Read this yesterday, its always darkly funny how they think that the technology/social structure for their disaster compound will somehow continue to function in any sort of long term disruption. Inevitably a component brakes and your backup store is eventually exhausted and/or the one doctor you have dies from a disease or accident or enough of the post-modern share cropper farmers you setup to support you want out and stop sending in their tithe.
You would literally need to become a a “stationary bandit” in the state formation sense exerting coercion on surrounding productive land and people at some point to extract rents (probably in agricultural taxation) to maintain the value hierarchy but as the article notes, the leader of the merc team protecting the compound is the person who would most naturally fill this aristocratic warrior position, not the capitalist money guy who floats on centuries of state capacity gains, economic growth and diversification.
Yep. There’s a good walk-through of these dynamics in Love, Death, and Robots S3E1 “Three Robots: Exit Strategies”
The funniest part to me is that these idiots never stopped to think “Hm, Once freed of the societal and economic incentives to NOT just kill me and take my things, my armed guards might just kill me and take my things.”
The more I reflect on this latest examination of the absolutely absurdly stupidly wealthy and their desire to convince themselves that they can buy themselves the avoidance of future societal calamity the more I keep coming back to the sense that the more wealth disparity becomes so incredibly extreme (not just that the wealthy have more than the plebes, but such an almost-governmental quantity of money) the more they have to try to do SOMETHING like this. These people are so out of touch with what normal people do everyday to live (buying groceries, waiting for appointments, managing their time with work and relaxation, chores around the house, considering what to spend their money on and what financial goals they want to aspire to in the short and medium term) that they literally cannot conceive of having to adapt to even a modicum of that plebeian life. What I think they worry about is not that society completely ceases to function, but rather that things change significantly from how the global supply chain and government services function today, even if far short of apocalyptic collapse.
The other thought I had before completing that article was how the obvious solution is to not be so narrowly focused on the self, but rather to expand the circle of people that they should be trying to preserve. And, ironically, the larger that circle is the more unlikely it is that they will ever need to resort to a survival compound. In fact, taken to the limit, the more the ultra wealthy ensure that a significant portion of society have what they need to live comfortably with all the amazing resources civilization has organized, the more likely the (only) quite wealthy will not need to worry about a huge drop-off in their standard of living. The article gets to this point too, though missing the obvious conclusion that if wealth were not so concentrated in the hands of so few there likely would not be such a mind-boggling endeavor, at least not to the level discussed in the article.
I like the phrase catastrophically successful, from this article that discusses the tension between exciting-to-watch and boring-play-to-win-the-game strategies.
He doesn’t quite get to the point that, if playing the game optimally makes for a boring experience, the game should be changed.
If you wanted to change baseball to make it more exciting, despite near-optimal play, the new sport would hardly resemble baseball at all.
Exciting plays are high risk high reward plays. Winning strategies are conservative boring plays. This holds true for most games, regardless of the rules.
The only way to make baseball interesting without making it unrecognizeable is to run it like wrestling.
Just script it.
Baseball’s the opposite! Going for home-run-or-strikeout is the high risk high reward play. And lame to watch.
I think you could make changes without redesigning the game wholesale to incentivize:
- steal attempts
- increase contact
- decrease strikeouts
and still keep the feel of regular ol baseball.
Lower the mound, rigorously enforced pitch clock, deeper fences come to mind. You wouldn’t even know just from watching a game.
Judging from the feeds of some of my Korean friends, baseball being exciting might be down to a cultural thing. Cuz they are about it (Or, it might be down to their appreciation of the cheerleading. K-pop cheerleaders: the 'flowers' of South Korean baseball | AFP - YouTube)
It’s absolutely a cultural thing; American baseball is boring as hell. I used to work with international students and warned them not to expect too much fun. They always said I was right. Baseball in Latin America is fun; they have songs and dances. Baseball in Japan and Korea is fun; they have chants and songs (one team’s song is “What Does the Fox Say?”!). Baseball in the US…should be best out of 5; who needs all 9 innings.
