mrguyorama

Industrialized agriculture drove the cost of food from 50% of a normal person's income hundreds of years ago to like 5% now.

The problem is that after a few centuries of relatively good times, structures have been built up so that the owners of assets can claw back all that income again. They are using housing as the sink for all that wealth, because land can't be industrialized.

They want us to be peasants again.

And when "Just build more" doesn't work because private builders have no incentive to build a million dirt cheap starter homes for a mediocre profit and instead focus on building a few mcmansions?

We have a lot of building going on where I am. It's all for $500k homes. Nobody builds cheap one or two bedroom homes on tiny plots of land because the target consumer is more constrained and therefore far less profitable.

So much of the problems in the US right now is that capitalism optimizes for maximum profit, not any profit. It isn't sufficient in the US business culture to run a business that merely employs a bunch of people and produces things, because in the US, the "business" exists to be an asset class for the extremely wealthy.

So if the free market has no interest in serving people with less money than god, what do we do then?

I don't know why people believe there is a regulatory impediment to building a home outside of a city core. My dad is a contractor and he serves pretty much exclusively rich (gay) tech bros who fled california to increase our cost of living here in maine because nobody else can pay what they pay. His clients that don't fit that mold all inherited a good mid sized business or are well connected families. He does this instead of the plan he had a decade ago to refurbish or build about 10 new homes on a specific plot because it's literally twice as profitable at 1/100th the effort. Instead of working himself into an early grave, he can work 25 hours a week and live as upper middle class with his $100k pickup truck that is owned by his business.

I love longplays and other let's play style things, even barely adjacent categories like Game Grumps where it's half podcast.

But I can't stand streaming because the entire culture is infantile and lowest common denominator. It's the same problem I have with Short form video content and microblogging, that in order to optimally attract the large market that prefers that content, you have to do things that are extremely off putting to people with my interests.

So for example, anyone playing a game on twitch will be pushed, by chat and by the invisible hand of the attention market, to optimize for stupid things. Instead of a roguelike build that is good, you will make a roguelike build that is "memey" because that gets you a larger audience. There's an aura of forcing chaos and chat sycophancy. It encourages the kind of antisocial behavior that sucks, like people in twitch plays pokemon who spent the entire time trying to ruin it.

There's also the problem that half the platform seems to be just softcore porn. Or gambling now.

Many streamers also run a popular youtube channel, and you can recognize a massive difference between content made directly for long form youtube videos vs their streamed content. IMO the quality itself is drastically different.

Streamers who don't do those kinds of things remain niche.

What was ever wrong with just producing a second draft of your work?

In this context, something fascinating is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_grill_illusion

You can artificially induce a burning pain sensation using alternating strips of mildly warm and mildly cold.

Here William Osman of all people builds one of these and uses it on his friends

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw67_k6oDQY

Are you under some absurd notion that NATO has ballistic missile defense in Russia? Or can magically reach out and intercept a ballistic missile anywhere on the globe?

If there was the right Arleigh Burke right next to the submarine (which there wont be), and the captain was insanely paranoid enough to contravene standing rules of engagement to already be prepared for a surprise ally launching a weapon, there's about a 50% chance they could intercept each missile.

They have no incentive not to, because we have purposely built our contract law to encourage you to purposely put completely illegal and unenforceable terms in your contract, and it doesn't invalidate the contract, rather it only invalidates the things you already couldn't do!

In the modern war Russia claimed that their motivation for the war was to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO.

If Russia is so terrified of NATO invasion, why do they keep taking defenses off the boarder with Finland which just became a NATO member as a part of this war? Why does Russian state TV insist they should nuke Britain?

Why didn't Russia invade any of the NATO members already on their border?

Ukraine chose to fight, at the urging of the West

It is well known that the US admin had prepared to airlift Zelensky out of Ukraine and support a literal insurgency because they expected Russia to win easily, and were not actually prepared to support Ukraine in a regular war. This resulted in Zelensky's famous "I need ammo, not a ride" statement.

Why did Russia violate their treaty terms with Ukraine, which explicitly guaranteed their security? Why should you ever trust negotiations with a leader who has clearly demonstrated they do not respect what they sign?

Their early movements were largely performative or Hail Marys

No it wasn't. Attempting to take Hostomel was standard doctrine, and they fully expected to succeed, which is why their convoy was not in fighting shape, and carried parade uniforms.

Russia, at the very top, fully believed and intended to defeat Ukraine in 3 days. They were literally not prepared for a drawn out war.

