“Slaves do not dream of freedom. When their eyes sadden at the gleam of gold, they are not pining to be free. They want slaves of their own.”

  • Mogesh

“‘Xoros is the greatest bullfighter in the world,’ may be an obvious lie, but you are still tricked to believe Xoros fights bulls, or that he even exists at all.”

  • Birondelle

    • War of Omens
  • 0 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Deflation is bad because you can “invest” by just keeping cash around. Which means investors aren’t contributing to economic activity.

    A small amount of inflation helps, because investors understand that if they’re not investing the cash they have, then they’re essentially losing money.

    High levels of inflation is bad, because prices can change so fast that it makes commerce too difficult with prices changing too frequently.

    But that’s for stable levels. Salaries tend to be very vulnerable to unexpected changes in inflation/deflation because they don’t change that often and they’re not pegged to inflation. Which means if the money unexpectedly devalues by 20%, then you effectively get a 20% pay cut and it might not be easy to negation a rectification with your employer and meanwhile you’re still underpaid.

    The reverse is true with unexpected deflation, you get an effective 20% pay raise and your employer can’t do anything about it except fire you or go bankrupt. This is how deflation can lead to unemployment.

    So deflation might help make a bit of wealth transfer from the capitalist class to the working class. But it’s very temporary and would likely come at a great cost to the overall economy.

    If you want to fix wealth inequality it’s really simple: tax the rich, regulate monopolies and oligopolies.



  • I just don’t understand the logic here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of abolishing the Duluth Model and the requirement to incarcerate someone on a domestic violence call.

    But neither this situation, nor the story you linked to seems to have much to do with that policy.

    In both situations, the police acted completely out of bounds. It is a completely different problem.

    The story on the website was written in 2014 about an incident that happened in 1999, that’s almost 25 years ago. It can’t be considered relevant today. If there’s a real systemic problem of this kind, you should have at least a dozen cases like this every single year.

    Hopefully, in this most recent case we’ll get some body cam footage released so we find out what really happened.

    And also hopefully, the body cams is what will put this guy off the force forever. It’s the second time he seems to have done something like this, but I’d bet that the first time, body cams were not standard practice yet.

    Seems to me that the solution to stop this kind of thing from being a common problem is body cams, and that’s what we have.




  • If you’re in a swing state. You vote for Biden.

    If you’re not in a swing state, you vote third party.

    Don’t not vote, by voting you make your intention and commitment very clear. Even if your third party candidate never has a chance, mainstream politicians may notice the interest in that third party candidates platform and adopt some of his/her policies.

    Participate in your state’s primary elections. There’s a lot more diversity of policies there and you can make your voice heard there as well.

    Participate in your city and state elections, the amount of money effort and attention placed on federal elections (especially presidential) is completely outsized compared to local elections. Which means the amount of influence that you can have as an individual relative to amount of power the offices that you have influence over is huge compared to the same calculation at the federal level.

    Many politicians start at the state and municipal level. So your influence there can be very helpful. Also if Trumps gets some success at creating a authoritarian dystopia at the federal level, it can be mitigated at the state and municipal level. Just like how each state can make sure to protect the right of abortion despite the supreme court flip on the subject.


  • If what you’re looking for is a decentralized pseudonymous system. Then this is absolutely possible with today’s cryptography.

    It’s called public-private keys. You create a private key that you can use to “sign” your messages. And people can verify that is was you that wrote the message by using the public key.

    No one can pretend to be you because only you have access to your private key and the public key can’t be used to find out what the private key is.

    It’s still anonymous because you don’t have to say who you are when you create the private key.

    It’s not perfect because the same person can create as many different keys as they want. So you can’t really “ban” someone. They’ll just create a new key and pretend to be someone new.


  • Fully decentralized, no censorship at the core of the system.

    You pay a moderator to send you a filtered feed that filters out illegal content.

    Then you upvote/downvote what you like and don’t like. A local system looks at what other people upvoted and downvoted. People who upvoted/downvoted like you gain credibility people who upvoted/downvoted opposite you gain negative credibility. Then you get shown the content with the most credibility. And a little like pagerank, the credibility propagates, so people upvoted by others with high credibility will also have high credibility.

    So, anyone can post anything to any subforum.

