Messages

1

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: March 19, 2016, 01:36:43 am »

It's impossible to get anywhere here, because in the end there is what is reasonable, there is what is nominally the law, and then there is how the law is actually applied. Feminists (and others, but it's mainly feminists relevant here) work tirelessly and successfully to warp things in their "favor", so all sorts of nonsense gets treated like it matters, alongside all sorts of injustice such as "Man is victim of domestic violence, man calls police hoping for help, man is arrested and treated like he was the aggressor when he did nothing.", etc. occurring. Note that Brion's listed legal definition of rape doesn't even allow women to rape men except via the men's anuses (although in practice fat chance even that is treated fairly). That's how ABSOLUTELY absurd things are, so no, the law means nothing. NOTHING. Law without justice in both the letter AND application of the law can ONLY mean nothing.

Sexual assault is likewise watered down and unequally prosecuted to the point of meaninglessness. Assault should mean violence or at least some severe invasion of personal space that is hard to resist physically or due to strong reasons such as "I would be fired and go homeless." (note that you should be obligated to clearly object and try to get out of it (if it's a suggestion/request/etc. rather than something already in action without consent, although obviously you have to object there, too, but in that case you're already being assaulted (IF you find it objectionable and therefore clearly object), whereas for mere speech sans action things MUST be clarified if there is to be justice), not merely imagine that this might be the situation...let the boss prove it to either be or not be the case; otherwise leads to wild disparities in information that can't be ideally dealt with because justice by definition doesn't automatically favor the CLAIMED victim). These things are frustrating to see supported if you're just a "normal person" (probably a minority at this point if it ever wasn't) who wants a world where only legitimately life-crushing things are cracked down on, rather than a demotivating, paranoia-inducing/cultivating, wildly unjust police state. But it just can't be helped, right? This is the world we live in, and lots of people actually like it this way... Let it burn, let it all burn...

The world works better if Moby is simply treated like an entitled jerk whether male or female. No need for society-wide shaming, ostracism, or violence and/or imprisonment. People that don't appreciate her can simply avoid her (the key issue here!) and life goes on. Since she's a jerk (IF she's actually a jerk often, that is) she'll end up mainly associating with other jerks and/or people that "use" her, so she still gets punished without any need to waste resources on her (so you can violently steal less money from people via taxes as well as not waste time employing people to accomplish nothing worthwhile when they would otherwise at least sometimes do something worthwhile), as well as no randomly punishing person after person after person that didn't do anything significant, if anything at all. If you legally punish or take from people unjustly they naturally often don't give a damn about things as they're already heavily owed by society, and who can blame them? Not me...

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It seems that Crest and Moby are able to get along again now, although I still don't think she's that great of a person given that she "pressed" him into an apology for this before actually apologizing for what she did first to contribute heavily to his speech. Of course this is not uncommon behavior, but she's still being entitled or similar like this, because she still cares more about being called "rapey" than how she made Crest uncomfortable up to the point that he objected THAT strongly...and she cursed at him in response, too, which apparently doesn't matter either as it has "slipped her mind".

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Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: March 17, 2016, 11:55:45 pm »

Well, I'll keep my main response to Brion via PM, but I'm not sure we agree on what real/phony respect vs. courtesy (I'm not sure if he really means the former or the latter) are and/or what a safe space is. Hopefully he can help me understand, but so far I don't feel like I've been considered by others as seriously as I've been considering them (maybe this is instead just meant to be a circus where everyone just reacts to characters however without interacting with each other at all on any serious level; I don't know), which feels rather safe spacey to me (if only I should be cautioned; I have no more information so far).

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Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: March 16, 2016, 11:48:25 pm »

This isn't loony. Killing unborn children is loony. Declaring war on people you have never met is loony. Wanting to go one day without being hit on or harassed is perfectly sane.

Newsflash, so to speak. Most rape victims do not speak up. The problem is, there are a few that cry wolf for celebrity status or for money. But this is actually a disservice to the rest of them, meaning they can't speak up or be told "you just want to make trouble".

As for Moby, this is totally off base. Switch the genders like Crest said. Suppose you were at a bar some guy closed the shades, took off his shirt, and expected women to jump his bones. He has a ripped chest but he's not an actor or anything, just some random guy? Most people find it charming? Not really. Most people find it weird, then creepy as when you say no he wants to take off his pants and show his package. Ummmm, yeah I can't imagine this works on ANYONE and the entitled behavior after calling on it is seriously unappealing.

This isn't loony thing. This is real. There are some frivolous rape "victims" but you should at least know when the claim is valid.

I didn't claim anyone here was loony as some general rule, although I'd say everyone is pretty much guaranteed to be loony about some things, myself included. I should be able to claim that newspeak, pushing for cruel, unfair laws and "justice" while ignoring SEVERE suffering that could be fixed by the same group clearly able to get the laws to change over and over again, and other THINGS are loony. Or stupid, or wrong, or bad. If these things are so core to one's identity that this is "triggering" then all I can say is that you're free to explain to me how I'm wrong with pure facts and reasoning. I don't always care what arbitrary feelings are out there in others any more than they care about my feelings when I see our disgusting world and they complain about metaphorical paper cuts when they could care about metaphorical beheadings instead. Obviously I can't give good solutions in many cases, but some things are just "loony" to where a clear improvement is simple to conceptualize.

I consider newspeak loony in that it pollutes our world and causes enmity and disorder by abusing trust in the honesty of people when they make a claim. It's clearly not a good thing. Moby DIDN'T attempt to rape Crest by a definition of rape that ONLY includes a range of activities worthy of heavy punishment. Trying to shove more and more and MORE under the term "rape" just makes the term soften to the point of meaninglessness, because you now never know if someone was just made uncomfortable or if they were actually ASSAULTED.

The reason I brought up feminism is because this newspeak definition of rape is overwhelmingly feminist. There is other newspeak (for example the "defense" budget) that is non-feminist in origin, but this is this and that is that. I'm sorry you can't accept that feminism is as untrustworthy and abusive as pretty much any other dominant form of politics, but the truth is the truth, and feminist newspeak is feminist newspeak. I honestly don't know why you were "triggered" to defend this clear violation of the concept of rape unless you continue to view feminism as a great thing for all and/or continue to reject the TRUE definition of rape which Brion already corrected you on, but which you must have rejected. In the former case you should simply accept that nothing is pure, and in the latter case I don't know what you're doing, really, unless you actually like the endless grab for power feminists make in part through redefining words such as rape and harassment. Certainly rape victims are not better off with the definition of rape watered down, nor is society better off by misunderstanding the motivations of rapists.

There are lots of false rape accusations, too (especially the ones made publicly), and REAL rape victims tend to view the redefinition of rape to include this, that, and the other thing (such as "I totally consented at the time but my boyfriend will think I'm a slut so I'll just say I was raped, since I know women are RARELY punished (and almost never punished heavily) for false claims." or "Boohoo "Moby" made me uncomfortable but I was totally able to refuse and leave whenever I pleased and "Moby" was totally nonviolent..."MOBY" TRIED TO RAPE ME!", etc.) to CHEAPEN their ACTUAL HARD EXPERIENCE to the point of meaninglessness. This is what Brion was probably at least in part alluding to when he called your 100% wrong definition of rape "insensitive".

Never mind that mixing truth and lies, harsh reality and hyperbolic inflation or even pure fabrication of victimhood, makes it harder to effectively act to prevent rape in the future. Victims by definition can't do anything to reasonably prevent being victimized, so their feelings don't matter when it comes to prevention, since the one you have to prevent is the victimizer, who again by definition doesn't particularly care about the victim's feelings either. This may seem cold to you but it's not because the focus is on minimizing victims, not ONLY coddling them by lying to them about why they were victimized by conflating their feelings with the cause of the victimizer's actions. One doesn't call lightning striking someone to be "about" a shocking, burning feeling and project this onto the lightning; one instead recognizes that the laws of electromagnetism dictated that you were a convenient target, and that in the future one may try using things such as lightning rods (and avoiding holding things that function as such) to avoid being struck again in the future (or for others who were never struck to avoid ever being struck).

The claim that Moby attempted to rape Crest is NOT valid. Brion clearly understands this (I doubt he's self-hating enough to say he would've accepted Moby's offer while believing that she was trying to rape him) but you want to defend someone trying to stretch "attempted rape" from 100% serious to approximately 0.01% serious (and I'm being generous here) in comparison with ACTUAL attempted rape. This just makes the whole thing ridiculous to people who care about REAL RAPE and not nearly so much about mere discomfort, jerk behavior, etc. Moby acted entitled, but this is NOT attempted rape unless rape is stretched to include things that are TRULY trivial in comparison with forced or non-consenting sex or the attempts of such. Crest was made uncomfortable and his sense of fairness was trampled on, but SURELY this is nowhere near an actual ASSAULT.

In your example with male "Moby" and female "Crest" I would ALSO say there was no attempted rape, so long as it was the same, meaning that "Moby" didn't alter "Crest's" mind (to induce direct (but ultimately false) consent where there would otherwise be none or make "Crest" unconscious) without "Crest's" consent or initiate any violence against "Crest". This is key to ACTUAL equality, justice, and truth. Just because something is uncomfortable doesn't make it on the level of ATTEMPTED RAPE. For a comparison, imagine someone, let's say a hobo, said "How about you give me your money?" to you on the street, but you said "No." and were completely free to walk away alongside the hobo initiating NO violence towards you. Is this "the same" as if another hobo pulls out a knife, corners you, and ignores your wishes? It's NOT. This should be easily understandable, but our current world is just a sad place in this respect.

But those people are evil and should be shunned. 

I just have to ask...what happened to your ideal of a world without shaming? Because you just unambiguously declared shaming to be good in this case, undermining what you were saying before. Well, I doubt it matters how you answer (so don't feel like you need to), since you probably don't really care that much about justifying this to me, and that's fine.

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I sent Brion a PM semi-related to things here, since apparently even he can't get through to some of you sometimes even though he's super-tolerant and reasonable, and it sometimes becomes "loony" to me.

4

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: March 16, 2016, 03:54:29 am »

That wasn't seduction. That was attempted rape. Pure and simple. She didn't try to make him comfortable or play up her sexuality, she tried to outright force him to have sex with her, and then justify it by saying "you're a guy, of course you like it."

Crest is completely in the right here. The one who's being a dick is Moby (no pun intended).

It wasn't seductive to Crest, but from Moby's perspective just flashing some skin has typically been good enough to get it to voluntarily (on both the man's part and hers) happen time and time again. She didn't try to make him comfortable by his standards because she doesn't know him well at all and she never or rarely needed to know anything much about the man in her past experiences...it was enough to appeal with pure sexuality to other men. Anyway, she's unapologetically entitled and Crest had to call her "rapey" to get her to even understand that he was serious about not wanting things to continue, but so far she hasn't actually done anything to force Crest to have sex with her. She simply assumed he wanted to and was just being shy or whatever. It's wrong and shitty, entitled behavior, but it's WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY below actual attempted rape (which could represent forcibly altering the victim's consciousness with drugs or magic without their consent and then trying to make it happen, or just using nonmagical or magical violence to attempt to make it happen; surely these are crazily worse?) so far.

Note that I'm truly not defending Moby's actions as if they were proper here, but this REALLY shouldn't affect Crest ANYWHERE nearly as badly as an ACTUAL attempted rape or more especially a successful rape of him would. I think he could easily be more negatively affected by having to face that the justice he naively assumed would care about him is not remotely blind. Maybe he should ask his mother why she didn't teach him that women are no more wonderful than men. Or maybe she taught him but in the society he grew up in a "slut" would be shamed HEAVILY (if not more), so he didn't consider it a possibility where he is now, where Moby can possibly be much wilder in comparison.

I realize that a man in our society doing the same thing to a woman would practically just be executed on the spot on the woman's word alone, but there's no need to jump in with the feminists and redefine words to the point of practical meaninglessness. Unless you like it both ways, that is (basically no one only likes it the "reverse" way, where only the male gets extreme "defense" and reversing Crest and Moby's sexes would receive a far lighter response to male Moby's actions). I like it neither way because I don't see the point of having to replace words that used to have relatively clear meanings with speeches to get the truth across, since now who knows what anything means...was it newspeak or not? You never know and therefore have to treat it like it quite possibly was! Sadly, newspeak is winning, and people are getting loonier as the signal to noise ratio approaches zero.

