shadowmore

I could see someone argue that, but would a monarch, for example, really hyperfocus nearly as much on optimizing crops to the point of driving the farmers to suicide, just so he could point to a line going up on a chart in a meeting with investors?

No, it's more likely to be a vague, emotional impulse for "more", without the bureaucratic apparatus to enforce it in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with human life.

Capitalism demands constant growth in ways and for reasons that are different from any other hierarchy.

I find this individualistic view of the problem fascinating.

It treats companies as individuals and thinks they're all different, which is bolstered by the BS terminology about "corporate culture" that the companies themselves push.

But to anyone who sees the big picture, it's obvious that this is capitalism. Under capitalism, you are a cog in a machine. Always have been, always will be.

This isn't some particular company treating its employees like trash. It's the entire system of commodifying all aspects of life in order for the line in the chart to keep going up indefinitely.

But individualism has people so utterly blind to this that they treat companies as people, which is dystopian to the max.

This back-and-forth will never end until there's government regulation that tells the creators of digital communication platforms, in no uncertain terms, "You do not get to control the content on the platform you have built, because the platform exists to serve the people of this country, and this country has law enforcement agencies whose job it is to police any illegal communication."

As long as corporations have the right to control what people say just because it's on their servers, and as long as they don't feel threatened by the state, this problem will persist.

Is there some reason no digital platform producing company ever washes its hands of all moderation and leaves control of illegal activity to the people actually responsible for it (the FBI, NSA, local law enforcement, etc.)?

Are companies actually liable somehow if they don't take proactive steps to mitigate illegal content, which nowadays also leads into heavy-handed censorship because of what they interpret as being borderline illegal (like "hateful speech")?

In other words, is this a purely risk assessment related action, or an ideological one as someone like Alex Jones would shout into a mic?

Imagine living in 2021 and still thinking this propaganda talking point from 1949 still holds any weight with anyone.

We know competition doesn't work. Competitors get bought out. We know the stock market doesn't work. Money raised gets used to automate away jobs, not expand and increase the number of human beings actually needed by the company. We know pricing doesn't get corrected, at all, because everyone who runs businesses or owns property is so rich they are able to self-sustain and ignore any market signals urging them to adjust prices.

None of the free market capitalist tenets actually work the way they're described, and there's a growing proportion of the population realizing this finally. It's just unfortunate they're being steered towards communism because the communists are currently the loudest opponents of this absurd system built on lies.

This just reminds me of how we ship meat from the US to China for processing and then back, then slap "US Raised" on it to avoid suspicion.

Surprising it's taken them this long. It's basically the world's news aggregator at this point.

Unlike Instagram or TikTok or any entertainment-focused social media platform, Twitter feels necessary to its users, whether to stay informed or to stay angry or to feel connected to other people.

That flippant posturing is the result of reading history books from the perspective of everyone who lived over the past several thousand years being backwards and evil.

It blinds people to the realities of power dynamics that still exist today and have not been at all lessened or subdued by progressivism one bit.

I can confirm this anecdotally.

I've always had near zero empathy for anyone who isn't a close friend or family member, and I have very high pain tolerance, to the point of outright ignoring minor wounds on a regular basis and then finding them later (sounds edgy, actually majorly annoying finding unexpected blood stains on clothing or furniture, or realizing I have an eyesore of a bruise somewhere).

It's usually prescribed specifically for fever, not just for any pain.

Could this be why so many people (myself included) report feeling a sense of wanting to live a more proactive life when sick with a fever?

You'd think it would just be because you're feeling a sense of contrast from your usual more energized state and want to avoid wasting energy on unproductive things once you get it back, but could it actually be because the Acetominophen reduces our overall sense of anxiety?

The article talks about how there have been studies that show it dampens all emotions, but to feel more sure about long-term efforts, you don't strictly need to be emotionally charged or inspired, you just need to be less anxious about the potential failure of such efforts.

Meanwhile, many multiplayer games have neither skill-based matchmaking, nor a ban on premade groups playing against solo queue players.

I just can't grasp how any developer can seriously think a game can be enjoyable when you're on a team of arbitrary players but being matched against a premade team of players all of whom have 2,000+ hours logged in that game and are coordinating flawlessly.

Bit of a meta question: is linking to Substack posts in this way equally as viable as linking to a standalone blog?

As in, the advantages of Substack are clear, but are there any distinct disadvantages to using it as both a blog (exposure, discoverability) and a newsletter (reader retention) at the same time?

Anything about it that limits it in ways in which a standalone blog wouldn't be limited, e.g. analytics?

But our leaders aren't incentivized to do it, because our leaders are incentivized only by the very corporations in question.

