Also some application of similar tech has worked itself into industrial machines and factories over the last 10 years or so, it’s downright ubiquitous for anything that’s expensive and requires maintenance/ upkeep. Also it’s well intertwined with the ML tech we see consumer facing nowadays, the image recognition of 4+ years ago was made to recognize issues with materials, unexpected growing patterns, anomalies, as well as recognition and counting etc… before we got just point your camera and it’ll tell you what you’re looking at.

Altruizine" – a substance that allows individuals within a limited area to completely share all feelings and emotions, including both pain and joy. The idea behind Altruizine is that people who feel each other’s pain as their own should treat each other as they would themselves. Altruizine. Klapaucius produces a large quantity of the substance and sends the above mentioned hermit (who is eager to help others) in human guise to experiment on the population of a single planet. Some of the results include villagers feeling the birth pains of a cow, depressed people being violently attacked and driven off and a crowd storming the house of the newlyweds to vicariously participate in their unaccustomed sensations. Eventually, the hermit is identified for a robot (because he does not feel the humans’ pain), is thoroughly beaten and tortured, then shot into outer space via a cannon. He then lands near Trurl’s house, where the story began. Concluding his tale, the hermit assures Trurl that his thirst for altruism has vanished. src

This is the somewhat harrowing conclusion Mr lem comes to in the cyberiad when confronting this same issue in one of the short stories.

Not to say anything against the sentiment, I largely agree just found it noteworthy. Especially if you’ve never heard of them give them a read/listen.

Every political position mostly tries to define in which ways violence is to be used. Realising this and knowing power is already established before you were even born. Seeing violence being used against your oppressor(s) is often times the only thing we feel we can still hope for.

Or from another perspective, is the war in Ukraine worth it for Ukraine or Russia, can you really say a war with so many deaths is preferable to being a russian subject, or an international embarrassment of the Russian state. Is the self determination of Palestinians really worth the terror and the war. We’re the PIRA justified in bombing London for their brother’s and sisters discrimination and deaths in Ireland. It’s ultimately all subjective, wether the violence of the system you fight against is bad enough you can bring yourself to fight.

Nothing brings back anyone but as long as there are people who want to, and do turn us into their machines, we have to rely on our interpretation of that being wrong, and fight them for it.

Both are abused by criminals and narcos and dictators

Everything is subsumed and used by those hungry for power, and with the means to solidify it. That doesn’t mean that the content of their claimed political thought doesn’t have meaning, or that we can never conclude anything about humanity or its ideologies from looking at history, understanding theory, analyzing culture, power …

Maybe understand why people here seem ‘extreme’ left, instead of just writing nonsensical, and obviously bad faith or confused arguments.

Because shock therapy has been done before, and the west is effectively at war with the result right now. Argentina might not be as bad but it’s easy to assume when looking at the history of the policy that it makes everything worse except for foreign and local elites.

Because they don’t have a perfectly fine business model. They get squeezed hard by both the oligarchs of music publishing UMG, Sony Warner who negotiate the price for the music. And from the other side by the tech giants google and apple who can cross service subsidize their own streaming.There exists essentially no space for them to make any profit in streaming music. So they have to go other places.

The only reason they’ll probably exist for the foreseeable future is because the rights holders are able to use Spotify to have more negotiating power against Google and apple.

Brother have you heard of both young people, and the concept of ‘having a future’, death might be inevitable, it’s still better to think about and implement things to quell the suffering, as well as to continue living with hope than to revel in the fact that we’re all dying.

Hope isn’t at the bottom of the box of Pandora without reason, it’s both, condemning us to strive and suffer, and the only way to make anything of it.

Brother US (and maybe the UK) made the propaganda and the systems of the world, they are gonna be very effective for their goals.

Have you forgotten they are a superpower or something? They are the origin of that kind of red scare propaganda, and they always aimed most of it not at the inside but at everyone else.

It’s certainly a saying here in Europe that we do what the US does ten years later (or that we do what they tell us to do) and it’s a saying because it’s core is true.

I listened to the entire and it struck a chord with me, it might be because I’m similarly petite bourgeois as the authors or something. But if you couldn’t get through it I might suggest softly that you read chapter 4 first (or only).

To me the order the book has it in makes sense, but it might be the wrong one for you. It explains the What for 3/4 and then carefully answers the Why with a short story in the last 1/4. It is essentially a manifesto with a reason to believe in it as the last part.

