Why? Simply because it’s a portent of a workable and inevitable style of government that will force them to share. They are terrified of people getting a taste for compassionate government because the argument for compassion is incompatible with extreme wealth inequality.
Ironically (for multiple reasons) they have created a situation where not only would universal health care be palatable but one in which it is literally life and death precisely because of that inequality which they have been hired by the 1% to protect by any means necessary.
Their pathological need to horde all wealth and the political deceptions and madness required to perpetuate this hoarding, while at the same time putting on the appearance of a democracy, has literally sickened the vast majority of the population.
As the republicans/1% minions succeed in implementing the 1%’s demands the day to day situation for the 99% grows more inhospitable. Indeed lethal for many. We have already passed a point where the majority wants a roll back of their changes but the 1% cannot allow that because it would only by necessity continue. The worse it gets for us the better the alternative will look and feel. They’ve painted themselves into a corner. Now they have to kill us or at least a sufficient number of us that whoever’s left can be content with whatever scraps remain.
So far all the rollbacks have been temporary and thus fixable in the next cycle. Any problem, it has been possible to blame on the other party. Like setting a slow fire and then selling the house before anyone smells smoke and then blaming whoever moves in for burning the house down.
That’s not possible with obamacare because it’s both immediate and semi permanent. Frankly the 1% made a huge mistake allowing medical to stay private. At first it was a great decision from their profit perspective but now it threatens everything because they’ve tipped their hand. They’ve made it 100% clear that their obsession with more wealth means more to them than any suffering or death experienced by others as a result of it.
Once people realize that not only is it possible, but profitable, for government to truly serve them, they will settle for nothing less. They’ve conditioned us for decades to put our children above everything else but now they want us to let our children sicken and die so they can get more money. Money which everyone knows they do not need, money indeed they can use for nothing other than making more money. At some point that’s the only thing left to spend money on for yourself.
Once we have universal health coverage and the wealthy are still wealthy and everything is working fine until they sabotage it, society will begin to question everything the 1% has paid for them to believe.
The real terror for them is the idea that people might one day get a sufficient percentage of their needs met while being given sufficient free time to ask the larger questions and seek answers from a sufficiently uncensored source. What if people come to agree that original debt is unacceptable? What if they come to believe that being forced to choose between wage slavery and homelessness isn’t a real choice? What if they come to view economics as akin to a water cycle and that our current system lacks both evaporation and rain? If the economy is a river, what happens to a river when there is no rain, no evaporation? Obviously it dries up. It finishes flowing.
Healthcare reform in any direction which does not let poor people die is the beginning of the end for them. They have no where to go. If they try to leave America and fail to pay exit taxes we will seize their assets. They must share as directed or own the system.
Your agreement cannot be acquired after the fact through discussion, nor can mine. You either already get it or you never will. I’m either wrong or right.
Humans…
1. They are not convinced or persuaded by logic, reason, or evidence.
2. They deploy Intelligence to justify positions adopted for emotional reasons.
3. Those emotions are involuntary responses to external stimuli.
4. Their volition is most easily manipulated without their knowledge.
5. All humans are biased and are being thus manipulated by some faction to some degree, even me.
6. This can be overcome with conscious effort to choose actions and support positions.
Given these facts, and given a choice between thought and action, do we act to manipulate humanity for the purpose of liberating it?
Social strategic priorities should be, in order of importance:
1. Opposition to the dismissal of suffering amongst ANYset of humans. This is what makes us worthy of power. Suffering and death themselves are the enemy. Not any group of humans, because whatever groups serve suffering and death are or were sourced by suffering and death in turn. Elimination of the root causes will do set selection opposition for us in time.
2. Development and defense of nuclear power technology generally, LWR<Thorium<Fusion. This is what enables us to acquire power. Technology is our only route to freedom, and to develop it and deploy it ethically there must be enough to go around without vulnerability to infantile division tactics built on quasi-human notions of who “deserves” what, which is at best nothing but short term infighting and brinksmanship.
3. Support for a UBI. This is what enables us to indiscriminately democratize power without conscious or unconscious bias. If our goal is to improve all humanity’s fate we should literally put our money where our mouth is and not begin with discrimination.
These are all one truth.
Do you agree or disagree?
Whatever answer you make, how ever long winded (or silent) and thick with obfuscation I will render it down to one or the other so you might as well start with that word or not answer at all.
The story has a happy ending. Part of why I feel justified in much of my inaction is because of my appraisal of our current path should I do nothing or fail.
