Author Topic: Chapter 45: discussion  (Read 52322 times)

Daisuki-chan

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #60 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.

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #61 on: February 12, 2016, 12:12:21 pm »
I was expecting some comments about Glyph turning Regina to the dark side or something, but it was mainly an interesting transtopic ("That's not a word." "Says you.") that I won't add anything to because 1) the conversation's already moving on and 2) I'm not interested in writing a mini novel of a post. But this has been a fun chapter so far.

sunphoenix

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #62 on: February 12, 2016, 01:25:16 pm »
...aheh.  Seems like he's getting a 'convert'! :)
"...no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free.  No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything - you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is Kill him." - Robert A. Heinlein

bulmabriefs144

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #63 on: February 12, 2016, 07:20:51 pm »
I was expecting some comments about Glyph turning Regina to the dark side or something, but it was mainly an interesting transtopic ("That's not a word." "Says you.") that I won't add anything to because 1) the conversation's already moving on and 2) I'm not interested in writing a mini novel of a post. But this has been a fun chapter so far.

Why I ultimately veered away. 5 or 10 such posts was beginning to grate on my nerves.

Seems like Glyph has nothing to hide.  ;D
"この世界の悪があれば本当に、それは人類の心の内にあります."
(Truly, if there is evil in this world, it lies within the heart of mankind)
—Edward D. Morrison

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #64 on: February 17, 2016, 08:35:33 pm »
Well, never mind the convert. She's going to join a nudist colony at this rate.

bulmabriefs144

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #65 on: February 18, 2016, 05:26:08 am »
I'm not sure I agree with Regina's utopia wholeheartedly.

A nudist colony would likely not be a wonderful world for anyone wearing clothing. Nor would it be for anyone who actively wants to be something else (taller, shorter, heavier, skinnier, a female like me, etc). Basically, it's a fine idea, but I'd rethink it since it smacks of conformity. Here's what I do think though.

I've been trolling Pinterest and Facebook, and one of the pictures caught my eye. It was a split screen picture of the same block. On the left we had police grabbing people on their knees, super-ultra-megapharmacy, drones, pollution, and so on. On the right, we have an organic health food store, trees, shiny happy people everywhere, and just a general sense that people are happier and more free. After looking at this, and looking at the other picture, I came to the conclusion that I want this sort of thing too. The reason I came to that things are so messed up is because a number of cause but mainly: an oppressive police state built on fear and shame (that is, the only actual crimes that there are would be based on mistreatment of other people, like rape or murder, and those could be policed by people seeking revenge; the rest of our laws are arbitrary restrictions like "white and colored folk can't use the same bathroom" or "you can't sleep just anywhere in a town, you gotta pay rent" or "you can't copy that DVD, and you can't play that here in this country"),  advertising companies that thrive on people feeling worthless, and our health system has decided to cause disease (look up pinkwashing and the cancer corporations, you will literally become sick to your stomach at how companies have suppressed the use of any other approach to cancer than chemo (which several sites have listed as 93% ineffective and weakening to the body), surgery (which is effective, but not always permanent since lifestyle is the cause of cancer), and radiation (known to cause cancer) when there are in fact organic foods that lower cancer risk, called antioxidants). In short, we have a society bent on making us feel worthless through constant reinforcement of insecurity, and things that use that to kill or frighten us. We need one that lets us be us.

Our military should not invade other countries, it should only defend from attack, and we shouldn't be excessively aware of its presence. Our medicine should be a combination of gene therapy, herbal cures (herbs do work, and they are often safer than many of the synthetic drugs because they have all the other stuff in the plant), surgery, and an emphasis on prevention (with most of its money coming from optional treatments like people wanting elf ears or something). Our police should be either volunteers or bounty hunter style and mainly work on murder and rape investigations, if they are there at all. We don't need to be told we need makeup. Makeup is like accessories, it defines our style (less "I look ugly without it" and more "I want blue fingernails today"). And our science could be extremely green, using ambient solar energy, wind power, geothermal energy and have a pollution free society.