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Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: March 14, 2016, 06:45:47 pm »

Rape is only necessarily about power to the extent that power is necessarily required to make the rape happen, but varying degrees of power are required to make ANYTHING happen. I'm sure some rapists enjoy demonstrating their power (I clearly wasn't denying this, I think: "The fact that you need power in order to rape doesn't mean that male rape of women is usually committed for the purpose of gaining or demonstrating power."), but there are MANY other ways to do this (and indeed other forms of violence and abuse are far more common), so it's clear that a desire for sex is the primary cause of rape (incidentally, soldiers at war supposedly are pretty rapey, which makes sense since they're super-duper-stressed (orgasm helps with this) and from a biological perspective "need" to pass on their genes NOW (meaning that men that didn't have sex in these situations were outcompeted in the genepool by those that did, regardless of anyone's "actual" motivations), since they are likely to be dead tomorrow (and since most men throughout history failed to reproduce (while most women succeeded in doing so) they quite often wouldn't have any children already, not that having more wouldn't be "better" for their genes, but rising above zero children is the greatest proportional improvement of all)). A would-be male rapist of women with no desire to have sex would be unable to get erect and would thus have to use other body parts and/or items to rape, but this doesn't seem to resemble the average rape to me, and doesn't explain why women of ages where women are far more attractive to men are raped significantly more often than for example 45 year old women. It's pretty much impossible to make people not enjoy having power (it's too advantageous to have power, after all), but making sex and masturbation as cheap, easy, and satisfying as possible would lessen the desire for some...unwanted, undersexed people to rape, and desire for sex is a basically ubiquitous thread throughout rape in comparison with desire for power (in the sense of power for power's sake rather than power for the sake of having the ability to rape, since the latter means that EVERYTHING AT ALL TIMES is about power) is. Anyway, I understand that people vary and can have many different pathologies or reasons to do bad things, but the most common thread for male on female rape is that the male wanted sex, since this is the only typical reason to choose to rape instead of doing any of many other terrible things (which can also be about power, but not sex), most of which are punished much more lightly than rape is.

As for Crest and Moby...Crest obviously is naive and thinks justice is blind, while Moby is used to men being happy to accept casual sex with her attractive body (note that her brain contents don't particularly matter in this equation to many of the men she selects so long as they still receive propositions from the same body; this is why she's turned down so infrequently, since it's obvious that almost nobody has a personality THAT great, to where "everyone" loves them, and I don't as of now see why Moby's personality would be so magical). Moby may indeed be happy with this while she's able to select the more exciting, attractive, or whatever type of men she likes, although it tends to be unsustainable one way or another (if the brain doesn't care about doing this forever then eventually the body will age and fail to attract the same level of quality in men).

Incidentally, there aren't many non-young women in Flipside in terms of character presence and importance (as I recall even Crest's mother has aged much better than average, not that she's a terribly important character), but I don't mind this since there's no need to make a fantasy as bad as reality is, where people inevitably become less attractive. Reality is bad and Flipside is one escape, so I prefer it this way! ;p

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Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: March 13, 2016, 08:47:38 pm »

Someone naked saying to another person "let's have sex" but doing absolutely nothing to rape it into happening (meaning that the other person simply says no and/or leaves) shouldn't be even remotely as emotionally scarring as actually being raped (if it is then that person needs a padded room...I mean a "safe space" to live in, far from society until they can be "fixed" (in any case the punishment should match the CRIME, not the victim's unverifiable AND random FEELINGS)). It's also already illegal to do in public and therefore surely needn't count as anything like rape when it's nowhere near as bad. Even a failed rape attempt would on average be much less scarring than a successful one, although how violent this was would be a large factor. In the real world people know what is and isn't rape and don't need to constantly push the boundaries (especially to the point where the original term becomes meaningless, as feminists often do with rape and harassment) because they're not angling to be a victim and/or to gain political power. I'm sorry, but your feminist links don't prove anything because feminists have a strong track record of both lying and ignoring the truth when it suits them. It's quite clear that Brion knows much better than you what rape ACTUALLY is, assuming rape is meant to ACTUALLY count as ALWAYS "rape-level" bad, that is, rather than "maybe really bad, maybe bad, maybe annoying, maybe trivial, maybe NOTHING".

As a parting "shot" (one of many possible since you routinely try to "educate" the forums with feminist "information"), no, rape isn't about power. At least not usually, out of the times when men do it (feminists aren't very interested in why women rape (assuming they even admit it's possible) so it isn't discussed much in comparison). The female rape victims of males tend to be youthful and/or easy targets, which makes sense if your goal as a rapist is the easiest, highest quality sex (obviously if you can get "enough" other sex you wouldn't tend to rape because the downside when you're caught is extremely severe; anyone who ignores this is uncontrollable anyway and not worth cracking down on or "matronizing" normal men over, as they are already not raping). Quality includes how attractive the victim is, so a disproportional amount of female rape victims are young and attractive, because that's what men are attracted to in women anyway. The fact that you need power in order to rape doesn't mean that male rape of women is usually committed for the purpose of gaining or demonstrating power. A rapist believes they have the power already, or they wouldn't likely try. Instead what they want is SEX. Perhaps you could try pushing for the legalization of prostitution, porn, and sex/masturbatory aids as much as possible for everyone if you want fewer women to be raped. If you make the alternatives to rape as attractive as possible to the potential rapists ALONGSIDE punishing rape heavily you'll tend to minimize the amount of rape (of course it would help if men weren't commonly raped in prison and in any case had the ability to get their lives back on track after leaving prison, minimizing recidivism, neither of which is the case in the U.S. and many other places). I realize that feminists have their dogma on this, but feminism lies and ignores evidence whenever convenient, and pushing the idea of a "rape culture" is convenient to feminism. The only real rape culture the U.S. has is in prison, and feminists refuse to fix this, instead preferring to pass more and loonier feminist laws instead, for the sake of the "fem" in "fem"inism (although ruining the law, justice, and society ultimately hurts women in the long term, too, not that feminists admit this).

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Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: March 09, 2016, 07:33:15 pm »

Didn't Crest actually reject Maytag for being "scum" earlier? And wouldn't he be holding a torch more for Suspiria than the "newly" unavailable Maytag in any case?

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Flipside Discussion / Re: Mistake Thread

« on: February 29, 2016, 09:41:38 pm »

Panel eight here reads "when they take you and spend money on you", where "take you" by itself might have a weird implication if it's not meant to include the missing word in the possible variation "take you somewhere".

Panel two here reads "Oh I'm SO SORRY I tried to seduce you!". You may want a comma after "Oh", but I'm not saying it's a mistake. Panel three on the same page reads "You fucking UNGREATFUL ASSHOLE!" instead of "You fucking UNGRATEFUL ASSHOLE!".

Panel two from directly prior (I missed this somehow last time) reads "You should consider LUCKY" instead of "You should consider yourself lucky".

Panel five here reads "THAT'S the reality that matters, here.". I think the comma is much more unnecessary than "usual" since the "here" doesn't seem like a separate enough "thought" for Crest to have not come up with it as part of the rest of the sentence, meaning that he wouldn't normally pause there (and it wasn't its own entity in the sense of him suddenly offering her an object to take). I overlook most commas since they're mostly pauses and such, but I don't understand this one in particular. Of course he still could have paused there, but I'm mentioning it anyway, just in case.

Panel two here reads "most ther girls" instead of "most other girls".

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Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: February 28, 2016, 08:54:40 pm »

bulmabriefs144, I don't think "winning" a "debate" necessarily accomplishes anything (it could happen to or it could not, usually not). I simply overinvested in part because you were easily convinced earlier, which put me in a sort of mental binary mode (meaning a personal quirk rather than a "justification") where I thought arguments (to be clear, this doesn't mean "fighting" to me) using facts and reasoning made sense to present. When you skipped over lots of things I said I tried to impress the points. I don't like it when I respond to essentially 100% of what one person says, paragraph by paragraph, but the other person purposefully refuses to acknowledge lots of key things I say (this is clearly undebatable and constitutes truth rather than any "hostility" or attempt to judge you as being bad, so please don't take it as more than an explanation), presumably because they're personally inconvenient to acknowledge in some way (from my perspective, by default, in the general case of this type of thing happening). I realize I was slow to adapt to the lack of progress.

Anyway, you say you want to "learn", not "debate", but it seems to me that how one judges the things I said to fit one (let's say "explain" instead of "learn" since it's coming from me rather than to you for the purpose of this sentence) or the other ("debate") is a personal choice that can be based on for example how "strenuous" "discussion" can be before it turns into a "debate". I did link to various information but you mostly didn't acknowledge it (among other things), while I tried to respond to everything you said every time (resulting in lots of text from me, increasing your problem or however you would categorize it). I realize this "burdened" you, but it's rather one-sided to categorize things as though you were just looking to learn and I was just looking to debate. If I was looking to learn I wouldn't simply ignore key things "against" my initial view, but I don't really care what in particular counts as what to you as long as you accept that I can't accept that your categorization of me is fair. I've tried to explain this but it feels like you view anything I say as hostile to the point where any explanation of my thoughts, given that they don't naturally favor you, seems like continued "fighting", "debate", and so on.

I have tried to disengage by acknowledging the uselessness of my efforts, the likely negative "public" perception they received, and so on, but you seem so far unable to accept that I believe I had reasons for what I did other than malice (as I would define the following) in the form of a thirst for "debate" in the same sense that I accept that you apparently had your own, dissimilar reasons for what you did. I don't expect to understand your reasons perfectly nor for you to understand mine, but please just let me have my reasons. I realize that you feel like it was a debate rather than a learning experience, whatever that means to you, but it feels differently to me. I'm sorry if my explanations disfavor you and make you feel as though you must defend yourself further from "debate", but I don't mean to do anything but as neutrally as possible explain my perspective (the steps that led to this waste of time, very likely more on my part (and therefore presumably "punishing" me more than you) than yours considering how much I typed in total), for I can't simply leave it at your apparent categorization of me as merely some errant debater that popped in.

For what it's worth, I know that you are also trying to disengage. I simply feel like you're reading unnecessary hostility into what I'm saying, when it's simply impossible to explain myself without mentioning the things you did which I reacted to, admittedly not in a very useful way. I understand that you felt and feel hostility, malice, "debate", "fighting", or whatever negatives you may or may not ascribe to me, but I assure you that I merely became annoyed as you purposefully didn't react to various things I said WHILE I stayed in a mental binary mode that was assuming that you could process what I was saying usefully, which was incorrect of me. This combination was of course irrational on my part, but such things happen to humans.

Okay, so you say you can't disengage well (let's say this is your "personal quirk" as minorly related to mine above). Well, it's over now (hopefully). As for "fighting", if this is all you think of it then that's unfortunate, but I realize you weren't looking for what I gave you and therefore don't need me to continue with the arguments on the main topics (which I have not been doing). Hopefully this explanation is sufficiently acceptable to you. I avoided this level of elaboration earlier because I hoped it was unnecessary and because I realized that elaborating upon the things you did which annoyed me (which is necessary to fully explain myself, and not an attempt to get you to apologize to me or to think poorly of yourself in any way) could easily not be received well, but hopefully you are able to tolerate it, and my apologies if not.

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Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: February 27, 2016, 10:34:53 pm »

Well, I probably became overinvested at least in part because you quickly and easily saw that you were wrong about revenge-based order. You then had problems with shame-free and anti-voluntary-business societies not working well. If it's any consolation I'm sure I appeared at best like a time-wasting fool to various people here. I don't think ideals are bad, but it's hard for me to accept the idea that people in general would willingly or happily adopt any one set of ideals. I feel like hoping too much for that can be self-destructive in the long run, but whatever. If you were just describing a theoretical heaven or similar then it wasn't clear to me (because you were referring to things in reality very often). I'll try to not waste our time in the future.

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Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: February 27, 2016, 01:40:50 am »

Brion, the initial spark was bulmabriefs144 mentioning a bunch of idealistic stuff mostly not that strongly related to Regina's sentiments, a minority of which I found "worth" criticizing, and the discussion on and around that. If you want to move it you can. I didn't really consider the placement because I didn't start it and thus considered it informal enough here since there were no warnings, nor was the initial post officially considered topical overreach for its placement.

bulmabriefs144, sure, a better world is worth aspiring to. Nonetheless, some of the worst tyranny, oppression, and abuse comes at the hands of true believers in an ideal. I think it's more important to consider how to make the next moment better (while considering that one person's better can be another person's worse without either being the one true way) than to focus on an endpoint that is thoroughly divorced from anything possible now. And I still think your ideals are limited in that they don't find the desires of others legitimate, nor do they consider some downsides that would occur because people do want other things and will work to get them (especially in nations that didn't listen to you and thus happily outcompeted "your" nation; this is not a good in itself but it is a major flaw as to the sustainability of your ideals), hampering the efficiency and/or purity of implementations of your ideals. If everyone shared your ideals I suppose it wouldn't matter, but then you wouldn't be able to complain about the ideals you have now not being implemented, since they would be. I've mentioned that people have tried to do various things with the unconstrained vision, communism, feminism, and so on before, and they ended in failures (note that this means involuntary implementations, where the system was imposed on a society...voluntary communes and such I don't have a problem with, since people can simply leave if they disagree and the system will succeed or fail naturally). I don't think it works well while you need masses of people (and not robots) earnestly working hard to support society. That doesn't mean I like the current system; I've mentioned many places where it's corrupt and inefficient.

Well, you say you need someone to make your ideas work, but this presupposes that they're workable without major changes like robots doing everything that matters. I wish a lot of things could be better for me but that doesn't mean that there's any real path to such a reality, especially without making things worse for others. In practice neither of us has any real control anyway, but I'm simply trying to explain that there ARE reasons people don't implement your ideals already, and you shouldn't simply dismiss these reasons as bigotry, meanness, stupidity, and so on. Of course there's plenty of that as well, but you seem to ignore people that don't share circumstances and beliefs with you a lot. I try to avoid doing this since I realize that these people will have their say as well, and have zero reason to care about my personal preferences rather than their own.

I don't know about political factionalism. I don't support any party. You've mentioned feminism, which is practically a political party in many nations. Mincome would probably be supported by many parties (relative to the total number that support mincome) that are heavily feminist and opposed by many of their opponents, so clearly I'm not very cleanly on any "side" overall.

