40yo single dude checking in. I think the government lost my assignment form!

I think in both cases you have a small and vocal minority within the group. Then you have the silent majority who never preach but just enjoy the lifestyle and the benefits it brings them.

I switched from vim to emacs years ago. Then years later I switched back. Emacs is cool and all but it really killed my pinkie finger!

That’s a lot of lactose in human milk! You’re gonna have a bad time if you’re lactose intolerant!

Which is a shame. This is an untapped skill in games! I recall sniping in Metal Gear Solid had a steadiness mechanic. It used analog and rumble. You could even pop some diazepam to slow down your muscle twitching, as well as press a button to hold your breath! Very cool mechanics that other games don’t bother with!

I have never had success with meditation alone. My brain is like a bumblebee swarm in a beach ball.

I enjoy guided meditation if the leader is soft spoken and knows what they’re doing!

All social systems require concerted effort to maintain. There’s no such thing as a magical system that runs perfectly forever as soon as you set it up. There will always be antisocial people who constantly work to undermine any system.

What capitalism does (that other social systems struggle with) is to give many types of antisocial people a productive outlet, at least for a while. They can exhibit their competitive drive and produce new products which benefit society. But when they become anticompetitive we need a functioning antitrust system to kick in and break up their companies. We used to have one but it was dismantled. Now Lina Khan is trying to rebuild it.

This is not even exclusive to people. Look at nature. Nature is full of parasites. Countless species of them. Take for example cuckoo bees which infiltrate beehives and consume honey while reproducing but doing no gathering work of their own. If the worker bees don’t destroy the cuckoo bees their population will grow so much that the hive will collapse due to excessive food consumption and lack of corresponding production.

Other systems (feudalism, Stalinism) allow antisocials to reach the highest levels of government where they can inflict enormous damage to the country by engaging in corruption. This is akin to letting the cuckoo bees run rampant in the honeycomb. In particular, the legacy of the Soviet system is now the murderous kleptocracy of the Putin regime. I’ll take any western capitalist liberal democracy over that, any day of the week.

Yes, capitalist democracies can also have corrupt people reach the highest levels of government. But that doesn’t give them absolute power over the economy the way other systems do. So the damage they can deal is greatly limited.

My first paragraph was not a defence of capitalism, it was a description of how competition inevitably leads to lack of competition and then the death of capitalism (and return of feudalism with a rentier class).

This is not an ideology by the way, it’s a law of nature. Since wealth accrues to wealth (wealth is an attractor in the system), we have that wealth distribution follows a power law. This is sometimes known as Pareto’s law or the 80-20 rule, but it generalizes to many natural phenomena such as rain puddles or the sizes of craters on the moon.

So it’s not capitalism that pushes us towards authoritarianism and autocracy, it’s human beings playing follow the leader (and taking shelter under the largest tree), just as they did under feudalism in the Middle Ages or during the Roman Empire or the despotic civilizations of the Bronze Age. Likewise, we saw totalitarianism in all of the communist regimes of the 20th century.

With perhaps a few exceptions, the only major systems where we saw proper freedom and human flourishing were with the autonomous indigenous civilizations of the past and under the capitalist liberal democracies of the 20th century. In the former case, those indigenous civilizations failed to defend themselves against colonization by autocracies (the Romans in Europe, the Mongolians and the Chinese in Asia, the Russians, the Mayans and Aztecs in central/south America) due to small size or they survived long enough to be colonized by Europeans in the age of sail.

Those indigenous systems are often held up by anarchists as evidence that anarchism without domination can work. However, for any system to succeed it must be able to withstand and defeat attacks both internal and external. The assumption that all people will fully believe in a system and only work toward upholding it is naïve Utopianism. After all, why do we need any system at all if you can just assume that everyone agrees to cooperate?

So then it should be obvious that capitalist liberal democracy where the spirit of free enterprise and wealth mobility are kept alive is extremely worthy of being protected. The present situation marked by wealth consolidation and a slide towards authoritarianism is not the inevitable outcome of capitalism, it’s the result of a concerted attack against the system by autocratic forces.

