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[philippesaner]

Is this about the whole "cousin marriages keeping clans excessively tight-knit" thing?

It's kind of esoterically funny to me that a) there's a fairly popular in, uh, Certain Circles pop-sociology thesis that the rise of capitalism in Europe is in some occult way downstream of the Catholic ban on incest and also b) the Most Catholic Family in History was also famously so dedicated to inbreeding they kept at it even when infant mortality rates for Habsburg heirs were like 80%.

[philippesaner]

Might work. Vienna and Singapore seem to have this stuff figured out. Still, I'm uncomfortable with expropriation. And that approach to lawmaking has a nasty tendency to backfire; the track record of rent control isn't inspiring.

From my point of view, the absolute most important thing is to get supply above demand. If there's a shortage of housing, landlords are kings; if there's a shortage of renters, they're beggars.

Free market probably wouldn't build that much housing even if we let it. So a massive public housing construction project is probably necessary.

And I think a simple public announcement could accomplish a lot. Investing is all about predicting the future; how much do you think Trudeau could drop property values with a single speech saying "I intend to destroy property values and send the housing market into freefall; this would be a good time to panic sell"?

But I guess it's all moot, because we aren't even letting the free market build as much as it wants to. Our government has made very clear that it wants to keep property values high and property "investments" profitable.

We obviously don't have the political will for your fairly radical proposals, or even for my more moderate ones, since we're currently actively working to make the problem worse. If we can't force ourselves to stop doing that, well...

The whole thing feels a bit hopeless, to be honest.

[philippesaner]

Well, there's "disabilities" and there's "disabilities".

There aren't many who would object to curing chronic pain. "Curing" autism would be a lot more controversial, and for good reason.

The fact that we use the same word for hundreds of entirely separate circumstances leads to some woolly thinking, I think.

PS: Deafness is legitimately curable in many cases, and it's controversial in the deaf community. An author I like was once publicly spat on for having cochlear implants.

Being able to walk to places with my friends/partners regularly would be nice...

[philippesaner]

This will sound like a rhetorical question, but I really do want to know the answer. Where do you think people who don't own houses should live?

[philippesaner]

It's definitely a thing that's happening. The question is whether it's a major factor.

I have the following Grand Theory of the Twenty-First Century that I would like to put forth. I don't know if it's true, but sometimes I think it's true.

Many of you will have heard of the Flynn effect. This is the observed effect that average performance on IQ tests has gone up since these tests started being administered. On a first glance, it appears that people all over the world have gotten measurably smarter in the past 100 years.

There are a variety of proposed explanations for this. Probably better childhood nutrition and the like has something to do with it. But another proposed explanation is this: IQ tests are known to be trainable. You can practice and get better at them. And you can practice the sorts of tasks that show up on an IQ and get better at those sorts of tasks, which might be why (IIRC?) standardized education seems to improve IQ scores. What sorts of tasks are on an IQ test? Abstract thinking tasks. Tasks related to abstract pattern recognition.

It has been proposed that people today live their lives in a world much more governed by these sorts of abstract tasks. We interface with bureaucracy and paperwork, we manipulate strange little symbols on a computer screen, we internalize the various abstractions we are (explicitly and implicitly) taught in school in order to receive the best grade. Where children 100 years ago were taught by their environment to do physical, concrete things, children today are taught by their environment to engage with abstract systems. And success at engagement with abstract systems is what determines success in life, which was much less true 100 years ago.

There are ways in which I think this is a good thing. Abstract systems have both many uses and many joys, which mathematicians have regaled us with since Euclid, and I think it's a good thing if people are more prepared to engage with abstraction these days. But it's probably not wholly a good thing. After all, there is also much utility and many joys in the physical and concrete, and I suspect that today we live in a world which prepares people markedly less well to succeed at the concrete. This is particularly troubling since many concrete activities make up the very most fundamental bedrock of the human condition (as it has hitherto existed).

In-person social relationships are of a concrete character. Leaving your house and doing shit is of a concrete character. Making and fixing things with your hands is concrete. Fucking is concrete.

I think it is possible, and potentially explanatory of some of the malaise I see among my peers, that we have grown up in a world which has taught us to shuffle symbols instead of to do things. People will blame this on their political opponents, leftists will attribute it to capitalism and rightists will attribute it to this or that form of effeminate progressive ideology, but (at the risk of being immediately dismissed by certain people) I want to suggest that, insofar as this is true at all, it might simply be best understood a consequence of industrial society itself. Abstract tasks simply get more useful and more in demand the greater the complexity of society grows and the more technology expands into our lives.

