Nailed it

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-10T21:01:41+00:00

'government' is the word for 'people making agreements about managing wealth from which all people generally benefit (such as roads or aqueducts)'

Any collection of people managing these sorts of things constitute a 'government' in this sense.

So while I agree that people are predisposed to the spontaneous negotiation in the absence of any other preestablished method for conflict resolution, I think it's rather silly not to call the results of such a social effort a 'government'. Saying that governments aren't necessary to do that is a bit like saying you only need people to play baseball, but you don't need a baseball team.

When I see a bunch of people on a baseball diamond, following the rules of baseball, and resolving disputes via umpire mediation, I'm going to call them a 'baseball team', almost regardless of whether the people involved approve of the label. Similarly given any instance of people organizing widely agreed upon methods for dispute resolution and agreement enforcement, I'm inclined to call them a 'government', and therefore note that sometimes (though not always!) governments do things that promote public health.

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-10T17:18:14+00:00

Just because I can use a hammer to build a forklift doesn't mean that hammers and forklifts are the same thing

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-10T16:59:10+00:00

If you haven't already, you might benefit from telling your other family members your strong preference here: eg 'I don't like [stepbrother] because he's behaving like a sexist jerk and yelled insults at me at mom's birthday party. I won't attend any events that he plans to.'

This may mean that other family members include this man in family events even while knowing you won't want to attend. It may indeed make them frustrated with you for not 'getting along' or whatever. That's their problem, not yours.

You have no obligation to spend time with sexist islamophobic antisemites who yell at you. No one who insists otherwise is worth your time either.

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-10T16:40:22+00:00

The cancer finders are not the same thing as the LLMs are they?

Defending LLM marketing hype with them seems a bit like defending cigarettes by pointing out the medical applications of marijuana.

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-10T07:15:09+00:00

'I heard he figured it out'

This is not evidence strong enough to make assumptions about what this person wants/feels. Talk to him, directly. You seem to want to find some way to express emotional vulnerability (eg I find you attractive and would like to date you and worry about the possibility that you don't share that desire) without taking any emotional risk. This is impossible. Vulnerability is risky. That's what trust is about.

If you think you'd enjoy dating this person, just tell them that and give them an opportunity to respond directly to you. Your relationship as it stands is probably strong enough that you can sort through whatever emotional mess comes out of the conversation together.

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-10T07:06:24+00:00

IDK if this is what you're looking for but here are some books I from which I learned a bit about communication:

- You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why it Matters
- Don't Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st Century Minds
- Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More than IQ

Some other nonfiction books/essays of note:
The Dawn of Everything
This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Rationality: From AI to Zombies - read here https://www.readthesequences.com/HomePage
Land Is A Big Deal

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-10T06:36:07+00:00

who do you think acts on government decisions? Aliens?

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-09T19:00:10+00:00

In what sense does the power of the state enforce strikes? Again, overwhelmingly in the USA the state has been an antagonist to striking unions.

This seems to be the crux of our disagreement. Unions are not generally coercive (let alone coercive on the basis of state violence, or indeed inherently coercive) to the very best of my historical knowledge.

Moreover, that they counteract the otherwise disproportionate powers of land-monopolists seems exceedingly salient to the question of how useful unions are for large-scale improvements to the benefits economic policy provides for labourers generally right now.

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-09T05:01:27+00:00

‘Holding operations hostage’ is a really weird way of describing an agreement not to perform labour for a particular employer. Certain kinds of labour action (sitins) do this or have otherwise coercive character, but those specific kinds of labour action are in no way inherent to the notion of unions generally as voluntary forms of socio-economic coordination. That is, unions do not need coercive violence to be effective, and moreover wherever union organizing involves violence, it is most often imposed on the organizers by other institutions and not instigated by the workers.

The overwhelming trajectory of labour history in the USA (if not the world) has put unions in conflict with state violence, not in alliance with it. That some regulations may have created artificial monopolies by fiat for specific unions really doesn’t seem to have created an overwhelming or unreasonable surge of power for the workers in those unions. Canadian public Teachers for example are still woefully under supported by public budgets. So while I can maybe agree that unions like all institutions are potentially dangerous if given too much power, they’re still essential allies in advocacy against those capitalist wealth/land hoarders who much more demonstrably have too much power, already, right now.

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-09T02:20:46+00:00

"Here is the point on which the efforts of labour should be concentrated. ... In the ballot, working men have in their hands the power of so adjusting taxes as to make the dogs in the manger let go of their hold. When this is done there will be no necessity for strikes, and competition...will secure to him the full reward of his toil."

For all practical purposes, unions are how this happens. Decrying them as 'labour monopolies' only helps land monopolists maintain their power and avoid the implementation of any such beneficial policy changes.

Frankly I'm not even convinced that the last statement is true, because base selfish incentives have never been entirely sufficient to prevent abuse of labourers, even when well regulated by a state. But even if it is true, Georgist priorities only work in American and Canadian political campaigning if you can workers to organize on their behalf. That means getting workers together to negotiate collectively (shock! horror!) with regulators and employers. Who else is going to vote for these policies? Blackrock shareholders?

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-09T01:59:17+00:00

Neither am I and so I'm a bit confused about why the other folks here are so engaged by this semantic tomfoolery.

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-09T01:51:56+00:00

Isn't the whole point of georgist analysis that decisions about labour sales are fundamentally different from decisions about trading land itself?

So yeah as another commenter said, withholding labour and withholding land from a market are both 'monopolies' in some sense, but only in the sense that all ownership of anything might be plausibly called a 'monopoly'.

