Now, on to the uses and problems of markets. The use of a market, obviously, is to distribute goods and services. They do this, of course, according to power - the power of wealth, of knowledge (Where can I buy x? How can I get it cheap?), of social standing and strategic position and all the million other forms of power both great and small through which one can get what they want. I wouldn't say that this is the best way of distributing resources, but it does generally assure that the carpenter can buy wood and the farmer can buy farm tools and that something vaguely resembling a functional economy will result. This is actually a bit where I find my expertise lacking - perhaps @profoundlynerdy can give us a good summary of the uses and advantages of markets? I could go for some adversarial collaboration right about now. :P
To start with, one thing I'd like to point out is why I'm not using the term "Free Market". And the reason is because I regard that term as errant propaganda. markets are always governed by limitations, enough so that calling them "Free" is completely misleading. What you can buy and what you can sell is always limited by a thousand different factors - what you have the resources for, what your government will allow, what you can manage, what you can defend, what your community will allow, what people are willing to sell you, etc, etc, etc. Using the word free in this context is just silly. :/
I was thinking about what I'd look like as a planeswalker, and I think I have an idea? Something like this, I think:
Angle, Pursuer of Options - 2GU Planeswalker - Angle
+1: Choose two: * Gain 1 life * Target creature gets -2/-0 until end of turn. * Target creature gets -0/-1 until end of turn. * Target player takes 1 damage. * Add one mana of any color to your mana pool.
-3: Choose One: * Put two +1/+1 Counters on target creature you control. Untap it. * The next time you play an instant or sorcery card this turn, copy it. You may choose new targets for the copy.
-5: You gain an emblem with the ability "Whenever a spell or ability would have you choose one or more options from a list, you may choose twice as many of those options."
Loyalty: Sunburst (~ enters the battlefield with a loyalty counter on it for each color of mana spent to cast it.)
What, you say? Thats waaaaay too much text for a planewsalker? Yeah, probably. XD
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way. - Janet Filch
I'm trying to use activitypub, and I found a nice set of schemas, but of course, they don't work with the library I'm already using. I think I could use both but it would be messy? Or I could look into getting the second to load into the first. Pretty sure that's not easy, but I could maybe program a converter myself? :/
Hmm. So the classic case for the minimum wage and/or unions is the employer/employee relationship, and how unequal it is. If you work for somebody with 10 employees, you count for a 10% of their employees, but they're 100% of your employment.
Thus, they have a massive advantage over you at the negotiating table. Unions help balance this out by increasing your negotiating power by allowing you and your fellows to negotiate as a group, while minimum wage balances it out by short circuiting the entire contest and ensuring that no matter how high their negotiating power, they can't push you below a minimum.
I was trying to think of another way to balance out this relationship, and the best I could thin of was "Everybody refuses to work more than 8 hours for any given employer and just pursues 5 different jobs., thereby reducing the amount of employment any given employer provides to just 20%, instead of 100%."
Unfortunately, this also reduces the amount of work any given employee provides to a 5th what it otherwise would be, which kinda cancels out the benefits. And thats before you factor in the costs and difficulties of the approach.
Given how terrible an answer that is, should tell you how big a problem this fundamental inequality is... :/
Blue: "Hey what up I finished that thing to turn everyone into robots. You wanna See me try it out?"
Green: "Whoa whoa whoa! Try it out how? What is this thing, anyway? How does it work?"
Blue: *Sighs dramatically* "It's quite simple. It's a machine that scans a body and replaces it with a carefully engineered artificial duplicate, without rendering the body nonfunctional at any time. It even preserves continuity of consciousness and proper syncing and conversion of a persons aetheric identity, I.E. their soul."
Red, staring at blue through narrowed eyes: "I don't trust it."
Blue, rolling their eyes: "Of course you don't. C'mon white, black, back me up here."
Black, sounding especially sinister: "I think it sounds very interesting. So much potential. I'd be happy to help you test it out..."
White: "DON'T let black get their hands on it. *I* will help you test it, with proper ethics review to ensure it functions for the betterment of society.
Red: "Better for your control, you mean."
White: "My control *IS* the betterment of society, yes."
Green: "I'm still not convinced this is a great idea at all. Even if it works as described, have you considered how this will affect others? What will happen to those who can't get it's benefits? How will this disrupt existing systems?"
Blue: "Ugh. 'How will this disrupt existing systems?' You always say that. I could just put that on a poster on my wall and skip talking to you all together."
Green: "Well, maybe if you'd listen for once..."
Black: "Enough of that. Lemme have a copy and I'll go gather that data for you. Be real quick about it, and VERY thorough."
Green: "They're gonna use it to make horrid necromantic abominations. Don't let them have it."
