Johanx64

The problem, fundamentally, is that unlike a computer program that won't compile if there's syntax errors, or that will crash on null pointer dereference, etc.

There's no such mechanisms in place to ensure logical consistency and coherance of made claims.

Thus the onus is on you to quickly realize that the other party "doesn't have what it takes" and bail out, or you're arguing with a person that doesn't have the mental capacity to recognize syntax errors and subtle bugs, they are simply interested in arriving at their destination and couldn't care less if they arrived there with an unbroken chain of valid chess moves.

I don't think this is true. There are times when I do think it's true, and when I start feeling that way I know it's time to step back because I can no longer engage constructively.

I love how you don't even care if it's true, merely how you think at any given moment (and this changes with mood) and how those thoughts makes you feel.

If you're unable to entertain the idea significant amount of people don't have "what it takes" (which is a fact, btw), have you ever been able to engage constructively?

One of the hallmarks of a person who isn't interested in playing chess is a person who focuses not on what IS true, but "what they think" or "how they start feeling" about chess moves at any given time, etc. Ie. focus is about vibes.

If they take the most absurd interpretation or nitpick about irrelevant details that doesn't take away from the crux of the point you're making - and that's the best they can do - are they really intelligent?

Or are you simply dealing with people that "don't have what it takes" to do better?

They simply don't have the faculties to make a better argument or approach from a different angle, it's the best they can do, and the best they can do is just not enough.

The frustrating part about arguing - on the internet:

1. Infinite supply of people.

2. 90%+ of times before you get anywhere, you find out the person doesn't have "what it takes".

At minimum you have to filter out 90%+ of people that simply don't have the mental faculties to evaluate what is and isn't a valid argument, before you even get started. All this just takes energy and there's just no benifit.

Its like imagine you're trying to playing chess, but

1. Most of the people don't even know rules.

2. Even if they know (some of the) rules. Some people are fundamentally incapable of recognizing and telling a difference between valid or invalid chess move. Some moves - like castling - are fundamentally too challenging for them to grasp. They simply don't have what it takes to participate.

3. And then you find out whole bunch of people aren't there to play chess to begin with, but rather discuss how the moves they use in their house is all different.

It's just such a waste of energy.

One is that money makes people inherently happy. Which is so obviously wrong it's not even worth talking about.

Really. The mere fact of having large chunk of cash and resources, without necessarily even spending it as such - per say, can make people inherently happy-ier.

I'll give you an example: You can say NO whenever you wish. It reduces stress without having spent a single penny of it. It changes your attitude to life by mere fact of having it. Even if don't say NO (because situation doesn't call for it), having the mere option to say it at any given moment - makes you inherently happier and have a healthier attitude to life.

So not even this point stands. Money can make people inherently happy-ier. Without as much as even spending a penny extra as you would have had before you got the "big stash".

"money can't buy happiness" is a poor mans cope. It's a comforting lie for proletariat, the opium for the goycattle.

If you can't buy happiness either one of these is true:

1. You don't have enough money to buy it. Buying happiness isn't cheap.

2. You have skill issues.

Most people simply don't have enough money to test the hypothesis that "money can't buy happiness", for them earning money involves a lot of struggle and selling their time, and all sorts of opportunity costs.

Thus for working class people having more money is intrinsically linked to selling more of their time or "working harder" (having two jobs, overtime).

Therefore it seems unintuitive to them that having more money will bring hapiness. After all they have to work so hard for it and sell a piece of themselves for it.

And then there, of course, people with skill issues.

The more money I have, the happier I become. Money has brought nothing, but pure joy in my life, it has made me smile more!

Most of the things that can be remedied with money are not the truly painful things of life either.

Have you done the math of what life consists of for most people?

It's 9-to-5. Your life is DOMINATED - by large order of magnitude - by involuntary wage slavery. Where you literally sell away your time for pennies on a dollar to a highest bidder.

That is the most painful thing in life, bar none, there is nothing worse than this. This is what ruins most of your health, ages you the most, causes most of the stress, which seperates you from spending more time with your family and loved ones and being free and doing what you want.

