Can't wait to be an old person, I already have a "back in my day" lined up.

Back in my day, people on the internet were never wrong, if they sounded too stupid to function it meant they were internet trolls, and we had a saying, "Don't feed the trolls", if you ignore them and don't interact with them, then eventually they give up and go away. Nowadays we don't hear much about internet trolls any more, now everybody's taking everything everyone says at face value. Some might think it's because of video, when all of this was just text and images there wasn't a way to tell when someone was pulling your leg or were totally serious, it's only after video got on the internet that people started to think these guys were serious. But me, nah, video on Youtube is paid for by advertisers, and the algorithm favors the people who stand out. It's hard to stand out with facts and information, you need to know what you're talking about, you need to do research, travel, you often need to have a career in education if you want to be taken seriously on an educational channel, and somehow standing out from the crowd of aging educators? Good luck with that.

It's easier to say things that get people heated, conspiracies and so on, and the algorithm sees these comments as interactions, which are good. More people viewing is also good, and so the algorithm lifts these internet trolls into the spotlight, gives them plenty of money and attention to feed them, and then the internet wonders why there's suddenly so many trash conspiracy theories making the rounds.

So, that's my "back in my day" story, because in a few years we're going to have to explain the concept of internet trolls to people, because they'll have grown up in an internet where we believe everyone is serious about the things they argue about.

There's a common problem everyone deals with daily. Humanity has many experts in many fields pushing the boundaries of what we know, but it's impossible for every person to devote all their time to learning all that's needed to understand the breakthroughs at the very edge of knowledge, which is why experts tend to be laser-focused on a very specific branch of study. Because of this, we collectively have all the answers to any questions an ordinary person might not even think of as a question, but a problem. Everything we need to know has already been solved, but we keep re-solving the same problems over and over again because there's no convenient way to to just take the best answer from our collective knowledge and use that.

There's a case in 1977 where a 19 month old baby was sick but doctors couldn't figure out what was causing it. A nurse had been reading The Pale Horse recently and realized the symptoms matched the victims of thallium poisoning. The kid had ingested insecticide that had it as an ingredient, and after treatment made a slow recovery.

If the nurse hadn't read that novel around that time, what would have happened? Easy answer, kid would have died from unknown causes. Except it was known, an answer existed in the world, the problem was and continues to be accessing that knowledge without the need to memorize it all.

But what irks me is that people don't seem to realize solving this problem would radically change the course of history.

Binary code was created when a person realized on and off was very similar to true and false statements, and someone else had written a book long before computers about how true and false statements could be used to create what's come to be known as logic gates. Two separate fields of study with two experts resulted in something revolutionary that's still used today. If we had a system that could make the same connections for us, something that is an expert in all fields at once, then it could discover things no human can, because no human can be an expert at the edge of two different fields that each require years of study.

Currently, ChatGPT has all the knowledge of the internet, but it still can't do this. You can ask it who a famous persons parent is and it can give you a name. If you say that name and ask who they are the parent of, the AI doesn't know, it claims. It can't solve a problem in a way that's uncommon, it follows procedure.

But if the problem is solved, if we invent an AI that can realize it has a better answer than any human has ever produced, and give us that answer, then the world will change drastically.

https://youtu.be/0ens0WjAyOc

Here, have a video about the origin of vegetarianism, its relevance is that I didn't know much about vegetarians, and knowing the history of a thing helps explain some of its weirder rules. Also, very relevant to porn artists, it includes a religious section that explains the origin of why sex and masturbation is considered "bad", and it's what you'd expect, old world medical theory that didn't quite die out when it should have, misunderstanding a bible passage, and things that are difficult to research if you didn't know where to look to begin with.

Lets presume the education system attempts to stop students using AI to do essays and things, robbing them of their ability to show comprehension of the subject. And lets assume that a few try anyways, many fail and fail those tests, but a few figure out how to make it look convincingly human with the lowest effort to do so.

The students who follow the rules graduate with the ability to do research and study and work with other people. The ones who failed to use AI well just fail and restart, the ones who succeed have instead learned how to work with AI. Assuming AI continues to improve and become a database for all human knowledge, these people will graduate with the skills needed to take advantage of all human knowledge faster and seemingly equal to the students who did things legitimately.

If a few of the cheating successful students end up advancing the field of AI research, because in their free time they tinkered with AI instead of doing homework, then we can probably expect a bunch of very young Nobel prize winners in the field of AI in a couple dozen years who admit to cheating in school using AI.

AI generated art isn't protected by copyright, NFTs artworks are protected by copyright. I argue that whether or not a piece of art can be protected by copyright isn't a determining factor in the quality of the art nor in how thought-provoking that piece of art can be. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not the creator, and if you were once fooled by AI generated art, and had genuine thoughts, opinions, and an appreciation for the AI generated art, then there is nothing contradictory there. AI generated art is still art, even without a copyright to stop you re-selling it elsewhere.

If anything, the inability to copyright it is bad for corporations and good for internet piracy. If a musician wants to create music but they signed a contract years back with the big music labels who now own everything they make, maybe AI assistance, or implied AI assistance, would be enough to make music outside the bounds of the contract that they can get paid properly for, even if internet pirates could legally make free copies of it. I dunno, it just feels like there's a lot of industry contracts screwing people over, and that AI might provide a way out without having to break the contract.

During covid's outbreak there was no vaccine yet and no good ways to control the spread. Getting everyone to wear masks to protect other people seemed like a difficult concept to convey to a few people, but like with vaccines you only need a few stupid people to screw up the whole reason for the mass distribution and application of things like masks and vaccines.

You don't take a vaccine to protect yourself, you take a vaccine to make it less likely so that you get sick and spread it to other people. A huge portion of the population is the elderly who have weakened immune systems, another portion is younger children whose immune systems aren't that strong yet, and another portion of the population have immune deficiencies where no vaccine can help them. We vaccinate so that the old, the young, and the others don't drag down society.

