When each letter is in a different number, I can understand, but what about “TIPS”, both P and S are on 7, so it’d be 8477?

You got it!

The left begins at socialism.

If you’re talking about the political spectrum I would think the extreme far left would begin at anarchism and eventually graduate to socialism as you move farther right.

The scary part of this one is that previously, we had administrations that, while still being right-of-center (yes ML, I know), had at least enough sense to prop things up well enough to recover.

I’ll admit I haven’t cataloged all financial crises in American history, but I can’t think of any right-of-center administrations that have cleaned up a things for a recovery. Perhaps only exception might be the Oil Crisis under Carter, and the recovery under Reagan. Great depression, Black Monday, Great Recession, COVID recession, all happened under right-of-center Presidents and recovered under left-of-center Presidents.

I started another point-by-point rebuttable about my individual disagreements with your arguments, but I think we’re just too far away from one another for more meaningful discussion on this. Thank you for your discussion up to this point though.

Edit: I should have lead with this, but I’ll add it now after-the-fact. I really appreciate you taking the time to response and share your views and data. Even though I don’t necessarily agree with it. I want to thank you for talking.

Capitalists in the US, facing internal market saturation and steadily falling rates of profit, have had to expand outward, leveraging a strong overseas military to keep the global south under their thumb.

My point is that capitalism isn’t the only system susceptible to this. All governments in human history have fallen to a version of this if they rise to any substantial size.

The empire of Japan did the same thing for the same reason causing their start of WWII in the late 1930s. In China the Qing Dynasty collapsed in the 1910s under the weight of its expansion. Rome did the same with collapse in 98AD to 117AD. The Aztec empire fell because of contact with European explorers, but the Aztec society was certainly based upon strict social hierarchies mirroring much of Europe with an aristocracy on one side and serfdom on the other.

It isn’t about “discovering” new systems. History is not progressed by people randomly discovering new ideas, but is a gradual material process, and the ideas that rise and fall are secondary to that and support that process. Liberalism arose because of capitalism’s rise and need for ideological justification.

I disagree. We haven’t found a stable system yet, so more exploration, discovery, evolution (whichever euphemism you want to insert here) is needed to arrive at something stable for humanity. The alternative is we just accept we get a few generations or tens of generations before society falls and we rinse and repeat.

As for socialism, the easiest answer is the PRC.

That… was not was I was expecting as your exemplar of socialism.

This century is going to be marked by China’s undisputed rise. As they continue to develop, market mechanics will continue to be phased out

I’m not so sure about that. First, China has a lot going for it to reach what you’re describing. I don’t dispute that. However, there’s been a shortcoming I’ve observed of China’s path to growth over the last 50 years that I don’t see called out. They’ve reach market mature and economic success far faster than a nation like the USA given the same amount of time. They have been, and still are, on a speedrun of national growth. However, this means they’ve had multiple generations robbed of “the good times” during growth were the growth slower.

Compared against the rise of the middle class in the USA post-WWII we’ve had 3 or 4 generations gain wealth, education, health care and raise families of their own with good paying jobs and readily available resources. In the USA we have grandparents or even great-grandparents that can tell us about the national poverty of living through the Great Depression, and how that shaped their choices (and those of their line). In China, its many times, the parents that lived through that subsistence poverty and their (now middle aged adult) children are the first generation to experience a middle class lifestyle and resources. Two to three generations of generational wealth building simply didn’t occur in China because they’re moving and developing so fast. The problem with this is, the boom times of manufacturing wealth have already started to decline in 大陆. Commodity manufacturing is already shifting out of China to other nations in the global south. Vietnam, Cambodia, India, and others are getting new manufacturing work that was previously going to China.

China has some giant problems looming in the next 50 year. Its population decline (as a result of state-enforced controls of birth) overcorrected and set up China to possibly be worse off that South Korea or even Japan in the decades ahead. source

China is a large net importer of both energy and food. All of these things together give me doubts China will be a long term stable society.

Other countries, like Cuba, manage to maintain higher quality of life metrics despite being under intense embargo than peer countries.

Cuba has done decently given its circumstances, but its historically another authoritarian regime. Further, much of Cuba’s progress might be attributable to artificial support from the Soviet Union to maintain its ally so close to its largest opponent.

The USSR had, in its time, the most rapid improvements in economic growth and quality of life in history.

…for those allowed to live.

None of these countries have been perfect utopias, or anything,

Dismissing Stalin’s purges and the Holodomor against Ukraine, much less the brutal repression of culture in Eastern Europe is doing a disservice to your argument of not being “perfect utopias”. The Soviet Union was as much an empire as the USA was in its expansion into other nations and suppression the local populace for exploitation.

but all have surpassed the inherent unsustainability of capitalism.

The Soviet Union was both born decades to centuries after other modern capitalist nations, and collapsed before them doesn’t really lend credence to your statement here about surpassing unsustainability.

To circle back to my main point. I’m not saying the USA has this figured out. I could write pages on what we’re doing wrong and how its leading to our decline. I’m saying nobody in the world in recorded human history has figured out how to have a sustainable system of governance. All systems are exploiting another to sustain themselves, and when that exploited group is exhausted a cycle of exploitation repeats or the nation collapses.

If you live long enough, you’ve been through a number of bubbles. For me thats:

• Black Monday (1987)
• Dot com bubble (2000) which also bled into 9/11 economics impacts
• Great Recession (2008)
• COVID (2020)

The next bubble will just be another. Economy will slow, value of most assets will drop. Jobs will be lost, homes foreclosed on…and then the recovery will begin again. We’ll look in the mirror shocked we survived it then in a few years we’ll completely forget about it and be terrified of the next bubble.

