Yep, and they don’t tend to be addicted to any substances or gambling. There are many reasons. The point being that, for one reason or another, many of the intelligence services and highest-clearance positions are filled with Mormons, and the government just told them that they aren’t part of the club anymore.

Religious zealots are not exactly known for their reading comprehension when it comes to their holy texts.

Did you know that Mormons are actually preferentially given security clearances, since the United States Constitution is one of the foundational documents of their faith? Do you realize how many people with positions near nuclear sites, NSA datacenters, and CIA operations these bumblefucks are aggravating?

Those also look very similar to pokeweed. You probably had a pokeweed infestation.

I would agree with that assessment.

Ironic, then, that I can’t comprehend whether you are concurring or dissenting from my view. Whom are you suggesting isn’t comprehending?

An important note: I literally never said that it was literal cannibalism.

I claimed that catholics literally believe that it happens, and that they believe that the transsubtantiation literally happens, which is what you said in your original comment. The entire thesis of my comment is that it doesn’t matter at all that it doesn’t literally happen. All that is required for the point is that the original statement was addressed to people who believe in the literal nature. The statement is made to “you”, where “you” applies to the reader if and only if the reader “regularly consumes the blood and flesh of a demigod with elders standing around chanting”. I think we can both agree on at least that much.

I am pointing out that, people not being perfectly objective, we must interpret whether statements apply to us based on our worldview. If a true believer in transsubstatiation read the comment, then the fact that they believe that they regularly consume the flesh and blood of Christ is sufficient to make that statement apply to them. Thus, it is utterly immaterial whether they “literally” eat a demigod. It is sufficient that they believe that they do, and thus should believe the statement to apply to them.

But ultimately, the statement being made is addressed to people who do literally believe that it is happening. If you don’t believe that, then the statement doesn’t apply to you, does it?

Furthermore, if they hold, as a requirement for eating the flesh and drinking the blood, that you must believe in its magic, then they are still people who seem to think that they are regularly practising literal cannibalism, and are not just okay with that, but are convinced that it would be morally wrong not to do so.

Law of superposition. The timescale is in the order that you would find it digging down through ancient rock strata: youngest on top, older as you go down.

A very well-reasoned answer, thank you!

Thanks. Good point!

I’m just a peon on mint.

Here’s a question: if you know the steak isn’t real, having copied only your memory of it from the matrix, but you know that the original had to have been based on the experience of killing a real animal, is the nonexistent steak vegan? What if all cows are already extinct, like in the world of the Matrix?

A great point, but I wonder if it would have reached that point if cypher had been given relaxation time and good experiences in the construct from the start.

So, as Cypher made clear, the main draw of the matrix was that he didn’t have to spend his entire life being miserable, with shit to eat, and nothing enjoyable to do. Soo… What about the constructs? If they could simulate people and sensory input with enough fidelity to “learn kungfu”, couldn’t they simulate the experience of a juicy steak? Why, when they weren’t actually spending their time outside the matrix doing much other than sitting in a spaceship, wouldn’t they just spend 6 hours a day in the construct (again, not the matrix, their own simulated construct)? Wouldn’t that have given them all much more practice with breaking the construct of the matrix, and also let them have the nice stuff that the matrix offered, and also knowing that they were the masters of their own destinies? It seems like Morpheus was just a shitty manager, and Cypher was unfulfilled in his job.

To explain what I see:

This comic isn’t saying (or even implying) that people are born communist, at all. The comic isn’t even implying that communism is necessarily a good thing. It’s saying that the random person clearly thinks that it should be morally acceptable not to love people who express or possess certain traits, while the messiah gave no such qualification. If your god says “love everybody”, you don’t get to say “but these people worship a different God, so I should get to hate them!”

Love everybody.

The comic makes clear that you can’t just claim to be a Christian, then reject one of the few things about which Christ was unequivocal. The ultimate point here is that most modern Christians do not follow the teachings of Jesus. That communism is mentioned is simply because it is a common scapegoat among american conservatives, who overwhelmingly identify as Christians. There has never been a significant communist presence in the united states, but that didn’t stop McCarthy from turning people against their neighbours in snipe hunts for the “reds”.

The actual effect being deflationary, and the statement on hoarding are exactly the sorts of insights I was looking for. Thank you! Can you explain how they are actually deflationary? And what does hoarding have to do with it?

