I commend your optimism, but personally I’m not sure automation is actually going to carry us through this in the time frames that we need. This population problem is going to hit really hard in the next twenty to thirty years. I don’t think we’re going to fully automate the world economy in that time.

The problems listed in the article are real. we’ve built a system:

1. Where a lot of economic growth stems from an increasing supply of (cheap) labour
2. That relies on people of working age being able to financially support a retiree class.

Both of these are going to fall apart if the population stops growing. The smaller group of working age people won’t be enough to support the amount of retirees, and without population growth there’s no economic growth.

It’s sad that economists correctly see all this coming but then conclude that the only solution is “make more babies.” It’s short term thinking almost by definition, because in the limit it’s rather obvious that at some point we will not have the resources to support any more people. And the closer we get to that limit the less each individual person will have (even worse when wealth is not equally distributed).

Unfortunately I don’t see any economist putting forth a plan that accepts population decline and alters the system to account for it. It wouldn’t be easy but it seems no one is even trying.

Pretty much the perfect form factor in my opinion. Put the back seat down when you need to transport cargo, up for people. Really practical. If you want to do camping trips or road trips where you need to move four people with cargo, you can get one with a towing hook.

The one thing it’s not great at in my experience is transporting babies around. There’s just not quite enough space for the car seat, stroller, two parents and assorted diapers and stuff. We can make it work, but it’s quite uncomfortable.

I think this is technically true, but mostly irrelevant. Sparta got pretty thoroughly trounced by one of Alexander’s generals while the man himself was out campaigning in Asia, and were effectively subjugated anyway.

The regular ones are one of my favorite ramen packet brands. I’ve never tried the 2x or 3x spicy types. I could see 2x being good because you definitely build up a tolerance and I find the normal ones don’t quite give the same kick anymore. 3x seems excessive but who knows.

You can buy the spicy sauce in a bottle, I have one in the fridge and throw it on my rice regularly. I like the noodles personally (not the carbonara flavor that seems to be popular now, it’s not for me). Maybe Korean style ramyun is just not your thing.

Ironically though, I could see how a misogynist might conflate the two.

She did in fact say that and your link doesn’t refute that.

Come now. She very clearly denies saying it in the interview I linked to:

Several reviewers accused you of saying that all intercourse was rape. I haven’t found a hint of that anywhere in the book. Is that what you are saying?

Andrea Dworkin: No, I wasn’t saying that and I didn’t say that, then or ever.

If you want to claim she’s lying about her own statements, find me a direct quote of her saying it.

Andrea Dworkin was an influential feminist mainly in the '80 and '90. She was pretty clearly anti pornography, at least as it existed in her time (she died in 2005. Who knows what she might think of some of the stuff out there today). She’s also one of the most frequently misquoted feminists of all time, particularly by anti-feminists. she did not say all heterosexual intercourse was rape:

Several reviewers accused you of saying that all intercourse was rape. I haven’t found a hint of that anywhere in the book. Is that what you are saying?

Andrea Dworkin: No, I wasn’t saying that and I didn’t say that, then or ever. There is a long section in Right-Wing Women on intercourse in marriage. My point was that as long as the law allows statutory exemption for a husband from rape charges, no married woman has legal protection from rape. I also argued, based on a reading of our laws, that marriage mandated intercourse—it was compulsory, part of the marriage contract. Under the circumstances, I said, it was impossible to view sexual intercourse in marriage as the free act of a free woman. I said that when we look at sexual liberation and the law, we need to look not only at which sexual acts are forbidden, but which are compelled.

The whole issue of intercourse as this culture’s penultimate expression of male dominance became more and more interesting to me. In Intercourse I decided to approach the subject as a social practice, material reality. This may be my history, but I think the social explanation of the “all sex is rape” slander is different and probably simple. Most men and a good number of women experience sexual pleasure in inequality. Since the paradigm for sex has been one of conquest, possession, and violation, I think many men believe they need an unfair advantage, which at its extreme would be called rape. I don’t think they need it. I think both intercourse and sexual pleasure can and will survive equality.

It’s important to say, too, that the pornographers, especially Playboy, have published the “all sex is rape” slander repeatedly over the years, and it’s been taken up by others like Time who, when challenged, cannot cite a source in my work.

First, Dworkin has never said that and did not think that.

Second, she died almost twenty years ago my dude. Intercourse was published in '87 during the second wave of feminism. Why are you misquoting her as an example of current mainstream discourse? And even if we’re going to be talking about feminist views of the 80’s, you’re conveniently ignoring sex-positive feminism. The sex wars were like, the defining feminist debate of that era.

All well and good, but the term dictatorship here still refers to a situation where the state apparatus has complete control over the means of production, in other words a total centralisation of power. Indeed in Marxism-Leninism the dictatorship takes the form of a vanguard party forming a single party state. Whichever way you look at it, practical power resides with a very small group of individuals.

The contrast with the eventual stateless communist society, in which power would be completely decentralised, is quite striking. It’s not quite clear to me how Marxist-Leninist theory envisioned the transition from one to the other, although it seems to me there was a general feeling that central economic planning and industrialization would fairly quickly lead to the end of scarcity altogether, which in hindsight seems… very optimistic.

If you ask me, the ideals of communism mostly died around the same time as Lenin. Pretty much all communist states that have existed (and currently exist) are mainly interested in maintaining their own power structures rather than actually working their way towards the idealised communist society. Which pretty much just makes them dictatorships in the classical sense.

Regarding the cognitive dissonance required to A) value decentralization of power, and also B) support the CCP: 🤦

One of the tenets of Marxism-Leninism is that a dictatorship is required to guide the proletariat to communist society (which would be completely stateless). So the dissonance is inherent in Leninist dogma 🤷

Be careful with those, chances are it’s an old fleet vehicle and those are not always the most well taken care of.

The problem is, usually the result of this capture process comes in the form of CO2 gas. Turning that into something useful takes even more energy.

Micro services always require more maintenance, devops, tooling, artifact registries, version syncing, etc.

The initial transition is so huge too. Like, going from 20 to 21 services is no big deal, but going from 1 service to 2 is a big jump in the complexity of your operations.

this year’s ‘fuck it, we aren’t winning, so let’s just have fun’ entry

Croatia is like the number one favorite this year.

What if I leave the bowl of cereal for a while, extracting the flavours of the cereal into the milk? Boom, it’s broth now.

But you’re just here arguing about semantics anyway.

Well duh, this is a post about the meaning of soup. We’re all here arguing semantics. Anyway, if you can justify the meaning of “vegetable” by its culinary use in the kitchen, then we might as well shortcut this chain of thinking and use that argument directly for soup.

Clearly cereal is not a soup, going by its culinary use in the kitchen.

It would be pretty funny if GPT starts putting licence notices under its answers because that’s what people do in its training data.

protecting their content by licensing it explicitly.

You can do whatever you want, of course. But any license you put on your content here protects it less than not putting any license at all. That’s after all what licenses are for, granting people use of your content.

So you’re not so much protecting your comments, but graciously allowing them to be used for training for non-commercial purposes, where most people are greedily keeping them to themselves. I suppose that’s admirable.