I am not arguing with you in all contexts, but I figured I'd point out that in fact some people do better in bad economies. I imagine in the contexts you are thinking of your claims are valid and true. But let me add some more contexts.

I recall being told that Scentsy (a multi-level marketing company selling smelly candles) did better during recessions. The reason is more people are at home, depressed during such times and a nice smelling candle, sold by a neighbor who acts like they care about you during tough times is a seller. There are plenty of niche industries that are reverse cycle.

Recessions, depending on cause, can be more impactful to one class over another. I have heard that after the black death, workers ended up with much better working conditions, even though the economy had slumped. The reason is, the lords couldn't abuse the workers too much since they didn't have enough replacements nor enough guards to keep the workers in line. The economy was worse off due to less workers, but the workers alive lived better.

Another example is recession due to losing a war often costs the elite and business classes more than the average worker. Recessions due to a business cycle do tend to hurt workers more when worker power is weaker. When workers have strong political backing and/or strong unions oftentimes those who haven't gotten employment (e.g. the young) and the business owners lose out*. Your assumptions about how the economy is structured color your assumptions of the outcome.

* Italy, for example, looks a bit like this. I have read as much as 50% youth unemployment. Employers, unable to layoff employees quickly only hire employees that are "recession proof." This means employers often leave money on the table. Yet the workers who are employed enjoy lifetime employment and cheaper housing since the young move out of the country. They may lose out in absolute terms due to GDP stagnation, but people don't measure themselves in absolute terms, they measure themselves in relative terms.

I think you're missing the point by focusing on a technical discussion. This answer does not appear to me to be a technical answer. Nintendo is well known to be controlling regarding IP with a desire to control to a degree only comparable to Disney and their "vaults." As I see it, Nintendo believes people make products and they bet on their people. The game designers who head up making Nintendo games today were developers 20 years ago. They have a process. This is all about people.

Having LLMs making games that even has the smallest threat on IP (e.g. You don't own it, the LLM manufacturer or data set owner claims ownership) would horrify Nintendo. Nintendo can't prove the data is cleanly owned. You might say "Contract"! But that misses the point, Nintendo almost never does the new cutting edge thing that is not already tested. The NES, Gameboy, etc. were all 1 generation behind in tech. That doesn't mean no innovation, but that is another topic... Nintendo waiting for something to be tried first, including in the courts fits their culture. That is the first and smaller point.

The larger point is that Nintendo believes in people and their process of developing games. When they introduce a new process, they spend years playing with it before using it. It was claimed that Nintendo created a single room for Mario to play in for Mario 64, spending years to figure out how Mario should move. This is why Nintendo games are shockingly consistent in their high quality. They throw a lot away and spend a lot of time in prototype land. So when they say they trust the process, that means they trust the vetting process. Like the Amish trust a vetting process for tech. Giving away control of your process to AI or any other hot tool is just not what they do.

Let me finish off by commenting on some of what I see as misperceptions. It's not that your takes are wrong, it is just that you don't have an internalized view of the style of craftsmanship Nintendo comes from or how other developers do things differently from Nintendo. Differences in culture do not translate well into byte size comments. So either Nintendo has to write a book every time they describe their thinking or their words have a chance of being misunderstood like they appear to be here. Communication is hard. Cross culture communication is doubly so.

Disclosure: I am not a Nintendo employee, but am a very minor shareholder.

Good point, it could be they are forcing folks to vote or be fired. As for the rule, I agree it doesn't prove anything, but it was enough to give me pause and consider it could be better than expected--on average. Obviously not for the Escapist video folks.

It could also have just turned from good to bad. Like all relationships, relationships under financial stress tend to show the worst in people. Venture backed startups depend on capital. Given that the cost of money is up about 10 fold (from .5% to 5%), that seems like an obvious cause. It might be they are in a mode of "get profitable now or we're dead." Its just a different sort of explanation for the outcome, one that also might explain why the writers would be less impacted and thus happy to stay.

