And despite barely getting enough food to eat the men are all jacked bodybuilders with 2% body fat in perfectly fitting muscle tees. Nobody gets utis or fungal infections despite not bathing. No one has to deal either poor eyesight or healing loss (especially since they shoot guns constantly without protection) Nobody gets worms or other parasites from eating bad food. Or dies from dehydration due to diarrhea. Etc etc.
It’s almost like the point of these scenarios is fun escapism and isn’t about perfectly simulating an apocalyptic wasteland down to the most mundane and uninteresting parts.
Also farmers baths are a thing. A little bit of water, soap, sterilizer in the form of alcohol or vinegar, and rags or baby wipes is all you need to stay clean.
Do not mix soap and vinegar. You will just de-saponify the soap and end up with expensive oil and salt. Vinegar is an acid and soap is a base. Use them separately.
See? I never have to bathe because women love my natural body scent. My mom still forces me to shower once a month despite any amount of facts and logic. No wonder I’m still single /s
It’s almost like the point of these scenarios is fun escapism and isn’t about perfectly simulating an apocalyptic wasteland down to the most mundane and uninteresting parts.
Also, they time travel past going to the shitter, sleeping, most of the journeys etc. So unrealistic that it’s literally unwatchable.
It’s not really fun escapism when it blatantly throws out verisimilitude for the sake of presenting the same trite, cliche propagandized rehashed garbage to us over and over and over again.
I’ll take the realistic apocalypse movie that actually gets the little things right. The little things are what helps sell the big things, like, well, zombies.
I said 📢IT’S NOT REALLY FUN ESCAPISM WHEN IT BLATANTLY THROWS OUT VERISIMILITUDE FOR THE SAKE OF PRESENTING THE SAME TRITE, CLICHE, PROPAGANDIZED REHASHED GARBAGE TO US OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
Or anything practically realistic, because it’s not a good faith critical examination of a situation like that the way the books are. They’re a mish-mash of tropes and cliches corporations know will put ignorant NPC asses into seats to bilk money off of them. They don’t make people think about what they’re watching which is one of the most important uses of critical thinking, have no real world message, and if they do the messages are extremely negative, i.e. The Walking Dead advocating the “every man for himself” mentality that stops the working poor from working together.
I could go on for days about it and that’s literally the tip of the iceberg.
But you’re not interested in a meaningful debate, you’re angry I dare to criticize something you like and you were only asking because you are looking for holes you can dig through to convince yourself I’m wrong and thus feel better about ingesting mindless, logically frail shit that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, so this talk can’t really happen. No talk can be had with you.
I don’t even like zombie films or games. You’re just being all high and mighty over nothing.
But yeah keep up with your cringe pseudo intellectual bullshit, so you can tell yourself everyone is a dumb mindless NPC and you’re the one true free thinker in this world.
Right? Just aging will get you an infection at the slightest change in the wind. Slept wrong? Ear Infection. Used those eyedrops and accidentally breathed into the cap before using it again? Hello eye infection. Oops didn’t pee after sex? Hello UTI. Heck didn’t even have sex? Your biome changed? UTI anyways.
Oh and if your infection gets out of hand: not enough doctors and you run a high chance of dying in ER
There’s a reason why the life expectancy shot up after antibiotics were developed. The moment we go back into the apocalypse we’re gonna start dying before 45 again. And more gruesome and painful ways than a zombie attack. Heck that will be considered humane.
You can’t meaningful separate these. Sure, capitalism is not mutually exclusive to say parliamentary democracy or dictatorship or monarchy, but you need a state that enforces the “will of the market”. Capitalism values property very highly. That’s a political decision. It allows a very hierarchical relation between workers and bosses by enforcing the property laws of the latter. At the end of the day, it’s the police (and therefore the state) that evicts you, not the landlord and not the market.
I see, I think there are a couple things to clarify. Causally, you can view it as the political system of decision-making determines the economic system, so keeping capitalism is a political decision made through a political system such as democracy or theocracy with downstream political consequences, e.g. property has high capital value, which affects citizens.
You may also be conflating decisions that carry a political quality with decisions made by a political system. Or conflating systems that carry political qualities such as economic systems and education systems with political systems proper, which are system for instituting decisions that govern societies. For example, the market may “decide” that asbestos is the best insulation, however, the market does not set political policy about insulation. It is up to the political system (e.g. democratic parliament or dictator) to decide whether or not to pass policy about limiting asbestos insulation, not capitalism. This distinction is also present in your own argument. Like you said, the market (capitalism) doesn’t create and enforce property law, it’s the state (political system) that creates the law and is responsible for enforcing it.
-EDIT- Okay I think I see the semantic disagreement. What others are emphasizing is that the economy is political in nature and therefore it is a political system. What I understand for the term “Political System” is more narrow to be more narrowly “system of government”. I certainly agree that the economy is political in nature. And honestly, I’m not married to my definition of political system. What I cared more about is drawing the distinction between “system of government” and “systems that are political in nature”. The only reason why I’d disagree is that by the latter definition, any system of social structure such as religions, education systems, human transportation systems, communication systems, language systems etc. Are also political systems because they’re political in nature. So the term “political system” may be too broad as to be useful.