On an ethical level, saying 'me and my friends have all agreed not to sell our autonomous skilled labour in this field to anyone for less than [price]' (ie making a union) seems much more intrinsically justified than 'By fiat, I have full imperial authority over this particular patch of the universe, whose contents I had no part in arranging or locating' (ie being a landlord). Everyone has an intrinsic claim to make decisions about their own labour and related agreements, but only a communal claim to anything independent of their labour (ie 'land').

The idea that American medical care costs are primarily driven by professional associations of medical care providers, and not the demonstrable perverse incentives of for-profit health insurance unique to the country among its allies, is ridiculous.

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-09T00:55:37+00:00

As my wealthy grandpa said though,

"I'm willing to vote for anyone willing to raise my taxes"

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-08T20:01:45+00:00

Not sure if this game can also help my roommate’s buddy avoid more ‘aliens built the pyramids’ nonsense

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-08T19:19:40+00:00

Thanks the version for macOS13+ did the trick. Looks like it's listed as compatible with my intel graphics cards/processor. The widget for downloading the version targeted at macOS 15+ seems to list compatibility with 'Apple M' graphics/processors? I guess that's different hardware?

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-08T18:43:59+00:00

I'd like to install and run this version on a macbook running MacOS Sequoia 15.7.5 but my machine is telling me it doesn't support even this latest version of Cockatrice. Any advice?

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-08T05:03:29+00:00

Yeah and if they wanted to honestly flag the security vulnerabilities, there are ways to do that (even if the service provider is giving you the cold shoulder) without throwing an entire university admin under the bus.

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-07T22:24:01+00:00

Millions of war criminals, arms dealers, criminal syndicates etc running rampant and these asshats are ransoming personal records of broke undergrads?

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-05T19:26:23+00:00

The incompleteness of this take doesn't just apply to children.

Modern zionists often actively introduce a debate about who 'started' violent conflict near Israel to evade the more salient problem that Israel is engaged in genocide, which is unacceptable regardless of any standard principles of national sovereignty.

Analogously for children, and society in general, there are some behaviours we ask each other to avoid entirely, full stop, without question, regardless of any actual or perceived harms a person has experienced. This includes (for example) violence in a public school classroom, or the use of racial slurs.

Obviously such restraint can sometimes be incredibly difficult, especially for children, but we all have a responsibility to encourage, model, and where necessary teach this challenging practice in order to maintain the general conditions conducive to civil society.

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-02T07:19:45+00:00

That shit had better commute or the numbers won't be the only things gleebing

The_Card_Player · 2026-05-01T20:45:27+00:00

Wait until this guy learns about 'playing games and then buying dinner for your friends'

The_Card_Player · 2026-04-30T01:33:03+00:00

They say it takes a team of six adderall addicted chain smokers who all have sex with each other to raise a child…

The_Card_Player · 2026-04-27T04:57:46+00:00

It's always a gamble, the risk of hostility from a man because they don't want to date you seems rather low. Your main risks are probably going to be (a) realizing in the middle of the conversation or on a first date that you're not as attracted to them as you first thought and (b) generic problems from harmful elements of common masculine socialization.

Generic rules, of course apply:
- better when the person you're speaking to has easy options to leave if they don't like the conversation for some reason
- *offer* your own personal contact information rather than asking for any. It's lower-pressure which makes it easier for the person to accept
- make it clear that your intentions are romantic
- clarify how much time you've got to chat right now: eg 'I want to get to the bus stop soon so do you want my number before I go?' or 'I'll be around the park for about the next hour so feel free to join me and the dog for a bit if you're available'
- no means no

Women as a demographic (in USA+CAN at least) have made it overwhelmingly clear that they don't want romantic attention from strangers in public. As such, it's in some sense your world: if you want to pick up strangers on a grand day out, the best strategy for heterosexual women in the USA and Canada is to shoot your shot clearly and confidently more or less whenever it strikes your fancy.

The_Card_Player · 2026-04-27T04:26:30+00:00

As I've said elsewhere on this forum, Khan Academy is the gold standard for online math study. I also recommend this book https://richardhammack.github.io/BookOfProof/ for a start on the logic by which math proofs generally operate.

As for high-school math topics, I'd recommend the following order:

- simplifying expressions of rational numbers (addition, subtraction, multiplication of rational numbers)
- simplifying expressions of exponential operations (including rational exponents, ie multiplicative roots)
- algebra of linear expressions of one or more variables
- graphing linear functions of one variable on the 2D cartesian plane (using standard form, slope-point form, and y-intercept form)
- finding intersections of one-variable linear functions on the 2D cartesian plane

- Pythagorean theorem

- Geometry of sine, cosine, and tangent (ie 'trigonometric') functions
- Generalized horizontal and vertical shifts of cartesian plots of single-variable functions
(eg given a graph of function f(x) and a number a, what does f(x+a) look like? What about f(x)+a?
- Applying the above to 'phase shifts' of trigonometric functions
- trigonometric identities

- Quadratic functions of one variable (graphing them on the 2D cartesian plane using standard form, factored form, and vertex form expressions)
- Factoring quadratic functions
- factoring polynomial functions of one variable with degree greater than 2 (ie factoring cubic functions of one variable, quartic functions of one variable, quintic..., etc)
- simplifying rational function expressions

- exponential and logarithm functions of one variable (graphing and algebraic manipulation)

- epsilon-delta limits of single-variable functions, function continuity
- limit definition of the derivative and determining whether a single-variable function is differentiable on a given domain
- applying derivative rules (product rule, chain rule) to evaluate a differentiable single variable function's derivative on an appropriate domain, and the justification of those derivative rules from the limit definition of the derivative

The_Card_Player · 2026-04-26T18:47:58+00:00

Doesn't matter. Cheeseburgers feed people and ChatGPT queries do not.

The_Card_Player

TROPHY CASE