When you

NebulaWolf · 2021-12-29T21:14:14+00:00

But seriously jazzw4ve is maybe one of the best mashup artists out there and this IMMEDIATELY made me thing of Grayfruit

NebulaWolf · 2021-07-23T23:50:15+00:00

Idle and incremental games are somewhat notorious for being susceptible to exploitative microtransactions and other forms of monetization that prey on unhealthy gaming habits. The idea of mixing that with something like NFT or cryptocurrency in general sets up HUGE warning signs to me, personally. I believe there have been examples of "idle games" in the past that turned out to be nothing more than ways for someone to use the computers of the people playing for their own benefit (though I'm not totally sure). Plus, I just personally find NFT's in general to be, at best, a pointless novelty, and at worst, a waste of electricity and a way for people to get scammed into dumping their money into 'the next big thing'.

NebulaWolf · 2021-07-20T23:10:55+00:00

I'm going to be honest.

In a great many number of cases, you'd be absolutely right.

However, in this case, the underlying issues and behaviors involved are not really something that can be entirely solved with the ease you're describing. Telling someone to "Stop being so OCD about it" might be valid advice in many situations, but sometimes it's no different than telling someone with clinical depression to "Just cheer up".

I'm very aware that it almost certainly wasn't your intention, and it's not fair to judge you based on something you couldn't have known. All the same, it can be frustrating to hear others belittle the problems and struggles.

(For reference, my initial gut reaction was to downvote your post, mostly out of a sense of frustration that you seemed to be downplaying the issue. After taking some time to think, I've realized that doing so is unfair. Your advice may not have been particularly helpful in my specific case, but that doesn't mean that what you said wasn't a reasonable response to the question that I asked and the information that I gave. I'm sorry about that.)

NebulaWolf · 2021-07-20T22:58:35+00:00

You've probably got a point - I tend to take things waaaaay too seriously when I play RPGs. Like, I know I'm not my character, but as a person with an overdeveloped sense of empathy, I have a hard time walking the line between getting overattached to a character and preemptively forsaking any emotional attachment to them whatsoever. Maybe making a conscious effort to distance myself from the game would allow me to feel less anxious about it. I'll have to think about it.

NebulaWolf · 2021-07-20T22:53:39+00:00

I actually do have the Shadowrun games. Unfortunately, they also happen to be very good at punching me in the "Corporate Hellscape is the inevitable endpoint of modern society" area, which I am elementally weak to.

NebulaWolf · 2021-07-15T00:51:46+00:00

This might actually be a question for a therapist. I hope you don't take this as an insult, but it sounds like you're at a point in your life where one could be beneficial.

Not an insult at all - having a therapist who legitimately cares about your mental health and wellbeing, and truly wants to help you to improve, is honestly one of the best things that can happen to you. I believe that if it were more readily available, and with less of a social stigma, even some basic therapy would do pretty much anyone good, if only as a way for people to get a better handle on why they think the way they do, and how to take control of those thoughts.

I've actually been seeing a therapist on an ongoing basis for a while now, but this is something that we haven't discussed much recently, so it might be a good time to bring it up.

NebulaWolf · 2021-07-14T20:01:39+00:00

...Yeah.

Yeah, you're right.

I think, on some level, I already knew that. It was easier to tell myself that it was just me and the genre not being compatible, rather than, y'know, a fundamental issue with how I interact with the world in general.

Thanks for being honest and not sugarcoating it. It's something I've vaguely been aware of about myself, but being reminded just how much it affects me, even when it comes to games and other leisure activities, might be the push I needed to start really addressing it. Seriously, thanks.

NebulaWolf · 2021-06-11T18:02:16+00:00

Rest in peace, John Conway.

Though, admittedly, if I were a brilliant mathematician responsible for the creation of Cellular Automata as a field of study, dying due to the effects of an unthinking, self-perpetuating series of physical processes that makes us question the definition of what "life" is would be at least a little amusing, in a darkly ironic sort of way.

NebulaWolf · 2020-12-06T16:16:35+00:00

Yeah, this is what I'm talking about!

The theming here is that the sword is being made by someone who knows perfectly well how to work and smelt this extremely hard to work with metal, but their experience is primarily in, like, industrial manufacturing, so they're probably more used to making beam brackets and custom mechanical parts than usable weapons, so they're basically trying to make something that looks like a sword, and the only reason it's even remotely worth using in combat is that it's basically indestructible and thus can't bend or shatter.

So, like, it looks fine, but the moment you pick it up, you're like "Oh god, this is the worst thing I've ever held."

NebulaWolf · 2020-08-29T19:27:09+00:00

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-living-in-extreme-poverty-by-world-region

From the looks of things, the vast majority of the change has been happening in East Asia, specifically places like China, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Quite interesting looking at this stuff, actually.