    But in principle if you upvote/downvote posts based on whether they are appropriate to that subforum, then you’ll only see posts that are appropriate for every subforum, because other users who upvote/downvote like you will also downvote off topic posts.

    So you end up with the internet you vote for. If you downvote everyone that disagrees with you, you’ll be in an echochamber. If you upvote does who disagree with you while making a good faith effort to bring up solid points, and you’ll find yourself in an internet full of interesting and varied viewpoints.

    You could also create different profile depending on what mood you’re in.

    Maybe you feel like reading meme so you use your memes profile where you only upvote funny memes and downvote everything else.

    Or you’re more feeling like serious discussions and you don’t want to see meme so you use your serious discussions profile.




  • There a ton of different ways to get laid. And depending on what your looking for, there are different requirements.

    Most commonly people who don’t get laid are looking for some level of intimacy with someone that actually finds them attractive. Which means that hookers are not an option.

    Commonly people in this category have two issues (I’m probably projecting :P, but I don’t have much to work on):

    1. Standards too high. Just like poor people try to become billionaires. Sexless people wish for a harem of super models. Practice flirting with less attractive women until you learn to connect with women on a deeper level which will make lowering your standards to reasonable levels easier.

    2. You’re unattractive. A bit similarly to #1, influencers and your own expectations for a partner are warping your perception of how attractive you need to be. Seeing as the level of attractiveness you wish you had is completely unattainable, you give up or you look for ineffective shortcuts.
      Don’t worry so much, work on the basics: good hygiene, not terrible clothes, some level of social competence, a minimal amount of confidence. The minimum requirements are far lower than what you’d expect or what most people would think.

    (Note being financially stable also helps in terms of minimum requirements for attractiveness, but it’s not like you need the incentive of getting laid to want to be financially stable).

    Keep working on both #1 and #2 and eventually they meet and you get laid and have a good time!

    1. I’ll sneak in a third point here. If you’re a man, your relative attractiveness automatically goes up until your 40s vs women of the same age. But the change is most noticeable when you hit your early 30s. So, worst case scenario, after a few years, the odds shift in your favor.


  • I don’t know how to reach these people or whether they’re reachable at all. Yes, my main motivation by a very long shot was to correct absurd levels of misinformation in a community where I believe most members care about not spreading misinformation.

    What worries me is that so many people seem to be living in an echo bubble that’s radicalizing them to hate people they shouldn’t be hating.

    So yes, there’s a lot of not so great things about Jordan Peterson. But all things considered he’s not that bad. And I haven’t paid attention closely for the last few years, but I wouldn’t be characterizing him as a piece of shit.

    The author of the article is a worse piece of shit than Jordan Peterson. People who seem to take pleasure out of Jordan’s suffering due to his Benzodiazepine addiction are even worse.

    But, looking at some of Jordan’s twitter comment, he’s definitely a bit of an asshole. But 95% of people seem to be assholes when they go on twitter.

    The only really bad thing about him is his political views. But even there, there seems to be less malice and less self serving talk than most right wingers (other than the apparent or effective grifting). But even the grifting, in my opinion, is not as bad as most people (both on the left and on the right). Still, right wing ideology is a very problematic from a liberal perspective (which is my perspective). But at the same time today’s mainstream and increasingly radical left ideology is also problematic from a liberal perspective. Regardless, I still don’t think that someone’s anti-liberal social views necessarily makes them a piece of shit regardless of if they’re on the left or on the right. But it does make it easy to become one.



  • Good article?

    The comments that formed the basis of the complaints against Dr. Peterson included comments on a podcast in which he commented on air pollution and child deaths by saying “it’s just poor children…”

    This quote is the most disgusting out of context character assassination I’ve seen in a long time.

    I got suspicious because while Jordan does say things that women and/or trans people often find deplorable. I know that he’s a strong supporter of the poor (at least in rhetoric) and as a family man I assume of children as well.

    The full context can be found on Spotify. Episode #1769 of “The Joe Rogan Experience” start from about 15:30. He’s the one that brings up how 7 million poor children die from indoor particulate pollution. Joe doesn’t believe him and gets a fact check, which eventually leads to Jordan sarcastically saying “Well, it’s just poor children, and the world has too many people on it anyway…”

    It’s such an insane mischaracterization of what he said, you can’t take the article seriously. Probably would have to write off the entire website that article is from, honestly.