The discovery of oil, the gold rush, the industrial revolution and countless other examples of periods of excess wealth

These are all factors that drove down the value of goods & services via finite windfalls, negative externalities and production optimizations. Tapping an oil well is basically finding consumer goods in the ground and passing them around, with a bit of value sapped via supply chain inefficiency.

Currency is only a tool for distributing those goods & services, no more no less. You can’t give people “more money” unless there’s surplus goods to be had and a demand for them. If there’s not you’re just devaluing your currency.

A day of labor is worth a day of labor, full stop. In 0 BCE that produced 1/4 of a shirt and today, through complex supply chains and efficient tools, it can produce 4000. But there’s a hard ceiling on the market for shirts (scaling with the number of backs). Unless you grow that market (more shirts per back or more backs), there’s no reason for the labor. This applies to every good and service. [Fun fact, there are something like 100 billion garments made every year. Those tailors should already be out of work for 5+ generations ]

I bring up excess houses and cars because they’re the most obvious and extravagant examples of inflating consumption for no benefit. 50 people can ride one bus or you can burn more resources to build 50 cars to marginally improve their lives. We should be thinking critically about the opportunity cost of 8 billion cars vs 160k busses.

It is only natural for a government to do what it can to minimize the effects of inflation

It should be the government’s job to ensure goods and services are fairly and humanely distributed and that labor is being directed toward that goal. Tailors shouldn’t be punished for working themselves out of a job, but we also shouldn’t be artificially inflating consumption just to keep their factories running. That path can only be sustained by irresponsible growth and aiming for X% inflation is a tool to encourage that.

when wages increases demand for goods and services increases

You slipped it in right there yourself. This consumerist mindset can only exist with infinite growth. It seems natural but that’s only because we’ve been immersed in growth for hundreds of years.

If I make $1 today and that dollar covers every necessity and basic luxury I could expect then there’s no reason I need to spend more. $2 can only provide diminishing returns on quality of life. I don’t need a second house because I get less than the X¢ of value from my primary residence for the cost of 2*X¢.

It’s reasonable for me to give that excess back in taxes/charity (allowing someone else the full $1 value) or even stash it in my mattress for a rainy day (deflationary pressure). The only reason for me to spend a portion on a second house [I’ll rarely use] or car [I won’t drive] or new hobby [I don’t have time for] is if advertising convinces me I’ll get $1+ QoL value from the purchase. But that’s a flat lie, as any study on happiness will tell you.

It’s theoretically possible but I think it would require a constitutional amendment, either to exclude the state or define a process. The unilateral secession question was definitely settled in the civil war.

Hard to double genocide people when they’re already dead. Can you provide proof that Harris was going to blow up Iranian children at school?

Stupid fucking conversation, especially when we take a moment to consider that Trump’s dismantling of all climate crisis mitigation efforts will cause 1.5 million deaths. Or is that just a palatable flavor of genocide to you? Dismissing that on vibes?

Even so, less is better. Being exposed X hours per week through friends is still better than giving them direct access to a dopamine drip feed for 56+ hours per week (avg for teens in 2025). If they really want it, you can set limited access via a home desktop/tablet and teach the same digital literacy.

A kid doesn’t need a smart phone in the same way that they don’t need their own car. They don’t need to go far distances with bulky items and passengers; they don’t need pocket access to banking apps and Slack. A dumb phone/watch can keep them in contact with anyone they could possibly need to talk to.

Except statistics are pointless in a vacuum. If you have a chance of 1 in a million, it is vanishingly unlikely that 100 chances hits that one in a million.

Gooooooooo baaaaaaack tooooooo schooooooooooool 🤡

Edit: of your “1 in 100M” people literally incapable of learning to read, I’ve personally met 4. What are the odds in a country of less than 400M?..

especially true when speaking about disabilities, most of which are genetic (which means most populations do NOT have the same chances), most of which do not impair literacy… [rambling for 8 paragraphs]

*Source: your ass 😂

“Buhbuhbut the population is smaaaaaaall (lets ignore that that also means less schools, teachers and resources…)”

1 in 100 million. There are not 100 million North Koreans

Gonna go ahead and discard any further discussion; you’ve proven you don’t comprehend the topic at the most basic level. Claimed literacy rate, measured as a percent of population , can be compared directly against the percent of incapable population.

Raw numbers have jack shit to do with it, you should probably go back to stats class if you think they do. The odds of 20+ million people all being literate is vanishingly small, the only reason to accept that statement is believing the probability of NK press lying to be 0.

‘Single Party’ also doesn’t mean ‘single choice,’

The fucking voting system is yes/no on a single candidate, who’s chosen for the ballot by a party committee. They made headlines by allowing party primaries in limited districts recently, the first time multiple people are on the ballot since 1948. Truly a bastion of democracy when they let you choose from two apparatchiks!

So why’d you post a paragraph of a position Kim Jung Un DOES NOT HOLD, according to your own information? He’s not the president.

It’s shocking you’re going to bat for NK without even understanding the basic political landscape. He is the PRESIDENT of the State Affairs Commission. Which part of those duties sound any different than any other president or prime minister? Pedantics over title (President/Chairman, NDC/SAC) or the specific electoral process does not change the powers of the role.

This is basic shit, you can just go look up from any source instead of making up DPRK fanfic.