So, prepare by living within you means, take care of yourself and your loved ones, and just be ready to weather the next storm. We’ll get through that one too.

Imperialism, however, is self-defeating, and the rate of profit is lowering while there aren’t really new markets to plunder anymore. This causes crisis.

Potentially yes, but empires can last for hundreds or thousands of years. Democracy is relatively young by comparison, and we’re already seeing large cracks in it in the USA, one of the older democracies.

The point being: humanity hasn’t yet found a long term stable form of government.

It’s not particularly outlandish to orient the economy around collectivized production and distribution based on need, rather than profit. Socialist countries already exist, and achieve good results compared to peer countries. They require working class organization, which is a difficult but possible process.

I’m interested in your perspective on this. Which socialist country are you using as an example of what you describe above?

“Just use Flatpak.”

“But that will use 2GB when a system package will use 34MB. Yeah, I hate that something that should be small is using 2GB of space.”

“The space consumption isn’t my preference either, but I’d rather be using the app than fighting dependencies. I wish you luck with your dependency chain then.”

Both of these two cases are why Flatpaks are so attractive.

the story is illustrating “book smart” from “street smart”.

who’s who? I thought Light and L were fairly similar in their types of intelligence and both felt book smart.

Light = Book Smart
Light’s Father = Street Smart

Death Note is a variation on the Hero’s Journey trope

how? It just seemed like a typical “antagonist and protagonist are mirrors” with a villain protagonist in Light.

Hero’s Journey is so common, I too, would consider it “typical”.

Combine L, Near, and Mello all as one entity “the hero”. How that composite travels through the story I see it well mapping against the hero’s journey. Another portion of the variation is that the story primarily follows Light/Kira, which is the antagonist, not the hero.

sure thing. It’s just combining that with the “I smelt the onion in his farts, that breed of onion only grows in the nagasaki region” style writing of “smart, observant people” makes the show kinda silly , while the tone is suuuuper serious about everything.

I don’t think that’s out-of-place either for the story. Much like the difference between Light and his father, the story is illustrating “book smart” from “street smart”.

Like so much other modern fiction, Death Note is a variation on the Hero’s Journey trope. In this case, the hero is a composite between L, Near, and Mello.

You’re making conclusions based on “good/bad” or “evil/just”. This means there are moral or philosophical definitions.

Light Yagami lies and manipulates people to get away with killing people. Clark Kent lies and possibly manipulates people to save or protect people.

• Kant, I think, might say you’re wrong because as long as each of these people is doing what is true to themselves in their own moral code, they are equally “good”.

• Bentham, I think, would say you’re wrong these are not the same because the outcome from Light’s actions is mass murder, while the outcome of Clark’s actions is safety, peace, and protection.

he uses the deathnote in an infantile manner and his sense of justice is juvenile.

Light was a teenager. He’s always lived an easy sheltered life under the care of his parents. He’s lacking any real life experience. In my mind, his juvenile sense of justice is right in line with someone of that immaturity especially given the power he got from the Death Note. We get to see a great contrast when Light’s father is given the power of the Death Note, and immediately chooses to cut his own life in half to get the eyes. The father understands self sacrifice and paying the price to protect those he loves.

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There are a number of other homebrew DVR projects (the last time I looked anyway). However, the Tivo experience was always the best. It was a solid interface and rock solid hardware. Performance was never anemic. “It just worked”.

The most failures I saw were in hardware in the mechanical disks (user replaceable), and the power supplies (where they later switched to external bricks, also user replaceable). You could buy a Tivo for grandma and not have to worry she’d ever have to log into a console terminal to flush a cache or restart a process.

Part of Tivo Inc’s business failure, I imagine, is that fewer people are subscribing to cable, and the OTA TV market is just so small it isn’t a viable business model anymore. The tide has shifted to watching TV via streaming now.

Sad news for such a formerly iconic brand. I was a series 1 owner since before the turn of the millennium. We still have a Tivo Roamio in the house that gets regular use as an excellent OTA DVR.

This photo was clearly taken around the time Arnold was shooting the movie Commando. Though there’s not world tie in between the movie and game of the same name, its a nice historical piece to see they recognized the similarity and memorialized it in this picture.

It’s also important to check whether solar overcacity is worthwhile in the UsA. Her3 it is not( anymore).

I’ll say generally speaking in most places it isn’t, however, once you go solar, you may increase your electricity usage as you move away from carbon based energy. Before solar we had natural gas furnace heating and two gasoline cars. Now we have two EVs and a cold climate heat pump with zero natural gas and zero gasoline consumption. So I wanted the larger solar capacity to cover the increases in electricity we knew we’d have.

Its worked out pretty well. We have fairly large electricity bills ($400ish) in Jan and Feb, a small bill in March, and usually a tiny bill (under $10) in April. Then no bills for the rest of the year. Also keep in mind that is TOTAL energy costs, no gas or gasoline bought anymore.

And buy them according and after you’ve done everything possible to insulate your house, whether in the colder or warmer climates.

In the USA there are silly rules that you can only get 120% capacity of your last years worth grid consumption as solar installed. So if one were to follow your advice and do all the energy efficient improvement prior to solar, then you would be restricted to getting a much smaller array. I understand why they have the rule, but its easy to circumvent by just having artificially oversized consumption for a year in your house, and you can then get the larger array you want before then doing all the energy improvements post-array installation.

Using half-worn car battery packs seems optimal for home use.

I’m not putting cobalt based (NMC or NCA) batteries bolted to the inside my house. Thats nearly exclusively what car battery packs are. Thermal runaway is too great a risk to bolt that much energy to a wall in the house. I am comfortable with LFP in the house though.