cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
3d ago
This debate shakes out the same way every time. Amadan was willing to write the objections, so I'll not repeat them all.
I'll add that I see being slow on responding to news as a feature rather than a bug of the policy.
This is not a news website it's a discussion website, and it's a place for thinking. I'd prefer allowing people to digest the news elsewhere and then post here if they want to actually discuss a particular thing.
The poster earned a ban because I have explicitly told them in the past to not do this. I'm not in favor of unlimited "warnings" that have no teeth.
cjet79
3d ago
You know not to do this, I've warned you before about low effort top level posts. 1 day ban while the discussion shakes out.
cjet79
3d ago
There is some silliness here. The existence of a zero sum game at the top of a field doesn't mean everyone has to be involved.
Only one person can have the absolute best house. It's a zero sum game. And there can be an arms race / wealth race to own that house. But there is no limit on how many people can have an excellent house.
Zero sum competition seems to be the game in top end places like New York or San Francisco. But you can travel to any other metropolitan area, find a software or finance job at one of the many companies based in that city and be at the top end of middle class wealth in that city.
Competition for Ivy League schools can drive kids crazy, but a good state school is not hard to access.
I live in a good house, in a good neighborhood, in a good area, with good schools, and our family income is through good well paying jobs. None of these things in my life are the best. There are better houses / neighborhoods / schools / jobs / etc. But I'm happy at the current trade-off point.
I am continually confused by people that seem willing to burn all of their wealth and happiness to compete for the best in something. I often find that quality growth in a product or service is linear. And price growth is linear, except for the top end of the market where things go exponential.
cjet79
4d ago
Mafia is gonna Mafia. States are gonna State.
I think there was recently an assassination of an Indian political separatist on Canadian soil. Putin assassinated a journalist in the UK. The saudis cut up a journalist. The US just blew up a boat in international waters that was merely suspected of being a drug running boat.
These things don't surprise me too much. They are ugly incidents. But I get the sense that they are merely another item on the international negotiating table. Its possible that they happen in America too, but perhaps one of America's conditions for such things happening is that no one is allowed to know about it. The power dynamic between the two countries probably matters a lot in all cases.
I do admire the people that loudly protest these things and raise the cost of doing them for all countries. In that sense I agree with your post in general. You just also asked for personal feelings of the readers, and that is why I think you see a lot of shrugs and gestures at 'realpolitik'. Its hard to pay attention for too long and stay angry about these things constantly.
cjet79
5d ago
It wasn't enough effort, since you removed it so fast I removed the mod note as well.
cjet79
6d ago
Ownership is a form of social technology. An old one for sure.
But I guess that means I could consider communist nations attempts at controlling technology levels at a national level. They failed due to outside competition and a breakdown in the fact that the social technology they tried to get rid of was a load bearing part of modern society.
cjet79
7d ago
Slowing is one thing stopping is something different.
After all, if we have achieved at some a perfect or 'good enough' mix of physical and social technology, than getting further away from that point is bad. Driving fast or slow off a cliff doesn't make too much difference.
cjet79
7d ago
I'm surprised there haven't been more attempts to freeze a society as a given technological level. The Amish have done it. I think some Buddhist groups in Asia do it. Vows of poverty by monks in Catholicism sort of have a similar effect.
If any people in a particular time period feel like they are at an optimal balance of culture and technology, they could run a tech freeze. As long as they can shelter in a larger culture that will prevent invasions.
The fact that it happens so rarely leads me to believe that everyone has some nostalgia glasses on and believe they just missed the golden ages that were their childhood. Rarely is anyone satisfied with the current culture enough to attempt to lock it in place and preserve it. Or they are some combination of optimistic about the future and powerless in the present.
cjet79
7d ago
This is also a bad comment and would have earned you a ban had I seen it first.
cjet79
7d ago
This is mostly an attack on various people. Such things aren't explicitly banned, but they are heavily treading into waging the culture war. I was going to make this just a warning. But looking through your history its basically the only thing we warn/temp ban you about.
5 day ban. It will escalate quickly if see this again, we shouldn't have to ask you a half dozen times to follow a specific rule.
cjet79
9d ago
Spam posters are guaranteed one set of eyeballs on this site. At least that Russian guy asking about who owns the website seems to have given up. Or I just haven't been the first to spot him in a while.
cjet79
12d ago
This is more of a sunday question thread type of post, and not a top level culture war thread comment.
cjet79
12d ago
As I said things are a spectrum, you said continuum. I don't think I'm asking for an impossible standard. The post office will send any letter between two private addresses, no matter what words you put in there. They'll send it no matter who you are or the recipient is or who they voted for. As far as I know they've maintained this level of non-politics since they were created. Even when they were a much more essential service.
cjet79
12d ago
The calculus for B has just changed, so I guess we will see if that leads to more adoption of crypto.
cjet79
12d ago
There is a spectrum of private company all the way up to government run "business" (like the post office). Payment processors are much closer to the government run business side of that spectrum. The closer any business is to being government run the more of a problem I have with it's operations being decided via politics.
It's not because I just dislike government. It's because the private market has corrective mechanisms that discourage politicized decision making. The more free market type businesses have the opposite problem, where they can be too heavily incentivised by the profit motive and not consider political things like "maybe this is really evil".
cjet79
12d ago
I don't have any special insight into the payment processors internal discussions of these policies. I suspect they are happy to go along with these requests, and just want someone else to be blamed or sued for the decision.
