Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  
Pages: 1 ... 986 987 [988] 989 990 ... 1249

Author Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0  (Read 1412293 times)

Loud Whispers

  • Bay Watcher
  • They said we have to aim higher, so we dug deeper.
    • View Profile
    • I APPLAUD YOU SIRRAH
Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: Post-Apocalypse
« Reply #14805 on: December 03, 2016, 08:55:24 pm »

If Bill Gates lost half his wealth today, he wouldn't notice. If I lost half my wealth today, I'd be homeless. In other words, money has diminishing marginal returns.
The gist of this is correct, but he would notice...
"Melinda, have you seen my $40,000,000,000? I think I may have dropped it behind the couch"

Rolan7

  • Bay Watcher
  • [GUE'VESA][BONECARN]
    • View Profile
Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: Post-Apocalypse
« Reply #14806 on: December 03, 2016, 09:00:39 pm »

Yeah...  Melinda is beautiful and they have three children.  I think he'd be okay.
Logged
She/they
No justice: no peace.
Quote from: Fallen London, one Unthinkable Hope
This one didn't want to be who they was. On the Surface – it was a dull, unconsidered sadness. But everything changed. Which implied everything could change.

MetalSlimeHunt

  • Bay Watcher
  • Gerrymander Commander
    • View Profile
Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: Post-Apocalypse
« Reply #14807 on: December 03, 2016, 09:08:19 pm »

I'm not taking it for granted until it's a majority amongst the youngest three generations, it isn't even yet majority in the youngest. Once its a virtue passed from parent to child I'll be less cautious in this regard.
No telling ahead of time, but I think that since people were objecting to consumerism before it even existed that its status as an Obvious Bad Idea is safe. Only our geopolitical circumstances lead to its acceptance, which just made it even more unpopular.
Quote
McTraveller sums it up well, and the likelihood of humans taking advantage of such a bureaucracy >99%
No doubt. But there's an easy answer for this one: Don't leave anything to be gained from taking advantage. The dirty social and system tricks of our current and previous bureaucracies are all basically sourced in the desire to get ahead; people being jackoffs because they're mentally ill or even just to troll without advancement is pretty rare. People in hunter-gatherer societies don't do this kind of thing, because to what end? Then everybody hates you and you still have nothing.

The non-nightmarish version of the automation economy is the opposite of this in material terms. If you can functionally get what you want and there's no dissemination hierarchy, abusing the system is pointless.

In the more social sphere, people's bosses are often dicks because their reputation is only one factor in the influence they wield, and so they can survive as a dick. Take it back down to your ability to play nice and people probably will, even if only for selfish reasons.
Quote
Exactly, humans do not deal well with boredom, thus they take on idle fancies. I doubt we'll decrease in intellectual pursuit, more just that with the majority of society without any work to focus on, all they'll do will be meaningless wastes of time. Kinda like now really, only imagine our worst anime neets, memesluts, yoloswaggins and such dialed to 100 because there is nothing tethering anyone to reality with responsibility
Likelihood 100%, because it's a problem with nature, how pleasure intrinsically has more powerful allures than most endeavours, and not all find STEM pleasurable
Honestly, I'll take it. Anime neets and memesluts are a far step up from work in the factory/fields for 60 years, bang out some kids, die, and that was the primary human existence until like 1985. Mid-50s if we count classic television. We're still pretty new at focusing our lives more around even media pursuits. I think drowning yourself in hedonism is a phase most people end up growing out of, and their experiences during that can still be positive inspiration. If you ask aged 20-30 gymbros and martial artists about their inspiration, you will with shocking frequency get "Dragonball" as the answer. God knows there are enough nerd kids obsessed with science and invention to keep STEM alive if they can just be brought to the door.

Those original childhood desires are crushed more often by circumstance than laziness. Not many people have the determination to keep going, but we can use cultural engineering to help that while also trying to take all the busywork we contact out to the young to machines. People who flip burgers and drive trucks generally do good work and should be recognized for that, but that's also not really what we're on this Earth to do (unless you're really into cooking or trucking).
Quote
Those who don't publish scientific journals get shot by terminator robots
I wonder if they can tell the difference between real work and paper mills, if not RIP Middle Kingdom.
Quote
No point trying to steer something that needs to die, automation doesn't need the human machine to live, praise omnissiah we can excise the useless humans
I wonder how many days hours seconds it will take for people to abuse transhumanism like this. I want to lose these flappy meat appendages ASAP and even I see people who want to overdo it.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2016, 09:13:57 pm by MetalSlimeHunt »
Logged
Quote from: Thomas Paine
To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.
Quote
No Gods, No Masters.

