cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
2hr ago
Resurrecting an old discussion?
I think I said all that is necessary at the time.
cjet79
11hr ago
The "it's a private company, they can do whatever they want" crowd can now enjoy the world they created.
This is me, unironically. And yes I am enjoying the world. Though I don't take credit for creating it.
The secrets to enjoyment:
- Longer time horizons. The transitions of various social media companies has often sucked, or been annoying. But I do find myself happy now almost a decade or more after some of those slow transitions began.
- Social media is a fundamentally toxic relationship. You give them your blood sweat and tears poured endlessly into content. They give you eyeballs and people to see it. These things are not equivalent, and their main lever for getting people to make more content for them, is just to feed them more attention. I've found that in my personal life toxic and unbalanced relationships can be fun and exciting for a little bit, but they all crash and burn.
- The only product you are owed is the one you pay for. I don't trust free products.
- Social media is a cheap and second rate alternative to real life connections. We've now all had a chance to run the experiment ourselves during Covid.
Everyone went on a weird social media bender for a few years, but I think a lot of people are waking up from the haze. The companies got to do what they wanted with their product, and they gave us the drugs so good and hard that now a bunch of us get sick at just seeing the drugs again. This is personally how I prefer to deal with additctions. I like to burn them out of my system hard and fast.
cjet79
1d ago
Can't you empty it by just gassing it out? Would that make it much easier to get rid of?
cjet79
3d ago
I understand. One aspect of my problem is how do I collect information of different formats from different places into information that actually allows me to improve my life and the life of others.
I'd suggest the old fashioned way, just writing down your summary and sharing that summary. If a bunch of people are doing bad workouts, share a better workout routine among them. Cite it with sources from the people that know workouts.
A suggestion for mixing up your information diet:
Real life is not siloed in the same way as the Internet, so you can mix up your information diet by sampling from your locality. It is of course still siloed in its own ways. I live in a neighborhood with a bunch of families, all of my friends here are parents. But I know there is a variety of political views, news sources, and job experience among them. The online silos of my neighbors look very different from one another.
cjet79
3d ago
The only time I say "always" is in quoting a fake person that is doing a bad takedown on the concept of erosion with a bad hypothetical example.
I even mentioned fudging of prices. Which I would have thought helped clarify that prices are not some exact mathematical thing.
I'll say what I said again: Prices reflect reality.
Saying that they don't perfectly reflect reality is not a disproof of what I said. Just like finding one mountain that is coincidentally less eroded does not mean erosion is not true. Utility is part of reality and thus prices will tend to capture information about utility and reflect that information.
Marx's work doesn't say there is a slight mismatch sometimes between market prices and utility. It says there is almost always a mismatch, because employers exploit employees for their excess labor to make profits. That is the fundamental economic misconception.
If a price is wrong, then there is often a method to profit off of that incorrectness. If some segment of workers is underpaid then their is a profit opportunity to open a competing business and pay them more than they get now and less than the full value of their wage. The greater the discrepancy, the greater the opportunity.
cjet79
3d ago
I think they also do algorithms based on time spent watching a thing.
But I feel like your approach is backwards anyways. You should be liking the interesting and enlightening content. Some people will specialize in it. It's better to follow them.
cjet79
3d ago
I love how flexible the game is. It does feel like they designed things with certain play styles and strategies in mind. But you can usually just overwhelm the "optimal" path with enough resources.
We did not optimize on Nauvis. I went after it with three players initially which is almost overkill for the early gameplay. Someone working on core factory, someone working on resource gathering and extraction, and then someone killing bugs.
I feel like if you are naming build strategies and talking about complex circuit network setups then you are at the top of the play curve.
cjet79
3d ago
Vulcanus is a great first planet. It is most similar to Nauvis gameplay, but even lower maintenance. You can basically get infinite copper, iron, and sulfuric acid within the drop zone.