Not really. If you attempt any other sort of hit besides a home run, the risk of a strikeout remains. If you hit the ball in play, there’s actually now an additional risk of other forms of getting out, including even worse things like hitting into a double play. One thing they could do to mitigate this is to make a strike out worse than a regular out. This would reward just getting the ball in play and making something happen even if it’s an out.
High risk high reward plays in baseball are things like running for an extra base hit when the ball wasn’t necessarily hit deeply enough. That’s exciting.
ACAB, but what happens when the unstoppable force of cops meets the immovable object of sovereign citizen bullshit? A week ago a 25-year-old white guy in Utah was stopped by police for not having a valid license plate and after refusing to provide identification or vehicle registration and telling the cop he had no right to interact with him, backup was called and after many warnings of being forcefully removed from his vehicle (again, white guy) they saw that he had a holster and/or gun on him and they said they believed he was reaching for it and they shot him repeatedly.
His mother was pulled over about a year ago and went through a lot of the same sovereign citizen bullshit with the cop. Apple, tree, and all that.
I mean, remember the whole shit at the wildlife refuge, or the Bundy Ranch? Basically that, usually.
The NYT is shutting down their sports desk, making The Athletic do it all.
I believe The Athletic is not unionized, and NYT reporters are… 
Short video illustrating actual audio from a court proceeding with a sovereign citizen where the Judge was not about to be run over by his bullshit: Sock Puppet Master on Instagram: "🟥🟦🟨 Source👉 Man tries playing mind tricks with Judge (by Court Cam on Youtube)"
There are abusers and there are enablers. There is an overt authoritarian death cult and a soft-focus death cult. The two parties are not the same – and that’s the point. They work in tandem to create this nightmare.
There is very little, if anything, that I would factually challenge about a post like this and the sentiment is very understandable, the frustration and exasperation at the lack of the variety of choice we would prefer to have in our political reality. It is one that I feel like I am seeing more and more, likely because we are already enduring what will continue for so many months still of the head to head campaign for the presidential election.
However, at this moment and even if all who are unsatisfied agree on the major facts of the problems with Biden & the Democratic party, what is the alternative that is realistic and not just a fantasy in early 2024 with the elections later this year? I don’t need to be convinced that the choices are not wonderful and ideal. I don’t need to be jarred from a false sense of hope or assurance that everything is actually just fine currently or that the current system and political landscape is working so well. I need harm reduction in the short term and to support people and organizations who are doing the hard and unglamorous slow and tedious work that over the medium and long term will improve the system. I don’t need protest votes or apathy & disengagement or “sitting out this election” or votes for 3rd party presidential candidates who will not win and could cause the worst outcome to occur (Trump winning the electoral college vote again).
And as far as the conspiracy theories that the Democratic party actually doesn’t want to attack or beat the Republicans too much because they need them to fundraise from or they want to enjoy their elite society ill-gotten-gains together. What a horsehit conspiracy theory invented out of much less “lets work together to be evil” motivations but instead: stupidity, bad judgement, self-interest of individual politicians, ego, etc… That is not say that Democrats or the party strategy are holy and perfect and that the results don’t end-up being very similar as if they were conspiring together. But I’m not convinced that just because people who mingle in that part of society have history or connections with both political party’s power players that it means that the two parties are conspiring to screw over the voters. They both just end up screwing over the voters as they try to gain and maintain their influence. But one party screws over and wants to screw over the rest of us a whole lot more.
In late September, Biden rolled out an ad bragging about his ability to work across the aisle. Across the aisle sit Republican seditionists, aspiring autocrats, and stooges propped up by dark money plutocrat networks. A person cannot rightly claim democracy is under attack and then brag that they are working with the people trying to destroy it.
Unless, of course, they are partners in destruction. Unless Biden’s proclaimed willingness to work with an authoritarian party is one of the honest things he said.
Voting is a choice between one of two power-seeking coalitions.
That’s it. You don’t have a third option. You choose which power seeking coalition you would prefer. You shape that coalition via primaries.
It’s frankly unethical to do anything but vote for Democrats in the year 2024.