Maybe Brion doesn't want to come up with lots of types of alcohol, or maybe there is a parallel. How many times have you read Flipside in order to commonly make such references?

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Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: February 24, 2016, 09:32:22 pm »

Continued...

If you set mincome at say 15% of GDP, and spread this equally among all adults, it won't matter as much if the costs of things go up. Because these costs become part of the GDP, and mincome would rise accordingly automatically. The funny thing is this is already a similar amount to the amount currently used on welfare, but...more than half of that money is wasted on useless administration! Mincome would ideally fire these people (who would be fine since they get mincome) and spread nearly 100% of the money, much more fairly, to all adults! No one would slip through the cracks, and waste would be minimized. Now obviously there are problems like ever-increasing inflation and debt, too, but these are always bad things and should be fixed regardless of other things. Fixing the labor market so that everyone not only has a job, but a job they find easy and like to do, is just tilting at windmills, however. It's literally fighting the very basis of specialization and trade that enables a real economy and technological progress. I don't want us to be poor and technologically backwards.

A lot of wage slavery stuff is self-imposed. If people choose to have roommates, to not have families or family "needs" they can't afford, to not waste money on luxuries they don't need, etc. they won't go into debt (credit card, mortgage, car payment, etc.) in the first place and will be able to be much less of a wage slave. Unfortunately our education system is more of a daycare-prison-indoctrination center combination that was formed for the purpose of creating interchangeable drones that are easily abused for both political and business purposes than anything that teaches people to save money, think long term, and be less wastefully materialistic. I would get government out of education in the sense of running the schools themselves. If parents decided and used government vouchers to pay the schools of their choice then everyone gets an education while freedom and competition between schools (increasing quality) is as maximized as it can be.

Well, it's obvious that you're a feminist, as well as having a very communist way of thinking that ignores many critical things you expect people to just work with you on even though they have no reason to want to. This way of thinking goes along with feminism well because feminism has its own "oppressor class" definition which is considered immutable regardless of personal variation or even factual and statistical evidence. You jumped to trashing men and bringing rape into the discussion because this is the obsession of feminism. The fact is that nudity is not so simple, and it's certainly not a wholly owned subset of feminism.

A LOT of shaming of women for substandard appearance, slutty behavior, etc. comes from women. Feminism works to remove this, sure, but there is a natural reason for it. Appearance simply has value, sex simply has value, and so on. It's more complex than feminism's talking points make it out to be. It's probably more likely that nudity is forbidden because people didn't want it in the past, and because people now either don't want it or don't want it enough to push hard to legalize it. No strange, vague theories on social castes needed.

I don't care what you read about nudists and what they claimed (never mind that they're self-selected and therefore could easily not remotely represent what the average person could feel if FORCED to go nude). I was talking about those three women flashing their breasts in that picture. You kept reading things into their playful, smiling faces that didn't NEED to be there. Nudist colonies are a tangent relative to this, since those women didn't seem to be nudists. Human behavior is more varied than you seem to give credit for, and not arbitrarily so. We are not blank slates.

I looked briefly at your link and the assumptions I saw made were arbitrary. So it's no surprise that they didn't match reality. Either the writer was a common idiot beforehand or they're just writing whatever interests their audience, meaning that they're just writing whatever they think their audience would assume as an extreme belief for themselves or others in order to get more hits.

There are levels of dystopia. If no one works and robots aren't perfectly covering the slack the economy and thus society completely collapses and we go back to hyper-violent tribal living. Almost everyone REALLY doesn't want that, so kindly desist with your ideals until such time as they become practical. ;p

Shame is a motivator, but it's better than violence, which ironically is how you would have to get your way. And I made my case that shame can be used for good and bad. Even if shame itself is a sort of "verbal attack" and threat of ostracism, that doesn't mean that its use is automatically bad on balance. Government is based on violent theft to fund itself, and yet I freely bring up that some functions of government ARE necessary. Compromise is necessary to avoid greater pain. You don't seem to do compromise, and don't seem to like freedom rather than conformity. Sure, you hate the conformity others want for you now, but you seem to have zero qualms about having your version as the ideal for all. My way is simply allowing people to voluntarily interact as much as possible. It maximizes freedom and minimizes violence, and it leads to efficient compromises between everyone in a natural manner. These things seem good to me, but you continue to go on about ideals that just have no path to them but violence and oppression. If there's no good path and people clearly disagree with you in large numbers perhaps the ideals themselves are bad?

I don't feel shamed and said already that I won't be shamed. Certainly I won't be shamed online very well without being doxxed (something feminists also love to do). I could be censored here in one form or another, but that wouldn't actually shame me. Feminism can't be about equality. The very name chosen for it represents "the advocacy of women's rights". It's not a neutral name, which makes it make perfect sense when the actions of feminism (talk is cheap and is often a distraction) result in as much freedom, money, authority, and rights for women as possible with no consideration for balance or what this does to men, children, or society in general. Children are hapless victims that become ruined. Men respond in many ways, mostly isolationist or self-destructive ways, because men and women both have a group preference for women, which means that men have little ability to unite purely as men (useless MRAs have tried to get things done for a century and have nothing to show for it). Men are also the minority, and more of a minority yet as voters, since women live much longer. So as long as women are more united for their own benefit than men are for theirs women can slowly force whatever they want (mainly socialism and the erosion of society and the rule of law) under a general democracy. Of course there is no solution and I don't really care. I don't want a traditional life and traditionalism is dead in general. Feminists still want men to act traditionally, though, and this is an unstable situation.

Youth is also value. Besides, this is obviously going to vary on a personal basis. There are other ways to have value than physical attractiveness, but adding more physical attractiveness adds value under almost all scenarios. The value is really an average based on what others, particular those you value and thus want to have value you, think. It's fine if someone likes the person others in the world consider the ugliest of all, but this person does have lower value for it. If that person was less ugly they would have more options than just the one fluke person that likes them in this example. More options allows one to have more leverage and achieve better deals for oneself. Men with lots of money may choose to cycle through young women forever, for example. They can because they have value.

Well, good luck to you with the younger sister. But again, your random personal ideals and experiences...do not map well to any average that can describe and explain society well. People aren't blank slates, and surely you know that you're different from others. It's not easy, but judging that ideals that don't work under the constrained theory are nothing more than fantasy is healthy, because knowledge is valuable. If you really believe your ideals are possible, especially without violence or shaming, you will be disappointed forever.

People reject me already, and I reject others. I'm sorry, but you aren't going to get humans to not care about looks. It's a huge deal and is ineradicable without tens of thousands of years of evolution under strict conditions that don't value appearance. But this is not going to happen since humans already value and thus reward appearance, which makes appearance valuable and thus selected for. I know that may seem arbitrary, but traits can be evolved that are costly and yet are selected for (like a male peacock's tail) because they're already selected for. In the case of human appearance the initial spark was judging healthiness. This is why women that are unlikely to have a high quantity or a high quality of children due to their age look much less attractive to men. Men don't all judge based on fertility, but the genes that do are burned into them, since those that chose otherwise were reproductively unsuccessful and thus had their genes disappear.

I can't go based on your experience. For all I know you were a very androgynous Asian to begin with. In any case, it can vary for other reasons, too. And I don't really want to be naked in public. It serves no purpose to me, just like being loud may serve a purpose to me sometimes but isn't something I would do in public for no reason. Clothes make it easier to stay clean and keep seats and such clean and simply avoid me having to care about reactions from others who could have any personalities or motivations humans may have, without me knowing which they have beforehand. This isn't really shame, just practicality. Now I do wish I was more attractive, but having lower value due to not being so is just how it is. People that would shame me for this simply cease to be interacted with by me. I have no desire to see my friends naked either. I just don't see the reason to become a nudist, but if others want to be without imposing themselves on others' personal space or property (this includes businesses) I have no problem with them.

Sure, most women can get dates with men. But which men? The "good" men that women collectively want much more are in demand and on average will use this advantageous position to either get the best single woman they can (if they want to be monogamous) or to get whatever high quality women they can at any given time. Women generally will want to be the former even though the latter is common (and women often irrationally or amorally try to change the latter into the former or trap them using anti-freedom laws and applications of the law in their favor). A good way to increase attention from "good" men is to be more attractive. How much is possible or desirable to attempt is up to each woman. The women that try hard often want a "good" man more or have more capability to be above average. Unmotivated or hopelessly ugly women try less hard, or not at all. Anyway, I'm not trying personally, especially for getting a man, of course.

Well, you seem to have this idea that people can all be equally valuable or whatever that conveniently means for whatever purpose. I just don't. Some people are better than others. Those who are better end up better off on average. This is why people tend to perceive some people as better...because they often are.

I don't particularly hate myself compared to hating others. I simply am in a place where there is insufficient positive or negative motivation to attempt much of anything. I'm not trying to date or make anything of myself. I recognize my own selfish desires but do not think myself particularly better or worse than others in this sense. People who would shame me often never get the chance, and certainly don't get many chances easily. I'm self-aware but the environment simply doesn't have value to offer me at a price I'm willing to pay. Other people are willing to pay but I'm not. I'm not interested in slaving away attempting to "better myself" or get dates with a low likelihood of return. That's just how it is. If I existed with the talents I wish to have in a world of magical adventure that was to my liking my motivation would be MUCH higher and I would do things, although I probably wouldn't do much of anything with dating there either.

A range means nothing if it can't be expressed in terms of qualitative and/or quantitative value. I mean, the fact that something is average or rare doesn't make it not valuable or valuable on its own. Everything is not able to change unless humans evolve the change. We are not blank slates. We are not good by nature. We are not endlessly modifiable into adopting and internalizing arbitrary ideals. Attempts based on the idea that otherwise is true have been attempted time and time again, and they all ended in miserable failures. Compromise, reasoning, and the acceptance of innate selfishness is necessary to achieve the maximum efficiency for a group as a whole.

I am not interested enough in Avril Lavigne's music or the title of that song to listen to it. I have other ways to use time, and these posts already use a lot.

I don't know what your issue with value is. It is whatever it is at any point in time as judged by anyone. If people do things based on valuations that are not shared by many others, particularly others who themselves have value to provide, it will often result in suboptimal or even distastrous results. For example, a feminist with a degree in bullshit studies who holds out well into her thirties for the perfect man. There likely is such a man, but there are not enough to go around and he has his own goals, too. Waiting too long can result in her having nothing in the end. No kids that she wanted, no man, nothing. So it's important to know your values and your goals, and evaluate things properly not just in terms of what you want, but what you can get, without ignoring that other people also expect to get something, and it may not be what you personally want to receive or give.

13

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: February 24, 2016, 09:31:59 pm »

The problem is most "fixes" are limited in that they cause new problems for others. And then THEY are more pissed off than before and want to "fix" what someone else "fixed". Your vision is false because the idea of "what the world could be, if people who had their stuff together helped to make it so" is unworkable. There's no real compromise nor consideration for those that don't willingly march alongside you. The idea that they just need to get "their stuff together" is wrong. From their perspective you would often be the one that needs to change, not them. In any case, human nature is selfish and is NOT a blank slate you can just push endlessly in whatever direction. If you don't take selfish desires into account you'll find that any "solution" you impose will "strangely" work far less optimally than you'd like. In most cases the "solution" will make things worse, often including the original goal the "solution" was "supposed" to improve.

People have always worked to live. It is the natural state of things. Welfare is a luxury that comes out of excess, and has many negative points to it as well as some positive. SOMEONE has to produce value. If everyone that didn't feel like working "just" to eat, have a home, have a nice family, or whatever didn't we'd be back to tribal living quickly. More importantly, we'd have never gotten here. It would have always been tribal living, which is actually far more brutal and violent than modern living. So it's easy to see how having people work is desirable on many levels, even if individuals dislike it.

Well, if you don't want to program that's fine. I mean, you can get and keep whatever job you can get and keep (whether that job would exist voluntarily is another issue, but that's not really very important in comparison, although as I've said having a job not based on customers voluntarily trading with you can bias your opinions). You're probably pressured, at least in many previous cases, because they don't want a burden (they want to keep more of their own money, time, emotional consideration, etc.) and possibly because they have expectations of you doing the normal thing and forming a family, I assume with you as a male. Males get pressured hard because males are not neotenous and thus aren't treated as softly, as well as being viewed as having agency even in situations where there are few real options, as well as being expected to be the sacrificial provider for the family, the state, and generally everyone else. There are often different pressures for females, and of course it can vary by person, family, area, and so on.

Generally speaking people don't stay in jobs where they provide negative net value to the employer/customers, because this is pointless and is thus eliminated. The government interferes with this, too, though. It's up to each person to decide what the pressure on them vs. their options means. Most people don't choose becoming homeless, isolated from their family, and so on. Goods used to last longer because work ethic was higher and because people could afford to pay for sturdier things. There are many reasons that this changed, but in general the unavoidable shrinking of the middle class and the lowering stability of jobs are major factors. There's no real way to "fix" this without bringing about inefficiencies (which lead to a worse economy and the flight of capital and labor from your nation), and besides you'd have to take a nationalistic perspective, where the many in other nations get sacrificed as much as possible for the few in your nation. Repairing things isn't really viable now because the complexity of things and their miniaturization have increased, and it's often cheaper to just replace them. You can't realistically "fix" this, either. Never mind that many people have no desire to repair things, too. The price of goods is high due to an endlessly inflated money supply combined with ever-increasing competition for labor (stagnating wages and increasing unemployment) from automation and from poorer workers in other nations. This is unfixable outside of things like making the government/banks not inflate the money supply (no chance; we're fucked) and not add endless debt (but that debt is mainly for socialist programs used to bribe voters).

