> with [the federal ACA legislation that the insurance companies' lawyers/lobbyists wrote to mandate everyone in the nation to buy into a broken healthcare paradigm in a broken financial paradigm] there really isn't any excuse for not having health insurance
> what gives the author the right to blanketly declare the lives of the middle class to be souless, meaningless, and that their jobs are bullshit?
Well, that's what modern life is under the TINA regime[1]. A whole society of people who've sold out every heroic ideal humans have ever conceived, in order to live as cells inside corporate organs of a hyper-capitalistic organism that would collapse if it stopped expanding. Money is god (it's about equal in power to law, at least), and money is created in a Ponzi between central banks and governments, and between private financial corporations and private enterprises/individuals, all on the promise that there will be even more money next year to pay back the debts of this year, and give "good enough or better" returns on large capital pools invested. We consume natural resources in an unsustainable way in exchange for this money, and for a cellular role in the organs and the organism, and it will last in this way until the last day comes, when we starve to death on our own planetary stripmine.
We could be taking a new course right now, to live in idealistic ways, in sustainable ways, in heroic ways. But we all just quit that notion before we start, because it's just too hard, and we distract ourselves with the greatest media spectacle of entertaining diversions and political issues every conceived.
Welcome to life in hell. You can get defensive and self-righteous when people point out the mass hypocrisy and delusion and error in all our lives, but it doesn't change the truth that we are all living in an awful state, as cowards and lapdogs of the hyper-capitalist system that gives us life today, even as it guarantees death in the future.
I figure that a not-yet born post-human super-predator will take the best of human intelligence and anti-entropic principles and incorporate them, and destroy the rest. Or some already-existing higher powers will swoop in at some point in the future to harvest the best of our anti-entropic principles, and destroy the rest of us.
Which is very much like something I'd been meaning to write for some time, though better-done (and certainly longer) than mine probably would have been. Strictly separating the practical and moral sides of the arguments was, in particular, a great idea. I do wish someone would send him more rebuttals, since I like reading take-downs of things I agree with and the only one linked there is really poor, even by the not-especially-rigorous standards of the original.
I believe the sentiment you express is shared by a large number of people, even more in the past. Maybe the Hacker community that spawned the Free Software movement is particularly aware of alternative means of production. Except for labor the amount of captital needed for software development is essentially zero, so that you do not have to attempt to reorganize ownership of capital to be successful.
Already today the production of most physical things requires in many cases next to no labor, which in turn means their price should approach the manufacturing cost. In those sectors cooperative invention together with shared means of production should take over (makerspaces), because it is unprofitable for businesses to compete in those domains. The problem is that unless landownership and resource distribution is not tackled at the same time all that will probably not happen because larger parts of the population will either be deemed unnecessary or be engaged in unproductive financial games.
Welcome to life in hell. You can get defensive and self-righteous when people point out the mass hypocrisy and delusion and error in all our lives, but it doesn't change the truth that we are all living in an awful state, as cowards and lapdogs of the hyper-capitalist system that gives us life today, even as it guarantees death in the future.
Rousing rhetoric, but it doesn't change the fact that while it's shit to be poor, it's still better to be poor now than at pretty much any previous time in known history.
A whole society of people who've sold out every heroic ideal humans have ever conceived
Which again sounds like nice and tasty demagoguery, but isn't true. We continually progress and improve on civil rights, for example.
If only there was a middle-ground between the GP's grandiose demagoguery and your clumsy strawmanning, there might be some discussion that helps find a solution instead of just lobbing insults at those whom you assume are your opponents.
Capitalism does not require net growth. People, things, culture and organisations decay. People get old, Teens in 2016 are not going to dress the same, listen to the same songs, or even read the same books from the 2015. The is a long cycle of banks flat out failing in good times and in bad. Clothing, Houses, Bridges, and Roads need to be replaced etc.
Sure, in steady state economy's there is a different balance and fewer people get to retire early. However, lower returns and later retirements does not break capitalism. Just look at Japan's falling GDP.