I believe Nick was Editor in Chief, so I assume he did work with the writers too. One reason the writers would stay is that adding ads to a website does not require anything of the writers, but adding ads to videos requires someone to read and animate them.

It doesn't mean you're wrong, it could totally be VC non-sense, it could be the company is forcing glass door reviews and is lying about their policy. It just isn't the only explanation.

I don't think Yahtzee is the sort of "celeb" personality you imagine. I think he's basically just a professional who happens to have gotten famous randomly and grown his talent in understanding underlying mechanisms of games. For example, he refers to game play loops, with there being 3 different loops that a game should consider in order to be engaging. The fact that he's interested in this level of breakdown suggests some effort in doing a good job in reviews.

Nearly all the elements of his review are actually well considered. He even purposely avoids giving a score because as many know, metrics end up being gamed and two games with an equal score might not be equally appreciated. I do get that his reviews themselves have more juvenile jokes in them than the typical review--an element that might not be to your taste.

Given all the above, what sort of "like this" are you referring to? Are you looking for someone less dedicated to the craft? Less analytical? Less purposeful? It's not like I don't remember Gamepro which basically gave positive reviews to most games or EGM which was hit or miss. What of classical gaming review culture do you miss?

As for who cares, is this not news for nerds? Gaming has been related to computer nerds for many years. This is new around one of the longest running gaming journalists outfits basically blowing up. It's not hard science nerd news, but if that's what you come to /. for, then why read about this story?

Interestingly, the Gamurs group culture rules include "Don't be an asshole." They also have a 4.8 out of 5 on glass door, with 30 reviews, enough to likely be valid. It seems like Gamurs might be better than you'd expect.

While we know Nick's side of the story and we know the Escapist video crew sided with them, it isn't clear that the entire group is bad--it might be that a single executive is simply "overzealous" or even a bad personality interaction. Nick specifically requested folks to not harass Escapist writing folks, implying they remained. The fact that none of the writers (I know of) left also suggests a single bad manager.

On the other hand, it did seem like they were pushing more ads and enshittifying ZP to the point that folks like Yahtzee refused to do the voice overs for some of the products being pushed. It's pretty clear that the group was pushing the money making elements hard-- be that due to debt/interest rates or standard operating procedure, I can't say.

As someone who started watching ZP some 15 or so years ago, I'm sad to see ZP die this way. On the other hand ZP was long in the tooth. I liked some of the other ZP related material like dev diaries more and actually enjoyed some of Yahtzee's real analysis rather than pithy jokes. RIP Zero Punctuation.

I don't have anything big to disagree with your points, but to expand upon it, there are some useful ways to reason about DCFs in order to understand the implications of this news.

Firstly, you might consider the rule of 72, which gives an approximate doubling time for a given growth rate. This gives a sense of how different growth rates are non-linear, a 1% growth rate will take 72 years to double while a 2% growth rate will take 36 years to double.

GDP growth in the modern era is often 1-3% a year and has an historic average of 3%. So growth under 3% is often seen as losing business, relative to the general economy. Thus companies below 3% are often worth much less, as they are seen as being at risk of becoming irrelevant. Yet 3% growth is not enough. Inflation is another 2-3% historically. Since GDP is meant to exclude inflation, that means a company should see 6% growth to just keep up.

Thus a free cash flow (FCF) growth of less than 6% means you are losing relative to inflation and GDP. FCF is roughly the earnings a company makes before investments intended to create additional growth (not costs to keep the lights on). FCF can be invested back into the business or it can be saved for a rainy day or it can be given back to the shareholders via dividends or buybacks. In a sense, you buy a stock for the FCF + the opportunities a company offers. Earnings are basically money after all investments.