As in, the corporations, through lobbying, quite literally write the legislation, not the people we actually elect to office.

So uprooting corporate tax info transparency rules is something that will never come to pass until other existing systems are demolished, but how do you get the legislators to legislate against their own self-interest?

And why are we now comfortable with not having kids? Because of atomism.

The "golden age" argument is flawed. No one seriously argues that literally everything was better in the past. Rather, the criticism is that it's absurd to have gotten rid of something positive we already had, only to replace it with something worse and gain no net benefit as a result.

It's all a matter of interconnected systems, including systems like social shaming. If it's unacceptable socially to not have a family, you'll have one. If it's unacceptable for women to work and compete with men for wealth and power, men will make enough to support their entire families, allowing at least one parent to always be there to raise children properly, instead of outsourcing that to strangers -- same for elderly care.

At the end of the day, atomism harms everyone and everything.

There is no name-calling or personal attacking in that comment. The one qualifier that could possibly be interpreted as "an attack" is referring to an inanimate subject (data crunching) not to any given participant in the conversation. Learn to read.

No one will ever be convinced by such autistic data crunching.

Human intuition is responsible for things like criminalizing drugs.

People feel uncomfortable around drug-addled lechers, so they want them imprisoned.

That's all the justification needed.

And this is the flawed "it happens more to the poor, so it should be abolished" take.

Something being done disproportionately doesn't mean it's wrong. It's a way of diverting away from the core point by appealing to victimhood.

Though at the end of the day this all comes down to a fundamental disagreement between people who embrace human intuition and pattern recognition versus those who think those things are somehow uncivilized or evil -- a delusion orangutans, I'm certain, don't share.

This is the epitome of the "How does the collective well-being of society affect you in any way? Mind your own business!" take.

Troubled people use drugs, including cannabis. Troubled people are prone to crime. Crime spreads and creates unsustainable living conditions for everyone. And that's not mentioning the destructive effect on culture and social interaction in general.

"Live and let live" wasn't a viable outlook on life for thousands of years, and it won't be going forward. Libertarian fantasies were a brief anomaly in history.

I keep seeing data points like this, but does supplementing vitamin D work? Does it make sense to read things like this and conclude that taking a vitamin D supplement pill daily is a good idea?

This seems somehow relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNTp4kELkSY

Sounds like the way dreams are usually structured. Seemingly coherent overarching structure with completely arbitrary zig-zags at the micro level.

I considered this, but opted for a physical visual timer where the amount of time you set it to is covered by a red overlay on the clock face, which recedes until it reaches zero.

That way you get not only the benefit of the alarm at the end, but also a visually distinct display of how much time is left if you ever look over at the timer while it's counting down.

May be more useful to me than most because of ADHD and the time blindness that comes with it, but either way, it's been a great help and a way to avoid paying attention to my phone while working.

But do we have laws requiring user data be protected? Aside from the new California law, we don't have anything like GDPR nationwide, do we?

Because "muh free market".

Even in 2020, both conservatives and liberals (the non-radicals on both sides) still cling to the idea of lack of regulation being a good thing, despite decades of evidence to the contrary.

The liberals are softening on this because they don't counter-signal the radicals on their side, while the conservatives actively demonize the radicals on theirs.

As a result, only one radical fraction of one half of the political duopoly actually has both the desire and energy to enact this kind of legislation, and that isn't enough.

You know it's 2020 when a judiciary committee address begins with a billionaire attempting to cloak himself in a victim narrative.

I can't wait for the world to go back to normal, so it once again becomes shameful to show any weakness and immorality, so we can deal with people's actions rather than their position on the victimhood totem pole.

Tom Holland is great. Really applies a stylistic flare to historic records, with some liberties taken in pursuit of creative narrative, but still keeping grounded and acknowledging when something is mostly deduction due to insufficiently preserved materials.

This is a point Peter Thiel brings up regularly on a larger scale, i.e. the circular, narrow nature of modern innovation, where instead of improving the physical world around us, we're way too heavily invested in this self-perpetuating "world of bits" that increasingly reduces total innovation in the world.

Incidentally, a great talk that includes that point here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO_00POR-Po

I can't tell satire from reality anymore.

On a tangential topic, do respectable online certifications for product management exist?

Plenty of Udemy courses and the like, but nothing I've found with certification.

Is certification generally reserved for specific technical skills like networking, security, cloud infrastructure, etc.?

If it offsets the vast amounts of delusional people who have absolutely no concept of the real world and all its dangers, then I'm all for it.

People who've been to prison are much more likely to be grounded in visceral reality and weigh things properly compared to much of our increasingly sheltered society, especially along the coasts.