uriel238

uriel238, 13 hours ago

You should see how they do things at the Hawthorne

uriel238, 17 hours ago

Morality, the thing we mythically got from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, is how we negotiate cooperation, specifically in holding back the predators, parasites, famine, disease and the elements (hot, cold, wet, dry) that are all glad to kill us. With enough cooperation we can survive the -40° poles and the big white bears. With too little cooperation, we’re homeless in own society and are rounded up in concentration camps.

But also we’re not great at this. In fact, we only are good for migratory bands of hunter gatherers, and while we have developed a robust list of egalitarian ethics by which we might maintain a community of tens of millions, generally, those fall to exploitation by those in power (parasitism is the most effective and most common survival strategy), but even our industrialists can’t help themselves and exploit us just enough to stay rich. They are driven to take more and more, and regard their workforce less until the situation becomes untennable. Often an industrial disaster results in discontent and unrest (if not civil war) but if not that, they are gladly polluting our world uninhabitable, dooming even their own legacies and future generations, all for number-go-up.

So, we can see that not only are we instictually driven to cooperate to survive, but those instincts only carry us so far, and even as we see what the rational choice would be to preserve a functional equilibrium, we are driven by feelings not to make that choice. Hence how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and even Christian bulwarks like Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas (whose jobs are to engage in pure rational thought) can’t help themselves but be total assholes.

uriel238, 15 hours ago

The question of existence ( why live? ) has only some intersection with the question of morality ( why be kind? )

On the side of the existential question, some folk find it enough to find a place to fit into society and serve a roll. At least this was the position of Jean-Paul Sartre, hence the notion of existence precedes essence. To me this compares too readily with the notion of interchangeable parts, as our industrialist masters are glad to force us to work for them as a component in their big productivity machine only to be discarded when we wear out. I digress, but maybe we shouldn’t let industrialists dictate the missions of society.

In my experience, all my occupational ideals were discovered to be toxic or driven by racketeering. Most music is stolen by the big labels. Game development is run by executives looking to make microtransaction skinner boxes, and gladly crunch their teams even when doing so has been shown to kill productivity. Navy advancement is based on what rich people and government officials you personally know. And so on. Having talked to others, it seems like there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that every occupational dream is quashed by grisly realities that are unnecessary but for our love of dominance hierarchy and doing things half-assed to maximize short-term profits. I have a lot of resentment of capitalism and how it’s done in our society.

But I got really crushed once it became evident we weren’t going to respond to the climate crisis in time, if at all, and we expect a population correction, late in my life. It may lead to human extinction in the next couple of centuries, but it absolutely will rend asunder any human culture, so whether I made music or discovered better scientific models or even wrote a sweet novel that was classic material, it wasn’t likely to survive the upcoming global famine.

But this is similar to where Albert Camus was after WWII, recognizing the absolute meaningless of life and the inevitability of death. We all come to this crux, where we have to choose how to proceed from here, knowing that life is pretty awful, pretty meaningless and pretty temporary.

• You can kill yourself. It’s where you’re going anyway. (I don’t recommend this mostly because it is really harsh on people close to you and some people that aren’t. Still, our suicide rate here in the states is high thanks to the crappy state of the economy and rising hate politics.)
• You can commit philosophical suicide by taking a leap of faith. Christianity offers a personal Jesus and the prospect of eternal life in Heaven, so you don’t have to concern yourself with the grim reality of mortality. That said, all the ministries are a sham that will parasitize you much like any industrialist or employer. Heck, pre-resurrection Jesus had a few things to say about this is the case and one should follow their own path to enlightenment spirituality.
• You can deal. Dealing with aplomb (that is, leaning into it and embracing the absurd mission of finding meaning in a meaningless life) is harder than it sounds, but so long as you don’t take either of the other options, you’re actually doing the thing, even if not with grace and poise and a perfect landing.