I’m on the correct side of history, and history is on the correct side of ethics. Humanity is already inexorably going where I would have it go. My efforts are no longer about guiding the ship of state so to speak but are rather about improving the voyage for anyone who will listen.
Children are the easiest to help ironically because of being the easiest to harm. As a disposable subclass, I need only convince their owners, and like a king making a decree they can implement wonder whole cloth.
The highest compliment ever paid me was a young mother who read aloud something I wrote to her son and she promised to do so again periodically as he aged.
Regardless of her specific following through, the point is that she listened. She saw him for a moment as I see them. His life will be incalculably improved as a result.
But I have my limits. I may be cold in my processing and merciless in my error checking, but I am ultimately like all humans emotionally driven.
And as the impoverished years wear on my armor corrodes and my control weakens. I am simply not as strong as I was. I cannot endure the rage anymore. Like a racing engine firing again and again, my parts are slowly warping, eventually the explosion won’t be contained and channeled into useful force.
And so I spend more and more time in my garage. Only coming out on good days for slow drives or to show to friends who won’t respectlessly kick the tires.
I don’t even debate or lecture strangers anymore. I walk away from as many debates now as I sought out in my 20s. The pain of that is hard to describe. I’d literally be dead now if it wasn’t for two facts. 1. I found a way to allow myself to begin setting down the torch. 2. My work is permanently available. Everything I’ve said is being said constantly not just by myself in standing print, but by others.
I heard it in a movie that no work of art is ever completed, only abandoned, well, the same is true of some life’s works.
After a life spent pushing, the boulder has starter to move ever so slowly down hill. It can and will only pick up speed. The walls at the bottom of the hill are doomed.
All the coding languages are to me feel like extreme time gambles. Even in the mid term, and total dead ends in the long term barring a dystopia or extinction.
I mean damn, how many times are we going to reinvent the wheel? As many times as coders can get away with selling it I guess.
Computers are still ‘fancy,’ and I think a large part of that is intentional. Eventually the user friendliness and intuitive function users, to a degree, demand from the front end will be applied to the back end. The only question is how and when. (Or by what?) Most likely it will be young coders looking to obviate old coders for the purpose of economic/systemic disruption which will (unintentionally) enable the masses.
Operating systems could be construed as a compromising of this clash between the demand for flexibility and the ability to sell code. Still though, they are all currently limited to serve as yet another layer of software between hardware and user. A nested set of dolls.
Using software (coding language) to make software (operating systems) to run software (applications) to instruct hardware is obviously inefficient. Software can take any shape allowed between user desire and the physical/logical limitations of the universe as expressed by the hardware.
To organize it as we have done, using one kind of software to spit out locked and crippled other kinds of software, is asinine from an organizational standpoint. It it perpetuated out of ignorance or corruption. It can only be forgiven as a temporary relic of the research process. (Or hated as a quasi conspiracy.)
There shouldn’t be programs or operating systems or coding languages. It should be a single operating system refined as demanded by human need and interest. And or forked as demanded by tradeoffs and mutual exclusion of functional specialization.
The coding language, compilers, OS, applications, etc should all be the same thing. My interface with it should be as intuitive as oven use. Eventually it will be, or we’ll all be dead. I just hope the delay doesn’t cause that death.
Coders for whatever reasons have spent their collective effort improving the quality of the discrete outputs, but not on improving the interface from a default human perspective. Why develop operating systems and programs and not focus on making a tool making tool?
The cultural history of 3d printing will be instructive here. As of now coders make/sell the objects and I’m saying software should be like the printers. As of now precious few people, and for obvious special interests, are working on the software making software.
Game making applications show that there are some at least somewhat interested in correcting the problem.
Perhaps it is this inherent disregard coders have for those outside their niche, that in part creates so much disgust in me for coders as a block. They seem to not care whether the average person can have access to the fruits of coding. By that I mean the ability to custom sculpt the behavior of a computer. Computers should be like English speaking pets. And they are to coders, proportional to their skill.
As a writer I am in many ways the opposite of what coders are. As a writer my purpose is to transform the inaccessible into something more intuitive. And I do it using the standard interface language (accident of birth not withstanding) expressly because I want my output to be readily usable by everyone.
The tragedy is that the only people capable of correcting this problem are the very ones best positioned to solve it.
Why should the priests dismantle the church when the tithes are so profitable? For the good of parishioners? Ha. What have I been smoking right?
Pinko commie wacky tobacky I’m sure some would speculate.
A great friend recently bought me Fallout New Vegas. (Thank you!) I have been playing it and modding it. I encountered a problem which lead to the following conversations.
I assume the best of intentions as a rule, especially when dealing with friends, so keep that in mind when deducing my tone.