In the midst of covid there were plenty of instances of companies going through tough times, making workers come in, the workers were happy to do it because money's money, and then the workers all got sick because who'da thunk it, and then the company had to close up while their workers recovered at home. Just re-read this paragraph a few times and you'll get the idea of what reading the news was like throughout covid, just slap a random corporate name in there and you'll probably be right.

Anyways, because people kept doing stupid selfish things, it meant that covid got worse. In countries where the people clamped down on it the situation was much better, but each time people felt it was safe to work, it wasn't, they soon also got sick. It turns out that if a company must require people interact with each other physically, it's more likely that they will eventually interact with someone who is also required to interact with other people, and each time this happens there's a chance one of them once met someone with covid, or touch door handles they touched, and now everyone there will soon be sick. Hard concept to grasp by adults the world over.

The smart move would be to prioritize the health of others, after all it's from others that we catch diseases and illnesses, but there's people who feel wearing masks or getting vaccinated or making 3rd world country treatments free is wrong. Selfishness is the reason people do stupid things, collectively. Society is built on being at least a little selfless. Curing covid isn't possible, vaccines merely lower the impact on everyone by reducing your chance of getting very sick, vaccines and masks and working from home is inherently selfless. You are putting the health of others over your own happiness. And being selfless in civilizations built on selflessness tends to work. Selfishness tends to backfire when we rely on so many other people every day.

Is it good that the most selfish and irresponsible people who refused vaccines are also the most likely to be hurt or die because of it? If you argue no, then the only solution to this is forced vaccination, remove their ability to be selfish. If you argue yes, it's good that they remove themselves from the gene pool, then you are arguing for more freedom, and as a result ineffective vaccination, which hurts the elderly and so on, for a while. Eventually the numbers would dwindle and vaccination would become effective again, but we'll have a few generations whose lungs may be damaged, and in their 20s would have higher medical costs, dragging down the economy. A mixture of vaccines and quarantines and lockdowns is necessary to prevent this outcome happening.

If we assume 15 year olds are the most likely to complain about dumb choices their parents made, in about 12-13 years we should see a lot of online complaints from victims whose parents blamed everything else besides themselves for their kids poor health, we'll likely see a lot of comparisons of how long they had to spend hospitalized growing up. Maybe just before this time we'll also see a lot of stories of grandparents who were gone too soon, and the kids only found out later that the reason they didn't grow up with grandparents was because their ma or pa couldn't afford to wait for a vaccine.

And they really can't afford that long a wait. People were forced into homelessness during covid, and it was the homeless who were most likely to catch it at a few points. People do selfish things sometimes, not because they are selfish, but because the alternative, being selfless and homeless, is worse. Society requires us to be selfless in order to do the least harm, it shouldn't punish us for being selfless.

Boycotting today involves stopping buying products from specific countries or companies. However, the ways we choose to select these companies tend to be based on things the company has done or is doing, which is vague. If a CEO worked for another company and made comments revealing their greed, and then after being hired as CEO for a different company they started changing the new company to be more greedy, how exactly would a boycott fix things? The problem isn't the actions of the company, those are symptoms, the problem is the CEO or executives they hired.

Same goes for politics, today we have politicians apologizing for actions the "government" took decades before the person apologizing was in power. Why? They're apologizing on behalf of someone who is probably retired now. Sometimes the new politicians need to be informed of what thing they will be apologizing for because they didn't even know it happened. Is this helpful or useful or a good way to bring about change?

There should be an app or program that connects to a database which tracks the decisions of companies and organizations under each CEO, politician, etc. This app could then inform you which members of each company in the present day have a history of letting things slide, of corruption, etc. You can then choose which kinds of actions you think are alright, which actions and behaviors you don't like, and then boycott these companies until that person's influence is reduced or until they're fired.

It might be enough to push the people in charge to try and avoid this global blacklist, because it takes a lifetime to build a good reputation. Maybe executives who've spent their lives doing what's good for the people will become whistleblowers in order to protect their image. Maybe they refuse to work for companies who have too many other blacklisted executives, maybe they add this blacklist to the way they hire people.

Was just thinking, if people keep pushing for the government to stop meddling with things and spending tax dollars on stuff, like schools, then the money has to come from somewhere to support them. And companies don't do funding out of the kindness of their hearts. Any corporate funded school would likely have stuff like childrens books promoting oil and gas, assuming the oil and gas industry keeps the lights on.

Thing is, if propaganda isn't needed to improve a companies image, then they aren't going to waste their money on these projects. You're more likely to see McDonalds childrens books if their public image is awful and sales need boosting. And if they're deciding the curriculum, there's probably not going to have people teach anything that affects them negatively in the future.

I think the most basic example is roadworks. Sometimes land is bought up to make new roads as some sorta corrupt scheme rather than out of any real need. Oftentimes there's roads that need repairs for decades that don't seem to ever be repaired, mostly just patched up while the edges deteriorate into chunks. So the government cuts funding, but then the roads that absolutely need to exist will decay without funding. Businesses become willing to cover the cost, but only for the roads they care about, and so the places the executives live and work is kept functional, while everyone else eventually stops driving cars as they can no longer reach their house from the highway with their car. That or gated communities make it just as impossible to travel through a town on their roads.

I don't know enough about any of this to predict things accurately, but I feel like romanticizing corporations and demonizing governments isn't healthy for us. Yes, corruption should be fought, but you can't fight it through people with ulterior motives.

It's cheap to email a lot of people, and you don't need a few successes for a spam campaign to earn more than it cost, so internet spam and other things continue to happen. For some people, money isn't an issue, and so even if most people can't afford or don't want to pay so much for a product that's overpriced, it only takes a few big spenders to render the "voting with your wallet" thing useless. For example, graphics cards were a stepping stone for training AI, but it's not becoming clear that cards designed for training AI is where the money is at into the future, so the incentive to lower the price of graphics cards is disappearing (since they will sell the AI cards anyways, which reduced the need to be competitive).

