For everyone else who doesn’t get it:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/john-mastodon

Hm, I totally get how you are frustrated with people using one-dimensional, overly used and in-group accepted answers to respond to very complex questions. Yes, they can feel pretty performative at times. “Capitalism bad” is an easy way to respond to all kinds of problems and not always useful. I guess I can also understand people using “capitalism bad” as an answer because after analyzing capitalism and all the consequences stemming from worldwide capitalist domination, it gets really frustrating always having to answer with a well thought out analysis. So a shorthand like “capitalism bad” can be quite handy.

Regarding your comment, you seem like a person that believes many of the capitalist talking points. (It reads a bit like Sabine Hossenfelder’s video on capitalism).

First of all, you talk about inequality and how capitalist societies have higher equality. You realize how nonsensical this is regarding how the most powerful, rich people are coming from the capitalist country that has hardly any healthcare and people living in incredible poverty, right? If you look at a list of inequalities worldwide based on GDP, you can see that the US files on rank C, behind the Philippines, Pakistan, UAE and Russia (just to name a few). And choosing inequality is in itself probably a rather bad measure because rich capitalist countries have been oppressing, exploiting and destroying other countries to maximize their own profits for as long as capitalism exists. And this is were the myth of capitalist countries bettering the lives of people stems from. Of course people of all classes are more wealthy in countries that exploit other countries. Comparing countries in isolation then is like a faulty equation where you leave out how country A is actually robbing country B. And this isn’t only true for the US alone, but for the whole Global North. I’m from Germany and this country’s riches are solely possible on the backs of slave workers around the world. Classism isn’t local, country-based anymore, we have found even lower classes of people to exploit. Colonialism is still running the world, but now in a new design.

Even if we don’t stay at global or country level but zoom in a bit you’ll find that technology and progress is often made not because but despite of capitalism. Uncontrolled capitalism does not work in favor of people. People have to intervene and contain it all the time. Look at the pharma industry for example. Look at patents, like for important vaccines, agricultural technologies or really anything else. Look at companies giving a shit about their worker’s health (or their human rights) or the environment. All of this behavior is rewarded in a capitalist system because it is about maximizing profits and accumulating wealth alone. Sure, there are some light versions of capitalism like social market economy (like in Germany a few decades ago). But again, this is still based on exploiting people and keeping them poor.

And are you serious about the civil rights being a by-product of capitalism? Again, civil rights have happened despite capitalism. It has been grassroot movements and anticapitalists that have been marching in the streets fighting for civil rights for the most time. Capitalism in itself just doesn’t care for human rights at all, there is no advantage to them. On the opposite, patriarchy is a by-product of capitalism giving it even more control over people and maximizing the work force. Civil rights in capitalist countries may be more advanced not because of a capitalist system but because these countries are much richer. Again, because they exploit everyone else! People like us in rich countries having civil rights have caused many people in other countries to have no civil or human rights, all the time. Rich countries and companies may have civil rights at home, but they really don’t care about supporting dictators, fascist movements or discriminatory practices elsewhere. On the contrary, keeping a dictator in place is much better for maximizing your profits because you have much better control over that country. Our rich countries have an incentive to keep civil and human rights low in other countries because of capitalist logic.

Regarding what you say about capitalism not containing any “dashing revolutionaries or catchy slogans” I partially agree with you. There are certainly people that made themselves comfortable in this niche of glorifying communism or any other revolutionary movement but that secretly do not want to change anything at all. But this is then only a critique of these few people and it adds nothing to the debate at all. It actually seems more like a straw man argument by you to defend capitalism. Who said socialism, anarchy, whatever needed any “dashing revolutionaries or catchy slogans”?

Hm, maybe I should give listenbrainz another go then. Thanks for the recommendation! I’ve used it for some time now to scrobble music so it should know what I’m listening to. Unfortunately my taste in music doesn’t seem to be that predictable because all services I’ve tried out have been quite bad at it. I tend to go on manual deep dives into obscure music on bandcamp hopping from one artist to another. Most recommendations I get from algorithms like Spotify tend to be rather popular-focused music which I often don’t really enjoy. (Not trying to be edgy here, don’t think it is inherently better or worse to like mainstream stuff, this is just a genuine problem I frequently face).

Such as?

I had a good laugh at “CyberStuck” and “hunk of junk”

But it may be something to work towards to, isn’t it? Or at least get rid of these societal taboos?

Where I live and grew up (Germany), there isn’t that much of a taboo on nudity. I liked showering in my gym for example where there is only a shared (gendered) shower. Since starting my transition I wouldn’t feel welcome in any gendered shared public shower however. I would really like to stop hiding my body but instead feel more included among cis people. One day I hope…

I still prefer going swimming naked (if there are not too many people around) because it avoids gendered swim wear. At most lakes in Germany you can find people going swimming naked or with swim wear. Just coexisting :)

That sounds really nice!! Unfortunately it is hard to find such a space where people who are non-binary or have bodies that don’t fit into the gender binary can go to and feel welcome :'(

Haha yes, recursion is always fun!