I, for one, believe that continued economic growth needs continued growth in global energy production, and that we will be unable to maintain this growth over the next century for thermodynamic reasons. This will be the big shit-hits-the-fan moment of the coming years, not climate change or wars. We literally have to throw centuries of economics out the window.
Solar energy is essentially untapped today (relative to output from fossil fuels), and we are in no danger of exhausting the supply of nuclear fuel in the near term.[0]
Eventually global energy production will taper off, but I would bet strongly against it being within the next century.
Yea, there is no "thermodynamic reason" for a limited supply of energy. Even if we started expending too much energy in the atmosphere (say if we found an efficient way to fusion), we could pump this excess heat to space, if it would ever come to such an extreme.
I see that none of you have heard of Carnot efficiency, or even the second law of thermodynamics. Even if we were to get electric energy from magical pink unicorns that produced no heat, the usage of that energy would produce waste heat. And no, you can't just pump heat into space; if we could that would easily solve global warming.
Constructive proof: build a large suspended reflector (mirror), put you power source on it and pump heat from earth to a sphere of any material, which radiates heat into space.
No, this of course can't easily solve global warming due to enormous cost it would have and ludicrous efficiency. It's way cheaper to just absorb less heat from the sun (less CO2).
Sometimes it's best to do the math before claiming stuff. Now, using thermal radiation from a metal puts your emission spectrum at blackbody radiation around or below 2000 Kelvin, and in that band around 50% of your emitted energy will be absorbed by the atmosphere (thus will not leave earth). Your heat pump going from 293 K to 2000 K will have a laughably low Carnot efficiency (the highest efficiency allowed by thermodynamics): for every Joule of heat you pump from the earth to the sphere, you have to use more than 20 Joules from our magical unicorns. Of these 20 Joules, 10 will be absorbed by the atmosphere and heat the earth. But you have only removed one Joule of heat from the earth. Thus your apparatus is not able to cool the earth, in fact it will be heating the earth by a lot.
Alright, thermodynamics + not requiring magic (except the unicorns) then. Thermodynamics has everything to do with it; if it were not for the Carnot limit on heat pump efficiency, your proposed scheme for heat removal would work fine. If it were not for the Carnot limit, we would have no problem growing global energy consumption at 2-3% per year (i.e. exponentially) for a hundred more years.
So, if you put your apparatus anywhere but in the low atmosphere, how do you expect it to pump heat from the low atmosphere (where the heat is)?
I'm not on any high horse, but I'm surprised at how quickly people dismiss this problem as absurd. It's quite obvious if you know some engineering thermodynamics. I think people dismiss it out of cognitive dissonance, since they don't want another unfixable world problem.
1) Thermodynamics imposes a finite limit on the energy consumption on Earth;
Sure, it might be necessary to build a fleet of titanic cooling towers to cool the atmosphere, I don't think we will ever need to do that; but thermodynamics doesn't forbid cooling Earth, hence your claim is false.
That out of the way
2) The direct thermal output of power sources/uses is going to be a problem in the near future
I claim that's also false. In fact, the burden of the proof should be yours when you make such a claim, but let me show why I believe otherwise: (approximate figure from wiki [1])
142 PWh of energy was used worldwide. Solar irradiance is 340000 PWh. It would take almost 200 years of steady 3% growth (or a 240x increase in consumption) to even reach 1% of solar irradiance as internal heat. Even then, the impact of greenhouse gases massively overshadows that.
On top of that, there's no activity requiring exponentially more energy, or evidence that we may continue expanding energy demand for hundreds or years. In fact, if you look at per capita energy consumption vs GDP [2], you can clearly see a saturation of energy needs. Once the developing nations reach this, it seems demand growth is going to slow down. Nothing physical ever maintains an exponential growth for too long.
>We could be taking a new course right now, to live in idealistic ways, in sustainable ways, in heroic ways. But we all just quit that notion before we start, because it's just too hard, and we distract ourselves with the greatest media spectacle of entertaining diversions and political issues every conceived.
Oh. You quit?
>Welcome to life in hell. You can get defensive and self-righteous when people point out the mass hypocrisy and delusion and error in all our lives, but it doesn't change the truth that we are all living in an awful state, as cowards and lapdogs of the hyper-capitalist system that gives us life today, even as it guarantees death in the future.
