@cjd @Wolf480pl Actually big game hunting was probably precipitated by an ice age, then continued afterward because groups that stayed good at it were better able to kill other people as well, so anyone who went back to small game as soon as they could got killed or joined the groups (potentially involuntarily) who hunted big game.

@Wolf480pl @cjd Hmm, I guess that assertion obliterates anarcho-primitivism, doesn't it? If H. sapiens is defined by big game hunting and war, then there was never a time that didn't have organized violence.

Which is not to say we shouldn't abandon war, just that link between war and civilization doesn't go the direction anarcho-primitivists think it does. In fact, agriculture and civilization would have *reduced* violence.

@cjd @Wolf480pl Since human history shows a long term, steady decline in death by violence in concert with the growth of agriculture, industry, urbanization, and technology generally, I'd say anarcho-primitivism has it exactly backward.

@Wolf480pl @cjd In fact, it was *trade* that created for the first time any reason at all for humans not to kill, kidnap, or rape any stranger they came across, because any other group would simply be a competitor for resources.

@freakazoid @cjd
I wonder how Mongol Hordes fit into this picture.

@Wolf480pl

Not sure about how this picture is framed.

Why does hunting big game = war

Also I dont think agricultural societies = peaceful societies.
Theres been very violent societies that practiced agriculture also hunter/gatherers that weren't aggressive. Also, as suggested, the inverse.
@freakazoid @cjd

@dazinism @cjd @Wolf480pl It's just a theory I once read as to why humans have hunted big game for so long even when it was not the most efficient way to get protein that was available to them. The tools and techniques of big game hunting also work well for killing people. It could certainly be wrong, but nomadic hunter-gatherer groups that came in contact would have been competitors more than, say, nomadic herders.

@Wolf480pl @cjd @dazinism And agrarians aren't nomadic, so they would only run into other agrarians if they were trying to expand their territory or had to move for whatever reason.

Of course, agriculture was a prerequisite for large scale war, but I think the scale of such wars was more than offset by the much reduced frequency. On average, of course.

@dazinism @cjd @Wolf480pl Agriculture also created the surplus necessary to have a ruling class, and the dominance that came with that, of course. I just had that long monologue thread about agriculture and feudalism. But it also created the surplus necessary for trade.

@freakazoid
All sounds like a rather bleak theory of the human condition, where out of group interactions are driven only by harsh utility

Is this theory based primarily on one thing you read, (do you recall what?)

I like to think that theres always been more possible reasons/options for interaction than just trade or war- certainly for me this is the case.
I think that theres evidence that this has also been the case historically
@cjd @Wolf480pl

@dazinism @freakazoid @cjd

I think by Occam's Razor, there's no reason to think there are other reasons for interaction, until shown an example that can't be explained by "harsh" utility.

Can you enumerate some of those other possible reasons?

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @freakazoid
This same question arrives again and again. Did we fall from grace or are we better every day ?
Plato clearly believed that we fell from grace, from the perfect republic with the perfect Philosopher King.
Lots of lore around this belief of fall from grace. The innocent and peaceful hunter-gatherers wiped out by the cruel and mechanistic Europeans is a really common belief system.

@cjd @dazinism @freakazoid
it's funny how ideas like "it used to be better" and "don't change things, you're making everything worse" are usually ascribed to right wing, while left wing is all about progress... yet these days what appears to be a left wing group also says it used to be better in the past, but it means much further past.

Is it all because we only remember the good parts of what it was like in the past?

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd That's not "remembering". It's mythology.

@freakazoid @cjd @dazinism
I meant a form of "remembering" which includes transitive memory, i.e. things that you remember that other people said from what they remember, etc.

But yeah, mythology seems appropriate.

@Wolf480pl
@dazinism @freakazoid
I think the difference of belief between "fall from grace" and "better every day" is at least as important a spectrum as right vs left. You see fall from grace thinking in leftist ethnic guilt and also in rightist traditional family. On the better every day side the left has scientific socialism and the managed society and the right has ethnic pride.

@cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl I don't know anything about "managed society", but people are terrible at science and even if they weren't, the economic calculation problem is not solvable even in theory, so "scientific socialism" as I understand it is not achievable, and there are all kinds of ways that pursuing such a thing could get us into a really bad place.

Left libertarians are also "better every day" folks.

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd Maybe I'm misunderstanding what "ethnic pride" is, but isn't it reactionary at its core? Or is it not because it doesn't advocate a return to ethnostates but segregation within multicultural states?

@cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl Of course, segregation is also reactionary.

@freakazoid @cjd @dazinism
not sure what exactly you mean by ethnostates, but isn't the fall of Yugoslavia an example that ethnostates are a more stable solution?

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd It shows that you can't make a multicultural state simply by fiat. Ethnostates are a "local maximum" just like tribes are. The multicultural states that have formed did so either because people chose to live together or because some empire or dictatorship managed to force them to live together long enough that they got used to it. Often that was enough better (or not sufficiently worse) than what came before that it didn't require so much effort.

@clacke @cjd @freakazoid @dazinism
But to have a unifying force, don't you need common values? And once you have common values, doesn't it become a single culture?

@Wolf480pl
I'm a bit pessimistic on the future of the EU because the US, with a single common language and national back story, still at some point it almost disintegrated and was only saved by a brutal show of force. Also the north and south have gravitated into the blue team and the red team who still fight like cats and dogs.
@clacke @freakazoid @dazinism

@cjd @dazinism @clacke @Wolf480pl The US did not end up in a civil war over cultural differences; it ended up in a civil war because the South was economically dependent on slavery, and the North was unwilling to share in the burden of weaning them off of it despite being just as responsible for it as the South. The "show of force" and reduction of states' rights has probably prevented a lot of conflict since then, but at huge cost and a missed opportunity to learn to live together better.

@Wolf480pl @clacke @dazinism @cjd The EU seems to have two main challenges: the Eurozone members have too much sovereignty to be able to share a single currency, and they haven't figured out how to handle refugees. Both require a central government that can redistribute wealth.

Racism is also obviously a huge issue, both against the people coming from the Middle East and North Africa as well as against eastern Europeans.

@cjd @dazinism @clacke @Wolf480pl Brexit is obviously a big threat to the EU's future, depending on how it pans out. But it's also an opportunity for the EU to actually decide how departure should work, providing an "escape valve" that can prevent or mitigate future crises.