Although I’m still confused on what the clock would show in an hour. Because if the subclocks mirror the parent clock at the given time, then they would all be stuck to the hour they are positioned on? Or if they can move then the sublcocks are coupled to 3 o’clock of the main clock. But well, it is all hypothetical anyways :D

What a fun idea!

Is it on purpose that all clocks in this are coupled at the 3 o’clock position? I assume all the clocks go the same speed. Then the large clock and all the smaller clocks at the 3 o’clock position (there are 13 of them) would show the same time. E.g. in one hour, the 12 o’clock position would show 1 o’clock, but the large clock and all the clocks on the 3 o’clock position would show 4 o’clock.

Oh and why is it a clock squared if you have three layers of clocks? Isn’t it cubed then?

Yeah, especially since even self-driving cars prove to be a much bigger headache to accomplish than anticipated. If we cannot even figure those out in so many years, it will take even longer to add a whole other dimension to all the variability.

Thanks for all the informative sources. First of all, I think you are probably right that it is a political or rather economic problem, not necessarily a scientific one. Capitalism doesn’t give any incentive to care for the environment or to recycle anything if it isn’t profitable. And politics are heavily influenced if not driven by capitalism.

But then, seeing the various articles you provided about nuclear waste storage, I didn’t really get the impression that it is a solved problem. Sabine Hossenfelder spends a very long time talking about what nuclear waste is but only mentions problems with storage for hundreds of thousands of years for a very short time. And also Elina Charatidsou doesn’t even mention potential problems of geological changes etc. And the facility she is presenting is still in the research stage. So where are the solutions for a long-term storage that guarantees safety? Nuclear waste may not be as problematic as it is made out, but real solutions look different to me.

Very interesting also the point about recycling nuclear waste. I haven’t even heard of it and it sounds like a really good thing to do. We’d still have very high costs handling and storing it, but only for a few hundreds of years at least. Although it seems like actually applying this is still not really planned by most countries and even then the problem of nuclear waste doesn’t go away fully.

Yes, I get that. But I think we should just keep in mind that it is no sustainable or long-term solution. Since many people have started talking positively about nuclear energy in the last few years, I think it is important to remind everyone of the problems that arise with it.

Can you show me any evidence for that? I’m really curious how we could develop a technology to safely store nuclear waste for millions of years. I mean, on that time scale you’d even factor in changes in geology and all kinds of other factors. Sure, there are definitely people who say that “it should be fine”. But how can you reliably model geology on that time scale? You simply cannot. So I would definitely disagree with your statement that storage is a solved problem.

Yeah sure, coal plants obviously have to go. But why not invest in sustainable energy production?

Nuclear waste cannot just be buried, unless you don’t care about polluting huge areas with radioactivity. In Germany, there have been decades long debates where to store nuclear waste and even to this day there hasn’t been found a good storage for the waste we produced in the 70ies. And this shit costs billions of euros that the company profiting of the plant doesn’t have to pay but that in turn society has to pay.

Hm, on the one hand this could be survivorship bias, i.e. only a lucky few scripts in stone have made it through. If you left enough of these glass discs or other modern media in very specific conditions they might also withstand thousands/millions of years maybe?

On the other hand, I think the amount of data and the corresponding resolution is important, too. If you’d try to store petabytes (or more) worth of data you’d have to carve really really tiny scriptures into stone unless you want mountains of stones just to save some bits of data. But the moment you scale your resolution up and your data engraving gets much smaller, you’ll also get a much more error prone, susceptible system. So even stones with tiny scriptures would certainly not be able to survive millions of years (at least the vast majority of them).

Oh wow, so even more radioactive waste that will afflict thousands of future generations and the environment for a tiny amount of produced energy now :(

Let’s say that we have a more recent micro SD card of 1 TB. So to contain the same information in a punch card (with a byte density of 80 byte/156 cm² = 0.512 byte/cm²), we would need a card of 512,820,512,820 cm². If I’m not mistaken that would be a punch card the size of 51 km²!! This is wild :O

Fair points, you’re certainly right about the lack in quality of the article. And I totally get why you feel offended by something with a sexual or even bdsm connotation immediately being considered derogatory or scary. I think this is really a counterproductive statement for someone to make if they wanted to talk about offensive language. Shaming sexual deviancies is offensive in of itself.

As far as the article goes, the word gimp isn’t necessarily seen as problematic because of its sexual reference but rather as a derogatory term for disabled people. And just because many people agree that they don’t care, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care. Democratic decisions fall flat when they deal with issues of minorities. The large majority of people doesn’t care about disabled people. So basing ethical considerations on the majority’s opinion is really no good idea. Same goes for other discriminatory language and slurs where always the same arguments are presented. I think the article does a great job of portraying the gatekeeping biases of such discussions.

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