beaconstudios

they're fairly unique in their free DDoS protection. They provide a LOT of security and uptime services for free that you just don't really find elsewhere (at least, the last time I checked; I'm sure they have reasonable competitors by now).

Even if a monopoly is not legally enforced, it can still dominate through quality or market forces or numerous other avenues.

It's called a developmental state:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_state

It's written in arc, a custom dialect of lisp that Paul Graham made.

you can't go wrong with ARGs. Like Pokemon Go but encouraging more in-person collaboration.

if you don't mind missing out on the parkour, and it being a VR game - I'd recommend Pistol Whip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9LxuTZBY8Y

giving people needles and drugs is called harm reduction for a reason - it's to reduce the risk of dirty needles and street drugs, these policies don't solve drug addiction, they just keep drug addicts safe(r). Solving drug addiction is actually a tremendously hard problem but it starts with helping rather than punishing addicts. Portugal is a good example of doing this right: drugs are broadly decriminalised and the government provides help to addicts. Here's an article on drug policies across Europe (and some other countries): https://www.foundationswellness.net/drug-abuse/do-other-coun...

Portugal: https://deserthopetreatment.com/addiction-guide/drug-industr...

therein lies the rub.

I was thinking the infrastructure and amenities state of US suburbs, where they're basically stamped down in blocks off a highway. I live in a single family home and drive a car in the UK, but there are tons of amenities within walking distance (and I can walk anywhere), community events and green spaces, etc. I can drive, get a bus or cycle into the nearest city, which my town is clustered near to, so opportunities are aplenty. I know my neighbours, family are nearby, and so on. The vibe I get from American suburbs is that they're much more like isolated house-units and if you want to do anything you have to drive to somewhere totally different.

the American style of suburb is quite unusual compared to e.g. Europe though, and AFAIK is driven by zoning laws and car-centric infrastructure more so than by consumer choice. Markets don't necessarily offer people what they want, people's imaginations are often constrained by what's available on the market. Something something, "faster horses".

Also, presumably the issue of needles and human waste can be resolved with further prosocial investments in harm reduction facilities for drug users and housing for the homeless. These problems aren't intractable.

The UK's hardly a haven of social democracy, but I've never seen human excrement on the street and only seen needles off the beaten path. We don't do a very good job helping our homeless population though.

the myth is explained in the book. the only difference between 'philosopher's stone' and 'sorcerer's stone' is that the former provides a connection to a real myth.

The philosopher's stone was a specific historical idea, the catalyst that would allow alchemists to create the elixir of life.

indeed, this is broadly acknowledged and studied in macroeconomics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cycle

Computers are already exponentially more intelligent than humans in constrained domains, like executing mathematics. Presumably we'll just keep expanding this category until they're better at everything than us, all the while reaping industrial benefits from each iterative improvement.

They're both calls to action: avoid cyberpunk, seek solarpunk. We've gotten so much "avoid this" fiction in the past decades that people are just burnt out and actual visions of a positive future have been largely absent since Star Trek, so it makes sense to say "hey, you know all these abstract political ideas that we talk about? this is what the world might look like if we implemented them". Nothing about solarpunk says that it is the default outcome. No reasonable person thinks that it is. It's an ideal to fight for.

The era of collapse fiction like cyberpunk has only really given rise to one political movement: accelerationism. Whose defining trait is "if the world's going to collapse, we should probably hurry it along so we can see if there's anything to salvage afterwards".

Solarpunk isn't about believing that social development will keep pace with technological development, it's about imagining what would happen if it did. Its politics are not a fairytale but a call to action to divert course. Cyberpunk says "the future is just gonna be awful" and explores just how awful it's going to be (which isn't rebellion, it's apathy), solarpunk says "imagine what the future could be like if we made it better". It's only a lullaby if you believe there's no hope for change.

This is just my headcanon but I think of the punk in solarpunk as being metatextual: it's not rebelling against its own world, it's rebelling against ours, and against the pervasive pessimism of capitalist realism. I think we need something like that in a time where most fictional futures are dystopian.

Solarpunk has pretty strong anti-capitalist leanings. It doesn't have the punk element of being "low-life" like cyberpunk is, but the commonality between the two genres is that cyberpunk imagines the world that unlimited corporate power would create (from an 80s perspective, hence the neon and ascendant Japanese themes), and solarpunk imagines a world where the negative side-effects of capitalism (exploitation, alienation, environmental damage etc) are mitigated. It's like the optimistic mirror image to cyberpunk.

it's also indicative of company culture if people with this type of disrespectful approach to interviews are allowed to continue without reproach. Remember that this person wouldn't just be joining a company where there's an asshole, they'd be joining a company that tolerates open assholishness.

