Money's just an object. Just do maybe 3 or 4 five year plans, and you'd probably be able to get there. If they don't like it, eminent domain their asses. I dunno. It's not a real obstacle, to me, that they're deciding to intentionally be obstinate and intentionally deciding to make all their neighbor's QoL worse. Just an slightly smaller version of the problem where some iowan baron decides it's their right to dump their 84 million people's worth of pig shit into a massive pig shit lagoon, tainting 70 something percent of the water supply. Except in this case, people aren't getting malaria and we're not having water quality issues. Instead, they're getting heart disease and increased risks of lung cancer from needing to drive everywhere, they're having to work fruitlessly on road and utilities maintenance jobs for longer, and grandma dies maybe 10 years earlier than she would've cause she was 5 miles away and nobody was able to notice that she wasn't coming out of the house.
However, in most case, each of those steps resulted in a useful service or product.
I dunno if I'd say that, really. "useful service or product" is inferring a lot about the context in which these transactions are done, it doesn't really open up the box, there. Is gambling a useful service to have access to, for instance? What about, say, setting everyone about buying a big suburban house, a car, running out a ton of asphalt to these places, putting out utilities to them that are both financially insolvent in the abstract and also take up too many resources for what they are? Like, I dunno, if we're considering the alternatives, there, which incur much less consumption, and thus, much less trade, the alternatives that cost a whole lot less, I would say that the idea that this is a useful measurement really at all begins to totally fall apart. I dunno. I maybe wonder if, say, free healthcare might be thought to decrease the GDP of a country simply because less money is being thrown around.
I have no close friends and I couldn’t be happier.
But also
I wish I wasn’t me. I really do.
hrmmmm
I'm gonna try not to go line by line here because I think it would end up swelling the comment sizes to a ludicrous degree like when I was vent posting and also I just woke up so I don't wanna do that, but I dunno. I am mostly convinced that markets are not actually good at allocating things because they assume rational actors, they externalize costs and thrust them upon the public and the government, because they replicate centrally planned monopolies anyways. I also don't like them because we broadly don't look a the core power structures that end up manifesting under markets, which are mainly authoritarian and thus obviously have information problems allocating resources, on top of information problems that arise as a result of competition between market actors. I would rather just organize the economy in a way that makes sense, even if it ignores the fundamental right, the fundamental good, the fundamental freedom, of private property and capital.
The broader point I was trying to make about rationality and ethics, is that capitalism and markets have a core conceit of what like, is good, fundamentally. This idea of "freedom" right. Maybe it's cooked up by the americans, I dunno, not really my point, I'm just looking at the fundamental core values that differentiate each system. In socialism, I'm gonna be looking at like, the organization of power structures, whether or not they're democratically organized, I'm gonna be looking at central planning vs, I guess the markets would be considered a decentralized form of planning, maybe, though you could also have like decentralized little anarchist communes running around or whatever. Socialism is a pretty broad tent. In capitalism, though, I'm gonna be looking at the ownership of private property, of capital, as a fundamental, core value that makes the system turn. The ownership of capital is thought of as a good, as a fundamental right, a fundamental freedom that people should be afforded. That's what capitalism is.
Also, again, I'm not so sure you can just be like, "killing old people is economically rational" type of thing. That's assuming a kind of core value to those economics that you're using, economics, like rationality, like, we commonly assume a value when we use economics because we live in a sociopolitical context where the people who use economics are going to be using them for a very specific purpose, right, but ultimately "economics", what we call economics, is just sort of the study of like, resources and how they're used and shit. I dunno if I wanted to come up with a better definition I can, but ja. But we still have to come up with a core value that motivates the shit along, there, is what I'm saying.