Unless the wage-slavery happens to be of enjoyable type for you. Which is bit of an outlier, lets be honest.

From having no respect from your peers?

Most people automatically give respect and admiration to people with money, regardless if it's deserved or not.

Will money save you from heartache? From being lonely?

Being a 9-to-5 wage-slave is ten times worse than heartache or loneliness. Or most other things.

If you're lonely and aren't able to distract yourself from heartache and you have boatloads money, you have SKILL ISSUES of the most severe kind.

Money has brought nothing, but pure joy in my life.

Dude, every sane language out there does this. Just generally with 4byte prefix. Null-terminated stuff has always been backwards compat stuff.

Pascal strings - historically and why people even remember this being an issue - were up to 255 chars in size, if not you had to use different string type.

You might still want raw pointers for all sorts of low level stuff, but you almost never want to have null-terminated strings for anything but back-compat, one of the worst things ever, even on memory constrained systems.

Yup, and there you go confirming beyond sliver of doubt that you're a genuine, certified "akshually" type redditor.

Fundamentally incapable of distilling the substance of the argument, and always latching onto any opportunity to misunderstand and nitpick some irrelevant semantics instead.

Textbook.

The purpose of consumption for most people is to soothe the pain of working.

Yes, for a lot of people it is like this.

When I was young, I couldn't understand why people went on 1-2 week short, extremely expensive vacations where they blow multiple months worth of their savings (ie. multiple months of their income after expensives) in what is extremely short amount of time. It seemed mind-bogglingly stupid.

Now I understand. Being part of the system and doing 9-to-5 wageslavery is inescapable fact of their life.

So when they get 2 weeks off - 2 weeks to actually go and live freely, they just go all out on having a good time. Because no matter what - they are going back to 9-to-5 system.

And however wastefully they "consume" whatever is left after basic expenses, doesn't really matter in grand scheme of things and won't free them from slavery.

It's a distraction. "Whatever hours of free time I get after work, I'm gonna indulge consoom however I want"

Now software engineers are a bit different, where it's possible to retire after 10 years of work if you plan and live frugally, this is simply not an option for vast majority of people.

Why are you being an obtuse "akshually" redditor?

The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Everyone wants more

If he wanted to say masses work, because they have to pay rent and meet basic necessities (ie. under threat of homelessness and starvation), he would have clearly said so.

The way this is worded very clearly refers to conspicuous consumption and consumerism - ie working as means to buying ever more funkopops and ever pokemon cards, ever larger houses to put ever more stuff in them, garage with ever more cars, a vacation house, a pool, a yacht and then a bigger one. And this being the primary motivator (rather than base survival)

Thus no matter what your productive output is per hour of labour, you will always work as much as you can, because you are - presumably - insatiably driven to always consume ever more with no end to it.

And frankly, he certainly is right, but only to an extent, as there definitely are people that operate like this, however them being majority? I don't think so.

The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around.

Hell, no. Masses work, because they have to.

It's not under threat of violence, it's under threat of sleeping under a bridge and starving. Which, frankly, isn't that far off.

People often spend as much as 30-40% of income on rent alone. Plus, once you stack up all the other basic necessities (which have heavily gone up under inflation), you'll have very small sliver left to allocate to "consumption" in a traditional sense of the word, where you "consoom" for sake of consooming all sorts of meaningless stuff.

Moreover, society is structured such, that you can't really partially retire - say take 5 year sabattical and come back without people perceiving as if there must be something wrong with you.

Most jobs aren't really accomodating of people who just wanna come in 2 times a week. Neither would that support basic necessities and rent except for some select few jobs.

Pentium 1 133mhz ran Quake2 pretty darn well as long as you had hardware accel. Without hadware accel it was ass.

(maybe even Pentium 100)

Before FB acquisition:

Yes, really, it ran on potato feature phones you've never even heard of. That can only happen if you really bend backwards to make it happen.

Massive userbase with very tiny team.

Why? It’s repressive if done to cap a natively-growing population, since that means government controlling reproduction (à la one-child policy).

There's a point where caping even natively growing population is actually the right move.

