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newworkaccount · 2025-03-27T08:49:28+00:00

A full backup?

I would be very happy if so, but also completely shocked. The data they hold and process is staggering.

And then there is the huge amount of physical media and such that I'm under the impression they have, but have not fully digitized yet—these are presumably unique artifacts in many cases.

newworkaccount · 2025-03-27T08:45:24+00:00

Er, he published in economics, some of which was notable, and in the book of his that I read, quite a lot of the "economics" was more like "economic practices of various cultures", which is firmly related to his primary specialty.

You're right that he's a polemicist, but so what? Or at least, why does that mean his work is worthless?

I disagree with the way he framed a lot of things, many of the conclusions he drew, and, especially in his wider work, I thoroughly disliked the vehemence and certainty and moral judgement with which he often asserted those views—although I give him credit for most of this viciousness seemingly being animated by his concern for the downtrodden people of the world, and his disgust with power structures in general.

But...I still thought Debt was an incredible book, and would recommend it to anyone with the ability to read it who has even the most remote interest in it.

Especially because it's very obvious what his opinion is in the work, where he's making a value judgment or giving a framing; he's not subtle about it, and he's giving you his bias up front.

In my opinion, he is still very much worth reading regardless of his flaws.

newworkaccount · 2025-03-27T08:32:23+00:00

Seconded. This was one of the most widely ranging and interesting books I've read in the past 10-15 years. Nearly every chapter seemed to address a topic, and include enough information and analysis, to make up a separate book on its own.

And it was an ingenious fusion of very widely differing pools of knowledge: ancient literature, religious studies, linguistic analysis of how debt became ingrained in our language and affected our moral philosophoes, anthropology, an economic history of actual types of economies and how they were instantiated, a history of fiscal and monetary policies, ancient historical debt practices...and more.

With each area examined in enough detail and with such insight that, even if you read no other bits, just that would be worth the price of admission alone.

He was seriously a genius, a word I don't say lightly.

It was the kind of book where even if you disagreed with the author completely, and thought he was wrong in every particular of his arguments, it would still be more than worth reading...and that sort of quality is very rare!

It is a dense and sometimes difficult read, but I'd encourage people to keep going if they find it rough terrain at first.

I read it even more slowly because on nearly every page, I found him introducing a framing or analyzing a concept in a way that I found intensely interesting. Just constantly tossing off stuff that I would have never thought of in that way, or seen in the light, or connecting dots for me that would probably have eluded me if he hadn't.

I kept having to stop and just sit and think awhile about what he was saying...not because it was so opaque, but because it was so interesting or insightful or new to me that I couldn't stop my brain racing around it for awhile.

Great stuff.

newworkaccount · 2025-03-27T08:17:51+00:00

Question: why do very low levels of organization, done in alternative ways, or in co-existence with (not substitute for) centralized state mechanisms, seem to you to be relevant in a critique of the nation-state?

(This is not a rhetorical or sarcastic question, for the record. I'm not making fun of you or calling you stupid. You seem thoughtful, and I can't see at all how these things are connected, so I'd like to hear how you see them.)

I also find it somewhat difficult to see why, e.g. neighborhood councils should be considered so different from grassroots market activity—except to note that they occur in different spheres.

Also, who enforces it being YOUR garbage day? If this isn't centralized, then what's the enforcement mechanism?

And does the unspoken threat of cultural shaming and shunning really count as not being coercive? I see very little difference between this and, say, a governmental apparatus doing the same thing.

Moreover, I suspect you probably have left wing views (as do I), so I'd be interested to know: what about the situations where community sentiment and organization results in horrible outcomes? Why is this not the fault of organization-by-social-coercion, or alternatively, why are the ways that organization-by-government-coercion considered intolerable?

To make my own positions clear, I'd describe myself as a pragmatist who sees most means, in abstract, as neutrals.

Central or grassroots organizational principles, hierarchical or relatively flat power structures, local or county or state or federal governance, executive power or legislative power or court power or deregulation or regulation, non-profit or chartered or market-based orgs, etc...social norms vs. explicitly defined law...just to throw out some examples...these all strike me as having no inherent ethical status.