Shadowlord

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: Post-Apocalypse
« Reply #14808 on: December 03, 2016, 09:10:56 pm »

Quote from: marx
What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse

ITT TIL Marx predicted cybersex.
Logged
<Dakkan> There are human laws, and then there are laws of physics. I don't bike in the city because of the second.
Dwarf Fortress Map Archive

misko27

  • Bay Watcher
  • Lawful Neutral; Prophet of Pestilence
    • View Profile
Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: Post-Apocalypse
« Reply #14809 on: December 03, 2016, 09:17:48 pm »

Yeah...  Melinda is beautiful and they have three children.  I think he'd be okay.
That's quite literally neither here nor there.

Bill Gates would be super pissed as that's a ton of money he isn't able to give away. Think of all the foundations! He coulda erased polio with that, what are you gonna do with it?
Logged
The Age of Man is over. It is the Fire's turn now

Reelya

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: Post-Apocalypse
« Reply #14810 on: December 03, 2016, 09:26:32 pm »

To be honest, if most of the population wasn't commuting for 3-4 hours a day, working like robots for 8 hours a day, then getting home too exhausted to do anything but a little TV or gaming.

I don't think that getting rid of that situation is going to decrease humanity's collective pursuit of intellectual stuff. Sure, some people will idle hours away in useless stuff, but they always have. If most of the population wasn't locked in a cycle of 80 hours of work and exhaustion each week with only some booze on the weekend to let of steam, I'm sure a ton of ideas would take off that aren't viable now.

But the thing is, many of those pursuits won't match the snobby "classic arts" style of intellectual / creative stuff so people are biased against them. e.g. if someone spends all their time creating fan art on DeviantArt, the snobs won't consider that "real art" (e.g. since it's not museum-type art). And there are still a lot of fucking assholes around who don't consider modern popular music to be real music because it's not classical music, which is the real stuff. A lot of creativity goes into things which are new and not considered "real art", and we hand-wave that away as time-wasting bullshit because it doesn't fit classical forms of creativity like songs, paintings, plays etc.

So a lot of our moral panic about how the new generation spend their time is often predicated on this idea of what's "real" because they're old traditional forms of expression which have "credibility", when in fact, that old shit is basically on artificial life support because it has zero relevance to anything in the modern world. And the stuff that are actually real expressions of how people live today often gets frowned upon as "fake" or not credible forms of expression.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2016, 09:39:37 pm by Reelya »
Logged

Shadowlord

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: Post-Apocalypse
« Reply #14811 on: December 03, 2016, 09:28:08 pm »

Yeah...  Melinda is beautiful and they have three children.  I think he'd be okay.
That's quite literally neither here nor there.

Bill Gates would be super pissed as that's a ton of money he isn't able to give away. Think of all the foundations! He coulda erased polio with that, what are you gonna do with it?
Buy a car, a home, fund more electric recharging stations... Fund the development of matrix-like tech simply in order to use it to make virtual sex with partners anywhere in the world a thing that is as good as the real thing and a whole lot safer... Important stuff like that. 
Logged
<Dakkan> There are human laws, and then there are laws of physics. I don't bike in the city because of the second.
Dwarf Fortress Map Archive

McTraveller

  • Bay Watcher
  • This text isn't very personal.
    • View Profile
Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: Post-Apocalypse
« Reply #14812 on: December 03, 2016, 09:34:47 pm »

Yeah...  Melinda is beautiful and they have three children.  I think he'd be okay.
That's quite literally neither here nor there.

Bill Gates would be super pissed as that's a ton of money he isn't able to give away. Think of all the foundations! He coulda erased polio with that, what are you gonna do with it?
He would be mad because he couldn't have say over how those resources are used.  That's all "money" is anyway isn't it - granted authority to decide how to use a resource?
Logged
This product contains deoxyribonucleic acid which is known to the State of California to cause cancer, reproductive harm, and other health issues.

Reelya

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: Post-Apocalypse
« Reply #14813 on: December 03, 2016, 09:44:53 pm »

Gates was able to make that money due to the widespread infrastructure that makes something like Microsoft possible. There's no Microsoft coming out of e.g. Somalia, the tax-free government-free wonderland for example. Gate more than most has a fortune heavily reliant on infrastructure, especially education. Illiterate people don't operate Windows PCs.

What they're going to do with that money is maintain and extend the same infrastructure that made people like Bill Gates possible in the first place. And if we didn't do that, then there would be no Bill Gates to cure polio or anything like that.

