tristram_shandy's comments

I think you might be having a completely valid emotional response to your consciousness being called false.

False Consciousness, like Dictatorship of the Proletariat, are specific terms within Marxist thought that are popularly misinterpreted, and often used by more cynical capitalists to misdirect.

False consciousness has to be understood as false as it relates to 'class consciousness', the true consciousness of the Proletariat as the Proletariat relates to its position within the dialectical materialism applied by Marx to the historical process. This has nothing to do with psychological consciousness.

The Proletariat has class consciousness when it collectively realizes that capitalism is simply a phase in history, and not an eternal state of nature.

It's awfully pompous. Marx wasn't infallible. False consciousness developed a lot after Marx, and you truly can't see it when you're in it. Krein, for example, is in false consciousness. He can't properly conceptualize that capitalism will be replaced, and has developed his own asinine class analysis not on the bedrock of Hegel, but on dividing the working class by race, gender, and ethnicity. It blinds him from seeing the real class antagonisms in society between the Proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

He doesn't seem to know he's a prole like the rest of us, for instance.

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>The Fact Remains That Your A Guy From Reddit, And Im A Guy Who Posts On A Website Thats Somewhat More Prestigious Than Reddit

Dril is the Shakespeare of our age.

One might imagine China wants Xinjiang to remain Chinese, just as the US wants Texas to remain American.

Let us construct a hypothetical situation where our geopolitical adversaries (Russia, China, parts of South America) had spent the better part of the 20th century backing equally hypothetical Jihadist (or even Reconquista) separatists in Texas.

Perhaps the situation in Texas deteriorates when separatist Texans return from jihad in Syria, and some more violent fringes, armed and trained by Russia and China through proxies, begin widely-publicized attacks on civilians in California.

Perhaps the most ethical response by the US would be to deploy prisons and security services to Texas, and use technology to monitor potential separatist action within the state. Certainly there would be human rights abuses.

Now who is at fault, truly? The US? The separatists? No, of course not. One could place moral blame at the feet of our geopolitical enemies for encouraging this in the first place, but this is simply the reality of political action.

Just to be clear, what is happening to the Uighur people is horrific and inhumane and absolutely disgusting, but I will not allow this humanist sentiment to be perverted by propagandists to manipulate otherwise intelligent, compassionade liberals into nationalists and xenophobes in the name of maintaining the Western hegemon.

The anti-Chinese sentiment that has invaded the internet over the past several months has gone well beyond 'legitimate criticism of the Chinese government', and now sounds more like a racist, imperialist drumbeat for war. We should all be suspicious when fascists and libertarian capitalists find common ground and call it humanitarian.

Policing in America is a mostly modern invention, and the first public full-time police force is less than 200 years old: before the police, towns would typically have a night watch made up of citizens who volunteered for certain nights and certain times, and industry would pay other citizens to protect property and commodities. These paotection jobs typically didn't pay well, and mainly employed a segment of the population who might otherwise be criminal.

The rise of the police was a consequence of economics peculiar to 19th century capitalism, the first public police force was created in Boston only when merchants convinced the public that the expense should be born by all for the common good, and in the South the public police force evolved from slave patrols as a necessity of maintaining the slavery system.

The public police force continued to spread throughout America, particularly in the West, in 19th century only as businessmen began to fear labour activism and required a militant police force to end strikes.

The public police force before the 1930s was not only a new idea, but it was entirely a weapon of political power and terror: police forces were chosen by the leader of the ward's winning political party, and would ignore that political leader's own street gangs as they intimidated rival voters. It wasn't until 1929, after the Wickersham Commission, which noted such gems as "the inflicting of pain, physical or mental, to extract confessions or statements... is widespread throughout the country", that a push for professionalism and the independence of the police force began in America.

The consent the average citizen has given to be policed and the satisfaction she should have with the current system is very debatable.

Would the night watch have enforced the war on drugs to such a violent end?

Do we really need to have squad cars looking for speeders, or can citizens just report dangerous drivers to the DMV?

Was it not easier to pay off erstwhile thieves a wage to 'guard the property'?

Perhaps our consent to the police is just a manufactured consent, as our economic system was only able to survive by creating a force capable of quelling our collective dissent?