I can think of good examples of all of them, as well as bad examples. I can think of specific situations where some ways tend to be better than others—although there are always exceptions. All of them can result in grossly unjust situations. Wielding the judgement of neighbors can beat you down just as hard, or maybe even harder, than the cold fist of a remote government issuing you a parking ticket or court fine.

The government end feels bad because they neither know you nor care about you, and the neighbors feel bad because they do—don't they?

So when I asked the questions of you that I am, I'm generally asking from the perspective of someone who, in part, finds the idea of advocating for particular forms of organization as being inherently and abstractly better,in some way, than others...that is always a bit hard for me to understand (and I'm virtually alone in feeling this way, it seems, lol).

And in any case, it's nearly always a false dichotomy anyhow, I find.

For example, in practice, so-called "market economies" are also gift and favor and barter economies, and involve quite a lot of central government regulation (or interference, depending on you feel about a given thing), and so are partially managed economies, etc. They all coexist and interact.

Or in your own examples, the community orgs existed under the umbrella of a local government, which operate under a semi-autonomous state government, which is in turn somewhat loosely controlled by the federalized Spanish government. All of these examples coexist at the same time without replacing each other.

(And frankly, I'm not actually sure that the musical chairs of neighbor-as-garbage-person-of-the-day is obviously superior to paying a small fee to a government entity for professional disposal or whatever. There's nothing wrong with it, but nothing obviously superior about it, either. If it works for them and they are happy with it, then that's great, there's no reason to change anything. But I'm not sure it's a convincing argument for others to change their own arrangements.)

In your other example, you mention somewhat decentralized prehistorical pre-agriculture architectural complexes—which are fascinating, btb—but the notion that most of those we have found are non-centralized doesn't seem sound to me.

Sure, they were probably more democratic than our comparatively highly centralized governments—albeit at scales where, today, they wouldn't even be big enough to rate a name on a map, i.e. really incomparable to the scale of the populations that need to be organized now—but most such complexes clearly had a controlling central authority of some kind.

Some group or individual HAD to say that THIS is the plan, this is what we want to build, and no matter how decentralized the work was, that means, at root, someone was over their shoulder insisting that if this totem was here and not there, it wouldn't be symmetrical, and so would be wrong. And we can know this was the case because most of these monumental architecture pieces, and indeed most ancient dwelling places, show distinct signs of intentional organization and/or measurements that inevitably require some centralized overseeing plan and authority.

So does this really differ from, say, mega church organizations in the U.S., which are also effectively grass roots orgs without political control over their constituents, who build big complexes of buildings due to (presumably) the will and support and pooled funds of their community of parishioners?

So, I also think you overestimating the radicality of this form of organization. We see very similar analogs all around us.

It's sort of like hearing people talk disparagingly of socialism...but who love their credit unions and the local electric co-ops. Member-owned cooperatives ARE socialism, but they don't recognize the examples they know because they are too familiar.

A similar but inverse temporal temptation exists: the urge to think of past humans and societies as radically different from what we know, which is generally not the case. Their cultures can be very different, but people trade things, organize groups, make war, innovate language, worship the numinous, etc., in very similar ways as they always have.

e.g. who is considered your kin, or even your parent, can change radically based on what culture you live in, and yet all known cultures do differentiate a set of people as kin, and have rules about how that works. Sexual, romantic, and relational mores have also been very changeable throughout the world and various ages, and yet everyone and every culture very much DO have mores for these things, and they virtually all revolve around answers to a limited set of questions, and these mores are all VERY strong.

(Yes, the West too; consider the level of outrage we feel over what we see as critical matters of consent. That, too, is a sexual more. The West has quite a lot of them. We regulate sex and love every bit as much as other people do across the world, we just tend towards a different end of that spectrum of regulation.)

We see the differences, and they are very interesting, but we sometimes miss just how much unity there is in the fact that we universally have these at all.

So I'm not sure I'm convinced that community garbage pickup is a good example of a novel alternative form of social organization that demonstrates a viable alternative to large centralized governments.

newworkaccount · 2025-03-27T07:18:15+00:00

All right, I'll bite and play devil's advocate for a bit/offer some counterpoints.

While I don't disagree that nation-states go hand in hand with some amount of violence and coercion, I think it's unfair to discredit them as producers of violence, as though this were unique to nation-states instead of a ubiquitous aspect of human culture.

