arkephi

“Those who pursue transcendence while denying their shadow don’t escape Nemesis; they guarantee her arrival.”

AHAAHAHAHAHAHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAA we are genuinely beyond parody, i’m gonna lose my mind how is this real life lmao

come on my guy, it's literally in the manifesto in all but name. there's no way these points lead to anything but a planned economy controlled by the state. "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State" "Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes." "Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly." "Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State." "Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan." "Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries;" -- The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Proletarians and Communists China is a different story and has a lot more in common with Germany than Russia this thread is about Soviet Communism though so I won't get into that

@arkephi @FabianBreitling @DelusionPosting and a planned economy was the biggest mistake of the ussr. china learned from it and hasn't had it since the 80s. communism isn't a planned economy. and socialism isn't communism or a planned economy either.

the USSR was the world's largest artificial fertilizer producer by the 1970s, they even became a major exporter of fertilizer although it was mostly poor quality. they also imported a lot of agricultural machinery and technology from the US especially during the 1930s while they were modernizing their agricultural production. Henry Ford personally played a major role in this and sent not only tens of thousands of tractors but also Ford engineers to help build the factories to produce them. even with massive investment in agriculture, collectivized Soviet production was only 25% as much as the US per farmer by the 1980s in 2016, 25 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian agricultural production recovered and surpassed the output of the Soviet Union in grain crops and became the world's largest exporter of wheat. the food shortages experienced during the Soviet era were almost entirely due to inefficiency and mismanagement of production and distribution through centralized planning and rampant corruption and fraud that thrived within their overly bureaucratic system where officials were more concerned with protecting their own positions than serving the needs of common people that's how incentives in a centrally planned economy work, you have to meet your quota to please the higher ups and when people fell short they resorted to misreporting, cutting quality or outright faking production to avoid getting dismissed from their positions. in a capitalist system, the producer is beholden to their customers directly. they can only earn more by producing more and if what they produce is low quality or overpriced then customers will choose another brand.

@FabianBreitling @DelusionPosting Your agricultural practices don't happen to use tonnes of hydrocarbon based fertilizers, pesticides, machinery and cheap materials? Or were Europeans growing food with stone tools 50 years ago? USSR made mistakes, but this isn't a communism vs capitalism issue.

@AutismCapital just spreading the love around

Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

This seems like a fun template to have: "Pssh. Please girl." 💅

@AutismCapital I should say 1940s/1950s since the boundaries don't cleanly align with the decade

it stopped when the counterculture began to cross the threshold from left leaning to right leaning 2010 to 2020 was a decade of active suppression and gatekeeping so none of the organic trends were adopted widely enough to create an aesthetic it's like an inverse 1950s when the right was dominant and contemporary media was largely conservative with the anti-authoritarian counterculture being fragmented and not widely known and popularized until later

What was the last decade that had a distinct aesthetic? 50s, aesthetic. 60s aesthetic, 70s aesthetic, 80s, aesthetic, 90s, aesthetic, 00s, aesthetic. Did it stop in the 2010s? Every decade you can pair with a music genre and an art style. What can you say about 2010+? It stopped.

the mind is a high dimensional terrain your subjective experience, "I", is a point in that landscape self is the attractor around which that point orbits, a valley worn over time by constant meandering each path you walk changes the landscape, deepening here, rebounding there that is how one becomes what one is

TLDR There is no inner self, you're chasing an imaginary concept, the end.

@boneGPT but we're more likely to see an AI powered dildo hit the market before either of them launches their own AI hardware

@boneGPT it would be nice if Apple would finish this or if OpenAI would steal the idea and release it youtube.com/watch?v=iJtTfI…

imagine paying 6.5 BILLION DOLLARS to hire Jony Ive only to pivot away from hardware without launching a single product gotta know when to fold em but damn 6.5 BILLION

@QuetzalPhoenix May God be with you and and help and heal your family 🙏

@rune_overas @IterIntellectus @wholemars they oversteered a natural process and drove fertility rates and economies into the ditch the damage they did will take generations to undo if we survive it

@IterIntellectus @wholemars But: Their narrative won it seems? People are now too scared to have kids.