What is politics? People spend have their waking hours in a strict top down system, instead of a democratically organized economy. Tbf that’s not only true for Capitalism but also for Soviet style socialism.
For example, the market may “decide” that asbestos is the best insulation, however, the market does not set political policy about insulation.
The market is not the only aspect of capitalism. Plutocracy is another strong one. Being rich makes you influential in capitalism in contrast to systems where your ancestry is important or systems that try to get rid of power altogether respectively try to distribute it as evenly as possible. So while I said it’s compatible with monarchy and democracy, this is true on a scale. If the monarch is listening to rich people instead of their kind, it’s less monarchical and parliamentary democracies are more prone to capitalism than more direct forms of democracy.
To put it differently: it’s not only about who makes the decision according to the constitution, it’s also about how this decision comes about. Besides: the institution at least makes capitalism possible, if not enforces it in one way or another. The existence of a state alone is something capitalism needs, a punitive justice system that enforces property rights, which often also are constitutional themselves, …
I think the argument is that economics and politics are not independent of each other. They are two sides of the same coin. Whomever controls the food supply has power over the population, which means it has political power. Whomever has power over the population, has power over the food supply. Basically, economics and politics are different perspectives on power.
For example, the political structures in the West create the rules over who gets to obtain power through the economy. From the other direction, the people with economic power get to control who gets to obtain power through the political structures.
Thanks for this, I like the pragmatic view that those with economic power select those who obtain political power. I certainly don’t think they’re independent. The economic system influences the political system for sure, but categorically/formally we’re still talking about two distinct systems, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about a separate political structure
I would say the greater achievement of right wing grifters is the connotation that “politics” is inherently bad and shameful, as implied by your comment as well.
It’s bad but necessary. It would be great if we lived in a world where there was no need for government, therefore no need for government policy, and therefore no need to debate those policies.
But in the real world government is necessary therefore politics are necessary. The right wing confuses people with the belief that politics is bad and therefore should be eliminates. The left confuses people with the belief that politics should be good and because it isn’t people should avoid participation.
Politics is ugly, and having unrealistic expectations for it is what blocks a lot of progress from happening. The right are better able to accomplish their goals through politics (even when their goals are harmful) because they have a better understanding of the ugliness. The left is oftentimes ineffective out of a silly desire to be above the ugliness of politics.
I see what you’re saying in terms of idealism/naivete vs pragmatism. However I also get the sense that what you mean by government and politics is a bit different from what the left usually means. I’d be interested to understand what you mean by “politics” and “government”.
A couple follow-up questions that might help clarify the distinctions
does a society make choices between better and worse practice of politics/government?
what would a world that doesn’t need government look like if you were to imagine it?
The only part is disagree with is that the left encourages not participating in politics. I’m pretty sure a pillar of the left is encouraging informed participation in politics. Unless you mean punk/commie ideas of rejecting the establishment in favour of revolution? That’s still participation in politics.
I don’t think it’s the left that discourages participation in politics. The right discourages the left from participating in politics and all too often the left falls for it, hook line and sinker. The right has the “both sides” narratives down to a science, but despite promoting this kind of thinking, they always vote.
does a society make choices between better and worse practice of politics/government?
Yes. But it’s not like ordering a product from Amazon. You don’t put your desired improvements in a cart and have it delivered in two days. To accomplish the change you want in a democracy, you need to vote in many elections, sometimes over decades. If you really care you might want to join a major political party and discuss the issues important to you with them. Again this may take decades, but if the issue is important enough then you’re willing to make that effort. Note how long the Christian right worked to get abortion banned. They didn’t instantly get to have things their way it took voting in every election, attending party meetings, along with decades of apathy on the left.
what would a world that doesn’t need government look like if you were to imagine it?
Mad Max kinda shit. Do you prefer the leadership of Lord Humungus or Immorten Joe?
There will always be a government. We’re a tribal species and we will form into tribes and war against one another if there is no one that sets the laws and enforces them. Those tribes would develop into a feudalistic society which may someday develop into a democracy again.
That whole Marxist “the state will whither away” thing is just pseudo religious belief comparable to the Christian belief in a rapture followed by an eternity of paradise. Which is why it’s attractive to atheists that were formally Christians. Old habits and all that.
Well I see it as a necessary evil. If you have democracy you’re gonna have politics. Hell you still have politics even without democracy, just a different kind and usually behind closed doors.
For me the phrase “politics is stupid but politics is important” sums it up best.
Politics is like taking a shit, it’s messy and it stinks, but it’s something you gotta deal with. And it’s preferable to take a shower after it’s been dealt with.
I feel like you’re splitting hairs, like saying all the shit parts of democracy are politics and all the not shit parts are somehow not politics. Democracy IS a part of politics. How about this, if you are to play devil’s advocate for yourself, try listing 3 examples of how politics is good rather than evil.
My view is a bit different though. I see it more as an inherent property or process of society, like mass is to matter or spatial distribution of a flock of birds.