As far as the risky jobs, I am not, and have never been, saying that no one will choose a risky job. I am saying that it shouldn’t be a consequence of any good system to capitalise on the altruism of firefighters or the stupidity of people who choose a dangerous job. If people want to take on risks, great! If the risks are inherent to necessary labour, they should be compensated according to the relative expected loss of future productivity. Just because they aren’t under the capitalist system doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be. I must presume that the goal of this system would be to increase overall utility, that is to say, to increase —nay, maximise— total happiness and welfare. Consider a person who is choosing a job. We need people to perform all of these jobs, but some of them, like farming or construction, are far more risky. There may be some adrenaline junkies out there, as you have said, but the presumption of a sufficient number of adrenaline junkies to fill every construction and farming job is not a basis for a system of governance. You say “replace them with robots”, but that isn’t actually an answer. That’s just saying that we should have the goal of making all jobs which carry a risk to life and limb redundant. Anywhere it is economically feasible to replace workers with robots, it has already been done (or is being done now) under capitalism’s ever-increasing drive toward wealth centralisation. So, back to the person choosing a job. They are faced with a choice: all labor has the same value, so where do they want to work? Well, a rational actor will do a cost-benefit analysis, weighing risk and reward with each option. They may have a dream job, but that will only get them through the door. It doesn’t keep them there. If they get seriously injured, they may never work again. Risk of death reduces life expectancy, albeit marginally. Why should the rational actor choose a profession —or choose to stay in a profession— which carries with it known risks to physical or mental health, when they can choose to do something with virtually no risk instead? If a job carries with it risks of death or injury to physical or mental health, then those jobs should be incentivised to account for the reduced expected career length and risk, in order to ensure that those positions are filled. I just don’t understand how that’s controversial. Equality is not equity. Someone working as a firefighter should be compensated for the fact that, at any time, they could die for the public good. That loss of future expected productivity should be compensated by spreading the expected loss of productivity (risk multiplied by cost) over the course of their labour.

When you do not properly incentivise people, they leave for greener pastures or, worse, stay and continue through a cycle of depression. It is bad for civilisation to have fields in which experience increases efficiency (nearly every field) being filled with new people to replace the people who realised that entering the field was a bad decision. That’s not something you should plan for, but in a previous comment you said that there would be plenty of people waiting to take over when the experienced teachers left. That is not a good thing. We lose teachers because they realize that you are correct, there is no rational way to justify working as a teacher unless you’re some green-beard altruist who doesn’t believe in money. It just isn’t worth the mental stress to work, if the payment is what you need out of it. No good system should rely on the intrinsic motivation of people to magically decide to do the right thing and throw themselves onto the pyre. How does the Marxist system suggest that we should handle labour which, by its nature, is more dangerous, more taxing, or has a lower expected career length, while also being essential to social progress? Any and all of those careers you listed should have increased compensation based on the serious risk of death.

I will look elsewhere for the answer to the problem of accountability, because you do appear steadfast that the question of who determines and assigns the values of goods and services is meaningless. I cannot fathom that apparent position, less reconcile it with your other statements, but very well.

I would point out that what has happened was that I asked about twenty questions, you half-answered one and then agreed when I extracted some meaning from it, then changed my original post to reflect it. You derided the other three quarters of my questions, repeatedly ignoring them, then mischaracterised my statements as “trying to have it both ways”. Or “presupposing” things, without any statements supporting this. Talk about strawman. Rather than actually addressing the questions I specifically requested to focus on, you decided it was more important to just dismiss any questions which weren’t already solvable under capitalism as unworthy, then got butthurt when I characterised that flippance as belying that your position must simply have no answer for the questions you have been so tirelessly ignoring. If you wish to characterise it as a strawman, feel free. I think I have my answers. Thanks for at least confirming a solution to the first problem. I’ll see if anyone has any serious responses to inflationary concerns, risk as a necessary consideration, or the accountability question, rather than just claiming that they don’t have to answer them.

Be forewarned: it’s definitively from the 1870s. They didn’t yet understand cellular respiration, there are a couple of seriously racist paragraphs (most notably one in which the article author states as a well known fact that the “hyperborean” people are all candle thieves, because supposedly they ate the candles. They didn’t yet understand the nature of dinosaurs, either. However, the chemistry experiments seem fun, if potentially deadly at times, including some terrifying instructions on how to make chlorine gas, capture it, combine it with hydrogen gas, seal the container, then expose it to light and watch it explode as the photosensitive reaction makes hydrochloric acid. Fun times. Anyway, it’s a very entertaining read, and there are six volumes of the stuff. I’ve only gone through the first thus far.

