impartial_fanboy

joined 4 years ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Oh yeah it wouldn't change a god damn thing, arguing about it would be literally pointless. Same thing as arguing against free-will, either it exists or it doesn't. Debating it is pointless, finding out one way or the other is pointless since in both cases nothing changes.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Fortunately there's a new funny science youtube who also seems to have at least decent if not verging on pretty good politics.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

From when I still watched her, Superdeterminism seemed to be her thing. Its a non-theory, totally unprovable. I don't think she's a MOND believer, could be wrong though but either way she's not a cosmologist.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

It was the NIF two years ago but it's also not going to be generating power ever, it was just a demonstration/proof of concept.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'll give it a shot.

  1. China can discipline individual capitalists but it cannot discipline Capital (in more vulgar terms, international capital).

  2. Since it lacks this capacity China is therefore dependent on Capital cooperating with it to achieve its vision of Socialism.

  3. Thus it will not achieve Socialism with its current trajectory.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Yes, Boeing made the first stage of the Saturn V.

'Defense contractor' and 'small' are oxymorons. The old guard, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Rocketdyne, etc. all got used to cost-plus contracts and so geared their production assuming they'd always have them. Now they're big mad that SpaceX and others are upstaging them in cost, performance and scale because, surprise surprise, decades of no accountability doesn't foster competence.

Rocket production has always been a public/private partnership, the only difference is SpaceX takes commercial customers too, not just governments (or companies who basically are part of their government).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

I think the growth vs. degrowth framing is really poorly defined, there's not a clear distinction between capitalist growth (basically GDP) and development of the productive forces and any discussion of the topic easily devolves into people talking past each other because they're using different definitions for the same terms.

A lot of GDP growth today is in things that manipulate the market and can be gotten rid of entirely like advertising, which is nearly 20% of US GDP by itself. This makes it relatively easy to get rid of but is a double edged sword. This focus on financial growth over the 'actual' economy over the past ~50 years has left it neglected and so the (re)development of the productive forces of North America (not just the US since the economy is already quite integrated) will require massive investment and thus 'growth'. It will obviously be a different sort of growth than has been done before (yes, even than the Soviets) so it is hard to say how exactly it will look but it won't happen unless the economy is under the control of the mass of people who make it up.

Fossil fuel extraction will continue probably for a very long time (we use it for nearly everything) but at a greatly reduced scale as alternatives are developed. Modern agriculture is actually fairly space (and thus calorie per hectare) inefficient because it's easier to automate and thus reduce labor costs. Likely there will be many more people who work in agriculture but still on the order of single digit percentages of the population (just more than the ~2% it is now). Enhanced weathering has the potential to be a sort of Hail Mary for CO2 sequestration, it can also be used on cropfields as fertilizer though it probably can't replace all nitrogen fertilizer but I don't know enough about it to really say either way. I think other forms of CO2 sequestration are mostly in the realm of fantasy so hopefully enhanced weathering doesn't have too many detrimental side-effects.

As for resource extraction more generally, it will also have to continue for a long time in all likelihood. Perhaps deep sea mining of those naturally occurring polymetallic nodules will be less impactful than traditional mining, perhaps not. Asteroid mining could genuinely be revolutionary in this aspect but the investment involved to get it a necessary scale would probably take too long for it to be a viable short-term solution even if there was a revolution tomorrow. Things can be done to make traditional mining less impactful that aren't currently because they aren't profitable, but it will likely be the worst thing that continues in any transition. Rewilding other areas to compensate will ease the damage.

It will be a difficult transition. Go too slow and you risk the environment degrading to the point of the collapse of production entirely. Go too fast and you risk the same by not having the inputs necessary to sustain it. The market is too slow and passive to handle the situation and so it will only be overcome if the (real) economy can be steered by society as a whole.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

His personal disgust with it.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago (1 children)

5v5. All the most toxic games are 5v5, whether its CSGO or League etc. I can't stand them. Though the real problem is automated matchmaking and lack of server browsers, most other pvp games have ways of mitigating the toxicity but 5v5's really just encourage it full tilt.

I really wish larger team based esport games were the ones that took off, but alas.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Guild Wars 1 had a lot of unique and weird weapons but the Fiery Dragon Sword is one of those rule of cool weapons even though it makes no sense practically.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

He needs to read the Enchantments of Mammon.

To be fair to him this is nowhere near as bad as Sabine's capitalism video which was really embarrassing even on a Lib level, she just really had no idea what she was talking about.

It just felt like for every positive point he made he had to throw in a jab or two to balance it out, which is unfortunate. Either he actually believes it or was afraid his audience would run away thinking he's a commie if he didn't perform sufficient disavowal.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I had literally just found this guy's channel a week ago and was super excited. It was disappointing how much disavowal he did (or felt he had to do) to appear 'impartial'.

But honestly this video was pretty basic literary analysis of Capital. Which I guess is good for libs to hear, a couple might actually read it maybe.

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