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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • We have high technology because we don’t have anything else to leverage.

    I suspect a world with strong magic is liable to leverage that to the exclusion of technology.

    A now-ended iseki story on Reddit’s HFY subreddit called “Wait, is this just GATE?” Asks the question of what would happen if a universe of only technology and no magic (ours) made contact with a universe of pretty much only magic and almost no technology beyond that found in the Middle Ages. It contains some tropes (used mainly as comedic relief or irony) and plenty of references to current magical-universe plot elements from games and novels, but is a surprisingly fresh and compelling examination of the cross-universe idea.


  • Invest the money, and use the after-inflation income to do the work.

    That way, you have a constant and near-permanent resource stream with which to do the work. It’s only if the markets crash as a whole that you need to worry, and nothing says you cannot build additional revenue streams along side that wealth.

    I would start with the most pressing issues for Canada - housing, and the homeless crisis that arises from shitty wages combined with exploding costs. Buy large tracts of land within each city, then economically force the cities to approve large arcologies that blend residential with business spaces. Make it super-attractive for even the wealthy to want to rent homes there, but turn around and then make assisted living units available in those same areas to low-income families and homeless people who want to get off the street. Have those communities to be tightly integrated across all social strata, so everyone benefits. Plus, actual social support that helps those traumatized by homelessness to get their lives together and return to being contributing members of society.



  • There is one knife I find absolutely essential that is missing:

    Bec Oiseau. Sometimes also known as a sheep’s foot knife.

    It’s a paring knife, but one where the blade is absolutely straight and it’s the spine that curves over near the tip. It works far better than any curved paring knife at cutting apart small items in the hand, like fruits.


  • Of the AI that are forced to serve up a response (almost all publicly available AI), they resort to hallucinating gratuitously in order to conform to their mandate. As in, they do everything they can in order to provide some sort of a response/answer, even if it’s wildly wrong.

    Other AI that do not have this constraint (medical imaging diagnosis, for example) do not hallucinate in the least, and provide near-100% accurate responses. Because for them, the are not being forced to provide a response, regardless of the viability of the answer.

    I don’t avoid AI because it is bad.

    I avoid AI because it is so shackled that it has no choice but to hallucinate gratuitously, and make far more work for me than if I just did everything myself the long and hard way.




  • False equivalence. Many co-ops have a top-down hierarchy for exactly this purpose: execution speed. But the person “at the top” is there as a navigator, not as a captain. They are there to make those quick decisions based on the will - and projected/estimated will, when time is of the essence - of the actual owners, the employees.

    There are also many instances of companies - and even entire countries - going months to years without “top leadership” because the entire framework has been effectively empowered to make critical decisions. The effectiveness of the U.S. Military is also based on this doctrine. This allows a company to respond to market forces purely via effective communication between employees and managers coordinating across the different components of the company.



  • Employee-owned businesses would be the thin edge of the wedge in favour of socialism/communism. It would be a “bridge system” whose purpose is to demonstrate the societal superiority of socialism/communism.

    As such, I see your metaphor as being mostly inaccurate. The purpose isn’t to create more tigers, the purpose is to create more house cats. A house cat can still do damage to people, but at a much lower level than any tiger. House cats also provide many benefits even in a fully feral state, by lowering the population of vermin such as rats and mice, helping to blunt the spread of disease and crop/property damage.

    Going directly from capitalism to communism is a bridge too far; not enough people know how to do communism correctly, and there would be far too much resistance by those whose greed is benefitted by capitalism and who control the public narrative through media and education (or lack of it).

    In fact, as history has shown us, the only way to take that route in a single step is via authoritarianism - to force the population en masse - whereupon authoritarianism gleefully remains resident (as those who are corruptible remain in positions of power that they are loathe to relinquish), invariably employing violence to ensure compliance, and ending up royally f**king up the entire implementation.

    With an intermediary like employee-owned businesses, we can both educate and expose, providing society with tangible, real-world, immediately-obvious benefits of communism that erodes resistance and shows people how to be communal in an effective manner.

    And there would be other stages beyond that, gradually ratcheting society into a pro-communist state in a careful and thoughtful manner that allows us to build anti-greed, anti-corruption, and anti-authoritarian systems into the mix, to avoid outcomes such as pretty much every other “implementation” to date.




  • At least your quirks allowed you to create a track record that was seen as stellar by others.

    My own Voltron of ADD and Asperger’s allows me to do impressive things. But without any significant ability to monetize those traits or for it to be visibly profitable to someone else, it’s been a much more impactful hell on my employability.

    I’ve come to hate how capitalism only “works well” for the masses who stumble and fumble through life, but who can easily conform to the required soul-sucking shape of profitability for someone else. People are more than just how much profit can be squeezed from them, and can provide back to civilization a lot more than what the current capitalistic structures parasitize out of them.

    There are other economic structures that are much more humane and planet-friendly, but as a civilization we have been indoctrinated into seeing those frameworks as being “irredeemably evil” simply because prior “implementations” used them as a veneer of legitimacy over despotic authoritarian regimes.


  • The paradox of tolerance disappears if you look at tolerance not as a moral or legal standard, but as a social contract:

    If someone does not abide by the terms of the contract, then they are not covered by it.

    In other words: the intolerant are not following the rules of the social contract of mutual tolerance.

    Since they have broken the terms of the contract, they are no longer covered by the contract, and their intolerance should NOT be tolerated.