Black, scoffing: "Well not to start with. First I find some poor people and pay them to be test subjects, maybe skip a few safety checks for the latter ones just to see what happens, and /then/ I make the horrid techno-zombies. Duh."
White, slightly exasperated: "Right, of course. How silly of us. Blue, let me test it, would you? *I* promise not to skip any safety protocols. I'll follow your instructions to a T, I swear."
Blue: "Eh, alright. Lemme write this down..."
Black: "Aww c'mon, I was joking about skipping safety procedures! Blue, w-" *Gets choked out by vines*
Another interesting point, though I think you see some of Scott's bias hanging out here, or at least that of the dude he's quoting. :V
"The Fabians protected a sort of middle-class-liberal atmosphere of intellectual freedom and what Pease referred to as an inability to take themselves seriously – not in the sense of not being committed, but in the sense where they would laugh at anyone who seemed too pompous or too certain of anything. Pease seems to have thought that the lower classes’ lack of a liberal education and likely religious upbringing made them susceptible to a dogmatic orthodox Marxism marked by witch-hunts to weed out revisionists. Most British intellectuals wouldn’t have been willing to put up with such a climate, and so wouldn’t have been able to get into socialism. The Fabian Society provided an alternative space where the sort of open debate that intellectuals and middle-class people take for granted was available and encouraged"
"I used to be upset when charitable and activist organization would have really nice offices with lots of art on the wall, call in expensive catered lunches to their events, and hire a bunch of graphics design and PR people to make everything look perfect. Wasn’t this excessive? Shouldn’t they be spending their money and energy on the cause? Pease argues no. There were hordes of unwashed socialists standing on soapboxes raving about Revolution. The Fabians’ comparative advantage was looking respectable. For a cause like socialism, where an important part of the battle is moving it into the Overton Window, handing out really well-designed stationery was important activism in and of itself."
"True Neutral (Green/Blue): True Neutral seeks total balance. It understands that actions will sometimes need to obey the laws, break the laws, help others, and help itself. Green/Blue is the color combination that is the best at seeing and understanding the totality of existence around it. This character will always think and act in terms of context, making decisions differently depending on the other factors involved."
...What, that? Sound familiar? Of course not. Where on earth would I have encountered such an individual? :P
...Though actually I'm leaning more and more white these days, so. :/
Also, someone recommended the following articles to me and I love them. They're about the D&D alignment chart, and how it's fundamentally a chart written from whites perspective. It uses this to elaborate further on the colors and their conflicts, including four more charts showing what the other colors version of said chart might look like. If you want to read more, check them out:
Green: *Bursts through door full speed* "Blue! Blue what did you do!"
Blue, not even looking up from what they're working on: "Hmm? I don't know, what did I do?"
Green: "The humans, Blue! WHat did you do to the humans! They were perfectly happy monkeys last time I looked, now they're miserable and they're destroying everything!"
Blue: "Oh, right. They were having a rough time of it, so I taught them to talk and think and all that, and it turns out they're really good at it."
Green: "They're destroying everything! It's a mega extinction event already! They're burning through resources unsustainably, fighting each other, destabilizing food webs, warming the planet, building bombs... They're not even healthy! They're dying of obesity! You even screwed up their sleep cycles! Do you ever consider the consequences of your actions!?"
Blue, still not looking up from their workbench: "Eh, it won;t matter once I turn them all into robots."
Green: *Meditates peacefully in a clearing in the forest*
Black: *Staggers into the clearing, covered in moss* "GREEN, WHAT THE FUCK!"
Green: *Continues meditating, gives no sign of awareness of Blacks presence*
Black, slowly limping closer, the moss growing and covering their body: "There was mold on my zombies, Green! I worked hard to raise those zombies. I had to make sacrifices. And then you just go and grow mold all over them, take them to pieces!"
Green: *Still Meditating*
Black: "What is wrong with you? Don't you have any respect for other peoples hard work? For their struggle? You think your bugs and your weeds give you license to do whatever you want?"
Green: *Still Meditating*
Black: *Pulls out really evil looking dagger with one hand while other arm breaks off, completely covered in mold* "You never let me have anything! Everything I try and make, you destroy! My mines collapse, my slaves escape into the forest, you grow mold on my zombies."
Green: *Still Meditating*
Black, almost completely covered in mold, beside their face and the hand with the dagger: "Why can't you just let me win for once! Let me have my dark empire, my grand castles, my legion of zombies? " *tries to jump at and stab Green, but their feet are bound to the ground with moss. They collapse, just short of being able to reach Green, as the moss consumes their hand and their weapon.
Green: *Still Meditating*
Black, choking out a few last words as the moss covers their face: "Mold on my zombies. You motherfucker."