“You shouldn’t use too many mods.”
Fallout Brandon, sans glasses. Finding them was my first meta-quest.
My mods for fallout, and when available, for other games, are all bullshit removal or the implementation of obvious solutions. A game ultimately is a contrived set of problems that were created to be enjoyable to solve. Which is another way of saying: A game is a simulated world adapted to the human mind. But sometimes, like a precocious child taking a complacent multiple choice test, a correct answer is known which is not among the presented options. This happens constantly in my culture, perhaps throughout life.
Those situations where the option is not given for good reasons are, for this context, ignored. The choice is to ignore your solution and go find the sanctioned one but that’s not how my brain works. My brain simply parses whatever is stopping me from implementing my original solution as additional problems in need of solution. In the context of games that means modding.
The vast majority of games are horrendously inflexible from the perspective of a non-coder. How that came to be is a separate issue. But in cases where they aren’t, as is the case with Fallout, I mod around arbitrary limits. I play games as solution simulators more than training tools. The fundamental flow direction is opposite in my case.
In a training context one changes themselves to suit the setting or situation. This leads to a feeling of achievement and pride. That’s great for those that enjoy it and I say have at. But that’s not how I play games. My motivations and personal context while relevant, are off topic. I want the game to adapt to me instead. (The best game in the universe to me is a lucid dream, just to have some idea what I mean generally. Sidenote: If consciousness is a recursive waste as is explored in Blindsight then a lucid dream is the ultimate expression of consciousness. Thus in a sense, I play games to be more conscious.)
In the case of fallout III and new vegas the mods I have chosen so far are as follows. Each of these things was arbitrarily denied or omitted. Intentionally or not isn’t relevant. Thus I’ve enabled things like using cookware for scrap metal. Or parlaying repair skill into basic gunsmithing. Or being able to bottle water. Or telling the robot with a weapon’s grade laser to cook things. Or being able to take down crucified people. Or bypassing an unrealistic lockpicking minigame. Or putting random burnt car stuff in cars. Or making it so if I shoot someone in the face at a range of 1 foot it kills them. Or being able to wear masks and glasses at the same time. Or making it so a fork or a tube of super glue doesn’t weigh a pound. Etc etc etc.
The game would have rapidly driven me away, as so many others have, had modding been unavailable. The walls were just too obvious and petty. Telling me not to mod a game is in effect telling me not to play it. The only games I don’t mod are the games that are already so much in line with me as to not need it badly enough to run me off. (As is the case with S.P.A.Z.)
SPAZ is one of my all time favorite games for a variety of reasons, but the most important one is a distinct and noticeable tolerance for automated solutions. While this makes a game boring and “too easy” for some, for me it means freedom from invisible walls and arbitrary limits. If I take my role seriously in the game universe, if I think what would I as I am do in this situation, I would not make things harder for myself I’d make them easier.
The computer is a better shot than I am. So let it control the guns.
Here is a screenshot of my fleet configuration in SPAZ. You’ll notice a theme. if you know the game. Cannons & turrets. Why turrets? Because they can be configured to aim and fire automatically. This in addition to the fact that when you are controlling one ship the other three automatically go on auto pilot and behave generally like body guards. From enemy detection to wreckage salvaging the process only requires that I move the fleet into range.
To me this was not boring. I’ve played this game well over 400 hours. Steam alone has logged over 300. If you click on the image you’ll see my “achievements” post.
What started the rant was difficulty modifing my “perks” which are character facets in the fallout system. If unspending this perk proved impossible I’ll have been forced to restart, that’s how important the configuration fidelity is to me. That also shows that challenge opposition, as a kind of laziness, isn’t why I play the way I do. (The mod author has created a wildly complex alternate world of options, when all I want is the ability to build a basic robot to haul things, like the real world Big Dog robot.) BigDog Overview (Updated March 2010)
VTM: Bloodlines Me
Had I been forced to restart I’ll have no doubt stopped playing for like a year, or however long it took for me to lose attachment to my current version of me. But in the case of New Vegas that version was the first one, so he’s especially important. This attachment is what I did to VTM bloodlines, though obviously I had no options with regard to character customization.
I truly can’t handle it when bullshit is thrown in my face over and over, and that’s what games do when they railroad me away from my solutions via invisible walls in favor of make-work. “I’m sorry player, this tent flap has a moderately difficult lock on it, you need to have 46,000 in lock smitheryness to even attempt picking it, and no you CAN’T use your knife to cut a new flap, because I said so.”