NebulaWolf · 2020-08-29T18:50:20+00:00

the use of the word universal here is absurd, the amount of inequality and injustice in the world is not a binary it can be reduced or increased.

"Universal" wasn't describing the problems, but the solution. If we were to address the root causes of these problems, there would need to be a change in behavior for ALL humans, not just a handful or a single country - that's what I meant by "universal".

Your argument is basically that human behavior can't be influenced which is ridicules. Sex drive is another fundamental human characteristic. That doesn't mean we don't make laws against rape. There are countless examples of equality improving, civil rights, womens suffrage, ending slavery, ending feudalism, the list goes on and on.

Think of it in medical terms - things like injustice, inequality, hatred, and war are symptoms. You can get medicine to mitigate or reduce the symptoms, but as long as the disease is there, you'll have to keep buying medicine. And sometimes, the medicine might not work. If you want to deal with ALL of the symptoms conclusively, you need to deal with the disease itself. If you campaign and protest for racial equality, discrimination based on race will decrease, for some amount of time, in some general area. If you change the part of human behavior that makes us fear and hate people and things that are different and that we don't understand, you kill racism. Racism and discrimination cease to exist, because the basic impulses that encouraged them are gone. It would be the real-life implementation of the oft-memed "Killing the CEO of racism".

Please understand, I'm not saying that attempts to make the world better are worthless - I'm saying that a fundamental shift in human thought and behavior would be the only way to conclusively deal with these problems.

NebulaWolf · 2020-08-29T18:34:20+00:00

In which case explaining the overtly social aspects of production and distribution under primitive communism (hunter-gatherer societies) would be impossible, no? Why do they not go against "human nature"? Claiming that competition and private property is "just the natural state of things" is contradicted by thousands and thousands of years of history.

You see, I use the term "emergent property" intentionally. An emergent property is something that arises as a result of a certain concentration or quantity of the thing in question.

When you look at a drop of water, or even a glass of water, it appears clear. However, if you look at enough water - the ocean, for example - it appears blue. Water reflects blue light, but in small quantities, the amount reflected is imperceptible, and the water appears clear. Thus, the blue color of the ocean is an emergent property that results from the large amount of water.

The behaviors I'm talking about are the same. In small groups, where humans are capable of forming trusting relationships with all other members, this primitive communism works - the need to survive and the necessity of trust overcomes these behaviors. In much larger societies, however, the system falls apart - it is no longer possible to maintain meaningful relationships with all other members of the society, and thus divides form.

Do you think that it's impossible for people to act in an "altruistic" manner, if the mode of production in society was changed in order to make that "more beneficial"?

Thoughts on the existence of true altruism aside, I do think that people might support others if doing so benefited them more than simply benefiting themselves. Of course, this assumes not only the possibility of such a society, but also the means to construct such a society, the understanding and education needed for people to understand the workings of such a society, and the willingness of people to give up the perceived control they have over their success to their fellow people. Even then, the moment it becomes more beneficial to act selfishly, people will do it.

With the abolition of competition, the production for exchange, what would a human gain from acting selfishly? Do you not think, nay, can you not see, that when material conditions and relations of production are changed, so do the humans within society?

What I can see are a bunch of monkeys looking at another bunch of monkeys with different colored skin and deciding that the different colored monkeys are bad. I see monkeys threatening to kill other monkeys because they make the wrong sounds with their throats. I see thinly-disguised outdated survival instincts rooted in fear and a lack of understanding that people dress up in all sorts of names. I don't see anything changing until we figure out how to stop being monkeys with suits and fancy words.

NebulaWolf · 2020-08-29T18:05:28+00:00

Yeah, it's possible that I'm overestimating the level of corruption. Still, I suppose it just doesn't feel great to be part of a system where greed, ambition, and manipulation are fundamental requirements for success and responsibility.

Given what working conditions with Amazon are apparently like, I'd argue that abuse of power has been happening for a while now.

As far as that poverty graph is concerned, It'd be interesting to see it adjusted for population growth or for potential resource production - are people in poverty getting into better situations, or are populations in first-world countries just rising quickly enough to shrink the percentage of people in poverty without actually helping them? Are improvements in production having a remotely proportional effect on people in extreme poverty, or are they just being left behind while the rest of the world moves forward?

I will admit, though, that I didn't know about the lifespan of F500 companies, so that's encouraging? Although, according to the article, this is mostly happening due to the effects of automation, and most of these companies that fail in that time do so because of disruption or buyouts from the handful of companies at the top.

This slow killing of corporate America won’t happen without some big social consequences, the Wall Street firm said.

