What’s amazing is our ability to calculate the path of something in the air.

There’s a test they did with Cristiano Ronaldo where someone kicked a ball to him so he could head it. They shut off the lights before the ball was in the air and somehow from the body shape of the person kicking it, he was able to know how to make contact with it without being able to see it.

https://youtu.be/0k2ey_okQ4E?t=1255

It’s worse than that.

Blockchain Capital LLC was co-founded by Steve Bannon pal Brock Pierce, a major crypto advocate, perennial presidential candidate, and close friend of Eric Adams. Pierce has dozens of other shady MAGA/Russia ties as well.

https://toad.social/@davetroy/113476797192400901

Dorsey’s already out, the people running the project are from the TESCREAL gang.

A feature that makes it easier for their users to migrate to a competitor? Blockchain Capital invests $15M in BlueSky. Insert that Anakin / Padme meme:

Anakin: Now that we’ve invested, let’s make that federation feature priority 0
Padme: As in highest priority, right?
Anakin:
Padme: As in highest priority, right?

Punches mostly hurt because of the mass of the fist and arm. If you’ve ever been punched by a kid you probably weren’t hurt. A skeleton weighs less than a 6-year-old, so there wouldn’t be much mass behind the punch.

But, then again, magic.

On one hand, sure, the British took a lot of things from other places when their empire spanned the globe. And, it sucks for places that had their stuff taken that it is no longer where it was.

On the other hand the British Museum is probably one of the safest places in the world for these things. The museum cares about preservation, knows how to do it, and has the funds to do it. And, while there’s undoubtedly corruption in the UK, there’s a very low chance that any of these things is going to disappear out of the museum and into some powerful person’s private collection.

Mohamed Salah is standing in front of a statue from Egypt, which was taken from Egypt to London. But, the British didn’t manage to take the Buddhas of Bamiyan from Afghanistan to London, and what happened? The Taliban blew them up. The British also didn’t fully loot Iraq when they controlled that territory, which meant that in the 2003 war the museum was looted but not by people who wanted treasures for a public museum. The poorer and less politically stable a country is, the greater the chances that their cultural treasures will be stolen or destroyed.

Despite the repression and corruption, Egypt is now probably stable enough that if any of these items were returned to Egypt, they would probably be well treated and put on display for Egyptians to see. The power of the military in Egypt and the level of corruption probably means a few small items would disappear from the museum, but the most important items would make it. But, is Egypt stable enough that the museum would be safe for another 20, 40, 80 years? I have my doubts. I do think London is probably safe for that long.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think the number one priority should be preserving these things for the future. Displaying them for the public should be a lower priority. If there are items like scrolls or clothing that are too delicate to even display behind a glass case, they should be stored away. I know that’s how they handle things at the Smithsonian, and I assume the British Museum is the same. Because of that, my bias is that the most important cultural items should be in the care of the richest museums in the world, even if it means that they’re not in the places they came from.

It’s a typo for YMCA.

In your imagination I bet people clap when you say things like that.

In your imagination, I bet you have big muscles.

You get to vote in socialist democracies like China, Cuba, USSR, etc

Sure you do, as long as you vote for the candidate that the state prefers. Again, look up “Wir gehen falten”.

It’s easy to be a hero in your own imagination. The real world shows that most people don’t actually do that.

No, I’m saying western democracies are better because you got to vote.

The first paragraph is literally the same “I can’t justify capitalism but the others are worse” argument again.

Which happens to be true. Maybe in the future there will be something better, but so far it hasn’t been found.

The society we live in is an employment based, market fundamentalist society.

Sure, ok. And it’s better than a feudalist society where you’re tied to the land, or a slave-based economy where you’re property.

Instead of lashing out and calling it a silly caricature

I’m not lashing out. I’m just describing it as a silly caricature, which it is. Capitalism is fundamentally about owners of capital competing to make more money by investing in capital and selling goods at a profit. People who don’t own capital have to work in that kind of a system. Similar to how peasants were tied to land they had to work under feudalism, or slaves were required to do whatever their owners demanded in a slave state, but it’s less brutal. Workers can change employers and their bodies are not owned.

Is it fair? Of course not, but no socioeconomic system that has ever existed in reality has ever been fair.

That being said, how much money would it take for you to change your mind about existence being measured in terms of money alone being a silly caricature?

No amount of money would make me change my mind. There would probably be an amount of money where I’d be willing to lie, but what does that prove? You’d lie too if you were offered enough money. That’s human nature, not capitalism. If this were a feudalist system you could be bribed with land. If it were a theocracy you could be bribed by religious titles.

