Bay 12 Games Forum

Recompile and insert a computer virus, then release into the wild. When scientists sequence the genome of the infectious agent, they will unwittingly cause the demise of the internet, killing millions and setting back civilization by about 200 years.


Set theory.

That's a good point, however, with both upward and downward mobility being balanced, that doesn't help with the basic premise of people rising over time (i.e. the expectation that your children will be better off than you, as well as rising over your lifetime).

True - but at least you'd genuinely have a shot at your folks becoming part of the upper crust at some point. You gotta distinguish between lamenting the dumbness of relying on social mobility happening just magically and lamenting the dumbness of the worrying expectation that the economy is going to return to a '50s-like boom any way now. They're separate dumbnesses, is what I'm saying.

E: Also you have cutoffs at the top and bottom, which complicates the analysis. Come to think of it, modelling society as a vertical tube full of water might not be an altogether bad idea... Discussions of the social impact of things would then be equivalent to arguing over how the temperature curve along the length of the tube would change if we rearranged the heating elements.

So the company that produced the anti-graffiti coating for the Holocaust memorial in Berlin also was the producer - through a subsidiary - of Zyklon B, the stuff the Nazis used to gas the Jews.

Talk about creating a demand for your product.

The best part is: If there is a civil war after all, the British pound will be worth jack shit

Quote from: Helgoland on August 20, 2017, 01:33:06 pm

the sort of legal positivism that makes people invoke internet rules.

Thank you for fucking knowing what this is*.  [...]

*Unless we're talking about totally different things, in which case I will retract my thank you in embarrassment

Huh? I was talking about Godwin...

If my high school history doesn't fail me, Sino-Soviet relations actually weren't all that great in the 60's. Apparently the communist party of China wasn't stoked about the bashing of Stalin's personality cult and some degree of condemnation of his policies by Khruschev.

IIRC China developed nuclear weapons before that though, and with Soviet help. Maybe the time given in the original question was off.

I'm talking about their vision, their endgame. Now, I may be wrong, but are they opposed to private property, to keeping around the existing bodies of government (President, Senate, House), the capitalist way of doing business? Do they want to disestablish the quote-unquote traditional family in favor of radical social experimentation? Hell, do they  want to significantly mess with the social stratification at all, apart from lynching a couple politicians and Wall Street fat cats? Are they opposed to the place the military occupies (heh) in American society?


Hell, I'd wager most would agree that the state monopoly on violence should be a thing - once it's the right people wielding it.

Right-wingers don't threaten the state itself. There's nothing surprising about it. If there was a right-wing movement advocating societal transformation as radical as that proposed by the leftist extremists, you could bet your ass they were going to be cracked down on as well.