More reasoned analyses of 20th century performed by actual academics tend to view the collapse of the Soviet Union as a complex process with multiple confounding factors, including heavy losses in WW2, meteorological tragedies such as drought, ensuring crises and massive social changes from a feudal serfdom being transformed into a space-faring nuclear superpower within two generations, corruption within Stalinism itself, inherent geographical and power advantages of America and West Europe, etc. Careers are built on this.

No reasonable person objectively looks at 20th century history and says 'workers owning the means of production caused this', and it's equally asinine to suggest 'public broadband will lead us back to this'

Is it really evil if a few children die in the factory? Is it really evil if the work week is 96 hours? Is it really evil if we go hungry while the profits of labour are captured by people who are already millionaires and billionaires?

Unionization is simply democratization of industry.

Unionization of the workplace ensures that wages, safety, environmental and social concerns are addressed democratically by workers and management, organized collectively against the short term interests of rapacious capital.

So yes, preventing labour from organizing collectively is oppressive, totalitarian, and anti-democratic.

It's evil.

It is obvious that we do not live in an actual democracy.

Consider this:

Do you actually get to vote on anything?

Do you get to vote on major national issues? Did you get a referendum on any issue, e.g. Gay marriage? Iraq?

Do you get to vote on local issues that affect you? Did you ever get a choice on where the new community center would be built?

Do you get to vote at work? Did you ever get to vote on an acquisition, a new corporate direction, a new office layout, or anything important?

We cast only a handful of ballots throughout our entire lives, and we rarely get a direct choice on any issue - we only vote for a candidate that has already been selected by the élite.

We can have direct democracy now thanks to technology. Citizens and workers should be empowered by technology to vote daily on issues that affect them at work, locally, and federally.

Yes, the system is broken. I, myself, have cast four ballots in my life. I've had nearly no say in anything that has happened in my adult life, and ergo I'm certain that our collective voting history is not the root cause of our problems. Nor are the élite themselves the cause - the fault in our system is of course systemic and material.

We are living in late capitalism, and the contradictions within western liberal countries are beginning to tear them apart. The dialectical materialist (Marxist) analysis of our system is becoming more correct as we move forward in the 21st century.

I am also an optimist and a techno-utopian...

BUT:

1. This has not been tested on a single human yet, as it has no FDA approval.

2. Preliminary trials in full quadripilegic patients are several away (these are also not yet approved)

3. Should these trials succeed, this will still not be available as an elective procedure for healthy people (that will take much more time)

3. The skull exists and is a hard barrier that is not going away. A decade or so from now, should this be approved as an elective procedure, patients will have to have a hole drilled in their skull (note that most people find LASIK invasive, even after decades of successful surgeries)

4. Patients will also have to become comfortable with thousands of fibers being inserted (albeit in a minimally invasive way) through brain tissue by an automated surgical robot.

5. Should the procedure be successful, patients should finally, at long last, be able to control a mouse, or keyboard, or smartphone using their brain and imagining the movements instead of using their hands.

There is perhaps, a cyberpunk future where crime syndicates mine Bitcoin in the brains of their victims, where malware pipes gigabytes of extremist political memes in seconds through the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of young adults.

Maybe that will come one day, but this technology is only using the signals generated by the brain to control a mouse and keyboard. This existed twenty years ago in chimpanzee studies. The real innovation here is in materials science and surgery.

This is amazing multi-disciplinary science in the pursuit of advanced medicine, and we should be applauding it for what it is.

So, thank you Elon for funding this -- but more importantly, thanks to all the scientists, researchers, and engineers who have dedicated their lives the advancement of our science and medicine.

I will not be electing to undergo this surgery in the future.

These are all simple platitudes, provided without reference. Imagine believing that 'socialism is just a phase' -- as if the entire history of the USSR, the Eastern bloc, most of Asia, and the 20th century history of labor and social activism can be reduced to just 'idealistic children'!

Among my age cohort (29), most of my peers have received an élite education, and this included a study of Hegel, Marx, Adam Smith, Kropotkin, Lenin, Trotsky, Deleuze, etc. Nearly all of us identify as socialists of varying stripes (syndicalists, trade unionists, communists, anarchists, and so on)

Nearly everyone I've interacted with who has espoused similar views to yourself has in fact never read even the introductory text of socialism, and this ignorance leads to debate in bad faith.

