Access that costs thousands of dollars for a short trip that most people simply don't have the spare money for. The median US income is <40k/year, and healthcare + housing costs dominate most workers' lives.
Also, it's not $18/year like a subscription, it's $165 upfront -- money that could be spent on gas, food, medical bills, desperately saved up for emergencies, etc. and won't provide any benefit whatsoever to their lives unless they're taking a vacation they probably don't feel they can afford financially or in their <2 weeks of vacation time.
You don't seem to have understood their post at all by asking what Ireland did that this is reciprocating. They're saying other countries should reciprocate this upon Americans. The point you make about the purpose from the American pov is valid and correct + clearly meant to be expanded upon or abused in the future, but not their point.
I'd argue it doesn't at all say paradise wouldn't be great -- plenty of people are content with their lives, and there's plenty of options to functionally die or reduce your level of consciousness below one that will really be able to care about the future or be bored.
Rather, it's a nihilistic dream from that place, free and limitless cyberspace; a heaven.
A timeless place at the end of history.
Perhaps read the companion piece (A Casino Odyssey in Cyberspace), which illustrates how one doesn't need to spend centuries to become aware of the Meaninglessness of life, and yet simultaneously how Meaning can be created for individuals even at the end of history.
I think a more interesting avenue to explore is the author's particular leaning toward sadism, as I find it a little unclear if his view is one in which sadism and domination is merely more interesting to explore for the stories, or if his particular view is that the most undiluted pleasure left in cyberspace is sadism or domination.
Something which, for as terrible as it may sound, I think we can actually find possible signs of -- moreso Domination (or far less ominously: Mastery) than Sadism.
I'll cut my comment short-er about here, but those intrigued by the idea can also explore the fact that in MoPI a character like Caroline isn't actually sadistic like many of those she meets, but absolutely spent centuries mastering skills and keeping busy with simple competition against others.
Likewise she ties into my earlier points about Nihilism and Meaning, where it's pretty clear the ending is likely just the moment Prime Intellect's definitions of death blurred just as it also realized it could never make people like Caroline satisfied as long as she thinks she's in cyberspace. Notice she's engaged in many of the exact same activities she spent her time on in cyberspace and would have gladly been happy continuing on that way for countless centuries more while guiding her tribe lamenting her old age at the conclusion.
(Aside: wow I'm so happy to see MoPI mentioned somewhere! It always feels so little-known.)
At risk of speaking too much for someone else: They are not blaming the left, they're blaming the democrat party -- and are far from assigning them total blame imo.
At the risk of getting lost in the bushes before GP themselves can respond, I'm not sure that's a reasonable defence. First of all it's a two party system, so the left and the party of the left are essentially interchangeable. They said that "the only reason" he won is because of this "abuse" from both parties. Indeed there's no suggestion that the democrats are taking all or most of the blame there, but my response was only on the basis that they were being blamed at all, which they were. I'm not sure there's anything that justifies the behaviour we're seeing, to me it seems unreasonable to expect one party to change their ways from relatively moderate politics because the other side, so to speak, will otherwise threaten to dismantle the democratic functioning of the state.
You're overall correct, but made me notice that there is actually an unusually coherent argument (by their standards) being presented by the reactionaries pushing for the things you mention. It goes roughly like:
>The reason these jobs are terrible is because immigrants are doing it for wages that would be intolerably low to anyone else.
>This is also why it's hard to find a decent job in general, our competition is basically cheating!
>But if we remove the immigrants, the employers will surely have to increase wages like they were supposed to
>Now americans will have high paying factory jobs, and if some goods increase in price that's ok, their wages will let them afford it.
>we got to have our cake and eat it too!
Obviously they're missing some key steps and consciousness here in the reasoning, but I feel it's interesting to reflect on in context of how it's almost right -- and surprisingly close to a marxist view of things until it starts assuming things like that individuals have more bargaining power than their employers or that economic agents will always try to set the lowest price they can afford for goods rather than the highest.
So for example they'd believe prices would only go up a little and manufacturing companies would just live with stagnant or reduced profits since they'd have no other choice.
Notice how they have a habit of assuming totally Good behavior from Companies but totally Bad behavior from Immigrants!
I think in context of all that, it becomes more visible both how we could actually resolve this problem other than by just accepting the loss of domestic industry, and what in specific the people falling for this narrative are being hooked on.