paul ehrlich predicted hundreds of millions would starve in the 1970s, that england would cease to exist by 2000, that the battle to feed humanity was already lost and advocated spiking water supplies with sterilants to prevent the population bomb he wasn’t even close. the green revolution fed billions, famines collapsed, birth rates declined entirely on their own. every single major prediction in the population bomb was wrong, and the institutions that built 60 years of environmental policy on his thesis never updated the model he died in a world where south korea hit a 0.72 fertility rate, japan is shutting down schools faster than it can demolish them, every developed nation is spending billions begging its citizens to have kids, and somehow the new york times called his predictions “premature” as if the mass starvation is still coming some time in the future (it’s not) the most influential environmental thinker of the 20th century spent his entire career being wrong about the one thing he was famous for, and the policies his work inspired (population control programs, anti-natalist funding, development restrictions) actively accelerated the real crisis of a world that cant replace its own population

@0xBigMoonDog @GzUpXX @cremieuxrecueil they're probably just being guarded with their language, doctors and engineers tend to be the same way even outside of professional settings because they're very aware what they say can have consequences for themselves or other people

@GzUpXX @cremieuxrecueil I guess I don't even know. Most of them sound cynical/pessimistic to me, but not in the misanthrope sense necessarily. Maybe it's partly an under promise/over deliver type thing. I'm a trader by profession, optimists tend to get slaughtered, and paranoia rewarded.

Wow, this study is devastating for cynicism. Here's a TL;DR: In studies 1–3, participants indicated they thought cynics would do better on cognitive tasks. In studies 4–5, cynics were tested and 1 SD of cynicism was associated with 0.25 and 0.17 SDs lower cognitive ability in studies 4 and 5, respectively. In study 6, cynics were found to be - less educated in 29/30 countries - less literate in 28/30 countries - less numerate in 29/30 countries - less computer-literate in 23/26 countries Cynicism is simply not smart. Source: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01…

I believe that is the point that has so many people up in arms about this everywhere should have right to try and what is money when weighed against life? everyone is angry that they're supposedly being told "No, we can't let you do this because it would be too dangerous. Sorry, but you'll just have to suffer and die instead."

@_benjaminparry I'd say mainly liability and regulatory reasons. Plus, it would still be somewhat expensive and have to be paid for with cash (no insurance). Some places have "Right To Try" laws where terminal patients do have wide latitude to try things.

Sorry to be the downer because this is an impressive story in some senses. But it is ~trivially easy to make a single mRNA vaccine. It's not hard. I cure mice of various cancers with various therapeutics all the time. I've made mice lose more weight in a month than tirzepatide does in a year. What is hard and expensive is proving its BOTH safe AND effective **in a randomized and controlled study in humans** while ALSO manufacturing it at clinical scale and grade. I am happy for this man and his dog. It is impressive. But y'all are overhyping it.

ok, I think I see a misunderstanding, but I don't see the joke unfortunately for myself and I presume others who immediately have a gut reaction to Ehrlich's supposition, the problem we see is the narrow focus on a single factor, population, and then deriving consequences for other parts of the system as though they were independent e.g. food supply I don't believe that a population boom is necessary to (or even could) correct the problems we have now, the simple reason being time not just time from birth through maturation during which a generation must consume more than it produces but the time it takes to change societal attitudes and beliefs in order to cause an increase in births anything we do now will not come to fruition until 50 years hence Ehrlich and his acolytes at least understood this which is why they advocated for such extreme measures, many of which were thankfully never employed they failed to understand that humans are capable of perceiving and responding to population pressure independently of any centralized guidance and that we had already navigated several population booms centuries before Ehrlich put pen to paper and now we see a clear pattern that is repeating with increasing frequency country by country, following the same curve dependent on industrialization and the maturation of the nation's economy and polity the acceleration is due to each nation standing on the shoulders of those that came before it and the ratcheting effect of technological progress leaving only the work of adopting and building the required infrastructure and techniques and technological progress itself accelerates as each nation comes into its own and begins to contribute by solving its own unique problems and pushing the frontier as they take their places in the vanguard the problem faced by crowds of people elbowing for room on a train or in the street is not the overabundance of people but the lack of infrastructure left to their own devices, people will solve that problem because the solution is obvious and achievable but when meddled with, restricted by law and propagandized to believe it is insoluble they are deprived both of the hands to do the work and the agency to do the thing at hand which is to solve the obvious problems they face every day on their own