In the interest of meeting the debate on its own terms, you should have at least read an introductory pamphlet presented by your opponent. We have of course, The Communist Manifesto. It's a 20 page propaganda pamphlet that has been translated for over a century now into every language, and is of course freely available on the internet. You should be able to get through it in a few hours.

You may be surprised to find that your strawmen do not exist.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...

The point is that the government doesn't need to borrow any money in the first place.

The government needs money only to buy the goods and services of the private sector in the service of the public interest. There is no other utility for money in the modern state.

The government no longer needs to keep stocks of gold, the government can create "digital gold" as needed.

Recall why the government needs to print money: because money is an abstraction, a fungible token that represents a constant fraction of the total real wealth in the the entire economic system. If we keep producing more goods and services, but don't produce more money, we enter deflation. To avoid deflation, the government needs only to ensure that the amount of money in circulation increases in line with any increase in economic output. As long as this is managed proficiently, the economic system will be stable.

The government increases the amount of money in circulation by purchasing goods and services from the public. To this end, the government can offer citizens money in exchange for labour that serves the public interest and fulfill both its economic and pro-social obligation.

What's the point of the government creating these abstract value tokens, giving them to us, and then demanding them back? And furthermore, why does the government need to borrow arbitrary amounts of similar tokens from other governments?

It doesn't. Our current system is a relic from the days of governments using a limited, fungible, physical resource (gold) which didn't linearly scale with economic growth.

The government no longer needs to borrow tokens, it needs only to create more of them, and should only occasionally need to remove tokens from circulation (taxation) as a way to account compel pro-social behaviour -- e.g. carbon emission taxes.

I haven't had any HiDPI issues -- the WQHD (2560x1440) display is quite usable at both 100% and 200% scaling.

I've tried laptops with 4K displays and this is a far better experience, basically on par with my rMBP.

It's also matte, my preference as I do a lot of work in coffee houses where I have limited control over lighting.

My external monitors are 4K, and I almost always run them at 200% scaling.

The only fix I had to make was to add a HiDPI flag for Spotify, but that might not even be necessary anymore

No complaints with this setup whatsoever!

The external 1080Ti will run pretty much everything flawlessly.

I play Overwatch, Rocket League, GTA V, etc, and run everything with max settings and get consistent 60FPS with vsync and no tearing.

Of course, you can always upgrade the graphics card in your external GPU enclosure to keep up with future titles

ThinkPad T480 (with a 1080ti in an external GPU enclosure for gaming at home / ML)

32 GB, 10+ hour battery life, 1Tb of flash storage with OPAL transparent self-encryption, WQHD main display, two USB C ports + two regular USB ports + an ethernet jack, automatic firmware updates through the package manager, and most importantly, no driver issues with the laptop and Linux whatsoever!

I replaced my workstation and gaming computer with this setup and am finally down to one-device nirvana.

Last month I knocked a full cup of coffee on the keyboard, and was relieved to discover the keyboard is completely separate and isolate from the rest of the device and is designed to be easily user replaceable -- I was able to replace the entire keyboard ($80 on Amazon) without even opening the case! The assembly is held in place by two screws on the bottom.

My previous laptop was a 2018 MBP, which I sold after two months due to my dislike (and distrust) of the keyboard. Couldn't be happier.

I got started with a girlfriend, specifically. For the first month, we agreed to do the following:

1) No breakfast 2) Only coffee (no sugar, sweeteners) or tea during the day 3) Go out for dinner every night. No cooking. Don't eat to excess. We mostly went to different sushi restaurants and had different rolls every night. Under $40 for two. 4) Eat a healthy breakfast on weekends and maybe have some popcorn or nuts or whatever to balance out whatever nutrients may have been missed during the week.

It was the easiest diet I've ever tried. The first few days weren't rough at all, contrary to my expectations. The anticipation of restaurant food (as a reward for the daily fast) did a lot to keep my mind off hunger, or at least reframe it: restaurant food was a reward, and I wasn't hungry, I was maximizing my future enjoyment.

We also saved a lot of time -- no groceries, no dishes, no meal prep, aside from some egg dishes on Saturday mornings in bed.

