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here's a poem by ryokan expressing a similar sentiment

My legacy—What will it be?

Flowers in spring,

The cuckoo in summer,

And the crimson maples

Of autumn...


gasoline

kind of the flip side of pascal's "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." if someone does have the time to make the letter short, it'll take longer to read (where "read" means to grasp the subtleties of.)

interesting how that logic only applies about half the time.

It doesn't. The republicans are able to stop things a lot of the time because Democrats don't have a strong majority in either house. They can barely scrape together a 50% plus 1 vote by bringing in people who are "Democrat" but for example refuse to allow public option healthcare or shut down of coal plants.

Republicans have voters that understand your guy has to be in the seat before you want something to happen. They correctly understand that if you just vote for more guys, you get more of what you want to happen, and correctly identify that the solution to not getting what you want is to get more seats in the next election.

I can never understand the shocking lack of civics education from people who get upset at democrats for not having power when the system describes in plain language that you need numbers for the power.

When Mitch McConnell prevented the vote to appoint a new supreme court justice, it was because he had that power as senate majority leader. If Democrats had a senate majority at that time, he could not have prevented the vote.


> Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body.

the subject is consciousness, not intelligence.


usually people romanticize china when they're comparing it to the united states. are chat apps in the US not infiltrated or run by america?

Signal genuinely isn't, or other end-to-end encryption chat apps. But yeah, WhatsApp and Discord and others are run by American companies that follow US law.

see what you don't understand is that the owning class actually bring crucial long term strategic vision. i wonder though: we always talk of ai replacing the working class, but wouldn't it be more economical for ai to provide that long term strategic thinking? i'm sure the operating costs for ai would be way less than the operating costs of billionaires. everyone would be better off.


If there is anything worse than the tyranny of greed, it is the tyranny of a machine that's trying to optimize you 24/7.


if we optimize the billionaire class everyone's better off, like i said. of course we can go orange catholic, but my comment was premised on how we might apply ai.


The billionaire class don't want universal childcare, they don't want medicare for all, they don't want a public jobs program, they don't want a welfare state, and they sure as fuck don't want to be told no.

I'm failing to see how caring about billionaires is suppose to help everyone else. The current American society, via neoliberal economics, is already optimized to help the billionaires (hence why they extract all the wealth and why income inequality is at its highest in the US since ever).


How do you figure that "the billionaire class" doesnt want those policies? Plenty of examples of them supporting those policies. Seems like the opposition is more to the tax hike they know is coming along side it but even then we still see billionaires supporting those policies.

If they do not want to fund it they do not support it.

The purpose of the system is what it does. Or in this case, the actions of the billionaire class and their capital are their values and morals.


But they both openly support it and fund it. It just turns out they are not a monolithic group and are split in what they want.

They mean put billionaires on a chopping block.


read "optimize the billionaire class" as "trim the fat."


> Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death.

not necessarily. you're inadvertently conflating things. just more people alive doesn't mean they aren't starving. a population boom can be had in the starving population too.


While you are not wrong, it is still historically correct to say that "more efficient agriculture meant a population boom". We don't know what they were doing for birth control back then (because this was a woman's job and they didn't write history), but there is plenty of evidence they must have been doing something that was effective (rhythm is more than good enough to explain this, and so likely what they were doing). People had a good idea of how much the farm could support and they tried to get just enough kids to ensure it would pass on - with enough spares for war, infant mortality and the like.


> Everyone has different situations and different level of risk.

that's true, and also why it's prudent to not go around giving unsolicited family advice to strangers.

also it's why, when you're talking about one particular woman you've never met, you should keep the demographic insights you think you have about her to yourself.


i've been waiting for you to share your conclusion for the last ten years. finally, i can sleep again.


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