I had thought racism against Muslim's in France was a huge problem, but from looking at the Wikipedia page it tends to get overblown in the media here and Muslims integrate really well in France. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_France

@freakazoid @Wolf480pl @clacke @dazinism
Based on my limited experience from Paris and the outer-lying region, I observe that a French person is a very particular thing. "Les enfants de la République" are something created by a very strict education system which begins very early. Here, there is such a thing as a French Muslim, a person who is indeed French but is also indeed Muslim. Not the same thing as a person who migrated here from a French territory.

@cjd @dazinism @clacke @Wolf480pl On the red/blue team thing, the US has been far more politically divided in the past even since the civil war. I'm far more worried about the decline in perceived legitimacy of the federal government. But FDR was far more charismatic than Trump and at least as disdainful of the separation of powers. He tried to get a bill through Congress that would have let him appoint a bunch more judges to the Supreme Court.

@freakazoid
Meanwhile in Poland, the ruling party passed such a bill overnight a couple years ago.
@clacke @dazinism @cjd

@cjd
IMO EU isn't supposed to be a single state. I'd rather it be an economical (and maybe millitary) alliance, aggregating the bargaining power of member states against giants like US, Russia, and China.

Haven't dug into it, but it looks like most of the major issues stem from the freedom of movement assumption. Now, I still think freedom of movement is a nice thing, but maybe we need to revisit its pros and cons, or tweak it a bit.
@clacke @freakazoid @dazinism

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @clacke @cjd Whether or not it's supposed to be a single state, it is. They have a parliament that passes far-reaching laws. They have a single currency and each member is allowed to issue debt that is considered (whether or not it's justified) to have the backing of the entire union. They have few to no internal border controls and strong(ish) external border controls. They are far more of a state than the US was under the Articles of Confederation.

@cjd @clacke @dazinism @Wolf480pl The EU has two clear choices given this fact: accept that they're a state, or accept that they've made themselves a state and undo that. The latter is probably a bad idea with Pax Americana on the way out.

@freakazoid @cjd @clacke @dazinism
>They have a single currency

That's Eurozone, not the whole EU. Many EU countries do not have Euro as their currency.

> They have a parliament that passes far-reaching laws.

Which then need to be ratified by each member state's own parliament before they enter into force.

>They have few to no internal border controls and strong(ish) external border controls.

That's Schengen Area, not EU. It mostly overlaps, but there are countries outside of EU which are in Schengen, and EU members which are not in Schengen.

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @clacke @cjd I can't find evidence of a ratification process beyond passing the Council (55% of states representing 65% of the population) and Parliament. Members get latitude in how they actually implement legislation via their own internal legislation, but that's the most I can find. It's more authority than the central government had under the Articles of Confederation. The Articles required unanimity.

...

@cjd @clacke @dazinism @Wolf480pl The fact that the Eurozone, EU, and Schengen are not the same thing just means it's a dysfunctional state, not that it's not a state ;-)

I think we can at least agree that they're in an unstable region of configuration space right now, and something needs to change. I think that restricting internal freedom of movement or trade would be economically devastating and essentially take Europe out of the running as a world power.

@freakazoid @dazinism @clacke @cjd

With regard to freedom of movement - I don't know enough about economics to be able to assess how bad it'd be to restrict it.

As for freedom of trade - I think you're the first one here to suggest restricting it, and I think you can have freedom of trade without being a single state, and with each member having their own currency.

Also, I don't think being able to pick and choose some of the EU-related treaties without accepting other ones would necessarily be an unstable configuration.

And even if some models are impractical to implement in EU right now, I'd like to explore the configuration space in an abstract way, to see what configurations are theoretically possible.

@Wolf480pl @cjd @clacke @dazinism AFAICT the instability comes from having a common currency without automatic wealth transfers, which can result in deflation and potentially default within individual member states.

One can definitely have freedom of trade without a common currency, but having your own currency means you can do the equivalent of enacting tariffs by devaluing your currency. With restrictions on tariffs, the likely outcome is competitive devaluation.

@dazinism @clacke @cjd @Wolf480pl In fact, something similar happened in the US under the Articles, only with external tariffs instead of currencies: states couldn't charge tariffs on trade among themselves, but they could charge tariffs on goods coming from outside. But the goods would just come in through whatever state had the lowest tariffs, so it was a race to the bottom. This was one of the biggest impetuses behind the Constitutional Convention.

@freakazoid @dazinism @clacke @cjd

Hm... in Poland we recently had deflation for a moment. But we're not in Eurozone. We still have our own currency... so why are we not devaluing our currency to create the effect of tarrifs? (if we did that, we'd have inflation, right?)

@Wolf480pl @cjd @clacke @dazinism It's an interesting question. The NBP seems unwilling to drop their benchmark interest rate below 1.5% for whatever reason. Poland has a significantly lower debt to GDP ratio, including for private debt, than even Germany, so maybe they didn't consider a couple years of deflation to be that big a problem?

1.5% is still a pretty low rate historically, though; it was a record low for the NBP. And the Zloty did drop 11% against the dollar during that period.

@freakazoid @dazinism @clacke @cjd
hm, so low interest rates cause currency to devalue?

@Wolf480pl @cjd @clacke @dazinism Actually I guess it was about 27% against the dollar, but it was relatively stable against the Euro, so it seems like things in Poland may have been affected more by what was going on with the rest of Europe than anything else.

Devaluation is hard to define with modern fiat currencies. Lowering interest rates has the effect of discouraging holding of it, plus the way central banks lower rates is by increasing the supply, usually by buying government debt.

@dazinism @clacke @cjd @Wolf480pl If you define the value of a currency by CPI, then by definition it wasn't devalued. But CPI looks at a specific set of prices. It appears to have been declining food and energy prices that caused Poland's deflation, not declining wages. Unemployment appears to have peaked in Poland just before the inflation started and has declined ever since. Which may actually be the reason the NBP didn't feel the need to lower rates further.

@freakazoid @cjd @clacke @dazinism
pretty sure there were at least 2 cases of Polish parliament refusing to implement some EU directive, but I don't remember off the top of my head, so maybe I'm wrong.

@freakazoid @cjd @clacke @dazinism
ACTA may've been one of those cases, but I'm not sure if it went through Europarliament, or if treaties like this go through a different path.

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @clacke @cjd There are apparently several different paths. I was going by Wikipedia's description of the "Ordinary Legislative Procedure". "Regulations" take effect directly, while "Directives" need to be implemented by each national parliament, but are still binding AFAICT. Modifications to the Treaty of Lisbon, and I think international agreements like ACTA, need to be ratified by national parliaments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_legislative_procedure#Ordinary_legislative_procedure

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd @clacke Specific values need to be shared. "Culture" is not a binary thing; you don't either have a single or different cultures. You have sets of values with different levels of compatibility. There are also values that are required to live with people who don't have all the same values as you. These values tend to develop over time as groups with differnt values live alongside one another.