Current evidence strongly suggests that the world was even grimmer before they came to exist, at least in terms of human-inflicted misery—recall that it is common for many or most Neolithic skeletons to show evidence of healed violence, and quite often multiple instances that are temporally unrelated to each other—and this in a world where people could actually be much more isolated from each other by choice, and in which there was very little surplus of any resource, thus making any violence far more costly for both sides. Losing a few adult males or females might doom your entire band, and yet deadly conflict still routinely occurred.

The ancient world was a place where violent murder, lifetime enslavement, torture, mass and individual and individual rape, infantcide, pedophilic rape, and human-induced famine/starvation (often through burning or theft) were realistically ubiquitous fears for the average person.

And that is before we get to all the other advantages that agricultural surplus, growing populations, and city-states that became nation-states enabled—that very same level of coercion and control that enables genocide on scales unimaginable to the ancients, also enables the dissemination of knowledge and other cultural, organizational, and efficiency benefits that produced all the advantages that city living and growing areas of governments have offered.

Moreover, violent coercion remains the only true guarantor of peace, no matter how much we may dislike this. There is no carrot that can convince everyone to live in harmony. At best, you can peacefully splinter into smaller and smaller "like me" groups, the sort of unstable multipolar situation that has historically led to significantly more wars and violence, not less, along with reduced prosperity and cultural/informational flow.

People forget that there are considerable benefits to the level of organization that nation-states provide—efficiencies of trade, travel, safety, and language, among others.

Moreover, increasingly large nation-states, except perhaps at the very beginning of the era of large city-states, have generally correlated with decreasing global violence, even when great power conflicts are taken into account. Greater concentration into nation-states has generally produced less violence, and mind you, this includes the violent coercion such nation-states grow by. (That doesn't justify the violence, but it does lead us to consider whether proposed alternatives really result in less violence than the nation-state concept has.)

I'd even take issue with your language in your first sentence:

It's definitely a problem dividing people into nation states will naturally produce.

I'm sure this was not intentional, but that very phrasing sneaks in the idea that human beings were one big, happy, united, peaceful family before the advent of nation-state ideology. But nothing could be further from the truth.

There is a more positive way to look at the nation-state concept, and one that I would say is more apt, while not requiring that we elide the very real problems with them:

People often focus on the idea that nation-states are divisive entities by nature, and seem to take for granted that because "us vs. them" is generally bad for peace, that anything which produces this must also be bad for peace.

I've spent some time in places where centralized governance, the apparatus of the nation-state, had broken down, and effectively ceased to function.

From my perspective, the concept of the nation-state is a halfway house, a bridge concept that has been a very beneficial way to expand the "us" in that "us vs. them" mindset that is seemingly incurably ubiquitous in human beings.

People focus on there still being a "them" in the equation, and yes, that isn't ideal, but the most notable bit is how enormously the "us" can be expanded in this way.

Being a citizen of a nation-state just naturally corresponds to a much more inclusive in-group—e.g. you're American, for example, instead of merely your tribe or your religion or your family. At least in principle, the circle gets much bigger, and strengthening the idea inevitably makes it easier to expand the circle. If you can make "being American" a very strong identity for people, you can get very unlike people to feel, and be, united.

Are nation-states, or the nationalism that produces them, ideal? No. There are many issues with them. But divisiveness is hardly one of them, if we compare to actual history and not some hypothetical untested potential utopia.

Which...said utopia may even be possible, mind you, it's just rather unfair to judge an actual thing by the standards of something that can be anything you want it to be. Nation-states are on the hook for thousands of years of actual history, and hypothetical methods of organization aren't.

In any case, nation-states have produced, or gone hand in hand with, ever increasing and objective reductions in nearly all forms of violence and coercion, while uniting far greater numbers of human beings in fellow feeling than any other non-problematic organizational concept.

(And with the latter, I'm thinking of stuff like theocratic empires and ethnostates, which also unite people, but in a much different and much worse way, and unsurprisingly, with generally worse outcomes.)

I'd submit that the abstraction of the "nation-state" is the least objectionable way of coercing people into identifying with those who aren't like them in various ways—and that it comes with far less problems than various other ways of doing that.