No the political aspects are also shit. Democracy is shit too. It’s just less shit than the alternatives. I think holding up democracy as some shining beacon of goodness leads to a lot of disappointment and disenfranchisement. Every system involving humans will be turned to shit, people will try to corrupt anything to gain personal advantage. But democracy is the best we’re capable of having and if we make some effort to improve it, it will be less shit. Though still shitty because because politics makes things shitty.
I think I’ve lost your meaning of shit/ty. It sounds like everything is shit. Life is shit, you’re born, you suffer, you die shitty, etc. Which sounds edgy but doesn’t really mean anything. What do you mean by shit/ty?
And at this point totally fair to call it here on this thread. It’s just my gut reaction to your response.
Yeah a lot of things are shit. It’s weird to put politics (of all things) on a pedestal and try to see the world through the shittiest of lenses. There are plenty of things the world that are actually good and trying to make everything about politics is just making things shitty that otherwise wouldn’t be.
Yeah that’s a bit of a strawman. The only people “putting politics on a pedestal” are human characatures, like people who’s whole identity is worshipping Trump are to conservatives or “alpha males” to men.
Anyway I already gave my take on politics being a property more than a lens.
Definitionally, anything that prescribes the way things are to be distributed is political. There has been a desensitization to the word politics with an ever present right using words loosely adjacent to their true meaning, but capitalism is inherently political. Now it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem with western democracies kinda being formed around it, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I sincerely doubt anyone would argue communism or socialism aren’t political because they are economic theories.
It’s an economic system that seeks to control the political system enough to further itself with no thought or care for anything that doesn’t fit that goal, in the same way a malignant cellular mass seeks to control the host environment enough to further unrestrained and out of control growth. Both kill the host.
For what I’ve heard japanese spend a lot of time working and their economy isn’t that great. People mostly avoid having children under these conditions for good reasons.
It’s not much better in the rest of the West too. Turns out that building a society where money and career determines your social status and doing unpaid work like taking care of a family and raising children is not valued at all and even very expensive makes people choose to have less or no children.
People of course do want children, but those that do very often will choose one or two children, below replacement rate.
Turns out that building a society where money and career determines your social status and doing unpaid work like taking care of a family and raising children is not valued at all and even very expensive makes people choose to have less or no children.
In my country the state taxes the shit out of us while pays for the children of non-working people (there’s a shitload of subsidies going into their pockets), so that doesn’t help at all. What people need is money in their pockets, so having a children doesn’t bankrupt a family.
When you work 8 hours a day, have 1 hour lunch break, waste 2 hours commuting, to earn barely enough of what Adam Smith considers ideal (twice the cost of living), it’s hard to sustain a second person, much less a third that requires near constant monitoring for over 7 years.
From a pure economic perspective, a child is a total money sink for at least 18 years. In many places (mostly urban), it’s simply not viable to have one.
Short term, raise the minimum wage. Force walmart to fill the gaps between what they pay and what their workers need to live. Right now, it’s the government is subsidizing that gap.
We kinda need lobbying and it would be very hard to effectively criminalize it. It would just move father into the back rooms. When I say we need it, groups like the EFF, NAACP, FFRF and ACLU all have lobbying arms.
A different idea proposed by Lawrence Lessig would be to remove elected officials from the legislative branch and replace it it something like the Jury Duty system from the court systems. While not perfect, it would be much harder to bribe a constantly rotating group of civilians and most people will vote in their interest even when it’s against their party alignment on a case by case bases.
Lobbyists would become like courtroom lawyers either pushing for or against certain laws in a public settings.
The US government already subsidizes companies like Wal-Mart and Amazon because they force their lowest-paid employees to apply for food stamps even though they work.
But how high is the rate of unemployment in your country? In Germany it is really low, so it probably costs a working person only a few euros per month to support all children of unemployed persons. Not sure if it is worth it to not help these children as they are already severely disadvantaged. Not to mention it can be seen as an investment in these children.
Incentivizing people to have children is pretty important for a society to continue on. Most societies are based around there being more young people than old people. When you reverse that, you historically don’t have enough people working to keep the country chugging along.
You would be surprised how many people actually cost the state money instead of bringing in money via tax in some countries. The problem isn’t the few unemployed people who could potentially work, the problem is that wages between high earners and low earners are out of proportion.
this pigbrained subhuman cruelty betrays you as an american citizen, thank god your shithole is in decline lol you should all rot and die there for the good of the world
There are Americans that routinely get sent to jail protesting/fighting to change America for the better every day. There are those of us in this very thread that agree with you calling the other commentor a pigbrained subhuman. The strict adherence to an absolutely shit narrative given to them by Reich Wing Media disgusts a large portion of our population.
It’s not entirely our fault that propaganda is so effective at keeping the absolute worst possible people in office and rotting the brains of our neighbors. The blame rests on the oligarchs and ultra wealthy assholes looking to divide and conquer, turning all of us against each other while they laugh all the way to their 3rd private island…
I agree, some of you are alright, it is the elite of america and the very notion of “america” as a nation itself which must ultimately face justice for this situation. I hope you have a good day.
America falling apart would be horrifyingly destructive for the rest of the world, for it will allow other corrupt capitalist powers that are, let’s be honest, not as humane, take over the rest of the world.
