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theincompetencetheorist


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 20 06:37:38 UTC

				

User ID: 1270

theincompetencetheorist


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 20 06:37:38 UTC

					

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User ID: 1270

Where does the idea of "Late-stage Capitalism" come from? What are the other stages?

I don't know for certain since I don't have the time nor resources to verify, but I do believe the ideas are a continuation from Deleuzes Societies of Control. The general idea late-stage capitalism is that capitalism controls us through various means, and there is some truth to that because of corporations we can't have any discussion we want on Reddit for example. The problem is the parasitic ideas of neomarxism has tagged along with it.

I didn't write anything about creating values ex nihilo, the point was slave morality is the passive values that is foisted upon the masses and never questioned. This forum is a rejection of slave morality essentially because the purpose is to come here and discuss our values, not come up with new ones but make our values more well grounded and well though out.

Yes, thank you for the precision that my language lacked. But yes master morality and the transformation to superman requires being active, so they look masterly to the slaves because they are passive.

I would also like to use the same disclaimer here.

I’m an expert on Nietzsche (I’ve read some of his books), but not a world-leading expert (I didn’t understand them). So take all of this as a riff on the concept, rather than a guide to Nietzsche’s original intent.

In my interpretation of slave morality vs master morality is a matter of being passive with your values vs being active with your values. To become the superman you want to actively decide what is important for you and live accordingly despite norms and structures of society. In a way consumerism is a slave morality, you buy your values to show off for others. And in a way Andrew Tate talks Master morality but he is just a Slave when buying a car to show the trappings of success. That is why there is the example of the MAGA Republicans as having Slave morality, most of them have just passively adopted the opinions of their tribe. Then there there are the woke tribe doing the same, passive values virtue signaled with the subtlety of throwing a brick at your face. Slaves locked in eternal conflict as we know as the Culture War.

The American IT industry was hit hard by COVID. Businessmen, C-suite execs, saw their people remoting in from home and trying not to return to the office. These execs, many of them free riders, realized they could halve their costs by hiring remote MSPs from out of country for IT and relying on Crowdstrike to be their security bottom line. A flood of IT layoffs happened this past year, deflating IT wages and making entry level jobs scarce.

I do think that it is slightly more complicated than that. First off all the lay offs of 80% of Twitter showed everyone that you don't need that many people to run a website. It was predicted by multiple of people that if Twitter didn't stop working other big tech companies would follow. Then there is the whole deal with Section 174 also that has affected the bottom line. Tech isn't unaffected by higher interest rates, when money was cheap they could amass people to be ready for "initiatives". Well not anymore.

I can give you the point of the free riders. The worst thing about them is that they actively make our tech worse to promote some number go up on their OKRs. Google is making search worse so people stay longer trying to find what they came to google for and watch more ads. Windows search always hits Bing when you do a search locally on your computer, just that it increments a number so a free rider can get a bonus. Just to take examples of search.

So I've started to see Elon (and many other tech CEOs for that matter) as living LLMs most of them can guess the correct technobabble to look smart for people that don't have knowledge of the areas they talk about. There is no true understanding of the things that he has been speaking about lately and has managed to staff with people that have been able to correct him in the past, but now no one can contradict Elon anymore. He is surrounded by yes-men and has been successful too many times being contrarian that there is no one to save him anymore. You are essentially listing stuff that is straight from Elon and someone who truly knows something about cars, running a social media company or rockets are able to correct or massage the message down the hierarchy anymore.

The whole point I'm trying to make is that the given that it is very public protest against the Israeli-Palestinian situation and Israel getting the second place in the popular vote. So if that vote is political then calls on cracking pro-Palestine protests would have been bigger than it is now. People are sitting at home and basically "fuck your virtue signaling" to the protestors and voting Israel. I see that as an apolitical act. One of the reasons we have a culture war is that we allow people to make everything political.