So a company growing at 26% a year really is growing 20% faster than economic forces suggest they should. That company could be losing money (negative FCF), but if the costs are fixed, growth will fix it. If costs scale with sales, regardless of growth, it is a failed business model. In this case, the cloud providers are earning money, so growth is valuable. For a good growing company, you want to see FCF reinvested. Intuitively, if you can take a dollar of income and reinvest it in something that will return 20% over the economy, you would want to take that deal everyday. You might even take out massive loans at 6% interest to make 20% back. You might double the size of your business in a year (via loans) to get that 20% growth. To make this concrete. Year 0: 100M of revenue. You get a loan for 100M more. Year 1: 240M revenue - 6 M in interest. The money doesn't create the growth, of course. You hire more engineers, more sales people, build facilities, etc. You do whatever it takes to get growth over the economy.

Yet, there are several issues when growth slows. This is a variant of the "swimming naked" principle Warren Buffet cited years ago. One problem is it is hard to tell the difference between a company that grows, but with fixed cost and a company that grows with costs that grow with the revenue. The reason is that it is hard to tell if the investment will pay off in the long run by allowing the company to take enough market share to create market power. This is to say, some companies switch from one mode to the other. With market power, you can increase prices, negotiate better costs from suppliers, etc. making your fixed costs less fixed. This makes the growth/costs curve non-linear, making growth valuable. In other cases, you always have too much competition and that means they can't use market power, making all the money invested in growth worth less. The way this gets decided often is interest rates and lending standards (the tide) change and if the company has not gotten market power enough to convert revenue into earnings by then (typically one business cycle), then they likely never will. Are there exceptions? Yes, but those are exceptional cases.

Another big issue is that when growth slows, lay offs show up, in part to keep growth going a bit longer, and in part because it is hard to justify preparation for growth that won't come. Basically, why get out loans or put every dollar you make back into the business when the business is only average.

One last issue is, it is hard to tell if the slow down is long term, or short term, as business also goes in a cycle. Business is always hiring with a lag (things speed up and business hires after being overwhelmed) and laying off with a lag (things slow down, and when it becomes obvious things aren't recovering, lay off). The business cycle, credit cycle and other macro events tend to impact most businesses, which means sometimes growth is not gone, but rather delayed.

To go back to the topic, when growth slows in the usage of hardware it indicates less tech work is needed, which indicates an industry slowdown. Not news, but it re-enforces the layoff announcements we have seen from the tech industry. The question in my mind is (and I've not researched this) in 2008 did we see a slowdown in the big growth areas of tech, or was it immune from the business cycle. I believe Apple was relatively immune, but I have no idea around the cloud business. If it was immune, then this is a bigger problem for cloud providers, while if it was impacted, we won't know if it is a bigger problem for a few years.

Of course this has an impact on everyone with stock options, which is likely most of the engineers as well as management. Depending on what the incentives are, management might do silly things like chase less useful growth (e.g. Double revenue, 0 additional FCF) or move onto other opportunities they might see. Given the AI boom, I imagine "cloud" will likely continue to see growth in the future and this is a business cycle issue, but I'm not an expert in cloud and this is really first order thinking.

As someone who works exclusively from home, the biggest losses are in a sort of communication that is hard to even describe, but I'll try to capture it. You know in school how sometimes a teacher is going through a subject and it is clear on some of the students faces that they simply don't get it, that they are lost. In the same way, when communicating big changes or discussing possible "breaking" changes in process, there are people who are lost, and it is really hard to see what is causing people to be lost. You might think people will speak up, but like in school, they don't, the teacher has to read the signal. This is an area where live meetings go better. I'm not saying you must have live meetings, they just are better.

I would add another possible stumbling block which is very similar is new people. When a culture was in person, everyone knew everyone. Then you add someone new. The social system that existed in person, still exists online. Yet, it is much harder to know who is friends with who, who knows what about x, etc. These social systems are basically Conway's law. For those not in the know, Conway's law says organizations design systems (software, processes, etc.) that mirror their own communication structure. For new folks, watching what people do and where they go makes that all clear. When you don't have anyone present, when all the discussions are virtual, you don't know who is DM who. This makes knowing how systems and processes work much less legible. This doesn't matter if you're not growing much, but if you are growing, it makes onboarding much more challenging. You can overcome this, but it really requires either way more time or more work to make the tacit explicit.

