>>> Show me one truly powerful person who could have survived 30% of his subjects actively resisting.
>> Syria is at 40% opposition, 40% pro-government, and Assad has been hanging on during an active civil war for 11 years:
> This illustrates my point
How so? The implication of your GGP comment was that any powerful person with that much opposition should not be able to survive, but the example shows a powerful person with more opposition surviving.
>>> Show me one truly powerful person who could have survived 30% of his subjects actively resisting.
>> It's a lot easier for "truly powerful person" to keep "his subjects [from] actively resisting" than you seem to think.
> Depends completely on the people.
Not really, unless you have a fictitious people that isn't subject to social coordination problems.
However, real populations are subject to those problems, which is why we've seen dynasties of awful dictators survive for generations (e.g. North Korea). The lesson of those dynasties is also probably "don't let up on the oppression or you'll lose power," which might be easier to keep up if the immortal leader doesn't doesn't have to be replaced by a naive successor.
> You have a mental virus that wants to believe everything is doomed.
LOL. Comments like that are totally unpersuasive, and also against the rules.
Well, you do. Lots of people do. I’ve never seen one become self aware though. But anyway, no, not all people are the same. Some populations of people create, initiate, prop up and then perpetuate evil cults of dogma as is the case with North Korea. Some populations never even let it get to step one. Make no mistake, the waves of political dogma lap on every shore. It’s always ready to take over. Some populations are less inclined to group think, save the children and etc. because that’s always what fuels it. I have read a couple of books about North Korea and you can believe me that North Korea was not held at gunpoint to create the regime. I also read “nothing to envy” which is a collection of memoirs written by defectors. They absolutely do it to themselves. And the multi-generational lifespan of that regime makes your point rather moot.
And Assad illustrates my point because I was watching the Syrian civil war and he very nearly did not survive. He was relegated to a bunker and when he emerged he was clearly deeply shaken and a different man. That 40 percent gave him his full moneys worth. To say that this is an example of dictators being invulnerable to dissent is incorrect. If it were 50 or 60 the scale would have tipped. It is an example of my point.
That’s like saying that one person will dominate the tv show survivor. In reality new cliques and alliances form all the time, power shifts and swirls as alliances coalesce and disperse. We will still have wars and disasters and things that no one person can control. Plus, people will still die just not necessarily from the disease of aging. I often notice that people resist something they are afraid of by thinking it will cause a disaster to change how things are. I think you are subconsciously afraid that it’s too good to be true. In reality it will be like penicillin or vaccines — massive improvement and not much else.
You may be thinking that this tech will automatically trickle down. There is infinite incentive to withhold it, whether by controlling access to it outright in a dictatorship or by letting it naturally be exorbitantly expensive in a market economy.
Note that in thought experiments I mentioned it is considered to exacerbate inequalities even if it is distributed equally to all. A thought experiment that reflects reality a bit better would be one where the rich not only get more rich thanks to money dynamics (plus a vicious circle of theft and violence in case of dictators, who are the bigger concern) but also never die.
> There are precisely zero things that were deliberately made to be more expensive than their intrinsic cost by a small group of “rich people and dictators”
Setting aside the fact that 0) US healthcare is pretty much all “things being made more expensive than their intrinsic cost”, believing 1) the market in a democracy is not affected by information asymmetry and 2) a dictator-kleptocrat elsewhere even needs to manipulate prices hints at immense naivety on your part.
> shut up
If it’s my mention of the June 4th incident that triggered such reaction, I hope the Party pays you well enough to justify the stress that reading Western media must be to you.
> you have no right to pose as some kind of intellectual
And you have clearly run out of substance to present.
Surprised to see this take from you. We could also have your parents, grandparents, siblings, kids, grandkids not get sick and suffer terribly before being discarded like garbage. And we can keep all the amazing people who fight for good. Oh wait, that would mean we can’t stick it to some bad people, never mind.
> Surprised to see this take from you. We could also have your parents, grandparents, siblings, kids, grandkids not get sick and suffer terribly before being discarded like garbage. And we can keep all the amazing people who fight for good. Oh wait, that would mean we can’t stick it to some bad people, never mind.
I don't think you're thinking this through. Immortality plus "kids, grandkids" (without sci-fi spaceships or suicide/euthanasia) will pretty quickly lead to overpopulation and a lot of obvious problems.
If it leads to decades more time of fertile reproduction and productivity, it needn't do so. We'll still have some rapid diseases not related to age, and of course accidents. If some of our brightest minds have another 40 years at the peak of their scientific and engineering careers, maybe we'll have seasteading and urban hydronic/aquaponic/aeroponic food supplies figured out and affordable. Convincing people not to have another generation at 20 years of age would of course be the hard part.