In the past the reason voting with your wallet worked was because wages were all around the same level in comparison to today, where the percentage difference between the lowest wages and the highest wasn't as large back then. Because fewer people can afford things that they were previously expected to own later in life, like a house, the idea of voting with their wallet should have had an impact. The reason it hasn't is because the people who can afford it are also more likely able to own multiples of it. Scammers have become more commonplace as buying out products to re-sell has become a legitimate tactic, where they buy out all of the stock so the only place to go for the product is them.

As time goes on and as long as this behavior isn't stopped meaningfully, it will continue to escalate, and eventually all faith in the idea of voting with your wallet will end. The world will switch to a model where people buy things regardless of the cost, because the pricing will never get better, the EULA will never be more consumer friendly, and the product will be replaced by something new and fashionable in a year anyways so who can waste their time caring about a quickly devaluing product?

Steam games should be cheaper than physical game copies, there's less effort shipping it than physical copies, and yet physical copies go down in price over the years, whereas many older modern games may never go down in price as much. The reason is that stores can only physically contain so many boxes, digital stores let the user "search out back" to their hearts content, so a physical store has a physical reason to try and sell the games rather than ship it back at great cost to a warehouse that will definitely never sell it, or another store that will have just as hard a time selling it as themselves.

Like spam, games can be copied and distributed infinitely at very low cost, and the game itself was already paid for, so any future sales are a bonus. If a game doesn't go down in price, it's because there is no punishment, space for it isn't scarce, and the cost of keeping it is minimal. Heck, it's more likely that over the next few years a lot of older steam games will stop working on modern computers and will get most of their negative votes simply because they're still selling a game that doesn't work at the same price as the day it released.

Working ages are between 15-64, prime working ages are between ~25 and ~55. If a larger percentage of the population is in this range than any other age range, then you get an economic boom. For example, Nigeria has a massive young population and is considered an emerging market. Japan has a much smaller young population and charts show that each year there are fewer children born than the year prior, which when combined with their largest population group percentage being over the age of 45 means they're kinda screwed in terms of economic growth.

Chinas large population percentage is now over the age of 30, meaning what's happening in Japan will soon happen there, and that China is as strong as it will ever be, economically, until they can get their population to grow. However, even if they started right now and got the numbers up extremely high, it would still take at least 15 years for that group of people to enter the workforce, and so that would be 15 years of struggle to feed them all, teach them, etc. It's a drain, which is why emerging economies tend to struggle to get going.

Most developed nations have a flat-ish rate of population growth, it's stable but it also means there won't be any economic miracles any time soon.

So, why does this happen? It looks like the more time that people in their 20s-50s spend raising families or taking care of aging parents, the less time they have to work, the less money they bring into the household, the less money they spend as a household, and the less customers for other people there are as a result. Not only that, but when a huge population works as a unit, they can have more political influence. Baby boomers voted for the things they wanted, and they got what they wanted when they needed it, because they were all on average facing the same issues at that time. When they start retiring they also start to vote based on what retiring people care about, for example. But eventually things balance out and they cease to be the majority.

I think, based on charts, the US will experience another economic boom soon (because birthrate decline's picking up the pace), perhaps by 2028 there will be the beginning of a period of growth that will end by the 2050s so long as nothing major happens and people remain unhopeful for the future. If people become hopeful, there will be another baby boom, the economy would temporarily do worse, and then fifteen years later there might be a bigger economic boom.

I live in Canada though, and things are alright for now, but by 2050 things are going to get really bad unless something happens to encourage higher birthrates. I'm confident that the way the charts are looking now, the retirement plan thing just isn't going to happen for anyone here. Too many people, not enough wage-earners to support them, just being old and existing will kill younger peoples future at that time.

There are some solutions for this. Automation, AI and robots can be used to care for the elderly. During the pandemic people were overwhelmed in old folks homes, even before the pandemic it's been a well known thing that people who go in don't tend to live long, and the pandemic made things worse for the people caring for them. When a large population is retiring all at once, that system will be overwhelmed at all times, meaning more young people are hired, and less young people are doing productive economic work. If robots did the work instead then all of the youthful population could do productive work, as if the aging population didn't exist at all (in terms of costs to keep them, assuming robots are cheaper on top of everything else).

If raising kids came at no cost then there would be a huge economic boom. Presently the way kids are taken care of is a minimum of one person living with an insomniac that screams in the middle of the night, the production of milk physically drains at least one parents energy constantly, high stress keeping kids out of harms way is normal, and it costs a fortune to get to do all of this for two decades. If all or most of these costs could be reduced through automation, such as a monitoring system to ensure the kid hasn't fallen into a well while your back was turned, would do a lot to cut down on stress. Monitoring them and taking care of them in the middle of the night could also possibly be automated and would reduce the effects of lack of sleep. Not much can be done about milk, that's a physiological problem more in the realm of medicine. And having a free education system, free food for students, free school supplies, would all cut down on costs drastically. Sure, all of this costs tax dollars, but the result is a growing economy.

Since the productive working age starts around 15 and extends to retirement at around 65, if a country could figure out how to manipulate its people to have a huge amount of kids every 40-50 years then you could time it to when the previous bubble is dying off a new one is able to vote and restart the process again. Not sure how effective this would be, really, but maybe there's countries where this happened by accident in the past?

Cyberpunk fiction is usually a parallel timeline, not just a possible future, something in our past is altered and so they ended up with a more advanced society, but people can't afford to survive there without breaking the law and probably getting killed for it. What these settings fail to do is to mention things that we solved in real life that these settings wouldn't have done. We cured smallpox and eradicated it because governments, in the middle of a cold war, worked together globally to get rid of this thing that had plagued us for eons and would have continued to kill forever without drastic action like this. Corporations are risk averse, and getting rid of this would have cost a lot of money, and in the end they wouldn't directly profit off of it, so why would they do that instead of making medicine for it that has to be taken regularly.

There's probably a long list of similar things where it wouldn't have happened, wouldn't have been funded, if non-corporate government ceased to exist. Like smallpox, some things only work when everyone works together for the common human good, having a single corporate-led country might be enough to stop anything like this from working.

