Tis the season for floating stuff in drinks. Summer by contrast is the season for putting stuff on the glass of your drink.

And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism,

I don’t know why you’d assume that. I’m pretty staunchly communist from a mix of seeing our current problems and understanding history enough to know that this didn’t start yesterday. But if it takes companies being really obviously greedy for some consumers to see anything is wrong, it doesn’t hurt to try to focus their anger to a productive understanding of the problem rather than whatever other nonsense they might get drawn to.

As far as alternatives. I’m always up front with people in saying that I don’t have precise answers for what our future ought to be after capitalism. That’s a difficult problem and up to everyone to work together to figure that out. But there is no future where we stick with capitalism. Or at least, not one we’d want to live in for very long. It’s a cruel system and it’s going to be responsible for ending the human habitable environment if we don’t do something about that. People need to understand this and they need to understand that tweaking around the edges isn’t going to fix the issue.

The thing about if they were ok with a reasonable profit is a thought experiment or rhetorical device more than it’s a proposed solution. It’d be nice if it worked that way. Capitalists want us to think things do or could work that way. Hence corporations saying they NEED to cut costs or raise prices while continuing to make increasing profits. But it’s important to understand why it could never work that way, at least for very long.

Agreed. I really hate it when people see the problems in the world, fall for misanthropy, and blame everyone, most of whom are blameless beyond their failure to put their lives at risk to change things.

People are great. We’ve done great things. We’re a species who’s defining advantage is cooperation. None of what we see today would be possible if most of us were greedy, hateful, idiots.

People can be lead astray. but who can blame them? We’ve created a world more complicated than any one of us could fully understand. It’s bad enough that a handful of psychopaths can take advantage of that, we don’t need to add to it by making it seem like everyone’s at fault for not instantly bashing their heads in.

I’m not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations. If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.

But they’re not trying to do that. Profit isn’t enough for a corporation. They need to make the most profit. And then after that they somehow need to make more than the most.

So they put in ads. But that’s not enough and oh look there are more places we haven’t put in ads, we should fix that. Oh look, our studies show that if we make the ads more obnoxious in these ways they increase this number by 3%. Oh wait, we have all this info we got from spying on people, why don’t we sell that too? Hey guys, we’ve heard you about the ads. Have we got a solution for you! For a small protection payment subscription fee of $10/month, you can get rid of those pesky ads we know you don’t like! Oooh sorry everyone, the price of the subscription went up again. We promise this is all necessary. Oh by the way, we’re adding ads back into the service. But don’t worry, wait until you hear about our NEW subscription tier! (I don’t think that last one’s happened with YT premium yet, but it’s happened with cable and most of streaming at this point, so I wouldn’t put it past them.)

There’s no way we can have nice things while this is the driving force organizing where our resources go.

Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.

Wars are plenty profitable if you’re a lot bigger than your opponents and can force them to be subservient to your business interests. It’s not a fluke that the richest country on earth is also the one with the most frequent wars.

Similarly, Rick Rolling is eternal. It’s kind of got a negative feedback loop. If it gets overused, people stop using it for a while, which just makes people more susceptible to it when it pops up again.

This is too involved a topic for a thread like this, but the red scare propaganda we learned about the Soviet Union isn’t a complete picture of how things were there. From researching around, it seems like at least on the dietary front, their caloric/nutritional consumption was comparable to the US, although there’s some variation in the estimates of different researchers/institutions. Sure, they didn’t have Macdonalds or Pineapples and stuff like that. But not having shitty unhealthy fast food and a fruit that could only be as widely available as it was in the west through imperialism isn’t exactly what I’d call a poverty stricken hellscape.

As far as recovering even now… there was a really important thing that happened between then and now that’s had an impact on these countries: privatization. Sell off public goods to private interests so they can profit off them at the expense of everyone else. And surprise, like we see everywhere else, private businesses don’t act in the public good and only occasionally, incidentally produce results that are good for everyone.

Like I said though, it’s a really complicated topic that’s worth reading more on if you genuinely want to learn. They didn’t do everything right, but these communist societies managed to rise out of feudal or colonial systems to become modern industrial powers despite all the forces aligned against them.

As for capitalism, even if it can produce great abundance,

a) That isn’t actually benefiting the vast majority of people. It’s hard to overstate how cruel it is to have people going hungry in a country that can produce so much food it throws a lot of it out with only like ~2% of it’s population working on a farm.

b) Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of that abundance isn’t merely from free trade and the ingenuity of industry. A LOT of it is built off the exploitation of other countries and the over-use of resources to the point of causing environmental damage.

Whatever you think society should be like, it isn’t hard to make a less cruel, less environmentally destructive, and more inclusive system than capitalism.