@freakazoid
And then these values suddenly disappear if you give people "social media".
@clacke @cjd @dazinism

@freakazoid @dazinism @Wolf480pl
Hmm, interesting question:
Examples of ethnic/nationalistic pride with which I have some experience include French, Zionist Jewish, Turkish, Muslim, Chinese, American, and European/"White".

American pride stands out as perhaps the most non-ethnic. Some groups want an ethno-state, some have one, some (Muslim) seem largely uninterested. Hard to say if it's reactionary, but it's definitely optimistic.

@freakazoid @Wolf480pl @dazinism
My personal opinion of "scientific socialism" can be summed up in James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State. But that ideology continues to exist and I would argue that lots of "lets just pass a law" ideas (for which the Left is known) are rooted in this thinking.

@cjd @freakazoid @dazinism
461 pages is pretty short for a summary...

@cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl Oh yes absolutely. This is a common issue with people who pride themselves on being intellectual - they tend to overestimate the capacity of intellect to overcome problems. At least when it fits with their worldview. For things that don't they're perfectly happy to point out all the problems with human arrogance.

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd This is why I like the idea of keeping interventions simple, transparent, and as measurable as possible rather than either avoiding them entirely or allowing unlimited intervention for any purpose. Try something. If it works, great. If it doesn't, get rid of it and do something else. When the sum total of interventions in any given area becomes complex, replace them with something simpler.

@cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl (This can work really well with finance, too - avoid any instrument you don't *personally* understand really well.)

@freakazoid @cjd @dazinism
This.
This is Science.

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd It's science in that it acknowledges the limits of our ability to actually measure or fine-tune the effect of interventions in society. It can easily depart from being science depending on what we call "measurable". I do not believe economics, for the most part. In particular macroeconomics is unfalsifiable, and things like GDP include economic activity we know is bad like cleaning up after Deepwater Horizon.

@cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl (Not that they shouldn't have cleaned up, just that there's no way that should increase GDP. The total damage of the spill, which is not actually measurable, needed to be subtracted out.)

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd I think you're probably better off not even trying to make it scientific, or even measuring except in the case of easily measurable things like prison populations, birth rate, etc. I considered not even including the term "measurable" since they really don't need to be as long as they're simple and transparent. Then people can just decide if they're happy with it because they understand it.

@freakazoid @cjd @dazinism
so measurement by a vote? Interesting concept :P

At the same time, it kinda resembles medicine, where there's very few things you can measure, and anything depends on everything. From a physicist's point of view medicine isn't a science :/

@cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl What you can do is have "evidence-based" interventions. Again, provided they're simple and transparent. UBI and EITC are obvious ones. We don't know the impact of EITC on employment but since there's no cliff and it increases at the beginning we can guess it probably encourages it (which may or may not be good, but it's better to debate about that than about what effect it even has).

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd Another example is a carbon tax. We know a carbon tax will encourage switching to alternatives. We don't know how much or how fast, so we can just ratchet it up gradually until we get what we want. We may have no idea how much was due to the tax, but who cares?

Cap and trade, on the other hand, requires setting caps and measuring emissions, and it gets gamed to hell and misses all kinds of other emissions.

@freakazoid @cjd @dazinism
how do you carbon tax without measuring emissions?

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @cjd @dazinism Right. You tax the carbon at the point it enters the market, whether by being imported or pumped from the ground. The underlying assumption is that all carbon eventually becomes CO2.

Some can become methane, which lasts long enough and has a potent enough effect to be worth taxing or regulating as a pollutant in its own right. But there are far fewer methane sources than CO2.

...

@dazinism @cjd @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr One could have a tax credit for sequestration, but deciding what should count as sequestration will probably be challenging.

@freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism
One problem with climate change is there's really no incentive to deal with it. If a democratic state starts to tax carbon, as soon as it begins to actually harm the economy people will vote that government out of power. Clean air is different because people in the cities directly feel the pain, climate change is always Someone Else's Problem.

@cjd @freakazoid @Wolf480pl @dazinism Depends on how you use the carbon tax, though. If you never harm the economy, or you even help the economy with the revenue from it, you might not get voted out.

Which is why most carbon tax proposals fall into two categories: use the carbon tax revenue to fund carbon reductions elsewhere (mass transit development and operation, EV subsidies, densification), and/or redistribute carbon tax revenue to the poor (either to offset the regressive effects of their having to pay carbon tax, or even to explicitly redistribute wealth towards them (which increases velocity of money in the economy, helping the economy)).

@cjd @freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism
Today in absolute condemnations of capitalism: " One problem with climate change is there's really no incentive to deal with it." This may be a hint.

@zeh
I don't care what kind of economic system you have, when people start to have difficulty putting food on the table, they're going to vote you out, and quality of life is unfortunately highly correlated with energy consumption.
@freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism

@cjd
That makes no sense. You're mistaking your experience for what is possible, when the first is a tiny subset of the second. Voting inside "economic systems" that constrict your options to what is profitable is a travesty of freedom and there could be as many ways to live well as there are people, correlated to energy spending or not.

@freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism

@zeh @dazinism @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr @cjd Well, sure, unspecified hypothetical modes of organization will always win out over real world implementations.

@freakazoid
Not what I did. I just pointed out that taking this shit as inevitable is a mistake. But if you want to go that way, you may take hunter-gatherer tribes as a counter-example of both of those claims (which are also referred to as a system of primitive communism, actually).
@cjd @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism

@zeh @dazinism @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr @cjd I don't take it as inevitable. But unless we have strong confidence both that a particular solution is better than that a particular set of actions is likely to get us there and not to an even worse state that's even harder to get out of, we're limited to incremental changes that are either easily reversible or that we at least have reasonable confidence won't make us worse off without a decent way out.

@cjd @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism @zeh And there's plenty of obvious low-hanging fruit *today* that for some reason people ignore because it isn't perfect, or because it benefits people they don't like, or because they don't want to be called "moderates", or whatever.

@freakazoid
Low hanging fruit? to address climate apocalipse, which was the case in point? Such as? Short of reorganizing the system of production and eliminating profit as the number one priority, what would you suggest
@dazinism @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr @cjd

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism Interestingly enough, this seems to be something that entrepreneurship is fairly good at. I'm sure there are other ways to accomplish it, and entrepreneurship (at least when funded by intellectual property) is obviously bad at certain kinds of invention, like certain types of drugs and medical treatments, but nonprofit foundations seem to do the best job there, not government grants.