For me the reason it worked is because the walk through philosophy and history sufficiently grounded the authors claims toward the necessity of economic planning and rewilding and in combination with my prior beliefs made the utopia real.

The problem that unfortunately remains with this book is how we get there, but to me it seems reasonable to leave that part out for this book, not just because of the violence and messiness, but also because it seems like the much harder part to coherently write as well.

Edit: I’ve played one round of the game and it’s fun, perhaps a bit easy after knowing the content of the book.

The problem is that we need to for many reasons transition to an international order of democratic cooperation instead of economic and military domination. And if the US can never accept this kind of shared and cooperative approach foreign policy of everyone is going to be forever dragged towards this kind of zero sum bullshit we have at the moment. Even though it’s obvious that foreign policy doesn’t have to be zero sum.

Even if other countries are potentially less honest with their implementation of global treaties, even a relatively slow movement there and maybe a more thorough movement in the US makes everyone better off.

The only way to actually foster a cooperative relationship is to make yourself vulnerable, otherwise it’s just coercion and power not cooperation. And yes if you get hurt too much maybe you’ll have to leave again, but this pessimistic outlook from the get go is certainly never going to lead to the changes we obviously need.

How do we solve things that require global attentio and accountability, like climate change, with an increasingly hostile and isolationist country calling the shots on decisions about global economic matters.

Simply put if I want to live in a world somewhat resembling the current one in 60 years, American collapse or integration into global democracy is a necessity.

Also calling a country that has been at war for 80+% of it’s history a protector of global peace seems a bit questionable. Similarly I don’t think anyone can conclusively say that the US has done more or less harm than good. But by that same nebulous metric shouldn’t China hold that same title, as well as the Soviets, the British empire, the Spanish empire,the Romans ?

I would expect almost everyone to feel more ambiguously about the later list than the US, but both the US and empires of the past are exactly what they’ve always been, a tool for those inside, especially the ones in power to increase their quality of life, while everyone outside gets to be exploited, integrated, subjected to rules that do harm, and be attacked, regime changed and so on. It’s not actually the US that is a problem it’s the US being a modern empire that’s the problem.

That the US tries to be a liberal democracy doesn’t really lessen it’s status as an empire, especially if the powers at be largely prevent it’s people to decide against the status quo of domination.

Almost by necessity the most powerful are the most harmful if there are no systems to prevent their harm, diffuse their power etc.

Your experience might be true, but to frame it as representative or real in any general way like you insinuate with;

if you/they want people to switch up the way they do things, there needs to be an alternative that’s at least as good, but preferably better.

is just disingenuous, you admit you live in a place with 4000 people, yet still you complain about transit. It fundamentally doesn’t matter because you are in the last couple of percent in terms of transit viability.

That’s why it reads like propaganda because while the examples you give are likely true, the overall picture you paint is significantly worse than the lived experience of most people that use the system, because you consciously or accidentally collect examples that make it seem dysfunctional. It’s mismanaged and it could be much better but it isn’t dysfunctional.

I somewhat harshly disagree with this sentiment, sure most of the problems you mention are real, although I always feel like criminal danger in central/western Europe is just not really something anyone should let impact their live decisions, as it’s generally so rare –

Punctuality is very much a mixed bag regional and S trains are usually pretty good here in Köln, there are delays of course but half of them seem to be idiots walking on the tracks which I don’t really attribute to DB.

Long distance is a bit worse than that, you could definitely say delays are common and sometimes very long delays occur as well.

And communication is usually pretty atrocious. Although this usually can be sidestepped somewhat by just reading the app carefully and at least occasionally reading the upcoming construction notices.

But and this is the actually important thing that makes it all worth it, they run a ton of service, to a just insane number of stations. You can legitimately use it for all your travel if you just impose a time buffer about as long as the initial trip. From everywhere to everywhere in this country, usually for under 50€ if you just plan the slightest bit, or with the Deutschlandticket travel regio.

The amount of stations we have in towns of under 50k people might be among the highest in the world. The amount of people within x km of a station with regular (usually at worst hourly) service is enormous. The amount of track per person both in the country as well as company is staggering.

It’s nice and easy to call DB a joke but I think it’s far from it, public transit especially in urban areas, where as we all know most people live, is nearly world class in terms of coverage. You don’t need a car anywhere in Germany if you don’t want to and that’s a great thing, sure if you are impatient or get stressed when things outside of your control have impact on you, you might want a car but it’s very much not a requirement. Unless you almost pretty specifically have your home or work as far away from civilization as you can get.