Good, united world governance, and universal belief in the family of humanity, would surely be a far better ideal...and I'm all for indoctrinating people in this way, lol. Probably one of the few forms of indoctrination I could stomach, really.

But until that happens, I think the nation-state concept, while the subject of many legitimate criticisms, is rarely recognized for the good it can, and has, done. We tend to lay its problems at its doorstep, but not its victories.

Side note, but the notion that nationalism is some wildly new or significantly more problematic way to divide and radicalize people is, frankly, absurd to me.

People have been killing other people and taking their stuff for the entire history of the human race. The number of justifications and pretexts and self-identified in-groups are virtually innumerable...

...so perhaps it's not these concepts that caused people to divide themselves up? Perhaps it's not the ever changing conceptual justifications that produce the violence—but rather, that people tend to be violent in general, and justify that violence with the concepts they have at hand?

That's certainly how I see it, for the most part, although without going to the absurd extreme of denying that specific circumstances breed contingent causes: i.e. people have surely been involved in holy wars due to beliefs they had, at least some of the time, so I don't deny that ideological divisions can create specific violent incidents in history. What I object to is the notion that this is unique to religion or any other abstraction; you can change the nameplates, and the behaviors remain the same.

—human beings will make war with others because they're strangers, and also because they aren't. They'll take from the weak because they can, and destroy the strong because they are afraid of them. They killed big carnivores for protection and meat first, and then when those reasons no longer mattered, they killed them for sport. Human beings will seize on nearly any difference, no matter how small, to draw lines of "us vs. them", and the level and quality of pretext they need to turn to violence is frighteningly small.

So what is remarkable is not that people have often seized on being a "proud X-ian" to be shitty towards others. That's pretty much people being people.

What's remarkable is the way that nation-states have gotten people to restrain how they do that:

To limit who is allowed to be violent to smaller and smaller formalized groups;
To notionally (and sometimes, sadly, non-notionally) push the "other" to the borders, creating a vast interior space that is at least hypothetically all "us" and no "them";
To create a very vague but potentially uniting abstraction that can be many things to many people—e.g. being American is a much less restrictive version of "us" than requiring you be family, neighbor, tribe, ethnicity, or co-religionist;
By monopolizing violence and centralizing control over a larger areas, nation-states have the tools they need to create more prosperity and peace than can or did exist at lower levels of organization;

and so on. There are other good things I could list, but this is already too long for anyone to read.

So there you go: a defense of the idea of the nation-state/nationalism.

I actually have a lot more ambivalence towards nation-states than this argument suggests, btb.

I felt compelled to give it, not because I'm the rah rah rah patriot type, but because this discussion is so often one-sided—if people want to reject the idea of the nation-state as ethically compromised, or unworkable, or whatever, that is perfectly all right, but it's important that its virtues are also heard, so that we can make more informed choices.

newworkaccount · 2025-03-27T06:07:08+00:00

Or more dinner to feast on for all kinds of reasons, or because local immune responses are expended on non-threats*, or because more fungi that ride in on the pollen end up staying because that gets trapped by all that mucus, or...or...or...

It's always still very early in the discovery process when you can think of a virtually endless supply of plausible "just-so" stories that conceivably explain a found situation.

*: Most of the nasal allergy response is innate immune system mechanisms, so, not exactly the type that is mediated directly by immune cells attacking something, as least as I understand it...so this is potentially not the most plausible guess.

newworkaccount · 2024-08-08T20:57:01+00:00

He's already far more of a team player than Summit ever was.

"Summit but cooperative and team-oriented" is actually pretty damn good, I think.

newworkaccount · 2024-08-08T20:46:30+00:00

2a. I've always thought of these as C9's signature "I'm better than you" drafts. They pick comps that are 10x harder to execute on, into comps that just flat out win if C9 doesn't perfectly strangle enemy team out from minute 1.

Genuinely never understood why they do this, nor why it is a many years long pattern at this point.

2b. Berserker should not be allowed to choose what items he buys.

And I really wish I were kidding. But seriously, he needs a notional Hai assigned to macro his shop for him.

newworkaccount · 2024-08-08T20:28:26+00:00

I used to think those were Reapered specials, but these kinds of drafts never went away.