What we need is not to feel bad about having shame of our own. Maybe we will be ashamed of our bodies. We are allowed any insane and expensive procedure we want, because it is our bodies. What we need, is to do away with external shame, the sort that is like a mom harping on her daughter "why aren't you married yet?" causing her to rush into abusive marriage.
"この世界の悪があれば本当に、それは人類の心の内にあります."
(Truly, if there is evil in this world, it lies within the heart of mankind)
—Edward D. Morrison

Daisuki-chan

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #66 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

bulmabriefs144

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #67 on: February 19, 2016, 04:10:24 pm »
Erm, lemme rephrase that. I don't think revenge seeking is good.

Essentially, yeah maybe you're right. We do need courts, where actual evidence that someone wronged us is brought up.

But we don't need cops coming to our house to arrest us because of something they have decided is illegal to even have.
Our current justice system is very much based on fear and shame. A prime example: indecent exposure. Honestly, is it anyone else's business how we are dressed? How about possession of guns? Possession of alcohol or drugs? There are laws that don't affect anyone at all unless we use such things to hurt others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victimless_crime

We need courts to prove that people who hurt us actually hurt us. And maybe mercenary cops to bring them into such courts. But we do not need police to enforce right and wrong.

I am not convinced of this. Without being made to feel ashamed, people can still be fired. And if we had no shame, we would be doing possibly unethical (under our current norms) jobs. Alot of people would be artists or writers (or prostitutes or really weird jobs).  For that matter, our current food industry is fucked up precisely because there are too many humans involved in it. If aside from people who loved to farm, the food industry was largely mechanized, we would have largely have healthier food. This would be true of many of the "conventional" jobs that everyone currently overrates because they are afraid to strike out alone and do what they love. This is already starting to happen, the big industries are becoming unnecessary. We currently have too many people involved in jobs that hate their job, this means rather than having a positive production from our jobs, we are making stuff that is garbage because there is an almost criminal lack of pride in work.

In short, if in order to retain money you have to work, then lacking anyone's opinion on the "sensible" thing, people do their dream jobs. McDonald's and alot of the really crappy stuff become mechanized. You would actually be surprised at how unsustainable our current culture is, it literally relies on force to get people to do what they don't want to do. Everything from sanctions, to isolation, to making people almost unemployable. This cannot last. We currently have millions paying into college but they have nothing to do. We call it a recession but the reality of it is, there are recession-proof jobs, and most of them are creative and/or entrepreneurial. A shame-free society, not only will not be decadent, but will sustain itself.

Also, decadence does not come from lack of shame. The reverse is true. Decadence is when the culture is sick. And this happens more from an excessively vain group of people. Think about this. An unashamed person goes out and does what they love. A vain person worries about what others think, and spends all of their time at parties, checking facebook, seeking the approval of others. A content person doesn't need approval, so they go find their own path. If their path doesn't work, they will screw themselves over and probably wipe themselves out. Or they get a new one.
« Last Edit: February 19, 2016, 04:26:41 pm by bulmabriefs144 »
"この世界の悪があれば本当に、それは人類の心の内にあります."
(Truly, if there is evil in this world, it lies within the heart of mankind)
—Edward D. Morrison

Daisuki-chan

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #68 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
« Last Edit: February 20, 2016, 05:11:59 pm by Daisuki-chan »

Brion Foulke

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #69 on: February 19, 2016, 09:49:33 pm »
Interesting discussion.  I just want to point out that in the current comic, Regina is talking about a specific kind of shame, and not shame in general.  In case that wasn't clear.

bulmabriefs144

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #70 on: February 20, 2016, 03:44:54 am »
Urgh supermegablock. I kinda got lost in parentheses so for now since I goto work, I will only respond to part of it.

You're obviously from the city. There are people who love all kinds of things. I for years worked on either a farm or garden. Why? I disliked the whole stifling bustle of the city, the urge to make ends meet doing alot of jobs that sat you in the back of an office. Farming was something where you could see the impact of what you did and felt connected to the land. I eventually burnt out in the loneliness and crummy wage, but it still help family out with yard work, and now work at a library. It was a job that I never thought I'd be doing but sorta landed upon with the sense that I also got annoyed between the highly seasonal nature of the job. I guess I saw these people always having fun, while I was usually looking for a new job come winter instead of just watching the seasons change. I tried retail first, but I didn't like the direct sales agenda (even though we worked at a fucking walmart). I liked books but the first bookstore I applied made me realize I love libraries. So I had like the most relaxed interview at the bookstore.

