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anyone with over let’s say, 100 million dollars of private wealth, should taxed at 100% (with a strong enforcement mechanism) and that money should go directly into public equity. What should the public equity be spent on? my vote is a UBI

i think we are in agreement

what i’m getting at is, your social disguise is going to mostly be effective on people who rely on appearances to judge the interior quality of things (including people). You will turn away high quality people who can see through your disguise, and to retain around you people who either can’t tell between you and the mask or don’t care. It’s a good survival strategy but not a good way to find deeper, worthy relationships.

If i wanted to be a little more cryptic and spooky about it i’d say something like ‘there is no ‘real’ you under the masks, it’s just masks on top of masks all the way down, the stack of masks in a literal sense is the reality of you.’

even if the ‘real’ you is just the one who is fashioning the ‘masks’, which masks you wear and their details says everything about the ‘reality’ underneath. The masks are there to obscure our faces from ourselves as much as for the social other

pavel not complying with russian or french requests gives me some confidence that if some agency subpoena’d telegram for user records, they might actually have the spine to say no

Isn’t signal basically just a honeypot for feds these days like TOR? i didn’t know telegram was also hosted in the US, which is kinda heartbreaking but such is life in the imperial core i suppose

this is very disturbing to learn, thanks for sharing

it is not hosted in the US or a country affiliated with the US, which makes it infinitely more secure from the point of view of sovereign risk

i’d be able to speak candidly to my friends and family again, other than just in person without phones in the room

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for ukraine supporters and soon to be moldovian supporters

does the pope shit in the woods?

being a cop, or being in the military (western). It’s not the act itself which is unforgivable, but joining either of these groups shows that you lack judgement and that you are untrustworthy, which i don’t have the patience or energy to navigate in my life.

Encouraging people to get the depopulation (emergency use authorization mrna) shots is also disqualifying to me, especially if you claim to be scientifically or medically literate, these people definitely should have known better. Usually you have to go back a few years in a person’s post history to find how the behaved during covid. Not believing in bodily autonomy or informed medical consent when it really mattered is bad enough, but the unforgiveable thing to me is the lack of basic first-principles reasoning and also an inability to read scientific journals criticially. Like if you are going to bother reading them, especially if they are otherwise out of your wheelhouse, you can’t just uncritically accept all of their findings without critically assessing the method, and comparing the results to other more established research. Super basic shit. But the bar is so low and was even lower during covid that just reading an abstract was enough to make you an expert. And the actual ‘experts’ were so cautious about losing their jobs and professional reputation that any scepticism or red flags they raised in their research were worded very subtlely or even pushed down into a kind of sub-text. Don’t read a single article and then pretend you are an expert! for a complete noob you’d be better off understanding some of the important concepts, then developing a first-principles understanding of the problem space, and then to read specific pieces of research to improve the resolution of this picture.

But people don’t read these things to learn or improve their understanding. They do it for a million other boring, pathological or career reasons.

In my weaker moments i shrug my shoulders and figure that these people aren’t going to be great to have in the human gene pool anyway, but this dehumanising malthusian thinking is itself disgusting. I avoid depopulation advocates (knowing or unknowing) not because i value their lives (even though i do) but because i find their method of thinking repulsive.

Also anybody involved in real-estate.

similar problems in aged care honestly. Many people would rather sign away the equity in their parents’ estate to an aged care provider, then actually care for their aging parents in their time of absolute vulnerability.

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shakespeare’s measure for measure had a big impact on me as a high-schooler

national economies handle being welfare states just fine, which isn’t so different from what a UBI would be. Also developed service economies live and die by consumption. A UBI would stabilise and stimulate domestic consumer demand.

Something like this already happened when we traded the long-term health and fertility of the topsoil for the immediate high yield output of artificially fertilized crops.

By outsourcing the repleneshment of fertility to the relatively fragile and unreliable supply chains and social organisations of man, we assumed management over a delicate balance which previously belonged to nature.

I’m not arguing against industrial agriculture and its commodification of fertiliser by the way. If carefully managed it’s possible to imagine an endpoint of equilibrium where global supply chains increase total system fertility by selectively resting soil and relying more on imports to then switch once local fertility peaks and so on. Really just sane and unmolested market forces should in theory discover such a negotiated endpoint.

Fertility alone is not descriptive enough to capture, say, the importance of biological diversity or the load bearing capacity of local environments to support ecosystems, while also producing exportable outputs suitable for maintaining population growth in humanity.

Perennial crops are also ridiculously underused in overall food supply chains. They are more difficult to monetize in existing commodity forms because their overall system value is not captured numerically.

I don’t have an overall solution, but any solution will require at its core a way to assign value to the work which nature already does to replenish its own local fertility and to price that effect very cautiously in such a way that it becomes cheaper for intensive producers to rest unfertile soil until it becomes fertile than it is to compensate for unproductive soil by importing chemical fertiliser from somewhere else