There's plenty of overpopulated shitholes (Mumbai, Dhaka, Cairo, Bangladesh, etc) where it would have been an absolute blessing if government was controlling reproduction or put a population cap in place.

If you think capping population is wrong, go visit Dhaka, I highly recommend it.

If you're still on the fence after visiting Dhaka, you're beyond saving.

I remember "playing" it briefly somewhere within PS2-era.

And the absolutely horrid framerate is the thing that I remember most about the game. It absolutely ruined the experience for me and made me stop 'trying' to play it.

And no, it isn't me a primarily a PC gamer complaining about 30fps. It was like 15-20fps. It's was absolute ass, bordering on unplayable.

It's like you weren't grappling with a colossus, instead you're constantly fighting the laggy 15fps framerate.

And I don't mean it just by the standards of today, I mean by standards of the day.

God of War games hit 50-60fps pretty well on PS2 and had all the epic bosses and set pieces

A stunning number of people have been raised/educated solely by the internet. That’s the source for knowledge, not other people.

On the internet you can learn from and sometimes interact with the best of the best, so the barrier of entry for what constitutes an "expert" is rised much higher.

For all I know maybe you are an expert, but as a general rule of thumb - people are sick of "experts" eager to share their "expertise".

It's simply the case that the supply of "experts" wanting to share "expertise" vastly eclipses the demand by several orders of magnitude.

I think there's a business somewhere, where you get paid to listen to "experts" and they get to feel better about themselves. It's a win-win.

So if people don't perceive you as an "expert" and dont go to you for answers, you simply do not register as one or they have a rather high bar which requires observable undeniable artifacts (and I don't mean credentials, I mean software) and competition is rather fierce - there's simply overproduction of people who think they are "experts" and thus you have to give unmistakable symptoms of being one to register.

If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".

I doubt most people wouldn't even think that this is a thing they can wish for or that this is even within realm of possibility.

It has to be explicitly named as an option - as, I'm afraid, people have forgotten that you can have "nice things".

Also I feel rather uncomfortable every time somebody purports to be representitive of or know that "most people" want.

Should Antarctica be counted as habitable then?

It constitutes something to the tune of 9% of Earths land mass.

And it's already inhabited by millions if not billions of people? Really? Is Sahara-Desert habitable also?

Not the tiny parcels next to an Oasis, not people that live next to Nile.

But actual-effin-desert habitable? And billions live there - right chock in the middle of desert?

Interesting, very interesting indeed!

And I still have no idea why you think oil running out has any role in your argument at all.

Oddly enough, your argument that earth isn't overpopulated, because there's still "a lot of room left in the desert, look at Saudis, UAE, Quatar!" hinges on Oil!

Your proof that deserts are habitable is basically - taking Saudis, UAE, Qatar - as an example.

Which is true, if you have infinite-money-hack, you abso-effin-lutely can man make it rain in the middle of desert (or middle of the ocean on a megayacht), ACs, green-patios, lambos, pools, artificial islands, giga-turbo-mega-towers and the most opulent displays of wealth!

Except it's not infinite money hack at all. It's very much 47years of partying left type of finite.

And now you're adding child-like strawmen on top, which is once again - arguing in bad faith.

Dude, your whole opening statement was how few people on earth there are or how large the earth is by comparing it to a mass grave.

Your whole argumentation is childish-wishfull thinking or an indoctrinated adult who just isn't very bright, saying you're arguing in bad faith would be putting it very kindly.

That being said, this conversation is obviously over.

I don't think you're discussing this in good faith. 134m^2 is well over 4 acres of land for a single person!

134m is a distance you can walk in a minute and a half. And you're already in somebody elses land. The only way you can present this as some sort of large plot of land is if you take some already overpopulated suburban area as a reference point where houses are lined up like boxes right next to another. And that's your only point of reference and you can't even fathom anything else.

Subtracting the uninhabitable land from it, you basically get less than a mere hectare.

Accusing others of acting in bad faith is game everyone can play.

And it's very easy to do so since you're arguing how easily deserts, oceans or permafrost are habitable "if you really want to" (its just basic technology!) - when in truth it's achieved by pissing away one-time generational oil money to make it rain in the middle of the desert - no less.