Meta is go big and build massive factories. Which is good cuz the enemies on the planet require an extensive expenditure of resources.
There is also some minor opportunity for space mining. Little asteroids will come at you above Nauvis. Early game that just means iron, carbon, and ice. But a free trickle of iron after an initial investment isn't bad.
cjet79
3d ago
I see it as a sort of tragedy of the commons. You can have a better view and a better time at a baseball stadium by sitting down, but this is conditional on everyone else sitting down as well.
The politicization of economic value is super super tempting. I think it is inevitable to some degree and I'm fine with it happening. I think it would be best if it happens within Dunbar number limited groups of people of about 150. Let a small company or group of people determine among themselves how to politically split up economic value. But make them compete in a more global system where value is determined by the erldritch invisible hand.
There is a sweet spot of not being subject to the eldritch forces, but also it's a benevolent eldritch force that will ruthlessly optimize for the things we are willing to trade for. So I guess I agree with your assessment, I just dislike the people that band together to deny reality, aka Marxists.
cjet79
3d ago
Quality doesn't shine until Fulgora. I would almost advise avoiding it altogether on Nauvis.
Fulgora has you developing lots of sorting builds and figuring out how to avoid the jam ups that result. It's a good crash course in how to make safer quality builds, that don't gunk up your factories.
There are also only three use cases where I've found quality to be absolutely worth it: spaceships, personal items, and resource extraction devices (pump jacks and miners). Almost everything else is solvable more easily through the traditional factorio solution: make your factory bigger. The resource extraction devices preserve more resources at higher quality levels. Allowing you to tap mines and oil fields for longer. So they are sort of a convenience, but still ultimately ignorable with just "expand the factory more".
I'd recommend just trying to go to space, and maybe even Vulcanus before you feel fully ready. Just get Nauvis to a defensible position, or shut most of it down to minimize pollution while you are gone.
cjet79
4d ago
There is an economic concept called "perfect competition" I want to be clear that this economic concept is not required for efficient prices.
And I am talking about efficient prices, not "perfect prices". Prices are a process and a search function for an optimal set of tradeoffs. One of the tradeoffs is information. To perfectly know all the inputs of a product, and to perfectly know the desire for that product would be a very costly search process. There is going to be some fudging of prices and that fudging should be expected given that information itself is not free or costless.
[Plumbers]
You've created a very long example that kind of assumes away many of the standard market fixes. I do generally like to use theoretical examples for most economic concepts, but I find that they tend to lead people astray when it comes to the nature of prices.
To me your example sounds a bit like this:
"Geologists say that older mountain ranges tend to be shorter and rounder than newer mountain ranges, because wind and erosion will gradually wear mountains down. But that's not always true, imagine there are two mountains. One mountain is 20k feet and in an old mountain ranges. And the other mountain is 10k feet in a newer mountain range. They are both subject to similar levels of erosion, and neither is a volcano. So older mountains can be taller."
You've assumed your position to be true in your example.
And yes the government is fully capable of distorting prices, or assisting companies in distorting prices. I usually bring this up as a reason why government should not have this power, or should at least have many restrictions on the use of this power. But this is also not evidence that prices don't reflect the real world, instead it is more evidence. After all if a government makes it hard to be in the plumber business we should expect the price paid for plumbing services to go up, because the supply of plumbers has been restricted. It would be strange if the government could intervene and not change prices.
cjet79
4d ago
So everyone wishes they were a monopolist with respect to their own jobs. No surprise, but we need to treat these requests as the selfish self interested lobbying that they are, rather than some generous societal oriented philosophy.
cjet79
4d ago
The idea that utility value and market value are different is a fundamental economic misconception.
Market prices reflect real resource shortages and tradeoffs. "Important" jobs are often paid low because many people can do it.
cjet79
4d ago
No worries someone else from themotte has been super available, they also like trains a bunch. So you'll be happy to know we aren't neglecting the trains like I would.
cjet79
6d ago
Still playing factorio space age. I think we've had a thread about it every Friday since its release. It deserves it though, solidly awesome game.