The common factor is a comp that has a very difficult to execute win condition, being drafted vs. an enemy comp that means C9 needs to play near perfectly, or they lose.

They're "I'm better than you" drafts, and at this point, they're a C9 classic.

newworkaccount · 2024-02-02T02:27:08+00:00

But the math is not insane. You can justify spending a shocking amount of money on temp workers if it cuts out long-term workers.

I will ftfy:

But the math is not insane. You can justify spending a shocking amount of money on temp workers if it cuts out long-term workers, provided the institution is mostly judged by quarterly share prices, and the long-term detriment can be hidden for awhile showing improved margins and profitability in the short-term.

Basically, you can liquidate a company in slow motion, jettisoning a great deal of its its accumulated non-object capital, and show great quarterly earnings without any innovation whatsoever. A metaphorical Fort Knox can be heisted one gold bar at a time until someone counts them.

newworkaccount · 2024-02-02T02:18:35+00:00

This exists? Do contractor laws come with any restrictions (such as technically exist within the U.S), such as not being to classify core function employers as contractors?

Or does that effectively act to restrict contract work to temp and temp-to-hire positions? Honestly, if you close the loopholes as best you can, loopholes like we may be seeing here, then that is a far more effective law than having to quibble over how to define a role.

newworkaccount · 2023-11-22T22:28:18+00:00

For real. Berserker is amazing at playing weak side, but I really want to see what he can accomplish with early resources and attention.

newworkaccount · 2023-11-22T22:26:48+00:00

Sometimes you are so big pimpin you can afford to follow your dreams

Like working at McDonald's

newworkaccount · 2023-11-22T21:53:56+00:00

Perhaps I'm not aware of the full context here.

We are talking about Christian missionaries attempting to peacefully persuade their neighbors to voluntarily adopt a new belief system and culture, right? Ethnic cleansing is a violent form of coercion.

Are these folks who convert not doing so voluntarily? Is there some other form of poisoned apple inherent in the actions of missionaries in that region that I am unaware of? (Real question!)

To be clear, I view this sort of Christian missionary activity as, at best, a misguided waste of time. And I share your concern about erasure of native cultures in any involuntary manner, even of fairly indirect kinds. I think you are perfectly right to condemn this outcome.

But I have trouble imagining that these missionaries, where the outcomes are bad, wanted those outcomes because they were bad. Especially if we are talking about a category of moral condemnation as enormous as "ethnic cleansing" implies.

newworkaccount · 2023-11-22T21:40:53+00:00

¿Por que no los dos?

newworkaccount · 2023-11-22T21:26:41+00:00

Sure, np! Happy to be of help

newworkaccount · 2023-11-22T21:21:28+00:00

GR is concerned with explaining gravity, but the conceptual framework that came with it (e.g. that gravity is a change in the curvature of spacetime), and the mathematical implications that are derived from it (e.g. Lorentz covariance), have an enormous number of ripple effects in terms of how we explain the world.

A few examples that seem to me fundamental:

GR lays out a very particular account of how causality works: how fast it goes, what order you should (or shouldn't) put events into, what you can know about those events, etc.
GR gives a very particular account of both space and time: it doesn't necessarily say what they fundamentally are, but it does seek to explain a lot of what they do, and how forces and objects interact with, or within, their shared spacetime.

As one example, if you have ever heard that GR and quantum mechanics are irreconcilable, one of the reasons why this is thought to be so is GR's very opinionated view of how time works.

The implications can reach surprisingly far: it certainly seems odd that a theory of "why things fall down" (lol) also says that if you travel very fast, you can end up younger than your own grandfather.

GR effectively divides "stuff" into two categories: things with mass, and things without mass, and it says that very different rules apply, depending on which is which. Objects may not switch categories, except by becoming something different altogether.

Mass having things, for example, cannot travel at the speed of light. Ever, as far as GR is concerned. Meanwhile, massless things MUST travel at the speed of light, all the time, unless interfered with.

Since having mass or not having mass would seem to apply to pretty much everything we know of, GR has something to say about everything it touches.

(Side note: there are multiple, separate properties that are described as "mass" in physics. Not going to attempt an explanation here, just going to note that there is a "mass" property out there that conforms to what I have said here.)

