Because immunity varies by disease.
Chicken pox? Pretty much one and done. COVID? Falls off rapidly after 3 months, whether you catch it or get the vaccine
Plus, every mutation is a dice roll on how much existing immunity will apply. It could be exactly the same as the last strain, or the old immunity might not help at all
That’s how she goes. Things get worse bit by bit, then all at once
It’s how systems fail
On one hand yeah, I’d look at us pretty dimly from the outside
On the other, we’ve been kinda fucked. Our mental health is in the gutter, we’re unable to make connections the way every other generation could, we’re missing all these milestones like buying a house and having kids and older generations keep telling us it’s our fault.
Even as far as voting, we’ve been fucked. Previous generations had a choice - we get an ultimatum
They just keep gaslighting us.
We don’t have the money, we don’t have the power, but we do have the numbers and as a group we’re not ok… Frankly, there’s no way this ends well. It’s hard to comprehend how the powers that be haven’t realized that and thrown us a bone now and again
Huh… I’m a huge proponent of brushing your tongue (it doesn’t take much, just a brush with a scraper on the back makes a big difference). I’ve never really tried washcloths, but now I’m going to give them a shot
On the flip side, my skin is weird. I get hives for literally no reason, I tried one of those plastic poofs and it makes me itch like crazy.
🤞
IDK if you can convince it to run on Linux, but I’ve been pretty happy with paint.net lately
It’s basically a newer project like gimp. It’s got the core abilities and appearance of Photoshop. Feature wise, it’s less than gimp or Photoshop, but what it has works decently well
Most importantly for me, the UX is much better than gimp… Not as good as Photoshop, but I find stuff is usually where I’d expect it to be
Obviously it’s built on .net, so theoretically it could run native on Linux… Not sure if anyone has done the work to make that actually happen
Biden was old in 2020, he was old in 2016 too. So was Trump.
Nominating younger options would be great… Except we have 2 parties who have special rights and few restrictions - they can straight up throw out nominations if they want, and they’ve convinced the public at large that 3rd parties aren’t an option
We need ranked choice voting desperately.
Personally, I also think all votes should be write-in. If you don’t know which office they’re running for and can’t spell your candidates name correctly, you haven’t met a very low bar of education on the topic. Maybe your vote shouldn’t count
Oh for sure with valve - they’re still a company and they’re certainly capitalist, which basically means they’ll get more cold and ruthless, and it means they’re making money for someone else through their labors
That’s still anarchist though - no ruler, not no rules. They don’t get told what to work on or how - the threat of getting let go (with a reasonable chunk of severance) doesn’t make it not anarchist. Neither does the fact they don’t get to keep their profits
You can mix and match systems - you can have pure anarcho-capitalism or anarcho-communism, although by operating in a predetermined framework it’s not really pure anarchism
The ranking system doesn’t take much away though, team roles are aren’t assigned, they’re ad-hoc. And with software we don’t have the same hierarchy within a team unless there’s a massive gap in skills/experience. You can’t code what you don’t understand after all - leadership is more about communication. You might have an architect designing the big picture and a team lead coordinating, but even in strict chains of command, programmers usually write tasks as a group then choose their task from what needs doing and what they feel confident in
But anyways, it might’ve been transformed to be more corporate over the years (I dug into all this a decade ago), but it was certainly designed to be anarchistic - that doesn’t mean good, not exploitative, in any way fair or equal… Just that the group functions through the individuals autonomously working towards the groups goals
I can’t edit in the app I’m testing out, but I’ll add a qualifier after hearing the pejorative connotations (I literally first heard the word last week and am looking for context)
I’d love to hear the take on the definition of the term tankies by someone who believes others would push the term on them
Fair enough, a pejorative term for what exactly though? The most nuanced answer I’ve gotten is from a proponent of communism who pointed at the authoritarian bent to it… Which seems super weird to me.
The way I see it, a bureaucracy has more leeway in allocating goods the higher up you go, which is very literal administrative capitol - it’s totally in conflict with the core concept of Marx, which is a person getting the fruits of their own labor, and no one getting to milk others (which is really the only way to get much inequality)
I’m a lot more critical of lennonists. While on the surface it imitates capitalism’s ability to optimize production (and with a more aligned goal, minimizing scarcity instead of maximizing the supply-demand equation), it also reintroduces the alignment problem. As you scale up, individual action and ideological beliefs become blips in the data, and the super organism created through humans arranged in the structure.