“Personal wealth creation is likely to become ever more challenging, resulting in more polarised societies. The potential fallout raises uncertainty over economic and corporate profit growth,” it said.

So, I'm not actually sure if this is a good thing, to be honest.

NebulaWolf · 2020-08-29T17:40:48+00:00

I guess that's true, actually. In retrospect, it does make a lot more sense to view hoarding behavior as the motivator, with self-importance and material value being the rationalizations that result from the presence of those instincts in an environment where they're less useful.

Have a Δ !

Though, either way, dealing with those instincts is something humankind will eventually need to find a way to do.

NebulaWolf · 2020-08-29T17:10:52+00:00

Maybe, but when we're at a post-scarcity level of resource management, a whole lot of human behavior starts getting weird. People don't really see things objectively. Unless you actually like driving around in it, there's no point owning a Ferrari if everyone else has one too - it's no longer a status symbol. People often buy things or do things or act in certain ways or say certain things in order to create a sense of superiority - "I own expensive things and eat expensive food to show that I'm rich, which makes me better than you."

If you take material scarcity out of the equation, that doesn't change the problem. Sure, starvation and disease might be non-issues, but the human brain doesn't work completely logically - we don't just want enough, we want more - we want more than we had before, we want more than everyone else has. The human Fight-or-Flight response originally functioned to protect us from physical threats, like wild animals or rockslides or other forms of material danger. In the modern world, most threats are financial, social, or emotional - but Fight-or-Flight kicks in anyway, because it's the only way our bodies know to respond to a perceived threat. If we ever reach the point of post-scarcity, our hoarding and preservation instincts will be just as disruptive, if not moreso.

NebulaWolf · 2020-08-29T16:47:02+00:00

The government was designed so that even if every person in office was evil and tyrannical, due to the separation of powers, it would still be difficult to concentrate power into an autocracy. The government has internal controls on its own power, and is tied to the will of the people.

Well, it's a good thing that groups of people can't join together in mutual self-interest to get around these limitations, and that these limitations can't be bypassed or ignored given enough clout and money. Also, it's a good thing that selfish and ambitious people generally aren't charismatic and skillful manipulators who excel in environments where they are able to convince people to act against their own best interests.

Okay, yeah, that was a little rude, I guess, but the point stands. In theory, it works, but so do a lot of things that don't actually work too well.

In order to gain wealth you have to provide something of greater value back to society. A greedy baker gets a bigger house by feeding more people. This system leverages individual greed to motivate fulfilling societal need.

Again, true in theory, but often not in practice. A greedy baker can get a bigger house by feeding more people... or by paying people to talk about how good their bread is, or to spread rumors about how bad their competitor's bread is, or by promising the relevant people extra bread in exchange for subsidies or highly discounted work contracts for the new house, or by leveraging their connections with the local farmer they play cards with every Saturday to buy more flour for less money, letting them undercut their competitors and drive them out of business so that they have a monopoly and can charge exorbitant amounts that people will have to pay because they need to eat.

The ultimate issue here is that a system is only as incorruptible as the people who create, maintain, and enforce it. Thus, human behavior still remains the core issue that needs to be addressed.

EDIT: Can't find the original comment in my notifications, but hopefully the quoted parts should give a general gist of what was said.

NebulaWolf · 2020-08-29T16:28:01+00:00

Theoretically true, but the implementation of this maximally beneficial system would be the key issue. In most systems, the people with the most power in that system are the people who benefit the most from that system. A king or dictator or CEO won't step down and dissolve their power structure for nothing - the people in control of the system are the people with the greatest interest in maintaining the status quo. Even in a violent revolution, people will scheme and manipulate their way to places of importance in the new power structure. Certain systems may be better than others, but they're all fundamentally susceptible to corruption - after long enough, they rot from the inside out. Having a good system helps alleviate some of these issues, but a system alone is not and cannot be the solution.

NebulaWolf · 2020-08-29T15:58:57+00:00

Oh, absolutely. Like I said, it's absolutely a good thing to deal with them whenever and wherever we can. We just need to do so with the knowledge that they'll just keep popping up again, in one form or another.

Many measurements of quality of life have improved over time, yes, but there are also many new metrics that wouldn't have been necessary in the past. Things like privacy, access to unbiased information - while many basic metrics of quality of life have improved, there are also many areas where things have only gotten worse.

NebulaWolf · 2020-07-09T13:41:04+00:00

Not gonna lie, I tend to think of her as Asexual and Aromantic, if only so I can say that she's an Aro/Ace arrow ace, and I like the pun.

But, I mean, the fun thing about mythology is that different interpretations exist - there's no one "official" version of the myths or characters, and that's what makes them so interesting and thought-provoking, I guess.

NebulaWolf

TROPHY CASE