My head is spinning from how fast we pivot from jokes about American “freedom” invasions to full throated support of Chinese freedom invasions

Very well said. It feels like every discussion turns into this dichotomy: suffer in the current system or opt out for change. There are times when those truly are the only two options, but that’s absolutely not the rule.

In plenty of cases, exercising the agency you have doesn’t preclude disruption. It’s possible to vote and organize a wildcat strike. It’s possible to attend a peaceful protest and sabotage the tools of a police state.

Unfortunately the polarization of politics has also fractured the entire spectrum. Any action that doesn’t fit the confines of your political identity is automatically useless or counterproductive. This is what gives attitudes that the meme lampoons: blatant accelerationism dressed in mental gymnastics or an emotional appeal.

It’s not uncommon for a donor to support both candidates because whoever wins will have a debt. Like you said this is peanuts to them.

The other factor is non-monetary support. A $1 billion check to a candidate’s campaign fund has a lot of red tape. It isn’t as effecient as a $100 million donation and $900 million spent blasting propaganda across your personal media empire.

This is bad because it means if you want to run for office, your campaign is mostly floated by this tiny group of people. $5.5 billion sounds small until you realize that breaks out into millions of dollars for any individual campaign. Unless you’re rich enough to ante up (and repeat that every election cycle), you’ll never play the game.

More isn’t spent because it doesn’t need to be, not because it isn’t effective. The policy goals of the 0.01% are basically in lock step, why would they bid against each other? Regardless of the raw number, the average politician has to equally weigh their representation between the needs of the 0.01% and the 99.99%.

That’s the secret with a starve the beast tactic. Either your funding cuts don’t impact performance so you can claim there was bloat or your cuts ruin the program so you can say it needs to be dismantled.

Waiting for the handful of weird Maga trolls on here to comment. It’s always funny to see them argue “Commander in Chief” means unlimited authority to do anything with the military.

Pretty obvious you have no fucking clue how the American political system works or any idea what daily life is like.

Half of Americans have less than $500 in savings and something like 30-40% have insecure housing. There’s no social safety net if you lose your job; political activism can easily spiral you (and any dependants) to an early grave. Transportation is incredibly expensive in both time and money, just getting to an urban area for a critical mass movement is quite literally more than people can do.

So that’s how you end up with one of the top 2-3 largest protests in US history being on a weekend and distributed over thousands of cities. And you’re right, concentrating that in Washington DC would be much more impactful. But is it reasonable to expect people to give up their livelihood and stop supporting their family to do that? To throw away everything they have in their lives just by trying?

If you think the answer is yes, that’s perfectly valid. But consider this: if you live in a major city in Central America or western Europe or Canada you could get to DC easier and faster (and possibly cheaper) than the majority of people in the US. Why aren’t you on a plane right now? Oh right, because you’re exactly like your American strawman: you don’t give a shit about stopping fascism.

20k attended? Damn, they could have just given everybody $2000 and skipped the $40m parade. I’m sure people would have enjoyed it more.

How many trillions of neuron firings and chemical reactions are taking place for my machine to produce an output? Where are these taking place and how do these regions interact? What are the rules for storing and reshaping memory in response to stimulus? How many bytes of information would it take to describe and simulate all of these systems together?

The human brain alone has the capacity for about 2.5PB of data. Our sensory systems feed data at a rate of about 10⁹ bits/s. The entire English language, compressed, is about 30MB. I can download and run an LLM with just a few GB. Even the largest context windows are still well under 1GB of data.

Just because two things both find and reproduce patterns does not mean they are equivalent. Saying language and biological organisms both use “bytes” is just about as useful as saying the entire universe is “bytes”; it doesn’t really mean anything.

I think the main issue has been how people try to implement Marx’s ideas without the full context of his work. Marx wrote while sociology and economics were in their early stages. The idea that society could be rationalized, studied and planned was a brand new idea in the Enlightenment Era.

His work builds well off of his economic axioms, but that doesn’t make it a universal truth. We’re quick to recognize this in many other fields of study; for example, Newtonian physics is outmoded even though it’s logically consistent with our daily life. However, the mix of philosophy and socioeconomics in Marxism makes it harder for people to see that.

Since it’s a description of how society should progress, it makes any deviation anathema to the end state. To maintain the logical and materialist foundations, a new theory must be constructed and thus a new -ism is born.

The other important factor is that revolutionary periods are times of incredible change. People in the 18th - early 20th century were lurching from crumbling bedrock institutions. Things like burgeoning atheism, urbanization and mechanization left a void in identity.

So revolutionary theory started doing the lifting for all of those. It became religious dogma, career, and the core of their social life. Similar to modern religious fundamentalism, that breeds a mindset where any criticism is a personal assault and a ready acceptance for ends-justify-means public policy.

All of this means that the old truism “it doesn’t work in practice” is valid but completely misses the point. Marx wrote his theory assuming a spherical cow in a vacuum, and revolutionaries started chopping cows into spheres to fit the theory.

You can see the legacy of this today. It’s why the left has strict acid tests for ideological purity while the right doesn’t. I don’t think that a radical left utopia is currently possible, not because it runs counter to human nature but because the left can’t move beyond academic theory.

Society isn’t an equation that can be solved, it’s a living organism adapting to its environment. Theory should form the foundation but can’t be prescriptive; a doctor cures the ills that need curing because perfect health is impossible

You are either vastly overestimating the Language part of an LLM or simplifying human physiology back to the Greek’s Four Humours theory.

If you want to boil down human reasoning to pattern recognition, the sheer amount of stimuli and associations built off of that input absolutely dwarfs anything an LLM will ever be able to handle. It’s like comparing PhD reasoning to a dog’s reasoning.