That is the point. It wasn't the queer theme or the politics that matter it is if people enjoy the show or act, my comment is in response that the "usual suspects" are "organizing a ballot stuffing". Well the usual suspects should have also been stuffing with UK votes. Ukraine winning because they are being invaded is an exception.

Or the televotes result is a disorganized majority that is tired of the agenda that shove politics in their face by what is en vogue for the terminally online, they just come for the entertainment and music. Because if you look at the UK televote votes. They received 0 points for almost a gay live show. And Israel received more televote points than the LGBTQIA+ winner. So in my mind, people simply didn't give a fuck and voted for the act they liked the best.

Tech choices mostly impact the business on how easy it is to hire for it and how much the tech has a tendency to create messes. There are bunch of over engineered Java projects and PHP hacks out there that just messes with the businesses. Other than that, it doesn't really matter if you avoid that trap with sane choices. Mostly wanting to play with cool tech is an exercise in masturbation that started out with scratching an itch that last project caused. e.g. "The web UI was a kludge of JQuery, lets do it in a framework like React."

So mostly we are entertaining ourselves with the next cool tool unless it is something that is awful slow to get things done in for one reason or the other.

So you think that "food deserts" don't exist because you can walk an 30 minutes to yours? There doesn't exist places where people live where they have to drive an hour to get "real food" while passing various corporate fast food chains on the way?

Do you know what a sumo wrestler is?

or their food is still so much more pure.

I wonder how much HFCS you can find in their food that they get from 7-11s? The options for good food at 7-11s AFAIK better than anywhere else ( not that I've looked myself but know people who have lived in Japan and talked about the cultural difference).

If you look at the history of "fat pride" it essentially started as dating for guys that loved fat women. And the post-modernist got its claws into it and gave it the social construct treatment and here we are: "healthy at every size". But the greater point I tried to make that some of the obese people have less choice in becoming obese, because their options are limited with what food is available to them. Yes being obese is a disease but I'm just making the claim that it is in big part caused by ultra-processed food much like cirrhosis is caused by overconsumption of alcohol, but it is much more reversible with better food and more excercise.

This little quote from NYU professor

discriminating against people who have a chronic disease.

People who are fat because of a chronic disease is in an absolute minority. The majority have issues with their size is because of eating too much ultra-processed foods full of subsidized crops like corn that is cheap and exercising too little compared to their energy intake. Is it a personal choice? Well if you are poor living in a "Food Desert" (i.e. a place where grocery stores with non ultra-processed food are far away) eating what ever is available, how much choice do you have? If you don't live near a grocery store it usually means that you are poor. Is poverty a choice?

As I see it the polemic of "personal choice" vs "chronic disease" is a faux debate disguising the fact that the options for the poorest urban areas and poorest "flyover country" don't have options with getting food without subsidized crops with high energy content. The only chronic condition they have is being poor.

So where does that leave "gym fascism"? Perhaps "Cui Bono" selling ultra processed foods to the poorest population is a multi-billion dollar business and it is also subsidized by politicians, they get to sell medicine for the consequences of that food(insulin for diabetes, pills against hypertension and so on) and so on. What happens if people notices this, that they are essentially being poisoned by the food supply? Better nip it in the bud the notion to have less processed food and more exercise cause losses. Lets call anyone who has that idea fascist? I don't know... It is a conspiracy theory...

It's good that you know better what's good for someone than they themselves! If only they had you to run their lives.

No that is not what I'm saying. Back in the day there where a bunch of rules put in place to rein in finance industry. Banks actually had a bunch of duties to fulfill when conducting business. One by one those duties has been removed, so instead of having someone with fiduciary duty now we have someone selling you financial services when invest in funds.

And indeed you cannot get a mortgage if your DTI is too big.

Yes you can if you have collateral that the bank can see as free money. They have no responsibility towards the borrower stopping them making a bad deal, which they used to have.

