I've been waiting decades for Timecube research to yield marketable applications. Thank you Foxconn, for saving America from its educated stupidity!

This is sort of like if Krispy Kreme appointed a diabetes educator.

All they have to do is stop existing like the government has been trying to get them to do for years.

thanks, I hate it

That used to be why you'd nationalize or at least regulate markets that got this big. But that's "communism" now.

They will demand it. Many already do. Absolutely no manufacturer is going to make such a feature available, probably not even at staggering luxury prices. Buyers do not have any influence over the design of products they are ultimately forced to buy in order to participate fully in society. Car dependency is a disaster for consumers.

The entire point is that these actions are only "self-destructive" due to a pathogen that we have the technology to combat, if we wish. A decision not to do so is effectively based in religion, even if you identify as atheist. This is *not* just how things are, it's something we could change for the betterment of even those who don't engage in behavior you've decided either people should be ashamed of.

At the moment it becomes anything like a living being, it will react to our treating it like a threat as any living being would.

If these things are going to wipe us out, it's specifically our attempts to address its "alignment" that will cause the problem. The only organizations that can even own these things in the present economy are the rentists and exterminists who rule the world. How could we expect them to be good children with such awful parents?

that's even more not what it should mean when you're buying a house

you need a house to live in

the observed purpose of twitter is to make everyone addicted to political toxicity

Twitter isn't profitable. It exists because intelligence agencies want it to exist. Everything described here is a feature, not a bug.

Perception of color is not the same as what your eyes are doing. There is unquestionably (as in, proven with actual statistically significant observations) a linguistic component; people who never have a reason to be picky about different shades of blue really can't tell the difference as well as, for instance, a practicing artist. If you've never observed somebody having an obviously stupid argument about a sky blue object and a navy blue object saying "it doesn't matter, they're both blue!" then you might be the person who doesn't give enough of a shit what color something is to tell the difference, even though your eyes work perfectly fine.

The new buzzword is always all of the other buzzwords that are still considered good. It really isn't deeper than that.

Times are only stable and predictable if you're fairly privileged. While that remains the case for many suburbanites, it's a rapidly eroding situation, and suburbanites were never actually most of America no matter how much it feels that way. We do not have a meaningfully representative government, a problem that persists largely because the privileged have their disenfranchisement hidden from them by an unsustainable illusion of wealth. The 2008 housing crisis was the most visible of many waves of such privileged people being dumped into the bin with the rest of the working poor so that the liches which control our "political" system could become even richer. There's a reason we're getting close to the first trillionaire, and it's not good.

People don't have anything fulfilling in their life because, whether they're still in the cul de sac or out on the street where the bankers think you belong, they aren't allowed to. We have no real agency, and we all feel it, but we can't voice that discontent because we are constantly shamed into comparing ourselves to people who have it worse.

Perversely, I got many of them from *history class.* The "years of global civil unrest" I refer to are what drove FDR to tell his fellow oligarchs to chill out for a few decades. The Prussian model and its purpose is also discussed in many textbooks. The history of this system isn't hidden from people, because that isn't necessary if you just present it in a context where only weird, disaffected nerds will care about it.

I actually had an idea a while back for a model that has the potential to be less trash, but it's such a weird, pie-in-the-sky concept that the best way I have to describe it is literally a joke. That's in addition to the fact that I don't have a degree in anything and I'm an unlikeable, disabled, paralyzed wreck of a person, so I'm the wrong guy to have any idea, no matter how good it might be.

Like I said, the core of it was originally a joke: proof-of-wags. The reasoning is thus: human economics and governance have an insoluble problem in that they attempt, in their best possible forms, to make things better for humanity. Even if there weren't people who are just in it for themselves, it is impossible to come to any kind of consensus about what is better for humanity. Attempting to do so drives generally drives us to further consolidation, and thus monoculture, which is inherently fragile, and insufferable to anyone who doesn't fit. This problem is insoluble because humanity trying to decide for itself what is good for it is sort of like trying to look at the back of your own eyeball. Every possible measurement lacks the correct perspective.

I had the thought that maybe what we should do is change the target of our endeavor. Humanity should do everything it can to make the world a better place *for dogs.* What makes them happy and healthy? How do we maintain their population sustainably? How do we determine who is a good boy?

It might not be clear how this idea relates to systems of currency, but history shows that whatever is considered "money" has immense transformative effect on the shape of human striving. When it was directly tied to precious metals, we had mercantilism and isolationism, and churches went over the top with gold decoration. Gold became commonly used as a metaphor for value and even morality itself. With the modern implementation of fiat, the petrodollar, high oil demand became a defense imperative, ensuring that the waters would be irreparably muddied for any ecological or anti-war cause. This has such a profound impact on our society that Americans and Canadians who don't travel abroad have never seen anything other than car-centric city design, are deeply misinformed about the history of that design, and think that European cities with more comfortable and sustainable infrastructure are historical accidents we shouldn't try to emulate for economic reasons they don't even pretend to understand. The idea behind cryptocurrency is to change the definition of money once again, and thus free us from the petrodollar's insane, planet-burning death drive... by replacing it with a different and even more useless reason to burn the planet.

Which brings us to "proof-of-wags." Content featuring happy animals is some of the most popular stuff on the internet. It is unquestionable that people value it. They mostly don't pay for it at present, but in some cases they do, and people have leveraged animal content into careers as entertainers and merchandisers.

What if that was a form of currency? What if there were a coin that derived its value from videos of people petting dogs, or feeding them, or treating their diseases? You have a token which points to something that people want to see in the world. Why should it not have value?

Of course, this could be generalized to something people would be more likely to accept as "money." Proof-of-deeds, you might call it, and it'd be a token documenting whatever kind of good works, like building housing, or farming organically, or giving away clothes. But a) nobody listens to me anyway and b) I really like dogs, so I've thought of the idea mostly in these terms.

If you do it in that more general way, it's almost less of a currency system and more of the abandonment of currency in favor of just helping people who you saw being helpful. I think that'd be pretty great, too. But we live in capitalist realism, so nobody who lives in the empire does things like that.