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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I mean, it was inarguably violence, and that violence seems to have a political motive (since changing or reforming the healthcare system is considered a political issue), and there is an element of using fear to further that end (since he would obviously have known that he cannot realistically change everything by himself or even just shoot every health insurance CEO, but shooting one while featuring a catchy phrase to make it clear the motive was being fed up with the health system, potentially makes all the other such CEOs and people in similar positions afraid that the next guy to try this might go after them next, and that more might be inspired seeing the shooting). Id argue that it does technically fit the term. People are just so used to that term being used alongside causes that they have no agreement with that they think it can never apply to a good one, or consider if it can ever be justified.




  • money is a proxy for resources, is the thing, having someone “own” everything includes owning all the money, at which point you end up with the same issue. Ownership is meaningless without a system to enforce that, because one person cant prevent everyone else from using “their” stuff on their own, and systems require buy in from a large fraction of the population to function, which requires giving enough people a reason to participate. Automation doesnt really solve this, it increases the total amount that can be produced, meaning you can hold a higher fraction of the total because the smaller fraction left can be “enough” to keep the system running, but some tasks exist that require a significant degree of intelligence and thinking to do, meaning you must either have humans do them, or have machines that are smart and self aware enough that them finding ways around restrictive programming becomes an issue.

    I dont think Mars has anything to do with some plan by the rich to escape tbh. Early space colonies by nature would be cramped, form-follows function places to live, and the rich tend to like a lot of comforts. It seems to me more likely that they would send other people to colonize mars as a vanity project, or for resource extraction, or just because they personally like the concept and have enough money to push for it to be done, than that very many of them would personally go there. They might suggest that it could be a way to escape climate change or such in order to try to prompt others to buy in, but that notion falls flat on its face when one considers that even if we burned every scrap of coal in the ground, every drop of oil, and then fired off every nuclear weapon, it would still be easier to build a settlement on earth than one on mars. If you have the resources and the technology to build a mars colony, “the planet burning” is no longer much of a threat to your survival anyway.

    EDIT: I guess I should clarify that Im not trying to say that I dont think wealth inequality is an issue, I think its one of the biggest issues we have, I just think this narrative I sometimes see of “The rich all have a long term plot to kill everyone and then fly off into space” looks to me like conspiratorial thinking that overestimates the rich and misunderstands their motives, which I feel is a negative thing, because it makes the solution seem less like “replace or transition the system into one that naturally tends to a more equitable distribution of resources” and more like “These specific guys are the villains, kill/imprison them and it’ll fix everything, and also mistrust automation and space development because they further their plans”. The second of those I think would even if successfully implemented, just result in a new generation of rich people naturally arising later on as wealth begets wealth, while neglecting technologies that I feel are vital for increasing the sum total of human prosperity.


  • Realistically, if a couple rich people ever obtain all the money, they no longer have any, because money only has the trait of being money and not merely some piece of metal or paper or information or whatever else when it is used as a medium of exchange, and if almost nobody actually has any, then exchanging it on a meaningful scale is no longer possible.

    Under this scenario, one must imagine that people would eventually start growing food and making things on land that they do not “own” and trading it amongst themselves, until some new thing that people actually have access to becomes money. Even hiring security to prevent that ceases to be possible, because paying that security means giving some of that money to someone else, and even if you do that, if theyre the only people getting paid it, then no economic base exists to support things like grocery stores that accept that money anymore, making those security people gain nothing from accepting it and thus have no incentive to do that work for you anymore. For the rich to stay rich, they must leave at least enough money (and resources) in common circulation for the economic system that maintains their power to continue to have relevance.








  • Would it really be (serious question, as I dont know a whole lot about legal matters)? My limited understanding was that perjury is lying under oath, and sarcasm, while it does involve saying untrue statements, isnt considered lying in everyday speech because what it actually communicates is the opposite of the literal meaning of the words. Since laws deal with humans and not computers, my assumption would be that it probably works in such a way as to depend on what message a person is actually communicating rather than the precise syntax by which they communicate it?