No, I’m saying western democracies are better because you got to vote.

It’s amazing to me that so many people are willing to work as unpaid moderators so that Reddit’s investors can make more money.

The first paragraph is literally the same “I can’t justify capitalism but the others are worse” argument again.

Which happens to be true. Maybe in the future there will be something better, but so far it hasn’t been found.

The society we live in is an employment based, market fundamentalist society.

Sure, ok. And it’s better than a feudalist society where you’re tied to the land, or a slave-based economy where you’re property.

Instead of lashing out and calling it a silly caricature

I’m not lashing out. I’m just describing it as a silly caricature, which it is. Capitalism is fundamentally about owners of capital competing to make more money by investing in capital and selling goods at a profit. People who don’t own capital have to work in that kind of a system. Similar to how peasants were tied to land they had to work under feudalism, or slaves were required to do whatever their owners demanded in a slave state, but it’s less brutal. Workers can change employers and their bodies are not owned.

Is it fair? Of course not, but no socioeconomic system that has ever existed in reality has ever been fair.

That being said, how much money would it take for you to change your mind about existence being measured in terms of money alone being a silly caricature?

No amount of money would make me change my mind. There would probably be an amount of money where I’d be willing to lie, but what does that prove? You’d lie too if you were offered enough money. That’s human nature, not capitalism. If this were a feudalist system you could be bribed with land. If it were a theocracy you could be bribed by religious titles.

I don’t know what you’re trying to prove. Capitalism is bad, but other systems are worse. There are purely theoretical systems that would be better, but none of them has ever survived an encounter with reality. But, that doesn’t mean we should stop trying. Eventually we’ll find a way to improve on capitalism, just like capitalism improved on feudalism.

we have less than 20 years to take control of our economic system before we all die from climate change

Yeah… sure. “We all die”.

The earth isn’t going to be hit by an asteroid, it’s just going to have more and more catastrophes. If the earth reaches a tipping point with the melting of the polar icecaps, it will still take centuries for them to melt. The tipping point just means that it won’t be possible to stop it. Humanity will survive, because killing off humanity would be as difficult as killing off mosquitoes or cockroaches. What will happen, not suddenly in 20 years, but gradually over the next few centuries, is that life will get more and more unpleasant. There will be more famines, more disasters wiping cities off the map. More wars over resources. But, some humans will keep living, and they’ll have children, and those children will grow up in a terrible world where survival is a struggle. But, humans will survive, though it might be a very brutal, primitive existence.

As for “capitalism”, it’s not “capitalism” that’s at fault here, it’s humanity. It’s not like North Korea is a bastion of carbon-neutral utopian living. Humans are unable to think and act on a global scale. They’re selfish, and always have been. The difference is that now there are billions of humans, and technology has enabled each selfish human to have a massive climate footprint. Human brains were evolved to exist in small groups on the savanna. The thinking that allowed humans to thrive in that environment has meant destruction now that technology has massively amplified the impact each human now has.

The solution isn’t some random change to a different economic system or a different political system. It’s either destroying most technology so that each human can no longer have such a massive impact, or it’s fundamentally altering the human brain so that people use that technology wisely and with a tiny footprint. Neither of those is likely, so we’re almost certainly doomed.

For bonobos, a whole variety of ways and very frequently.

Capitalism and modern western democracy suck. But, life has always sucked for those without power. Life is/was much worse for people under “communism”. It was much worse under fascism. It was much worse under feudalism. It is/was much worse in a theocracy.

Also, this idea that “existence is evaluated in terms of money alone” is a silly caricature of capitalism. People with power have always been the ones to make the rules. It doesn’t matter if that power is in the form of money, or absolute control over anyone who lives on a certain bit of land, or in terms of absolute control due to being the representative on earth of a god’s will.

That’s nice, but the issue was whether they were part of the governing class. The rights the women were given in the GDR didn’t include the right to pass new laws. As for choosing new representatives, look up the term “Wir gehen falten”.

You’re on the right track, but the issue isn’t “the capitalist class”, it’s “humanity”. Slavery existed long before capitalism. Waste existed long before capitalism. Getting rid of capitalism won’t suddenly make people better humans.

There are no rules that say luxury goods couldn’t be produced for consumption

You don’t seem to even understand what a luxury good is. A luxury good isn’t a great bottle of wine, or a designer handbag. A luxury good is something that is rare and expensive and coveted for those reasons. Luxury goods are older than capitalism, they go back millennia. Important people in stone age groups had “luxury goods” that the rest of the people didn’t have access to.

Too much is made, most of it is wasted.

Yes, because it’s extremely hard to figure out what people want. Markets (which are much older than capitalism) are the best way we’ve found to figure out what people want and to meet those needs. You can’t get rid of markets, you can only drive them underground. When the USSR was meeting people’s needs by giving them the goods that the government decided they should have, the black markets were famous because the things people wanted were not the things that the government had decided they needed.

Workers must seize this system and destroy the old structures

If the “workers” are as idiotic as you, they’ll probably die because they simply have no idea how the world works. I’m not defending capitalism, I’m defending markets, which are much, much older than capitalism. An idiot like you thinks that you can magically replace markets with magic, when the fact is that every system that has tried to replace markets since the dawn of time has failed.

