Comment Re:...because... (Score 1) 54
Touche!
Touche!
>But suffering is suffering, just as dying is dying.
It really isn't. Chronic back pain is suffering, so is horrible tooth pain, and so is loss of a parent or a child. All cause the reaction known as suffering that requires frontal lobe (fun fact: fish cannot suffer because they lack that). But at different intensities, durations and types. Same to death. Getting shot in the head by a high power rifle is a very different death from death from thirst.
And this isn't torture. This is suffering. Torture is intentional. There's no intent on nature for inflicting suffering. It has none. The sole thing nature does is non-stop selection of those that get to pass into the future from those that don't. We call it evolution. This is honestly one of the most horrifying realisations a human can arrive at. That there is no "grand will" behind the universe, no grand plan. It doesn't care. It's incapable of it. It just is. Most of the human starvation throughout history for example wasn't intentional. Crops just fail, hunts failed, fire died, and so on. It's why we have so many delineated stages of going from satiation to hunger to hunger pains, to hunger numbness, to early starvation, to starvation, to late stage starvation to death. Each stage having distinctly different physiological expression in humans. Because that was a norm, and those that couldn't perform optimally in each stage didn't get to pass into the future and have their genetic inheritance be with us at this time.
>We need to ensure that water, food, and shelter are available at very low cost to every individual on this planet. And yes, there should be a cost since there is a cost to provide it. The cost should allow for NO PROFIT.
This was attempted. Result has been biggest mass starvation events humanity has ever seen. Consistently. Inability to gain status and wealth demotivates people so totally, that the only solution we know to combat this is the most brutal forms of slavery. The kind we do to mine and plantation slaves. Where there's extreme enforcement cost, with a lot of overseers, because it doesn't work otherwise.
Between Holodomor, Mao's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, and several other slightly smaller famines, "no profit" model of combatting starvation has caused more starvation deaths in last two centuries than any other factor. "But this didn't happen recently" is the usual attempt of the debunk from people as unaware of reality as you. Look up at DPRK starvation event of the 1990s. Another case of system built to ensure that no profit is allowed. Another case of mass starvation and millions of deaths. Until for profit people were allowed to get aid through.
That's the reality. When we stopped playing around with Marxist dogma about oppressors and oppressed, and instead allowed for profit and status motives to be fully applied, for the first time in human history we solved starvation. It doesn't exist any more outside politically induced one (people shooting at those delivering food). We have been so wildly successful with capitalistic solution to starvation that all the NGOs created to combat global hunger had to reorient to combat "food insecurity". That is, they're trying to make people like me eat breakfast every day, rather than skipping it. I'm not even joking, that is what they have to do now that the only starvation there is is in the active war zones.
Turns out that nothing motivates people to generate far more resources than would be otherwise available that profit motive. And then we dump the massive oversupply on anyone who would take them, so that prices stay sustainable for long term production everywhere. Remember how everyone was screaming that Ukrainian grain going offline would cause mass starvation across Africa? Did you notice Africa is still obese?
That's what profit motive and capitalist system does. Insane surpluses that can shift across the world with demand. Because people are highly motivated to do so at every level of the production chain. There's money to be made. Status to be gained. Greater access to hookers and blow.
And yet, you denounce the system that beat starvation, and insist that we must go back to the system that caused most starvation in last two centuries. In the name of ensuring there's no starvation again. This is utterly counterproductive, and all but certain to get starvation to come back. We solved the starvation. Don't destroy the solution and make it come back. We really don't need another Malawi, because your types feel that help should be altruistic only, because people just should be better. People won't be better, because people are people and will remain people. The mythos of "socially constructed human" is just as much of a myth today as it was when gnostics invented it as a solution to the evil God that humans must destroy to return world into the inherent state of good many millenia ago. Reality just doesn't bend that way.
But it's an answer.
Reddit is a giant meme anyway, so why not?
If you pay some care to the line of discussion, you'll note that this consideration is addressed, alongside an example of a nation that does house its space program away from its mainland.
As I noted in reply to another of your posts, position of strength often results in acts of stupidity. When this happens on a strategic level, position of strength quickly evaporates.
Boeing fusing with McDonnel Douglas makes for a good case why you shouldn't mix the good with the bad in strategic sector unless you're willing to really slash and burn the bad parts before and during the fusion.
How's that Baghdad Green Zone going?
What about Kabul?
I hear Al-Tanf is positively cooking this time of year.
Making bad strategic decisions has been a thing of people who believe like you that being militarily strong means making really stupid strategic decisions doesn't get punished. But decisions on things like nuclear strategy and space strategy are made by people who look less like you and more like the old bearded Silent Generation types that actually understand how the world works, and were fucking horrified at Boomer stupidity of the kind you're demonstrating.