Russia's explicit and communicated goals for this war were utterly failed by day four of the invasion. Arguably they lost within hours when they failed to take Hostemel airport.

By Russia's own accounting, they lost years ago. It does not matter what the outcome is, Russia has taken massive pain to sustain this war they never planned to sustain. They entirely used up their immense Soviet inheritance, which was something they held in high regard and used to insist made them strong. It's gone now. Used up.

The gas station of Europe can no longer produce sufficient gasoline for internal use. It will take at least months to get that capability back.

They have utterly failed to substitute sanctioned components, having switched back to imported components after their internal substitutions performed so poorly.

Their navy is being taken apart by a country that scuttled it's own navy on day one. Ukraine sunk the flagship of the black sea fleet with supposedly just a few missiles, something which the Moskva by all accounts on paper, should have handled just fine. Except all their craft are in such poor condition that many of the systems on the Moskva were likely just nonfunctional, including defense radars, communications, and anti-missile defenses.

Russia was totally reliant on an American private company for their battlefield communications, and is not coping with the shutdown of their access, which they should have been prepared for long ago. They were also dependent on Discord and Telegram.

Russia is being seriously wounded by a country much smaller than it, which also ostensibly had all the same problems as Russia, like poor soviet doctrine, corruption, a poor economy, and demographic issues.

Russia is failing to compete industrially with a former vassal.

Russia had to import soldiers and ammo from north korea.

Russia's weapons export industry is dead. Nobody wants their trash that has proven terrible on the battlefield. Nobody expects Russia to actually be able to build what they claim to sell anymore.

Russia is so run dry on arms that they couldn't help Venezuela against the US invasion. They sent a single anti air weapon system.

Half a million Russians are dead.

If the war ends today and Russia is allowed to keep all the land it is currently standing on, it still has lost. It's not even a Pyrrhic victory at this point.

And what do you think happens when a chargeback is issued that would lead to "Risk" for Stripe?

What fraud risk?

What do you mean "Stripe doesn't want to deal with the risk"?

What risk does Stripe take on in this situation?

I have subscribed to Spotify since before 2012. I enjoyed finding new music and the convenience of listening to anything, whenever. My consumption habits are not very amenable to buying CDs, because I have no idea ahead of time which songs will "Hit" for me. I generally don't like "Artists" or "Genres" and I enjoy listening to wildly different music from day to day.

However, I have watched Spotify destroy my playlists regularly, and now it seems to happen more than once a year! Songs that they still have a license for and still have on their platform will be removed from your playlist and marked "Unavailable" because some licensing agreement change meant the actual file and unique ID in their system has changed, and they make zero effort to resolve the damage this regularly does to my library and playlists.

It makes staying on the spotify platform, the spotify "ecosystem" as it were, utterly worthless. No playlist you make today can be expected to be usable in the future. Any effort you put in to organize and find stuff is for naught.

Meanwhile, my shitty folder full of mp3 rips from sketchy sources from highschool has stayed with me, and works perfectly.

It's getting hard to justify now. None of the money I pay even goes to the people I listen to, because they are primarily niche and indie groups. Spotify seems to be doing this on purpose, and a close friend of people high up in Spotify is running a business to generate AI music so that spotify can fill up their generated playlists with slop that they don't have to pay anyone for, and which dilutes the rev share for real humans.

In reality, almost nobody ever has built "Generational wealth" because it's not a normal thing that happens.

Most people are just trying to survive for tomorrow.

There's no discrepancy because "social engineering" isn't "Being good at social things"

Social engineering is just conman pressure tactics or hard sales tactics. It's so simple you can train your average stay at home mom or "hustle culture" bro to do it for Amway or similar in an afternoon.

It requires zero social skills. You aren't "Charming" the tech support, you are just badgering them and waiting until they do the normal human thing of trying to be helpful.

An LLM can't help you build a nuke. LLMs can't paper over hard engineering challenges like "You need to reinvent the centrifugal separator industry" and "rocket engineering is pretty difficult" and "you need really really good data to simulate things before you can actually build an implosion device" and less engineering challenges like "The CIA keeps murdering anyone who works on this"

There's never been an information access problem with nuclear weapons. The information was so public that most physicist realized everyone was building bombs from the sudden lack of published papers on how you could build bombs.

It's just silly how people seem to believe that if you just have a page worth of text saying something, you can suddenly do that thing.