A game with sledge hammers (magic tech or not) and literal fire axes should not ever make an impenetrable wooden door or impregnable window. A game with ruins and crumbling brick half houses and said sledge hammers should not even have normal walls that are impenetrable. But I realize Geo-Mod is asking a lot. So I tell myself that it would be too risky for my character (demolitions can be dangerous, I could crush myself or end up suffocated) or that I did, went inside, and found nothing of interest. Imagined context can create effective emotional workarounds.
All these invisible walls and arbitrarily denied solutions: It’s literally being told “get back in line” by the devs. And like the right wing, the irony is that they’d call you a lazy cheater for hacking/modding your way around it when in point of fact the same argument fits them perfectly: Too lazy to redo the story, too lazy to code the option, cheating with magic fabric and invisible walls.
“When I want your opinion on what’s fun, I’ll give it to you!” ~99.999999% of mainstream game devs. Which I why I don’t play that percentage of games. The more a game lets me do what I would do, build what I want to build, in an interesting setting, the more I enjoy it.
What I hate in the context of subjective entertainment is of paramount importance, regardless of the argumentum ad populum of sales goals. I hate devs anyway (insert ipl rant here), and I hate authority anyway, and I hate being forced, and I hate being commanded, and I hate being manipulated and I hate being given ultimatums and I hate being told to want something different, and this one type of event, encountering a bullshit restriction, manages to invoke all of that hate simultaneously.
And it’s such a shame because the game obviously has worlds of potential. No doubt I’ll be playing it off and on for the rest of my life, but whether or not I’m playing it in a week really critically depended on being able to recover that perk. Fortunately I was able to thanks to Finland 🙂
My character isn’t like most. Most others are an arbitrary dynamic key which you fashion almost solely for the purpose of opening the game’s gigantic, elaborate, and beautiful lock. You’re as happy to play a female mage as you are to play a male fighter. You shape your ‘build’ based on the lock. Your goal is partly pride in your clever key construction, which is undermined by altering the lock too much.
I extract fun in a completely different way. If I wanted to win I’d just download a save or give myself 20 levels. If I want a “challenge” I’ll do something real. But in point of fact I don’t want a challenge. I think being alive is challenging too much already. Complaint about life being too easy is wildly narcissistic to me. Climbing a rock isn’t an achievement, it’s a hobby. Hobbies are fine but they are inherently self centered. To what degree that’s a good or bad thing is a separate issue.
What I’m doing when I play is placing myself in a world with different options. Like I did in bloodlines, I’m trying to take it seriously and be honest about what I would do and see how the game world reacts. When the game stops me from doing what I would do, I mod it. If I can’t mod it I try to find a way around it justified by other context.
I’m not playing the game for some sense of victory over adversity or some kind of trophy to gloat over. I’m exploring, sand boxing, and tinkering. I’m simulating. Today for example I spent 15 minutes playing with tin cans and the bb gun. (I eventually started using a 10mm pistol. Turns out bottles can’t be broken. They just get an awesome bullet hole decal.)
Besides, It’s single player. Nothing I do in game annoys anyone else, and you’re free to play how you want.
“It’s just a game.”
This trivialization scold is as self centered as it is contradictory. If it’s “just a game” then I’m even more justified in disregarding competitive achievement and rule obedience for the purposes of pride.
It’s like competition is the only thing some process as meaningful. Would you tell Mozart it’s just music? I’m playing fallout to create an emotion in myself the same way he played music to create an emotion in himself but because I can’t show it off, or sell it, because it doesn’t make me an alpha male, it’s trivial to so many.
That way of thinking is profoundly corporate. And wrong. The profit motive is not the end all be all of human endeavor. To believe otherwise shows very little real respect for the humanity of things. They tolerate it true, but they treat it as ultimately secondary. Like comments about not having time to game as if gaming can only and should only occur after your money making is complete.
http://underlore.com/bait-and-switch/ <—<read this
Don’t let the white effect turn you into a savage robot as you age. The point of life is enjoying living, not being a slave to either your whims at the expense of life, or life at the expense of whims.
“Just try to enjoy it.”
How I feel isn’t a choice and if I didn’t enjoy it I wouldn’t care so much.
Updates:
So I restarted the game knowing what the devs meant by various traits to make my character more accurate.
The results are spectacular.
Recovery! Once again a mod saved me, mostly.
Yes I’m wearing a space suit. Why? Because it’s a radioactive desert, and why wouldn’t I walk around in air conditioning? Anyway, how did I manage to kill Caesar fairly and accurately?
Having upgraded the bots, and the guards letting me leave assuming I’d walk straight to the tent to report, I instead went to vegas and euthanized Mr. House (I would have preferred to remove his access and keep him alive as an adviser, as dangerous as that would be) and installed my fAI on the central systems.