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism Tesla is an interesting example. Elon Musk has as much money as he does because of the factors I mentioned, but Tesla itself is in many ways a charity; VCs and angels would never have financed such an endeavor out of a profit motive. It's going to take a very long time to even come close to paying Musk back, much less making him more money than he's put in.

@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr And the current pattern of bringing new technologies to "early adopters", who tend to be wealthy, first means that those early adopters are the ones paying for the research. One can imagine ways to accelerate this process, but most new products that aren't just minor iterations on old ones end up failing, so most of the time you'd just make failure more costly in total.

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism Making failure more costly is bad, because the process of invention is mostly a random search, so failure should be fast, cheap, and plentiful.

This is a major problem with the current way the markets are allocating capital. Uber has essentially been treated as if the investors are certain it will succeed if only it gets enough money and grows large enough.

@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr In a way this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because that money is getting spent on lobbying and driving competition out of the market. But it's also extremely costly, because to make an above-market return on their investment, the investors are betting on the irrational exuberance of the public after it IPOs.

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism IOW, their plan is to build this thing that looks like the "next Facebook" and dump it on the public. And the public will suck it up because with enough VC money almost any idea can be made to look good.

So raise interest rates, shift more money into debt financing which requires actual profits, and actual savings accounts (or treasuries and CDs), and make companies grow more slowly and fail more quickly.

@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr (Those latter things were consequences of raising interest rates, not additional actions that need to be taken.)

@freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @dazinism
I would really really like to know how the monetary policy would work in the Federated Republic of Sean.

@freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @dazinism
Because these issues are things I've wrestled with in my mind and I never found any decent conclusions, nor even really proper understanding for some of the phenomenon.

@cjd @dazinism @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr I don't have a good answer yet. As much as he's demonized, Milton Friedman came up with a couple interesting ideas late in his life: either target the broad money supply directly instead of interest rates, or keep the monetary base constant and let the market decide what the multiple should be. The problem with the latter approach is that there are still other levers like the Federal Funds Rate and Discount Rate.

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @dazinism @cjd I like the idea of "free banking" as well. This doesn't mean banks are completely unregulated, just that they are not backed by the government or Fed, which would not exist in such a scenario. I would probably have the government provide insured banking services, with the private banks left for folks who already had sufficient "safe" savings.

@cjd @dazinism @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr Free banking is not exactly what used to exist in the US, for a couple of reasons: first, banks were regulated under state law and were prohibited from branching outside their own states or even a single neighborhood, which meant they had no diversification. Second, many states required banks to hold a percentage of their assets in the state's own debt. Those states, unsurprisingly, tended to default a lot.

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @dazinism @cjd A better example is Canada, where banks were allowed to branch nationally, and which had no bank failures during the Great Depression. Canada created a central bank, but in order to facilitate international payments without relying on London banks, not to promote stability.

You don't understand the magnitude of the problem. Capitalism is eating the planet for profit. All of production is organized for profit at the cost of everything else, and this force will continue to organize our lives to serve this goal. I don't know how to put it more clearly. Either read Das Capital or play universal paperclips until you get it. http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

@freakazoid @cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr

@zeh @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd Still haven't heard any practical alternative proposal, just "this is terrible we need to replace it". Ok, great. With what, exactly? Do we just burn it down and hope to somehow have enough left over to deal with the effects of climate change that will happen even if we stop all consumption of fossil fuels today? Not to mention all the stuff that will still continue to happen even without climate change.

@freakazoid
You're shifting the subject all the time. You were just saying that there is low hanging fruit to address the issues, now you're saying that I didn't present a solution. That was diagnostics, prescription is a different matter. It's hard as hell, yes, and would need a force to overcome capitalism for another system to be born, one that organizes time and space for life. My point was precisely that nothing short of this will do.
@cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr

@zeh @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd Hey you don't get to jump into a thread and then dictate how the discussion proceeds. As far as I can tell you haven't even bothered to read much of the thread that preceded your entry, so it is you who are trying to change the already existing subject.

If we don't have a solution, it doesn't matter how much of a crisis climate change is. We're just as likely to make ourselves extinct by creating chaos in the midst of a crisis.

@freakazoid
Maybe you have a point. But I wasn't trying to dictate, it's just that I tried to reply to your points and felt that you didn't follow that through, didn't reply to what I said.
I think that correct diagnostics help, a necessary first step, otherwise we're just chasing our tails and hoping that will work. Moving on, jumping off the thread. Bye, take care.
@cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism Addressing the other points in your post, while it's true that we know the technology works, the problem is that we also know there are a bunch of alternative technologies that are likely to be even better, so going "all in" now has a decent chance of producing a worse outcome (possibly much worse) than an approach that puts the decisionmaking and risk in the same (preferably distributed) hands.

@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr In my view the best approach by far is to push *away* from the thing we know for sure is bad and let people decide on their own what they think the best alternative is. The best way to do that is with a carbon tax.

...

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism And also raise interest rates, but the immediate recession from that will slow things down a bit in the short term. We'll have a renaissance afterward, though, from all the capital and labor that's now been freed up from "zombie" companies that only existed because investors were constantly throwing money at them.

...

@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr And the resultant increase in revenue will more than make up for the increased cost of borrowing, including the extra bonds the government will have to float in order to pay for expanded/extended unemployment, welfare, and health benefits or even a UBI in order to avoid making the most vulnerable worse off in the short term.

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism I agree that battery powered cars appear to be the best choice, for cars. What we don't know is what kind of battery or charging system is best. If we picked CCS chargers and lithium ion technology, we'd be stuck with a system where charging takes at least 10x as long as fueling. Long lines at charging stations, etc.

@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr Investing in alternatives to cars is exactly what the government should be doing. It can use a carbon tax to partially fund this if it wants, but IMO the carbon tax should be considered independently of any redistribution. If the carbon tax is a good idea, we should implement it. If subisidization of mass transit is a good idea, we should do that. Doesn't matter where the money goes from the first or comes from for the second.

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism Another thing that should be considered independently is the progressive or regressive nature of various policies. If a carbon tax is aggressive in its effect, instead of not implementing it, let's offset it. With cash, ideally, since the decision of whether to take mass transit or a car should not have to depend on how much money one makes.

@freakazoid @dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr imho strikes me as odd. What people are able to do is pretty much inherently tied to what they can afford in our society.

Where people live depends on how much money people make. Seems even more involved with peoples lives. Infact so much so that people might be forced to drive cars if other modes of transport are unsuitable to the area.