I don’t know what you’re trying to prove. Capitalism is bad, but other systems are worse. There are purely theoretical systems that would be better, but none of them has ever survived an encounter with reality. But, that doesn’t mean we should stop trying. Eventually we’ll find a way to improve on capitalism, just like capitalism improved on feudalism.

we have less than 20 years to take control of our economic system before we all die from climate change

Yeah… sure. “We all die”.

The earth isn’t going to be hit by an asteroid, it’s just going to have more and more catastrophes. If the earth reaches a tipping point with the melting of the polar icecaps, it will still take centuries for them to melt. The tipping point just means that it won’t be possible to stop it. Humanity will survive, because killing off humanity would be as difficult as killing off mosquitoes or cockroaches. What will happen, not suddenly in 20 years, but gradually over the next few centuries, is that life will get more and more unpleasant. There will be more famines, more disasters wiping cities off the map. More wars over resources. But, some humans will keep living, and they’ll have children, and those children will grow up in a terrible world where survival is a struggle. But, humans will survive, though it might be a very brutal, primitive existence.

As for “capitalism”, it’s not “capitalism” that’s at fault here, it’s humanity. It’s not like North Korea is a bastion of carbon-neutral utopian living. Humans are unable to think and act on a global scale. They’re selfish, and always have been. The difference is that now there are billions of humans, and technology has enabled each selfish human to have a massive climate footprint. Human brains were evolved to exist in small groups on the savanna. The thinking that allowed humans to thrive in that environment has meant destruction now that technology has massively amplified the impact each human now has.

The solution isn’t some random change to a different economic system or a different political system. It’s either destroying most technology so that each human can no longer have such a massive impact, or it’s fundamentally altering the human brain so that people use that technology wisely and with a tiny footprint. Neither of those is likely, so we’re almost certainly doomed.

Capitalism and modern western democracy suck. But, life has always sucked for those without power. Life is/was much worse for people under “communism”. It was much worse under fascism. It was much worse under feudalism. It is/was much worse in a theocracy.

Also, this idea that “existence is evaluated in terms of money alone” is a silly caricature of capitalism. People with power have always been the ones to make the rules. It doesn’t matter if that power is in the form of money, or absolute control over anyone who lives on a certain bit of land, or in terms of absolute control due to being the representative on earth of a god’s will.

That’s nice, but the issue was whether they were part of the governing class. The rights the women were given in the GDR didn’t include the right to pass new laws. As for choosing new representatives, look up the term “Wir gehen falten”.

You’re on the right track, but the issue isn’t “the capitalist class”, it’s “humanity”. Slavery existed long before capitalism. Waste existed long before capitalism. Getting rid of capitalism won’t suddenly make people better humans.

There are no rules that say luxury goods couldn’t be produced for consumption

You don’t seem to even understand what a luxury good is. A luxury good isn’t a great bottle of wine, or a designer handbag. A luxury good is something that is rare and expensive and coveted for those reasons. Luxury goods are older than capitalism, they go back millennia. Important people in stone age groups had “luxury goods” that the rest of the people didn’t have access to.

Too much is made, most of it is wasted.

Yes, because it’s extremely hard to figure out what people want. Markets (which are much older than capitalism) are the best way we’ve found to figure out what people want and to meet those needs. You can’t get rid of markets, you can only drive them underground. When the USSR was meeting people’s needs by giving them the goods that the government decided they should have, the black markets were famous because the things people wanted were not the things that the government had decided they needed.

Workers must seize this system and destroy the old structures

If the “workers” are as idiotic as you, they’ll probably die because they simply have no idea how the world works. I’m not defending capitalism, I’m defending markets, which are much, much older than capitalism. An idiot like you thinks that you can magically replace markets with magic, when the fact is that every system that has tried to replace markets since the dawn of time has failed.

We’re not talking about “capitalist systems” though, we’re talking about “the market”.

“The market” existed long before capitalism. It’s an essential feature of human trade. Buyers offer goods for sale, sellers choose what they want to buy. People voting with their dollars, or with their cowrie shells provides a signal for what’s in demand and what producers should make more of.

Every system that has tried to get rid of the market has failed, and the market always pops up anyway, often in the shape of a black market.

But almost everybody wants something different in a home.

If you’re paying rent to a bank, you don’t own your house, at least not yet.

All countries have always been governed by the property owning class. With all its faults, capitalism has resulted in “peons” having the most say they’ve ever had. It’s not a lot, but it’s sure better than under classical democracy, feudalism, monarchy, theocracy, and “communism” at least as practiced in the USSR, Cuba, North Korea and China.