Even a magical superintelligent AI could not do these things. It's going to tell you the exact same thing that has been known for nearly a century now:

"Hire 100 engineers and a couple physicists and 1000 very skilled machinists and laborers, and spend a billion dollars on plumbing, and then do that a second time if you need to deliver the device using a missile"

Meanwhile a dirty bomb is trivial.

These things don't happen because people who want to cause mass harm are generally poorly resourced.

"The smartest people" were not working on ads because building an advertising behemoth is not a smart thing to do.

When there's nothing good being invested in, "the smartest people" are simply underutilized. They do things that they think are good instead.

"The smartest people" have never sought maximum capital accumulation, and have not historically been driven by "highest wages" jobs.

The computer industry formed out of WW2 because a bunch of smart people ran into each other and did what they thought was really cool and had realized was suddenly possible. Von Neuman literally met one of the other guys and discussed computers as a theory at a train station and that meeting was influential on the future industry. They did not try to make billions of dollars. They had fairly average jobs that paid average. Often working for the government itself.

"The smartest people" did not work on targeting ads at people, and while some of them may have been involved with early transformer work, they certainly would be disillusioned with LLMs by now and would not be working at companies burning trillions on them.

The DVDs I got in my childhood 20 years ago still work just fine, the drives to read them are $20 or less, and ripping them to a format I can use more conveniently and backup however I want is a single button click.

Plastic discs are the optimum data distribution format. They degrade in the same time frame as a paper book, essentially lifetime, you retain legal rights like the first sale doctrine, you can easily format shift for safety and storage, and nobody can take any of that from you ever, and you can use that data however you like, as long as you aren't trying to sell bootlegs.

Books and plastic discs are infinitely better than the digital realm. The consumer rights are so much stronger and better.

This is delusional. Normal people have been calling social media addictive since before facebook existed.

The real problem Section 230 was built to solve was the prevent email companies and places like Flickr being burned down by the feds for all the child porn in inevitably ends up holding.

Section 230 is not what allows Facebook to push lies.

Eliminating section 230 will fix the problem though, by banning all user generated content from the internet forever. No more SaaS in general.

You make this comment as if this exact argument didn't happen 6 times in the past decade when talking about Huel and Soylent

Excess capacity (literally free power) is only a problem because we mandate that electricity generation can only be done as a business that has to earn profit margins.

Because of economics, this means it makes sense as a business to sell power that requires a purchased input commodity, and doesn't make as much sense as a business to build enough solar to sell power during darker months. This is absurd, backwards, and is hampering our ability to deploy clean and affordable power.

National Governments should be massively overbuilding solar and just handing out the resulting power. It's really difficult to mismanage a solar farm.

Maybe instead of a deregulated generation market, we should focus on a barely regulated power storage market.

The entire premise of the NCAA for the longest time was "They aren't employees, they are getting a good education for free and playing sports in their off hours!"

This has long been a farce though. They would be put in made up classes with no actual work and given fake grades.

Go to a low crime neighborhood. Cops are super friendly and basically spend their day happily helping old ladies cross the street or getting cats down from trees.

If you think cops like cracking heads

They adore getting to crack heads. That's the entire reason they became cops. They love being able to use their power, rightfully or not, they don't really care.

Cops themselves say this!

California enacted a law in 2014 that turned all theft under $950 into a misdemeanor instead of a felony (reverted last year)

So all states with $1000 Felony cutoffs or higher should have this issue, right?

So why don't they?

You know the National Retail Federation had to stop posting their annual shrink numbers after they demonstrated that shoplifting was not meaningfully higher than previous years.

Actually, the first thing we tried generally WAS ethanol. The company that made TEL discarded it as a fuel additive because they couldn't patent and control it.

We poisoned the world with lead because it was more profitable for a single company.

That information used to come with the water pump

In Farm Simulator 2025, progress for me was felling and processing every single tree on the map. They were "in the way"

I have problems.

There's an entire microcosm on youtube of former games journalists, generating a variety of content from good to slop. Most of them are from when "Games journalist" was still a classically trained journalist, and had real credentials and knowledge of how to critique the art form. Which is why they were generally pushed out, to be replaced with know nothings who are just there to parrot a script.

Both Itch.io and GOG are alternative platforms, as is just doing your own thing

Many games I own started their life distributed exclusively through a platform other than steam.

Arguably, you don't even want to approach steam distribution until you've already collected your hype. Steam no longer can surface gems, because it's just far too flooded, so you should seek alternative channels in general.