We finally made it to Aquilo. Kept feeling like every other planet still had minor things we needed to fix. Aquilo feels like the seablock mod a bit. You need to build your own land.
The high power costs of drones, and the requirement to use heating pipes adds some new challenges. Builds tend to look pretty different.
I'm also trying to build a massive space platform for some forms of production. Its almost 4500 tons so far. I expanded it from a ~1000 ton ship that was producing its own space platform. I think I want to see how ridiculous the space platforms can get.
Quality has also been a fun mechanic. Feels like burning massive amounts of resources for slightly better stuff. But factorio is all about using up massive amounts of resources. And usually the resource sink is science, but sometimes science isn't enough.
cjet79
7d ago
I do wonder if the DOGE organization is just a way to offer a cudgel to the private sector that they can wield against the bureaucracy.
Right now it is mostly one way power. A regulator can come in and say "hey we don't like this" and a private company is faced with a costly and lengthy legal battle to overturn that.
Now musk can say "oh you don't like that thing, maybe you are being inefficient and need a reduced headcount".
If your goal is to reduce overall regulation it will mostly fail. If the goal is to reduce regulation for the people that have connections to DOGE then it will probably succeed.
Main problem is this is bureaucratic end-state problems. When the main reward you can hand out to political allies is an exemption from the worst regulations and taxes that everyone else must face.
cjet79
9d ago
I think there was a case of this in 2020, guy got a delivery truck and drove it into a crowd at a parade. There was also the Unite the right rally in Charlottesville where a guy drove his car into a crowd. So it does happen sometimes.
Maybe people who go on these killing rampages often want to make it a murder suicide event. Guns make the suicide part easier at the end, whereas the car murderers tend to get caught.
Mass car murder also seems like a crime of opportunity, you need the right circumstances to actually pull it off. Most sidewalks are full of hard things that will wreck a car, including up to concrete barriers that are specifically designed to stop a car. Larger vehicles are necessary. And crowds of people in a flat non barrier area that are not so dense that the vehicle will be immediately stopped, and not so sparse that they can easily see what is happening and move out of the way.
It's a messed up person in the first place that wants to commit mass murder. But I think they usually want more choice in their targets, they want to be dead afterwards, and while cars and trucks are ubiquitous they are actually more expensive than guns and ammo. There are ways to get large vehicles, like theft or working a job site with them. But those are still a little harder to pull off than just buying guns.
I think there is a steady supply of crazy and crazy mixed with the wrong meds that if we magically banned all guns in the US you'd probably see more car based killing rampages. But guns have a specific purpose and they are good at that purpose, so I think they will remain in use.
cjet79
13d ago
This is the full interview: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ry1IjOft95c
What was great about it is that Trump is a New Yorker, and this is a podcast of New Yorkers. I of course knew intellectually that Trump was from New York. But it didn't sink in.
New Yorkers have an aggressive and bombastic style of talking and interacting that often involves lots of interruptions and talking over one another, active ribbing each other, and grandiose exaggerations (that everyone in the conversation knows are exaggerations). Trump is often given too much of a chance to talk. It leads to him ranting and going on weird tangents. This happened quite a bit early on in the Joe Rogan interview he did, and I could not watch more than ten minutes of it. Trump gets accused of being a bully for the ribbing he constantly does. And finally Trump is known as a liar for his constant grandiose claims.
In the flagrant interview Trump is interrupted, he is talked over, and there is ribbing going on constantly, and Trump loves it and thrives in it. Because he is a New Yorker and that is how they talk and interact. He even extends the interview for an extra 30 minutes or so. His ranting is far lessened. His weird tangents are there, but don't dominate the conversation. He is quick on his feet with jokes. There are very few awkward moments.