I don't want to present this sociological theory with too much confidence, and I am certainly not claiming we should burn down all the factories and go live in the woods or whatever. I'm just saying, uh... maybe this is something that's going on. I sometimes look around and think "this definitely might be something that's going on." And if it is going on, we should think about what its implications are.

[philippesaner]

Do you have any actual evidence for the claim you're making here?

Or are you just assuming it's false because it's an attack on China, and assuming that the goal is to distract us from that specific issue because that feels like a plausible motive to you?

China tried to meddle in the last two Canadian elections but the results were not affected and it was “improbable” Beijing preferred any one party over another, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has told an official probe.

In sworn testimony on Wednesday before a commission conducting a public inquiry into alleged foreign interference in the 2019 and 2021 Canadian elections, Trudeau answered questions about intelligence briefings he had received and asserted the elections were “free and fair”.

The prime minister set up the commission last year under pressure from opposition legislators unhappy about media reports on China’s possible role in the elections. China has consistently denied that it interfered in Canada’s internal affairs, calling the allegations “groundless”.

Erin O’Toole, who led the main opposition Conservative party during the 2021 campaign, has estimated Chinese interference cost his party up to nine seats but added it had not changed the course of the election. Trudeau’s Liberal Party won both the elections.

“Nothing we have seen and heard despite, yes, attempts by foreign states to interfere, those elections held in their integrity. They were decided by Canadians,” Trudeau said. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland, @vague-humanoid

Note from the poster @el-shab-hussein: Don't fall for this shit. It's a lie meant to distract you from the fact his campaign worked with the fascist BJP to slander and attack Sikhs in the elections wherein he had to go up against Jagmeet Singh. Corrupt bastard. Don't buy into this shameless redscare tactic, China's just his scapegoat here.

[philippesaner]

I could deliver a walrus to your doorstep.

It would be strange and surprising behaviour on my part, I suppose, but not that strange or that surprising.

I've asked this question before and been surprised by the results, now I have access to more weirdos it's your problem:

It is the middle of a Sunday afternoon. You have nothing on, and aren't expecting visitors, deliveries or post.

Unexpectedly, there is a knock at the door.

[philippesaner]

You can already do most of this stuff. And where there are obstacles to doing so, most of them are only loosely connected to capitalism.

I believe we live in the end of the age of capitalism, we live in the century capitalism will finally die, but we must ask, what comes after, we will never be a hundred percent sure what it will be like until we start building it, so we must dream and imagine it, and multiple dreams will exist in one world, I am sure of it, I have multiple dreams, multiple imaginings, and none are perfect, but all are far better than now.

A dream of this small town with buildings of brick with plants climbing them, beautiful colours scattered, cars a rarity, the sounds of birds singing and kids playing in the streets, I am able to sit down on this comfortable bench, eating a sandwich as the world goes by.

A dream of going to a library and being able to get an audiobook, digital copy or paper book of anything, listen to stories as I sip a nice warm drink and watch, and hear people truly enthused to learn because they got to choose to without worry.

A dream of living in a village of maybe a couple hundred people, and going to a community gathering where people cook and share with all, and where the next day I help pull weeds from a kind persons garden, just because I can and they'd like the help.

Dream of worlds you would enjoy living in, as without dreams and stories, we don't have a future, to truly dream and imagine a better world is to start to create it, dream and share those dreams, as they will help bring on a better world.

[philippesaner]

If the word "null" is the problem here, couldn't it just be replaced with a more thuggish phrasing like "ain't shit"?

I've been reading a new comic called Kattabolt, which is too new for me to review yet. It's a'ight so far, though. The art is very cute, the story is moving quickly, and it tags all the characters who appear on a page for easier searching, which is surprisingly rare in webcomics, so it's one of those comics I'm keeping an optimistic eye on. (wouldn't mind some keyboard navigation, though).

But I can't decide how I feel about "Your advantage over me is null" from firey teenage street thug Ray in panel 4 there. On the one hand, it seems kind of an odd phrasing, both in general and for the character of a street thug (though if we learn Ray is some kind of nerdy street thug than this is great foreshadowing).