While a dog can learn some interesting tricks and the smartest dogs can solve simple novel problems, there are hard limits. They simply lack a strong metacognition and the ability to make simple logical inferences (eg: why they fail at the shell game).

Now we make that chasm even larger by cutting the stimuli to a fixed token limit. An LLM can do some clever tricks within that limit, but it’s designed to do exactly those tricks and nothing more. To get anything resembling human ability you would have to design something to match human complexity, and we don’t have the tech to make a synthetic human.

On the plus side, that shows that even when CNN is feeding people the most anodyne, milquetoast, sane-washed headlines it’s not hitting 50 🤷

Why do we need more of it? Since 1950 the USA has increased electricity usage 14x with slightly over 2x the population. With full electrification, our electricity demands are expected to increase by 90% in 2050 with only a ~10% population bump.

Surely we’ve gone beyond necessary consumption and hit diminishing quality-of-life returns. And all of this is considering just production, excluding the complications of replacing infrastructure, transportation fleets and upgrading the grid.

Those projections also don’t include gen-AI datacenters, which will consume ~12% of total usage by 2028. Electric trains are between 2-10x more efficient per passenger/kWh than BEVs. With a focus on more efficient transportation you could turn off those datacenters, skip the complex and expensive BEV infrastructure and come out with a much lower 2050 consumption.

This sounds like quite a rube goldberg machine to avoid simply supplying a predictable baseline with nuclear. If you try to out-surplus increasingly common climate catastrophes, you’re going to be in for a rude awakening.

Any surplus or pricing plan will be gamed by power hungry datacenters or other wasteful capitalist scam-de-jour. Like you said, demand is elastic so any spare watt will eventually be sucked up as the price curve is optimized. The combined fluctuations on supply+demand is not what you want for a stable grid.

I predict a scenario where storage has to shore up that instability; much more storage than people think. The potential for a zero-supply floor (independent of demand growth) with massive surplus peaks requires building out an equally massive buffer. What will that ecological damage will look like? Will our current projections and efficiencies hold true at that scale?

The cheap energy -> increased demand -> increased storage -> more surplus cycle will cement our reliance on cheap energy, which requires more stability which means more storage, etc…

Let me clarify here that renewables are important for planning a responsible energy future, but only chasing cheap energy isn’t the solution. It’s not possible for us to out-produce the over-consumption that got us here.

Can anyone explain to me why cost matters in these conversations? Do shrinking populations need more energy for any sane reason? If so, do we need it scaled that rapidly?

Do we need electricity to be dirt cheap for any reason other than we want to consume it? Is it just capitalism-brain insisting that tricking the market with profit incentives will save our planet?

Anyways, the second amendment exists to combat tyranny.

Just want to step in here and say that no interpretation of the second would cover a civilian killing a foreign diplomat, no matter how tyrannical 😂

I have examined the goat entrails quarterly metrics and determined that gods markets require more human sacrifices corporate tax breaks

I don’t disagree that anarchist ideals about localization make sense as a reaction to our modern, global, hierarchical world. I’m not arguing to preserve the efficiencies of centralization but pointing out that their gravity makes opposition by other means impossible. Here’s the issue that I never see resolved:

if one group starts consolidating power and turning coercive, that’s a problem. However it’s not solved by having centralized oversight in the first place. That’s how we got here.

Then how does it get solved? History shows a thousand instances of empires expanding through piece meal conquering of fragmented autonomous polities. Look at the European conquest of Mesoamerica, how the Roman’s picked apart most of the world, the colonization of Ireland, the fate of the Iroquois Confederacy, etc… The aggressor doesn’t even need a material or martial advantage, as in Macedonia’s subjugation of the loose federation of Greek city states.

Generally, the expansion only stops from an internal shift (dynasty change, leader death, coup, etc…), hitting a geographical limit, or when the aggressor runs into someone too large to bully.

I’ll point out as well that this doesn’t even need to be a nefarious, expansionist scheme. Changes in climate can apply a survival pressure to take what you need from neighbors. Take for example, sea level rise reducing arable land for the Vikings, one of the causes for their invasion and settling in Britain.

I asked this in a thread a while ago but I’ll repost it here since I never got an answer:

[I don’t see how anarchism] would work in practice. Hierarchies form to simplify the logistics and social cohesion of a disorganized network of subunits.

As a basic example, how the hell do collectives even communicate with those on other continents? It took millenia for humans to develop reliable seafaring technology, only made possible through the direction of state actors. Sea cables cost millions to maintain; satellite communication is even harder to achieve.

Assuming that any of these could even be accomplished strictly via collectives (“Why the hell should I give you my Chilean copper so you can throw it in the ocean to talk to Europe?”), operating these essential services gives access to power and coercion.

Somebody has to launch the ships or run the heart of the telegraph network. Will you centralize the authority of multiple collectives to regulate and monitor it?..

And if you don’t do anything to bridge the ocean, what’s to prevent ideological drift for that continent; getting a little too centralized for more efficient resource use? Even if your accessible web remains strong and ideologically pure, you have to pray that completely separate webs will be just as strong.

Anarcho-primitivism is the only critique that seems to own the inherent anti-civilization logic, but even then there’s nothing stopping a collective-of-collectives from making a bigger pile of sharp rocks to subjugate you.

The gist of it being that hierarchies form due to the natural gravitation of civilization towards efficiency. Delegating someone with power to direct the actions of a large group will always be more efficient than getting N subunits to reach a web of equilibrium. If you’ve ever tried to horizontally coordinate a group of a large size it’s pretty obvious.

Efficiency begets power and power propogates and entrenches the system that it’s derived from.