Notices by mike805 (mike805@noc.social)

@AAKL @joeo10 Yes this is silliness. However it would be just as well for the tech industry to take a break from getting new stuff for a few years. Instead work on efficiency and reliability and making this fixable.

A shortage of hardware would be a good thing. The industry is flabby and needs to get in shape.

@AAKL @joeo10 They should be required to pay the full infrastructure cost of all the water and electricity they need. This would be a great way to get renewable solar infrastructure built out on the dime of Wall Street. And if they lose their speculative bet, too bad, we still have the solar infrastructure.

Most of the early railroad builders went broke but the rails were still there and were put to use. Likewise the early 21st century fiber buildout.

@AnnaAnthro I watched the movie. And yes there were a lot of Americans there.

Olympia has impressive sound editing for that era, almost up to modern standards. Whenever the American athlete was up, they would fade in the crowd chanting USA USA USA.

It got me wondering, what would it have felt like walking around Nazi Berlin in 1936? Foreboding and creepy?

The Germans did restrain the Storm Troopers for the duration. They tended to punch foreigners for not saluting.

@amerika @Forestofenchantment @Bernard If human productivity has increased by 10X or more since the nineteenth century, why are there still have-nots?

One of the reasons the Leftist plague is so hard to eradicate is that conservatives, when securely in power, do not care about the have-nots.

If the billionaire class did not put so much effort into stealing a few additional points of GDP from the working class, Leftism would not be such a plague. Nobody likes the Leftist cultural agenda.

@Bernard @amerika @Forestofenchantment There appears to be a deliberate effort to keep the population 50/50 on issues the elite does not care about. This is to prevent the public from voting its wallet.

For example, the D party could have passed a national right to abortion under Obama. They did not.

And then just when the party system required a Leftward move, the Supreme Court decided to overturn RvW.

The American political system is too stupidly designed to handle more than two viewpoints.

@amerika @Forestofenchantment @Bernard "No need to steal" then why do they buy perfectly good companies and wreck them for short term profit? Who not just say "I have enough" and enjoy life?

A lot of these people see life as a video game where they are chasing the high score.

Those who do philanthropy (Gates, Soros, Koch family) get involved in creepy and harmful stuff.

As for natural selection, this society is dysgenic as hell. The more responsible you are the less likely to reproduce.

@amerika @Forestofenchantment @Bernard I'm thinking of Boeing and General Electric, for example. Boeing was a great engineering driven company until they let McDonnell-Douglas bean counter management take over. GE pioneered the screw the worker, export the jobs business model before it was cool.

Finance people should not be running non-finance companies. They will wreck it every time.

@amerika @Forestofenchantment @Bernard I think chivalry was interesting, and misunderstood today.

It was a practical thing that only applied to nobles.

You knew that the same families on the enemy side would be there after the war. If you made personal blood enemies out of them, revenge would be taken, against you or your sons.

So therefore you ransomed prisoners rather than killing them. You did not rape noblewomen (peasants were fair game.)

It was more about strategy than morality.

@Bernard @amerika @Forestofenchantment What do you think of the fact that democracy is always held out today as the ultimate ideal to which we must strive? If things are not going well, the answer is always more voting by more people in larger polities. Never considering that maybe voting doesn't scale to infinity.

Whereas the ancient Greeks saw democracy as the degenerate state of a Republic just before it crashed into a dictatorship (or got conquered.)

One or the other must be wrong.

@amerika @Forestofenchantment @Bernard The Japanese had most of the same noble culture around the same time. I think a lot of it was about the weaponry of that time.

Armor was very effective. The movies underestimate armor by a lot. The good armor also cost more than a peasant would make in a lifetime.

Mastering either armored cavalry warfare or the longbow was a full time job. The knight needed a large crew to keep him in action.

A bunch of angry peasants with pikes could not overthrow 1/2

@amerika @Forestofenchantment @Bernard During feudalism also, the state was about WHAT IS. Physical reality. Which was, if noblemen with horses and swords did not defend the land, someone was going to take it over.

The whole domain of WHAT SHOULD BE - morality, altruism, justice - was assigned to the church. The church had all the soft power. The state had the hard power. The two respected each other even if they did not always get along.

@Bernard @Forestofenchantment @amerika When the Arabs brought in Black slaves, the slaves were physically neutered. When they imported White slaves, the slaves were trained as Janissaries and sent out to fight their wars for them.

The Arabs of that time were brutal enough to have slavery. Western civilization is not, so slavery always bites us in the ass.

@Bernard @Forestofenchantment @amerika IMHO this is the basic problem with immigration in the West. We have a handful of true assholes that want to exploit the immigrants economically. They want desperate people.

Then we have a larger group of soft-hearted altruists who say "we must help those people" without understanding their culture or values.

If you take in refugees from a social disaster elsewhere, you will get some of the bad people who caused the disaster. They will cause one here too.

@Forestofenchantment @amerika @Bernard Christianity won out only because Rome was already hard up for a new organizing principle.

Christianity was at one time a pretty hardcore ideology of conquest. If everyone else is going to hell, then conquering and Christianizing them is doing them a favor.

Christian empires that lack a military threat for a while get lazy and decadent. All nobility systems rot in peacetime.

@Bernard @Forestofenchantment @amerika Rome's OLD organizing principle had them bringing non-Romans in as slaves. And although the slaves had no political rights, they had their culture, their language, and their reproductive apparatus.

Rome was largely overrun by its own slaves. When Rome's politics got shaky, suddenly the citizens discovered they were outnumbered by people who didn't like them too much.

This happened in Haiti too, and would have in the American South absent the Civil War.

@Bernard The first principle of Communism is that Communism has no principles.

The Left sees principles as a tool to hobble the principled.

@earthshine Also in the USA, the government was NOT supposed to have a monopoly on violence. That is the purpose of the 2nd amendment.

Some people argue that "militia" means the National Guard, but in those days towns and counties had militias as well as the state.

Every unit of human organization from the family on up to the nation was supposed to have the means to do violence if required.

And if you are worried about "fash" they always disarm their opponents first.

@divVerent @ArneBab @HeliosPi @DGI In the 1960s you had the Black activists and various Leftists getting armed and taking the 2nd Amendment seriously. California banned open carry because the wrong people (Black Panthers) were exercising that right.

So why doesn't the Left like guns? The Left was certainly armed in just about every country where the Left successfully came to power.

@jeffowski Whatever happened to JAILBAIT? An old idea which needs to come back...

@danwentzel The thing people are vaguely remembering was when the coffee shop owner family lived upstairs from the coffee shop.

There was no modern private equity buying up real estate then. If you want nice things you have to get finance out of them.