Just bring in some eagles to take care of the mongooses.

I really need to start spending more time up trees.

Yeah sorry I forgot what thread we were on. You will get no help from the US on the genocide unless you get someone amazing like Sanders elected as president. Even then, no one will likely work with him on it.

I honestly can’t say I disagree with you on this. Voting blue is more a stay of execution than a solution. I voted 3rd party for decades. But I’m at the point now where the Republicans just need another sound defeat.

I left the USA 25 years ago because I saw this coming with Bush Jr. I have been talking about fascism coming to the USA since then. I dont really see anything stopping this short of a full uprising. But at least we can have a rest in the march to fascist autocracy, right?

Well we could theoretically flip congress in the midterms in 18 months.

Yeah I’ve been watching. They don’t have many out there yet and they are sort of still in beta. I hope they perfect them and massively scale them.

Another World

Half Life

Bioshock

Elder Scrolls Oblivion

Dragons Age Origins

Baldurs Gate 3

Ugh. I hope that laser interception becomes possible and drone interceptors and gepards become more available.

Roblox is the absolute worst thing for kids.

All my kid’s friends are on it so I feel bad not allowing them to use it, but there’s no way to set it up that doesn’t allow them to access these horrible experiences without also blocking access to pretty much every normal experience.

The devs are allowed to set their own maturity level so this experience probably has the same maturity as Grow a Garden.

So I have to just constantly monitor it and manually block inappropriate stuff, but there’s a limit of 200 for blocking which I’ve already hit. It’s the worst.

It looks like destructive environments are back and the nod to the BF4 theme at 2:00 is interesting. Let’s hope that DICE can pull their head out of their ass for this one.

Roblox is the absolute worst thing for kids.

All my kid’s friends are on it so I feel bad not allowing them to use it, but there’s no way to set it up that doesn’t allow them to access these horrible experiences without also blocking access to pretty much every normal experience.

The devs are allowed to set their own maturity level so this experience probably has the same maturity as Grow a Garden.

So I have to just constantly monitor it and manually block inappropriate stuff, but there’s a limit of 200 for blocking which I’ve already hit. It’s the worst.

I’m happy they’re still going. I thought that defunding of NOAA would kill them.

I fully agree we need something new. And I hope we get it. I can readily imagine better ways to tackle the problems we have.

The problem with “post scarcity” is that every time I dig into the details of what “post scarcity” government proposals are, they are basically just communism rehashed with some arm waving about “technology”, so until I see some better proposals than that, I am very skeptical of anyone proposing “post scarcity” as a solution. Hence why I replied to you with my feelings about communism. To me, they are the same things in their current incarnation. Even if you take away money. There is still some central government that is doling out resources, and someone doing the production of those resources which want some compensation for their work. I don’t see that changing any time soon. But maybe someday if we get true AGI and AGI robots, we can give them all the work and let them do this…

I’m sure someone will still try to slant the playing field their way like Musk is trying with Grok, though.

Me exactly. I keep a lot of the streaming services because I don’t want to host a bunch of 4k stuff myself, though I do often get the 1080p stuff for when I fly on planes or haven’t yet re upped my subscription for the show I want to watch. But many shows aren’t on any of the sub services in my country, so those are straight to the seedbox.

As it should. Ukraine is defending all of NATO

Yeah, that’s a good case for this.

I’m not sure what the difference is between this and just providing food stamps. I think food stamps would probably work out to be more efficient in the end unless for profit stores turn out to be massively inefficient.

Ask anyone who’s lived under communism and they’ll tell you otherwise. I live in a formerly communist country and have thousands of people around me who can directly compare. The only people who had it better under communism are the bottom 5-10% or people who didn’t want to work. If communism makes things cheaper, it’s because almost everyone has so much less money. Anyone who thinks otherwise has no real experience in the matter.

That’s not to say that capitalism can’t go off the rails. Without proper oversight, it will descend into monopolies and fascism, as we are seeing today. But in a well functioning system that has socialist and pro worker legislation as we see many places in Europe, the best of both capitalism and socialism can be brought out. I don’t know why everyone has to always try to go to one extreme or the other when the best system is always somewhere in the middle.

I think that price gouging is mainly a result of allowing too much consolidation via buyouts and mergers, and not actively enough perusing antitrust and anti price fixing enforcement.

I suppose if it’s allowed to get too bad, the government could try to compete in the market, but governments are almost never the most efficient way to do things and can rarely effectively compete on efficiency against a functioning open market. In my eyes, regulation of the open market via labor law, protecting unions, trust busting and anti collusion enforcement is a far better way for government to solve this problem.

Unfortunately a government that’s not functioning well enough to do this kind of oversight will almost certainly fail at trying to compete against in the open market as a grocery store too. At which point you are just running subsidized food banks, which is also fine by me but I don’t think subsidizing all food for everyone will work in most government budgets.

Of course I want to live in a post-scarcity society.

Unfortunately I don’t live in a post-scarcity world. There are limits to everything. Energy, labor, minerals, fertilizer, economies, governments, etc. Due to abundant energy from fossil fuels we have started to believe that anything is possible and that’s great, and I hope we do manage to continue via AI and automation and new technologies to get closer to post scarcity. But we aren’t there today.

The other thing I don’t like about post scarcity utopias like the Venus Project (and yes, I’ve spent a lot of time researching them), is that when it comes to governance, the current plan just seems to be old fashioned communism with a ton of handwaving about how technology will solve everything else. Communist societies of the past also had access to technology, and they didn’t produce anything resembling post scarcity. As a matter of fact, if anything, they mainly produced more scarcity most of the time when compared to capitalist ones.

So for the time being I think the best we can do is to allow capitalism to do what it does best (innovation, scaling, bringing down costs), and let socialism do the things that capitalism can’t handle (economic externalities like climate change, basic human needs that profit motives greatly mess up such as health care and education, solving food and housing insecurity, etc.).

Someday maybe we will get there with enough automation and some fancy resource management software, but I do very much fear the wrong people slanting those systems in their favor. Good governance and oversight will always be paramount to making any system work, and just hand waving about technology won’t be enough.