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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • I’m probably being a bit hyperbolic, but I do want to clarify that the descent into violence and musical knife-chairs is what happens if they succeed at replacing or disempowering the State. The worst offenders going to prison and the rest quietly desisting is what happens when the State does something (literally anything, in fact. Tepid and halfhearted enforcement of existing laws was enough to meaningfully slow the rise of crypto) and they fail, but if they were to directly undermine that monopoly on violence I fully expect to see violence turned against them, probably at the hands of whatever agent they expected to use it on their behalf. In my mind this is the most dramatic possible conclusion of their complete lack of understanding of what they’re actually trying to do, though it is certainly less likely than my earlier comment implied.


  • I mean, I love the idea of automation in the high level. Being able to do more stuff with less human time and energy spent is objectively great! But under our current economic system where most people rely on selling their time and energy in order to buy things like food and housing, any decrease in demand for that labor is going to have massive negative impacts on the quality of life for a massive share of humanity. I think the one upside of the current crop of generative AI is that it threatens claims to threaten actual white-collar workers in the developed world rather than further imisserating factory workers in whichever poor country has the most permissive labor laws. It’s been too easy to push the human costs of our modern technology-driven economy under the proverbial rug, but the middle management graphic design Chadleys of the US and EU are finding it harder to pretend they don’t exist because now it’s coming for them too.





  • Having read the whole book, I am now convinced that this omission is not because Srinivasan has a secret plan that the public would object to. The omission, rather, is because Balaji just isn’t bright enough to notice.

    That’s basically the entire problem in a nutshell. We’ve seen what people will fill that void with and it’s “okay but I have power here now and I dare you to tell me I don’t” and you know who happens to have lots of power? That’s right, it’s Balaji’s billionaire bros! But this isn’t a sinister plan to take over society - that would at least entail some amount of doing what states are for.

    Ed:

    “Who is really powerful? The billionaire philanthropist, or the journalist who attacks him over his tweets?”

    I’m not going to bother looking up which essay or what terrible point it was in service to, but Scooter Skeeter of all people made a much better version of this argument by acknowledging that the other axis of power wasn’t “can make someone feel bad through mean tweets” but was instead “can inflict grievous personal violence on the aged billionaires who pay them for protection”. I can buy some of these guys actually shooting someone, but the majority of these wannabe digital lordlings are going to end up following one of the many Roman Emperors of the 3rd century and get killed and replaced by their Praetorians.



  • You know, I feel like he’s still breaking down barriers because I’ve never heard of a straight man being that much of a messy bitch.

    But internalized homophobia aside the fact that they’re so frequent in failing to pay their hired help really puts the lie to the libertarian side of their ideology. Even if you and I in particular have too much pride and sense to work with them they never seem to have issues finding someone to take the risk, meaning that *someone is getting exploited into make the lifestyles of the rich and famous possible.





  • I had forgotten about that one. Thanks, I hate it.

    I was already largely out of step with the Rats at this point, and I definitely hadn’t read it with the new “actually I feel like I was right about this one, neener neener” header. What strikes me now is the attitude here. Like, it takes a staggering degree of reflexive contrarianism to frame this as “see Trump isn’t that racist” instead of “hey look how fast the rest of the political establishment embraced this overt racism. Maybe we should have listened when everyone tries to tell us how racist the political establishment was underneath the respectable and reasonable public face”. Just because the wolves have taken off the wool suits now doesn’t mean they weren’t wolves the whole fucking time.