Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Max™ on June 07, 2020, 09:37:57 pm

Strictly speaking, we're a lot closer to infinite than scarce.

Mathematically speaking, that's impossible.

It's possible to convert energy into mass, we don't know how to do this on demand yet, but we didn't know how to turn a pile of metal powder and epoxy into an AI optimized lightweight and strong portion of a hypercar suspension at one point either.

At some point, barring humans wiping themselves out, we'll figure out how to begin custom tweaking molecules and printing them on demand, afterwards we should be able to figure out how to directly tweak atomic scale structures, from there we'd move to directly converting energy into mass.

There is no reason to think the universe has a spatial or temporal bound, but we will have to deal with entropy, and eventually worry about shit like proton stability, but this is getting into the 10^40~100 year range, so far beyond what out there sci-fi discusses as deep future as to make it look like tomorrow comparitively.

There are problems wrapped up in all those ideas of course, but none of them involve "running out of stuff" unless we mature fully beyond a Type III Kardashev civ.

Capitalism requires scarcity, in the face of reality it has to argue for artificial scarcity, and it's easy to do this because people are relatively small things with a relatively shit grasp for large numbers.

People act like a millionaire and billionaire are in any way similar, when being a millionaire means you can retire fairly comfortably, while being a billionaire means you can't spend all your money and run out anymore because it makes more of itself before anybody is able to use it.

You've spent most of your life with a horizon between 1 and 5 kilometers away most likely, so at your scale the world seems like it must be a similar size, but you have to be floating around in orbit for the horizon you can see to reach the size of the world itself. It is so massive as to measurably warp what you might normally think of as immutable concepts like distance: the planet is literally a millimeter or so deeper than you would expect by measuring the surface and calculating the radius. That excess radius is a result of enough stuff to curve spacetime around itself, and it is the most wasteful possible use of material you could imagine for the production of a breathable and livable environment.

Spun out into habitable containers you could probably fill a significant chunk of our orbit with all the shit locked up inside the planet, but to actually fill it you'd need to pull shit off the sun, maybe deconstruct a couple of the gas giants/ice giants out there, or figure out how to start printing sunlight directly into mass and spend a long enough time doing it.

Physics allows it, we can understand that it is at least possible, it will probably end up happening eventually unless stopped, so no, scarcity on any scale you have used the word is imaginary until you start seriously discussing stellar masses and whatnot.

I uh, I think the implication was that violence by whites against hispanics was being counted as white on white, not the laughable idea that hispanics are somehow more violent than whites.

Dude may not legitimately know how fucked up and racist IQ tests are either.

My personal theory about all this is that during the whole slavery era the US developed a culture where people became excessively sensitive to moral criticism. This would have come about due to Northerners and foreigners almost constantly piling on the South over the slavery issue (or, were perceived to be piling on). Over time the geographic divide was subsumed into the R/D political divide. What we’re left with is a US where people simply will not even bother trying to understand what anyone perceived to be an “outsider” thinks, instead assuming they are ignorant, immoral, or running some hidden agenda.

It’s basically a siege mentality where people assume bad faith from just about everyone else and limit themselves to ideologically aligned echo chambers. I think the latest bout of siege mentality was triggered by conservative backlash to political correctness, in particular the arbitrary nature of some PC “rules” and the complete lack of discretion in its application. There are legitimate complaints there. The trouble, of course, is that The PC backlash is as intellectually lazy as the PC lynch mobs themselves. It’s like we’re caught in an eternal deterministic cycle of offence and backlash which will ultimately consume us.

Then you have individualism, where everyone seems to be under a lot of pressure to be exceptional in some way. It’d be hard for people to admit that an ideological enemy might have been right all along, after all.

In the end, the people who believe this crazy crap simply aren’t listening. This is also how nonsense like Young Earth Creationism can exist. Now, the US isn’t the only place people believe stupid crap, but it does seem to have an unusually strong influence on political discourse, at least for a developed nation. That last point could be incidental though. Could probably happen anywhere, but just happens to be the US now.

I know there are various valid criticisms of his model, at least one alternative but similar one I know of, and various deeper reasons behind lots of shit in the US, but holy fuckbats the country makes so much more sense after seeing maps like Woodard drew up and various explorations of the idea like the ones this dude offers: https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/maps-of-the-american-nations/ which are both an interesting read in general and an interesting read in particular for ameripol understanding.

Regarding the military and why though I understand people being alarmed and thinking shit might go down, I felt the need to say that was a very very very unlikely outcome, even IF said orders were given by someone loved and respected by all...

That's part of what the training involves, instilling the idea that you're not a bad person for doing this because you're doing it to keep people back home safe.

When you just instill the "targets are shaped like people" and "follow orders" subroutines you get cops murdering people all over the fucking place, but I think a little more highly of soldiers, got a whole family of marines down to my little sister, and I'm basically named after my awesomely bearded grandpa, though he usually answered to "Gunny" when he was still around.

Uh, just to note using said example: if you spend a week and make a shovel and use it to dig a well in a week... you still have a shovel AND the well, in no way is that less valuable than spending twice as long to wind up with just a well.

Oh I get why he stopped and freaked out, eyes twitching around, ears up on tiptoes somehow, huffing and puffing like a freight train as he sniffed and snuffed at them.

Let him walk down into the ditch some to get closer and he clearly wanted to see them closer but I was like "dude, I get it, but you're acting like a creep and scaring them" and had to get him back up on the road again.

Quote from: Max™ on June 05, 2020, 12:41:46 am

When you look at census numbers you would find something like 10% of rural adults are veterans while only 7% of urban adults are, accordingly you might think there is a significantly larger number of rural enlistments, but we're looking at 10% of less than a fifth of the population vs 7% of the rest of the population aren't we?

You're putting the cart before the horse.  Where a veteran lives after leaving the military is irrelevant, and there's a lot of reasons why that would skew urban, the primary being that census of all veterans necessarily includes all age demographics, including those that require to be close to major healthcare facilities due to age.  What matters to this conversation is what areas supply the military, and that is skewed rural.  Waaay rural.  Looking at military recruits, 36% of them came from rural areas and almost 40% were suburbanites.  Less than a quarter came from the country's most populous areas.

Now, I did consider afterwards that there are no doubt a varied number of ex-rural vets who moved inwards towards cities, but it seems weird as hell to hear anyone consider suburbs in any way resemble actual rural areas.

I mean, I personally lived in all three categories around Dallas, going from Lewisville and DeSoto suburbs out to a house in Hutchins where we had horses and the neighbor on one side was like 10 miles away, the other was actually next door, but then it was another half mile to the guy that raised emus, and another couple of miles to get to where Chuck Norris lived so I guess it was pretty damn rural even before considering the huge fallow field across the road... after that we moved briefly to a duplex in East Dallas where I could see downtown if I stood out in the street on the closest thing to a hill around there and we had three or four windows shot out which were completely unrelated to us, just stray bullets.

Ever heard a lowrider thumping la cucaracha? It's a trip, but if East Dallas wasn't full of mexican bangers and you couldn't literally see downtown I would definitely say it was more like any suburb I've lived in than those suburbs resembled rural areas.

I mean, to go to a convenience store in hutchins was a several mile bike ride, I once rode one of our horses out there because he loved trying to figure out what the fuck emus were and it was hilarious the first time we were clipclopping down the road and he saw them come out from behind their shed and LITERALLY slid to a stop on the road... KSSSHHHHHH and if we had been going much faster/I hadn't kinda been expecting him to want to take a look I mighta smacked into the back of his head. Big beautiful moron.