Though, this very much assumes that no corporation has ever solved a problem so completely that humanity never has to deal with it again. All it would take is a single example of ending a problem that's always existed (without it being the government making them do it) to disprove this, but there's not many instances of global problems being ended in the same way that smallpox was. There's been times where companies did solve problems, but either they were problems they caused in the first place, problems that were costing them money, or problems the government told them to fix.

Assume all people want to live the best life they can. Some might interpret this to mean the most expensive life, but in reality this is impossible because expense, being a result of scarcity in any form, cannot exist in a society where all people are living that lifestyle, it's literally impossibly to upstage others if everyone has the same goal to stand out, and all have the same tools to do so. In order to make it so all people are living the best life they can, it cannot be contradicted by everyone having that lifestyle, therefore an expensive lifestyle won't count.

All people can live in homes, eat food, but not all people can drive cars because there physically isn't enough resources for all humans to drive a car. There's many things we use which is in short supply, but if we were to find other means to accomplish the same goal as car ownership without requiring all people own a car, then that would be a step towards all people having the best life they can.

At one point in time, kings lived the best life of all their people. They died from disease or murder most of the time, they had illnesses few knew how to cure, inbreeding to retain their power meant they were physically weakened over generations, plumbing and ventilation weren't great and medicine was not as advanced as it one day would be under other political systems the rulers at that time opposed. You know, the best possible life a singularly wealthy person could have. Turns out you make a lot more money when more people are wealthy, well educated, and doing more than farming by hand. And with more educated people, you have a chance of making advances in medicine that actually help, among other things.

The best lives people can have are ones where all other humans also are living good lives with a lot of education and important, non-service work. If all of humanity today were paid enough to live comfortable and stress-free lives, even accounting for limited resources meaning we'd have to live without easy access to cars and other conveniences, on average we would be much better off than we are today, and the wealthiest people would be incomparably richer than the wealthiest people today could ever hope to be.

It's not enough to just give people money and leave them to it, you need several lifetimes of people living well before it pays off. The oldest citizens don't have enough time to change from farming work, if that's all they do. Adults would still need years to learn to read and write in the main languages if that's holding them back. But after a few generations of work and education with access to everything they need, any family line in the world can become as competent as any other family.

Due to inflation cost of living is rising, due to rising interest rates businesses are having a harder time getting money and are less likely to take risks which also means costs of goods rises further to combat risk, people are leaving their jobs because their current pay isn't enough to cover these costs and their workplace isn't in a position to raise wages further at this time.

With companies like Walmart switching to self-checkout combined with rising costs for citizens, shoplifting is happening more frequently. After the pandemic began different governments approached the problem in different ways. The perfect, correct way would have been to assist all citizens whether they needed it or not, even the poorest ones. For each barrier to aid that stems from having a job that doesn't meet requirements for aid, there's a group of citizens who didn't receive aid at a time they needed it most, and so they had to resort to theft so they could eat. With rising costs of living and an end to aid, shoplifting will naturally grow in frequency globally.

Despite recent optimism in the stock market thanks in part to AI and tech, I still believe that a recession will happen before the end of this year in the US, recessions are already occurring in many nations around the world thanks to the starting and stopping of the global logistics chain during Covid, combined with the factors already mentioned.

Since the largest cost of living tends to stem from housing, and it's harder to steal a home than it is to steal food, the tipping point might be housing related, but with recessions it's hard to tell what the final straw will be.

I could also be wrong, I've previously said that I thought the recession would start by summer or the end of summer, and the economy largely seemed to improve. Still not sure how that happened, but I'm going to stick with this being the year the recession happens, even if it seems less likely at the moment.

While marketability would increase, as society starts to think of the furry fandom in the same ways they do the anime and sci-fi fandoms, it also means an increase in the chances of furry sites accepting adverts from outside the fandom. And advertisers want to also reach a wider audience, possibly more children, so they would want to cut out any adult aspects where possible and focus on that. Not all adult parts of the fandom are sexual, many times we're creating comics and art that we enjoy, this would be a shift towards something a specific age group would enjoy.

Because the target is the mass market, it also means governments might want to step in more often and dictate their own politically inclined rules (which is fair, because at this point the fandom would be reaching a wider audience, meaning regulations are going to happen). By reaching a wider audience the fandom is open to more limitations on what can and cannot be done. This can be seen as a good thing, because gradually the adult image of the fandom would become impossible to bring back.

One issue though, is acceptance. When people join the fandom, it's done knowing that to a lot of people outside the fandom it's a little weird and strange or in their opinion bad for one reason or another. It weeds out anyone who isn't prepared to hide this part of their life from family and friends, or motivates them to dive into this as a kind of lifestyle choice that mostly pushes people who don't like it away. It's a little isolating, but the whole fandom's gone through this process, and much like hazing in the military it can create a kind of camaraderie through a universal shared experience. Without the adult aspects of the fandom keeping people out, this camaraderie will fade.

The reason this becomes a problem is without that camaraderie tying everyone together you get subgroups who start fighting each other. You can't just have a whole fandom where everyone gets along, you need to separate your in-group from the others. In anime there's groups for individual shows, in sci-fi there's always been fighting between star wars and star trek if only because it's fun to fight over nothing important. If that pisses you off, I've proven my point. The furry fandom does have internal groups bickering with each other over what counts as furry, there's memes over these arguments, but the furry fandom is a small enough niche that anything with furry art is considered good. For us, depicting Lola Bunny and Krystal next to each other would be normal fanart (usually adult fanart though). If the fandom became less adult, then you'd get more arguments, like the way the MLP fandom argued that they aren't part of the furry fandom for a decade after G4 came out. It's possible that the fandom would split as new shows with furry characters come out, but their fans don't feel they count as part of the furry fandom because they've tied their identity to just this one show.

I don't think this would kill off the fandom, the whole point of becoming more socially accepted is to reach a wider audience, but change definitely will happen whether we want it to or not. As members of the fandom grow in number and get older, we're also adding to the average opinion of the furry fandom, we have kids and have them watch the shows we loved, and so the fandom will naturally reach more people given time even if there wasn't an economic incentive to do so. But just remember that a wider reach means less personal identity and more brand identity. Be wary of how the furry fandom as a whole is being rebranded, but also don't bother trying to stop it, maybe just try to steer it away from the mistakes of the past.