Of course, this is predicated on the assumption that OP's perception of events was reflective of reality. Sometimes high-pressure situations can also make people over-sensitive (I know it can for me, at the very least).

I do try to remain more tone-neutral on the political threads, but it seems like no matter the degree to which you try to be well reasoned or diplomatic it just draws angry responses. But at the same time, the status quo of startup politics goes unchallenged under the rules (ie, neoliberal or libertarian perspectives) - so it's a matter of just let those perspectives go unchallenged even when there are level headed arguments to be made, or make the argument and risk people getting mad and then me getting banned for "flaming". I'm genuinely unsure what good answer there is, because this isn't an un-political forum (at least, not so much nowadays it would seem). Do we just ignore Thiel's fascistic tendencies in a thread surrounding one of his political projects?

I'm not expecting a reply because I know moderating this place must keep you busy, but it's a legitimate bind and the guidelines aren't very instructive. From an intent perspective, I'm not trying to sling mud, I think legitimate discussion of political perspectives is interesting and important.

We can't easily pack humans more densely into trucks

We basically can, with decent urban transit and rail services.

This is just bad polemics. I wasn't even talking about my own positions here, so I don't think it's important to try to explain them to you.

I framed fascists as the death camp ones and a variety of left wing causes from outright revolutionary communism to social democratic positions as the opposition, and said that libertarians often pick the former over the latter. I'm not sure what about my argument you are struggling to follow - it's a widely acknowledged historical tendency. Yknow, IBM's holocaust computers and all that.

I'm not going to dive into the whole theory side, but suffice to say as a libertarian socialist, no, I'm not a communist in the sense you're thinking. I also don't accuse "anyone who opposes communism" as being a genocidal fascist, so I'm not sure where you got that from. Libertarians have a tendency to backslide into fascism when confronted with left wing pushback, but libertarianism itself isn't a fascist ideology.

You're framing this as libertarians versus Stalinism or something like that, I was thinking more unionisation, social-democratic movements, that sort of thing. Fascists pop up in the face of some pretty milquetoast leftist agitation - see the parent commenter who decided to become a fascist because leftists were mean to them.

I do believe that voluntary contracts can be exploitative (because they can by definition), but that didn't come up in this thread at all so I'm not sure where you're bringing that in from.

I'm anti-capitalist too, but I think the capitalist argument is that wealth is the incentive to innovate in the marketplace - it doesn't matter whether it's actually useful, but that it motivates hard work. I think this argument is easily debunked by pointing to the comparative innovation of businesses versus state-funded research, or that wealth is created by the work of the employees moreso than the founders, but that's the argument.

true, but you were talking about investing in the financial sense before. Having good money sense should definitely be taught in school, but few will benefit from an education in investing.

I get it, you're a fascist. But no, it isn't.

edit: so people told you you were a fascist and, to own the libs, you decided to abandon what you believed in? must've been a pretty tenuous belief for you to switch from pro-liberty to pro-authoritarianism so easily, but so many libertarians do so that it's unsurprising. it's almost like capitalism is inherently authoritarian...

I just assume you fell down the alt-right pipeline and had conservative talking heads like Tucker Carlson convince you into becoming fascist.

most people don't have enough savings for investing advice to matter. An understanding of the job market would be pretty universally useful though.

Saying somebody is a fascist is not the same as saying they're a Nazi. Fascism has a few competing definitions, including Umberto Eco's 14 points and "palingenetic ultranationalism". Both of these definitions match Trump very well. The latter essentially means national rebirth by returning to the old ways, of which "make america great again" is a perfect example.

Also, the classic alt-right threat of "if you keep calling us fascists then I guess we'll become fascists" is... Basically just an admission of being a fascist, or at least proto-fascist? It's not the "gotcha" you think it is.

[edit] also, voting for Trump doesn't make you a fascist. Plenty of different interest groups voted for him and most of them, I would say, aren't fascistic.

Depends on what you think is normal I guess. I'm not going to repeat the whole comment I posted elsewhere in this thread, but his allegiance with Trump, his association with Yarvin, and his protégé Blake Masters are pretty informative of his politics.

What about this paragraph, then?

But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

His talk of women being a "problem" in politics is just one example of this broader theme in the article. He talks about establishing a new territory (where /who/ would rule exactly?), he complains about welfare recipients and champions economic depressions without a care for the lives they ruin.

This isn't even taking into account the evidence for what libertarian politics actually create (the Gilded Age is instructive) or the fact that capitalists who get too fed up of either liberal reform or socialist agitation tend to ally themselves with, or outright create, fascists, as Thiel is doing nowadays with Trump, Yarvin and Blake Masters.

It's clear to me that he's moving down the pipeline from libertarian to fascist, as many have done before him.