On the other hand, it's fairly elegant exposition, where Ray is completely justified in saying something he and Nathan (the purple guy) both know, that trusts the reader to make some satisfying conclusions of their own. From those six words, we know that it's not just that Ray has fire powers and Nathan and Leigh (wait, the gang duo has rhyming names? That's cute) have water powers. There's this whole system of elemental powers, that have Pokemon-style type matchups, and that was the main reason Ray didn't jump to beating Nathan's ass until he had backup (as opposed to, say, Nathan being a kewl action hero). We can also deduce that if Ray, a bully, was nervous at a type disadvantage and didn't learn anti-Nathan lightning magic to deal with this recurring nuisance, then he probably can't do it, and this is an Avatar-style world where people can use exactly one (1) element, only unlike Avatar there's elemental weaknesses. That's really a lot of information to be able to glean from six words!

It's also a good use of genre convention. The magic system in Kattabolt is "Avatar with type advantage", which is a system that's very easy to understand. Kattabolt takes advantage of this tropey magic system to be able to explain the entire thing in a single throw-away line and get to the interesting part of the comic.

Y'know what, I think I've talked myself into it. "Your advantage over me is null" is a bit of a clunky line, but it carries a ton of expository weight and lets me catch on to the magic system myself instead of treating me like an idiot or pretending "kung-fu with elemental magic" is some kind of novel idea worth spending six pages explaining. And that's more than worth a single somewhat awkward sentence.

[philippesaner]

In general, I think Dungeon Meshi prefers pragmatism to idealism.

Marcille needs to accept death not because death is good, but because she isn't actually capable of beating it. It's not so much deathist as it is defeatist. Which is a respectable position, in my opinion, though I don't really agree with it.

The approach to other themes, from racism to economic woes to existing in this world while autistic, strikes me as similar. There's not really a "correct philosophy" being advocated for, and I suspect Kui distrusts all "correct philosophies".

Here's a panel from another comic she wrote about how to solve racism in a fantasy world:

It's notable that when Laios actually becomes king, the epilogues start talking about all the logistical problems and necessary compromises that rulership involves. Perfection is clearly not on the table.

seeing people reblog dungeon meshi all the time is like, how I imagine something like made in abyss looks to normies

[philippesaner]

That's less than a hundred dollars per Canadian. Closer to fifty, actually.

The federal government will be investing $2.4 billion to accelerate Canada’s artificial intelligence (AI) sector, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Sunday. The investment will be divided between a number of measures meant to advance job growth in the AI and tech industry and boost businesses’ productivity. “This announcement is a major investment in our future, in the future of workers, in making sure that every industry, and every generation, has the tools to succeed and prosper in the economy of tomorrow,” Trudeau said in a press release Sunday. Majority of the funds, $2 billion, will go toward increasing access to computing and technological infrastructure. Another $200 million is being invested into AI start-ups to accelerate the technology in “critical sectors” such as health care, agriculture and manufacturing, the release says. Additional funds will be put toward helping small and medium-sized businesses incorporate AI, with another $50 million being committed to help train workers whose jobs may be disrupted by the technology.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[philippesaner]

Times like this, I understand why some people are anti-voting.

So, what's the motive here?

Does he imagine there's some electoral advantage in this?

President Biden said that his administration is exploring whether he has the authority to shut down the southern border without authorization from Congress.[...]

"We're examining whether or not I have that power," Biden told Univision's Enrique Acevedo in an interview taped last week that aired Tuesday night.

"Some are suggesting that I should just go ahead and try it," Biden said. "And if I get shut down by the court, I get shut down by the court."[...]

Bipartisan legislation to give the president more resources and power to control the border failed earlier this year.

During his State of the Union, Biden defended the legislation and dared Republicans to defy former President Trump and help him fix it. Before the speech, Biden officials had been exploring how they could essentially close the border with Mexico by turning asylum seekers away if they cross illegally.[...]

For Democrats, there have been some warning signs that Biden is losing support with Latino voters.

In his first year in office, Biden held a 54-24 advantage over former President Trump, according to the latest Axios-Ipsos Latino Poll in partnership with Noticias Telemundo. That 29-point margin has dropped to 9 points, with Biden leading Trump 41-32.

10 Apr 24

[philippesaner]

Our culture has a perverse relationship with the concept of intelligence. So we often assume things are about intelligence when they're absolutely not.