That's what I'm talking about. The fact that so often in capitalism, the values are assumed. Maybe it's because we exist in a kind of post-history, end of history reality, where capitalism and neoliberalism won, or whatever, but we assume that whatever is good is whatever makes money, and we assume that whatever makes money is economically efficient. And then, if killing old people can make us money, we do that. But we don't pay attention to the broader contexts under which all of this takes place, which shapes the incentive structure, it shapes whether or not a particular company can make money doing something or not. That's my point, is that we don't look at those core systems, their incentive structures, their organizational structures, we just say "leave it up to the market", and then the market just sort of shakes out somewhat randomly but mostly towards little authoritarian fiefdoms and monopolies. And we do that because we assume that to chase after private property, and capital, and to be a capitalist, is a sort of core freedom, a core good, a core moral value, which is supposed to exist for everyone.
Also, I must address this, right:
My primary concern for something like socialism is that we would remove some fundamental level of freedom. Only building high density housing because it’s what the collective hive mind says.
So, collective hive mind, right, I dunno. Halfway, that sounds like democracy to me. I mean, there's a lot of reasons, again, divorced from the organizational structure, that I've put forward in my previous comment and I could put forward now, you probably know the arguments already, as to why higher density housing is a good idea, why it's rational, why it's logically sensible, especially when done at scale. If we give most people the "freedom", to choose which housing they want to live in, then we kind of run into a prisoner's dilemma where people of means believe that it's in their best interest to turn themselves into antisocial suburbanoid hermits that can live apart from the "others" that live in the city, they can commute in and out, they can retain some level of status as a result of their lifestyle, and maybe because of this they can gain some level of luxury through living in suburbia, at least for the first 20 or 30 years before their house fucking crumbles into dust cause it was made of particleboard and sad dreams.
So, is their "freedom" to choose to live in suburbia, is that thought of as more democratic than the popular will might be, because it afforded that minority of people the power to live as they chose, right? Or is it actually less free, is it actually less democratic, because it imposed the will of that minority of people on the majority of people which would've rather lived without the issues that suburbia brings to them? i.e. racism, increased utilities costs, increased maintenance costs, financial and economic insolvency leading to crumbling infrastructure, pollution, massive ecological costs, I've said this shit already, you get the point. I would say that the former, obviously, forcing people to live either in high density housing, then having some proportion of people live in like, cabins in the woods where they do permaculture style farming, and then maybe having the rest of the people just live totally separate from your society maybe even if they so choose, right, I can argue why that makes more sense as a whole in material reality, why it logically makes more sense. But the question as to which one is good, which one affords more freedom, which one is morally correct, that's an open question. I put my chips, so far as that exists, in the camp where we're not doing massive amounts of ecological damage.
But, that's the core sort of, distinction I'm trying to get at, here, which motivates the difference between capitalism and, not even socialism or communism necessarily, but just between capitalism and other systems. That core ideological divide, that belief in chasing capital as a right, that's what I'm trying to get at.
You didn’t bury the pipes
Seems like a bad idea in colder climates, and also, in other non-cold climates. If the pipes aren't below the frost line, then they'd freeze and bust open, or, if they drained, you'd be without water for the whole of the winter. You might be able to get away with it in a hotter climate, but then you run into other problems. What do you make these pipes out of? A single conduit of inflexible pipe would be best, since this would deliver water along the fastest route, would be easiest to service, and might also require less chopping of local ecology than if the network was more decentralized or if the pipe was flexible. Because you're going to have to chop up the local ecology to some degree. Tree branches will grow into or around the pipe, which is a bad thing. A flexible pipe might avoid that but you'd gain a lot of other problems in return. If you go with steel, especially galvanized, that's kind of ideal, as plastic is gonna have a pretty sorry half-life in the sun and heat and elements. So, you could do it, but, it would take some amount of effort. If you had a stable singular conduit, you could also maybe pump the hot water through more constantly, or, pump it back and forth in times of low demand and otherwise store it in some sort of tank more local to the houses, which might help prevent freezing.
I think probably the best solution, in this case, is just to dig deeper than the, say, 7 feet that the tree roots are gonna be, and then bury your pipe about that deep. Only problem is that you're gonna have a much harder time servicing anything if you have any sort of problem along the way, since now you'd have to trek through the forest and try to get at it through there. You might want to make a whole fucking very deep custom underground service corridor for all of your utilities, at this point, and that's going to be incredibly expensive. Especially if your soil conditions are garbage, which they probably are, and you're still going to have to dig and chop through the roots of the trees where you decide to have outlets for your utilities. I can see some sort of combination of an overhead pipe and an underground service tunnel here, that seems more reasonable while still also being insane, very stupid, and inefficient.