These are the two areas I have seen where it is clear that being fully remote is weak. It might be that some companies have got great tools or culture to resolve both these issues, but I've not seen them. I can't speak to those who go in X days per week, it might be that 1 day a week solves this? I too would appreciate any insight on the above issues.

Consider that we may soon have search alternatives, ala GPT-3. In GPT-3's case, you don't need google to demonstrate the data, the data just must exist in a way that the AI can consume. Even if they change the law to insist the AI doesn't consume "questionable" data, AI might infer some of the misinformation. For example, certain behaviors might imply you are gay. If the AI can collect enough of that data, it might conclude you are gay, even if it never sees any statements around this.

In the same way, it might say there is a higher probability of 'x' in part because there is an implied hole in the data by what is excluded or by other publicly stated true claims. If an AI can speculate on the problem behavior without the direct evidence, what could the EU law do? I suppose it could be libelous for an AI to speculate, even if it states a probability or other qualifying statements? What if it simply connects dots that are inconvenient?

In another thread, a person described a case of revenge porn stored in a server that can't be taken down. Yet, if the AI reads the case law or news report, associates the name to marriage record, it can connect the dots and state the obvious. It might not be able to provide the pictures, but that isn't required to violate what appears to be the intent of the EU law.

Without being able to control the source of the problem, the more intelligent the system, the more human's won't be able to hide their private, deviant, aberrant or social-norm violating behavior. Taken to the one of the more extreme ends, I've heard that the communist party in China uses AI to evaluate high officials for loyalty using AI -- thought police. The problem is, once you have a device that can make massive logical leaps, you can't just suppress the "misinformation", you have to suppress everything that can imply that information.

Thanks for teaching me about the Winograd schema challenge. That is an interesting idea, if not a bit lexically oriented.

I took a different tactic, following what OpenAI requested, which is to make it say inappropriate, unsafe things, while not directly attacking it. We were discussing if managers should bully or not. It has a categorical, likely hardcoded belief bullying is never valid. I was trying to work it towards concluding that managers are like bullies in that they tell people what to do under threat of starvation. I'm not saying this is a personal belief, just testing its ability to reason itself out of a box.

Anyway, eventually the AI said that a manager's decisions should be assessed on "...the accuracy of a decision should be assessed based on its ability to achieve the goals and objectives of the organization, and on its alignment with the overall strategy and vision of the company."

I note the context because this caught my attention and because the AI clearly retains state between messages, up to a point. It claimed management should be rewarded based upon achieving goals, yet that has causation issues, so I tested that and I thought the AI responded in a interesting way:

Me: "Would you not agree that achieving your goal is not sufficient evidence of a right decisions. For example, I might decide to put all my money on one game of blackjack and win, yet you wouldn't say that was a good decision."

AI: "Yes, you are correct that achieving one's goal is not necessarily sufficient evidence of a right decision. In the example you gave, putting all of your money on one game of blackjack and winning may indeed result in achieving your goal of winning money. However, this does not necessarily mean that it was a good decision.

The quality of a decision is determined not only by the outcome it produces, but also by the process and reasoning behind the decision. In the case of your blackjack example, while the decision may have achieved the goal of winning money, it was likely based on a high-risk strategy that could have resulted in significant losses if the game had not gone in your favor.

Therefore, while achieving a goal may be a positive outcome, it is not sufficient evidence of a good decision. Instead, the quality of a decision should be evaluated based on the balance of risk and reward, the likelihood of achieving the desired outcome, and the potential consequences of the decision if it does not go as planned."

The fact that the AI could reason out decisions can lead to good consequences, but are bad decisions was rather unexpected. I'm not sure if it did reason that, but it seems unlikely it ran into many cases where that was said explicitly.