No, the working classes are actually revolting, because the system has guaranteed them death today.
All kinds of things are actually happening around the world to deal with humanity's problems, and here you're complaining instead of contributing.
Get back to work!
>I figure that a not-yet born post-human super-predator will take the best of human intelligence and anti-entropic principles and incorporate them, and destroy the rest. Or some already-existing higher powers will swoop in at some point in the future to harvest the best of our anti-entropic principles, and destroy the rest of us.
I'm right here, and it really boggles me why people like you keep thinking people like me would destroy you ;-).
I find what you wrote interesting yet it sounds very alien. It is probably just my indoctrinated brain. Can you recommend any good books or readings that echo these thoughts in more depth?
"I gave a talk about how to get started contributing to Chromium, but ... my slides by themselves look like cold-medicine induced hallucinations (which, to be fair, they were)."
Is she serious? Hardcore. That stuff will "make pure LSD seem like Ginger Beer..."
Outside of the rhetorical zone, outside of the we-can-believe-any-feel-good-idealistic-high-minded-righteous-principles-we-want-as-long-as-we're-just-talking-comfortably zone, this is not true.
You know how politicians have a certain style of rhetoric they use when addressing the public? How when they go on talk shows or try to speak about some platform/policy they are tendering to the public, there's this whole pretense of them actually believing in not only that the policy being tendered could work after you elect them and people like them, but also they have these "American" ethics/values, or even sometimes universal ethics, which form their motivation for wanting to be in politics, and wanting to enact policy?
I'm asking if you notice the gulf between how politicians speak, and what motives they give you the impression they have, versus how they really feel on the inside. One can say I don't knows how they feel on the inside, yet we've been lied to so many times, and we have seen contradictions between their public rhetoric and their private motivations in the past, that we should actually be considered gullible / abused-victim battered-wives if we take the rhetoric and policy prescriptions for, say, the 2016 elections at face value. I can safely predict that these candidates are pushing policies with a pretense of justice and ethics, yet they are for all literal definitions lying about what they say they believe.
I used the sort of politicians you vote for as an example that you should already understand. It shouldn't be controversial that Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are actually speaking words from behind a more-electable "persona" that is actually a lie. They effectively "pander" to us by talking about doing things "for America" and "for Americans". We've seen their lies in the past contradicted by their actual actions.
Anyway, military and civilian contractors in positions of power in the government need to be understood in this light.
"In what way are people who work for the NSA not American?"
Simple. No one who is not self-deceived, or deceived by others, works in that way. They are self-interested for the most part. They don't want to help everyone in America; there are millions of people in America they despise. The higher the stakes, the less altruistic they are. Give up your "hard-earned" money in taxes? In private charity? Too high of stakes. They be more likely to help other Americans if the others were "the sort of Americans" they prefer, and they prefer to leave the sort of individuals they don't like, or don't know and don't trust, to fend for themselves.
That applies to low-level workers, and it applies also applies to individuals at high levels of power. The fact that individuals at high levels have to use political-style fake rhetoric and personas to be appointed to their contracts and their stations does not mean they actually believe it. What truly motivates them is usually selfish things: attaining more wealth, ownership, control, more agency to mold their personal worlds to their will (cars, country clubs, whatever), and more agency to mold their greater civilization to their will (forcing other people to exist in ways that are more pleasing, or convenient to the powerful).
You see, there is no America, in reality. The reality that people fundamentally care about, will care about over the deceptive rhetoric when the chips are down, and that the military serves to exist, is wealth, power, and control.
We exist in a planetary civilizaion, but we presently pretend that old national civilizations are what motivate us, even as we take action year-in-and-year-out to further along the globalness of our order: we try to globalize/standardize our finance and governance system over every single individual person in every old nation.
So it's global power that motivates the ones in power, and building and preserving their own individual status in the global order that is what they are really beholden to.