Mincome would be a partial fix in that it is a way to fire useless government bureaucrats and cleanly and fairly have welfare for adults (I don't want to pay "owners" of children directly or indirectly for having children...any mincome for children would go into parents' pockets and therefore incentivize shitty people in the way that single mothers are now incentivized to have children that have overwhelmingly high rates of dysfunction). No doubt under our current system the government would keep the bureaucrats and the same stupid voters would push to have mincome increased until it neared the average wage, causing taxes on the working to near 100%, meaning that almost everyone quits and the economy crashes. But if it could be frozen at a fairly low level it would be cheaper than current welfare and prisons.

Trying to reduce respect for employers is not that useful. It's like how you might get the occasional fully functional relationship between parent and child that considers the two to be "peers", but you otherwise overwhelmingly need a hierarchy. Why exactly would employers want employees that just fucked around and had no consideration for obeying on the job in exchange for the money they're being paid? It doesn't make sense unless you idealize it. The average person would totally fuck around if they just thought the employer was no one special. As for image, unfixable. You could fix it on a small scale by starting your own business and allowing casual attire, though. Wanting it to change without offering anything to those you wish to have cooperate with you is futile in comparison. Personal best is obviously not agreed upon. If there are no rules you will get people that are just lazy and say it's their "personal best" or whatever bullshit will get them out of having to care. And thus a dress code is born...

You not liking work or interviews is common. There's no solution. The interviews and jobs you want to appear just for you (even though you're not special to almost anyone else) won't appear. Even if they do it's just on a small scale, and becomes a game of musical chairs for the huge group of people like you. The jobs don't exist because they don't provide value to customers they're willing to pay for. Letting go and admitting that the jobs have no reason to exist leads directly to ideas like mincome...

You were probably pressured to get more/better status/better-paying/etc. work because that's the main path to traditional success for males. I say traditional but feminists have the same demands of men, as evidenced by many things such as complaint articles about the "good" (actually meaning high status, high money; these demands are clearly confirmed for females in surveys of each sex on what they look for in a heterosexual partner) men not existing for them. Unfortunately part of the money issue is a demand that the man make at least as much as her...preferably 200+% as much. This obviously doesn't work as well when the same women are competing with men for jobs, and it's even worse given that the government enforces quotas that ensure that low quality women get far more work (quantity of employment and often quality of position as well) than employers would be willing to give them, leading to even greater hurdles for men that want to meet women's standards. The idea that the traditional life is quite bad for males right now and probably mostly always was isn't a consideration, because males are expected to provide, since otherwise society goes downhill. Even now males pay about 70% of taxes while receiving about 30% of benefits from those taxes. Anyway, since you probably have no desire to fill the traditional male role their pressure probably feels like more of a straitjacket than usual. The pointlessness of current society, where there's no adventure and anything you can do, someone else can and will do better, and cheaper, is just how it is. Humans didn't evolve under modern society rather than under primitive, hyper-violent, tribal society, so we're naturally not adapted well to the current reality.

I don't know why you think everyone ought to try to be an entrepreneur. It's very costly when it fails and having everyone try it would increase the failure rate to near 100%. This would lead to loads of debt and suffering for all. The reason they won't succeed is that it's already hard enough to provide the right value at the right price for customers and flooding the market with inept, unmotivated people will naturally result in few successes. It's basically a punishment to get people to try when their likelihood of failure is too high. Maybe you want the failures to not cost people, but again, this is more the case under mincome, where at least you won't starve if you fail.

People won't get off their asses, for many reasons. The demand for their labor isn't even there, and for good reason. They are useless. Perhaps you dream of personally doing something useful even though you simultaneously hate hard work and compromising personally on many things that others routinely compromise on, but it's a dream and nothing more, in the general sense. Useless people are useless people. Many people lack passions or have passions they are nonetheless unable to monetize or at least are not skilled enough at to compete with more competent people on. Just lie about why you want the job. I'm sure lots do. Yes, it's for money. Oh well. Money comes from customers or it comes from the government (or a mob) stealing money with threats of violence they will follow through on if the victims don't comply (and oftentimes even if they comply but are simply unliked or "in the way" or whatever). One seems better than the other to me...

Talents are developed...If you have the genes for an 80 IQ (IQ is 60-80% inherited and mostly can be made much lower by the environment (lead for dinner, horse kicks to the head, etc.) but not much higher) and have no particular other talents you can't do much. You can't just "develop" yourself. Technology has ensured that the overwhelming number of well-paying jobs require more than an 80 IQ to do well. Even a 100 IQ is rather mediocre right now, and is probably mainly good for Starbucks-level jobs assuming no particular other talent. And most people aren't super-talented at much of anything, and most talents are economically useless. Yes, people without motivation often don't get far. What's your point? This doesn't establish that skills are developed ex nihilo in any sense.

Overpopulation of desired jobs? You're complaining that customers don't demand more than is worthwhile to pay for to them. Just because a job is desirable to a theoretical worker doesn't give it the right to exist. My ideal "job" (short of omnipotence and other such completely unidentifiable scenarios) is immortal maximally talented ever-improving magical, combat, and intellectual ability adventurer in an infinite world of magical adventure and intrigue. Funny how that job doesn't exist, isn't it? You just really ignore the flip side (;p) of things. Why should other people that have value to trade be forced at gunpoint to hand it over to you in exchange for you wasting resources and time providing a service that is already well covered by others? It's just inefficient by nature, to an extreme degree.

Okay, so you're seriously suggesting that "hipsters" constitute some mass solution? Hipsters that don't work shit jobs like at Starbucks must receive money from elsewhere (you mention tourists) or they will be no more of a net positive than other random workers. There is not an endless supply of hipsters of the caliber needed to sustain towns all over the place, much less cities. You can't save the average dying town or city. It just doesn't have any particular reason to exist as it once did, because the value it used to provide is now lacking or gone. A "hipster subsidy" is just a random small-scale "solution" that doesn't exist in numbers high enough to save many places, and which itself is quite possibly unsustainable in many cases. The supply of tourists is itself dependent on those tourists having generated enough value in their lives to enable them to afford to become tourists, and in any case there is a limited demand for tourism. If you made every failed town or city into Hipsterville most of them would not stand out, would have no mindshare, and would not receive many tourists. The market would be oversaturated. It's not a mass solution.

Minimum wage should be eliminated under mincome so that every person has the ability to choose for themselves how much EXTRA money they want to receive. There are jobs that are worth less than minimum wage, but if you're not allowed to pay less you just won't have the job done at all, even though someone may have been willing to do it. Mincome would eliminate the stated reason for minimum wage anyway, so you may as well maximize economic freedom by eliminating minimum wage once you have mincome. Yes, employers can pay less when the labor market is bursting with interchangeably skilled people for their purposes. What's your point? How about we just accept that there are no jobs for useless people instead of fighting it by trying to ruin the prospects of both employers and customers? What a low-skill person "needs" as a job doesn't matter. It MUST provide value as judged by voluntary customers or it is literally violent theft! You just don't care about this and want us to all just be nice and do things that severely punish various people arbitrarily. Well, those people DON'T LIKE IT, and they're not wrong. We're way past the point where real jobs for all is plausible. Do you love communism or what? Because that's how you get jobs for all. Never mind that they're generally jobs that provide no value to both employees and customers...they keep people busy, right?

You keep making all these stipulations on what the worker "needs". It's basically childish, and is backwards. The job needs demand from customers FIRST or its very existence is an act of violent theft! Why exactly is there a point in wasting your time working to provide no value to others in exchange for money people don't want to give you? I mean, this is basically mooching at gunpoint while pretending that you're working. It's insulting to the victims of theft and it's pathetic for the person pretending to work. Mincome at least fixes the former part. Boom, you don't waste time and resources effectively running on a treadmill to nowhere. You have leisure time, stability to change jobs, reject jobs you dislike, and take jobs that pay as little as YOU decide is right (without minimum wage) without worrying about starving (this itself would make employers compete harder as the lower quality people more or less permanently drop out of the labor market, pushing the labor pool towards the favor of the labor from where it is now), and the ability to be an entrepreneur without it being as much of a risk to you.

Continues due to the character limit...

14

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: February 24, 2016, 01:38:19 am »

Your ideals happen to clearly favor you (as ideals tend to) and certain...whims you have that don't necessarily apply to MANY others. I really doubt you understand how to make things work since it was established (even to the point that you immediately reversed your position on it) that you have ideals which ultimately turn out to be naive fantasies (revenge-based order being an extreme example).

We have tried a lot more things than you seem to think. And honestly, you still have no consideration for employers nor customers, even though you should be a customer yourself (or is that your dad's job? I don't know either way). As well as for the fact that businesses, labor markets, and nations compete globally. And you still strangely have no opinion on mincome, minimum guaranteed income, basic income, guaranteed basic income, unconditional basic income, or whatever one wants to call it. I find this solution far better than trying to materialize low-skill jobs for tens of millions of people out of thin air in the United States alone.

I'm telling you your "enrichment" is based on the unconstrained vision, something you also have no expressed opinion on, and has been tried MANY times recently and throughout history. I'm sorry, but we don't need another cultural revolution, and actually getting your ideals to be enforced on society REQUIRES forcing people to act against their own interests at gunpoint. This is slavery enforced by violence and is wildly inefficient as well as miserable. Your ideals will fall on deaf ears to whatever degree (people who want free money or who want to buy votes will pretend it's good under the ideal of the unconstrained vision while in fact acting under the constrained vision by benefiting themselves at the expense of society and the future) for GOOD reasons.

People that have "real skills" can find employment. MANY people lack such skills AND lack the combination of talent and motivation (and not merely the opportunity) to get them. There are USELESS people. People who are dysfunctional or mentally deficient (with no other compensating talents). They will get some form of welfare (so let's pick the best one), be sterilized, or be killed. So pick one. No, you can't pick "everyone gets a dream job". It's beyond preposterous, but you seem to lack the experience or position to see this.

Okay, so you blame "the culture". People aren't responsible for themselves even if they were merely given freedom to make either good or bad choices. This is again the unconstrained vision. We will simply have to wait while it continues to ruin society to see the end result (in this case; we have historically seen it MANY times already). The idea that people will act good without shaming or legal (or mob) punishment is the unconstrained vision, and is WRONG. People, en masse, act selfishly. If you don't use shaming or violence to stop people they WILL make decisions that hurt many others. It's not a matter of "culture". It's a matter of incentives. We took away the negative ones in various cases and often also replaced them with positive motivators to do the wrong things! And yet, if people were good by nature it wouldn't matter, because they would still choose to be good. But they clearly don't. They want to be bad, because they are selfish. This is the world we live in.

Anyway, "the culture" doesn't leave us with "nothing to do". The glut of labor simply means there IS NOTHING TO DO for a ton of people! I'll wait while you create dream jobs for everyone at a faster rate than jobs disappear to automation. Until then what do you offer that is of true substance?

I don't care about which things fundamentalists are wrong or right to shame people for, for one purpose or another. You claimed in the first place that a shame-free society would be a nice thing. I told you that it wouldn't be sustainable under anything resembling the current conditions, and no, these aren't merely "cultural". I understand fundamentalists may shame you or I for our "alternative" lifestyle desires, but that's not the point. I needed to only prove in ONE case that shaming can prevent more damage than it causes, on either a societal or personal level. I did, and you have no direct response to my example. You're effectively making a straw man argument by jumping to instances of shaming that happen to probably affect you personally, which I also never said I supported. The whole idea was simply that shaming CAN be a net good, and it CAN be. The unconstrained vision is just wrong. It doesn't explain our world. It's an ideal, and is abused endlessly once it grabs ahold of the culture, as it has in the modern west (but also in many other places and times).

Yes, I get that you like the idea of having a "useful" job that you also enjoy enough. I have my doubts that librarian is actually a useful job anymore, and you can't counter this so long as you are paid with money seized from people at gunpoint. If you worked for customer rather than government money you'd be back to the "SELL SELL SELL" mentality you specifically said you loathe. In any case, what is possible or desirable for you is not possible or desirable for everyone. It just isn't, and it's so basic it's silly. WHO will deal with sanitation? Don't lie to me that enough people will make those jobs their first choice over all sorts of more interesting creative jobs, crafts, and whatever else. Do you want society to only provide sanitation to the wealthy? If not, admit that the jobs are NEEDED, RIGHT IN THIS VERY MOMENT. No idealistic baseless theorizing. Your ideal CAN'T work RIGHT NOW, and needs all critical jobs to go to robots to be workable in any sense. And this is something I said WAY back at the beginning, in spite of which you for some reason feel you can "explain" to me in some cases.

We don't agree because you ignore everyone that isn't highly like yourself, and think your ideals can be reached under the unconstrained vision, which is the false vision. Masses of other people, who aren't like you, will resist you to the bitter end for completely explainable, reasonable reasons (maybe they want a good life for their families, for example)...if you have the sense to adopt the constrained vision. It explains instead of demanding conformity to an arbitrary ideal.