Well it's not just that but also the expectation that their wages will increase. The current government is only trying to drop the minimum wage (under the guise of minimum wage earners being losers/leeches which is a strange reasoning)
And very few Americans are actually unemployed. The disappearance of manufacturing is a process that started decades ago and most people have moved on to bigger and better things. So why would they be making more in a minimum wage factory job? They will be making less and without access to cheap Asian manufacturing they can do even less with it. I totally agree the idea of companies doing the right thing is wrong.
But yes the reasons we're doing better in Europe is that we're not giving free reign to companies and have good welfare systems. When people have less worries about their survival they spend more. Of course to Trump backers this is unthinkable because of 'socialism'. Yes it is socialist which is different from communism.
We do of course have similar problems (housing is a problem too and there is resentment of immigrants)
I think the problems here are less bad though because:
1) We don't have a two party system (except for the UK which is in a similar situation to the US). That means it's not a zero sum game. A loss for one isn't an automatic win for the other. So politics are more focused on the positive than kicking the other down. Also we don't have this powerful singular leader with the kind of power the US president has.
2) Right wing politics is more a religion than anything. Not in a god per se but in the narrative and leader. Its followers like being told what to believe. This works best on the poorly educated. We see the same here but because our education system is better (less difference in quality between poor and affluent areas), less people fall into that trap.
> We don't have a two party system (except for the UK which is in a similar situation to the US).
The UK does not have a two party system to anything like the same extent the US does. There are 13 parties with at least one seat in the House of Commons and 15 independents.
Smaller parties look likely to gain a lot more seats in the next election.
> But yes the reasons we're doing better in Europe is that we're not giving free reign to companies and have good welfare systems
Historically true, but it seems to be less so.
> Its followers like being told what to believe. This works best on the poorly educated.
I think it is not that simple. The poorly educated correlate strongly with the poor, who have done badly in recent decades.
> We do of course have similar problems (housing is a problem too and there is resentment of immigrants)
To a great extent in some countries. There are multiple European countries that have parties more extreme than the US right that are growing: AfD, PVV, Fidesz, Rassemblement national etc.
> Smaller parties look likely to gain a lot more seats in the next election.
That's true but that's more because the "two party system" became a one party system with labour doing the same as the tories. They started to become more different again under corbyn after the disaster of "tory-lite" but now they're right back to their old ways.
> I think it is not that simple. The poorly educated correlate strongly with the poor, who have done badly in recent decades.
Yes but voting right-wing is making them even more poor because the right only think of the poor as a natural resource. Yet they manage to convince them they care. Why would a billionaire care about the poor?? The only reason they became a billionaire was exploiting the poor. The only reason billionaires exist is the huge gap between rich and poor and those are always going to draw the short end of the stick.
> There are multiple European countries that have parties more extreme than the US right that are growing: AfD, PVV, Fidesz, Rassemblement national etc.
I don't think those are more extreme than the Republicans are now. They are the exact same. I'm from Holland myself and the reason the PVV (and also similar parties like FVD and BBB) is not getting anything done despite being the biggest party now, is that the coalition government waters everything down. The current government is constantly trying to grin to one another while trying to shoot each other in the back. Which is good, because it undermines their ability to do anything. I doubt they will make their full term.
If you're interested in human habitation of Venus overall, you may find it interesting to learn Venus is probably preferable kept at about its current temperature or only made a little colder.
See, the atmosphere at ~50 altitude... happens to be about 1 bar (which happens to be Earth's atmospheric pressure ASL)... and happens to have temperatures that can support human and plant life!
And better still, the atmosphere being mostly co2 with a little nitrogen actually means normal Earth air is a lifting gas! Starting to see where this is going?
It's not too hard to imagine the skies of Venus full of floating habitats that move to stay in the sunlight, or occasionally dock with tethers or balloons carrying cargo from extremely reinforced mining facilities deep underground (where they could be much more protected most of the time from the pressure/temperature/corrosion) -- a future where people (or machines!) might scoff at the idea of cooling off Venus and losing out on such an excellent habitation zone, one which could also fairly easily support elevated runways or launch platforms to more cheaply reach space from.
With Venus also having 91% of Earth's gravity, and those atmospheric conditions at high altitudes that add some radiation shielding and would probably let a human worker only need a very limited suit more akin to a hazmat or firefighting suit with SCBA to work outside habitats... Venus is actually easily the single best planet for humans to live on after Earth!
(Can you tell I'm writing a story set there? Hehehe)
Haha, i totally feel that. Maybe people will have little personal balloons for emergencies like that :p
At the same time, do consider how you already count on conventionally supported structures like bridges, buildings, tunnels, etc. not to have any defects or design flaws. Or once-in-100-years storms or earthquakes.