In short, no there is a possibility of loving farming. But nobody loves working at McDonald's, nobody loves working at food factories where junk food is made, etc. These are soul destroying jobs, because you know in your heart that your actions hurt the health of millions. These would be fine run by robots, if they even existed. Because they are jobs most people feel shame about, where it is possible to be proud of growing crops.

I'm going to look at the rest later.

Okay, back. And yes, Brion I understand the point of how it's only sexual shame, but as you've experimented with alternate political systems (including one that seems to be a mercantile constitutional anarchy) I think it's only fair to take a look at this as a universal system.

Art would run the same. People who don't do good work, or at least popular work, will not have people buy their stuff. This would drive the people who just want art because they think it's easy out, and make the rest work better. As for farming, in this country certain subsidies for growing certain crops mean that even if they cannot sell to local markets, they have guaranteed income.

Recession is not defined as unemployment (that is depression), it is defined as negative economic growth. This means, the country as a whole is not producing money. This is as a result of several factors, some of which as purely fiction, like "there aren't enough jobs". Wrong. You can create jobs, and anyone can be an employer. The only limit is whether the job is viable at making money and preventing loss. In fact, the way we understand "making jobs" is often totally bogus. I have seen this many times. A town is doing okay with many shops in town, then we have a Walmart or ballpark or some other megastore. Do new get created? Hmmmm, let's think here... We have retail shops all over that area. They have the people they need, so no new jobs there. In theory that would make new work, since there would be now a place for people to work. In actual fact, however, there is limited physical space, so this ballpark is competing for space and probably knocked down retail stores. These people can't all work for the ballpark, so they are evicted from their businesses. This equals lost jobs not new jobs. The only way to create new jobs is to build a business that is not in competition with other businesses. This equals: (1) home business or (2) online business or (3) both. The business now operating outside the current businesses in town, is able to hire new people that are not currently employed.

Creative jobs are recession-proof if they are a creative usage of niche. Everyone becoming an artist, is decidedly not creative. That is, if I find out that there is a desperate need for pet therapists, I make the pet therapist job, and become the best paid (the only one, but anyway) pet therapist in town.   

I have read nonfiction books aplenty. I've learned some on business and economics, some on ethics, and a few on self-help. Basically, I'm a huge nerd that reads either books or the internet most of my waking hours, filters it until something fits logically. Not always right, but yea, this feels wrong. The best resources for self-help on this subject are The Gifts of Imperfection and When Panic Attacks. Guilt does not make people behave. Consider the following: a person dieting (I have my dad to use an example). When he is guilt tripped does he suddenly stick to a diet? Not hardly. He responds defensively to people "pestering" him about his eating, and now that he feels bad, eats even more self-destructively. This is, guilt/shame backfired, making him more prone to bad behavior than before.

Decadence is a product of dissolute culture. That is, when people feel insecure about what they have to offer the world, they just sit and watch movies all day.

http://www.ask.com/family/causes-moral-decadence-among-youth-92fb16619b2e1b2

Quote
Causes of moral decadence among the youth can be categorized into social, economic, cognitive and technological factors. Social causes include peer influence and unstable home environments, while economic factors include poverty. Technological innovations, such as media and the Internet, expose young people to potentially unwelcome information and cognitive causes are related to the need for belonging among the youth driven by physical and psychological needs.

Did you see, "lack of authority structure" anywhere here? No, but you did see unstable houses, peer pressure, and need for belonging. This is short for shame. They are ashamed of being homeless so they act rich. They are ashamed of not fitting in, so they do high risk behavior to impress peers. And they receive loads of ads from technology that convince them they won't measure up without the latest whatever.
« Last Edit: February 20, 2016, 10:27:03 am by bulmabriefs144 »
"この世界の悪があれば本当に、それは人類の心の内にあります."
(Truly, if there is evil in this world, it lies within the heart of mankind)
—Edward D. Morrison

Daisuki-chan

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #71 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.

bulmabriefs144

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #72 on: February 21, 2016, 04:59:46 am »
Judging what is and isn't a creative or fun job is about the least creative thing you can do. It's not to your taste, but this doesn't mean there aren't people who love to do it.