Regina can't create that world. Brion could, but it would be a more shallow, Mary Sue-ish world of sorts. A world that doesn't really make sense. Given Brion's apparent interest in different societies (he has created three in Flipside, I believe) I don't see it happening at least in the sense of it becoming the new world the story continues on in for a significant period of time.

Well, again...your view seems based on the unconstrained vision. It's easier to consider it my way, where makeup is advertised because people can have the desire to wear it, for selfish reasons. Women compete with each other. Those with better makeup appear more attractive, at least in the short term. If women were assigned husbands like in the past and just stayed at home I imagine the urge to compete hard with makeup would naturally be reduced. To avoid confusion, unless I specifically say I endorse something in particular you shouldn't assume I do. So I'm not saying assigning women husbands and then having the women stay at home would be fantastic, just that it would likely reduce the desire of women to use makeup. Clothes are similar to makeup. Of course beyond competition there is validation for appearing more attractive, too, so it's not as if it's likely that all demand for fancy clothes or makeup would go away under almost any scenario, but it can be reduced, advertising or no advertising. And if women didn't buy makeup and clothes as much the money to advertise them (in order to compete as a business with other businesses) would also be reduced.

Well, maybe you'd enjoy nudity, but you know...there's no reason these people you compare yourself favorably to would want to go along with a nudist society being enforced at gunpoint. And then you have those that want to ration out looks at their bodies as well as those that want to appear more attractive than they are. Lots and lots of people would prefer to wear clothes. Short of the government pointing guns at people that defy nudism, how will you possibly get them to create this society? Shaming? But you hate that categorically. And it's quite clear that you can't appeal to them rationally, for they have very good reasons indeed to reject your grand solution. My solution is the freest, but it wouldn't likely result in a huge amount of nudity, rather than simply not punishing people and ruining their lives for what I view as a relatively trivial "offense".

Yeah...we're not the same when naked. The amount of variation in health and attractiveness is quite large. People will see this and more which they often don't want to see and often don't want to show. Do you not like freedom?

What do you mean you wouldn't want it forbidden anywhere? There are sanitary concerns for one thing, and what do you do when people freely choose to not associate with those that refuse to wear clothes? Do the government guns come out? I keep pressing you on this because this is the ONLY way many of your ideals can come into existence, outside of what is effectively science fantasy. You will NEVER get people to go your way remotely uniformly by choice. And you can't even shame them into doing so without changing your mind on that, never mind that it wouldn't work in this case anyway.

I said homes and businesses...SURELY you can understand if people would refuse entry to and kick out those who were or became naked in THEIR homes. Or are you THAT anti-freedom? As for businesses, these are also property such as homes, and in any case ideally serve the customers. If the customers don't want naked people around then so what? The business can make its choice. It can choose to be naked-only for all I care. As to the quality of service provided, this would depend on the customers. Just remove the government guns and things can settle into a natural, more efficient state. If it happened that nudists tended to be richer then they could have better services at nude-only businesses. That's fine by me. The reverse is also fine. It's freedom.

I don't think feminism needs to be involved in discussions on nudity. I didn't need to involve it. People may choose to involve it, but it's not inherently a subset of feminism. As to the standard, it differs in places in Europe, Africa, and so on. I don't really care what people think about it...just get the government out and freedom in. Toplessness can then regulate itself according to the myriad varying personal demands of everyone. There is no one true solution. Except that to me the government is interfering, by deciding in some places that toplessness is sometimes bad and sometimes not bad, even though it's not in my opinion important enough to require the use of violence to control.

Lots of things are more "honest", but freedom should exceed this. A world where you have to rigidly obey violently-imposed universal standards that you neither agree with personally nor can be made to understand the importance of is not so great to me. Outside of contracts "dishonesty" is already the norm, and that's not changing any time soon. Trying to make it change would mean a police state the likes of which has never been known. It would be amazingly severe if it even mostly achieved its goal.

I don't know why you think they're "overthinking it". It seems like projection to me, based on your desire to normalize and desexualize their behavior. It's easy to explain it other ways, too. Short of asking them and gambling that they both know and tell you the absolute and complete truth there's no way to know. There's no reason to assume anything meaningfully negative from my perspective.

Sure, clothing, makeup, and many things relate to sexuality. It's not purely cultural, though. And it is possible that things may work more smoothly if clothing is the norm, for many reasons that would include non-sexual ones. I think you're really optimistic about the lack of downsides from a violently imposed nudist society. Besides that it really opens anything up to violent imposition, which is a dangerous precedent to set, since it WILL be abused even more than it already is if you go so far as to use it to enforce nudity, of all things.

I really don't care about feminism's reasoning for things. It's often scatterbrained and itself full of shaming, including shaming those who shame without thinking it quite ironic (meaning that hypocrisy is fine as long as the target is defined as "bad"). Is being naked violent or otherwise costly to others, provided that you respect their personal space and property, including their homes and businesses? If not then don't enforce government violence to prevent it (but also don't subsidize it...this is violence against those who would not voluntarily do so).

I would not care nearly as much about being naked if the trade off was that I get to perpetually have a well above average body and face, such as Maytag does. It's a bit harder when your value is lower, and that's just life.

15

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: February 22, 2016, 08:15:00 pm »

Continued...

It sounds like organic farming is inefficient, which explains why few people choose to pay the necessarily higher price for it (since after all the quality is not remotely enough higher for most people to voluntarily pay the higher price). Besides, as far as I know there is no realistic way to feed the world on organic farming alone. It seems more like a personal preference or fetish to me than anything important to strive towards, although I support the freedom of people to farm organically (and alternatively in a modern fashion) and attempt to sell that food to voluntary customers. As for gems, I'm sure some of them are mined by enslaved children over in Africa, so it's probably going to take a little longer than usual for robots to take those jobs, seeing how little some of the current workers are paid. I don't see it as an impossibility, though, unless technology stagnates or regresses. Do you?

Again, you seem to think of "us" not "needing" undesirable jobs in a very unrealistic fashion. YOU don't like that CUSTOMERS demand that they be filled. People that would otherwise be unemployed and homeless actually do want to take those jobs, but they still hate doing those jobs, in that the jobs are not enjoyable for their own sake by any means. There is no oversupply in jobs...I PROVED otherwise with HARD STATISTICS. If people choose to compete for jobs in the city they simply value living in the city enough more than not living in the city to make their choice. They are not WRONG just because you don't feel like what they're doing makes sense [probably for you]. It's funny how you speak of things in some humanitarian sense and yet I offer the best solutions for the economy (society's standard of living) as well as for personal freedom. You simply suggest ideals that CLEARLY are unwanted by MANY people, but I guess it's okay to you as long as YOU "feel" they're right [for everyone].

Haha, "People aren't honest about what they really want.". So they should instead all bend to your ideals, right? Let's all quit being janitors and become organic farmers, even though society wants the former more than they want the latter. Have you considered that different people have different desires, and your ideals are just not right for everyone, and therefore would impose misery on those they are not right for?

So you admit not everyone is suited to the country while just previously going on about how wrong people are for competing for jobs in the city. I would ask you to be more consistent, but I really doubt you can be at this point. It should be obvious if you admit that there are people not suited to the country that the city can be preferable to people, which means that it can be the right choice for most people to choose to compete in the city, since it can be the case that most people would prefer to live in the city. This isn't a very complicated chain of logic. You must be irrationally assuming that lots of people would be "better off" in the country even though they are personally voting otherwise with their feet.

If MSN says there are many openings in nursing (not your unlikely maximally exaggerated automatic lie of "all the openings are now in nursing") it will encourage more people to become nurses. So what? Never mind that MSN is not definitive enough to singlehandedly convince everyone with no other sources backing up the same information, why is it bad that a job which needs to be filled will get filled? Yes, some people will be unable to be nurses in the long term after or before doing the work, but the others still need a job. Your solution seems to be that they create jobs based on their own desire to do those jobs, but this is a sucker's bet for most, because jobs only persist based on persistent demand. Of course you could demand that the government inefficiently act as their employer even though they provide too little value for customers to voluntarily pay for, but this is clearly worse than mincome would be.

I'm sorry, but there is no "niche" for everyone. There is supply and demand from customers, employers, and employees. As I have PROVEN we are already short tens of millions of jobs in the United States alone. There is no particular work waiting for these mostly useless people, because CUSTOMERS do not value their output enough to pay them. Without customers where does the money come from? Why should they waste their time tilting at windmills by doing a job that provides low to no value to society? It's just silly. Your ideals do not feed or fulfill people. They are purely empty speculation or prescriptions and do not explain why or how things can actually work in the sense of having customers, employers, and employees voluntarily exchange value with one another to create value via specialization in an efficient manner. If you only care about employees you're effectively a communist and have no sustainable solution.

"Comic shops", "burger and fry places", and so on exist at the whims of their customers. It's not a matter of people just deciding they want those jobs. THE JOBS HAVE TO BE IN DEMAND FROM CUSTOMERS FIRST, OR THEY WILL BE UNSUSTAINABLE. The reason there's a "desperate job culture" is that there are more people needing to work than jobs needing people to work at them. So again, why would you not favor mincome over your unworkable, inefficient, hand-waving ideals? If people had mincome they would have a measure of freedom to create their own jobs by being able to attempt them without having to go homeless or starve. Once that [usually] failed they would just go back to mincome, or get a real job that customers currently have demand for. If they succeed, that's fine, too. Customers will make their choice. Mincome would make it easier for employees to switch to jobs they want more while avoiding having to eliminate the ever-increasing masses of useless, unemployable people. Mincome would also ensure that no one falls through the cracks and ends up as a starving criminal. Mincome is more efficient than prisons, forced military service, and bureaucratic government jobs that provide nothing to society. Mincome is better than the type of welfare that exists now because it ensures no one falls through the cracks and because you can then fire the government bureaucrats that currently consume more than 50% of welfare spending, in that the administration costs are greater than the actual welfare given out to welfare recipients. Of course the government is highly unlikely to downsize, but this is at least a functioning solution and not hand-waving about everyone having a niche without any proof nor reason to believe this, alongside a clear lack of concern for why customers would want to fund these superfluous employees rather than simply buy from businesses that only hire the labor they need, which can be in some other nation, too, leaving no jobs in the formerly uncompetitive, now dead businesses in the nation adopting your ideals.

Sure, someone that loves their job will TEND to do a better job, but that doesn't mean that those most skilled in a given job will be those that love the job the most. There are people who are just BETTER than other people. They may have the skills to do any of many jobs better than a useless person can. This is natural inequality, and you can't paper over it in the way you seem to want without enforcing massive inefficiencies, typically at the barrel of a gun. This degrades the standard of living for society and therefore will be rightfully resisted by many, who will naturally loathe your inefficient ideals.

I'm sorry, I'm not locked into a business mindset...I'm locked into a value mindset. It's just that at the moment the typical employer "has an advantage over" the typical employee because there is a ridiculous glut of labor. There are cases even today where the employee is in high demand and squeezes the employer for all they can get, and that is equally legitimate to me. Ultimately you have no solutions and can't explain how people would voluntarily form your favored type of society. If you have to point guns at people to make things "work" you need to seriously reconsider what you're doing. I do admit that violence is necessary to maintain basic order and national defense, and to perform services humans generally "need" but don't have the mindset to pay for in a both efficient and effective manner beforehand (perhaps firefighting services would be an example), but otherwise it should be minimized in favor of voluntarism. As for mincome, it's ultimately that, relatively highly wasteful welfare and unnecessary government jobs such as we have now, or elimination of the ever-expanding useless population in one sense or another. Unless you have another REAL suggestion that isn't just fluffy ideals.

I see you still have nothing to counter my example of an anti-decadence use of shaming, so you therefore automatically concede the point. Shaming CAN be used in net positive ways for both society and individuals.

Don't tell me what I think choosing to go naked means. I already told you I think it should be legal to be naked in public (even though I mentioned that most people are ugly and on average more so when naked), so this is ridiculous. I simply think that being naked is not an act of violence, nor does it constitute significant harm to others. I mentioned freedom of association because limiting this causes significant harm, and wanted to make it clear that nudity could be legal without it becoming the norm to allow in homes and businesses. Ultimately it's not up to me how many people accept nudity in their homes and businesses. That's freedom for you. I would only have the choice of not visiting homes or businesses that allowed nudity IF it bothered me significantly enough for me to do so. Nudists, if numerous, would have homes and businesses that allowed them.

As for topless feminists...my view is not based on feminism in the least sense. And obviously if someone can legally go naked going topless would not be a problem. I guess you're assuming I'm getting an erection or getting wet when I see some "hot girl", or more likely assuming the former since you likely assumed me to be male just as you assumed a "hot girl" would be for me (I am a lesbian so you randomly got my gynephilia correct). I don't actually have anyone I like in person and don't expect to any time soon, but I would be wearing clothes anyway, since that would be allowed. The fact that being naked would stand out more while most people wore clothes is just how it is. I don't think that people wouldn't notice males' erections or females' severe wetness even if everyone was naked, though. I don't think the girls in the second picture are ashamed to be flashing their breasts. They certainly don't look that way. They seem to be having fun WHILE thinking that it's sexual, because sexuality is the reason that anyone is interested in their breasts anyway, and that's why they are specifically showing off their breasts.