After that first month, we were both down 8-10 pounds, and conditioned to fast... Importantly, we didn't feel as though our diet had cost us anything socially: we could go out every night and eat together, the meals were so important to us that we had genuine excitement about what was for dinner, and this by itself was a good topic for conversation while waiting for the sushi to arrive.

At the end of the month, we had both shifted from passivity towards more active-executive control over our daily lives, especially our diets. To go a day without food is nothing, now. If either of us ever need to lose weight, it has become easy: we can simply eat less until we reach a goal.

I can actually speak from expertise on this! I've done fasting for the last five years (daily, eating once between 6-9PM), but this advice mostly comes from endurance road biking.

You can find "Salt-Free Salt" products in most supermarkets, typically in the spice section, it's a niche product for people on very low sodium diets. I believe the biggest brand name is "No Salt" -- these products typically contain potassium chloride, calcium, and some magnesium salts. Because of this, they're an excellent hack for athletes, anyone operating in extremely hot weather, and anyone looking to start a fast.

To make a (more or less) isotonic solution for hydration, add one teaspoon of the potassium salt and one teaspoon of normal salt per 1L of water -- this will give you a solution with a balance of sodium, potassium, and small amounts of magnesium and calcium that's around 0.9-1.0% salinity.

Personally, I adjust my diet to include slightly more of the potassium salt.

Don't write anything on your resume that would indicate "number of years experience" -- list your jobs, explain key achievements, don't distill anything down to a number. Your resume should NOT explain who you are, or go into real specifics -- it's an advertisement for you, as simple as that. If they want details, they'll have to schedule an interview.

Once you have the interview, you can talk about your experiences, why you're a good fit, what you do in your spare time, etc -- they will not tally up years of experience or record your answers directly into an Excel spreadsheet.

Also, don't say you're "pivoting" your career. Just don't.

China has also banned Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Bitcoin...

The lesson here is to invest in any technology that China bans.

I'd prefer not to gamble millions of lives on the theory that people or states (especially states that are effectively just one person) are going to act completely rationally.

Here's one example where "rational self interest" doesn't seem to have worked out:

- Kim Jong Un could rationally (in both his and his countrymen's self interest) live the rest of his days in a gloriously well appointed Chinese estate, albeit in exile, perhaps as part of a transition negotation that sees his dynasty exchange their power in Korea for both their own safety and the good of the country.

- If rational action by people and states are as close to a physical law as is so frequently assumed, why has this not happened? Why does he not act rationally, and why do we imagine that he will act rationally in the future?

Here's the fundamental problem with the MAD / game theory / self interest / rational actor tack: the model implies that there's a 0% chance of nuclear weapons ever being used (because it wouldn't be in the self interest of the state), and therefore, the appropriate policy response is effectively to ignore continued accumulation of greater and greater stockpiles of nuclear arms, as no conflict can ever be possible. The MAD theory leads to a political calculus that promotes the proliferation of ever more nuclear weapons, and as we're seeing, ever more nuclear weapons in the hands of ever more unstable actors.

The MAD theory is unsound and fundamentally dangerous. Clearly, the chance of nuclear war is not 0% (a truly absurd idea), and so the policy response that MAD implies (perpetual deadlock) leads us down an even more dangerous road: perpetual stockpiling and proliferation, without any measured guarantees to stability.

We're placing very, very large bets (right now our civilization, soon the human race, one day the entire planet, even the rocks and stones) on an idea that we can't falsify and have never tested.

If one studies history, even casually, one might note that nearly all wars in history have not started as a result of rational actors making optimal decisions in accordance with game theory.

Why, then, do we continue to believe this fallacy -- the fallacy that peace is guaranteed because nobody would be irrational enough to actually start a war?

Wars start through miscommunication, human error, the whims of (usually despotic) leadership, internal crises, and unforeseen Black Swan events that escape our (Gaussian) models. This can be summarized thus: wars frequently start for no real reason at all.

We should be more pragmatic, and look at history instead of borrowing a theory from the dismal science of economics to reassure ourselves, as there are now millions of very real lives at stake. North Korea has become a problem worthy of more rigorous analysis than the pithy comments about MAD.