Party which will most likely wrap up with mass starvation (globally) when the pumps run dry (47 more years of this! give or take!)

No sane person arguing in good faith would make arguments like this:

"Well, planet isn't overpopulated, there's still a lot of room in the desert! oh, you can inhabit the oceans and permafrsot too! You could live on top of the Himalayas (you don't, but you could!) Oh, the sky is the limit! Oh, yes!"

You aren't actually interested in truth, you're simply really, really want to and are programmed to multiply, and are working backwards (rationalizing) how actually planet isn't at all overpopulated or resource constrained, etc. That's what's actually happening. It's textbook.

I think your intuition of 140m x 140m being a small parcel of land is rather odd.

I actually went into google maps/satellite of some very familiar places to me, and drew out a 140m x 140m meter squares just to get a feel how much it is. It's very much a small plot of land.

I rounded up, the actual plot of land given 8.3bil pop is closer to 134m x 134m. Mind you, 134m x 134m per person IF you include all land area (so deserts, permafrost, high mountains and various unlivable areas), so in practice, it would be significantly less, so 95m squared give or take depending on what you consider "livable".

Of these 134m x 134m arable/fertile land would be only like 10% if I recall correctly. And arable/fertile land is - ultimately - the bottle neck.

This does not in any shape or form emphasize "how few of people there are on Earth". Quite the opposite actually. And every new person just makes that small parcel of land ever smaller.

And I think calling deserts uninhabitable is quite odd given everything from Nevada to Saudi Arabia. Basically no lands are truly uninhabitable if we want to inhabit them, even including water as the gradually expanding territory of China is demonstrating.

And what happens to be the population density of Sahara Desert? Plus, do you live or want to live in a desert yourself? No? Well then...

Nobody wants to live in "close quarters" in insanely polluted, noisy overpopulated shitholes like Dhaka, Mumbai or Karachi or deserts. Just so you know... people there never had a choice and were just spawned there.

Planet is overpopulated, the overpopulation is simply not evenly distributed. Mind you, as recently as 1950s your plot of land would be 3x larger, when pop of planet was "mere" 2.5bil.

Saudi Arabia is wholly dependent of it's oil reserves to make miracles happen in the middle of the desert. At current oil consumption rates in the world, the total world oil reserves will last mere 47 years.

Then either some "magical transformation" will happen, or lots of people will end up poured in that square death cube of yours. And only the fraction of people left alive in Saudi Arabia will go back to riding cammels instead of their sports cars and jeeps.

Betting that a "magical transformation" will happen in 47years is nothing more than wishful thinking.

Unfortunately people aren't really wired for long term planning and reason backwards from the conclusions in their mind as starting point instead.

Rather than derive conclusions from the observable, quantifiable and measurable - even if those conclusions end up being less than pretty.

I'm not sure if this emphasizes how few humans there are, or how massive the Earth is. But it's the same point in both cases.

It emphasizes neither!

What you've described is a mass grave.

Quite literally so. If you killed all living humans (8.3billion), the mass-grave you'd have to dig to put them all in one place isn't quite large indeed!

Plus, humans on earth are affected by gravity, so any arrangement of them cubic squares instead of square miles is highly unintuitive, unusual and unnatural to begin with.

This doesn't say anything about habitable or fertile farmable area (measured in km^2, not in km^3) of the planet, or the number of people (that you've conveniently reduced by taking a square root of - twice! by packing them into a tightly packed cube)

For example, if you took 8 billion people and made them hold hands with each other tightly packed (0.5m per person) it would wrap the circumference of earth 100 times.

Now this actually says something about size of the earth!

If you divy up the land surface of earth by population, you get a rather small parcel of land, something to tune of 140m x 140m (this includes deserts and other mostly uninhabitable lands!)

Arable land would be a much smaller parcel of land still!

If you measure human land use in terms of arable land and living space per person, instead of mass-grave metrics the planet Earth is pretty much squarely over-populated and is very much stretching of what is sustainable.

Lets say, you have 47 years left to live.

Does that make those 47 years irrelevant - just because they will end?