I'm going to stop right there. Where you say "the non-creative jobs someone has to do them." No one has to do them.

Long ago, car washing was a team project or at least hard work for someone. Then the automatic car wash was invented, and one person making their living collecting the coins. Ditto for a laundromat, one person's creative juices made individuals reasonably rich and free to do whatever in their own time. Not only are those workers laid off but the one guy who collects the coins has the rest of the day to write books, pursue hobbies, even work another part-time job. The same for the laundromat. Yes, dry cleaning has persisted but they are experts at dry cleaning, and eventually that too might be automated. On the other hand, library despite having autocheck scanners still have  staff. Banks despite having ATMs still have staff. Why?

One word: customer service. It is the one thing that a computer, short of being like Watson, cannot do
 And it is the one thing it shouldn't do. That job needs a personal touch, and will always need employees. Oh sure robots, but they always make the logical decision not the other ones.

The less creative a job, the more it is likely to have a genius type be like, "hey this job has no components other than the task (no customer service, no repair, and no sales or creative aspect) I can mechanize this whole thing pay my boss and run the company myself." That becomes a job freed up. Mining and farming both have large scale machines for the big commercial stuff. But they can't do organic farming. And they can't do gem mining without butchering the materials.

So no, we don't need uncreative soul-crushing jobs. For that matter, I don't need "that'll never work in the real world" or especially "that's not the way we've done it before." If the current plan is inefficient that is the thing that should be replaced. McDonald's is literally just the order. The entire thing, including the cooking could be mechanized, with just some guy running the automatic order system making sure it has no pickles.

I'm not going to drag this on. Because I'm obviously right. :D There are probably examples each of us could give about a structured vs unstructured world, but the major point is that it's a sorta balance. I would say you could indeed have a world like you described, but unless some people were a little more shameless, nobody would really be happy. I could also show a world like I described, but I'd concede there might be some less than perfect things unless people had a firm sense of boundaries.

So about Regina and her modesty-free nudist world, let's examine why that would or won't work? And what she means by being stronger. Is this about the 2nd dissolving test, or about Maytag?

Update: Pfffft. Funny we should mention stuff like this. Today my dad gave me a "not in that outfit" lecture. Apparently something I was wearing was rather short.
« Last Edit: February 21, 2016, 03:02:11 pm by bulmabriefs144 »
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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #73 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.
« Last Edit: February 21, 2016, 11:28:44 pm by Daisuki-chan »

bulmabriefs144

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #74 on: February 22, 2016, 07:53:04 am »
One more comment, and then I'll totally move on to Regina (later on today).

Here's my take on it from my own life experiences. My first job was at 6, I was feeding cat food to kitties. I got maybe a few dollars of spending money. It was not minimum wage, but I had no real need for it. It was a quiet job and sorta fun for a kid. My second job, I was maybe 13 or 14 (it was under-the-table). I was helping a neighbor pull weeds and fix his house. I worked about 60 hours (over several weeks), and he shorted me, as at the time minimum was was maybe $5 or something. I wound up with $200 for my trouble, the math didn't add up and I've been slightly cynical about work since. I've done alot of gardening jobs where I worked maybe 3 hours a day, $10/hr, maybe 2-3 days a week. In other words, pfffft crappy wages. I had other job, some of which we on call and sucky hours, some of which were fulltime, some like Amazon were overtime. Some like Walmart were shifting schedule. Whenever I started to really hate my job, either my work would suck and I'd get fired, or I'd begin to work less hours for one reason or another (maybe I'd get sick, maybe the boss wouldn't need me, maybe I'd ask for more flexible schedule).