That was meant to be a hypothetical scenario, in which growth is slowed supernaturally before a population bulge forms. I don't support limiting population growth rate or reducing population size through coercion, and I understand why Ehrlich is widely hated by the people I mostly agree with. However, I don't think the mistaken overreaction to the mid 20th century demographic boom proves that it's possible or important to have another one in the future. It could be possible to have wealth and progress with a much larger or a much smaller population, but the failure of degrowth emboldened some influential billionaires to say that the only way forward is multiplying the population to produce more outliers to advance technology, which seems unlikely. And preferences and values are still relevant here, since I got pulled into these arguments because of a tasteless joke. I'll admit that I enjoy seeing thyristor valve halls and giant automated container ports, but find it horrifying to watch crowds of people elbow each other to squeeze into a densely packed train, which is probably somewhat evil and anti-human. But I'm sure the people in those crowds also don't want to be there either.

The only good thing I can say about Ehrlich is that I'm glad he lived to 93 I'm glad that he spent the last 30 years of his life knowing that he was wrong about everything. I'm glad no one thanked him for his work and many people blamed him for the misery he created.

we have never ignored them, all of human ingenuity and effort has been bent to overcoming them since the day we first broke a flint into a sharp edge every day since then humans have worked tirelessly to alleviate the depredations of nature and to overcome limit after limit that is what it means to be human, we do not accept a life of limits, we do not look at the horizon as the limit of our world, we see instead a frontier, we are called by it and we go beyond it

@politicalmath Predictions can be wrong. But ignoring population pressure, resource limits, and environmental damage isn’t exactly a winning strategy either.

attempting to limit growth is exactly what has put us into the miserable state we're in with regard to fertility rates and imbalance in the number of productive young people to elderly China has it worse both for the rapidity of the change induced by these programs and by the imbalance in male female population that selective abortion created his ideas caused nothing but harm and are set to continue harming everyone on the planet for generations he's earned his place among the villains of history and the only reason we should not forget his name is so it can continue to be cursed and held up as an example of folly and hubris perhaps then he will do some good by serving as an example of evil to be avoided

I'm now realizing that I was making a weak argument, because I used the population growth decline in combination with the working-age population crisis to claim Ehrlich was not completely proven wrong. But this means the negative consequences from the 20th century demographic boom could have been prevented by both limiting growth as Ehrlich wanted, or doing the exact opposite and maintaining or increasing it. You would arrive at a healthy population age either way.

@AutismCapital it's been weird for a while, the algo feels like it over reacts to everything you do instead of staying centered around a TPOT or cluster like it used to the Following tab is a safe space though

Is it our imagination or have the vibes been completely different the past couple days on X? It's been very bizarre. Hard to articulate what is going on.

based on hints in the replies and a quick search: the painting shows Clara the rhinoceros in Venice in 1751 and the woman is wearing a moretta (or muta) mask which is a small, black velvet mask held in place by a button which is clenched between the teeth the mask was a popular fashion accessory for women in the 17th and 18th century especially during the Carnival of Venice Clara was a popular attraction during Carnival in 1751 but prior to arriving in Venice she had rubbed off her horn in 1750 while she was in Rome the painter Pietro Longhi observed her in Venice in 1751 and would have seen her without her horn, likely during Carnival and so we can clearly see the inspiration for this painting

bonus: notice the man most closely observing the rhino. in some reproductions, he is simply a man. in others, he is masked. why? i simply do not know. (pietro longhi, exhibition of a rhinoceros in venice, 1751)

can we take a brief tour of an odd painting. i mean, youre on your phone. i promise this is worth it. check out this actual unedited detail from a 1750s painting of venice. surreal. now, i am going to show you the rest of the painting. […]