16

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: February 22, 2016, 08:14:38 pm »

You continue to think of jobs as having demand based on the wants of the employee. That's just not how jobs work, not really. A job is supposed to provide a good or service to a customer that voluntarily pays for it. This is where demand comes from. The demand of the employee is by default money. Yes, people have varying preferences for varying jobs, but this is swayed by money and other concessions/bonuses in working conditions. The employee absolutely does not get to just work at what they "deserve" to do simply because they want to! This is why most jobs have too few people that want to do them unless positive and negative motivators such as money and shame are involved. The few jobs that people want to do in numbers beyond what the customers require tend to require skill beyond what most can provide (such as creative jobs) and/or pay very little (because so many people can and want to do them). If you realize these truths you can clearly see why creative jobs are obviously VERY susceptible to recessions. Do you really think the overwhelming mass of underskilled people that want creative jobs will choose to start or continue doing them when the pay is nothing or close to it? Because that's what the customers will pay them in a recession! It's not a matter of the workers "feeling" they "deserve" to work at that job. The market of customers says they provide little to no value, and therefore won't voluntarily pay them. So what are you suggesting? That they are paid involuntarily, which means that the government or some mob comes over with guns and forces them to pay even though the robbed people receive no value in exchange, or that people should change and start to value the garbage-tier work of the underskilled, self-important special snowflakes? The latter is laughable, of course. And the former is inefficient (compared to mincome, for example) and rotten.

I'm telling you that only having people that want to farm farming is inefficient. These are not actually the most skilled people, and besides that, most of these would probably rather have an easier job anyway, which under your sentiment of people only taking jobs they want/deserve means they don't farm. And there's no proof there are enough even if you made anyone that slightly likes farming farm. Even if there happened to be enough farmers, would there be enough janitors? I mean, come on. Some jobs are literally shit. And no, society can't just have few to no people doing them without a major penalty to everyone's standard of living (except for the wealthy's). So we do NEED people doing those jobs. You seem to use "need" when you mean "want" and "we" or "society" when you mean "I". I'm sorry, but this isn't how thinks work. It's an ideal, and you have no way to make it work, just like how your ideal of order based on revenge was unworkable in the extreme.

You're a librarian because you provide a service. Your feelings are ALWAYS secondary to this. I don't care what you think you deserve; once you can be automated in a way that customers prefer when it comes to the combination of service and price YOU ARE FIRED. The job doesn't exist for you. It exists for the customers. Of course in your case it's a government job, is it not? Which means it's already involuntary to pay you, in that you don't have to care and can just ramble about ideals knowing that you have far more job security than you would in a voluntary market, because you will receive the money of others which was taken from them at gunpoint no matter whether or not they use the library or think you're worth the money they have to pay.

It's funny how "SELL SELL SELL" is bad to you. This further establishes you as a naive idealist along the lines of your ideas on revenge-based order. Do you not see that if you sell nothing you should be paid nothing? Why exactly is it good for you to have a job that provides less value to customers than the customers would voluntarily pay you? That sort of job is a tax on society and should be eliminated (special, limited exceptions for maintaining order which people can not efficiently and effectively pay for only when they have a problem-based need aside).

I didn't watch your link (and it's not like you paid attention to the statistics I handed to you, either). Based on the lying title I can assume it's fluff about anything being possible, which is a lie. IT IS A LIE. People have to accept their limitations to improve their quality of life. Sure, thinking positively helps, but you extrapolating this to "we can make society anything and have only wanted jobs for everyone" is very wrong, unless you favor a collapse (which is the result of enforcing this ideal), in which case the main jobs will be farmer, prostitute, criminal, and soldier. Which are not very attractive jobs.

The reason jobs that must be done aren't valued more is that people have no better options, and for the most part these jobs are low-skill. There is supply and demand on both the employer (who coordinates the work and risks his own money for the customer by creating the business; note that an employee does not do the latter and simply moves on relatively cleanly if the business fails; this makes the employer DESERVE more money, at least in the employer's mind, and you would respect that by your own standards unless you happened to be a communist or similar) and employee's end. The employer wants people of a certain level of skill. The employee wants to not starve, to not be a loser to women, to have a nice home, or whatever.

If the level of skill required for the job is low this increases the number of people able to do the job. As I have proven there is a glut of labor at the moment, especially of low-skilled labor, so there is a huge supply of potential employees desperate to take the job, which means that employee can be paid down to a level that more allows the employee to live than thrive. Now, I can imagine that you hate this, but if the employer chooses to pay the employee more he has to pay himself less (but he DESERVES more), and ultimately even this "buffer" runs out easily, if the raise for the employees is not minor, FORCING the employee to CHARGE CUSTOMERS MORE. This has two effects. Firstly, it makes competitors who keep their prices down by not foolishly overpaying (note that if the competitor values the employees enough more to pay them more AND gets away with it then this simply NATURALLY becomes the standard price to meet for that labor) their employees more competitive, resulting in the ultimate doom of the generous employer's business. So it's not sustainable anyway. Secondly, the overpriced goods or services effectively cut the income of everyone else! Everyone else can't afford to buy as much of the goods or services the generous employer is offering anymore. This is part of why such businesses are unsustainable. They provide a poor value to cost ratio to the customer.

Now, in the alternative scenario where few people have the skill to do the job (however talent and time/money-expensive training line up to limit the number of prospective employees) the employer will pay more, because otherwise people will simply work at an easier job for the same money or an amount of money that is acceptable for the reduced difficulty, and in the long term people will stop trying to get that job, which can result in fewer people wasting their time on education or trade schools that would train them to do the job, which will lower the supply of potential employees and therefore increase the wages, assuming the job is valuable enough to the customer to support this. Paying more means that more of the population that has more skills will be employed, because they can get jobs that pay them more on average. This means that the unemployed population will always be of lower skill than the employed population.

In conclusion, if you felt you were worth more than you were being paid, you should have quit and eaten the consequences. You could try to improve your skills or you could just complain. If you just complain you can't expect too much, though. If you just complain and happen to be WRONG about being worth more, too bad. But one can indeed be WRONG.

You keep speaking in the current tense about "grunt work", "soul-crushing jobs", or unwanted jobs being "expendable". I have already corrected you on this, so why do you persist? I also already reiterated that you are UNABLE to explain the future to me because I PREEMPTED you on this long ago by stating that if robots take ALL critical jobs the pressure to fill such jobs will be much lower. What are you doing? It seems to me that you are doing your usual naive, idealistic rambling, which if enforced right now would lead to greater inefficiency and an accordingly lowered standard of living for the society that enforces it. Does anyone else have another opinion? ;p

You AGAIN refuse to read what I'm saying. I already said "I assume the banks at least believe enough customers prefer using a teller, and besides, it's not like an ATM covers all possible interactions with a bank." So you're merely agreeing with me that an ATM is an insufficient replacement, and therefore have no point. You're not explaining ANYTHING to me, but you act like you are. Please try harder, unless you're a troll, in which case you're doing a good job. Besides, you continue to think of computers as having no future ability to replace tasks you consider "human". This is arbitrary and will ultimately be proven wrong unless technology stagnates or regresses. I have no idea (other than naive projection) why you actually prefer humans doing "human" jobs which, by and large, are STILL undesirable to the worker, rather than having robots replace as much work as possible, no matter what, and giving humans mincome.

And why shouldn't the labor "beg" employers if they're that low in value to the employer? People with extraordinary skill are in such demand that the employers "beg" them instead! Do you find that acceptable, or does it only go one way? Should employers be able to ordain that these wonderful employees can't make too much money, even though they're worth it (and would therefore have a strengthened tendency to move to somewhere with more fairness and freedom that would pay them what they're worth)? If not, why should we ordain that employers pay employees more than they're worth? Never mind that the inefficiency of either degrades the quality of life for society, and will lead to failed businesses and fewer jobs...

What happens when the quality of labor is not good enough for anyone, as is the case for tens of millions of people in the United States alone? Do you have a realistic, efficient third alternative to mincome (minimum guaranteed income) and elimination for these truly useless people? No, there will NOT be jobs for them. It's funny how you suggest everyone can get a job they deserve alongside the idea that all the jobs for low-skilled people (most of the current unemployed) should be automated. If the latter occurs it just increases the number of unemployable people, but I guess in your mind everyone can be an astronaut or something instead.

Continues due to the character limit...

17

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: February 21, 2016, 11:06:03 pm »

Okay, so I can't judge what a creative job is (by assuming that you mentioning artists and writers meant that you had a similar opinion to mine on what counts, which seems reasonable given that people looking to be "creative" tend to try to get/keep such jobs), but you can judge that a category of jobs, which is apparently undefined in any meaningful way, is recession-proof. Sure. If you just mean judging such jobs AS A JOB, this has no relevance to what I was saying that I can think of. In any case, you can't prove that there are enough people that love such a job without special positive and negative incentives, can you?

Yes, people DO have to do the non-creative or even soul-destroying jobs. Granted, some of these are unnecessary, but people in general don't want to live in a world where only the wealthy (not rich, but WEALTHY) can afford proper homes, sanitation, electricity, and so on. These jobs need far more people to do them than want to do them.

I assume the banks at least believe enough customers prefer using a teller, and besides, it's not like an ATM covers all possible interactions with a bank. Whether or not a computer SHOULD do a job "needing" a personal touch is up to the customers. If they're willing to pay more they'll maintain their personal touch. If not, why do you want them to pay more anyway? They clearly don't want it, as they're not willing to pay. It just seems like you have some ideal of how things would be nice, and all I'm saying is that instead everyone can collectively decide on what they get by paying or not paying, or paying less or paying more.

The job isn't freed up, the labor is. But as I have demonstrated there is a huge glut of labor already. So I suggest that the only relatively efficient solutions are that either useless humans are eliminated in some sense (death camps, starvation --> crime --> execution (prison, military service, bureaucratic government jobs, etc. count as inefficient welfare, and the starving will take these over death), exile, or who knows what else) or there is a minimum guaranteed income imposed, at least until labor is needed again, i.e. when technology and/or energy/material supply is reduced due to a collapse. If you know of another realistic (meaning not creating tens of millions of jobs out of thin air in the United States alone) solution I am of course interested.

Uh, machines can do modern farming but not organic farming? This feels like your previously mentioned preference for organic food is clouding your judgement. Can you describe exactly how organic farming differs from normal farming in a way such that robots/computers/AI/etc. could never replace a human? As for gem mining, I'm sure they're working on that if you're right. Are you looking at machines as not having more capabilities in the future or what? If you assume there will be a collapse then sure. But in that case I assure you that organic farming and making sure no one has to do jobs they don't want to do will not be foremost on people's minds.

We need uncreative and/or soul-crushing jobs filled right now. If robots were covering them completely then we wouldn't, but that isn't the case right now, so what are you hoping changes now outside of robots being made able to cover 100% of these jobs?

You're obviously right? Maybe if I understood what you think differently from me I could understand. Apparently you claiming we "don't need" people doing unwanted jobs was just futurism. Normally when someone says "we don't need ___" it means now, not in a theoretical future. I already preempted you on the future by stipulating long ago that if robots can cover all the critical jobs then shaming people into taking them will be less important, so I don't see the point of you "explaining" the future to me.

Okay, so "unless some people were a little more shameless, nobody would really be happy". Don't you just mean that the people who "need" to be more shameless would be unhappy? If you mean what you said literally then the implication is that the "some people" that are stopped from being "a little more shameless" would ensure that EVERYONE else would be unhappy, since this is the only way "nobody would really be happy". I feel like you're just projecting here, which caused this strange statement. I haven't even been suggesting that shaming trans people was necessary or desirable, just that shaming people CAN be used in ways that create long term positive outcomes, as well as in bad ways. Anyway, the world is not going to come to a place where everyone can be happy any time soon, so the matter is really of choosing which, how many, and how strongly people are unhappy. Please "show" your functioning, currently existent example of a world of the type you think would work for all, if you have one. If it's pure theory then I can simply point at the current world ask you how we get there without a major upset for many people who will resist at all costs, possibly for good reasons, as well as point out any reasons why people wouldn't desire this world (making it not ideal for everyone).

I notice you said nothing about my belief that rewarding single mothers with prizes for their statistically proven destruction of the future (I omitted the former part but it is part of the current problem, as it incentivizes people to make this devastating choice) instead of near-universally shaming them so that future women choose to avoid becoming single mothers is bad and leads to decadence even under your own stated causes of decadence. If you have nothing then one must conclude that this would indeed be a legitimate use of shaming (unless one is in favor of decadence and social fragmentation, as well as ultimate collapse, unless the robots and mincome save us ;p), which means that your ideal of a shame-free world is just that; an ideal.

Okay, so do you live with your dad? Is he supportive of you transitioning (not that I know your status or plans on this)? I'm just curious, so no need to say anything if you don't want to. But if he's unsupportive or opposed, as would usually be the case, it could explain why you are so anti-shame. I don't actually love shaming people and said myself that I would not be shamed due to personal reasons, but I do see the long term logic of it, and since I believe in the constrained vision (as it is explanatory rather than a prescriptive ideal) I see no reason to try for the impossibility of a world where everyone is happy.