Let’s establish the fact. Nobody knows what the consequences will be. But overpopulation won’t be The outcome. Developed countries have a population die-off problem. In the US the birth rate has plummeted since the 70s and we are way below replacement. We desperately need more people.
Tens of thousands of people die in car accidents alone every year. The geriatric population is exploding and we can’t take care of all of them. We need a cure for the disease of aging.
So you're solving the overpopulation problem by hoping the "kids, grandkids" don't exist or are small enough in number that death via accidents creates the space for them. OK.
The corollary of immortality for everyone (without sci-fi spaceships or suicide/euthanasia) is either stagnation (more or less the same set of people existing until resources run out) or overpopulation (and prompt resource exhaustion).
So the main problems listed are inflammation, lack of omega 3 and reduction in some kinds of autophagy. All of these can be addressed with an animal based diet or a keto diet plus intermittent fasting. The more I look into it the more I am convinced that a high fat animal based diet with fasting is the healthiest diet.
Spotify is the worst and buggiest software I use, both the app and the web app. How bad could it be? It resets to the beginning of a multi hour podcast randomly with no way to get back to where I was. It does many other unbelievable things. God damn the Spotify player.
You point to one example of homeostasis and therefore we should just give up on all medicine? That’s like someone putting down the idea of vaccination because they developed a coffee tolerance. The human body is complicated and diverse and homeostatic forces aren’t omnipresent or present at the deepest mechanistic levels.
I do real estate for a living and this opinion is like a zombie that never dies no matter how many times it is proven wrong.
You are putting forward that landlords acted collectively to increase the price of realestate. This is obviously wrong. The price of homes is determined by the market. It doesn’t matter who owns those homes, they are worth what the market says they are. Landlords do not control the market and even if they banded together in a conspiracy to increase the price of homes, they couldn’t because the vast majority of homes are owned by regular people.
The high price of housing is caused by a shortage. If you don’t believe me then watch the 60 minutes segment about it. There’s no conspiracy. If there weren’t landlords building new stock it would be even worse. It’s so ironic that the hive mind spits in the face of the only people building new housing; the only people making the problem better.
Landlords and homeowners and the finance industry don't control the market... they just form a political bloc that controls zoning and taxes and transportation infrastructure and central finance, and these knobs in turn control the market. For some reason, they always vote for policies that pump their holdings. Can't imagine why. These policies do create problems, though, and it's not only reasonable to attribute the problems back to the people who voted for them, it's unreasonable to do anything else.
"It's just the market!" is on par with "Look, a squirrel!" in terms of critical thinking.
Again, landlords aren’t a big enough group or coordinated enough to do anything. There’s no landlord lobby. Homeowners are a different story. It’s them who stop us from building more. But yea, it’s just the market and there’s no conspiracy and landlords are the last people to blame. Your comment on my cognitive abilities is a petty insult and is not allowed on this platform.
"You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge."
The landlords don't need to conspire - they know what's good for them and the politicians either own property themselves or are connected enough to landlords to help them out.
None of these parties have an immediate interest in the lower class affording housing or maintaining the community fabric in the long term - especially the faceless incorporated ones.
Homeowners outnumber them and local politicians listen to them more than to some far away group of people in NYC. Really it is quite simple, homeowners vote in tax cuts for themselves which also apply to landlords.
Why would homeowners vote tax cuts for landlords as well? I wish that the politicians listened to the citizens. You have a very naive take on politicians and how they are motivated. Think campaign donations and hobnobbing for a cushy job when they leave office —- that’s what motivates politicians.
There are luxury condos right where I live that are sold by a property management company. They are unoccupied, and have been unoccupied for months. The prices have not gone down.
There's no super strong market force to push the price of a house down, while there is a large market force to keep it valued where it is or make it go higher.
Respectfully, this doesn't prove that the law of supply and demand no longer applies. Any individual seller may choose not to decrease their prices -- but if they do it long enough, they run out of money and are forced to sell.
It's also difficult to tease out the effect of general price inflation. If house prices stay stagnant but currency is devauled, prices are decreasing in real terms.
Some places have tax breaks for unoccupied property rentals. Instead of lowering prices they leave them high and break even on the losses (or close enough such that they weather the short term until demand at their preferred price is reached)
Months is way too short a timeline to say anything. There is no market force that says these houses must sell right now today and so like literally every other asset they’re being held until in the expectation that offers will come in that meet the asking price.
I wish there was a game that was hosted on an enormous and powerful server. Imagine a game that is designed to run on terabytes of memory, even more storage and a whole bank of GPUs. Basically a game that takes full advantage of a super computer, played remotely. You could have unprecedented detail, full physics and ray tracing, maps as large as planets with full detail and no loading times. Fully destructible environments.