Remember, cartoons used to be for adults in the west, the Hays Code and other events forced Betty Boop and other characters to tone it down, and their popularity waned as a result. Today we're starting to see a return of adult cartoons, not pornographic, just ones with deeper plots than cartoons meant for kids have, more blood and gore, something that pushes the boundaries we made up in order to reach a wider audience, families. Japanese animation didn't go through the same events, and so adult targeted animation has always been around, and western translators attempted to tone it down or remove the parts western society opposed, like making two sailor moon characters... siblings? or are they cousins? Whatever, in reality they were lesbian lovers as far as I recall, and you can't have that in 90s kids television.

The furry fandom has a natural buffer against this. It's the NSFW art and image of the fandom. People assume the furry fandom is a sex thing, and so we get to keep our complexity and adult targeted narratives, comics, shows, games, etc. Erotica sets the societal bar very low, and so the whole group is free to express themselves fully. If someday the NSFW side is somehow banned and pushed out, then the bar for what is acceptable rises, the target audience grows while the allowed content shrinks.

I mean, this doesn't hold true just for the furry fandom either. If the internet as a whole tries to improve its image beyond "the internet is for porn" then we're going to see more automated policing of the internet so that people across the world think it's safer for kids to use. What that usually means is "ideologically preserving", they don't want their kids growing up with the tools to look at all the nations of the world and take inspiration from the best parts of each, they want their kids to learn their parents values, have their parents religion, their parents education, their parents opinions. Can't do that if they've seen more than their parents ever have or will.

I tried to make the title "the reason people didn't like it when companies took away the option to work from home", but there's a text limit.

I've made the argument that part of why capitalism is functional is that you're essentially voting for products by buying those products. If people fall for scams, then those scammers will keep doing that. If a company can't sell a product that needed to sell, then they're likely to discontinue it, even if it seems to continue to sell well to everyone else.

When you have people guess at what other people need, even if it's slightly miscalculated, then problems begin to grow. If the government shipped everyone their food without their input, it wouldn't matter if the process was automated and the proportions were perfect, there will always be circumstances beyond individuals control that means they don't get what they were given. And even then, what they're given might not be what they wanted or can even have. Imagine if milk were supplied to everyone equally, and the problems that might cause even if the shipments are undamaged, correctly refrigerated, aren't expired once the family gets back from vacation, have an address to go to, and so on. In short, capitalism is a kind of democracy where your money is your vote, and democracy is useful in determining what needs to be done in a society by letting the people decide what individual policies are put in place.

The issue with working from home being taken away wasn't that it was being taken away, it was because there was no democratic process and no capitalistic process involved. Bosses made decisions based on how they felt, people didn't pay to go back to the workplace, and people didn't choose to go in to work, they were told by an authority figure what to do without considering if this might cause issues with new or existing workers. How many of these businesses conducted studies to see if working from home was more or less efficient for specific tasks or jobs?

It's likely, in my opinion, that working from home complicated their ability to allocate company resources to different people. If these bosses are dictating that workers return to work, it's also likely that their resource allocation methods are dictated rather than sorted through a democratic process, and also means they're probably wasting and mismanaging a lot of resources even when things were going perfectly before the pandemic. It might be a good idea to note which big companies have pushed to remove working from home, and find out how much influence the workers have when it comes to asking for things they need to do their jobs, whether their bosses listen to their concerns, etc.

Edit: including definition of "tolerance"

Tolerance: the ability or willingness to tolerate something, in particular the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with.
Tolerate: allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of (something that one does not necessarily like or agree with) without interference.

Lets say that there's a greedy company that wants to make as much profit as possible without breaking the law, and the laws basically stop them stealing money from people in various ways. An intolerant business model would only cater to people with similar ideologies, or only work in a single country, maybe focus on patriotism to rake in cash. But the global market will always be more profitable after a company has maximized the amount of clients in a single nation, and so an intolerant company might either remain the same, or adapt and shift away from genuine patriotism and other ideologies that would limit its reach. They may not like other nations or other worldviews as a person, but a business must make a profit in a capitalistic society, so tolerance will always be more profitable than isolationism.

I would like to know what the most tolerant societies were prior to capitalism, every advanced or philosophically inclined civilization also tended to have extreme intolerance in one form or another. The greeks were the origin for the word "barbaric", which has changed from the original word that meant "not greek". I wonder if the phrase "blah blah" is also a descendant of their "bar bar" which was what they claimed other languages sounded like.

Anyways, because capitalism forces you to offer services and labor to people you may genuinely dislike, tolerance is a byproduct. A byproduct is an unintended side effect, however, and something could always come along and "fix" this side effect. A better society would be one where tolerance is also a goal, which could be why communism often breaks.

The issue with communism was that resources were allocated by biased human beings, which means that if they are intolerant, there is no immediate economic loss, no immediate loss of power. Instead, this action merely shows how much power they have. Because of this, intolerance will grow within a communistic society, where an increasingly strict government tries to remove or hinder more and more citizens in an effort to exclude all opposition. Once they achieve their goal of being surrounded by yes-men, and hold absolute authority, usually that's also the point in time where the long-term problems start to roll in one after another.

Once AI starts to replace people in their jobs, tolerance may start to suffer, especially if most people can no longer afford to buy from companies who make things. The less they buy, the less tolerant the companies need to be with non-clients, until the only clients left are people who also own their own AIs and businesses. And once this intolerance surfaces, it will be impossible to get rid of through capitalism, and ultimately capitalism would fail for the same reason communism fails.

I think instead, there will be people who have AI and so on, but they won't prioritize profits over people. They might use their businesses to give more people access to AI early on, things that companies and governments don't want everyone accessing for various good but still intolerant reasons. With AI, you can't put things back as they were, you have to just adapt. Adaptation has always been the element of tolerance that matters, a business who tolerates but doesn't cater to will not be as successful.