That's a reality for some, other than dealing with it, don't think cars are a "right".

@freakazoid @dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr incidentally a right wing nutty politician in the netherlands actually said ... flying vacations are a right...

I think cars and flying across the world for vacations are basically luxuries we can't really afford.

I mean.. it's not absolute at all, like some areas with lower population densities and some cases like illness, or people moving homes. I mean to deal with shit..

@jasper @bhtooefr @cjd @dazinism
I totally agree with you that it's not great for someone to be able to choose to do something that's harmful to the planet just because they're rich. But at the same time, why do we ignore that they're also doing something (paying the carbon tax) that we have decided as a society is good?

I...

@dazinism @cjd @bhtooefr @jasper Whoops the "I" before the ellipsis was me failing to delete all the text I meant to move into this post.

I guess we can make absolutely certain the harm is fully offset by just banning fossil fuels entirely, but that would cause substantially more chaos in the short term than even a fairly steep carbon tax, and it would be just as regressive in its effect.

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism Retrofits are possible but costly with the car itself. Also with the charging system, though to a much lesser extent. Keeping cars for longer and primarily buying used and refurbished does let you amortize the cost of a retrofit over a longer period. Higher interest rates would push us toward that ;-)

@dazinism @cjd @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr
(untagging zeh since they've jumped off the thread)

HSR is a good target for investment because the technology is mature.The challenge is building it in such a way that it will actually be useful to people. California's project died because it would have been so expensive and slow it wouldn't have had any ridership, and it was politically infeasible to subsidize it sufficiently to fix the ticket price issue.

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @cjd @dazinism And that's almost certainly generous given that early estimates in such projects are always overly optimistic by a large margin. This is where centralizing certain powers helps a lot; it makes no sense for local communities or even counties to be able to block transportation projects that benefit the entire state.

@freakazoid
@dazinism @bhtooefr
Thinking a bruit carbon tax without a functioning alternative risks becoming another way to extract money from the poor. Cigarette tax didn't (afaik) have a material impact on smoking, what did was advertising bans and labeling regulation. Unfortunately "don't burn gas" is more complicated than "don't smoke", people need to get to work, and many of them would much appreciate not being slaves to their car, but "transport on tap" needs to be solved.

@freakazoid @dazinism @bhtooefr
Autonamous cars are a huge deal in this direction. Once the owners of cars become institutional and people pay for simple access, lots of problems become tractable:
* Businesses (unlike people) do behave as rational economic actors so even without carbon taxes, they will optimize for efficiency.
* If you can access a truck when needed, you don't need to buy one "just in case", you can go to work in a 1 seat car.

@cjd @bhtooefr @dazinism This is a compelling argument and IMO the correct way to think about the problem. But I think there's a strong tendency among the public to couple it with the disposition of the carbon tax. This is a problem because a) it usually ends up being a general subsidy rather than specific projects targeted at creating alternatives, and b) there's no reason to believe that the correct level of spending on alternatives is the same as the correct carbon tax.

@dazinism @bhtooefr @cjd I feel the same way about autonomous cars. Also for people who can't drive for whatever reason. Of course, if mass transit works well, you don't need to drive a truck to work even if it's your only vehicle. (Plus I'm pretty sure 80% of the people who drive non-commercial trucks & SUVs don't actually "need" them at all.)

@freakazoid
@bhtooefr @dazinism
When it's CAPEX "need" means "might need" (want to go camping, snows where you live) this is purely perception and car companies love to play to fears of a smaller vehicle proving inadequate (with all the Freudian implications). Then you have behavioral economics, people but vroom and car companies know it.
Just make the buyers institutional then at least it's a fair fight.

@freakazoid @dazinism @bhtooefr
* If you don't have to figure out parking, taking a little car from your home to a train station and then taking the train to work becomes possible. You don't even get your suit wet in the pouring rain.

Emissions regulations have shown that if you push businesses, they do find creative solutions. Even without any carbon tax, EVs are interesting just because emissions control kit is becoming more and more expensive to produce...

@cjd @bhtooefr @dazinism The problem with Uber in SF has been that, while it's somewhat improved the utility of already-crowded Caltrain and to a lesser extent BART, a lot of that was people switching from buses, and it was already pretty horrible to get to SF from not-SF so it's not like people needed encouragement to take Caltrain or BART, so the net effect is probably negative. Which means autonomous cars carrying single passengers will only make it worse.

@dazinism @bhtooefr @cjd I think what we actually need are autonomous passenger vans/mini buses using a network of designated pick-up and drop-off points and making people change vehicles when necessary to keep occupancy up. Couple that with bus and light rail for popular corridors and you have the makings of a very efficient transportation system.

@freakazoid @dazinism @bhtooefr
And when you think about what is involved in owning a car, it's actually pretty shit. First you have to get your license, then you buy one:
* If it's new, you make payments and if you're fired from your job then it will be repossessed.
* If it's old then it might break down and if you can't get to work you'll be fired.
* If you don't have one or it doesn't run, you can't get a job.
I think people would *love* to move to an OPEX model.

@cjd @bhtooefr @dazinism This is the exact vision behind Uber AFAICT, and it's pretty clear not needing to pay a driver makes the economics work, once we can make autonomous cars work (which I suspect will be longer than we think). Car ownership even in the suburbs will plummet as soon as the cost of ride services drops below TCO of a car. It already is for occasional use, but not for the daily commute.

@dazinism @bhtooefr @cjd Of course, reducing the cost of riding around in a small passenger vehicle will make mass transit all the more unattractive by comparison, which will increase traffic. Which is why I think we need to be careful about how it's deployed. The market-based approach would be congestion charges to encourage people to use the car to get to transit instead of straight to their destination.

@freakazoid
@bhtooefr @dazinism
Mass transit will be cheaper, which will play into the thinking of many daily commuters. But mass transit also needs to be competitive. Living in France (carless in fact) I can tell you that the SNCF behaves just like any other monopoly. So I'm partial to vans, buses, and trains indeed, but there needs to be choice.

@freakazoid @bhtooefr @dazinism
Also if one of these smart companies can figure out how to remove all of the friction of moving from a car to a bus or train with shopping bags and 3 kids, they can offer a "car ride" on train infrastructure and pocket the difference...

@cjd @dazinism @bhtooefr This seems to describe Personal Rapid Transit pretty closely. And PRT works even without autonomous cars, though it doesn't solve the issues associating with owning cars, parking, etc. With autonomous cars, the main advantage the PRT "tracks" provide is allowing for much smaller batteries and less charging infrastructure and providing a dedicated lane for AVs "automatically".

...