As I said the most important thing is the very incestuous relationship between government and private industry, and the lack of competition that this relationship causes.
In my head the optimal response to "these three payment processors don't accept porn games" should be something like "use one of the other dozen payments processors". Right now those other dozen mostly don't exist. That was supposed to be the dream of crypto.
cjet79
12d ago
I was not aware that any payment processors even existed that would willingly get into this industry. Not even limiting it to the ones that valve is willing to work with. But I've never tried to run a smut based business, so I'm ignorant of the options available.
cjet79
12d ago
Good correction. I had a surface level recollection of the details, and the article I read was probably a left leaning author so putting the blame on religious people was probably better in their mind than putting the blame on feminists.
I mostly don't want to go after any of the groups that might have moral objections. For both practical reasons and philosophical reasons. I'd rather just remove the tools of censorship so that no one can use them.
cjet79
12d ago
I think the payment processors are somewhat laundering their policy change through these moral groups. That is why I listed the lack of competition as the biggest problem.
cjet79
13d ago
There has been a recent crackdown on naughty games on steam and itch.io. The game platforms say the crackdown has come from payment processors. Payment processors have said they don't want their business associated with unsavory practices, and that adult products have higher charge back rates. Some people have blamed activist religious groups on aggressively lobbying the payment processors for this crackdown.
I mostly feel a sense of annoyance. My libertarian leanings have me feeling certain ways about all this.
- The biggest problem is that payment processors are usually an unholy alliance of governments, banks, and financial groups. This makes them allergic to competition and new entrants to the market. The Internet has reshaped society over the last three decades and I'd say only 1.5 payment processors came out of it. PayPal, and the crypto market. The term "coup complete" got thrown around a lot in the Biden presidency to describe what was necessary to build a competing Internet ecosystem.
- I'm worried this might signal the revival of the religious culture wars that happened in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000's. It's frustrating to me but a lot of people seem to gravitate towards religion of some kind. I think woke culture has plenty of religious elements. The atheist movement in the 2000s seemed genuinely anti-religious. But it seems the longer term strategy is just have a different religion.
- Neutrality as a default. This is the end goal. Once you accept that a thing is subject to politics it becomes entirely subject to politics. We are cancelling thots and porn this year. 4 years ago it was lab leak conspiracies. I certainly think some things are more important to not be censored, but the machinery of censorship seems to work regardless of the subject being censored. Once it is built it will be used.
cjet79
14d ago
The account of the introverted feeler here seems to be approaching an almost mythological level of detachment from social norms and practical concerns, an ideal standard that no mortal could ever reach. Like, barring mitigating circumstances, how can the goal of social interaction not be to make the other person feel good, or at least avoid causing offense? Hello?? But, if the accounts that I've been reading are correct, this is essentially how a great number of people go about experiencing life on a daily basis (or at least this is how they subjectively experience life, regardless of how much they must actually modulate their behavior due to social norms out of rational self-interest).
This is indeed how I feel and act, and it is neat to read a description of it that actually makes it sound cool.
Growing up I felt like everyone else got to read a secret manual about how to act in social situations, and I was stuck trying to figure out the manual through trial and error. I'm not autistic so I'm not oblivious to the veiled insults, or the looks of hurt on people's faces when I broke a social rule. And I'm not a psychopath, so I'd still feel bad sometimes when I caused those moments of hurt.
There is a great deal of rational self-interest in being able to moderate your behavior to match social norms. Its how you make friends, acquire romantic partners, maintain any job with a boss or customers you must speak with, etc. Its required, not an optional add on. We at at least need to know the rules before we can know how to break them. But the rules are not very simple, they usually take an entire childhood to learn, and I've known plenty of adults that still don't seem to understand all of the rules. I had always been jealous of the people that seem to have a psychic ability to read and measure the flow of a conversation with someone in such a way that they are just always a joy to be around. Then I discovered a magic elixir that could temporarily grant me their powers. People call it alcohol.
Grass is always greener on the other side I guess.
cjet79
17d ago
The Harry Potter game was mechanically awesome. The main story was good too.
Harry Potter has always been very progressive in its outlook. JK Rowling had the TERF fight. But the video game distanced itself from that with a Trans character. I think they did the trans character badly, but it's mostly only a side quest.
cjet79
20d ago
I'm not willing to say it's an all around bad practice with gift giving.
As corvos points out quite a few cultures adopt a more transactional nature for gifts. I feel that even the standard American culture has some aspects of gift giving that feel more transactional in nature. Wedding gifts are often basically a ticket price for attending the wedding. I currently have young kids everyone buys cheap crap for each other's kids, and then gives out gift baggies of cheap crap for the party. The kids barely know each other well enough to buy meaningful gifts. They certainly don't have some idealized understanding of gift giving. Tipping at restaurants which is supposed to be a gift is often just an assumed revenue stream for servers.
I wouldn't say I purged it so much as never had it in the first place. Or at least haven't had it much as an adult. I have some vague recollections of jealousy from elementary school. Pretty sure puberty switched my priorities.
I thought most adults were similar. I guess that was typical mind fallacy.
There are a bunch of philosophies/religions that try to curb that jealousy. Marxism being a major exception that encourages everyone to embrace that jealousy, and tells them that it is fully correct.
There are large financial returns on embracing a search for the good, rather than simply trying to do better than a neighbor or friend. There are also social gains to be made in cutting off status competitions with friends.
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