Anyway, in my eyes the biggest danger of believing nonsense is losing your ability to judge trustworthiness. If you believe in crystal healing, how can you explain the universal hostility of all actual medical authorities to it? It must be a conspiracy, it must be evil for the sake of being evil, and it must be so wide-ranging and powerful as to defy all logic. It must be the Jews, or the Devil, or the Devil Jews. So how can you trust anyone, about anything, when crystal healing has proven that the slimy tentacles of the Devil Jews are everywhere?

Well, there's one reliable way to show that someone isn't a puppet of the Devil Jews. They claim to agree with you about crystal healing, or whatever else the Devil Jews are against.

Obviously that approach will lead you to trust charlatans, and only charlatans. You'll start treating honesty as a threat, you'll seek out liars to put your faith in. So you'll get burned again and again and again and again.

We see this phenomenon with money, with politics, with religion, with pretty much everything. And it's horrific.

Plenty of highly intelligent people end up getting sucked in to cults because they just wanted people to hang out with. There are antivaxxer nurses. Your ability to act on empirical reason breaks down fast if your social and emotional needs aren't being met.

[philippesaner]

That would require the government to keep track of how much money everything makes. Would create a lot of unnecessary new bureaucracy.

I'm not sure what the best way to handle IP is. But one thing I feel strongly about is that if the author stops caring, so should the law. There's a lot of old stuff protected under copyright for no reason at all, stuff that the author barely even cared about when they wrote it thirty years ago. I hate to see old video games becoming lost media because the only people allowed to preserve can't be bothered to do so, old magazines left to rot even though nobody involved would have any objections to seeing them digitized, that kind of thing.

By default, I think, copyright should probably lapse extremely fast. If people request extensions on their works, they can have them, and maybe we could throw a bone to the corporations by letting them simply buy very long extensions if they think it's worthwhile. But when the creator loses interest, so should the law.

The more we talk about IP laws and so on, the more I want to write in to law the following system:

Copyright is granted for a period of <80, or whatever> years for any new work. BUT, this is reduced by one year for every <$500,000 inflation-adjusted dollars, or whatever> in revenues from the sale of products claiming that copyright, with the cost of production deducted.

This seems to me to capture the best of all worlds for copyright: it assures creators substantial revenues for their creative work, up to <$40 million dollars, or whatever>. For small or independent folks, it gets them fuck-you money if their work is successful, or more likely, a small stream of revenue for their entire lives and probably a bit for their kids if they're so inclined. But for very large, cultural events, it rapidly transitions the characters to the public domain and the public trust, precisely in the cases where the characters and stories are so popular that they become a part of common culture, but only after substantial profits are pulled in.

Could even have special different numbers for the really high-dollar stuff like movies and TV shows if you were so inclined- like, if you need to employ more than fifty people in the creative act, you can apply for the <$10,000,000 per year reduced, or whatever> tier.

Anyone see obvious dumb problems with this, assuming the <numbers> are adjusted to mutual satisfaction? I can see I suppose a moral objection that people are entitle to unlimited restitution for creative works, but that would also seem hard to square with limited copyright terms full stop. We all seem to agree that this kind of thing should be bounded to some degree already.

[philippesaner]

What exactly do you expect people to do with this information?

Looking over the history of vampire-related tags on Tumblr can reveal informative trends. For example, for roughly the first decade of this site's life, expressions of interest in a vampire version of Seinfeld were a recurring motif, then in 2019 people suddenly stopped asking for that.

[philippesaner]

This it?

[philippesaner]

What's KSR?

After a bit of Googling, my best bet is Kim Stanley Robinson.

Is that who the quote's from?

i like the expanse and for all mankind as pure entertainment, but modern-non-KSR "hard" sci-fi is so boring because nobody has any fucking imagination. 20th century capitalism in space. 20th century communism in space. men, women, the nuclear family in space!

“We have come to Mars for good. We are going to make not only our homes and our food, but also our water and the very air we breathe— all on a planet that has none of these things. We can do this because we have technology to manipulate matter right down to the molecular level. This is an extraordinary ability, think of it! And yet some of us here can accept transforming the entire physical reality of this planet, without doing a single thing to change our selves, or the way we live. To be twenty-first-century scientists on Mars, in fact, but at the same time living within nineteenth-century social systems, based on seventeenth-century ideologies. It’s absurd, it’s crazy, it’s— it’s—” he seized his head in his hands, tugged at his hair, roared “It’s unscientific! And so I say that among all the many things we transform on Mars, ourselves and our social reality should be among them. We must terraform not only Mars, but ourselves.”