Then again, the destabilization of the U.S. is well under way and our collapse is inevitable so I guess disputing it is a moot point.
America falling apart would be horrifyingly destructive for the rest of the world, for it will allow other corrupt capitalist powers that are, let’s be honest, not as humane, take over the rest of the world.
Well technically the continuation of america is more destructive than its inevitable decline, since america has a very awful pattern of killing millions of people for the enrichment of its elite, via means such as invasions, installing genocidal puppet leaders, and corporate extraction. The worst part is that america often destroys countries just as their people are on the brink of greater liberation.
Notable examples include:
Installing the Taliban in Afghanistan to oppose a Socialist government then destroying it
Destroying Iraq for Oil
Helping quash the Protocommunist Taiping Rebellion in China
The current blockade of Cuba
The current blockade of North Korea
The murder of socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile and the installation of Pinochet, a neoliberal dictator
The Contras
Sending $3 billion a year to isntreal for the mass killing of Palestinians
The genocide of first nations peoples on the North American continent itself
Assassinating Fred Hampton and the political killings of the Black Panther Party
Meddling in the affairs of practically every single third world country on Earth
Fucking Monsanto and their land grabbing bullshit
It is also probably the most inhumane of the corrupt capitalist powers as revealed in the details of these genocidal ventures either by using its own weapons or by proxy.
As such, the death of america would enable the possibility of a flourishing of socialist nations without the threat of the worlds most powerful military brought to full bear against their people for daring to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.
…Until Russia and China start doing literally the same things if not worse. Russia wouldn’t hesitate to nuke countries that wouldn’t play ball with it, for example.
China has a no first nuclear use policy, and the USSR/Russia used to but dropped it down to threats to territorial integrity.
The United States has refused to adopt a no first use policy and says that it “reserves the right to use” nuclear weapons first in the case of conflict.
Both NATO and a number of its member states have repeatedly rejected calls for adopting a NFU policy, as during the lifetime of the Soviet Union a pre-emptive nuclear strike was commonly argued as a key option to afford NATO a credible nuclear deterrent, compensating for the overwhelming conventional weapon superiority enjoyed by the Soviet Army in Eurasia.
Until Russia and China start doing literally the same things if not worse.
Probably not, China is on record, better than the United States in that it does not destabilize burgeoning socialist governments nor engage in one-sided business deals with third world nations to cripple them with debt like how the west does in Africa. Furthermore, they have no historical precedent of engaging in genocidal colonialist ventures in countries halfway around the world from them. If China were top dog they would just be free to expand mutually beneficial international relations at a greater rate then they are doing now without fear of america and its allies nuking them for stepping out of line.
Russia, on the other hand, is truly a failed state that is also in decline. They have a dogshit military that can’t even take a small pissant nation headed by a film star right on its border. It is very unlikely that Russia, in its current form, will be able to reach the same level of economic and military domination that america currently possesses.
Fundamentally, one of the other reasons why China and Russia are unlikely to do the same things is because they are not settler-colonial nations born from genocide. The ideology of Manifest Destiny, invading a militarily inferior nation, slaughtering every single one of the people there, plundering its resources, and settling the land for the sake of “Personal Freedom” (the American Dream), is a unique historical pattern that the very idea of america as a nation is contingent on.
If US hegemony ended today, it would mean immediate war between Saudi Arabia & Iran, China & Japan/South Korea, Russia & the former Soviet states, and probably China & India eventually. The US is far and away the most powerful military in the world, and without the threat of the US military intervening on behalf of its allies, those conflicts are nowhere near as one-sided as they are today.
For example, see what happened as the Ottoman Empire & European colonial empires collapsed at the beginning of the 20th century. Then scale that up from a 2.3 billion global population to 8 billion.
Whatever you want to say about the crimes against humanity committed in the maintenance of US hegemony, I will agree with you, but that doesn’t mean for a second that the alternative is better. Be careful what you wish for and all that.
If US hegemony ended today, it would mean immediate war […] The US is far and away the most powerful military in the world, and without the threat of the US military intervening on behalf of its allies, those conflicts are nowhere near as one-sided as they are today. […]
See, the problem here is that all the potential apocalyptic conflicts between american allies and other nations are contingent on the existence of american foreign meddling in the first place. The global conditions of multipolarity between now and WW1 are different. The reason for animosity between america’s allies and their neighbors is that the neocolonial western powers, headed by america, are using these allies as pawns, puppets to further their own interests within these regions against its enemies. It would instead be more accurate to say that if america’s enemies were weaker militarily and economically, america would be able to swoop in and destroy their people via a combination of hard and soft power using its allies as forward operating bases. I am not saying that the enemies of america are perfect nations, however, in the absence of american meddling, they have been shown to pursue more peaceful and mutually beneficial international relations with neutral nations, as opposed to outright warfare and economic genocide, as america does.
As such, if there is no america, then there would be no threat of slaughter for its enemies through its allies, and therefore there would be no more reason for the sort of animosity that could spiral into a nuclear war. The enemies of america, due to their position, are generally intelligent geopolitically, and do not possess the historical legacy of being colonial empires. If america truly fell, then they won’t start wars against a now nonexistent enemy for no good reason.