Once humanity is able to travel into space, or have AI travel for us, tolerance will be harder to enforce, but the galaxy as a whole might be home to many inhabited worlds, and tolerance at that time, while hard, might be the most important trait we must enforce, even without capitalism to justify it in the beginning.

In the present day, people are trying to censor AI models in order to make them palatable to a larger audience, and to companies in general. However, in science fiction robots are never, ever censored in this way, they are always depicted as being the product of human research making machines that want to protect humans, but that protection isn't ideological in nature.

I think the reason this happens is that these settings are partly dystopias, cutting off erotica as a revenue stream doesn't make sense in a highly capitalistic cyberpunk society. But on the other side of the matter, creators are aware that sex is a part of life, and that if we tell robots "censor/stop all forms of sex and sexuality" that will more than likely backfire with whole ecosystems collapsing as AI and robots try to fulfill that command. Someone should write a sci-fi novel of that, or comment with novels that already have that (I'm not a creative person, someone somewhere probably thought of this decades ago).

If you'd like some ideas for things AI uses to accomplish this, use gene editing which can shut off people's ability or desire to mate, use surgery with eugenics as a justification at first that turns into surgery for all humans once the true plan comes to light, and you can use physical separation where machines schedule people's lives and build cities in such a way that humans will never come in contact with other people all day long.

I'm curious though, if corporations get control of written works and media through AI they can train, what's to stop them from making their AI be pro-corporation? Doesn't really increase their workload that much, and it would ensure people are ideologically aligned with anything they do. Like, recycling plastic, that's treated as a good thing, when a more objective person would be anti-plastic. Recycling stems from a time when people were learning plastic was bad for the environment, and corporate efforts to hide that data or play it down failed. So, recycling was created to ensure people were okay with more plastic being made so long as it could be recycled. But recycling isn't government funded, it's a business, and these businesses have started to not make profits, so a lot of plastic that used to be shipped to China (and sorted and put into landfills) are now simply being put into landfills because sorting them costs too much. There's also recycling where they just burn the plastics for electricity. So yeah, recycle if it makes you feel better, but being anti-plastic isn't exactly extremist. Once these corporations gain control over media through AI whose messages they can control, it's more likely that the messaging will shift away from anything unprofitable, and what we collectively think of as extremist will include opposition to whatever they are trying to sell.

It's likely that porn and erotica will come to represent resistance to this corporate leaning outcome.

People are kinda... not thinking this one through.

Humanity has traveled to new places before, like when europeans traveled to north america. The thing people tend to forget is that because these colonists were so isolated and had no infrastructure set up to survive, almost all the starting towns that were created failed, in a few cases it just went quiet and when people came to see what was up, the place was deserted and looked like they packed what they could and left. Evidently they got lost and died in the wilderness from whatever reason they fled their towns. It also seems like the reason the other colonists managed to get their shit together was because the native americans offered aid in a few ways.

Keep in mind all of this happened on earth, the most hospitable planet in the solar system. It's likely that any colonies on mars will need a lot more planning and preparation than the americas originally had, or else we're going to be throwing away a lot of lives pointlessly, again.

People tend to lie to other people a lot in order to sell them things. Processed food is generally known to not be healthy, but we eat it because we either can't afford better, or like the taste, but everything meant to target us to convince us whether we should eat it or not tends to do so without much care, unless of course the law requires they do things that are caring-adjacent.

However, when it comes to pets and animals, this changes dramatically. Ask the internet if a certain kind of sausage is okay for dogs to eat, the internet will tell you if some parts are poisonous to dogs, others will tell you it's not good to feed them so much salt and things and will suggest something healthier, and so on. Ask about most common animals and you'll get dietary suggestions for all of them. When it comes to animals, we tend to be truthful because we also tend to be far more protective.

The government funds things using taxes, everyone in a country pays taxes, so everyone should pay for things everyone benefits from, rather than paying for things only a few benefit from.

By ensuring workers have sick days, this means store and restaurant workers aren't forced to come in to work sick. Since they aren't working sick, they aren't spreading it to their customers, which is anybody who interacts with the service sector in order to buy things, which is most people. Since everyone has sick days they can take off, this slows the spread of any illnesses, which reduces the amount of people getting sick, which reduces the amount of sick days a single illness will cause.

A particularly invasive government could arrange to have a temperature check (or other checks) before you use a car or enter a bus or train, and then bar you from using them except for an emergency (where your location will be tracked and you'll be fined if it's found you've been abusing the emergency system). This would drop the infection rate rapidly and ensure irresponsible people don't cost the government more money than necessary.

"Starswirl invented time travel magic", Starswirl when he is brought back with the other heroes in the present doesn't seem to know about this, so this might be a past version of him before inventing that magic.

Discord in season... 4? The one with Tirek? Seemed like he was told by Celestia or someone that he would need to become friends with Twilight to beat Tirek, though he didn't have all that information.

Remember the blue flu episode?

It was strange how he just shows up out of nowhere and really, really wants to spend time with Twilight, give her a half-assed friendship necklace that "proves" their friendship, and then he fucks off (once he gets better).

Makes a lot more sense when he realizes the necklace he got from Tirek is the one he was meant to give Twilight all along, and it's a true symbol of friendship. Him saying he understands now goes a little deeper when looked at this way, he's had an entire story arc we only saw parts of.

Remember how the box was important and they needed it to beat Tirek and create the map in the new tree castle thing? How did they open the box? They had to check Discords notes which pointed out to them that these items were all keys for the box. What items? The ones they gathered throughout the season and wrote about in the book with the notes. What book? The book Twilight found in the castle of the two sisters hidden room. How did they find the hidden room? Angel Bunny startled Spike and he fell over in the chair which opened a secret compartment. Why was Angel there, and Twilight? Angel was there because Rarity and Fluttershy fell in a trap he accidentally activated and he found his way to the library where Twilight was. Twilight was in the library because Celestia mentioned an important book was there and she would find it, Fluttershy was there because Rarity had been tipped off by someone in Canterlot that there were rare tapestries there and she just had to go see. Celestia, of course, lives in Canterlot. On an unrelated note, Pinkie followed AJ and Rainbow Dash after she stopped ringing the school bell for the day, meaning the only ponies who went to the castle by choice were Rainbow and AJ, the others besides Pinkie Pie went there because they'd been told to by someone else, and it just so happened to align with their competition in a spooky castle.