But I also find the "Bill Gates cured Polio" thing itself to be questionable. How do we know that a more equitable distribution of wealth vs time worked wouldn't cure more diseases than relying on the whims of the occasional ultra-rich person? After all, poverty is often a big factor in disease, and disparities between rich and poor play into that.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2016, 09:51:31 pm by Reelya »
Logged

misko27

  • Bay Watcher
  • Lawful Neutral; Prophet of Pestilence
    • View Profile
Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: Post-Apocalypse
« Reply #14814 on: December 03, 2016, 10:14:38 pm »

Sometimes I think this thread should be put down. It really only seems to serve as a vehicle by which we produce new and exciting (or old and repetitive) derails about topics tangentially related to US politics.
He would be mad because he couldn't have say over how those resources are used.  That's all "money" is anyway isn't it - granted authority to decide how to use a resource?
And? What is your point? Are you defining money for me? That's fantastic but I didn't ask for that at all.

Where is Mussolini when you need him? Forget about making the thread run on time, just keep it on the tracks! Or at least in the same time zone as the tracks... Let's talk about something relevant. Surely we can find some interest in that, right? Politics have never been so fucking interesting in your entire damn lives and we can't stop going on about distant hypotheticals? Nonsense.

Here, I'll start: Donald Trump's phone-call to Taiwan. Trump is the first President to speak directly with Taiwan in decades, and mentioned publicly on Twitter that he had spoken with "The President of Taiwan". The issue? Trump is treating Taiwan as a sovereign state, and China has made clear that it is entirely willing to go to war if there is any hint that Taiwan is seeking independence. Currently both Taiwan and China proper are attempting to downplay the issue, but it risks setting Asia alight.
Logged
The Age of Man is over. It is the Fire's turn now

Egan_BW

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: Post-Apocalypse
« Reply #14815 on: December 03, 2016, 10:15:05 pm »

There is no heresy, merely the dogmas of that blithering fool Lorgar shackling the rational inquiries of the material reality, the reality in which the Void Dragon sleeps and the Emperor is only human
Awaken Mars
AWAKEN MARS
Yup, you're a heretic. Sorry mate.
Logged
Not true, cannot be proven, true but misrepresented.

Reelya

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: Post-Apocalypse
« Reply #14816 on: December 03, 2016, 10:25:31 pm »

Politics have never been so fucking interesting in your entire damn lives and we can't stop going on about distant hypotheticals? Nonsense.

No i think there have been more interesting times. Post 9/11 was more interesting. Cold War ending was another time. Trump still has time to start something bigger than 9/11 however.

Shadowlord

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: Post-Apocalypse
« Reply #14817 on: December 03, 2016, 10:38:38 pm »

That time Ugh clubbed Argh over the head to establish dominance over the tribe of 🐯 🍴 👶
Logged
<Dakkan> There are human laws, and then there are laws of physics. I don't bike in the city because of the second.
Dwarf Fortress Map Archive

Reelya

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: Post-Apocalypse
« Reply #14818 on: December 03, 2016, 11:43:33 pm »

#TrumpCup now
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/18/living/trump-cup-starbucks/

A trump supporter was racially discriminated against at Starbucks. The girl refused to serve him because he was a white Trump supporter (according to him, that's the reason at least). He's on video screaming his head off at the staff there. Now Trump people are taking the war to Starbucks,  by spending money at Starbucks, and saying their name is Trump. Starbucks must be quaking in their boots.

Quote
Some supporters claim to have been refused a #TrumpCup and see it as a breach of their rights.
They're probably the same people who say it's ok for other businesses to discriminate against gay people.

Meanwhile the depths of Starbucks evil know no bounds:

Quote
This all comes after the controversy that plagued Starbucks last year as it introduced a plain red holiday cup that was markedly different from Christmas cups in the past. Joshua Feuerstein, a former pastor, called the new cups a "war on Christmas" in a video posted to Facebook.
OMG less Christmassy Christmas cups?!? You know there's a deep-seated problem in society when people who have influence spend that influence complaining that disposable coffee cups aren't festive enough, and that it's part of an evil conspiracy.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2016, 11:54:16 pm by Reelya »
Logged

Neonivek

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: Post-Apocalypse
« Reply #14819 on: December 03, 2016, 11:49:34 pm »

Starbucks, always the center for controversy. Could be worse. In Vancouver there was a particular street corner with 2 Starbucks right across from one-another.

Man... all this anger gives me a real hankering for some starbucks.
Logged
Pages: 1 ... 986 987 [988] 989 990 ... 1249