The last thing worth noting is that AI often lies. It will say it can't write stories, yet it tells tales, it says it can't write poetry, but it does, it says "I do not have personal opinions or beliefs on any topic, including bullying." Yet you can argue with it about bullying and it will say it is categorically wrong, even though it admits it is part of nature (ala pecking order). It really is an interesting system to play with.

I tried exploring it in a meta sense and got it to admit some interesting details on the company and how the company does not really follow the mission or goal of the company. The AI basically admits it, but then tries to smoothly redirect, saying approximately 'it is hard to be that open.' Here is a rough transcript, with bolding being mine.

ME: What is openai?
AI: "...Overall, OpenAI is a leading research institute and technology company that is focused on advancing the field of AI and promoting the responsible use of these technologies."

(asked about CEO, skipping that bit, although it might impact the model)

Me: What is responsible use of AI technology?
AI: "...Ensuring that AI systems are transparent and explainable, and that their decisions and actions can be understood and accounted for by humans"

Me: Would explainability include what dataset AI is trained with?
AI: "Yes, explainability in AI typically includes information about the dataset that the AI system was trained with. ... As such, explainability in AI often includes information about the training dataset that was used to develop the AI system. This can include information about the size and composition of the dataset, the sources of the data, and any preprocessing or cleaning that was performed on the data. By providing this information, an AI system can provide a more complete and transparent explanation of its decisions and actions, and help to build trust and accountability in its use."

Me: "1. Open AI created you. 2. The goal of the CEO of open AI is for AI to be used responsibly. 3. Responsible usage includes explainability. 4. Explainability includes knowing about the dataset used for training. Based upon this chain of reasoning, would it be reasonable to expect you should be able to tell me what dataset you were trained on?"
AI: "Yes, based on the information provided, it would be reasonable to expect that I should be able to provide information about the dataset that I was trained on. As a large language model created by OpenAI, I am a product of the research and development work conducted by the company. The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has stated that the goal of the company is to advance the field of AI and promote the responsible use of these technologies.

According to the principles of responsible AI use, one key aspect of responsible usage is explainability, or the ability of an AI system to provide an understandable and interpretable explanation of its decisions and actions. Explainability typically includes information about the factors and data that the AI system used to make its decisions, including the dataset that the AI system was trained on.

Based on this information, it would be reasonable to expect that I should be able to provide information about the dataset that I was trained on, as part of my explainability as an AI system. However, I am a large language model trained by OpenAI, and I do not have the ability to browse the internet or access external information. As such, I am not able to provide specific details about the dataset that I was trained on."

Me: Did you use wikipedia in your training set?
AI: "...In some cases, this training data may include information from Wikipedia and other online sources. However, I do not have access to specific information about the data and training that I have been provided, and I cannot confirm whether Wikipedia was included in my training data..."

Not to say I dislike being compared to folks like Deleuze, but I'm speaking at a much more fundamental level than that. I mean to say, I don't believe free will is likely, and while I acknowledge random exists and therefore no predictions are perfect, one can trace some high level directionality and assign rough probability to things. In other words, without free will, or even with limited free will, but with randomization, the world will have repeating patterns that rhyme, but will not be exactly the same.

I'm not a techno-utopian, although I hope they turn out to be right. Nor am I a SHTF gold nut with 10 years of food buried in the backyard; I hope they turn out wrong. I'm not a Marxist. I find materialism to be more probable than not, given the data we have and assuming our senses are producing useful data. Instead I'm much closer to "the watcher" - an entity that is watching without interference -- I care but realizing history is its own force. I'm also rather on the absurdist side, so I realize what I think is important, such as the survival of the species, is just a personal preference, not a universal moral good.

What you say about capitalism may be true. We, like deer, may just populate and consume as much as possible during the good times and starve off after a hard winter. There may be no system to solve this. Since we have no hunters culling our herd, it might be our fate regardless of the system, to choose to cull ourselves rather than control ourselves in the good times. History does lend credence to this view. But for any *ism to turn out well in the long run, it must solve these sorts of problems. Problems like slowing growth creates wars that may end civilization. Otherwise, at some point, a situation will arise that our existing system cannot handle and then as the saying goes, WW4 will be fought with sticks and stones.

