to the american public and to really anyone of moral conscience, that they should serve as a clear marker that something is wrong, and something needs to change. Serial killers create a similar effect. It’s almost like a kind of terrorism, using that word without judgement, here. That’s the power of these protests. We’ve already seen it spread across a bunch of news media, even though it’s being reported about as poorly as you’d expect.

I’m not particularly sure that repeat incidents would do any good, and I think I’d generally be opposed to that, as should anyone, but, an instance of self-immolation is what caused the arab spring. This sort of thing isn’t ineffective, I think it does a disservice to aaron bushnell to say otherwise.

If you want to stop this sort of thing from occurring in the first place, you should really try to understand why it was happening, instead of brushing it aside.

I thought the real lesson that’s never learned is that everything is just doomed to get worse forever?

dopamine pump goes brrrr.

But also, I think to some degree, “building meaningful platforms with an abundance of excellent communication options” is kind of just. Investor speak. It’s kind of impossible. Systems are brittle, communication needs to be flexible, to some degree.

Speaking more specifically, right, if we’re looking at reddit and lemmy as examples, we have to think about the kinds of content that these systems are incentivizing. Upvotes float a post to the top of the front page, top of the comments section, right, and then that kind of lends itself to platforms where the top posts are snippy little nothings that everyone can kind of vaguely agree with, while the most downvoted posts are going to be snippy little nothings that everyone can kind of vaguely disagree with. And then you’re getting the full range in-between, with really no way to kind of properly find things based on what their substance is. The organization structure, basically, is arranged based on the kind of collective idea of quality, which isn’t really a specific enough kind of organization to be useful to most people.

So, that has drawbacks. What if we just went at it like a classic forum, right? People make accounts, people make posts, maybe you even have a membership fee. Well, now post quality has maybe gone up, but we’ve also created a large barrier to entry, which is a really bad strategy for growth. That’s maybe not a problem, as people tend to kind of, stupidly prioritize rapid expansion over steady growth and the quality of their core product, right, without really understanding the value they are actually looking to create.

Realistically though the biggest problem is just that the insularity of the forum is kind of going to be a snowballing thing, especially depending on subject matter. Jargon and in-jokes can develop that make it basically impossible to interface with as a newcomer, and that’s going to lead to a kind of inertial collapse where forums just slowly come up and then slowly go back down. Also contributing to this is kind of a point at which every discussion has been had before on the server archives, so any time you make a new post, refer to post 1224. If they don’t just die from inflation of basic goods, and can’t afford to keep up hosting costs, which is also a major killer of classic forums.

So, conventional forums also have drawbacks. So maybe we get rid of the accounts, now it’s anonymous, and everything is still going to be organized chronologically, right? Nope, that sucks, because now there’s not really any incentive to keep up post quality and your forum is going to get spammed to death with the maximum amount of possible noise, meaning you need to take on bot filters, which means you need to create more brittle systems to try and sort quality posts away from chaff. You could also just, not do this, and let chaff kind of swim around on your platform, but, that might not be a great idea, I dunno.

If you do end up somehow making a platform that can be, at the very least, popular and desirable for communication, then you’ve basically just ended up making a public good that you’re probably not massively paid for. Queue the platform getting bought out and ruined by an idiot stooge. Not just elon, but also, every other platform on the internet ever.

I think it’s pretty reasonable to look at all that and just think. Man. I want some more dopamine! Turn on the dopamine pump! And then the corporation says, yes sir, here is your dopamine pump, “free” of charge, of course, go to town.

Basically the cynicism is from two ends, is what I’m saying. It’s from the fact that the internet is kind of constantly undergoing a kind of expansion and contraction, where the systems work at the low end, and then rise, and then collapse under their own weight once noise starts to accumulate, right, so an ideal system is somewhat impossible, at least, under the current kind of economic constraints, maybe, but maybe also in general. So there’s a cynicism to that, right. There’s also the cynicism of being conscious of that. And then there’s also the cynicism of like, people just not really wanting communication, and wanting dopamine pumps. Though, I think people might really want both, if they were pressed on it.