More like a CCP apparatchik caught moving corrupt money. I still remember the hilarious case when Chinese authorities grabbed one of them before he could move it out, so much cash at home they had to use trucks to move it out. Literally tons upon tons of cash in weight.
This is almost certainly same shit. Corrupt Chinese money trying to get the fuck out of PRC using mules like this woman. They get nabbed occasionally, but most of it gets past the authorities.
Stories of "Chinese nationals showing up with suitcase of cash to buy your house" has been a thing in a lot of nations with strong rule of law and protection of property. Chinese upper class have been running scared shitless that anti-corruption campaign gets to each of them, and have been trying to get the money out for close to a decade in increasingly weird and desperate ways. And a few years ago when Hong Kong got finally taken over by PRC, most of the insurance scams and other similar HK paths to get money out dried up, so they moved up to bitcoin.
They also don't want to be seen as monopolizing the field. That invites a lot of extra scrutiny they just don't need.
So talking in context of reflective cloud cover, and then pretending that volcanoes are totally all about CO2 emissions and not reflective and absorptive cloud cover when it comes to significant events.
Then you follow with a lot of unnecessary technobabble which is trying to obfuscate the claim of "clouds from ship don't cover globally, so they can't have significant global effect on global warming", while the context is not global warming as a whole, but tiny aspect of it that is heating of the surface of the oceans.
11/10 trolling. I award you full points, and a wizard's hat. For being fully anti-scientific while using lots of big words.
This only makes sense if you interpret "protection" as "immunity".
I've no idea why you would interpret it that way.
I suspect Ts will be utterly fucked by the end of this chain of events. Pendulum will swing the other way, and lesbians who used to think they hate men in general discovered that they actually hate men who try to get them to suck their dicks because "man transitioned to a woman, suck that girl dick you bigot" way more.
It's been hilarious to watch the gay dating apps meltdown, after under the pressure from T activists allowed you to search specifically for Ts, but disallow to exclude them from your search.
Because LLM can moderate and censor nearly infinite amount of things, as opposed to algorithms that require constant human supervision. That's actually one of the main selling points of LLM right now.
They just need to deprioritise censoring european heterosexual people existing in any positive context, and prioritise censoring spam in context of their store.
I address this point here:
Most of us who had the distinct pleasure of experiencing both life within and outside the developed nations tend to develop an ability to quickly tell apart those that have genuinely come close to something that resembles the bottom of human existence, because we had that in places like Malawi of 2000s, or have in parts of Ethiopia and some parts of Syria today. And those that came to the bottom as far as Western civilization will allow in developed nations, which is closer to average to above average existence in those nations.
And we view it as a form of stolen valor when latter types claim they have a right to complain about horrors of the former. I'm not even American. I live in a much, much better country than America, because that's my native country. It's a massive privilege, earned through the blood and sweat of my ancestors, who also lived in much worse conditions than what you describe as bottom less than a century ago.
But my parents spent their lives building power plants across the planet. In part to give people who live far closer to what you describe as bottom, and see it as untold luxury an opportunity to rise up. Because cheap, always on power is a massive luxury that allows for incredible opportunities for uplifting from extreme poverty. I still remember how local power plant builders lived for years on plant sites. I still remember the queues to be one of those builders, because that was a massive improvement on how they lived otherwise. All of these people would have killed to get to live what you see as "bottom". I'm quite certain that some have, because intertribal competition was always bloody in some parts of Africa and Asia. The gruel they ate as a norm would have made you vomit, even when going hungry for a week. Our delicate Western microbiomes built on things like chain store burgers with their standards of cleanliness aren't meant for that shit. The diarrhea is long and epic and will leave one crippled for a good portion of a week. Ask me how I know.
My point isn't to piss you off, just like I don't think it was your point to piss me off. My point is to try to get to through to the people living in developed nations that what we see here as "bottom" isn't even close. It's so elevated by excellence of our societies that this "bottom" is seen as a luxury across much of the world even today. Did it make you a better man to go through that, compared to an average Western nepobaby who thinks that people telling her "no" are aggressors against her? Almost certainly, because understanding how fall people can fall calibrates your understanding of the world and makes you a much happier person in general.