Individuals have a perverse incentive to maximize their own authority, the number of people under them, and the scale of their operations - by doing that they appear more meritocratous and are more likely to move up the hierarchy. Eventually someone gets the idea to fudge the numbers, and since the metrics are too complex to spot this in a spreadsheet, the most widely selected for skill to move up the ladder is to distort (or spin) the numbers so an individual appears to be serving a greater need than what actually exists.
Lennon’s theory is great, the more centralized the distribution, the greater the potential for optimization - but it ignores the emergent properties that appear when humans form an entity too complex for individual humans to grasp the full picture. You can reign in the worst excesses through watchdogs and harsh punishments, but ultimately that just becomes another layer for power to concentrate. You can keep layering and slow down the rot, but it’s a fundamental alignment problem - either you purposely concentrate the power in a person or group and regress to autocracy, or you constantly keep adding layers of checks and balances (which eats away at the efficiency gains)
So I see a fundamental contradiction here, which is why I can get behind techno-communism with intelligent agents running the show, or I can get behind decentralizing the system and creating something more anarchistic (or ideally, both), but Lennon always seemed to me to be a smart architect given a problem with a scale and an urgency beyond his abilities
Or am I missing something fundamental?
There’s a lot - it’s the default organization structure for humans.
Friend groups are more often than not anarchist. Valve (the makers of steam) is designed as an anarchist company where workers freely start and join projects (they’re not the only ones with a similar structure, but their employee handbook is an interesting read). The fediverse is generally anarchist
There’s very few pure ideological systems out there - certainly there’s never been a pure capitalist or pure dictatorship. There have been pure anarchist communities out there, because it’s not rule by consent or through will of the people, all it takes is people coexisting with an aversion to hierarchy
So I’ve heard tankies defined as “someone who specifically supports the centralized, authorization flavor of communism practiced by the USSR”. They also often mention worship of Stalin and Mao, and a revisionist version of history supporting such a stance
This seems odd to me, especially since a group of tankies flocked early to a decentralized platform geared for long-form discussions
Personally, I believe capitalism is an ideological virus. You can trace a clear path from the Roman empire to the modern day, where a hyper-specialized society eradicated every other system of resource husbandry by sloppily harvesting as quick as possible and using that advantage to gangpress everyone else into service under them (and destroying anything that would even slightly slow down the process )
I don’t think communism is the answer, because I don’t think it’s a path we can walk without first curing the disease, but the guiding concepts resonate with me.
So in that light, I’d like to ask in good faith:
Self-identified tankies - how do you define a tankie?
I have an interesting protocol for this.
Moonlight rituals. The idea is, you get a bunch of people together, say 20-50, in the same place at the same time. Everyone opens an app, and it takes control of the screens and gives semi-random actions - like hold up your phone to the user to the left of you, get everyone in a circle with phone screens on your chest and walk forward, enter the middle of the circle and slowly spin around, hold it up to take a picture of the moon…
The idea is, you constantly change the screen, take synchronized pictures, record audio, get flickers in gps signals, record fluctuations in the magnomiter.
The idea is to synchronize everything with millisecond precision, randomly take snapshots both across the group and between groups, and use all this to corroborate the fact that there was one user per phone present at this point in space and time. By using reality to generate enormously complex data sets, you can make it arbitrarily difficult to simulate, and doing it in real time could use cheap hardware and require processing orders of magnitude faster to spoof.
Doesn’t matter how much processing you throw at it - a system like this would theoretically be able to measure gravity waves and stellar radiation - no way you to measure that and adjust your data before you time out the recording window
On top of nodes doing all this, you’d build a web of trust with random nodes spot-checking each other.
It’s crazy and impractical, but I love the idea just because it’s turning technology to magic - making group rituals to authenticate is just such a fun concept to me
I think it’s a combination of less presence/engagement in niche content, sorting methods not quite being there, and not enough discovery without going out of band to find things
One thing I really miss is the science groups, askscience always had great debate that I haven’t yet found here