To be clear, I am not a New Yorker. And their style of interaction can grate on me. I can take it in small drunk doses in person, and can barely stand it at all when sober. For podcast listening it can be real fun, but is often a bit overwhelming. I don't regularly listen to flagrant, but they can have some absolutely laugh out loud banger episodes when I'm in the mood for it.
I just finally feel like I understand Trump, and that is a huge relief. I don't feel like I've ever really understood him in the past, and I don't feel like I've ever understood any other president or presidential candidate in my lifetime (except for Ron Paul).
cjet79
13d ago
I just don't think that these sit-down interviews are that important when it comes to a presidential general election campaign.
They switched my view. Trump's flagrant interview literally changed my whole opinion of him, and I voted for him and it was my first vote for a republican candidate ever.
Joe Rogan has 18 million subscribers and he did an episode with 3 million views right before the election with Elon musk where he endorsed Trump.
Rogan has higher viewership then all of the mainstream media combined. I think the longform interviews were more watched than the debates.
To think this doesn't move the needle is a little crazy to me. Sure they didn't do crap back in the 1990s but we live in a different world. And Trump moved with the world rather than clinging to old strategies.
cjet79
14d ago
Real poetic and stuff, but too "battles of the sexes" heavy for me to really resonate.
Men and women are different, but they are still ultimately the same species. The variations among our minds can dwarf the average variations of the sexes. The tallest woman is much taller than the average man. The most caring and consensus driven man is much more so than the average woman.
Whichever woman you are talking about might just be a psychopath. They aren't all that rare. I knew at least one maybe two hot women psychopaths in college. Not a moral bone in their body, though a little less dangerous than the three male psychopaths I've known that have to find balance while dealing with a male sex drive.
Obviously I only know what you have presented, but I can imagine a scenario where it is still possible to resurrect the relationship. In this scenario she preemptively broke up with you, because she thought you would do it instead of a long distance relationship. Or that you'd cheat on her in the long distance relationship. If she has a past personal experience with it, or close friends it has happened to this is almost certainly on her mind. If you didn't fight her much in the moment on the no-LDR thing, you probably came across as agreeing.
If you think this is the case, then this might be the path to fixing things. You'd need to have a sit down talk with her, and you'd have to put yourself out there:
You will come across as desperate, and that is fine. It is ok to be desperate around a woman who knows and loves you, especially if that desperation is for her. You need to create the reassurance in her mind that you won't hurt her, and that the only one doing the hurting is her to you and herself.
If she does take you back, know that the relationship will start to feel different. This is not a bad thing. You were in a honeymoon phase of love. Its a time mother nature gives people to make sure they are fucking a bunch and having a kid to tie them together. But the next phase to make it work together is partnership. You need to be a team together. People do this by moving in together, getting a pet together, working on a project together. My wife and I sort of started at this phase because we met at work and already know how to work as a team together. But you two already have a project ahead of you that you can work on: keeping the love and affection alive during a long distance relationship.
I will again repeat that I don't know everything about your situation and my read on it may be totally off. I do think that your assumption that she found another guy is almost certainly wrong. If she is the cold-hearted bitch that would have strung you along like that and seemed so loving, then she wouldn't have broken up with you. She would have just proceeded to cheat on you and not have a bit of guilt about it. My experience and the experience's I've seen other people have with psycho types is that they tend to not try for true breakups with people. Because relationships are one-way streets with them. They are not held back by the terms of the relationship, only their non-psycho partners are held back. I do remember a case somewhat similar to yours where the psycho boyfriend moved away for a three month gig, and did not inform his girlfriend till the day he was leaving. And then immediately went on to cheat in the other city while claiming to do a faithful LDR.
Dig up your old feelings of love for this woman. There is a decent to good chance that she made a decision in fear and uncertainty and with a desire to avoid being hurt. It might be a decision that she regrets. If you still want to have a relationship with her there is probably a path to that working out. If you want things to be over and done with, commit to that path and fully block her.
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