But people like you, who only saw how it works in developed world, you still often keep that entitlement to fairness. You still think that world should be fair and think it insulting when people point out to you that it inherently isn't. One of the formative experiences you had is that it was unfair that the social worker was there to help someone who's by his record a much worse as a person than you. Whereas those like myself who have seen what it's like much closer to the bottom do not have that illusion. World is not fair. It's not fair to the microbe that gets killed by your immune system. It's not fair to the chick being kicked out of the nest by a cuckoo. It's not fair to a child in Malawi in 2000s, who gets hit with a starvation event and fails to have proper brain development, resulting in being one of those countless adult men and women who just sit all day, staring into nothingness with that dead stare that burns you as an intelligent person when you see it. Until they are stimulated by environment to do something for a short while. And then reset to that dead stare again. Because there's not an intact human intellect there. That was killed by the starvation event. There's merely a shattered remains of one, trapped in that starvation damaged brain. And there are millions of them. And they all have that same stare.
That is what starvation during youth does to people. You don't unsee that once you've seen that. That's not a foot infection that causes discoloration that really hurts for a long time, but eventually goes away. It's not hunger pains, after which a person can still complain about HFCS or sugar as bad rather than a bloody miracle of human technology, a pinnacle of human achievement in eternal quest for satiation of hunger. It's something far, far worse.
And while that is pretty close to bottom of human existence, there's a whole lot between that which you see as bottom as you've reached it, and something that actually resembles that bottom. A good example is places like rural South and South East Asia, where our decadent "anti sex trafficking charities" grab prostitutes and send them back home, only to find them back as soon as they can walk the distance. Because being a sex slave in a city is a way better existence than what they would have in their village. Because like you they think that sex slavery in an awful city while sharing a room with five others and being routinely beaten by pimps and always hungry and likely addicted to drugs is about the bottom of human existence. They genuinely believe that they're doing good. After all, they're saving them from existence that is worse than what you described as your lived experience. And are utterly confused to find the boys and girls they try to return again do their best to run away from them before they're returned to their village and get back on the streets. Because to those boys and girls, that's a massive uplift in their existence that saves them from the actual hell that is their domestic life at home.
This is why work to create conditions for people to uplift themselves is so important. This is why I rage at the Western Greens who block cheap power projects in developing nations. They do not understand how deep human misery goes, and how little chance at opportunity most people need to actually get themselves out of it. For the same reasons you don't. Your "worst" is "decadent West at its worst", when its worst is better than normal existence in many places, much less a worst existence there. And even that is not the bottom of where humanity will fall without a functional civilization. It's probably close, but it goes lower.
The world is not fair. To anyone. There is no accusation here, nor is there any malice. It just is. This is why Christianity worked so well for pre-industrial societies allowing them to be the only ones to emerge into industrial age. It pushes acceptance of this simple fact, even if it masks it with promises of Paradise should you accept it. It's not that I don't see misery around me. It's that I am aware of misery well beyond that what I see. And I accept it as a norm, because it's been a norm long before I was born, it will be a norm for as long as I lived, and it will be as long as I live and well beyond. I do what I reasonably can to alleviate it, but I don't have the resentment for it that you have, because I don't see myself as we Westerners often do, Nietzschean Supermen who replaced God. Because I have seen something that actually resembles the bottom of human experience and I've been humbled by the magnitude of it and my utter insignificance before it. And that contrasted with the decadence of my everyday existence at home burned most of that emotion out of me. I'm at the final stage of grief on that one, unlike you.
And this is a pretty common phenomenon among the people like myself, who have seen both ends of the coin. You'll find a lot of it among the people who did long term work in aid organisations as actual volunteers for example (rather than "volunteers" who made a career out of the NGO side of it, the vocal ones that get the attention). We accept the life as it is, and view those who think that they've seen something resembling bottom in developed nations with sadness mixed with scorn. Because your formative experience of the worst there is... is so good that many people we got to interact with would have killed to have that much.
And yet you dare to accuse the very thing that ended horror shows like Malawi starvation for not working well. You fucking dare! You who experienced some, thinks he's a know-it-all because of it and thinking you have the right to rain judgement upon the very system that allowed for your bottom tier experience to be so good, that there are hundreds of millions in the world even today risking their lives to get a shot at it.
Your suffering taught you much, but it failed to teach you the most important lesson of all. Humility. And because you think you've seen the worst it can be, you're willing to damage the very system that ensured that you're not one of those dead-eyed Malawi adults and that there is unlikely to be millions of them in any point in near future as it was in the past. Who've actually lived through what you think you lived through, the supposed bottom of human existence, when you haven't come even close. You don't even grasp what they lived through as a potential possibility.
I'll never forget that stare on so many of those people, all in one place. It truly burns your soul when you see it, and leaves a permanent mark on it. Be thankful that you don't have it. I am. Every day when I get up and everything around me just works. Capitalism, for all its flaws, is truly by far the greatest system we have ever invented, for it ensured that there will be less and less people with that stare because of overabundance it produces.
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.