Edit: to amend. We are not in disagreement here on how it should work. We are in disagreement if it works like this today. The starting point of this whole discussion is that my theory is that the 'life script' isn't working is because there has been an effort over the last 50 years to make companies more responsible towards their shareholders than to the customers of the companies. You as a customer have little recourse against a bank that tricks you out of your house with a bad loan. This is what happened 16 years ago and I've heard nothing that has changed preventing that happening again. If you don't believe me.... I'm done trying to convince you.

Why would the borrower take a loan that didn't benefit them?

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” - George Carlin

They'd take out loans even if the price of the property didn't go up.

I'm not sure that would be the case if they would be targeted with marketing for taking on more loans.

This is a fully general argument against homeownership.

No it is not general argument of homeownership, it is an argument against predatory practices on giving out loans without the safeguards of looking at DTI etc... i.e. the first claim you made on how it is supposed to work.

Just because you find companies where it doesn't seem to hold up in one aspect it doesn't mean the whole statement falls. Large companies like Google do other stuff that is against the interest of their customers and especially against their users. For example "ad topics" is to use their browser monopoly to be the only game in town for targeted ads on the "open web", after disabling third party cookies they jack up the prices. Also they are trying their best in tricking chrome users on enabling it.

But keep in mind For every "bloated big tech" company that pamper their employees, you find big tech companies who doesn't do that. Oracle, Cisco, IBM, AWS ...

The obvious case is the investment banks where the employees are millionaires while shareholders fight over scraps.

As for investment banks paying their employees much, who do you think has the most ownership of those companies? Is the compensation given to employees as equity(i.e. shares) in the company?

Businesses that treat employees poorly are generally structurally unprofitable – forced to compete on cost. They don't want to, but they have to in order to survive.

Talked as someone who hasn't been in contact with private equity firms I see.

Sure people pay off their loans, but there are a bunch of people that use the raising equity prices to fund that they can on other liabilities.

I cannot parse this sentence.

People take out more loans when the price of the property goes up, they leverage that as an asset to have as collateral on other loans.

Obviously, the bank is not a charity. People enter into agreements for mutual benefit.

Again looking on the mechanics of the subprime crisis back in 2008, the loans given were not to the benefit of the lender. The calculus for the banks where that the value of the property would be higher when the lender defaulted, thus being the only ones benefiting on collecting the interests and get the money back with the sale of the asset.

Well that is the general theory of how it is supposed to work. They haven't corrected all of the mess that led up to the subprime crisis back in 2008-2009.. Sure people pay off their loans, but there are a bunch of people that use the raising equity prices to fund that they can on other liabilities.

No, if you can't pay your mortgage, the bank takes the house and kicks you out. Yeah and if you can't pay your landlord rent they kick you out. That is the point, with rising property prices people that attempt buy a house if it is too expensive you essentially rent from the bank if they ever get laid off and can't find a new job fast enough to keep up with the payments. Plenty of families ended up in that situation 15 years ago. This is tragic family history for some people.

Sure you can say that it is the customers responsibility and it is absolutely that. And they are plenty of people see that they don't have the economic means of buying property because they are being responsible. A couple of decades ago plenty of jobs it was possible to buy a house and pay it of outright, but now it is fewer and fewer people that get opportunity.

But make no mistake, if someone in the bank thinks that they can make a profit of a loan too you... they will do that, even if it is just the person approving it is just getting a bonus.

My personal pet theory why that script isn't working is that all corporations on the stock market are run on "maximizing shareholder value". Oh times are rough well shareholder value maximizing requires layoffs, good bye for the lifetime employments where get a gold watch after 25 years of loyalty. If lifetime employments with the possibility of buying are reasonably priced house and owning the stuff is being ruined by "maximizing shareholder value". You have no job security in e.g. customer service working your way up is gone, because you have been replaced by a low wage worker who reads of a script and the moment corporations can trust the AI chatbots that entry level job is gone. Banks are interested in loaning you money as much money as possible towards your house so you can never pay it off. If you never can pay off your mortgage you are for all intents and purposes renting a property from the bank who doesn't do any maintenance on it. The reason is "maximizing shareholder value"... That HP inkjet you bought.... well you didn't buy it, HP made an investment in you so you could have a subscription, any issue with payment well you ain't printing shit. And the first thing you contact is usually some kind of customer service bot. Yeah that car you have, if it is newer model with heated seats well those could be a subscription service. Guess why companies do this?