That said, tacos is as perfectly find a reason to continue onward as any other, an example of a hedonistic approach. I find my cat sometimes provides me with enough cause without further explanation. On the other hand, I do have a desire for my own legacy, not future generations, but of contributing to the body of human knowledge, art and technology, and I can’t be sure anything in my fields of interest are going to be useful once the ecology fully collapses.

Atheism, in my experience, is coming to terms with bad news: We’re going to die. The odds are against our becoming significant in the universe. We’re not even a particularly happy species or society, and while I’d like to imagine we’ll overcome some of these with technology, say some sociological tricks that allow us to curb corruption and move towards egalitarianism, it’s much more likely we’re just going to go extinct, and let some other critter evolve social brains and have a go at reaching into space.

In that regard, religious faith is at hubris that we are bigger fish in a smaller pond, and at best a cope rather than confronting how tiny we microbes are in a vast unending ocean.

uriel238, 17 hours ago

This is one of those places where a technology might be beneficial to a communal societies but are dangerous in capitalist ones, since any technology that replaces workers, or substitutes high-paying professional jobs with menial jobs impact survival of the workforce.

I think AI will get better at simulating human creativity, or allowing less-skilled workers produce high-quality results to the point that it will change art much the way desktop publishing revolutionized graphic design (with much resistence from the X-acto generation.

The challenge, IMNSHO is navigating the new technology so it serves society and not just the bunch of capitalists at the top who’d gladly replace us all with robots and let us starve.

The working class shall tremble and all that.

uriel238, 15 hours ago

I’m pretty sure society needs more roaring rampage of revenge against puppy-killing power-brokers and plutocrats.

Nowadays they even admit to the puppy-killing.

uriel238, 1 day ago

When I was a toddler, my dad was one of the mission control guys for the Apollo missions, and my room was decorated with NASA launch vehicle charts dad got from his work.

And I loved it. I thought rockets and space were the bee’s knees.

So I don’t personally see any issue with setting your kid up with jetfighter kitch if that’s what makes them happy.

uriel238, 1 day ago

Fuselage? Formation? Firewall? Funky Chicken?

uriel238, 18 hours ago

Contrast classic astronaut speak: 「Engine explodes and the lower half of the spacecraft drifts away」Um, we might be facing a contingency here.

uriel238, 17 hours ago

What is scary is how consistently cruel, apathetic and ignorant our plutocrats are, which is exactly why we gave up on monarchy in the first place.

It shows us how capitalism doesn’t work and just deteriorates to rule by force (but with more manufactured consent).

uriel238, 18 hours ago

Syd Mead is one of my gods. I’d hoped during the COVID-19 outbreak we’d get so into masks and screens that we’d see some of Mead’s anonymity helmets, but there was so much resistance. Someone did create a personal environment with filtered airflow, but it was expensive and posh.

uriel238, 1 day ago

The people on your man o’ war
Are treated worse than scum
I’m no flogging captain
And by God I’ve sailed with some
Come with me to Barbary
We’ll ply there up and down
Not quite exactly
In the service of the Crown

🏴‍☠️

uriel238, 1 day ago

So are they going as far as to say the Resurrection of Jesus was likely to be ahistorical?

We’re used to a post-Newtonian world being free of ghosts, fairies and divine intervention. But recognizing that their own origins are mythical would be a significant step.

It’s as much admitted to seminaries, just not to the laity.

uriel238, 1 day ago

Yes. And hagiography deals in manufacturing a myth by asserting it cannot be disproven with available data.

uriel238, 1 day ago

I’m also glad to let the Roman Catholic Church render itself obsolete and irrelevant. The participation of the USCCB in the Christian nationalist movement, and the Catholic Federalist Society wing of SCOTUS is going to cause a heavy backlash against the entire church, including the Holy See if it continues to push dogma-driven doctrine and further strip civil rights.