We’re not talking about “capitalist systems” though, we’re talking about “the market”.

“The market” existed long before capitalism. It’s an essential feature of human trade. Buyers offer goods for sale, sellers choose what they want to buy. People voting with their dollars, or with their cowrie shells provides a signal for what’s in demand and what producers should make more of.

Every system that has tried to get rid of the market has failed, and the market always pops up anyway, often in the shape of a black market.

But almost everybody wants something different in a home.

If you’re paying rent to a bank, you don’t own your house, at least not yet.

All countries have always been governed by the property owning class. With all its faults, capitalism has resulted in “peons” having the most say they’ve ever had. It’s not a lot, but it’s sure better than under classical democracy, feudalism, monarchy, theocracy, and “communism” at least as practiced in the USSR, Cuba, North Korea and China.

Sure, because that’s one thing socialist / communist systems are great at, making goods people want.

For some reason, only one ape species ever has non-small breasts. You never get large breasted gorillas, chimpanzees or bonobos even though they share 98% of their DNA with us. What is it about humans that means that that trait was evolutionarily advantageous? It’s obviously a feature with significant disadvantages, so what is the advantage that offsets that for humans in a way that it doesn’t for other great apes?

I wonder if there is any evolutionary advantage to larger breasts. AFAIK, there’s no difference in their ability to deliver milk to babies. And smaller breasts probably have an advantage in a woman’s movement and agility, not to mention avoiding back pain. Humans also seem to be the only animal that has larger breasts than necessary – OTOH, humans are also the only mammal that walks upright, so there are other biological differences.

If it’s the case that the only evolutionary reason for large breasts is to better attract (some) men, that would be interesting.

At least it adds noise to the system. It’s better than the people who are happily training the AI.

What’s ironic is that the main purpose of reCAPTCHA v2 is to train ML models. That’s why they show you blurry images of things you might see in traffic.

AFAIK the way it works is that of the 9 images, something like 6 are images the system knows are True or False, and another 3 are ones it is being trained on. So, it shows you 9 images and says “tell me which images contain a motorcycle”. It uses the 6 it knows to determine whether or not to let you pass, and then uses your choices on the other 3 to train an ML model.

Because of this, it takes me forever to get past reCAPTCHA v2, because I think it’s my duty to mistrain it as much as possible.

You would also think that Rockstar would want to stop those kinds of cheats just for greedy reasons. If there is some kind of ultra-powerful flying saucer item available, it’s probably something that they sell to players for money. At the very least, when someone spawns something like that, check to see if their account purchased it.

So much of the rest of the stuff could be handled using heuristics. The average player gets X headshots an hour, this player is in the 99.9th percentile. Maybe they’re just very good, but let’s flag that account and see if there’s anything else suspicious about their playing. That’s the thing about an MMO, you have vast amounts of data about players so there’s a lot of stuff you can use to see if something is normal.

I guess if they’re not doing it they’ve done some business calculations and decided that investing $X in techniques to ban cheaters won’t result in at least $X more in revenue from happy players who want to play more now that the cheating has been reduced. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re counting on making money off the cheaters somehow – maybe they periodically do get detected and banned and have to buy a new copy of the game. So, the math now says you don’t want to be too aggressive about the cheaters because they’re a good, reliable source of revenue.

It’s amazing to me that Blizzard spent 15 years with the PvP realms in such a broken state. It was only when they introduced “war mode” and the option to turn it off that people finally had some relief.

What finally made them address the problem was that many PvP realms had become 95% one faction and 5% the other faction. That meant that any PvP encounters were very one-sided, and they were also very rare, because the outnumbered faction just avoided any areas where they might be attacked.

Even if you lived for griefing, being on the dominant side in a 95% your-side realm sucked because there weren’t enough victims to pick on.

I guess they wanted to make griefers happy because making the game fair for people who enjoyed PvP but didn’t want to grief others would have been relatively easy.

That’s one thing I’ve always admired about Eve Online. It’s an MMO that’s almost entirely player driven. Various sectors of space change hands between different factions of players. That results in the sorts of things you’re talking about. Unfortunately Eve has extremely boring space battles (for players, for watchers it can be fun), and a toxic community.

But, I’ve always wanted an RPG where the world evolved. To me, the key thing to make that realistic would be NPCs that didn’t respawn. Like, if you killed a certain golden dragon named Gurnadom, that dragon was dead, gone, nobody else could kill it. There would be no Gurnadom killing guides because there was only ever one Gurnadom and only one group of players ever killed that dragon. There might be tips on killing golden dragons, but each dragon was unique so it wasn’t a matter of watching videos and understanding the patterns. Each fight against a golden dragon could only happen at most once, and every fight was unique.

And, in any game involving war, there should be permanent destruction of things: fortresses that were attacked would take damage over time and eventually be turned into rubble. A side that’s winning a war should be expanding its territory. As a result, where a player can safely go should depend on the progress of the war, which is something not programmed into the game, but player driven.

I’m just so tired of the WoW style of MMO where the player is “The Champion” who has saved the world multiple times… along with the hundreds of other nearby players who are all the one-and-only champion who also killed a certain raid boss over and over every week for a month.