The entry point into the life script is dependent on that you can get a stable job so you can buy a home and have stuff and we are not getting that, and that is feeding into nihilism of some cohort of people that becomes NEETs (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) because they can't enter into "maximizing shareholder value" for some corporation, which can't wait to fuck them over the moment the rogering provides value.

But it is just personal thought...

If we look at the very public firing of Damore when writing an internal memo of gender differences. More specifically the public firing of Timnit Gebru might have spread that same culture of fear in the AI team. Being uncomfortable by having diverse thought and getting publicly ousted because of them would spread a culture of fear! So I would bet on 2 on being the truth.

Well the modern aristocracy keeps "their people" on top by suggesting that Asians are "white adjacent" when applying to universities and making BIPOC the benchmark for affirmative admission, miseducates the black youth by saying that math requiring correct answers is racist(so they can't succeed when they get older) and so on. If you look closely by the elites woke policy outcomes and if they don't benefit you are not part of the elite. You'll end up paying rent like the rest. Sure violent uprising could happen but chances that you end up being warrior elite from behind they keyboard are slim.

Well if we are ignoring the superficial political alignments you are essentially getting that end result. Feodalism is the end goal of todays elite when they travel to Davos for the WEF summit. The the mainstream wokism only purpose is to subjugate the plebs allow the elites to become rentseekers. To discuss the finer points enlightenment has given or not given the modern world is pointless since the "inferential distance" is so big between us.

Without video games, or Marvel movies, or football to keep them passive, maybe young men would start getting up off their butts and get active. Don't "fight" to take back gaming or comic books, fight to take back your country, to take back Western Civilization. Because there won't be anyone trying to "wokify" your little hobby once the Woke have been crushed utterly.

What do you think they are fighting when they are fighting for escapism to be free from wokeness? What the hell is "Woke" anyway?

I'll spit out a definition and see what happens. Woke is anti-enlightenment. We owe so much of modern way of living to enlightenment ideas. We owe Western Civilization to its ideas.

One of the things that has allowed Western Civilization ideas become so prevalent even outside its modern central nation state of US is entertainment in any of its forms. Books, Movies and now in this modern age Games. The centerpoint of this latest gamer drama is a Brazilian guy that noticed that consulting company that does sensitivity reading inject anti-enlightenment ideas into the stories. So he recommends against the games, closes down the public forum and writes a note full of the shibboleths that woke tries to accuse anyone who contradicts them.

This is the culture war in its essence, the fight of anti-enlightenment ideas that has infected the western civilization and is about to kill the host. The pathway it uses to infect others are media in any of its forms. It started with a slow burn of entertainment and education but it is continuing infecting our institutions. Because when it kills the host then we are back in the middleages with how people are governed, like the non-western civilizations... Russia, China, Large parts of the middle-east and most of Africa.

I'm not going to dwell of the rest of the stuff but I just need to point out.

One conceit that many people enjoy is the idea that a large conspiracy is impossible, because if even one person spills the beans, the jig is up. For example, keeping the AACS encryption key secret was impossible. One person spilled the beans and it was over.

It wasn't a person working with the organizations that spilled the beans. The timeline is clear in the article it was the keys were lifted from software players. It was just a matter of shipping decryption keys to the end user and ignoring Kerckhoffs's principle. So your example of a conspiracies fail is a little flawed since it was "exposed" by an outsider.

One of the funniest things is that Sony is always somehow involved in these fails. And the funniest is that back in the day people could run Linux on PS3 and that feature was actually a moat against competence and patience. When would have thought that nerds that enjoy getting running Linux are competent and patient enough to find your errors in cryptography. To Sony's credit they managed to patch it but reportedly the last bastion of firmware fixes fell in 2012.