That is why things like "Homeland Security" and NSA domestic information gathering exist: though the people with their hands on the levers of power here say it's to "protect America," they actually don't love all of America. "When the chips are down, these civilized people will eat each other, you'll see." They can't possibly save all of Americans, and they're building a lockdown-safe domestic order that will treat non-conforming Americans just as poorly as they treat non-conforming non-nationals.
They are working to protect themselves from violence, not the "Americans" they pander to. You will be protected precisely to the degree that you endorse and support the global regime, and you will be oppressed precisely to the degree that you resist and combat it.
Their professed "to protect America" motive is just a fork-tongued, or sugar-coated, rhetorical device that does not comport to the reality in their own heads when they put their heads down on their silk pillows at night. They are protecting their global economic and political order: corporate power, corporate governance, financialization, ueber alles.
> I'm asking if you notice the gulf between how politicians speak, and what motives they give you the impression they have
okay.
> No one who is not self-deceived, or deceived by others, works in that way. They are self-interested for the most part. They don't want to help everyone in America
wat. maybe you're the one who is self-deceived. how could you even know?
> You see, there is no America, in reality.
wat
> Their professed "to protect America" motive is just a fork-tongued, or sugar-coated, rhetorical device that does not comport to the reality in their own heads
wat
None of your rambling and incredibly cynical post precludes the idea that a person who works for the NSA can have strong beliefs that are sympathetic with (some portion) of the USA. Or maybe they intend to help out other parts of the world. If you are not too dulled by your own view of things, you should be aware of various crises that have occurred and are occurring around the globe. Accurate and timely information in these events can and will save lives.
Why join the NSA? It can be hard to help people when you lack the wealth or resources to support your endeavor and when you lack the power and control to execute. The NSA has all of these.
Or maybe they're all terrible people. Maybe they're in it for the thrill. Maybe they have no choice. I don't know. But there's just no way you can be so certain about any of this.
Except that since 2008, we've been experiencing an historically unprecedented flow of newly-created fiat money by way of bonds -> TBTF European and US banks -> central banks (and central banks don't need to have money in their accounts to buy something with bank transfer).
It's a massive flow of some of the cheapest capital available being pumped regularly into government treasuries and private financial institutions, with central banks (for whom losses are meaningless) holding more and more of the bonded debt continuously, every year.
Then, whether or not a government program like the "Working Group On Financial Markets" ('pluge protection team') prevents cascading selloffs in equity positions, or whether it's simply the self-reinforced cycle of buying-2x%-up-on-a-x%-drop asset trading algorithms that have enough cash this month because of the central banks, and don't have to sell down their equity positions because last months positions are neutral-to-good, there's enough breathing room to trade up again this month, and a reliable "Federal Reserve put" backstopping everyone.
This is happening because we live in a new state of financial fantasy ever since everyone went bankrupt in 2008. Now they just keep printing money and sharing it amongst elite government (military) powers and private equity/asset controlling powers.
Few in the private sector would be solvent if they actually had to take losses on their assets back in 2008, in an environment where liquidity could not match obligations, and everyone would have to sell. It's the same for the public balance sheets, who need profits in the private sector to have any money at all, and who usually overspend and oblige themselves to more debt than they can pay down even if good times lasted forever.
Debt is money, and debt is an asset. Who cares if there's always more debt than money?
We're just all continuously bull-shitting-out money from the central banks, to the elite capital/government institutions, down to the middle- and upper-class. And to the U.S. war machine, which has a magic credit card with no limit, but which would have gone bankrupt in anything like a real market.
One reason they have to do this is to keep baby boomers' retirement "assets" worth something, in a situation where they all are going to want to cash out of 50 year's of liquidity-draining investments over a 20 year period, which will be quite a liquidity-draining effect on the equity markets. But that's a whole 'nother long discussion.
The West bullshits itself pretty hardcore over the television, and on the internet, and in their suburbs, and at their corporate workplaces. But it's the bullshit financial markets (and the fantasy-land equity market valuations) that is the both the biggest pile of bullshit of all, and is the power source which keeps the rest of the bullshit from collapsing.
But, hey, go ahead, tell yourself these are "conservatively" priced markets. You're a great citizen.
conscientious objection