Black: *Walks into room, whistling obnoxiously and looking very smug*
White: "Uh, excuse me, I though we all agreed to follow a dress code. Go put a shirt on. Also, what is that sticking out of your chest?"
Red: *Takes off shirt, blows a raspberry at White."
White: "Very mature, Red."
Green: *Peering intently at Black* "...Is that a zombified hand sticking out of your chest!?"
Black, even smugger than before: "So what if it is?"
Green and White, in unison: "Dude, that's fucked up."
Black: "I'm sorry you think that. It must be very trying for you."
Green: "why would you do that to yourself?"
White: "Also, I'm pretty sure this violates our rule about visible necromancy in the common spaces."
Black: "So you think your rules are more important than my life? Typical."
Green: "No, seriously, why would you do that to yourself? What the fuck, Black?"
Black: "I had a close call with a demon and needed something to keep my heart beating."
Blue, not even looking up from their book: "Not the solution I would have chosen, but I guess it works."
White: "You mean you made a deal with a demon and it went badly for you, and now you're trying to squirrel your way out of the consequences."
Green: "Please don't insult squirrels by associating them with Black. Black, can you find a solution that doesn;t make us all look at the rotten severed hand protruding from your ribcage? Like, maybe putting a shirt on?"
Black, disdainfully: "I could..."
Green: "Will you? Please?"
Black: "Why should I? I rather like this look. I might even go for some more severed hands protruding from my body, just for artistic purposes."
White: "See, now thats a violation of the rule about deliberately trying to wind each other up."
Green: "Dude, don;t be an asshole. We all need to live in this world together. We should try and get along. And deliberately making everyone else look at your disgusting perversions of the natural order is not trying to get along."
Black: "If you want me to do something, you should make it worth my while. What's it worth to you?"
White: "Dude, constantly trying to extort advantages from us is no way to live. If we all did that, this place would be miserable for everyone, you included."
Black: "Well maybe if you weren't constantly trying to strangle me with rules and regulations, I wouldn't have to extort you."
Red: "Yeah you tell him Black! Fuck the police!" *Tears off pants throw's them at White*
Green: "Look, I think white goes a little overboard with all that too, but you have to consider other people."
Black: "The fuck I do, you goddamn hippy. I didn't spend eons struggling and amassing vast power so some treehugger could tell me how I needed to respect others! I worked hard for this power and I'll use it as I please."
White: "Typical behavior. See, this is why we need rules."
Red, shouting at the top of their lungs: "FUCK YOUR RULES! YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO-"
Blue: *Locks everyone else in a stasis field, goes back to reading their book* "Ahhhh, much better."
Aaaargh I'm trying to do the "bundle install" from the masto developer guide, and I'm getting this error: "[!] There was an error parsing `Gemfile`: no implicit conversion of Symbol into Integer. Bundler cannot continue.
I found a stack-exchange that looks like it answers the question, but I don't understand it's instructions. Manually type the sentence again where? In the source file? :/
Hmm. So I've been thinking about culture and memes and stuff, and it feels like we're currently in a state of heightened cultural memetic conflict. Not just the obvious stuff, like politics, but even the stuff you barely notice, like memes about hard work, or about whether or not it's proper to ask for money from strangers on the Internet. Like plate tectonics grinding away at each other deep beneath our feet, and all we can see of it on the surface are the mountains, volcanoes, and earthquakes that result. It might be a necessary process, ultimately, but it's pretty rough on people in the here and now. :/
#nowplaying Dumai, by Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird
(I carry in my heart a dream / a flag of peace & a land redeemed but in my dream a wall of wire / stone & iron forged in fire on the wall a soldier stands / keeps us out of our own land borders tear us all apart / on the ground & in the heart while we all must learn to conquer hate, / what's a nation without a state? the land is holy, but for whom? / God of the star or the crescent moon? no one freely gives up power / we alone can take what's ours without freedom, without land / here in exile we do stand without justice, without peace / just a dream become a beast where will exile draw the line? / in Israel or Palestine?)
Hey, I finally wrote that thing! It's been a couple months, but better late than never, right? XD To start with, a couple quick warnings. First, I’m an atheist, and not really the spiritual sort either. As such, this is all written from an atheistic perspective, (And a very particular one at that), and I worry that those of you who don’t share that perspective might find it uncomfortable to read? That’s not to say that you shouldn’t read it, but you should know that and be prepared for it.
Second, I'm going to base a lot of this in science thats not fully established and that I don’t entirely understand, so some of it will likely end up being wrong - probably at least 10%. It should be interesting and thought provoking and a decent learning experience though, and I hope to get the broad strokes right, so I'm gonna go ahead with it anyway. Just make sure you take everything with a grain of salt, alright?