This attack has been made possible by a steady erosion in trust for institutions, many of which were accidents of history. For example, loss of trust in the mainstream media (newspapers etc) is an outcome that resulted from technologies such as the internet and social media. The internet first destroyed the classified ad business via sites like Craig’s list, forcing newspapers to cut journalism costs to stay afloat (and beginning a downward spiral in trust) and then social media gave rise to click bait, heralding in a new era of yellow journalism. This loss of trust in the media is one of the biggest contributors to the rise of trumpism and far right populism, and a big reason why things have gotten so precarious now.

I think it does. If anything, capitalism is in grave danger right now. It seems to be getting closer and closer to slipping back into feudalism. I’m talking about a world with zero economic mobility and a rentier class that owns all the land.

Competition kills competition. To the victor go the spoils. Bigger war chest, bigger army. Etc.

The reason I defend capitalism is not because I like the outcome. I just have good reason to be extremely skeptical of the alternatives (judging by history). Systems that don’t take into account people’s natural competitive instincts are doomed to catastrophe.

For anyone who hates hierarchies and dreams of a flat system (some form of anarchism), I would invite them to read The Tyranny of Structurelessness by feminist Jo Freeman.

Standards are always changing and they always align with what’s hardest to obtain. In the time of Ancient Greece, having extra body fat was a luxury and a sign of wealth and status. Today it’s the opposite.

No, I think you’re mistaken. I don’t think they feel that way at all. I think billionaires keep going because they are competitive. They want to win! And they often lose unfathomable amounts of money in the process, which they don’t care about. Survival brain does not shrug off huge losses so casually.

The other reason they keep going is because they want power. They’re used to being in charge and they hate when others have power over them. They’re subject to all kinds of scrutiny and they’re afraid when political power is leveraged against them. So they do what comes natural to them: try to leverage what they have for more power (and more wealth, which brings more power with it).

It also does not illustrate what motivates a billionaire. It just makes their behaviour seem totally irrational which does not do you any favours.

The issue is that her arms would have to be cut off at the shoulder to fit into the arms of the suit. This fan-made diagram shows what I mean:

She’s tall but she’s way too narrow to actually fit the shoulders on the suit. It’s one of those weird game oversights, like how many game building interiors are too large for the exterior to contain.

Why would you expect a random person on Lemmy to be on your side?

A 1000Hz display necessarily has a latency of 1ms between frames. For 100Hz, that’s 10ms.

But this is only the lower bound. You have to include all other sources of latency, such as software, input hardware, drivers, graphics card, etc.

You absolutely can tell the difference between 90Hz and 1kHz. Just draw a squiggly line! See this video for a rather dramatic demonstration:

Microsoft Research: High Performance Touch

Because lots of people don’t want to go into a job and work with other people. They would rather work by themselves or with their family members.

When you work in an office or at a factory you recognize that some people do way more work than others. If everyone’s getting paid the same then that is extremely demoralizing.

On top of that, you have all the politics and drama of the work place. Just because you succeed in a Marxist revolution doesn’t mean you have eliminated interpersonal conflict forever. Gene Roddenberry tried to portray that in Star Trek and it was laughably unrealistic.

Human beings are innately competitive for social and sexual reasons. That doesn’t go away when you eliminate private ownership of capital. People just find other ways to screw each other over and gain an advantage. Formal power structures get replaced by informal ones.

The deepest reason to want to have your own woodworking business is an overwhelming desire for self-sufficiency. When people have screwed you over and made your life miserable it’s an incredible escape to be able to switch to working for yourself. If you take that outlet away from people you will face violent resistance.

You make it a business to support yourself and your family. Otherwise you won’t have much time to devote to it and you won’t be as good as it.

Anyway, how are you going to get anyone in a democracy to vote away their own property rights? The Soviets certainly did not achieve that. They used violent revolution to achieve their ends. We all saw how that ended up. The most stalwart opponents of Marxism today are those who knew what it was like to live in the Soviet Union. A system where hard work is devalued and freeloading predominates.