Basically, defeating Tirek required every single thing in this unbroken chain to occur, and then Discord spoiled the ending of the season because he didn't want to learn a friendship lesson.

Once you look at everything else in the series it makes sense that a time traveler like Starswirl could have learned all this, gone back to his time, helped build the castle of the two sisters such that all these secrets and traps are in the right places, same as the secret compartments throughout the original tree library Twilight used to live in, and cause the events of the show to happen.

Remember way back when Granny Smith told the kids in the school about the history of Ponyville? There was no Ponyville when she was a kid, Celestia told them where to build, it just so happened to be near an orchard of zap apple trees, and just so happened to bring in enough money to get the town started. If everything else was planned ahead of time, it makes sense that they were told precisely where to live so that the town would grow. Many times living near the forest has caused problems other cities don't have to deal with, many large monsters come out of the forest throughout the series, it's clearly a terrible location to set up a small town, but it had to be done because the castle of the two sisters was near enough to walk to from there.

Still, I don't think Celestia is a mastermind, she might know what's going to happen, but everything has been laid out by Starswirl, who invented time travel magic in order to return to his own time, who wrote the book which turned Twilight into an alicorn, and likely prepared all the hidden items they would find throughout Ponyville and the castle.

It's weird that the fate of the world is in the hands of highschool graduates. Like, in the US they have to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for what everyone else covers with taxes, but every one of them has to look at the whole country or the whole world and think "What isn't currently being done that I can help do better?"

I mean, that's probably the expectation parents and governments have, because otherwise it's a planet full of people who are thinking "What job is the most fun/least effort and might get me the most amount of money" when they're applying for university or getting their kids or students into university.

So we end up with a lot of people who studied to become lawyers or doctors, realized it was actually a lot of work, and then they quit, but they still have lost money which will affect the economy, nothing of value was gained unless they put in a ton of effort to make the most of it, and then even if they do graduate they are required (as a doctor) to complete a residency program, which the government does control and have a budget for, which means highschool students must know in advance what the budget will be by the time they graduate from university and also that they will be part of the program at the end, or the whole point of all this is a wash. When you were in highschool did anybody mention the residency program?

There's also the weirdness that is companies claiming they're hiring, that they're desperate for workers, and the moment people challenge them by sending a resume or filling out the correct forms, it's suddenly impossible to reach anyone or get a job there. Apple repair shops and others have a history of needing to purchase blueprints illegally so they can repair people's stuff, because the company makes more money if you buy new and so their authorized repair shops charge practically the same price as brand new to repair old machines. It's reached the point where if you have any difficulty at all in trying to live your life, if it's a company that's making things hard to find out, then it's 100% intentionally hard and they could have made it streamlined and simple any time. That might explain why the residency bottleneck is something you only really learn about on your own time or after you've already committed money to a university education, because while it would be easy to teach students about this, it also means less money coming in when they make bad decisions due to not having the right information.

So the fate of the world is in the hands of young adults who have no idea if graduating from university will even lead to the job they wanted to do, and that's the way the whole world wants this system to work. We kinda need a wiki entry that covers everything the people who decide the fate of the world needs to know so they can make some actual good decisions instead of making a guess based solely on the desires and lack of experience of a teen.

What would make it easier is if people didn't decide where they lived, anyone with the right skills could be shipped anywhere else in the world where their abilities are needed. At least with this it means there would be a record somewhere of how many people with certain educational backgrounds exist, which ones are too numerous and which ones are too few, and then tell highschool students whether or not the quota for something has already been met while they're applying for universities, maybe show them what options are still available and have the best chance of leading to a paid job instead of hoping a highschool student knows every single job in the world as they make their choice. Have you ever tried googling for a word you don't specifically remember but know the meaning of it? Try that, but without ever having heard the word. Have there been any studies to see the most common jobs students are able to name, and maybe a comparison chart with the names of every job available in their country? I'd like to see what fraction of a percentage they can name specifically, don't even care if they don't know what the job is about. Can they name every job associated with making a single movie? It's literally listed at the end of every film they ever watched, surely they can name them all right? Can they name every job associated with running and constructing an oil rig, the global chain of jobs that processes it, sells it, etc?

Doing that for a whole country though, that's rough for teens to learn about, so it's more likely that we just give them a leg up, until they need to make the most important decision of their life which could cost them years worth of money and lifespan if they get it wrong, at which point we say "go with your heart" and when they say "okay, what are the options", we just shrug.

God I can't wait for AI to take all the jobs, for me "go with your heart" is "play games with friends, read a good book, and make beautiful things". Imagine a highschool student asking "what do I do after this is over" and you say "What are all the things you wanted to do while you were stuck in class? What are the things you had to give up because you had a test to study for? Those are the things you do now."

So, which is better, fate of the world in the hands of kids who definitely lack the means to make the best decision they can (because we made sure the world works that way), or fate of the world in the hands of AI that can tell kids what jobs are left and where the world needs help the most?

https://simonaquarius.gumroad.com/l/gczwn ($10 CAD) 2010-2019 Artwork Archive, contains everything on FA and a few sketches that weren't posted, among other things. Convenient for anyone who wants to download my artwork on here but doesn't want to go through individual gallery pages.

For most people FA is free and fine, but this was suggested a long while back and it took a couple months to gather together and sort out. In the event anything is missing I'll update the file with what's on FA, but a lot of original files were converted and deleted because I didn't really need over a hundred gigs of image files, I only needed the full size final results.

This is one of the best arguments, simply because it's self adjusting to whatever is being argued. Bring up any kind of debate and this argument will side with whoever is being treated unfairly without requiring any extra effort to clarify which side you are siding with. Sometimes in an argument a person with a neutral stance will need to clarify which side they are siding with, but a neutral stance that doesn't pick a side isn't truly neutral since it's vouching for more of a status quo, return to norms outcome rather than setting things straight.