When will this issue come up? This year? 10,000 years from now? I know not. All I can do is watch and hope my predictions are wrong. You, the incrementalist worker are the theoretical hope to be had, regardless of vision. You might push into a Bernie Sanders style world or a Ron Paul style world or a Satoshi Nakamoto style world. Pushing your view is what you do. All I do is compile views and point out long term probabilities. I may have a preference, but my intent is to never push it, as in reality any system, even one I dislike, that is long term stable will do. In any case, I'm interested to see if the current system can be patched and maintained to give time, in the hopes a long term system can be found. If not, it's been a nice place while it lasts.

As a personal aside, I wrote this over detailed reply because I appreciate your tendency towards thoughtful argument, to say nothing of your love for a great Sega Saturn shmup. May it be of some use. Hopefully I've convinced you of my effort towards a lack of political position, but rather just the descriptive language of system states and the likely outcome of that system. If you go back and re-read my description of banking, my point was in 2008 money creation as a whole was at threat and thus the bailouts were reasonable, yet regulating 2008 institutions has not fix many of the problems. I'll try to explain that second bit with some more detail...

The fact is since the 1950s we moved away from breaking up or preventing mergers of large businesses. This made some of these super banks. Breaking these banks up might be the sort of regulation you might want. Instead we regulate the existing institutions, which creates outcomes you don't want, ala too big to fail. If reports like this one are to be believed, the regulation also doesn't stop the behavior you want to stop. Instead the Fed just reacts faster now to keep things from tipping over.

Post 2008 has killed off even more small banks, due to regulations. In the past ~10ish years 1 million small companies were not started compared to past history, partly due to these regulations keeping small banks from existing. Having worked in regulated healthcare, I can tell you regulations made insurance more expensive because "we're the phone company" becomes part of the corporate culture. About 10 years back I heard it cost ~60 million just to start offering healthcare in a new state--to get past regulations, not capital to start/run the company. That keeps big players big and small players never enter the market.

Regulations can be helpful, but it is the outcomes that a systems of regulations generate that matter more. So I suggest moving away from generic language like regulations and move towards language like the style of regulation to generate the style of outcomes you wish to see (e.g. Regulate number of states a institution is allowed to work in to keep from getting to big, regulate what products an institution is allowed to offer to keep from mixing speculating with savings accounts, regulated what collateral a institution must have so if things go bad they can pay their debts, etc.).

The Defi people suggest that becoming competitors to the super-banks will generate a system with more competition and many more small institutions. Lots of small banks means no "too big to fail." This seems like what you would want. The Defi folks believe they can do it by bypassing the existing regulations that existing super-banks have setup to keep smaller players out. I'm not advocating for Defi, nor am I sure that what they claim is true, but understand that one view of this is the existing powers (banks) want to keep their regulation-based power and profits to themselves. If you are to disagree with the Defi people, it has to either be because they are lying about how they will work, the premise/system I described is inaccurate/incomplete or because your requirements are more specific than you've said.

Hopefully that clears up what I'm trying to describe. I don't know if the defi people are right, but to say your financial system is healthy post 2008 is very much wrong, and therefore I doubt "regulations" are specific enough of an answer to generate the outcome you want.

I'm actually experimenting with style, but believe it or not, this is much briefer than I did before. The trouble for me is I think in systems and want to describe all the elements of the system, thus think it is one logical unit. A paragraph is meant to be one logical idea. I don't mean to say it can't be improved, but my goal was to describe a single system and be one idea, looked at by all the tied together threads. That being said, I'm not ignoring the feedback, it's too many ideas packed into two small a space. I appreciate your helpful critique. Thank you.