"About" Regina, personally I think people should be allowed to be nude, but the fact is that most people don't want to see others nude (if nothing else most people are unattractive, and often much more so when nude). Since I support freedom of association I believe that homes, businesses, etc. should be allowed to bar nude or otherwise unwantedly dressed people from entering, participating, etc. I think people that went around naked in public places (this not being illegal in this scenario) would have to plan to not use such spaces or services (since most would bar nudity) and would, in particular if they were ugly, be shamed (or otherwise complained about, but this is basically a form of shaming as well) by others who didn't want to see them in that state. It would be up to them to decide if it was worth the displeasure of others being reflected back upon them in an attempt to cause them to change their behavior or not. If it wasn't worth it then I guess enough people viewed it negatively enough to outweigh the person's desire to go around nude, which may indeed be a net gain of happiness for society, even if a given shamed person ended up less happy. For attractive nudists that only want to be in public spaces, they have to consider the unwanted attention they get from others looking at them, and that any attempts on their part to shame people into not looking in spite of their nudity to be hollow to many people (and thus ineffective), who can easily tell them that they could clothe or otherwise cover themselves if they didn't want their body parts to be visible to all.

18

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: February 20, 2016, 05:57:02 pm »

Yeah, I know it was bulmabriefs144 that seems to be anti-general-shame, Brion.

Just because you liked farming (although you really favor my side of the argument by admitting you burned out AND wanted more money...clearly it isn't a dream job in either sense for you) doesn't mean it's popular, nor would it mean that jobs like janitor, miner, construction worker, truck driver, etc. would be naturally popular. I agree that "creative" jobs would be popular, but that's part of why so many people try to do them but end up having to do something else instead of or in addition to them. I'm speaking from a zoomed out perspective. Individual exceptions can not support an overall system unless they are more numerous than required for the work, and even then there is the question of natural talent plus skill development needed to do the job efficiently. It's more efficient to have the right people working for money than it is to have two or ten times as many relative failures working the same jobs. Unfortunately societies/nations do compete with each other so being inefficient means your society/nation dies faster. As for a bookstore job, this is basically retail, right? Just a kind you like. Most people can't simply get such a job...if working at a bookstore was popular it would pay nothing as well until people stopped trying to get that job, since the job doesn't filter heavily based on skill. There is only so much demand for books.

For "soul-destroying" jobs...someone has to do them. You have to pay them more and make sure they feel like losers if they don't make money to get them to take and keep those jobs. If they don't feel like losers without money you have to pay them far more, which means the standard of living for the society goes down as the society has to pay more money for the same amount of services (really this would result in paying less money for far less services in most cases, but either way society gets less for its money, making it poorer). There is the issue that without people feeling like losers for not having money they will put less back into society via taxes and via not creating prosperous, large families often, instead having nonexistent and/or small and/or dysfunctional (being poor will push many people over the limit if they would otherwise not be) families.

So you agree that inept artists would be driven out, and yet you call it a recession-proof job... I already explained that entertainment budget comes out of excess, which is disproportionately affected in a recession, which means that these jobs are the most dependent on a strong economy, which is the opposite of recession-proof. Maybe you think that if they just do a good enough job it doesn't matter, but this isn't really true since entertainment isn't a NEED. I don't know what mentioning subsidies for farming is supposed to be about. Are you saying you support them because they give some level of "guaranteed income"? Subsidies are effectively involuntary business and hurt the efficiency of the market and society. Doing this for art would be even worse as at least you do need some level of stability in farming regardless of good or bad years for crops, since the need-based demand will never drop below a certain level. There is no need-based demand for entertainment.

I wasn't defining recession as unemployment. I don't agree that "anyone" can "create" jobs. I defined a real job as providing a service that people will voluntarily pay for. So sure, the government or anyone with money to burn can create jobs, but if they don't provide value that people voluntarily pay for they're for the most part a drain on society and not real jobs. Jobs really need labor, capital, technology, ingenuity/skill, and demand to come into sustainable, voluntary existence. Your examples with Walmart just seem to be some anti-big business sentiment...if Walmart was not favored by the local population it would be the Walmart that failed and left rather than the other jobs. The fact that Walmart employs fewer people while replacing the same (or discarded, evaluated to be unnecessary relative to the Walmart) services means that Walmart is more efficient, freeing labor for other jobs and/or for leisure. Of course our society is not set up to allow people to not have jobs, but the solution isn't to mandate inefficient or unnecessary jobs for everyone. As I demonstrated, there is absolutely no way to give everyone a REAL job in the United States. You would need to create tens of millions of jobs out of thin air, which won't happen. So there are only two relatively efficient solutions...some sort of minimum guaranteed income or eliminating the unemployed, useless humans in one way or another. Replacing Walmarts with local jobs that the population clearly prefers the Walmart over is a tax on the population, not a source of real efficiency.

The problem with your idea of small entrepreneurial businesses is that it's basically hand-waving. You have no hard examples of things people can do now that are in sufficient demand to sustain new real jobs, and no proof that these jobs wouldn't also end up consolidated and made more efficient by larger businesses. So there's no reason to believe in the existence or stability of such jobs as a solution. There would be more jobs if taxes and regulations were reduced (although it's not like all regulations are bad, and some level of taxation is a necessary evil as well). Even then there's no reason to believe tens of millions of jobs would appear for the low skill, low quality people that tend to be unemployed at the moment. Right now we already have plenty of inefficient jobs that ought to disappear for the good of all (most government jobs and lots of other bureaucratic or regulation-created jobs in the "free" market), so you really need to create even more than just tens of millions of real jobs. I don't see this as a possibility as automation relentlessly makes ever more unintelligent or dysfunctional people unnecessary as labor. If there was a major collapse and we needed way more farmers or whatever then there would be jobs, but we would also be much poorer.

Creative jobs aren't recession-proof...only needs are recession-proof, although needs (even including hunger) are basically just wants that are high in the hierarchy of wants. I didn't consider pet therapist to be a creative job by default because you mentioned artists and writers, but now you just seem to mean any sort of creative idea for a job, and not a job that itself is creative in the sense of crafting ideas. I can assure you that pet therapists are wildly vulnerable to recessions, though, as pets don't really need them very much and can't pay for them directly, instead relying on the fancies of their owners to pay for their therapy. If the owner is poorer they may wise up and realize that they can simply feed and treat their pet well and fire the pet therapist. 

What feels wrong? That shame causes people to harmonize with society better? Listen, I already mentioned that the unconstrained vision is the ideal of society now and this ideal believes people can magically be encouraged to become wonderful special snowflakes without shaming, responsibility, sacrifice, etc. If you believe this then of course the idea of shaming having value depending on the goals (such as having a healthy, sustainable society rather than maximizing personal freedom) will "feel" wrong. And there are endless books that are based on the ideal of the unconstrained vision, so of course you can find endless examples "supporting" that idea. Like I said, if you believe in the unconstrained vision you simply need to wait as society inevitably maximizes decadence, parasitism, irresponsibility, and apathy because people more and more often see no reason to sacrifice themselves for a rotting society. Or maybe you're right and we'll end up in some magical utopia of pet therapists and only people that love being janitors being janitors and whatever else.

Also, shame is not guilt. Shame in fact is more useful against those with less likelihood or ability to feel guilty, which are the very people more likely to fuck everything up for everyone else. Someone that feels guilty is more likely to self-adjust without shame, although it's not like the guilt will match societal norms at any given time, so shame can guide such a person, too. But someone with low to no guilt needs either shame or harsh, strictly enforced laws (or vigilantes getting revenge as a normal response) to conform. Your example of someone already dieting reacting one way is just constructed. There are societies for example in Asia where you get shamed significantly more than in the west if you gain weight, and people work harder to not gain weight than in the west. Counterexamples can exist, sure, but in general the more shame, the more conformity (although suicide rates may also increase, but everything is a trade off on the grand scale). It takes will (or dysfunctionality) to resist shame from society in general (meaning without significant portions of society clearly rejecting the shame as legitimate) consistently being applied over time.

Okay, so you agree that unstable home environments contribute to decadence, but you think removing all shame on bad parents is a solution. Hey, whatever, the unconstrained vision makes sense to you, then. And what exactly is an unstable home but one with a lack of legitimate, consistent authority structure? For example a single mother that constantly rotates men who don't want her in the long term and certainly don't want to care for a child that isn't theirs, while she has to work and becomes stressed by work, childcare, and constant long-term romantic failure and takes it out on the kid? She has authority over the child but is dysfunctional (in terms of providing a proper environment for the child, but likely in general, too) and the child is statistically proven to be 5-30 times as likely to become dysfunctional in each of many different ways. (Here is one collection of such data.) But I guess we shouldn't shame single mothers, who choose inferior lives for their children. The likelihood of unstable houses and an unfulfilled need for belonging of course increase for the children of single mothers, and peer pressure is something children of single mothers are more likely to give into, since they are more likely to have a bad relationship with their mother and a bad or nonexistent relationship with their father and not respect their authority, possibly for good reasons.

In the end I have never been saying that shame in general is good, just that some shame can have good general outcomes. You seem to think shame is inherently bad, in that it can only make things worse, at least in the general sense. This seems ridiculous under the constrained vision, however.

19

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: February 19, 2016, 07:44:48 pm »

I completely agree that there are way too many laws. I think most people in jail or prison (or otherwise punished) shouldn't be, either because what they did shouldn't be legally punishable or because the punishment is way too severe for the act.

Well, without shaming people into working harder to provide for a family they may also have to be shamed into creating (and the former is more or less a prerequisite for the latter for men because women are extremely unlikely to start families with losers or unemployed men, although they may be willing to have children with such men (if they're sexually attractive) if there's free money from elsewhere, which can include a cuckolded husband) the non-dream jobs will be much harder to fill. The critical jobs in society, where things are invented, created, maintained, or moved, are very often of this type. And if men or women choose to have no, small, or unstable families the economy also suffers due to fewer useful (intelligent or creative while not being dysfunctional) people existing via not being born or via being ruined by bad childhoods. Importing masses of immigrants with no qualifications for good jobs and often with no desire to assimilate doesn't fix this problem, and makes things even worse overall.

Basically no one "loves" to farm, but we need enough farmers, and they need to be functional people with enough skill to efficiently farm who are also motivated to farm. This is done by offering enough money to attract them. Shaming people into trying harder to get money is a general effect that feeds back into getting people to do such unwanted jobs (which are most jobs, but farming in particular is a critical job). Conversely, many people would love to have creative jobs such as artist or writer. However, it's hard to be skilled enough to stand out compared to the others who want those jobs, and society technically doesn't need such jobs to function, so the pay is slim to none unless you are skilled. This combined with shaming people to make more money causes us to fill the unwanted critical jobs such as farmer while only the best creative people are able to sustain themselves on creative jobs. The reason people can't just do their dream job is because the value they provide to others in doing so is too low to cause others to buy enough of their work to sustain them.

You call current culture unsustainable, and that's true, but forcing people to do all sorts of undesirable jobs is something that has been the case since time immemorial. I think you mainly just dislike this and want to dream of a reality where this doesn't have to occur. I mentioned robots doing everything critical because this is a way out, depending on who benefits from this, of course. Without such robots there is no way to have a functioning society with a good standard of living without there being economic pressure to get people to do undesirable jobs. And it's much easier to get at least men to do these jobs if you shame them into feeling like losers or worthless if they don't make lots of money, since this plays on the fact that women that are in demand will routinely reject average or below average men as losers, not to mention unemployed men.

I don't know why you think there enough jobs for everyone right now could be made to exist (where job means something that provides enough value to others to cause them to voluntarily pay the jobholder enough for their work to sustain themselves (government jobs for the most people are just welfare via busywork and do not qualify as real jobs due to the fact that without taking people's money at gunpoint people would not pay to keep these jobs around)). In the United States 29% of people aged 18-64 in the "civilian noninstitutional population" are either in the "civilian labor force" but unemployed (meaning that they are unemployed and are trying to get jobs) or are not in the labor force (meaning that they are unemployed and are not trying to get jobs), overwhelmingly the latter. Of course people from other age groups also compete for jobs, which means that 41% of people age 16 and over (and the extra people are overwhelmingly 65+, not 16-17) are unemployed, and again overwhelmingly are not trying to get a job. There is not enough demand for labor relative to the population to get real jobs (where people voluntarily pay for value) for everyone or even close. The reason the unemployed people aren't simply doing their dream jobs is that they have no capability to do so in a fashion that causes people to voluntarily pay them enough for their work to make it worthwhile. There is no actual need for more artists and writers. Only the good ones (as consumers judge them) sustain themselves on that. Adding tens of millions more would result in almost all of the new ones being low quality and receiving little to no money in return, even if they were able to try for a while in order to reach their maximum creative potential.

Creative jobs are actually the least recession-proof, because no one really needs entertainment. There is always media (mostly things to watch, listen to, or play) that already exists as well as other pleasurable activities to entertain people. So if you had the mother of all depressions and many people lost their jobs or at least part of their income the total remaining money to spend would mostly go to things people consume and/or need, like food, housing, energy, etc. Entertainment would be paid for far less because the money left over after paying for the former, more important things would be far less. As for "entrepreneurial" jobs, if they produce things people need there is already demand for them, which means that this demand is being filled at more or less the rate it can be filled at. Of course the government could lower taxes and lessen regulations to encourage more economic activity, but it's not like there is any particular lack of labor available to perform these jobs already.