@bhtooefr @dazinism @cjd Of course, you can do all of these things with a regular paved road by embedding inductive charging coils in them and only allowing AVs. The only real difference between such infrastructure and PRT is that you'd be using a software "linkage" among vehicles and a wireless power link to the road rather than physical linkages between cars and a physical "track" to provide power and guidance. You'd still use tires for traction because they're quiet.

@cjd @dazinism @bhtooefr Incidentally I had a PRT vs AV debate with a PRT advocate almost 20 years ago. I'm pretty sure I thought we'd have AVs long before now, so maybe he was right then. But PRT is an example of an infrastructure decision that could end up being a pretty bad one, due to AVs in this case.

@bhtooefr @dazinism @cjd Oh now that I think of it said PRT advocate is here!

@nocleverhandle what's your take on PRT vs alternatives these days?

@clacke @cjd @freakazoid @dazinism PRT == automated guideway transit with small vehicles. The vehicles are summoned at stations, the guideways are closed to everything but those small vehicles. There’s been fully-automated PRT systems in service since the 1970s at least. Higher infrastructure cost to deploy, but it can be done with technology that demonstrably 100% works today.

“Autonomous vehicles” means autonomous cars on the roads, a much much much harder problem to solve, but using existing infrastructure.

@clacke @cjd @freakazoid @dazinism The “PRT vs. AV” debate being posed in this thread isn’t between a hypothetical “non-autonomous PRT” and autonomous PRT, it’s between autonomous PRT and autonomous cars on roads.

@bhtooefr @cjd @clacke @dazinism I was thinking of PRT systems where the cars could be driven on roads as well, which solves the last mile problem. I can't find mention of such an option on the Wikipedia page, so maybe it wasn't as common a proposal as I'd thought. That's why I was thinking about the combination of the two technologies.

...

@dazinism @clacke @cjd @bhtooefr PRT seems like it could potentially deliver on the failed promise of monorails: cheap elevated guideways. Monorails are big and you can't walk on the guideways, so being able to evacuate means you need a lot of ladders or walkways along the side, so the infrastructure is not much cheaper. With PRT you could potentially climb over or around the cars and walk on the guideway, just like on an elevated freeway.

@bhtooefr @cjd @clacke @dazinism That means you can have a guideway that's barely larger than a pair of cars and space the emergency ladders/stairs farther apart, assuming elevated guideways, which I think is usually what you want.

Though there is a huge advantage to sharing infrastructure even with dedicated lanes, since you can just expand as you cut into normal car travel.

@dazinism @clacke @cjd @bhtooefr (There are also structural reasons monorail tracks are expensive, and the vehicles are more expensive. So the only real advantage is noise because they run on pneumatic tires, but there are lots of different guideway and vehicle configurations that can use pneumatic tires.)

@freakazoid
I spent a good few years working modifying vehicles to run on biofuels & trying to encourage decentralised biofuel production. Became very aware of transport issues, alternatives, energy requirements & thought about it all a lot

Its not hard to imagine better systems but theres a number of massive & influential industries (roads/oil/auto/finance) tightly tied to the existing model. This heavily influences the political will to push for alternatives

@clacke @cjd @bhtooefr

@freakazoid

I attended government consultation events packed with representatives from the established industries, pushing heavily for their interests

I think the finance around autos is very important. After a mortgage its the biggest debt many folks have (although college/uni debt has also become huge)

The implications of changing from this amount of personal debt would be huge

The transport inefficiency in our societies is huge. People travel long distances to…

@clacke @cjd @bhtooefr

@freakazoid

…another town (sometimes even country) to do a job, someone else from that town does the same the other way. Same with goods. Its all daft. You'd think that economic efficiency would stop stuff like this, but it doesnt, its common

@clacke @cjd @bhtooefr

@dazinism @freakazoid @clacke @bhtooefr
I seem to recall someone saying that nobody thinks about skype as a green technology, but the possibility for telecommuting which it created has had a massive impact on energy consumption. People still need handshake and eye-contact, it's part of trust and collaboration, but this doesn't necessarily have to be every single day.

@cjd @bhtooefr @clacke @dazinism Zoom, Slack, email, Jira, and Confluence reduce my commuting by 20%. I'm planning to work only remotely after this job; I have a standing offer for a job where the office is much farther away but I could work from home most days and on days I went in my drive would only be a few miles because I could take light rail to the train.

@dazinism @bhtooefr @cjd @clacke Low interest subsidizes the capital cost of cars to an extent. Long commutes are an effective wage reduction. I think they don't go away because voters (i.e. the people who actually vote, donate, and campaign for politicians) won't allow them to. By which I mean they don't allow the construction of new housing or mass transit.

@clacke @cjd @bhtooefr @dazinism As for goods going long distances, that's subsidized by exchange rates, fixed international postage rates, the governments of export-dependent countries, and the US government through stupid tax laws (which I think 45 may have fixed?). Also ships don't have to pay motor vehicle fuel taxes (or many other kinds of taxes AIUI). Not sure about international cargo planes.

@dazinism @bhtooefr @cjd @clacke I think this is why a carbon tax is ideal. It lets us shift things gradually and "naturally", and we'll naturally start with the lowest hanging fruit, which is probably the truck fleet and other fleet vehicles, because the infrastructure is more centralized and biodiesel can run in unmodified engines.

@freakazoid @bhtooefr @clacke @dazinism
My personal opinion is that we need a new "interface" which is neither butt-on-seat nor rubber-on-pavement. Some interface between a transport pod which carries passengers or cargo and the car/train/boat/mag-lev/hyperloop which carries it, then a sort of router which switches pods on and off of different transport. This would change the economics of running (for ex) a train line, because it can directly pull commuters off of a road.

@cjd @dazinism @clacke @bhtooefr We already have such an interface, and it's cheap as hell. It's called a cargo container. There is also some kind of system that allows attaching those to trailers, but I don't know how standardized it is given that I see trailers loaded directly on flatbed train cars a lot.

@freakazoid @bhtooefr @clacke @dazinism
Now it just needs to be fast enough and safe enough that people will sit inside of them while they're being transported.

@bhtooefr @clacke @dazinism @cjd It is probably possible to design a fully-automated loading and unloading system that could load cars onto special "sleds". The main drawbacks would be that you're unnecessarily transporting the car's power plant and undercarriage, and the sleds and loading system would be expensive compared to just driving a special car onto a guideway.

@cjd @dazinism @clacke @bhtooefr Actually, now that I think of it, adding hardware to current electric cars to let them run autonomously and receive power from a guideway would be damn cheap. Just a lowerable doodad underneath with a pair of brushes and an interface to a bus that signals over the power lines. Linking the cars together could be optional, but that linkage could provide redundancy in case of gunk on the guideway conductors.