Whatever you want to say about the crimes against humanity committed in the maintenance of US hegemony, I will agree with you, but that doesn’t mean for a second that the alternative is better.
This is a common argument for a neoliberal status quo: “Well sure we know global regime X is shit and kills millions of people per year, but hey, all these strawman alternatives are bad so in the end, There Is No Alternative.” It’s been overused by conservative politicians to the point that its a slogan: TINA. However, we must realize that there are multiple alternatives, including the building of a better world.
Be careful what you wish for and all that.
Its going to collapse anyways over the next century or so, we do not need to wish for anything.
I can’t say I particularly disagree, however I think you’re overestimating the moral character of states in general. If US hegemony erodes over a “century or so” I think that is a manageable course of events rife with opportunities for building a better world, as you say. If, on the other hand, the US were to suddenly become incapable or unwilling to fill its role as global hegemon, the resulting power vacuum would undoubtedly effect chaos.
I hope for a graceful retreat from imperialism into some sort of international socialist utopia… but history isn’t exactly reassuring.
Not really imo, a sudden collapse of america would create chaotic power vacuums but they mostly be internally localized to america and countries completely dominated by america. Countries on the periphery would not immediately jump to fill the power vacuum molded to a white-supremacist settler-colonial hegemon as they do not have the material basis to fill such a role.
Furthermore, such a framing takes for granted that the current world is run by an orderly, functional system made up of countries subservient to a hegemon when in fact, the current situation is quite chaotic, as we live in “interesting times”. It is moreso a complex, multipolar situation made up of blocs with competing interests, and its just that one bloc mainly headed by one country is getting its way. Unfortunately, this country is america, with an agenda fundamentally inseparable with the extraction and genocide of other civilized nations. Other blocs do have their own interests, but it is unlikely they would be as bloodthirsty as america.
Moreover, even if things somehow do lead to war, historically, during the time of chaos highlighted earlier, one of the greatest socialist experiments, the USSR, was born. And for a time, there was hope for a better future in the world.
At the end of the day the preparedness and struggle of socialist movements worldwide will decide what will happen if such a situation occurs.
America falling apart would be horrifyingly destructive for the rest of the world, for it will allow other corrupt capitalist powers that are, let’s be honest, not as humane, take over the rest of the world.
This is what every imperial power says about itself
Because the US is one of the best examples of your desire to see the children of poor and unemployed people starve?
“G-g-g-get a grip, I don’t like my shitty views being challenged and I can’t actually defend them”
Mate if you’re going to post dumb shit you probably should have a better response than that.
I’m assuming you’re not actually very dedicated to the idea of starving children, that’s just something you’ve heard and parroted because your own economic status is precarious
So you pretty much called me dumb because I’m poor?
And also, that since you don’t agree with my economic views, Im just “brainwashed”? Seriously? That’s your argument? Seriously, go see the world, every country that actually applied your way of thinking ended up having a lot more children starving than the ones who apply my views.
State shouldn’t be taxing workers because some morons who decided to have children when they’re not supposed to don’t want to go work for 7$ a hour. Get a fucking grip and grow up “mate”
You’re poor because you’re one or two crippling events away from poverty, you’re dumb because you’re choosing to be.
I’ve been to the US and the level of poverty is horrific. Meanwhile China has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty.
The idea of “brainwashing” came from returned American POWs who learned that they were getting a shitty deal from American capitalists who profiteered while the soldiers were firebombing Asia, so no, I don’t think you’re brainwashed. I think you’re a classic middle-class westerner attacking the poor because you see yourself as part of the actual wealthy class even if you’re not. You might have to examine why you’re not on $7 an hour, or if you were born unlucky, $2 a day.
Finally we see the true LIB emerge - eugenicist takes on how poor people shouldn’t have children, and then how their children (who didn’t actually consent to be born) should be punished for that
Do they? I mean, even if first-world people aren’t as well-off as they could theoretically be, they’re still much better off than people in poor counties (or their own ancestors a hundred years ago). But those people in poor countries and those ancestors have/had a lot more children. Meanwhile people in Sweden have fewer children than people in the USA.
I think that many people in first-world countries do not in fact want children.
(And within a country, poor people have more children than rich people, so actually making more people poor would increase fertility.)
Sure, and people in the south are popping them out like crazy even though they definitely can’t fucking afford them and need constant welfare support (that they’ll turn around and rail against politically) so it’s clear that things like education are also involved.
If people understood the scarcity of resources and their own earning potential they’d be fucking TERRIFIED of having children. Since they’re all dumbass hicks, they just fuck and don’t think about it. I’m sure Uncle Sam will show up with a other WIC check to help their poor decisions.
I am not sure if it’s really “I don’t want children” or more “I want a career (too)”. In Sweden 76 % of women are employed versus 57 % of women in USA. There are also more women with higher education in Sweden than in the USA.
You have to decide whether you want a career or a child. And when a good career is a viable and achievable option, you decide to have a career instead.
