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4 days agoI got one just in June. I’ve been using it for months and have never created an account. I only connect it via USB and use it to read works from Anas Archive.
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Cake day: September 6th, 2024
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1·4 days agoPolicy has nothing to do with politics in the historical era you live in. Accept this if you want to understand your world.
Abandon logic. Think emotion. You will not succeed when viewing politics through the lens of logic and reason. Voters no longer trust polished candidates with well-reasoned and detailed policy proposals. It’s so easy to write that crap with corporate consultants and then ignore it as soon as the polician wins.
Aside from the proud and overt racists, people don’t vote for right wing parties based on policy analysis. Maybe only 5% of the voters actually vote this way. You probably don’t vote this way. Very few voters ignore party and select candidates based on a detail analysis of their policy proposals. Most vote based on either party affiliation or vibes/emotion.
Voting for right wing populist parties is an act of rage, the political equivalent of flipping the table over. Voters have come to resent the empty promises of neoliberals, and at this point they deliberately vote for whichever crazy candidate will piss off the respectable upper crust of society the most.
Stop analyzing politics through logic, reason, and who has the objectively best policies. In the current environment, policies are seen as worthless. What matters are vibes and emotions.
When you tell someone voting for a right wing populist, “but this guy supports policies that will hurt you!” They think, “I’ve voted for the logical and right choice my entire life. I’ve voted based on policies again and again. I’ve been betrayed again and again. At this point I’m just going to vote for whoever seems to most anger the media, the corporate owned, intellectuals, and all other social elites.”
This is also why there was a lot of overlap between Trump and Mamdani voters. A fair number of voters will at this point just vote for anyone who seems to most anger the corporate media.
AKA, the Internet matured and became corporate like every other form of media before it.
We could create forums that can only be logged on to using a desktop browser. Sure, some mobile users with basic tech savvy could install some spoofer that still let them access the site. But that’s still mission accomplished. You’re still requiring some technical competence.
But for the lazy:
spoiler
The novel explores the effects of mass automation on society. And unlike some sci fi novel set in a far distant future, it’s set in the present. This isn’t the Bulterian Jihad a thousand years in the future. It’s set in the here and now in our world.
In Manna, the machines don’t rise up and take over the world. Paperclip maximizers don’t run out of control and kill everyone. AI alignment isn’t even a problem considered in the novel. The novel explores the societal effects of the tech working completely as designed.
Automation gets deployed more and more. What jobs remain become increasingly dehumanized. Increasingly jobs are just literally being a meat robot for the computer. When working at a place like McDonalds, you put on a headset. The restaurant’s computer system tracks you through the day, micromanaging your time down to the second. It tracks every minor work action you perform. This starts in restaurants and customer service, but ultimately grows out from there to nearly all wage and salary jobs. This novel was written in the 2000s, but it predicted a lot of the algorithmic debasement we’ve seen with companies like Uber, Lyft, and Amazon and the slopification of jobs such as programming. Jobs also become more and more scarce, and the credit rating system becomes ever more onerous and interconnected. Pretty soon almost every employer is sharing the same employment records. If you get fired too many times, the central system blackballs you and you become unemployable.
This mass automation results in the vast majority of the population of the US being rendered destitute. Either to avoid rebellion or out of some limited sense of morals, the ownership class comes up with a solution. We don’t get UBI. We get fully automated
luxurycommunism.The same automation that impoverished the populace also makes it very cheap to construct mass-produced buildings. The federal government scoops up vast swathes of empty land in places like Western Kansas and the Nevada desert. This is where the surplus population is warehoused. The government uses automated construction to build giant high rise complexes hundreds of miles from any work opportunities or population centers. They’re basically giant dorms in the middle of nowhere. You have a simple space with a bed, desk, and entertainment. You live with a roommate. You eat in a communal cafeteria. The buildings are maintained, the interiors cleaned, and the food all prepared through automated systems. These aren’t prisons per say. The people in them aren’t being punished. They’re simply being stored somewhere where they won’t bother the wealthy. Imagine a vast building the size of a city’s downtown and many stories tall. A single building capable of housing millions in a vast windowless labyrinth. This is the reality for most of the population. You get a roof over your head, a bed to sleep in, a nutritionally sufficient diet and unlimited access to tv, video games, etc. Bread and circuses on a mass scale.
And moving to one of these facilities is not voluntary. If you lose your job, you have a short window to find another, demonstrate some other source of income or independent wealth, or be ticketed and arrested for vagrancy. The old vagrancy laws are brought back in force, and the vast majority of the population ends up being dumped into these facilities.
Once there, escape is nearly impossible. There are no walls or armed guards. But the only real way out is to have someone on the outside come and sign paperwork saying they’re willing to support you financially. You’re allowed to walk out the door and meander the trails around the buildings. But if you wander too far, a sentry robot comes up and starts giving you vague warnings about it being dangerous to go further. Keep going and you’ll find yourself knocked out by a tranquilizer dart and wake up back in your dorm room. And there’s no real way to apply for work. The few people with jobs on offer aren’t looking for people trapped in these facilities. Unless you have some caring financially independent relative willing to take you in, you’re trapped in the government dorms forever.