DB has much more potential and probably should be much better than it is but it’s far from bad even. Some of the arguments brought against it also in your comment will just read like old anti transit propaganda for the car companies, wether rehashed out of habit or ignorance. Please at least get your mostly valid criticism and don’t aim it at DB but the car lobby, and 20+ years of neolib transit policy that’s responsible for this situation.

I knew 14 year old girls who would use the trains in the middle of the night and I have used them for all my transport that’s not on a bike for the last 6 years. And I like the system. Your comment reads like pure anti transit propaganda to me. Even though some of it I’d say myself as a jokey complaint.

To end on a lighthearted note, at some point in time I borded a train (45mins delayed although for me it was essentially 15 mins early in a hourly schedule)heading for Aachen from Köln Deutz. After heading successfully through Hbf and Ehrenfeld we found ourselves on the track heading onto the südbrücke back to the eastern side of the rhine, with our train conductor being about as confused that we were now rolling through the same station i borded the train at, as everyone else on the train. All in all we ended up almost another hour behind.

In this same reality it’s also still more expensive, logistically difficult and just again inhumane. If the afd is getting close to taking charge entirely, I’ll take my bike to France to learn how to make the polices job a living hell. Just resigning to stupid outdated thinking doesn’t seem particularly appealing to me.

Sure some might cheer when they start to push that hard against immigration. Others will riot and burn the streets even worse than they do already. Because for example we believe having such a thing as universal human rights is a good idea.

Because completely counter to whatever you think about defending borders countries have for literal time immemorial tried and failed to gain advantage or prevent each other from doing so by military force. It’s been catastrophic every single time. Or are the Greeks Romans, Chinese kingdoms, Nazis, Soviets, still here with us today, did they have a graceful and good end to their reign.

The choice you present is false both options will inevitably end in the decline of the West, one just might be faster than the other. But there is in theory at least better alternatives, they just require Europeans to stop being US lapdogs. And letting go of the thousands of years old doctrine of military and economic domination, that creates most of its own problems to begin with.

Yes it doesn’t work if you make it impossible or very hard for it to work. I’m obviously not perfectly sure but for the amount of refugees we have both in Germany and likely Denmark, especially now with Ukraine we spend way to little money on the process of integration, if there’s not enough (language) schools, shitty temporary housing and unhelpful and uncooperative Ausländerbehörden, we shouldn’t turn to blaming the people who come here for the problems we in the “West” largely created.

Blaming and viliviying Somali and Syrian migrants just gets us increasingly deeper into this rabbit hole, until at the end of the day you have fundamentalist or ethnic riots, or firing squads at the outside borders. Both is completely unworkable, incredibly more expensive and frankly inhumane.

The conservatives that think human rights are a good thing should get their head out of fantasy land, the crusty socdems should ask themselves how they let this shit happen, and yeah the afd isn’t gonna fix it but closing the borders as they demand is the most stupid non solution ever, just letting the thing heat up there on the outskirts until it blows up in all of our faces. Which it will continue to as long as no one takes it seriously enough to actually make a good solution. But relying on the publics generosity and frankly Kafkaesque government regulation and support isn’t gonna get you well integrated migrants in a generation, it takes 3 maybe 5 in that case. Which is what we’ve been doing.

Ah yes because 2M people without any ~15cm diameter metal pipes sugar and fertilizer makes a lot of sense.

Which is a stupid thing to say knowing full well that the IDF doesn’t give a shit about Palestinians, or anything said by them. The IDF and the Israeli police and public regularly take Palestinian land, harrass their people, as well as jail and kill them. How would any Palestinians suffering from that situation even begin to trust the IDF for anything.

But only for the 4 weeks a year you spend in unusually cold weather, the other 48 it’s more efficient.

It’s not like truly arctic places are a reasonable application but the overwhelming majority of our population lives south of Quebec and north of Wellington. So it’s not a relevant point, everyone in the Arctic can just use resistive heating or burn fuel, and if we get everything else on heat pumps we reduce our enegy use by a factor of 2-3 regardles.

It’s also literally always trying to monopolise the platform for a market and then essentially extract rent from that platform, which is stupid, Uber and Airbnb (…) provide an app and maybe a little customer support but joink N% percent of each transaction.

Lg chem Panasonic and Samsung, might be who you are looking for.

The idea is that air exchange mostly happens through a heat exchanger, so the air leaving the house warms up the air that is entering the house, for this to actually work all other parts of the place need to be airtight, because otherwise your heat escapes.