Wtf does population size have to do with it? It’s a percentage of any population, unless you think smaller populations are magically more mentally and physically fit

is not the head of state and never has been

Sorry my apologies, he’s only General Secretary of the only party in the country [which unilaterally decides who’s name appears on NK’s single candidate ballots] and President of State Affairs. His duties include:

the power to lead the overall affairs of the state and appoint important state officials. The president also has the power to appoint diplomatic representatives and conclude treaties with other countries. The president can declare a state of emergency, a state of war or a mobilization order and direct the country’s national defence during times of war. The president also has absolute control over North Korea’s nuclear arsenal

But totally not the head of state. Would you also like me to specify that Starmer isn’t technically head of state?

it’s never been claimed he won an election by that percentage

My apologies, his party won 99.93% of votes for parliament (with near 100% turnout). He personally was elected with 100% of parliament’s vote (no abstentions).

Here’s a totally normal, completely not staged, photo of his voters dancing after casting their votes.

It’s not about having a foolproof plan; it’s an easy win to spy on the 95% of people who don’t know or won’t bother. Doesn’t matter if your surveillance network has blindspots if you can put up enough cameras.

You realize a non negligible portion of any population will be mentally unfit or have conditions (genetic or otherwise) which leave them illiterate? Claiming 100% while ignoring that may as well be saying “everyone who can read and write is literate”.

If you’re taking an honest measure and still claiming it’s possible to approach anywhere near 100% literacy you must be advocating for some impressive eugenics programs.

…Or you could just admit the country with (totally not dynastic) heads of state claiming to win 99.93% of the vote might be lying through their teeth…

36 states require identification to vote. A passport is ID.

Gonna stop everyone right here and mention that ID requirements were not the norm until recently. It is, and always was, possible to prove citizenship without issuance of an ID (let alone a photo ID). Studies have shown that it does very little to reduce voter fraud and only disenfranchises vulnerable populations.

Secondly, elections are the purview of the states. Any requirements that give feds control of the voting process are unconstitutional. A federal passport is US property issued at the discretion of the government and can be revoked at any time (as shown in this article), and is therefore unconstitutional.

Nah, steam PCs will probably start to be best bang for buck based on economies of scale. This will push more general steam library adoption and game devs will target specific steam machine benchmarks.

Steam machines become the new console market, they enshittify with hardware DRM or similar, prices creep up and the entertainment market will move somewhere else.

I doubt powerful consumer hardware will ever rise again. Consumers who only want the entertainment don’t want the hassle and corporations are always happy to crowd us out of the market so they can rent us back the compute.

I think rage baiting requires some degree of deniability and subterfuge. The “[normal question] if you were athletic?” is a good example. The ones that are just “Shut up short man” are too crass

Too many people in here are perfectly fine with all movement outside of their home being ID’d, documented and monitored. A plate on a bike does absolutely nothing to make the road safer. It just normalizes the “safety” of constant surveillance by your benevolent overlords.

Put normal regulations on e bike performance and build bike safe infrastructure. “It would be too dangerous to chase them”… get on your own bike you fat lazy pig.

There’s a slight difference between consumer goods and backbone energy infrastructure

Ah yes, it’s not a train of systemic issues compounding over 250 years combined with weaponized wealth disparity to keep everyone sick, isolated and tired. It’s because they won’t pull up their moral bootstraps.

Give me a fucking break.

https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/vagrancy-act-of-1866/

It’s like we’re doing Reconstruction, but in reverse 😀

I’ll be the contrarian and say IMDb ratings are pretty accurate for me. The two exceptions are super inflated Cinema™ ratings and middling ratings for comedies. A 9.3/10 silent era movie gets too much credit for having functional lighting while a 6/10 comedy gets panned for its shallow character development.

I never heard of a submarine on the 101 so this must work pretty well

Holy moral absolutism batman, this barely reaches Sunday School levels of ethical thought. I’m a strong proponent of abandoning animal product dependence but poor-puppy-dog arguments drive me nuts.

For starters, every living being has a prerogative to survive and propagate its genetic pattern; pleasure and pain are base mechanisms for that. I personally refuse to believe that there is anything inherently bad about the existence of pain any more than the existence of pleasure is inherently good. Our human aversion to inflicting undue pain is natural as prosocial animals but that doesn’t make it morally just or our tolerances for violence absolute.

Our reactions to violence aren’t universal because every plant and animal has a set of characteristics which overlap with human characteristics to varying degrees. Those overlap very little with plants, more with mammals, even more with domesticated animals (selected for prosocial traits) and most with primates.

Moreover, our sensitivity to those traits is highly personal, depending on the context of our exposure to them. If your only exposure to non-human mammals is pet dogs then you’ll obviously draw parallels when you see cattle with eyelashes and fur and tails. If you have to deal with dangerous feral dogs and nuisance vermin then you won’t have the same sensitivity to those traits.

Our society exists at the expense of other forms of life, either directly (animal husbandry) or indirectly (habitats disrupted by our infrastructure). So saying nobody should eat meat because it causes suffering doesn’t say anything about universal ethics, it’s an unexamined exclamation that tells more about your existential dissonance than mine.

Before you dive into an argument about minimizing suffering, let’s look closer at this part:

There is no way to rationalize eating meat in modern society as anything but catastrophically unethical

Humans have already destroyed many food chains, usually by eliminating apex predators. If there’s nothing to hold the deer population in check, native plants will be decimated and the ecosystem will collapse. Humans are left in the position of culling them as the apex predator, the violence must happen either way.

How could eating the meat be “catastrophically unethical” in that situation? That’s the expected flow of the food chain. Is it better to self-flagellate by disposing of ready calories; wasting water + topsoil + time to turn it into a vegan food?

Putting aside “humans greedy and meat bad”, let’s examine a fun part of your argument:

we cause immense suffering and death at a scale and acuity worse than the holocaust

We have 8 billion megafauna primates on our pale blue dot. Any pain we inflict is necessarily going to be at an immense scale. The scale has no ethical bearing unless you’re arguing against utility derived, in which case a genocide is infinitely worse because we derive no utility from it.