This magnifies further if you've ever flown on a plane or sailed on a ship. It only takes the right series of failures to be plummeting to the bottom. Now imagine people who spend months or years counting on technology and redundancy to keep them alive in space, and might expect to do so indefinitely.
You need to give us more. I feel that just the heat is a tricky problem, even at 50km altitude. Anything todo with Venus is very much scifi at the moment. It might be easier than a moon base but we can not know.
Oh it wouldn't be easier than a moon base or simple orbital habitats. And as for Venus being scifi, anything to do with space colonization period is scifi right now; humans haven't even stepped foot on another celestial body of any kind in over half a century.
Rather my meaning was that it's (a little shockingly) the best suited planet for humans in terms of most closely and reliably resembling conditions humans could survive in, which relates to the terraforming notions I was replying to.
It'd be overwhelmingly harder to make all of Venus Earthlike than to just use the existing relatively Earthlike regions of the upper atmosphere to our advantage along with their unique properties. Cool off Venus and you just get a big ocean of liquid or frozen co2 to have to deal with after a loooong time and a lot of construction. Keep it like it is and a fraction of the resources/effort will yield far more utility while we can still enjoy a segment of the atmosphere.
Isaac Arthur on YouTube makes videos on sci-fi ideas that we might be able to do within the laws of physics, albeit not with today's technology. He did a video on Colonizing Venus some years ago, and an updated one a few months ago, and some others around colonisation and teraforming of the planets in the Solar System:
>public safety is the number one priority for any government
You blanket-declared that any/all governments have it as their number one priority, with no nuance I might add.
Additionally, are you somehow completely unaware that the American government is sending people to that country's worst prison, and that the current president has said he wishes to send American citizens there? This is why American values are at all being referenced here.
Nobody thus far in this conversation has been defending gitmo, the patriot act, or the illegal and unjust invasion of Iraq -- and personally I'm against all three. Yet you're creating false equivalencies, ascribing strawman views to others, and mostly avoiding any nuance to such matters as if the country's underlying corruption and dysfunction which enabled such lawless conditions is any better (which it might genuinely be, but such points ought be evidenced and argued, not declared).
Instead you've transformed it into something approximating: "now el salvador is safe and everyone is happy, there was no need for liberty or human dignity to be respected then or now."
Therein you make yourself out to argue in poor faith.
>You blanket-declared that any/all governments have it as their number one priority, with no nuance I might add.
No nuance needed, there is no single country who flourish when people fear every day for their life. Not being murdered is point number one for living beings...again no nuance needed.
>Additionally, are you somehow completely unaware that the American government is sending people to that country's worst prison
That's a "you" problem, not that of El Salvador. Fix your country without killing a million (for example) Iraqis....and btw stop calling people from other country's "aliens" fkn disgusting!
>Instead you've transformed it into something approximating: "now el salvador is safe and everyone is happy, there was no need for liberty or human dignity to be respected then or now."
Now you try to make me a Fan Boy of Bukele, and to be honest your framing is childish. There was no space for "human dignity" when gangs ruled the country, now it is at least a unwritten letter.
Gotta say, my man, you were the one making blanket proclamations about what governments must care for first. Yet you shy away from defending the principle.
Do note that at first it was assumed just Chrome was involved, but then people started to message me that they also saw it when using the apps, Firefox, Safari and other browsers aswell.
Aptly observed. I'm not even sure if it's what I believe is the case, but there's some serious merit in this line of thought.
It could make a lot of sense even if they have better means of access, and even with this attention risking the compromise of said access, simply because of how valuable even slight furthering of any division and political incoherence is right now both mid and long term.
Still wouldn't seem the more likely Plan A, as success would obviously be even better than such an apparently close failure, but I can see it being used to justify acting. Succeed at the intended plan and you win -- fail and you still win, just a little less so.
1. It's a quote, not an expression of the poster's opinions directly.
2. We wouldn't even be talking about that industrial scale genocide this early on Hitler's term, which I don't say to suggest he's going to be Hitler 2 but rather to point out how it can be quite valid to be concerned before someone's getting into full swing with atrocities.
Also, it's not $18/year like a subscription, it's $165 upfront -- money that could be spent on gas, food, medical bills, desperately saved up for emergencies, etc. and won't provide any benefit whatsoever to their lives unless they're taking a vacation they probably don't feel they can afford financially or in their <2 weeks of vacation time.