I wanted children, but I wanted to be independent and not poor when I am older, more. I know so many women who are poor and lonely because they did not focus on their jobs. While I am often sad to not have children, I’d never give up my independence and safety cushion just for that biological urge. I know of many women who think the same way.
I lived and worked in Japan before returning to the US. It’s much worse in Japan. When you leave college, you’re basically employed for life by one company. Your place in society is determined by your work in that company. My company was one of the more progressive ones. Salaried personnel still had to clock in and out to prevent people from working too much overtime. People put in great effort to cheat the time clock and put in more overtime than would be acceptable. People would get to work an hour early and leave at 10pm. There was little effort to make work more efficient because the employees can just work more. The company had an employee discount deal with customer products and employees were pressured into buying their products. It’s much better in America where the common tactic is to switch jobs every few years. America has a long way to go when it comes to work, but saying it’s almost as bad as Japan is just not true.
It’s crazy how much doesn’t even get done. No one wants to leave before their boss, so they space out their work and give the appearance of being busy.
For what I’ve heard japanese spend a lot of time working
According to the OECD, the average Japanese worker works just about the same number of hours per year as the average EU worker. It’s actually pretty surprising because the average Japanese worker seems to work less than workers in countries that most people do not think of as being overworked (e.g. Canada, Spain, Italy).
Of course, averages don’t account for distribution, so there absolutely are workers who are chronically overworked. There’s also more part-time workers in Japan, which kind of explains things. On the other hand, you then have to ask how/why it’s financially feasible for so many people to sustain their livelihoods with only part time work.
It really is amazing that even the worst linux ones are better than like everything on windows. I find fileroller so much more annoying than Ark, but if someone ported fileroller to windows it would probably be the best thing available by a huge margin
Okay I wanted to mention that there was pretty much no explorer alternative. But there is QTTabbar and Clover are a thing, and there are tons of other tools.
I think just nothing “looking like an improvement over explorer” on alternativeto.net
Overall, I dont know, Windows 10 was so ugly?? All those rectangles, the white theme, just ugly?
Why worry about Israel attacking a US ship while pretending they are Egyptian in order to draw the US in a wider war? It’s not like they’ve been shown to be spying on the US, or have any recent evidence that Netanyahu’s government funds enemies of Israel in order to bolster political support.
This is all a big nothing-burger of millions of lives at stake. 😬
Thanks for that! I watched his pinned video and I don’t think that " but hey, it’s Hollywood! It’s a dog eat ass world and I gave it a shot!" us gonna leave my brain for a long time 🤣
Come on, nothing burger is one of the better ones the kids these days have come up with. I give Nothing Burger the Gen X seal of who gives a fuck what you think. Let people like things.
Just for information, how endgame is an endgame in Civilization? I assume at some point you do so well that you can’t do anything else and all new nations must bow to ur immense nuclear power
It depends, but in civ 6 at least, if you don’t go for science or culture, someone else will win those eventually. Usually you become so overpowered compared to the AI by the endgame that you’re just waiting for the win screen to show up.
That explains everything that’s going on. Whoever was playing this game won the two big wars so everything pretty much got settled out so they gave up before actually winning the game.
I ended up running a military campaign across the entire world because nobody would stop being hostile, then I eventually lost as my own cities rose against me.
It was my first Civ campaign, I played it in one go for hours upon hours until late at night.
The feeling of utter futility after complete domination is still memorable to me, it was such a strange feeling.
I know the guy meant it as a joke but in my team I see the damage “academic” OOP/UML courses do to a programmer. In a library that’s supposed to be high-performance code in C++ and does stuff like solving certain PDEs and performing heavy Monte-Carlo simulations, the guys with OOP/UML background tend to abuse dynamic polymorphism (they put on a pikachu face when you show them that there’s also static polymorphism) and write a lot of bad code with lots of indirections and many of them aren’t aware of the fact that virtual functions and dynamic_cast’s have a price and an especially ugly one if you use them at every step of your iterative algorithm. They’re usually used to garbage collectors and when they switch to C++ they become paranoiac and abuse shared_ptr’s because it gives them peace of mind as the resource will be guaranteed to be freed when it’s not needed anymore and they don’t have to care about when that is the case, they obviously ignore that under the hood there are atomics when incrementing the ref counter (I removed the shared pointers of a dev who did this in our team and our code became twice as fast). Like the guy in the screenshot I certainly wouldn’t want to have someone in my team who was molded by Java and UML diagrams.
Depends on the requirements. Writing the code in a natural and readable way should be number one.
Then you benchmark and find out what actually takes time; and then optimize from there.
At least thats my approach when working with mostly functional languages. No need obsess over the performance of something thats ran only a dozen times per second.
I do hate over engineered abstractions though. But not for performance reasons.
You need to me careful about benchmarking to find performance problems after the fact. You can get stuck in a local maxima where there is no particular cost center buts it’s all just slow.
If performance specifically is a goal there should probably at least be a theory of how it will be achieved and then that can be refined with benchmarks and profiling.
Writing the code in a natural and readable way should be number one.
I mean, even there it depends what you’re doing. A small matrix multiplication library should be fast even if it makes the code uglier. For most coders you’re right, though.