There's no contradiction there. It just makes these last-remaining fossil fuels even more valuable.

Moreover oil use hasn't ramped down, nor is it getting replaced in any substantial way. I suspect people have no slightest clue just how reliant the modern world is on fossil fuels outside of it's use in cars.

I mean something undeniably WILL happen as the world has roughly 47 years left at current consumption rate of oil.

Whether what's going to happen will be whatever it is you're imagining is completely different story entirely.

Needless to say, If you have a largely deindustrialized country you can't really make any sort of transition happen yourself anyway, not at the grand scale and speed necessary for this endeavour.

Expect fireworks.

Familiarize yourself with this: https://www.worldometers.info/oil/

Top reserves by country, historical data on consumption (including by country).

These basic data points explain US foreign policy better than anything.

There is no data or trends that supports the notion that oil is becoming irrelevant, much less quickly.

US with it's current reserves and oil consumption rate would last roughly 12 years, btw.

What do you think American Empire is all about if not controlling the oil rich countries in middle east, as well as extremely oil rich countries like Venezuela?

The only failing here is that America has decaying, hallowed out industrial base where it can't just cheaply mass produce and replenish hi-end rockets and tech to take care of business-as-usual quickly, because everything down to raw materials is just so expensive.

how can anyone justify the United States of America and Israel attacking ANY country?

Every military action will have an on-paper "justification". It's kind of irrelevant frankly. But to cut bullshit, it really isn't that complicated.

Venezuela is an extremely oil rich country. Countries in the middle-east region, including Iran are very oil rich.

And that's in large part why US (by this point firmly decaying petrostate propped by petrodollar) is constantly there "meddling" and ensuring all the oil is continuously bought using US dollars.

That is wholly sufficient to explain things.

Every other cartoonish-evil justification "Iran wants to build nukes to bomb US, etc" is largely bullshit (why, for example, Iran doesn't want to nuke.... say Germany or France? hmmm.....)

You're presuming that if they had a choice, they wouldn't accept it.

The reality is that chinese goverment is - overall - delivering results. People will accept things that bring good outcomes.

There's also upsides from the surveilence and the way things are done in China which makes it way more resilient from outside influence and disruptive bad actors.

Now I don't want the same things in my country, but it suits China to some extent.

For quite a while i was thinking how we're in the phase one: mountains of unmaintainable garbage code being generated... and once the shit hits the fan, some maintainability ceiling gets reached - "the real programmers" will be summoned to clean up and deal with this shit.

Now I've come to realize the error in my ways, this is probably not going to happen. What will happen is instead is that the ones doing the "shuffling of shit" is just going to also be agents themselves. Prompted by a more senior slop-grammer specialized in orchestrating "shuffling of shit".

The issue is - fundamentally - whether you think life is "mostly good" isn't based on measurement.

Lets say you had a device that could accurately quantify and measure how much pain/suffering and joy/pleasure you experience.

Lets say that number comes out to 70% pain&suffering and 30% joy.

Is life mostly good?

Lets say 70% of people say that the ratio sucks, and 30% of people says it is a good thing. After a couple of generations, the only people that exist are mainly the ones that think 70 units of pain vs 30 units of joy is "good life" and continue procreating producing offspring that are selected for the same qualitites.

Lets say environment changes, and life is 90 units of pain vs 10 units of joy. Given some time, the only people that exist think this life is a "good thing". They still feel pain mind you, but think the trade-off is worth it.

If you don't think the trade-off is worth it, you get selected out of the gene pool.

Now you can take this thought experiment to extremes, 9999 units of pain and 1 unit of joy, etc. This life would also end up being a "good thing", because natural selection optimizes for procreation and survival, and not for "quality of life", "joy/enjoyement", etc.

70% pain and 30% joy is derived 5 workdays and 2 days of rest, as a starting point.

I'm afraid there isn't any thinking involved in any of this, it's just hard survival instincts selected by natural selection. The people that think that having children now (for whatever reasons) isn't a good idea wont exist anymore, and only people that "think" it is a good idea and end up doing it. This isn't based on objective measurement of pain/pleasure (it's almost irrelevant).