Then I found a mod that lets me befriend basically any NPC and turn them into companions, (I have speech of like 80 so that’s fair, plus I think with power and resources I actually could get people to listen to me) so I used that to grab a pair of mark two securitrons. That seems extremely fair to me since I now run the city/mainframe, and the story started with a securitron playing body guard, and I just activated a whole bunker full of them in the story as well.
Then I went to Caesar and got my reward, he would not let me spare Benny, so I gave him a stealth boy (the existence of which justifies my cloaking suit because making one permanently powered seems like a short order compared to d-cell sized fusion reactors), and then I vaporized Caesar’s head, and hid behind my rocket launching securitrons firing at the guards when able while Benny made his escape. I did not need to reload, he successfully made it to the door. I probably would have left him dead for realism/fairness/immersion.
Prior to that I had stealth killed as many guards as I could get away with without faction loss, (reloading in these cases justified as always by maxed luck and enhanced sensors, even if I as a player missed something my character would not have) including the entry team via reverse cloaked grenade pocketing which typically disarmed companions (even ed) which explains why they didn’t go ape shit when I entered the tent with a pair of military robots that were almost too big to fit through the front flap. XD morons. Even disarmed those bots would be horrifying opponents.
Naturally, given all this, I depopulated that fucking slaver camp. I plucked a teddy bear from the ashes and returned it to a slave girl, and used the companion mod to equip her and and siri with everything they’d need to escape. (I did that to the background packmule slaves as well.)
And since I killed Caesar after his quest this time (as opposed to exploiting rock-stupid AI) I’m apparently on the independent story line and everyone is now speaking mostly like he’s dead. (Though visiting the great khan’s legion fumentari broke that a bit, he’s all like “you’re close to pissing off Caesar” and I really wanted a “Don’t worry corpses tend to stay calm, you’re going to have to find some other thug’s name to mispronounce.” type response option :P)
So now I’m roaming around, doing good and side quests and learning about the families. 🙂
My armor and pistol are pretty heavily upgraded now, the suit fully cloaks me when I sneak (which was already like 80) and my pistol virtually doesn’t miss, which is fair for a line of sight/energy weapon.
Sidenote: Fighting over a hydroelectric damn with pocket sized micro fusion reactors everywhere sufficiently powerful to run robots for centuries is a way bigger logical fail than anything I’ve done with mods.
This is good news for me on two fronts, firstly, I’m enjoying the shit out of that weapon when had it itself been a mod I’d have considered it cheating and not used it. (I’d be using a .50 bmg rifle no doubt.) Secondly, it means that the rest of my actions are justified even more.
I sent my securitron guards home after the Caesar kill and replaced them with a great khan and a jet addict. I figure that’s less conspicuous than the giant rolling reminder that I’m the new Mr. House. I figure the less NCR spies and others know about my bots the better. I’ll need the legion to weaken the NCR.
At which point I’d use my bots and adopt a secular version of the Genghis Khan model. Letting each city state do as it pleased so long as it obeyed some really simple rules and sent resources when asked.
As you may know I’m totally ready to make a stab at running a pluralist planet/society/culture. Having fAI and a literal army of immortal robots at the start pretty much guarantees that I could kick off a singularity with really minimal loss of life, if any assuming a non-lethal energy weapon could be devised.
This universe even has elements of transhumanism. A street doc sells implants apparently, and I already met the robot dog.
Pretty sure that’s the most important discovery of the 21st century. Notice I didn’t say “so far.”
Yeah. I’m calling it this early.
“In the equation, F is a force that acts so to maximize future freedom of action, to keep options open with some strength, T with S, an amount of diversity to possible accessible futures, up to some future time horizon, Tau.”
Give me one example of an intelligent behavior that isn’t an attempt to maximize the number of future options. Sacrificing one’s self at the behest of one’s genes isn’t intelligent or is at best an indirect investment in something which the intelligence has come to identify with.
An intelligent agent acting in this way is deploying their intelligence not for their own good directly but for the good of the genes which provide the substrate for their existence. (Kin selection and altruism.)
But assuming a desert island, last being in creation sort of context, I can think of no intelligent action that falsifies the assertion. If you’re right it should be easy to falsify. But it isn’t.
The entropy mechanism just explains how intelligence can arise from a purely mechanistic and unintelligent setting.
It is not at all far fetched to me that a simple physical law should form the foundation of intellect.
“Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas, which, given enough time, turns into people.” ~Edward Robert Harrison
