It seems society always goes down the shitter over and over following the same path. People rise to wealth and power extracted on the repression of the masses, massive disparity, ignorance exemplified, xenophobia and blaming minorities for any possible issue, laws signed with golden pens but becoming more meaningless when...
Yes, it’s a drunkard’s walk. All systems constantly and inevitably evolve towards concentration of resources.
People talk about entropy being the big-bad, but selection is entropy’s personal wetwork consultant, and she is a cold heartless bitch.
It’s like a rainforest: you start off with a bunch of tree species that all grow at the same rate. Then some chance mutation makes one tree grow just a little bit faster, and hey look not only does it get the sunlight the others trees don’t, it shades them out so they can’t compete. That’s some hellacious selection pressure right there, and so the arms race is on.
You can’t stop that from happening, it’s baked into the very fabric that all the systems are built on.
Some deer decides that big antlers are hot, and a million years later all the males are stuck walking round with a fucking tree growing out of their head. Fuck the individual, keep them teetering on the edge of starvation or violent death at all times, extract maximum efficacy at all costs.
Everything from biology to economics and fucking video games. Oh no, you don’t get to play a fun creative entertaining build, you slavishly follow the meta or you’re out of the running. It’s the same in business, it’s the same everywhere you fucking look.
Every slightly sub-optimal build of [organism | business model | social organisation | I dunno, school of fucking architecture ] since the beginning of forever has been outcompeted by something slightly more effective, and has been abandoned, throat slit and dumped on the roadside like an underperforming child prostitute.
And enshittification is just one aspect of this. Anything that exists can be out-competed by something else a little more ruthless, a little more exploitative or unscrupulous, a little more expensive, a little more shitty. And at any step, someone can not take that step, in which case things stay as they are… or they can take it, in which case it gets worse. And once they have taken the step, there’s no going back. One little step at a time, salami-slicing us all to hell.
You can never fix it from inside the system, because the system is always rigged to protect itself - you don’t get there in the first place unless you’ve already subverted the things that could stop you. All you can ever hope to do is burn it all down and start again.
I was wondering who is going to pay for the reconstruction of all the razed apartment buildings, schools and hospitals in Gaza? Are the US and Europe going to do that, or is Israel going to do at least this?...
It’s all over twitter lately, people getting recorded ripping down posters with a graphic about the missing Israeli children and then their real names are found and are quickly fired from their jobs.
I’m not just talking about counterpoint, though. (funny story, my introduction to baroque and early music started after I went frantically searching for counterpoint after seeing an old Ethel Merman movie on TV as a kid.)
Counterpoint is all brain-tickly, but the real payoff for me is… uhh. Patterns that are obvious in retrospect, but weirdly hard to predict ahead, given how simple they are. You can get this all the way back to plainchant, and the more basic the construction, the more impressive it is.
Conversely, once you scrape off all the drama and fussy bits off most classical composers, you’re left with something very basic indeed. You pull the ends, and for all its loopy squiggling, it doesn’t actually make a knot.
Meh. I not words good. There’s a concept there, but I lack the tools to reason about it.
I don’t care for later composers; I love the elegant-yet-complex structure of early/ier music and I have yet to find anyone who can explain to me precisely what I mean by that.
I have a huge mental blind spot when it comes to music theory; I don’t understand a damn thing about it and likely never will, so I can’t put this in actual smart-people words.
But Bach (along with a number of earlier composers) sounds immensely fucking clever, like he’s carrying on a conversation on three different levels at once, and somehow doing counterpoint down the timeline instead of across it, even with an unaccompanied cello.
Whereas your beethovens and mozarts of the world seem to use ten times as much sound and fury, or ten times as many twiddly bits… to say very little at all. If you boiled out all the redundancy, all the structures would collapse and you’d have nothing left over.
If anyone knows what the fuck I’m talking about and is able to translate, I’ll be eternally grateful.
Hey, so I believe in a higher power but I’m not on board with any particular religion. Anyone else think it’s cool to just fly solo as a good human, no religion attached?
I personally am in a phenomenally stable polyamorous relationship. I’ve been married to my wife for 12 years, and she has had the same boyfriend for about half of that time. It’s a really fulfilling arrangement for all of us in various ways. We’re all genuinely happy and satisfied. I’m kind of casually looking for a...
If I see an interesting recipe online, I’ll rewrite it without all the fluff and discussion, in a standalone document I can have up on my phone while I cook.
If it’s deemed worthy, I stick it into the master document, called ‘how to make food’ - a document I have shared with my 17yo.
Will human societies always enshittify themselves?
It seems society always goes down the shitter over and over following the same path. People rise to wealth and power extracted on the repression of the masses, massive disparity, ignorance exemplified, xenophobia and blaming minorities for any possible issue, laws signed with golden pens but becoming more meaningless when...
Who's going to pay for the reconstruction of Gaza
I was wondering who is going to pay for the reconstruction of all the razed apartment buildings, schools and hospitals in Gaza? Are the US and Europe going to do that, or is Israel going to do at least this?...
What are your thoughts on people being doxxed for ripping down missing israeli posters?
It’s all over twitter lately, people getting recorded ripping down posters with a graphic about the missing Israeli children and then their real names are found and are quickly fired from their jobs.
What's the significance of calling it "Israel-Hamas War" vs "Israel-Gaza War"?
I’m in the US....
deleted_by_author
What are your thoughts on the concept of having faith in a Higher Power but choosing to distance oneself from established religious doctrines?
Hey, so I believe in a higher power but I’m not on board with any particular religion. Anyone else think it’s cool to just fly solo as a good human, no religion attached?
What are your experiences with polyamory, first or second hand?
I personally am in a phenomenally stable polyamorous relationship. I’ve been married to my wife for 12 years, and she has had the same boyfriend for about half of that time. It’s a really fulfilling arrangement for all of us in various ways. We’re all genuinely happy and satisfied. I’m kind of casually looking for a...
If you could custom make your *perfect* shoes, what features would they have?
Preferably realistic features, but if your perfect shoe involves some kinda anti-grav hover features, I’d absolutely understand....
[Discussion] How do you store/organize your recipes?
Hello everyone, I’m curious about how everyone here store their recipes and organize them (and looking for ideas for me too)....