@bhtooefr @clacke @dazinism @cjd Alternatively you just have two doodads (trolleys?) that connect to the center guide.

You'd probably want the guide to be T-shaped to make it hard to touch both sides if someone needs to walk on the guideway. Unlike the "third rail" or overhead line in an AC system, I think HVDC is safe if you only touch either conductor, since neither would be grounded.

@cjd @dazinism @clacke @bhtooefr Rather than using cameras or sensors on each car, the guideway could use cameras all along it. No radar is necessary, and the processors could be local and connected in a daisy-chain fashion with wireless long-range links to bridge any failed wired connections or control units. You'd have 3 control units per cell, maybe just by overlapping them with the next and previous.

@freakazoid @dazinism @clacke @bhtooefr
The idea would be to split the part with the passengers, HVAC, stereo, etc from the part with the powerplant, wheels, etc. Of course it's carrying more than you have to carry if everybody's on a bus, but my opinion is if your transportation network can't be used to transport an ambulence, it's not complete.

@freakazoid @bhtooefr @cjd @dazinism

this many posts in 2 hours?
untag pls

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism The structure of capital markets is driven largely by the specifics of regulation and taxation and by monetary and fiscal policy. The single largest driver is monetary policy, because interest rates decide the balance between debt and equity as a source of financing. Low interest rates drive large market capitalizations, demand for fast growth of individual companies, and an appetite for risk.

@freakazoid @dazinism @Wolf480pl
This is a really cool thread, from Javascript to fall-from-grace politics to economics and carbon tax.
One comment: In Europe they implemented high fuel taxes so one would have expected the first EVs to emerge here. Instead car innovation was somehow stunted, people continue to drive the same small diesel cars while the US is roaring head-long into EVs. Europe has, however, created a less car-centric society which is nice in many ways.

@cjd @freakazoid @dazinism
I don't thing the lower car-centricism is caused by fuel tax.

My parents remember the times when there was only one car in the village. Many years before the first affordable car, Fiat 126p, was invented.

@cjd @freakazoid @dazinism
there were many motorbikes tho. Also, major farmer families had tractors.

@freakazoid @cjd @dazinism
I think it's science in that it tries to perform experiments in controlled conditions.

@freakazoid @dazinism @cjd
Do you by chance know what complexity class is that economic calculation problem in?
Or have any links where I could read more on this topic?

@Wolf480pl @cjd @dazinism It's not a computation problem. It's an information problem. The Wikipedia page is as good a place to start as any. The criticisms are primarily of the way libertarians have interpreted it, which is to say that "free markets" are always better than any kind of central planning, which is not what it says at all.

@cjd
Stumbled into this recent blog post, which I found an interesting read & is somewhat related to what we'd been chatting about

Living and Working together (1/3) The Social Brain Hypothesis Revisited – Unvirtual - https://unvirtual.us/2019/08/19/living-and-working-together-1-3-the-social-brain-hypothesis-revisited/

@Wolf480pl @freakazoid

@dazinism @Wolf480pl @cjd Interesting. The article doesn't mention anything about how they handled conflict among groups, but this page says they ran away if they met any aggressive groups. That works right up to the point where there's actual resource pressure. They seem to want to blame agriculture, but it seems more likely to me that it was warfare and the need for protection that was the root cause of hierarchy and inequality.

@cjd @Wolf480pl @dazinism I suspect one could probably find peaceful agrarian societies that happened to live on particularly fertile land that then took a long time to become crowded and for whatever reason rarely got raided and had such high productivity that it was easy to recover from raids.

@freakazoid @dazinism @Wolf480pl
I think despite whatever effort researchers can make to be impartial, research will always tend to confirm the biases of the researcher.
I suspect the reality is that some immediate-return societies were idealic at some times (e.g. when resources were plentiful), others weren't, some were in some ways but would horrify us in others.

@cjd
Yeah I agree, think all research & presentation has bias, even if the researcher/author cant see it. This always needs consideration

I think that human societies & interactions are complex & its best to avoid generalisations about how humans behave, & why, unless backed up by **a whole lot of data** from a lot of sources (who have a verity of very different biases) with limited, weak counter theories/evidence
@freakazoid @Wolf480pl

@cjd

Theres widely accepted theories that dont stand up very well to investigation

Tangentially related to our talk of trade/war Graeber, an anthropogist examined the historical record on money/debt/trade

There is no truth to the widely excepted claim that money replaced barter

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/08/what-is-debt-–-an-interview-with-economic-anthropologist-david-graeber.html

Some stuff about quantifiying everything there too

Recommend the book
@freakazoid @Wolf480pl

@dazinism @Wolf480pl @cjd The thesis seems to be that, because some societies already had money at the beginning of the written historical record, and because there were still societies using barter for a long time after, it cannot be that money replaced barter? I don't follow that reasoning. You can certainly choose a narrow definition of "money" that by definition must have been created by governments, but that doesn't really tell you anything.

@freakazoid
The interview only scrapes the surface, If you are interested in a pretty thorough investigation of debt (which by necessity also looks at money and trade) backed by the historical record and anthropological observations of different societies I'd highly recommend reading the book. Lots and lots of fascinating information / observations.
@Wolf480pl @cjd

@dazinism @Wolf480pl @cjd A socialist system where the government has a monopoly over fossil fuel extraction and gets a lot of its value-add for its citizenry that way has even less incentive to deal with climate change.

@cjd @Wolf480pl @dazinism There are plenty of countries in the world where this would obviously not be the case, but interestingly those tend to be the same countries doing a good job dealing with climate change now. It might be instructive to use a hypothetical socialist US and Canada as thought experiments. Let's assume a democratic socialist system.

...

@dazinism @Wolf480pl @cjd If we're honest with ourselves we cannot assume that the government would have eschewed fossil fuels before global warming was widely known about. So each administration would use fossil fuels to help keep the populace happy and get reelected.

Does the government in such a country even fund research on climate change in the first place? That can only make people upset.

@cjd @Wolf480pl @dazinism And even assuming people do learn about climate change, you'll still have a faction that opposes the shift from fossil fuels due to the cost, which now must be purely be borne by the people. Now *everyone* has an incentive to deny climate change, to be able to keep their consumption levels high.

@Wolf480pl

>Can you enumerate some of those other possible reasons? (Than trade or war)

Us humans are curious beings - could be interested in the sound of their music, their clothes, their hunting methods etc. etc.
Maybe looking for love?