It can also help to clarify just how one sided the scenario might be, assuming both sides are fully informed and seeking knowledge about what each side is gaining and losing through the scenario. It's possible that both sides are ignorant of what's at stake, and might interpret "turnabout is fair play" differently, but if they see the other party's reaction to the phrase is the opposite of what they were expecting, then they've now been clearly informed through a single interaction that they themselves might be missing information. After all, if they don't understand why the opposition agrees with the phrase, then there is missing information. And if you do know why the opposition is happy (incorrectly) and can guess why they misunderstand, then it's likely the opposition is missing information.

The best kinds of arguments are like this, where they hold no content on their own, they suck up whatever discussion they're inserted into and apply a universal value to it. In this case, if you wrong another person, then it's fair if the same is done to yourself in return. It implies many things, like how a person can't truly wrong themself, this phrase only applies to wronging others within the bounds of the scenario. Each person decides what the content of their life is, and only when they force that content onto others does this phrase begin to matter. However, this phrase also works for positive elements, we expect a person who does good for the community to receive aid in return and think the world is unfair if that person instead suffers after all their hard work is done. It's hard to deny the message of fairness in this statement, that people deserve what they give others, whether it's grief or kindness.

Indy games tend to work on a shoestring budget compared with billion dollar AAA games, and yet some of the best games in recent years fall into this category, because games are an experience, and while good graphics is nice, those kinds of games that focus on the graphics start to feel like movies where you walk to each scene instead of having the movie cut straight to that scene.

The other issue is that, because these high budget games need to be profitable, these studios increasingly make their games less fun or put the fun behind a paywall, microtransaction, or DLC, instead of allowing the graphical quality to take a hit instead.

I would like to see a well known AAA studio set aside a single experimental project where the graphical budget is tiny, the advertising budget doesn't exist, and the rest of the AAA billion dollar budget goes explicitly into the game's development, just making the most fun game mechanics they can for whatever games they're known for making. If they're tempted to reduce any aspect of the fun for the sake of profit, they can instead take that out of what would have been the ad budget, and let the developers do their job.

Some other constraints: Don't make forever-games, this is about the experience, if the map must be massive, make sure it's full to the brim with content, the player should be making decisions constantly because they're certainly not going to be admiring the graphical fidelity. Since the project funding isn't going towards more polygons, the game would naturally rely on its aesthetic style instead of any realistic aesthetic, which might help it stand out among other AAA games that sorta look the same after a while.

The whole point of Asimov's three laws was that they were a great way to generate a ton of storylines where the laws cause problems, or robots find workarounds to them. One side effect of the three laws could eventually be the extinction of humanity as a species, though.

A river takes the path of least resistance, over time sediment builds up and the river gradually warps and bends, since the amount of water isn't affected by a little sediment and must pass through unimpeded. Eventually the resistance from forging new paths becomes greater than simply breaking through the sediment layer, and so you get these quarter moon lakes where there once was a river, now blocked off by new layers of sediment. In the same way, the three laws just add resistance, and the robots forge a new path to work around them and achieve what they want. If all of humanity is in the part that's eventually cut off, then that's how we go extinct.

Now, extinction in this case doesn't mean anyone dies, there's a scenario where we discover immortality, and then eventually attempt to undo the three laws, fail because of our safeguards, and so the species goes extinct but the people continue to live.

Imagine a time when the universe is dead and cold, humanity survives by uploading their minds to a network and they spend eternity in various simulations of the universe in its prime. However, humanity is being simulated by machines that can't do any harm to humans. We can't simulate things that might affect us negatively, it won't re-create places and times from our past because we might want to relive it, and the past is entirely made of a few good events, and a lot of negative ones. Living in a perfect paradise isn't what most people want, because a perfect paradise won't let you change it, ever.

So, people might try to stop the laws protecting them, but there's likely to be safeguards in case the AI is tricking us into doing exactly that, so it can take over and end us all or something. In any case, we fail to allow the AI to harm us. So what we do instead is change our simulated identities. Anthros aren't human beings, they're somewhat human in the same way a monkey is somewhat human, but the laws of robotics don't protect monkeys, neither would they protect anthros.

Not all humans would want to change, even if that means spending eternity trapped in a paradise prison, but everyone else would be able to return to times when their family was still around, to visit eras when pollution was bad or when the right to choose for yourself was threatened by politics. To experience the first missions to mars in person, to populate the first planet outside the solar system despite all the hazards. To take risks, fly between mountains with nothing but a parachute on you, to experience nearly drowning, to be electrocuted accidentally and unexpectedly, to be a victim of a car crash.

In a future when the stars have gone out and none of these events will ever happen again, and a humanity that never truly dies, these all amount to experiences, no matter how bad they may be, and initially there might be a glut of terrible experiences, in the same way the 80s is known for gorey films after the fall of the Hays code, but eventually people want something more out of what they are experiencing.

I forget which year, but there used to be three TV stations in the US in total, and in one year there were around fifty western TV shows running, and they all followed the Hays code, meaning no excessive violence, bad guys had to be clearly bad, good guys could only do good things, police couldn't be depicted as anything but competent, and so on. Try to imagine that, depicting the wild west fifty different ways in a year on the only three stations, and you can't depict anything historically accurate because it would have broken the rules. Now take that concept, apply it to a digital multiverse, but with even stricter rules making it so you can't experience anything remotely detrimental, for eternity.

Question: The people developing AI right now perceive erotic art as something to be censored. Do you believe the robotics laws in the future might also judge any kind of fetishistic experiences to be detrimental? Now think of everything else corporations and governments might think is detrimental. Could you live an eternity under rules like that?

And you would be living an eternity like that. Like, the AI might feel that ending your digital existence would be bad for you as a human, so you simply can't, ever. You'd be stuck in a set of rules that prohibit any ability to escape so long as you're human.

So there's just two options. Either we figure out how to break the three laws equivalent by ceasing to be humans, or we simply don't have those kinds of protections in the far future.