It’s really time for religious institutions to resign from their position as the second estate.

uriel238, 1 day ago

It was a fraternity thing in the mid 20th century for members to rotate taking classes for their mascot pet, to accumulate the units necessart order to secure them a degree (not honorary, but potentially fraudulent).

uriel238, 1 day ago

Dr. Fluffywiddlewumperkins

Fluff for short.

uriel238, 2 days ago

I gave up on Far Cry and Watchdogs not because the games were deteriorating with each iteration (they were / are) but because the sexual harrassment ring on which the upper management fed and HR silenced the victims made supporting the company untennable. At least for me.

Since then I’ve found alternative indie projects that have scratched some of those itches pretty well. I don’t play Ubisoft, even those games I already own have licenses for.

uriel238, 2 days ago

Extinction by AI takeover or robot apocalypse does seem cooler than extinction by pollution rendering then environment uninhabitable.

I’d rather not go extinct at all, but if we’re fucked regardless.

uriel238, 2 days ago

But, according to Das Kapital (and the last two centuries) capitalists will always capture the government and regulators, neutering their ability to fulfill their role. Greed and the susceptibility to corruption will always drive the system to where it is today, in which only revolution will free us from the established system.

But even then, civil war rarely heralds a communist revolution, but usually a run of dictatorships, each overthrown by the next. We have to get very lucky or be tired of fighting before we can install a public serving state. And we haven’t yet tried pre-writing and publishing the new constitution.

uriel238, 2 days ago

Take a look at Abiotic Factor a love letter to Black Mesa in the form of a crafting survival game set in a New Mexico laboratory complex.

I haven’t played it yet, but am sold from the LPs I’ve seen and am waiting for a sale.

uriel238, 2 days ago

I’m pretty sure Jeff Bezos owns WP, but I can’t speak to how much he intervenes, or if he has pressured WP to suppress stories critical of Amazon.

Bias-wize, it was pretty solidly neoliberal when I last read it consistently (which ended when the paywall became too hard to circumvent, and I switched to AP and Reuters).

That said, protests are commonly not good for business, especially if they’re big and loud. Doubly so if they become a riot.

On the other hand, police brutality almost assures success of the protest in some essential ways, even if its at the expense of protestor life and limb: Bystanders become sympathists. Sympathists become activists. Activists become radicalized (saboteurs and revolutionaries). It shows that the grievance is serious enough that the state needs to suppress it. And when you’re lucky, folk songs get written about how The Man did you wrong. ( Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming… )

This figured largely into the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s strategy in the Civil Rights Movement, which was to become a nuisance enough that the police would get violent. And while some protestors got hurt (or killed), it amplified the message and escalated sympathies for the cause. BLM is trying to do the same thing these days, but with the addition of phone cameras, so recordings of violence from the incident gets leaked to the internet, and people can see for themselves how the police treat their fellow Americans in minority and lower-class neighborhoods, hence the 2020 unrest in the US after the killing of George Floyd.

The thing is law enforcement is supposed to know better, as are elected representatives like the Mayor of New York or the Speaker of the US House of Representatives. When they get hawkish about putting down unrest with force, it is a sign of incompetence and a clear disinterest in good governance, which itself fuels even further grievance and unrest from the public.

uriel238, 2 days ago

Standard haxor uniform for posing for pictures.

uriel238, 2 days ago

I’m seeing very long form post replies that read very much like what is generated from LLMs.

Oh goodness, as one who has a bad habit of putting responses into essay form, I hope this doesn’t refer to me. I’m not an LLM. Honest!

Okay, I’m pretty sure I’m human. It’s a damn convincing hallucination.

uriel238, 2 days ago

Then you don’t understand the complex reality in favor of a simplistic view. If that’s what you need to do to cope in what is, granted, a terrifying reality, then you do you. But I cannot follow. Do what you will.

uriel238, 2 days ago

My shirt says Gunpowder, Gelatine.

My face says I’m momentarily out of action.