The novel describes how this was a deliberate choice to manage the excess population. The characters mention that the facilities are built tightly enough and isolated enough that if the destitute in these complexes ever rose up in rebellion, the government could just drop a couple of hydrogen bombs on them. They could completely eliminate the excess population in an hour with no collateral damage to anything else. Individual dorms are sex-segregated, and those couples that do still manage to form report that any attempts at having children are unsuccessful. They conclude that birth control drugs must be in the food or water.
In Manna, automation finally forces the US to build a proper welfare state. But automation also makes it possible to do so cheaply. And the US has never been known for its compassionate treatment of the destitute. The government doesn’t leave everyone to starve. It just warehouses everyone, keeps them from reproducing, and lets the problem solve itself in time. You never have to fear physical deprivation. You will not starve or die of exposure. But you lose absolutely any bit of control or agency over your own life. The government isn’t supporting you. It’s storing you somewhere out of the way where you can’t cause any trouble.
It’s not 1960 anymore. Sure, early on the EU (well its predecessors) were just France and Germany. But today? The combined population of Germany and France is 150 million. The EU population is 450 million. The most populace country, Germany, represents just 19% of the EU’s total population.
For a comparison, in the US, California represents about 12% of the total population, so not that different. And historically, when the US was founded, Virginia contained about 19% of the total US population.
The EU has grown immensely, but its governmental structure reflects an earlier era. Veto powers made sense when everything in the EU other then Germany and France was a rounding error. But the EU has grown so much that France and Germany now occupy a similar position to any number of most-populated states and provinces in countries around the world. One province having 19% of the population is not unusual. Hell, the largest German state has 21% of the German population, and they don’t run an internal veto system.
The veto system made sense when Germany and France truly controlled the EU and dominated its population. But as the block has grown, these countries now look more like the most populated provinces or states you find in every country. And their relative influence will only decline further as the EU continues to expand. The EU has grown and matured, and it’s time for its government to do so as well.
It’s called making an allusion or reference. Summaries are easy enough to look up if you don’t want to put in the time to read the whole thing. But honestly, it’s something anyone should read. It’s one of the few novels I’ve read that I can truly describe as prophetic.
If you want to see how free housing could be terrifying, read Manna by the late great Marshall Brain.
Either way there’s some odd moral implications…
Aka, it’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!
The shop keeper is just prejudiced. Charlie’s four grandparents are in a long-term polycule together. Charlie is the result of an insane two-generation long plan to get all members of the polycule to have a single genetic child together. The polycule has been completely open to the whole town about this plan, and everyone knows it.
The shopkeeper isn’t prejudiced against the poor. He just has sexual hangups. And he’s projecting his bigotry onto an innocent young child that had no choice but to be part of this whole situation.
If you’re a beaver, you just know!
Probably just hoping random people show up at his door at 2 AM with a basket of laundry.
2·22 days agoI mean, it is literally the Land of the Caliph.
1·25 days agoExactly. People bought condos or signed leases with the agreement that the elevator costs would be shared. Now folks want to renege on that agreement after-the-fact. It’s a classic bait-and-switch.
Do you know the definition of a bait and switch?
It’s still morally wrong even in condo situations. In fact, it’s even more unethical, as it’s a lot harder to walk away from an owned condo than an apartment lease.
Democracy is not a substitute for morality. If a slight majority votes to murder everyone in a minority, that does not make it ethical.
Imagine a 5 story condo building. Everyone bought units expecting elevators to be free to use. The agreement from the beginning was that maintenance would be shared among all owners. Every condo owner bought their unit agreeing to this deal.
Then after some time some dingbat proposes making the elevator pay-to-use. The people on the ground floor don’t need elevators, so they vote in favor of the change. Each higher floor has fewer people vote in favor of it. Those on the top two floors vote near-unanimously against the proposal, but it passes anyway. Those on the upper floors, dependent on the elevator, have to shoulder all the cost.
Think of the situation those people on the upper floors are in. They might be retirees living on fixed incomes. They bought their condo knowing they could afford the maintenance fees. They bought knowing the agreement was that all maintenance would be shared by all. But now the folks on the lower floors have gone back on their word and decided they don’t want to pay for the maintenance on the elevators they have little use for.
This is a way for the residents of the lower floors to take advantage of the folks on the upper floors. The upper floor units would have very low market value without a working elevator. When the building was built, those upper units sold at the same or higher prices than the lower units. If the upper units had to be sold for half the cost of the lower units, then the cost of the lower units would have had to have been much higher to make the project viable to construct.
We’re used to upper floors of tall buildings selling for more because of views. But historically this didn’t happen. Historically, ground floors commanded the highest rents. The elevators in a condo building allow the ground floor owners to purchase units much more cheaply than they otherwise would be able to. And now those ground floor owners are trying to both benefit from the reduced purchase price AND offload the elevator maintenance costs to the upper floors.
It’s a Koba Libra Color. I can’t recall if I’ve had to do a hard reset or not, but so far at least I’ve been able to use it without an account.