Username checks out.

I can’t dare to hope ~that it’s about to go to zero~.

AI is where former cryptocurrency companies pivoted when mining cryptocurrency stopped being profitable. There’s nothing left to pivot back to. Even those who have drunk the blockchain Koolaid don’t think there’s money in mining. Just gambling by investing with real money and hoping someone will give you more real money than you bought it with.

Honestly, reporting GPL violations is probably a good way to combat the AIpocalypse.

(Do read that Bradley Kuhn blog post that’s linked there before you just up and email the SFC, but yeah.)

It’s down for me. See https://web.archive.org/web/20251012183954/https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc58.2018/AlpertAlienPrequels/index.html .

Don’t confuse condescension with reality.

Most Christians don’t really care what the Bible says, regardless of how much they like to pretend they do.

Be honest. Is this some fetish of yours?

1. Is living a curse?
2. MUH.
3. I heard someone on NPR say that liberals misunderstand conservatives more than conservatives misunderstand liberals. Not sure who said it. Someone on a program I started in the middle of.

Also, “3 of the following (1 each)” is a weird way to say “one of each of the following.”

Silly OP. Humans don’t use em dashes.

At most, their word processor magically turns regular dashes into em dashes and they don’t care enough to change it back.

I’m still mulling whether this really qualified as a shower thought, but I gave you an upvote.

That’s not really less likely to happen if I choose 25 years old than if I choose 10¹⁰⁷ years old, right? the genie said “forever”, which I assumed meant immortality. And there was nothing in OP’s post that made it sound optional to become immortal.

The heat death of the universe is expected in at most, say, 10¹⁰⁶ years.

So, 10¹⁰⁷ years. I’ll be an ancient, godlike entity far beyond the understanding of any living thing. Like an aboleth.

In Eisenstein’s estimation, the solution is a transition to a gift economy. And the process starts with:

• Negative-interest currencies
• Elimination of Economic Rents, and Compensation for Depletion of the Commons.
• Internalization of Social and Environmental Costs
• Economic and Monetary Localization
• The Social Dividend
• Economic Degrowth
• Gift Culture and P2P Economics

(That list is from the section titles of Chapter 17 which kindof serves as a “summary” of the rest of the book. He lists very specific policies in service to all of these points.)

Most of these are things that would require legislation to make happen, but Eisenstein is optimistic. Or at least was in 2011 when he wrote the book. (Not his only book, but I haven’t read any others by him. I probably should, however.)

Charles Eisenstin’s book “Sacred Economics” (which you can read here and that I recommend reading in full) has a nice, simple parable in chapter 6 about that.

Once upon a time, in a small village in the Outback, people used barter for all their transactions. On every market day, people walked around with chickens, eggs, hams, and breads, and engaged in prolonged negotiations among themselves to exchange what they needed. At key periods of the year, like harvests or whenever someone’s barn needed big repairs after a storm, people recalled the tradition of helping each other out that they had brought from the old country. They knew that if they had a problem someday, others would aid them in return. One market day, a stranger with shiny black shoes and an elegant white hat came by and observed the whole process with a sardonic smile. When he saw one farmer running around to corral the six chickens he wanted to exchange for a big ham, he could not refrain from laughing. “Poor people,” he said, “so primitive.” The farmer’s wife overheard him and challenged the stranger, “Do you think you can do a better job handling chickens?” “Chickens, no,” responded the stranger, “But there is a much better way to eliminate all that hassle.” “Oh yes, how so?” asked the woman. “See that tree there?” the stranger replied. “Well, I will go wait there for one of you to bring me one large cowhide. Then have every family visit me. I’ll explain the better way.” And so it happened. He took the cowhide, and cut perfect leather rounds in it, and put an elaborate and graceful little stamp on each round. Then he gave to each family 10 rounds, and explained that each represented the value of one chicken. “Now you can trade and bargain with the rounds instead of the unwieldy chickens,” he explained. It made sense. Everybody was impressed with the man with the shiny shoes and inspiring hat. “Oh, by the way,” he added after every family had received their 10 rounds, “in a year’s time, I will come back and sit under that same tree. I want you to each bring me back 11 rounds. That 11th round is a token of appreciation for the technological improvement I just made possible in your lives.” “But where will the 11th round come from?” asked the farmer with the six chickens. “You’ll see,” said the man with a reassuring smile. Assuming that the population and its annual production remain exactly the same during that next year, what do you think had to happen? Remember, that 11th round was never created. Therefore, bottom line, one of each 11 families will have to lose all its rounds, even if everybody managed their affairs well, in order to provide the 11th round to 10 others. So when a storm threatened the crop of one of the families, people became less generous with their time to help bring it in before disaster struck. While it was much more convenient to exchange the rounds instead of the chickens on market days, the new game also had the unintended side effect of actively discouraging the spontaneous cooperation that was traditional in the village. Instead, the new money game was generating a systemic undertow of competition among all the participants.

The development of currency results in loans. The practice of loaning starts the practice of charging interest. Interest requires constant growth.

Individual companies have to grow to keep up with the necessary constant growth of the economy as a whole. Any company that doesn’t keep up dies.

This is the way.

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This is the way.

Regexes in bash commands are my nemesis.

You’re a ginger, Harry.