If no one is shamed people will act irresponsibly towards their future and especially towards other people's futures. This is because responsibility is unattractive to humans for its own sake. Sacrificing in the present for the future is unattractive, in part because the future is uncertain and thus is devalued relative to the present. Common idiocy enhances this effect. Being responsible by sacrificing for others is even more unattractive for obvious reasons. Without shame people will more freely do all sorts of economically and socially negative things to themselves and others that lead to, in the long term, far many more poor and/or dysfunctional people who typically lack or are unable to use (due to dysfunction or a lack of money or opportunity) skills that are actually valuable to others. You can't simply rely on people to magically become the best people they can be...this is the unconstrained vision and is the ideal enabling people to believe in much of the nonsense being attempted in the west over the last century or so. If you believe in this you only need to wait as society rots further to see how wrong it is, and that people are actually innately selfish, irresponsible, stupid, and...decadent. It wouldn't matter as much if people didn't need society in the form of other people to make everything function to a high standard, i.e. if robots did everything critical.

I have no idea how you think you'll cause people to become less decadent and vain without shaming them (you could just make loads and loads more things illegal, but this is more painful than shaming people anyway, so it's not a real improvement over shaming). People don't naturally care about others as much as they care about themselves, for obvious reasons. Society is a heavyhanded compromise that involves shame even now, and especially in the past when excess wealth didn't enable nearly as much decadence to be sustained for long periods of time. Without shame people are much less motivated to properly create and develop the families and skills/jobs/companies that are needed to sustain and/or improve the future. This means that more people act in isolationist, parasitical, or dysfunctional manners that, when allowed without even shame to help prevent them, only encourage yet more people to do the same, since being a decent, sacrificial person is painful in comparison, and very much not worth it when so very many others are allowed to make things worse for everyone without consequences. This is a vicious cycle that only results in maximum decadence and societal rot until the society collapses economically, violently, and/or by not having enough people remaining (due to flight and a lack of births) to outweigh new people with different values that push into the original society's land.

EDIT: theory --> vision

20

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: February 18, 2016, 05:52:41 pm »

Well, I don't think a society where people seek revenge based on the random claims of themselves or other people (obviously many people won't be willing and/or capable of getting their own revenge or "revenge" but will simply enlist family and friends) is good, since it would easily spiral into everyone being paranoid about their defense from random bullshit claims, which of course means that eventually people just isolate themselves (fragmenting society and making it inefficient) and/or shoot first (people WILL get guns because they NEED them to SURVIVE in that society, but even without guns it would just be other deadly weapons) because who knows when someone (or some lynch mob) is going to try to viciously attack or kill you based on whatever bullshit they or someone else claims. And of course when you shoot first you just get your mob to defend you from the lynch mob that's coming for you because you shot first (you claim whatever is necessary to survive), or just shoot enough to ensure everyone that could tattle on you is dead, etc.

Also, a shame-free society likely isn't sustainable in the long term (without robots doing almost all of the critical jobs, anyway) because way too many people won't care about profiting society in the long term (of course this is effectively a scam and/or slavery for the many people that get back less than they put in, but without these people society collapses), so they'll generally do the minimum to sustain themselves. Then everyone will see that society doesn't have anything extra for them when they need it, and everyone thus will tend to contribute less and less back, which is a vicious cycle. Of course western society is already low on shame for many things, which is part of its current decline (from a long term societal sustainability standard, not a momentary personal freedom standard). Without shame you can't get people to stop being parasites or to become slaves (to support the parasites) nearly as easily, especially if it's combined with a lack of a real justice system (the justice system of course is already degraded beyond belief, too).

This probably doesn't make sense to many people, but it's complicated how shame interacts with other things that are critical to having a society work with rather than against itself. If everyone just goes for full decadence (which is personally attractive to humans) society becomes unsustainable (unless no one is needed for critical jobs (if those are covered by robots then basically everything is covered), but even then you could have other severe problems). I'm not saying I'm contributing myself, though, but part of this is is due to the treatment I've received, which makes me not care at all about giving anything back, since I consider myself to be owed quite a lot in the first place. Shaming me won't work either since I know that I am unable to shame society into making some critical things up to me, which makes me know that I am worth nothing to society, which makes society worth nothing to me. I guess society should've had better laws and justice for me if they wanted me to have a chance of caring. ;p

21

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: February 11, 2016, 09:13:34 pm »

It's still discussion about the world, which can be interesting. ;p

Regarding the current story with Regina, I try not to speculate too much about future events because it could influence Brion regardless of whether my speculation matched what he planned to do or not. There are obvious story options Brion could take for one purpose or another, though.

22

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: February 09, 2016, 03:58:27 am »

I have no idea how many sorcerers may have collaborated to do whatever to Eschelon, when this occurred (or if it needs ongoing, possibly "expensive" maintenance), or if it's partially or wholly some effect from pre-sorcerer times (when nanotechnology may have indeed been spammed more heavily). Many nations today have aircraft carriers (which can cost billions of dollars each) and other super-expensive things, so even if something was "possible" it can still be inaccessible to Vennice for financial reasons, which is part of what I've been saying. By the way, the next page says the floating rocks are clouds, not rocks. ;p

Maytag's arm replacement was "mirroring" in your link. Good luck mirroring wings or genitals you don't have or that you want changed. It seems to come back to the idea that restoring a default is easier (although mirroring being copying with a minor twist makes it even more basic, since it would seem that if Maytag lost both arms she may have been fucked), like one would think it would be in a story. In fact since it's not based on DNA this is a bit difficult to make work for random body part choices...good luck mirroring some random wing or genitals that aren't yours in the first place and having your body not reject it. And even if you didn't reject it there would be the question of sensing and controlling the new body part properly...perhaps not so much of an issue with mirrored arms, but extras like wings or swaps of genitals may not be easy at all to make work as though they were your own since birth. So we can easily be back to no luck for randoms like Vennice (perhaps Vennice is wealthy or a powerful sorceress or has such friends, but I have to assume not until otherwise is proven).

Anyway, calling it "easy" is relative. Clearly that location was well set up to do that, but if Maytag didn't luck into getting such help how "easy" might it have been to find and purchase it? Obviously healing is not "easy" in some areas, where "easy" should mean cheap, not "we're in the best area with the most sorcerers and specifically have a set up for this and have done it over and over to the point where we can reliably do it well". Basically, a surgeon in a hospital might call some operation "easy", but is it cheap? ("Free" healthcare just obscures the cost rather than actually lowering it, to be clear.) If you aren't relatively wealthy (let's say you're a random peasant such as might exist in Flipside or our third world) what are your chances of purchasing this? Vennice might not be a random peasant, but if she wants something better than mirroring an arm she already has one of she might be out of luck, as the price would normally be higher, since it would probably be harder than "easy", and "easy" very probably doesn't mean cheap.

I see no evidence law enforcement is doing much of anything. Of course if you looked and acted like a monster they'd normally act, but if you looked "weird" but didn't do anything is there a reason to believe they'd do anything? And of course one has to consider where one is...perhaps the knights would be very proactive, but as I recall they don't rule very much of the total land in Flipside.

23

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: February 04, 2016, 04:44:07 pm »

You call it the "same", but there's no evidence of that. To me it's restoring the default properties of something vs. creating something arbitrary. If everything was the "same" just because nanomachines can do lots of things then we ought to have more and/or more powerful sorcerers, alongside greater effects upon the world. Given that healing IS expensive and there don't seem to be loads of heavily modified people running around I can't just jump to wings and whatever being no big deal for any random Vennice or whoever wants them.

Your nanomachine design? What are you talking about. ;p In any case, there is a lack of hard details on how Bloody Mary works, isn't there? Perhaps it's one thing, perhaps it's another. When I said it has drawbacks few would accept, it implies that the exception (although I specifically didn't say there were none, so it's an exception to what's common in Flipside, not to the logic of what I said) came with horrendous drawbacks that wouldn't normally be acceptable to people otherwise wanting regeneration. And since there's no other example of high quality regeneration that I know of this means that all regeneration I've seen has not even been good overall, which kind of defeats the "anyone can have anything and therefore Vennice would surely have whatever she wanted" theory.

24

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: February 03, 2016, 04:27:40 pm »

I said a lot of people...and there are not a lot, are there? Is Vennice known to be one of those people? And Bloody Mary must be beyond the capabilities of almost anyone to create, plus she has drawbacks few would accept. As for Maytag, she was helped by important people. And we KNOW other healing that should be simpler and in higher demand than what Maytag received is still expensive. Also, regardless of "morality" I don't see how Maytag's healing is in the same category as "random" modifications.

25

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: February 02, 2016, 10:20:56 pm »

bulmabriefs144, you seem to agree with me that there is an extra step, namely having to edit the DNA. Regardless of what one does to avoid rejection by the rest of the body, whether or not this involves nanomachines, this alone makes it harder than simply replacing damaged parts with copies of what the original was or would've been according to the original DNA. And as I said there is more demand for this than for "random" edits, so between that and the default greater difficulty of "random" edits it's plausible that Maytag's healing was possible while things like sex changes or adding wings would be impossible or prohibitively expensive compared to the former. It's only equal and thus a given that since Maytag was healed anyone could edit Vennice or whoever easily if magic is so developed and commonplace that all sorts of extreme body modification would be common. I don't see a lot of people in Flipside running around with bones stronger than titanium, muscles that can throw ten ton boulders one hundred feet (of course you'd need better bones and other body parts for this, too), extremely fire or cold resistant skin, or regeneration that lets one heal major wounds in minutes or seconds without exhausting the person, not to mention new body parts like wings or tails, so it's easy to imagine that Vennice has either no or very limited options, assuming she would want to take such an option. For all I know Maytag's healing was already something only a very rich person would normally have access to, making "random" edits only possible for extremely wealthy people and/or rare, high-powered sorcerers, if anyone. We do already know that even lesser healing (such as of Bern's father) can be expensive, after all.

26

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: January 31, 2016, 05:31:40 pm »

You say "from a genetic perspective", but I do think there is an extra step (or likely many more) involved in not merely refreshing the original body part. You also seem to be thinking of real world SRS rather than creating completely normal body parts. I also don't know why you think real world body part replacement would require nanomachines...we don't need those for all the transplants performed today, so we should only need to grow body parts, which again doesn't necessarily need special genetic manipulation (in the sense of editing the original genes to create something preferred instead of the default thing) beyond getting the body part to grow in the first place (and since there's no genetic inconsistency with the original there's little chance of rejection). Of course there might be similar SRS in Flipside, but I was thinking about something more like replacing Maytag's arm with magic, which gave her a fully functional arm that would be more or less indistinguishable from her original arm. It seems to me that it would be easier by default to create a default body part than to just create whatever the body didn't naturally express in the first place. I know magic in Flipside could potentially do all sorts of things, but in practice you need skilled enough people to create and perform the magic, too. Replacing missing or damaged body parts with equivalent-to-the-original body parts surely has a much higher demand and payoff in Flipside than doing whatever random modifications, and should be easier to boot.

27

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: January 30, 2016, 05:19:17 pm »

This is why I discount transgender. They are generally okay with stuff down there, assuming they made the switch.

Well, I have no idea what quantity or quality of change is possible in Flipside, nor what it would cost. Regrowing an arm or other body part that is intended to stay the same as before seems easier (from a genetic or "default state" perspective), less controversial, and more useful in war or other potentially dangerous skilled labor than relevant changes one could effect upon transgender and/or intersex people would be.

28

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: January 29, 2016, 11:02:30 pm »

Intersex can make sense, but it doesn't seem very common in stories compared to trans, so it didn't occur to me. It would fill the same role in my possibilities as C, although it wouldn't be the same to Vennice, of course.

Anyway, I believe that surgically altering intersex babies must lead to additional transgenderism.

29

Flipside Discussion / Re: Mistake Thread

« on: January 29, 2016, 10:49:34 pm »

Panel five here reads "I've known here for a long time." instead of "I've known her for a long time.".

Panel one here reads "She was quiet" instead of "She was quiet.". Panel five reads "That would be strange considering they come to visit her.". Moby is often "loose" with how she talks so this is probably also just how she talks, but I would say "considering that they".

Panel seven here reads "thier" instead of "their".

Panel one here also reads "thier" instead of "their".

Panel six here reads "dispite" instead of "dispute".

Panel three here reads "Me and Maytag" instead of "Maytag and I". Of course this could be Crest's mistake, but I'm just pointing it out in case it isn't meant to be.

30

Flipside Discussion / Re: Chapter 45: discussion

« on: January 27, 2016, 08:59:01 pm »

Well, it seems either Vennice is arguing in an extreme, reactionary way to get out of an argument she has no real explanation for or Vennice is a true man-hater for some reason Brion may develop in the future and/or Vennice is trans and thus reacted extra-strongly to avoid being seen naked and is so unwilling to share that she's trans that she simply picked another extreme to get out of the conversation (either part A is true or part B is true or part C is true or parts B and C are simultaneously true). Her being a random undeveloped man-hater is another possibility but seems even more shallow than her having no reason whatsoever for modesty. So I'm hoping A and D are not true and that B and/or C are true. Of course it's possible that B and/or C are true but Brion will kill her off or otherwise remove her from the story before explaining/revealing B and/or C in any depth, but this makes the conversation a waste of time outside of developing Regina, and I'm not sure the conversation did much for Regina other than cement that she idolizes Maytag and wants to be like her.