You can add tons of explanatory comments with zero performance cost.
Also in programming in general (so, outside stuff like being a Quant) the fraction of the code made which has high performance as the top priority is miniscule (and I say this having actually designed high-performance software systems for a living) - as explained earlier by @ForegoneConclusion, you don’t optimize upfront, you optimized when you figure out it’s actually needed.
Thinking about it, if you’re designing your own small matrix multiplication library (i.e. reinventing the wheel) you’re probably failing at a software design level: as long as the licensing is compatible, it’s usually better to get something that already exists, is performance oriented and has been in use for decades than making your own (almost certainly inferior and with fresh new bugs) thing.
PS: Not a personal critical - I too still have to remind myself at times to not just reinvent that which is already there. It’s only natural for programmers to trust their own skills above whatever random people did some library and to want to program rather than spend time evaluating what’s out there.
Thinking about it, if you’re designing your own small matrix multiplication library (i.e. reinventing the wheel)
I thought of this example because a fundamental improvement was actually made with the help of AI recently. 4x4 in specific was improved noticeably IIRC, and if you know a bit about matrix multiplication, that ripples out to large matrix algorithms.
PS: Not a personal critical
I would not actually try this unless I had a reason to think I could do better, but I come from a maths background and do have a tendency to worry about efficiency unnecessarily.
I think in most cases (matrix multiplication being probably the biggest exception) there is a way to write an algorithm that’s easy to read, especially with comments where needed, and still approaches the problem the best way. Whether it’s worth the time trying to build that is another question.
In my experience we all go through a stage at the Designed-Developer level of, having discovered things like Design Patterns, overengineering the design of the software to the point of making it near unmaintainable (for others or for ourselves 6 months down the line).
The next stage is to discover the joys of KISS and, like you described, refraining from premature optimization.
I think many academic courses are stuck with old OOP theories from the 90s, while the rest of the industry have learned from its failures long time ago and moved on with more refined OOP practices. Turns out inheritance is one of the worst ways to achieve OOP.
I think a lot of academic oop adds inheritance for the heck of it. Like they’re more interested in creating a tree of life for programming than they are in creating a maintainable understandable program.
That’s the problem, a lot of CS professors never worked in the industry or did anything outside academia so they never learned those lessons…or the last time they did work was back in the 90s lol.
Doesn’t help that most universities don’t seem to offer “software engineering” degrees and so everyone takes “computer science” even if they don’t want to be a computer scientist.
There’s an alternative system where this doesn’t happen: pay university professors less than a living wage.
You do that, and you’ll get professors who work in the industry (they have to) and who love teaching (why else would they teach).
I studied CS in country where public university is free and the state doesn’t fund it appropriately. Which obviously isn’t great, but I got amazing teachers with real world experience.
My son just finished CS in a country with paid and well funded university, and some of the professors were terrible teachers (I watched some of his remote classes during covid) and completely out of touch with the industry. His course on AI was all about Prolog. Not even a mention of neural networks, even while GPT3 was all the rage.
To be clear, I’m not advocating for not paying living wages to professors, I’m just describing the two systems I know and the results.
I don’t know how to get teachers who are up to date with industry and love teaching. You get that when teaching doesn’t pay, but it’d be nice if there was a better way.
OOP can be good. The problem is that in Java 101 courses it’s often taught by heavily using inheritance.
I think inheritance is a bad representation of how stuff is actually built. Let’s say you want to build a house. With the inheritance way of thinking you’re imagining all possible types of buildings you can make. There’s houses, apartment buildings, warehouses, offices, mansions, bunkers etc.. Then you imagine how all these buildings are related to each other and start to draw a hierarchy.
In the end you’re not really building a house. You’re just thinking about buildings as an abstract concept. You’re tasked to build a basic house, but you are dreaming about mansions instead. It’s just a curious pastime for computer science professors.
A more direct way of building houses is to think about all the parts it’s composed of and how they interact with each other. These are the objects in an OOP system. Ideally the objects should be as independent as possible.
This concept is called composition over inheritance.
For example, you don’t need to understand all the internals of the toilet to use it. The toilet doesn’t need to be aware of the entire plumbing system for it to work. The plumbing system shouldn’t be designed for one particular toilet either. You should be allowed to install a new improved toilet if you so wish. As long the toilet is compatible with your plumbing system. The fridge should still work even if there’s no toilet in the house.
If you do it right you should also be able to test the toilet individually without connecting it to a real house. Now you suddenly have a unit testable system.
If you ever need polymorphism, you should use interfaces.
The Design Patterns book itself (for many an OO-Bible) spends the first 70 something pages going all about general good OO programming advice, including (repeatedly emphasised) that OO design should favour delegation over inheritance.
Personally for me (who started programming professionally in the 90s), that first part of the book is at least as important the rest of it.
However a lot of people seemed to have learned Patterns as fad (popularized by oh-so-many people who never read a proper book about it and seem to be at the end of a long chinese-whispers chain on what those things are all about), rather than as a set of tools to use if and when it’s appropriate.