I’m increasingly concerned that it seems like you are dismissing my concerns about risk of harm by just saying “it’s already that way under capitalism, so why should it need to be better?” It also seems like you are claiming that I hold the burden of proof for saying that the conclusions of game theory and simple economics hold, rather than that a totally untested, never-successfully-implemented system must prove its worth before completely discarding every single model which describes the system of humanity as we know it. Doesn’t that sound, very literally, reactionary? As in, a reaction on reflex? That we should just throw ourselves to the wind in the hope that we end up somewhere better than capitalism?

By saying that no true democracy that “includes economic matters” has ever existed, you make my point clear: you are saying “this has never been done before, therefore it must work because it is different”

The reason I do not provide data on human nature is because the burden of proof lies with those attempting to disprove the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis here is the current understanding under the system known to the querent: I.e. very basic economics and game theory. The untested system is the one which must prove itself. I would be very genuinely interested to see your data on “homo economicus is a myth, one that is disproven daily”, preferably starting with a rigorous definition of what, precisely, are the implicit assumptions of “Homo Economicus” which are to be disproved. The only presuppositions I have made, as far as I can tell, are that humans are not perfectly rational actors (hence the “easily manipulated” part), but that they are still capable of rational choices given incomplete information. Basic game theory can describe why people would make selfish decisions. All you need are the right perceived cost and benefit weightings to show that a rational actor would and should make betrayer moves. Just saying “altruism exists”, or that people who choose to become teachers have intrinsic motivation is insufficient to prove what appears, at least to me, to be a patently naïve view of the innate goodness of people. If you want my “data” on “a fair portion of people suck, and it is often rational for people to betray others”, I recommend the lovely little simulation “the evolution of trust”. That’s nothing but simple game theory.

As far as “having it both ways” on coercion, I believe that any society that I would want to be a part of should incentivise people to make cooperator moves, and disincentivise betrayer moves, rather than relying on intrinsic motivation in a pie-in-the-sky, all-in bet that humans are intrinsically good enough to cooperate at scale without people gaming the system. All you need to see that intrinsic motivation is insufficient for most, is to look in a classroom. I can provide studies on intrinsic motivation in the classroom (which is about as far as you can get from capitalism in the modern age), if that would be helpful.

Anyway, Coercion is not something in which I’m interested. If a system cannot act without being based primarily on coercion (as you seem to be calling it or, as I would say it “without the clear inevitability of falling to a totalitarian state”), then that’s not sufficiently better than the status quo for me to justify the effort of instantiating such a system

You treat the amount of teachers at equilibrium as the goal, but if you want an educated populace, your primary focus needs to be in incentivising those who are good at the job and those who have enough intrinsic motivation to want the job, to stay in the job. If you’re constantly shuffling out the experienced teachers for new blood, then not only have you effectively just recreated the current Teacher-Crushing Machine™ (brought to you by the makers of the Orphan-Crushing Machine™ and the Torment NeXus™), but you’ve also just put the education of your entire population into the hands of inexperienced and mentally-taxed people desperate to get out. That’s simply an untenable situation, and it’s the same for every sector which carries risk. You want to minimise the risks, then actively incentivise those who are suited to the job and who are willing to take the risks to actually keep doing so. Is the goal of this whole endeavour not maximising utility? How is creating huge populations of jaded ex-firefighters supposed to serve the public good, let alone help to convince the populace that the system works better than the capitalist way? If the end goal just looks like a slightly different torment nexus, why should I want to upgrade to Torment Nexus 2 (now made with 30% recycled material!), for the low-low price of a violent revolution or three?

It would be like sticking your penis in pineapple juice. It contains digestive enzymes that are very similar to stomach acid. The reason that butterwort (another carnivorous plant) is called by that name is that you can use the plant’s dew to curdle milk. Just like how you can use acid or enzymes to cure food, it would cure your penis (in fact, volume I of the book “Science For All” from the 1870s has an entire chapter on carnivorous plants, and they give a fascinating description of how you can cure meat using sundew or butterwort dew) The curing (effectively cooking) would not occur very quickly (it’s not like it’s piranha solution), but it would happen, and that tingly, prickly feeling of eating a pineapple that you get on your lips and in your mouth when you eat a bunch of pineapple at once? That would happen to your penis, but it would happen faster, and burn more, because the penis is a very sensitive organ.