Just uproot the trees and replant them later, EZ.
Old growth forests have interconnected root systems, so you'd have to cut up all the trees at the root, raise them up, and then hopefully you can put them all back in the same configuration you got them out in. Not really a great way around that. This is probably going to kill all your trees. The local nursery is actually a better idea, and it's better just to move away from an industrial scale of tree production that only produces a couple different kinds of trees, which I think is kind of psychotic at its face.
Yeah, well, we’re gonna have to learn how to do it eventually.
I dunno if our population will keep growing, to be honest. I'm not entirely sold on the idea that just education and birth control will curtail population growth to a maintainable degree, or at least, to the degree where our level of growth won't outstrip our level of innovation to be able to compress said growth.
Also, probably no chance that we return earth to a pre-change state. Well, maybe. You have promising ideas like spraying sulfur dioxide or some other type of aerosolized chemical high in the atmosphere, like in snowpiercer, and that might be able to curtail a lot of the major effects of climate change if only someone was really willing to do it or co-ordinate an effort.
But seed banks, banks of genomic information to re-sequence species from close neighbors. You can't really bring back those plants or those species if the conditions which surrounded them no longer exist. I'm not even talking, say, the rainforest as a whole, right. That would be incredibly difficult, but you could line up a process of succession, take the hardier species, plant those, propagate them, then slowly start to propagate other plants that can take over and develop other niches as they arise, same with animals, and probably you'd wanna pair both of these with a good degree of population control so you don't get any runaway problems like with kudzu in the south.
No, the bigger problem there is that, I don't really know how you would decrease carbon levels, or global temperatures, or decrease soil acidity, or other chemical traces in the soil, or the level of sand in the soil, or whatever other problems you might have. The reasons why those plants and ecosystems destabilized and went extinct will still be around, and would still have to be combated. You could maybe cook up some different schemes to try and solve those, more geoengineering, more terraforming, but we've already been straining credulity with this whole thought experiment, here. At some point, you really have to start asking why a shit ton of people would start to undergo this sort of a process if they couldn't even see the value in the ecosystem enough to prevent themselves from destroying it in the first place.
You're also kind of looking at it in terms of, what level of natural change should be allowed to happen. The dinosaurs went extinct from natural causes present in their ecosystem, whether that be an asteroid or a big volcano or whatever. The massive fungus forests that died because of the proliferation of cyanobacteria, that was also a natural process. These things were also massive extinction events. So we really gotta figure out what we're trying to do here. Are we trying to preserve human suffering? Are we trying to lock nature in some kind of stasis because we think that to be advantageous? Are we maintaining nature and trying to minimize human involvement out of a kind of ethical obligation to do so? I don't really know.
I dunno, in any case, better to just have everyone live in an apartment complex, I think.
I am also mocking the idea that the choice has been made easier by Harris.
It's also like, not a choice, just straight up, right? Like the offer between, shit sandwich and shit sandwich with, I dunno, ham, or some other ostensibly good thing, that's not really a choice, both because on the surface it sucks or whatever, and also because I'm gonna choose the one with ham. If I'm, by default, guaranteed to choose the one with ham every time, then that's not really a choice, I was predestined to choose that. It's no wonder that with this constant framing, the focus is always put on these nonexistent undecided voters, because they're the only ones which can actually be presumed to be making a real choice here, they're the only ones who "need" any convincing.
I mean arguably we could've done all of that with nasa if nasa had received a similar level of funding to SpaceX, but that's kind of getting into alt-history.
