courtf

12 ms·

61.
by courtf 5y ago
This is true, but when so much of our culture and the starting conditions many people find themselves in are decided before our birth, often as a matter of public policy, the whole exercise starts to feel a bit, contrived? The rules of the
62.
by courtf 5y ago
Why do we feel the need to get ahead of others? Because we see how the lower classes are treated and would rather live a better life. Our justified fears of falling behind the curve are manipulated by our circumstances, that we have no cont
63.
by courtf 5y ago
Not sure I see the point in extending our lives. All the problems we have with history being forgotten and humanity repeating the same mistakes won't go away, the cycle will just take 150 years instead of 100. It will take longer to ev
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by courtf 5y ago
The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder described underwater concrete structures that become "a single stone mass, impregnable to the waves and every day stronger." https://www.nature.com/news/seawater-is-the-secret
65.
by courtf 5y ago
Beautiful comment,thank you. The closer we look at anything, like fungal growths, the more we realize how little we actually understand. Trying to tease apart the microscopic mechanisms that underlay the behaviors of fungal spores and slime
66.
by courtf 5y ago
This gets tricky when employers ask workers to internalize the company values (incorporating them into their identities). Probably helps with retention, but then you get everything else that comes with identity. If you represent the company
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by courtf 5y ago
Prevention is cheaper and results in a friendlier environment for everyone. The proliferation of expensive, reactive solutions that tend to aggravate the very problem they're ostensibly working on is great for shareholders though. Publ
68.
by courtf 5y ago
These arbitrary checkpoints also generate a steady stream of trivial "security incidents" just by existing, which for the paranoid owners is taken as evidence for their necessity, and they double down.
69.
by courtf 5y ago
Even if we allow ourselves to imagine policing as a commodity in the most charitable way possible, what citizen did is still way out of bounds. Rabble rousing an anonymous mob to chase people down is something different from buying security
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by courtf 5y ago
Tech-enabled feudalism is considered very innovative by the wealthy sociopath club.
71.
by courtf 5y ago
Huh? No, I'm saying that a billionaire may have lost all their investments, but chances are they will never be so poor as to become one of the traveling poor when they are old. The crash in 2008 didn't just wipe out investments, t
72.
The Agricultural Revolution: History's Biggest Fraud(erenow.net)
2 points by courtf 5y ago|0 comments
73.
by courtf 5y ago
Something tells me they won't be spending their twilight years working the fields, but I suppose there's always a convenient counterexample or two out there to latch onto if you're looking for ways to ignore the broad trends.
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by courtf 5y ago
> First, comparing capitalism to Auschwitz is obscene. That phrase has been used before and after the holocaust to justify cruelty, but fair enough, it was in bad taste. Any thoughts on the obscenity of sending grandma to work the fields
75.
by courtf 5y ago
For most of humanity's existence, we were nomadic hunter-gatherers. The majority of what we HAD to do was keep moving. We traded that life for a more predictable food supply during the agricultural "revolution." That was when
76.
by courtf 5y ago
They are scarce, and capitalism makes them more abundant at the cost of subjugation. Humans work endlessly to have access to things that, while scarce, were available in nature for free, often in superior forms. The world no longer supports
77.
by courtf 5y ago
Yes I've read Frederick Douglass. He lived that version of slavery, but still described wage slavery in writing about working shitty, thankless jobs. There is more than one way to use the word.
78.
by courtf 5y ago
The only reason it comes across as hyperbole is because of the US history of antebellum slavery. Sure, we aren't all being held against our will, subject to extreme violence at any time, but the prison system does something pretty clos
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by courtf 5y ago
This is neither how the world has always been, nor how it must always be, so it's a bit myopic to call the situation "reality."
80.
by courtf 5y ago
The country has never functioned without hordes of cheap, disposable labor that must work into their geriatric years or starve. There is no long-term stability, nor any expectation of it, unless you can become part of the owner class.
81.
by courtf 5y ago
It's broken for sure, though it's not really anything new. The US is still structurally a slave society, even if we now have the freedom to bounce between plantations (unless your visa is only sponsored by a specific one).
82.
by courtf 5y ago
Cruelty without end. Billions are made off crashes, like the one in '08, that sink people into poverty exactly when they can't afford it. Billions more are made off their continued labor. But if one of these grandmas picked up a g
83.
by courtf 5y ago
Bad words belong to all of us. I use words that can hurt, and words that have been used to hurt me. The N word is interesting because most white people are very hesitant to utter it. It's a rare, off-limits place that isn't access
84.
by courtf 5y ago
Indeed, although I think it's a huge mistake to represent these failures as permanent, and bitterness as an immutable, defining characteristic of fierce, unsuccessful nerds. Not only have some of the greatest intellectuals overcome dec
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by courtf 5y ago
It's misplaced anger, but that anger is valid. Not everyone can adapt nor gets the opportunity to adapt. Our society leaves millions behind, a cruelty that keeps the wheels of capitalism lubricated with fear of the same happening to yo
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by courtf 5y ago
PG often writes about people as if they have immutable characteristics, like being mean, or a hater, or a loser, or having fierceness. It's a dull, incomplete way to look at the world that makes his writing wooden and unrelatable. Obse
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by courtf 5y ago
As usual, there's a fair bit of "just so" equivocating going here (success being the antidote to bitterness stands out as especially over-rationalized, as if anyone was really wondering why the successful are so cheerful, ign
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by courtf 5y ago
Absolutely. And there is still value in propaganda that is recognizable as propaganda. The meta game has as many layers as an onion, and one piece of propaganda can serve multiple purposes. Maybe a particular piece is obvious to spot, but t
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by courtf 5y ago
Propaganda doesn't necessarily always operate in the direction of the creators most obvious interests, there may be propaganda pushing multiple conflicting narratives all originating from the same source. Criticism of the wet market th
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by courtf 5y ago
I'm more interested in the pre-agricultural world, and the differences between that time and our own would be significantly greater than comparing to a mere couple hundred years.

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