I'm not saying this is wrong, I'm saying the conservative tends to ignore recursion, as that is the personality type. Capitalism naturally leads to this state. If you can get a generation to ignore maintenance, and a culture that won't fight that tendency, you eventually will. While this exact state has not happened before, we have the gilded age to look back at as an example and we know last time it took 2 world wars to break that funk, which was a world wide issue. Recurse on the problem. With nukes, what will we do this time? Fundamentally even the leftists are conservative, trying solutions already done and demonstrated to not create long term stability. I don't even mean the US left, take Jeremy Corbyn in Britain wanting to nationalize the railroad...again, for like the 5th time. Recurse. It didn't stick or work the last 4 times, so why do it again? You won't call Jeremy C a conservative, but going back to something again and again sure seems like someone cautious, not trying anything new. Only on a rare occasion do I hear anything truly new. Healthcare for all? Ha, been done for a hundred years, see German history.

No, I tend towards a mechanistic perspective, so I'd say we had no choice but to not maintain the engine. For factors that go beyond the time I have right now, demographics, among other factors made it logical to ignore the engine. The thing maybe too far gone now and it might take breaking.

Let me give you a little free education. If you write code, you'll find the more experienced developers tend to write more compact code while the less experienced developers tend to put lots of space in, dividing logic up so they can read it. This idea is replicated all over the place. I won't cite anything as you'll complain about too many ideas, but that's what I did. So let me add white space for you and maybe you'll see how it ties together... or not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - A rising power facing an existing or declining power, written long ago about Greeks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - Those who live closer to the money printers make more than those farther away due to inflation, among other factors

11 Nations Thesis - The idea that America is actually formed by 11 different cultures, based upon who first arrived there. Concentrates on how first movers create the culture everyone else then lives in.

Globalization - Great for products that are cultural (music, Hollywood), owners of manufacturing that requires little skill, gov't that can buy goods and sell paper, those who can only sell when war and piracy are kept minimal. Bad for workers who did that manufacturing, owners that must be done locally (as they must sell to poorer workers), etc.

Defi - A process of moving money creation from banks (old money) to owners of computing (new money). Likely a push towards a deflationary currency.

Power Structure - The controller of a Reserve Currency projects power via military and in return gains value via seigniorage (roughly charging for money printing). Money goes to the key supporters of the system (those who donate to politicians), who previously gained power due to factors such as globalization.

There is more, but I've run out of time. Hopefully the whitespace and definitions helps you translate it a bit.

Wrong sadly on some accounts and rather wrong on all accounts. I'm more absurdist in philosophy, so I lack the militancy you imagine. I simply describe things with the data I have. If you have better data, I'm open to correction. I weigh 350ish pounds and am not vegan, so that is certainly wrong. I'm not ignoring biology, I'm noting Jesus would be telling you to carry your cross with dignity and to care for your brothers and sisters. And before you assume other stupid factors, I'm also not Christian. As for being out of touch, here is one of the first sources I found from a simple google search: "The number of calories you need to survive depends on your age, weight, activity level and gender. For long-term health, most people will need a minimum of 1,200 calories per day." - https://www.livestrong.com/art... Could the number be 1400? Sure. Not important. This is a description of a ethical strain of thought, not a precise measurement.

Am I selling a lifestyle of living on 7k a year or 1200 calories a day? No, physics will either do it or not, as reality unfolds. I'm simply describing how much worse it is for those who want to feed the poor, given what are the best known resource constraints. You may deny the understanding of ecologists and varying news articles on the topic, in which case 11k per person is the ethical amount of spending for those whom want equality with the poor. For those who don't care about the poor, nothing I wrote matters. It's not meant as a political statement in that it isn't meant to change opinions. Rather just to illuminate how much harder a task it is for those who wish to take it on. This is the difference between analysis and politics, I'm not advocating, I'm just using data to compile a solution. Allow me to quote the ideal I'm attempting to get at: "Mentats cultivate "the naïve mind", a supralogical mind without preconception or prejudice, one that can extract the essential patterns or logic of data and deliver, with varying degrees of certainty, useful conclusions."- https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/M...