Depends on the writer. You get a superman DC writer, homelander probably gets treated like every other fascist superman beats up. If it's a "the boys" writer, homelander probably uses kryptonite to rip superman in half in a graphic full-page spread or some shit. You're also gonna be dealing with, are we dropping superman into the relatively hopeless universe of the boys, are we dropping homelander into the DC universe, where he'll probably be right st home with like 30 different characters almost exactly like him, will we come up with some portal stuff, what's going on there
So I dunno, depends on the writer. Ke personally I'd prefer if superman won, cause it's more hopeful and less garth ennis-y.
I mean I'm generally skeptical of like "this one weird 19th century ideology can solve all our problems" schtick, right, and I'm also skeptical of the mythical single tax systems, as a kind of simplified and idealistic compromise between your libertarians, your anarchists, and your more standard socialists and communists.
If you were to ask me in more detail, I would basically say that I think it's a compromise solution for an extremely narrow set of problems that too often gets extrapolated into encompassing the entirety of a political system. I think that it functions well enough as an ideology within a specific set of constraints and goals, but if you seek to extrapolate it solve like, every political problem, as georgists generally tend to do, then it kind of falls apart, and doesn't tend to be broad enough.
It's basically just a less generalized version of marxism, to me, where land is equivalent in the system to capital, and rent-seeking behavior is only really banned from interference with whatever resources are seen as natural, which is primarily land. I dunno. I think as I slowly go more insane and become more cranky, I find myself increasingly wanting a horrible authoritarian state that just does exactly what I want, because everything I like is awesome, and everything everyone else thinks is bad and evil or whatever.
yeah georgism is crap though
I think it's probably that your anecdote and experience is kind of out of left field considering this guy was only dealing with a couple coyotes, and honestly you probably don't even need a gun in that circumstance, and I don't think you'd much need anything larger than pistol-caliber.
Hmm, I don’t understand the downvotes but okay lmao I’m sorry that the AR platform is actually fine in close quarters?
As far as I understand it, the main problem people have with it, which they also have with pretty much every gun larger than a foot or so, so most guns, is that you can't really cross a threshold horizontally. About the only thing that could qualify against that maybe is like, a pistol or one of those shotguns with a bird's head grip, or like, some smaller pdw or something. I also dunno how much of a problem that is, of, oh it's gonna snag on something, or whatever, right, I guess it's just the idea it's going to present a higher snag risk or something when turning around, or, when getting up to a ready position? I dunno I'm not a gun nut.
I think it probably also isn't helped by the increasing consumerist trend to load up their guns with more and more extraneous shit and go for longer and longer rifles on their AR platforms to try and increase accuracy on the range, which means they tend to conceptualize of them as being unsuitable for close quarters despite that kind of being the idea of an intermediate cartridge and all that. It also doesn't really help to cite our military engagements with it considering over the last like 3 decades of the rifle's service we've mostly only fought like, random middle eastern terrorist organizations that don't have a great reputation for good training or good equipment or anything like that. You could maybe look at uses of the rifle by other organizations like the IRA or whatever, but I don't think they had any close quarters engagements.
Yeah, i would empower monsters to do heinous things to my citizens, like forcing them to live in a rural village where someone will care for them when they're old, and their utilities layouts will make sense, and their cost of living and lifestyle footprint will massively decrease. Oh no! The horror!
Also, I dunno. ahh, they'll go to war, how horrifying! whatever shall we do! How many of these people will actually go to war, though? That's some shit that floats around a lot, but I realistically think that if you just kick someone into some situation that's realistically better than what they were previously hucking, then they'd probably just take it. IF you really wanted to swing it, though, then you could just swing it all through the markets and then fuck them over that way, just like they're already being fucked. Not many people actually have that killdozer gene in them, though, and they wouldn't really have a good target. There's no amount of "blowing stuff up" or "going to war" that can realistically bring back a, by it's nature, highly vulnerable, detached development style like that, and blowing stuff up doesn't really help you contest with whatever your current standards of living are.
Lemme ask you this, though. How do you think we should solve the problem of the suburbs? Do you think a market solution is going to operate fast enough? Do you think those solutions are going to solve the broader problems with the housing crisis popping up in every major city? Do you think they will be enacted fast enough to mitigate climate problems?