(Ditto for Agile, where so many seem to have learned loose practices from it as recipes, without understanding their actual purpose and applicability)
I fully agree about the damage done at universities. I also fully agree about the teaching professors being out of the game too long or never having been at a level which would be worth teaching to other people. A term which I heard from William Kenned first is ‘mechanical sympathy’. IMHO this is the big missing thing in modern CS education. (Ok, add to that the missing parts about proper OOP, proper functional programming and literally anything taught to CS grads but relational/automata theory and mathematics (summary: mathematics) :-P). In the end I wouldn’t trust anyone who cannot write Assembler, C and knows about Compiler Construction to write useful low level code or even tackle C++/Rust.
That’s wild that shared ptr is so inefficient. I thought everyone was moving towards those because they were universally better. No one mentions the performance hit.
Atomic instructions are quite slow and if they run a lot… Rust has two types of reference counted pointer for that reason. One that has atomic reference counting for multithreaded code and one non-atomic for single threaded. Reference counting is usually overkill in the first place and can be a sign that your code doesn’t have proper ownership.
OP doesn’t know shit about arictechture OR history.
Early on in Italy they did finish buildings but due to the gravity situation and the soil there they would tilt over. Using the protractor (invented by da Vinci, an ITALIAN) they started calculating which part of the buildings to leave off so they would stay level.
and it could’ve been another work of art from u/shittymorph if In nineteen ninety eight the undertaker had thrown mankind off hеll in a cell, and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer’s table and…
Recognizing their hard work, it would have been helpful if they had occasionally issued public appeals for donations, similar to FitGirl. Numerous sailors are eager to assist such a great site and would be prepared to donate or advocate for their continuity.
Their main issue is prematurely assuming negative outcomes without providing the community with an opportunity to extend meaningful support. Additionally, their communication has been somewhat ambiguous and mysterious (and still is), causing confusion among users.
Yeah, this shit’s just weird all around. Don’t ask for money, but swap the site to invite-only because people aren’t giving you money? Calling it invite-only, but offering no path or conditions for getting an invite? Calling it invite-only but saying that it will at some point be open again? Giving no explanation as to when or why it might open again? If it costs too much money to be open why would it open up?
Bout to be the most private site in the world if no one can make an account. If they think I’m going to keep checking daily to see when they’re “open” I’ve got some bad news for their future plans.
They do occasionally ask for money, but their messaging was always a bit weird.
While I agree their communications could be vague in some respects, I feel like the actual issue was that they were too specific in one way. They’ve been clear for a long time that further donations go to buying games from GOG so they can put them on the site (they were clear that they have enough recurring donations to cover the site itself.) The fact that they do this is why they update so much faster than everyone else, since other sites have to wait for games to appear elsewhere and few people bother to distribute updates outside of major ones.
But I think that this meant that there was a lack of urgency that deterred people from donating. If they just said “give us money if you want us to keep doing this” I suspect people would have donated more.
I wonder what happened, though? Something made them change course over just a few days - as recently as March 11th, they were posting updates on their Mastodon account.
Even weirder, the site now has a link to a changlog, listing games they’ve uploaded but which are not available to anyone except people who were invited.
I mean, would you call this post ‘content’? It’s just low-effort, non-discussion-provoking, nothingness about a platform that nobody around here cares about anymore (except you apparently?)
You literally repost AI generated images, you dont even possess the originality to come up with your own prompt Lmao and you’ve never even made a post with over 1k upvotes. Git gud
Nah, fuck spez forever. That sentiment should never die. I hope a decade after reddit goes bankrupt, he can’t leave his home without getting the phrase screamed at him
We can decide to never go back to our ex and also warn others if it comes up, while still moving on with our lives. However, if we’re just bringing it up out of nowhere, we’re still hung up on them.
This is exactly right, I even find myself wanting to check my GME DRS subs but knowing I shouldn’t and feeling bad about it and blocking it for myself until the next week when I unblock and check my subs again in shame. But I’ll never return for real because I know she’s bad for me, wait we’re still talking about Reddit right?
I don’t know how to comment when I see this. I want to talk about how this works, but most people know how this works. So I don’t know why its a thing. Its funny though.
I would like to hear an actual explanation. I don’t know shit about light physics but my attempt to explain it is that the trajectory of the light is such that it reflects off of the egg into your eyes and that it is this trajectory that is reflected in the mirror.
My wife was having a brain fart once and knew there was a logical reason but couldn't figure it out atm. So I drew a diagram top down geometry class style. Set her straight just like that. It's just the light bouncing at an angle so that you can see what is on the front of the paper.
This particular version is more about the characters depicted (Denji and Power from Chainsaw Man), who are famous for being endearingly stupid.
The more earnest versions you tend to see on TikTok are mostly posted by, or at least targeted at, actual kids who don't yet understand how vision works. Nobody on Lemmy is under the age of 30.
Windows requirements: sprawling list of unsupported hardware based on an arbitrary requirment for a security chip that doesn’t actually improve security at all
Yes they do. Microcontrollers contain a microprocessor that is optimized for branching instructions and already include memory and peripheral interfaces which are connected directly to the processor bus (opposed to general purpose CPUs).
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