Having a million in a 401k today is like having a pension 50 years ago. If you want to actually retire in this capitalist hellscape, that’s what you need to have. A million in a 401k is like $40k/year of retirement income. And it’s not like pension funds don’t invest their savings in Wall Street either.

Not really. In today’s world, a couple having assets of up to a few million is the equivalent of someone 50 years ago having a paid off house and a pension. That’s the kind of assets you need if you want to finance a basic middle class retirement.

That’s why I support a maximum wealth cap. My preferred figure is 1000x median household income. Anything beyond that is taxed at 100%. I don’t even care what the wealthy do with the money over that wealth cap. Donate it, spend it on conspicuous consumption, I don’t care. What matters is that the wealth isn’t pooling at the top, allowing the wealthy to outbid everyone else for things like housing.

Hell, imagine a world like that. Maybe at the end of each year, the rich burn off all their excess wealth by throwing giant lavish parties that they invite the entire populace of their cities to. Or maybe they just cut everyone a check. If you’re forced to burn off all your excess cash, you might as well burn it in a way that makes you popular.

Exactly. The only real problem with the covid stimulus was that they were implemented quickly, and that they occurred simultaneously with covid-related supply chain disruptions. That’s why so much inflation happened. You could make that level of stimulus permanent without any inflationary effect as long as you slowly ramped up the stimulus over a decade or so. You wouldn’t want to implement a $20k/year UBI overnight. That would cause huge inflation. But if you slowly ramped it up, that would give time for the production system to slowly expand to meet the need.

The only way to really make capitalism work in the long term is if you pair it with sufficient social spending to provide a substantial redistributive effect. A free market, if you can maintain it, is a wonderful thing. Competition breeds innovation and efficiency. The problem is that there’s nothing capitalists hate more than a free market. As soon as any company gets big enough, or any capitalist gets wealthy enough, they start directing their wealth to buying public policy that will give them an unfair advantage in the market. And as soon as any company gets enough market share, they start engaging in uncompetitive business practices if not heavily regulated.

Marx was fundamentally right. Capitalism is an unstable system. Even if you could magically start a society with a perfectly free market, it would inevitably collapse into oligarchy. And when the oligarchs push things far enough that enough people are desperate enough, oligarchy collapses into fascism.

The free market has a lot of merit to it. But ironically, the only way you can maintain even a vaguely free market is by heavy handed government intervention. You need a large redistributive mechanism to prevent wealth accumulation at the top, and you need strict regulation on the size of businesses to prevent them from dominating markets. Free markets require heavy government intervention in order to persist long term.

He probably did something similar in his past. Maybe raped a drunk girl at a party or similar while in undergrad. Never got caught for it, and never went on to do it again. So he figured if he can learn his lesson and not repeat the crime, why not this kid? Justice to the victims isn’t even considered.

That approach always fails in the long run. Yes, you can lose weight by just counting calories. But you are fighting your body every step of the way. And even after you reach your target weight, your body will constantly be trying to return to the overweight state. In the end, your will will almost certainly fail. Are you prepared to religiously count calories, be constantly tired, and miserable for the rest of your life? Then sure, you can rely on physics alone to keep your weight down.

But that is not how human beings were meant to live. We’re meant to simply eat until we’re full. What we’re talking about is a massive public health problem. And public health problem is not obesity. The public health problem is that the “full meters” of hundreds of millions of people have been irrevocably damaged by modern processed foods. Your set point, your full meter, your satiation reflex, whatever you want to call it. This is as a part of your body as any other organ or gland. When someone breaks their arm, we don’t demonize them for having a broken arm. When someone has a broken full meter however, we decry it as a moral failing.

The primary difference between skinny people and fat people is that fat people are simply hungrier. People have different set points that their bodies try desperately to stay at. And this set point is largely affected by the diet you experience in early childhood, and it’s set for life.

Yes, obviously it is possible for a person with a fat set point to lower their weight through constant grinding effort and calorie counting. But that’s not how human beings are supposed to have to live. Most skinny people don’t have to count calories, they simply rely on their natural hunger levels to maintain their weight.

If a skinny person tries to eat past their set point, their body will actually fight them. If you try to eat past your set point, your body will force you to burn off calories in all sorts of ways. Your energy levels will soar, so you spend more time active. You’ll experience insomnia, so you spend more time active and burning more calories.

If a fat person tries to lose weight just by counting calories, their body constantly fights them over it. Their energy levels decline so they’ll burn less calories. They’ll get tired earlier and find themselves sleeping for 10 hours as their body forces them to preserve calories.

Weight is not a moral issue. It is a simple health issue. Our modern food systems create unnatural foods that fuck up people’s internal set points. Instead of your body trying to get you to maintain a healthy weight, it tries to maintain an unhealthy weight.

We see now through the invention of drugs like Ozempic that the whole idea of calorie counting and brute force willpower to maintain weight is a Medieval and barbaric approach to the problem. We’ve taken a medical problem and turned it into a moral failing. It’s no different than how people used to ostracize, demonize, and banish those who caught leprosy.

Oh, and for added physics fun, that extra 40 mph represents a 62% increase in vehicle kinetic energy and stopping distance.

That’s 186 mph. In the US, the highest posted speed limit anywhere is 85 mph, on some stretches of highway in remote rural Texas. So you’re looking at more than 2x the speed limit of the highest posted speed limit in the country. A lot of cars come preprogrammed with some speed governor in them. They usually top out at an already absurd speed of 125-155 mph.