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So, let's talk about human nature. What /is/ human nature? That is to say, what does it mean to be human, when you get right down to it? What holds true between all of us? What is our common ground, our unifying experience? I think I can answer that. But first, I need to explain a few very important but very complicated concepts.
The first is evolution. Evolution is the primary force responsible for bringing us into existence. It is, you could say, the closest thing we have to a creator. But, it is not a kind creator, not a gentle creator, not a considerate creator. You can read more about it here, if you’re curious:
To give you the short version, the evolutionary process has a lot of shortcomings. It has no thought, no sense of morality, no ability to plan for the future. Genes which currently cause their frequency to increase will do so, genes which don’t, won’t. Morality and long-term planning don’t enter into it, those are human inventions. Worse still, the only factor that evolution cares about is whether your genes propagate and survive. So a gene that increases the chance of you having children at the cost of making you miserable is a winning gene, so far as evolutions is concerned.
But, evolution does have some advantages too. In passing on the benefits of intelligence, evolution passes too on it’s limitations. Never will evolution miss some counter-intuitive idea because it “didn’t think of it.” Never will it become locked into a single strategy because thats all it’s familiar with. Never will it continue to fail because it’s too stubborn to admit it’s wrong. Nothing is too strange and weird for evolution to imagine, because evolution does not imagine. Shrimp that fire high power bubble bullets to knock out or kill prey, or even to tunnel into solid rock to make homes for themselves? Sure, why not. Birds that give up flying and become amazing swimmers – at the south pole, one of the coldest places on earth? Go for it. Plants that reproduce by surrounding their seeds in delicious fruit and /inviting them to be eaten/? Sounds like a killer strategy, lets use that everywhere.
Why does this matter to us, you might ask? Because this is where we came from. We evolved. We emerged from the filth and the muck, brought forth by thoughtless amoral evolution. It gave us all our strengths - and all our weaknesses. It gave us the strength in our bones, the power in our muscles. It gave us reflexes, and stamina, and intelligence too. Even the morality and foresight it lacks, it managed to give us. But it also gave us a host of flaws.
For example, did you know that our eyes are backwards? That is to say, the blood vessels and neural wiring required to make our eyes are actually placed /in front/ of the lenses. We can’t normally see them because our brains edit what we see to remove them, (Yes, really!) but there are various tricks to make the shadows visible, if you want to google the problem. Same thing with our blind spots – thats where the neural wiring passes through the lenses to reach our brains. Which, again, edit the image to conceal the defect and preserve overall vision quality.
Next, let me talk about Predictive Processing. Predictive Processing is a hot new theory in neural science, not fully confirmed but very promising, and I personally think it sheds a lot of light on the subject. It states that the brain doesn’t just wait to receive sensory input, but is constantly creating and updating it’s own theories and models (or ‘predictions’, if you will), and checking them against the incoming data, and then using the resulting error to adjust and respond. This is actually a fairly common technique in data processing and compression – match the data against another set of data and only transmit the difference. It can save you a lot of bandwidth. Now, why is that important? Because bandwidth, and processing in general, are a limited resource that you can never have enough of, for reasons that will be discussed later. This impacts the way we think about and interact with the world in a number of different ways.
For example, it’s theorized that this is used not just to understand the world, but drives us to interact with it in certain ways. You see something out of the corner of your eye but you’re not sure what it is, what do you do? You turn your head to get a better look. Or, to get even more crazy, for motion, it’s been suggested that first we adjust our model of where our limbs are, and then the bits of our brain responsible for actually controlling them adjust their positions to match. In essence, adjusting reality to fit the models, not just the models to fit reality. Some even suggest that uncertainty reduction and error minimization are the fundamental, ultimate drives of the brain, and everything else is hacked in as a secondary drive, by hardcoding it’s prediction. So our brains will always generate the prediction “Not Hungry”, and anytime our body disagrees and says “No, actually, I am hungry”, we get predictive error and the only way to resolve it is to go eat something. Same with sleep, health, etc, etc.
Again, this is still just a hypothesis, but I’ve heard it fits the evidence pretty well. Even the physical structure of the brain supports it. Most of the actual “thinky bits” of the brain are around the outside, while the inside is mostly supporting infrastructure. To use a metaphor, most of the computers are on the outside, while the inside is mostly maintenance hallways, power lines, data lines, coolant pipes, that kind of thing. This means that bandwidth for transmitting between different sections is at a premium, so spending some computation making predictions so you can transmit less information is worthwhile.
What this means for us, is that much of our brains are not under our conscious control. They work autonomously, trying to minimize predictive error in their various ways. And of course, as with anything, especially anything evolved, they have their flaws. Depression, mania, basically any mental condition worth complaining about is the result of this process failing.