Tiresia

Labor-based production is such 20th century thinking. Modern companies don't try to make products, they try to acquire capital. Intellectual property, industrial capacity, housing, utilities access, etc. Cornering a market is so much more profitable than trying to compete in it.

Why do you think there's so much money going into AI? They can't wait to rid themselves of their human workforce so that humans starving to death won't affect their production targets.

If capitalists get their way, capitalism will outlive humanity. Inefficient humans and their annoying ecosystem dependency will be left to boil to death or something while Von Neumann probes owned by AI-managed corporations spread across the universe. Just imagine, one share in SpaceX would be worth several galaxies. You won't find a better ROI anywhere in the universe!

I feel like this post is going to be interpreted very differently depending on what the audience is.

For left-of-centrists, this seems like a decent wake-up call. Stop being depressed about there being no solutions in your narrow overton window, and embrace the necessity that society adapts to reality.

For conservatives, "pessimism" is an odd phrase, but they'll be glad to hear you're warming up to signing up for lifeboat defense duty - maybe if you work hard you can get to be in it.

For realists, "abandon" is an worrisome phrase. It has always obviously been about both. Is this another excuse to keep consumption high?

Right now we're clearly still making more steps in the wrong direction than the right one. Militarization, abandonment of climate research and (already too lenient) climate goals, continued investments in fossil fuels, planned obsolescence, neocolonialism, etc.

With the US turning fascist and the rest of the world massively increasing military expenditure, I'm pretty sure even the ratio between steps in the right direction and steps in the wrong direction is worse this year.

I briefly stayed at a multi-millionaire's place. They did have a herb garden. Nice planters and automated watering systems. All provided and maintained by the groundskeeping company, of course. I sincerely doubt they ever planted anything, they just grabbed herbs when they needed them and instructed people what herbs they wanted.

I imagine richer people might similarly have food gardens maintained by waitstaff. Maybe not around their primary residence, but what if the desire to cosplay as or claim to be a farmer or plantation owner strikes them?

Unauthorized government cheese.

That literally is the opposite of a comedy.

The movement is stronger than ever. The coverage has disappeared, but there are more and more people willing to seek out every right answer and give up every privilege.

Centrists and right-wingers keep pretending that solidarity and radicalism makes movements weak, when it has always made them stronger. The moment Labor parties abandoned radicalism and chose the Third Way, their voter share dropped off a cliff. The moment movements abandon their most radical left-wing contributors to appeal to the lowest common denominator they collapse from in-fighting and the hardest workers moving off.

There is no Schelling point for less-than-complete justice. Nations, religions, ethnicities, even capital is just one of countless different ways to slice the pie and pretend that the hurt you suffer is more urgent and in-scope than someone else's. If you morally accept rallying to one subgroup, then you have no defense against others you depend on from rallying to another subgroup and coming into opposition with you. There is no way around it:

None of us are free until all of us are free.

Getting enough food supplies to last a season. Having plans for what to do if the power goes out for a week. Having a bug-out bag ready to go. Connecting with a community to prep for potential self-sufficiency. Learning skills that would be useful in a post-global trade scenario. Getting money out of banks and into tools and goods you can give away or sell. etc.

I strongly disagree with one of the core arguments of the article. The article describes "concentric circles of caring" - a person caring more about friends than acquaintances than compatriots than others. It then characterizes top-down action as trying to change from the outside in while bottom-up changes from the inside out.

This seems very clearly false. There are many top-down initiatives, like national welfare plans or child support subsidies, that try to work from the inside out. And there are many bottom-up initiatives, like veganism or supporting undocumented refugees, that try to work from the outside in.

As such, the question of outside in and/or inside out bears no relation to top-down or bottom-up. The conclusion of plurality of tactics remains intact, but only because it is the best position in a zero information scenario. (aka: throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks).

I think you're giving the author too little credit. They talk of the necessity of establishing solidarity outside the preconceived circle of caring, which can directly be understood to include the rest of nature.

The author doesn't give an indication either way, so perhaps they should have been more explicit if they agree with you, but "I don't think it's that simple" is a bad way to address that.

Conservatives are perfectly capable of understanding positive-sum games when they expect the privileged in-group to be the benefactor. What is a labor contract, if not a positive-sum game where the corporation sucks up all the positive gain?

Game theory as a cental tenet of the human condition is a liberal concept, which conservatives will happily discard if it doesn't suit them. Conservatives may cloak their disapproval in the guise of liberal concerns so that they're in a stronger debate position in liberal-dominated social circles, but what they're really upset by is the negation of the conservative world order - a strict hierarchy with narcissistic men at the top of clearly delineated nations, struggling for dominance through pettiness and violence.

They will accept any negative sum game, they will ruin their own livelihoods and their own lives, if only it helps sad little kings of sad little hills.

It can and it has done creative mathematical proof work. Nothing spectacular, but at least on par with a mathematics grad student.