No, but the difference is you don’t have the threat of starvation and homelessness if you can’t do it.

Elden Ring doesn’t even feel like a game for everyone who liked Dark Souls. They completely lost the plot on what a fun challenge is.

Yeah. It’s more like:

Researchers: “Look at our child crawl! This is a big milestone. We can’t wait to see what he’ll do in the future.

CEOs: Give that baby a job!

AI stuff was so cool to learn about in school, but it was also really clear how much further we had to go. I’m kind of worried. We already had one period of AI overhype lead to a crash in research funding for decades. I really hope this bubble doesn’t do the same thing.

I agree we need to get organized to make this happen, but I’d push back on the idea that Biden/Democrats would be somehow more amenable to the development of movements that have genuine power to change things.

Just some of the concerning things to have happened with Democratic support in recent history:

• They’ve continued to expand the military, which aside from being one of the major sources of pollutants is also a tool to secure more oil/resources and when needed, push back against the protests of the masses and any of the other consequences of climate change like mass migration.

• They’ve continued to expand the surveillance state, both in capabilities and by eroding legal protections to privacy/security such as attempts to get companies to give them back door access to people’s secure devices, attacks on encryption, etc.

• When faced with a choice about how to respond to police violence, they decided to support the police.

• They’ve labeled left wing activists, including climate activists, as potential domestic terrorists.

People talk about how electing someone like Trump would slide us into fascism as if they can’t see the infrastructure of fascism being built before our eyes. It’s not really a matter of revolution being easier or harder under democrats or republicans. The establishment will push back against challenges to the system with violence regardless.

Admittedly I’m less familiar with the specifics on the gradual climate change argument, but to my understanding, it seems like there are some things that would make it very difficult to go back from once we let them happen. Various positive feedback loops. Major shortages of water, arable land, and food causing mass displacement. More frequent and intense disasters like storms and wild fires will present major disruptions to organized human life that will make it more difficult for us to build the infrastructure we need to solve our problems. Etc.

If we do a few small things, but ultimately fail to stop the world from getting to that point in time, are we not still doomed? Scientists have been sounding the alarm bells about this my whole lifetime. Through 2 republican and democratic administrations. And the problem has only gotten worse. It’s borderline suicidal to put any faith in the system that has continued to fail to address the greatest crisis of our time for that long.

Even if want to pretend that things get better under democrats and worse under republicans, the very fact that our system is built in such a way that allows for such frequent and profound losses of progress is a critical failure of it. To consider this another way: What would you do if Trump wins? Let him do what he wants for 2-4 years and hope you’ll be able to do something next election? Adhering to the rules of the system is killing us. You can’t play nice when the stakes are this high.

Incrementalist policies could have worked if we started decades ago. We’re now at the point where it’s become a catastrophe in progress. The best we’re hoping for at this point is mitigating the disaster if we were to make big changes starting now. It’s kind of all or nothing at this point. Either we do what’s necessary or we don’t.

The article acknowledges the administrations failures and says that activists need to “hold his feet to the fire” … by voting for him unconditionally? People who take this stance have no concept of power. They think that they can get the government to do what they want simply by writing strongly worded letters and going to the occasional conflict-free protest to hold up signs and then go home.

If you’re not serious enough about the problem to break away from civil politics and lesser evilism,then we’re doomed. At some point people need to start breaking things.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

That’s a problem for the poors and whoever is holding the bag after I retire.

I’ve been torn on the game as well. The platforming has been enraging/draining and you need to do so much of it in the process of backtracking around the map for metroidvania stuff. I’ve been kept going by the intrigue of the secrets, but I’m not sure how long that can carry me past this much frustration, especially as new discoveries get fewer and further between.

It seems I’m near the end of the basic ending, but honestly if I don’t end up going beyond that I’d consider the game a failure. The core gameplay isn’t fun enough if I don’t get some solid payoff on the secret hunting.

It’s a shame. I really like these kinds of games that reward exploration and discovery. Tunic is up there as one of my favorite games of all time. But the key there is that while there was some skill based combat I had to struggle through, once I did it, I usually didn’t have to do it again to get around the map. I constantly need to deal with the same platforming bits and puzzles to get back through certain parts of the map in this game.

No. But not because AI isn’t gonna get better, but because hype is an ever moving goal post. Nobody gets excited about what’s already possible. Hype lives on vague promises of some amazing future that is right around the corner we promise. Then by the time it becomes apparent that a lot of the claims were nonsense and the actual developments were steadier and less dramatic, they’ve already moved onto new wild claims.

Maybe my brain just saw it was about Kennedy and something about space and filled in the rest. It’s weird.

At first I ready the title as “Kennedy Space Center” for some reason and I was really confused.

I tried a 2nd time and just got the same automated message about the 2hr limit.