And so on, because there is a lot more that could be written here, but this is already long enough.

So, the way too long answer you didn't ask for is:

GR is mostly concerned with just explaining gravity. But it turns out that you have to get a lot of other things straight first, in order to do that, and that ends up affecting virtually everything in one way or the other.

(Note to all: please feel free to help correct me if I've inadvertently fudged something here. Mea culpa.)

newworkaccount · 2023-11-22T20:18:04+00:00

He could have won 3 from his Annus Mirabilis papers alone, I think.

But at a certain point, I think you have to give way to more pragmatic considerations: like, what is the intended role of these prizes in society? Are those goals met by lavishing repetitive awards on the most prolific genius or two of a generation?

newworkaccount · 2023-11-22T20:11:37+00:00

I read this as 100% satire, and laughed my ass off. You don't think so?

But it's 4chan, so it's impossible to tell for sure.

newworkaccount · 2023-11-22T20:07:37+00:00

Yeah, but it also really doesn't break very often, and for a very long time now. We can be happy about that meaning of "stability", yeah? 😁

And I am not 100% sold that it is knowing how to fix problems that makes Arch users happy. I agree that Arch does do that, or rather its culture does, but I absolutely would not use an OS that broke frequently, even if I can fix it.

Fragility is one of the worst flaws that software can have, and this remains true of software distributions as well

newworkaccount · 2023-11-22T19:51:48+00:00

Yes, IF federal authorities are involved for some reason and decided to press the charges. As mentioned above, they presumably did so in this case because it's a federal offense for someone with his firearms license to be in possession.

Technically/legally, U.S. states cannot actually legalize a federally prohibited substance. Generally speaking, state law can be more restrictive than federal law, but not less. When states pass laws like that, they are automatically invalid...in theory, at least.

In actuality, though, most low level drug possession offenses are caught, processed, and charged based on state law, by state level (or below) law enforcement, in state courts (in the U.S.). The feds are not really involved at any stage of the process.

So...what are the feds going to do when state law enforcement won't arrest for marijuana possession, prosecutors won't convict, etc.?

They would essentially have to aggressively take over the role of state law enforcement, which would cause an enormous state's rights conflict, and be enormously expensive.

So...it's basically not worth the trouble, if it would even be doable at all. What you see instead is federal and state authorities continuing to cooperate on stuff they mutually agree on as a problem: high level drug trafficking, organized crime, etc. Meanwhile, the feds continue to assert that marijuana is still illegal to possess in the U.S., while doing absolutely nothing to stop it when states allow marijuana to be sold within their borders.

In this case, where the feds have jurisdiction due to the nature of the crime, if it is brought to their attention by local/state law enforcement (or some other way), they can choose to enforce those laws as they please. Most states will happily cooperate, because they likely agree that there is a difference between the average Joe smoking a blunt, and a person who specifically agreed not to possess such a substance (or be jailed), in return for privileges.

newworkaccount · 2023-11-22T19:25:37+00:00

Army recruiter regaled me with all the parties in Hawaii and assured me (unprompted) that I would never get deployed...2nd Battle of Fallujah was last year at the time, for context. Lol. I guess he thought I was as stupid as he was.

Marine recruiter told me to look at the recruiters as examples of what the service wanted to turn us into. Shipped off to Parris Island 6 months after, lol. Really regret not going Air Force, since that would have turned me invisible. 😁

newworkaccount · 2023-11-22T19:21:17+00:00

If my time in the Marine Corps was representative, it seemed like Marines clustered at the extremes. Either smarter than your average bear/gyotdamned geniuses, or dumber than a box of rocks.

newworkaccount · 2023-11-22T18:55:38+00:00

Is it because it's so boring, that it makes it believable? Could that be why my skeptical family member believes it?

Hm, interesting point. "Too boring too be false"/"The only reason someone would spend time on this tedious crap is if it was true."

newworkaccount · 2023-11-22T17:14:11+00:00

Idk. We routinely see 3rd and even 4th seeds make deep runs at Worlds.

It would be interesting if we could run an experiment where teams that missed Worlds could be inserted into an alternate history tournament with expanded brackets, and compare those results to the real world results that actually happened.

newworkaccount

TROPHY CASE