I know some may like to suggest these kind of interactions are trades, even go as far to suggest all human interactions are effectively trades. I dont >buy< that 🤣
@dazinism @freakazoid @cjd

@dazinism
But if they have differen clothes, that means they're doing it WRONG because OUR clothes are obviously superior...

or at least that I think is what many people's first reaction would be.
@freakazoid @cjd

@dazinism @Wolf480pl @cjd The link between big game hunting and warfare is, but many games and sports are pretty clearly practice for warfare as well. There are numerous sources that say nomadic hunter-gatherer groups tended to kill one another when they ran into each other, too. American tribes certainly were not peaceful, at least in some areas, presumably where there was resource contention.

@cjd @Wolf480pl @dazinism I don't consider steady progress toward peace to be a bleak theory at all. The notion of falling from grace and everything steadily going to shit while a small fraction of us act as Cassandras is what's bleak.

@dazinism @Wolf480pl @cjd Speaking of warfare, one of the best warrior groups ever was the Mongols, who learned to hunt with bows on horseback. They never would have bothered if they were eating rabbits and squirrels and herding sheep, which would have kept them from sweeping through Europe and giving many of us their genes.

@cjd @Wolf480pl @dazinism There's a chance herders were less warlike than hunters just because grass tended to be a more plentiful resource, and branding (a technology!) was a pretty good way to avoid conflict over who an animal belonged to. Theft of animals would presumably have been an issue, though.

@dazinism @Wolf480pl @cjd Also, I don't think Pax Romana is just Roman propaganda. One can argue whether it was worth the cost, but I think there's pretty good evidence it was indeed more peaceful than what came before. Though what came before included both settled agricultural society and nomadic ones.

And the nomadic ones are who took it down when it started rotting from the inside out.

@cjd @Wolf480pl @dazinism (I think people who believe the invasion/infiltration by nomadic groups was the root cause of the fall of the Roman Empire, rather than just the result of its decay, tend to be Trump supporters.)

@dazinism @Wolf480pl @cjd OH! I guess one can conclude from this is that *organized* violence is more efficient, so you can get away with less of it.

Though it's more complicated than that. It's the careful application of violence to create some kind of rule of law.

Which, by the way, is how Triad gangs avoid killing one another. "Shows of force", which don't involve actual violence.

@cjd @Wolf480pl @dazinism This also makes politics, as Heinlein said (IIRC), "The art of not killing one another."

@dazinism @Wolf480pl @cjd It also makes the claim by some libertarians that government is bad because it's "backed by violence" self-contradictory. Backed by violence is clearly better than having violence as the only tool. Which is why using armed police as anything but a last resort is a super bad idea.

And, of course, figuring out how to get people to cooperate with one another on their own is even better.

@cjd @Wolf480pl @dazinism I guess you could call that large-scale cooperation, and I don't see how that is possible without a complex society that involves cities and people who do things other than subsistence, which require agriculture and other technology. It also requires specialization, another thing anarcho-primitivists eschew. Which requires trade or some other means of transferring the fruits of labor.

@freakazoid @cjd @dazinism From my limited experience, libertarians are more like "govt is bad because it has monopoly on violence, and monopoly is bad", or "if govt is allowed to hold me at gunpoint, why am I not allowed to hold govt at gunpoint?". Don't remember them claiming that "voilence is bad, and govt is backed by violence, so govt is bad".

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd As a former libertarian I heard (and made) this argument all the time.

Libertarians generally don't have a problem with monopoly as long as no "force" (in the narrow libertarian definition) is involved in maintaining it.

@cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl I should have said their problem isn't with violence in general but with the "initiation of force". With them deciding what constitutes force and its initiation, of course. So, not paying your taxes isn't force because you never agreed to pay them in the first place, at least not without duress, but throwing you in jail for not paying your taxes is.

@freakazoid @dazinism @cjd Hm... but for initiation, you need an ability to dash to your enemy. Does that mean libertarians always pick characters without a dash?

@freakazoid @dazinism @cjd
at least their definition seems to be symmetric. Imagine how fun it'd be if they said that "randomly shooting a policeman on the street is not initiation of force".

@freakazoid @dazinism @cjd
AFAIK, Mongols were herders, and they waged war when they ran out of grasslands due to drought.

@Wolf480pl @cjd @dazinism The warriors Gengis Khan used were hunters. When they were herders they tended to lose a lot.

If you'd like to listen to 8 hours of podcast on it I can lend you the series. https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-wrath-of-the-khans-series/

@dazinism @cjd @Wolf480pl One might ask why hunting didn't always displace hearding, and I'm pretty sure the reason is the lactase mutation. Herding for dairy is much more efficient than hunting. It even gives one enough vitamin B-12 to adopt a lacto-vegetarian diet, though it's kind of pointless not to eat most male animals and most herding societies lived in areas with relatively poor native vegetation.

@Wolf480pl @cjd @dazinism Agriculture would have been worse in the short term most of the time but won out over the longer term as more advanced techniques spread because of the formation of cities, and the fact that it enabled trade and specialization.

The cities also killed people because of urban diseases, but they eventually developed immunity and better sanitation.

@freakazoid @Wolf480pl @cjd Don't be part of the problem...

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript

@seven @freakazoid @Wolf480pl
If you're not part of the solution then you're part of the problem, sort of the leftist version of "either you are with us, or you're with the terrorists"

@cjd @freakazoid @Wolf480pl Jabascript, terrorism... 🤔​ One could argue that. ;)

@cjd @freakazoid @Wolf480pl But, alas I have to use it just like everyone else...

@cjd @freakazoid @Wolf480pl That is far away from, by choice however...

@seven @freakazoid @Wolf480pl
Well it's unfortunate that you have to use it and you don't like it, but I would argue that if it makes programming accessible to more people then it's a net win for society.

@cjd @seven @freakazoid
"chose between being part of the solution and being part of the problem"

"chose between lesser evil and greater evil"

@Wolf480pl @cjd @seven @freakazoid

BASIC, and the personal computer, is the fire Prometheus stole.

When the gods finally noticed, they taught Prometheus capitalism, and then he and his followers convince the world that BASIC was bad, and that only Promethians can use fire safely.

@requiem @seven @cjd @Wolf480pl Ok now that's a myth I can get behind.

All hail Prometheus!

@Wolf480pl @cjd @seven @freakazoid

BASIC, and the personal computer, is the fire Prometheus stole.

When the gods finally noticed, they taught Prometheus capitalism, and then he and his followers convince the world that BASIC was bad, and that only Promethians can use fire safely.