So 300 km/hr is absolutely insane. That’s enough to get jail time in most states.

Ok, I really can’t understand the dynamics of this arrangement. Not with the info provided.

So you don’t actually build this product or service, you’re just a middle man? Why not just have the vendor include the missing piece?

I think crucial details are being lost in the vagaries.

Can this additional part be obtained from a third party?

Intellectual property is a lie. Pure propaganda. You can own physical things. You can’t own concepts.

Public domain is the default natural state of humanity. Copyrights, trademarks, and patents have only existed for a few centuries. For most of history, you could copy any song, work, or invention you wanted. Hell, for most of history, you claiming ownership of an idea would have been downright sacrilegious. God/The Gods/The Muses were the ones responsible for creative works; human creators were just the channelers of that divine will. In the Medieval era and earlier, artists didn’t even sign their works.

Again. This is the natural state of humanity. We naturally have the freedom to build and create whatever we want from whatever inspiration we want, including copying others. That is after all how humans learn anything. Everything you have ever done, every behavior more complex than simple biological functions is something you learned how to do. Someone figured out how to make even the most rudimentary objects in your life. No one patented the first bowl. Someone just figured it out and everyone copied from there. This is the natural state of human beings. Knowledge is meant to be shared.

At some point however we decided that in order to facilitate the arts, science, and invention, providing a limited time restriction on people’s rights was justified. We temporarily take away some of everyone’s freedom to creatively express themselves. In exchange, we encourage authors, inventors, songwriters, etc. to create high quality original works.

Over time, this purpose has been lost and the fundamental nature of the arrangement forgotten. Rights holders started spreading propaganda, using the term “intellectual property.” You are a victim of this propaganda. As if the ability to restrict the creativity of others is a natural right like the freedom of speech. Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are not rights. They are PRIVILEGES. They are a practical arrangement. To encourage you to create a thing, we restrict everyone else’s freedom to use that thing for some period of time. But it’s just a practical arrangement. It’s not something you’re entitled to as a creator by natural right.

Of course, the balance here has now all been thrown out of whack by corporations buying laws. Originally the term for copyright was just 7 years, renewable to 14. After that the temporary restriction on everyone’s freedom ended. That was still long enough for creatives to make a living off of their work. But now it’s been extended bit by bit, everyone’s freedom restricted more and more, longer and longer. Now copyrights take everyone’s rights away for generations.

There is a reason respect for copyrights is at an all time low.

Mississippi Pot Roast.

The AI summons an extremely attractive and buff version of Charles Grey. He is holding a cup of tea and wearing absolutely nothing.

Uploading your consciousness to a machine wouldn’t really extend your lifespan. Think of it like moving a file from one device to another; the file isn’t actually moved, you just get a copy on the second device. You and your digital clone will also begin to diverge immediately as the lived experience of being a new digital entity would be different from continuing life as a meat person.

But your mind already operates this way. Human consciousness is naturally discontinuous. Your consciousness is essentially a program that runs on the hardware of your mind. And your consciousness is not a continuous thing. If you’ve ever been sedated for a surgery, you’ll know that when you’re sedated, you are just gone. You don’t dream. You don’t drift. You just don’t exist for however long you are under. The experience of sedation is the experience of death.

And beyond that, your consciousness ceases every time you go to sleep. Yes, there are some periods of the sleep cycle, such as REM sleep, where your consciousness is active in an odd state. But there are others where again, no one is home. There are periods of every night where your conscious mind ceases to exist entirely.

“You,” a conscious mind experiencing the universe, exist for less than a day. Tomorrow a new version of you will be spun up to experience the world, including all of your memories. But the you of your current conscious self will cease to exist this very night.

If I go to sleep, and instead of a new copy of my consciousness springing up tomorrow in my body, a copy activates on a computer, is that still me? Really, I don’t see why not. Both would have my full memories. Both would have my personality. Neither would be a direct continuation of my conscious experience. Ultimately, they’re both copies of my current conscious self.

I will not live past today. I, you, and every other human consciousness exist but for a single day (in normal sleep conditions.) We exist in a chain of such iotas of life, the self of each day passing the torch to the self of the next. Each self is united only by shared memory. That is how every human consciousness experiences life.

Everyone wonders if uploading your mind to a machine will extend your lifespan. What they should be wondering is if waking up each morning does the same.

Try to make the most of each day. Remember, you only get one.

A cubic meter of the core of a neutron star would still count as matter. While it probably wouldn’t literally destroy the Earth, I wouldn’t want to be on the same…continent…when that thing went off.

It can’t be the energy. It has to be a matter rearranger, not something that makes matter from raw energy. Consider a cubic meter of water. It will have a mass of 1000 kg. By E=mc^2, that water has a mass energy of 9e19 Joules. New homes in the US are built with 200 amp panels, delivering power at 120V. The typical new home can draw up to 24,000 Watts from the grid.

At this max output, it would take a house 120 million years to draw enough electricity to create a cubic meter of water from nothing but pure electrical energy.

So this thing must actually work as a matter rearranger. You provide it a supply of pure elements and it synthesizes from there. Or, if it’s fancy, it creates elements by rearranging nuclei. But it can’t be something that truly creates matter ex nihilo.

Day 2: create a cubic meter of food (also probably enough for a month)

Now I’m just imagining a cubic meter of spam.

It’s likely most of your problem. Alcohol helps you get to sleep, but you wake up after a few hours of restless sleep.

You probably need to work on your sleep hygiene. Have you heard of the 10-3-2-1 rule?