The point in all of this? We, as humans, take jobs based on what we think we deserve. I have also noticed that we tend to take lovers based on what we think we deserve (explaining why I'm still single). So, the natural progression of these suck jobs is that without a demand for them, people find other ways to do them. If people hate the tipping system, either waitresses start demanding real wages, or formal dining goes the way of the dodo. Likewise, if people are tired of fast food, the industry collapses, and there is only traditional restaurants. If people eat at home, we have neither. An industry only needs to exist if If people stopped depending of conventional farming, we would have hydroponics businesses. Or if we stopped liking other people making money from food, we'd all have home farms or labs where we grew our own food. Nature abhors a vacuum, and something fills the need. But no, the need as such is not fixed in stone (someone gets food to the public, someone grows food, someone delivers water and other necessities, but the method this happens is NOT fixed).  So no, there is never a need to do such jobs. We just convince ourselves that is what we are worth. It's a self-punishment.
I'm a librarian, because I like dealing with customers but I don't like selling people stuff. When I finally understood that I was better than these crappy jobs that were like SELL SELL SELL, I started being able to move towards even halfway decent work. Are there days when work sucks? Yes. But these are days when I realize that I've been feeling bad, and this reflects itself in the choices I make.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmN2RL4VJsE

You can take this guy with a great of salt, but effectively, positive thinking does impact outcome. So, when we feel ashamed about our job options, we only get drudge work with no option of promotion. You see alot of money, maybe, but like for Amazon, I was making tons of money, but other costs would eat it up. "Someone has to do these jobs" I used to think. If someone has to do them, why aren't they valued more? Truth is, they can automate many of the jobs, as I said before. This would leave many people out of a job, but this would leave more people time to think about their own businesses. Jobs that use creativity and the mind are valued more because you need an actual person making a decision. Grunt work is expendable.

It isn't just preference for a teller. The ATM can pull in and pull out money. It cannot license changes of name or address, approve loans, or decide ANYTHING, it cannot instruct people in the exchange rate of foreign currency, give stock advice, or whatever else a banker can do (my knowledge on that is limited). There are specific instances where you need someone caring at the other end, and this is where purely automated stuff loses out. A computer can do some of our work at the library like searching titles, cataloguing, and checking in and out. It cannot show people where the W2 form is. It can't help people with computers, or advise on resume writing. It can't help people log in to the right WiFi connection, or help them print their phone stuff to a copier. It can only do repetitive stuff.

The labor is freed up, yes. That labor can go on begging other employers for scraps only to have them say "hmmmm, based on your (previous service/criminal record/driving record/other stupid piece of paper), I can't hire you." Or the labor can say, "well I guess if we aren't good enough, we can walk to somewhere we we are good enough." When I have been self-employed, that wasn't an issue so much as making sure the work was good. And when I wrote a book, well, nobody ever bought it, but it was completely my own time. 

The organic farming is often done with a minimum of chemicals and pollution. Many of the organic farmers insist that diesel fuel gets absorbed by the crops and taints the flavor. Or pesticides, or other fumes. This is why it's more expensive, because it's done using alot of trained workers. The jobs I have worked at, they didn't have 500 acres of land plowed by big tanker tractors/sprayers/other stuff, they had alot of people that were weeding by hand, and it was very hard work.
Likewise, while some of mining can be done in 5 min using a digging machine, getting an intact vein of gems tends to be more of a skill than a mechanic. These are things that need expertise, otherwise you have nothing but tiny fragments, rather than a giant statue at the end waiting to be carved into an emerald woman (which you would get if you mined a vein out perfectly.

We don't need these untrained grunt jobs. We need for people to think hard about what they actually want. There is an oversupply in jobs, because people all head like sheep into the city, where they all compete for the same jobs. If you're a minister, for instance, many of them won't take jobs on the outskirts, so these churches struggle. But there are plenty of openings there. Want to work in a small town, and got IT experience? You can set up better network lines there, but *gasp* out in the boonies. Where you can, duh, order stuff online anyway.
 People aren't honest about what they really want. "I 'should' go out and get a conventional job. I 'should' commute to the city." Really, should you? Because it seems like the commute is killing you. Not that everyone is suited for the country either.
But if MSN News says "all the openings are now in nursing" everyone gets retrained as a nurse, where are there likely to be no openings? Nursing. If wewere instead to stop being ashamed of doing something more like us, suddenly, we would find our niche. Some would work at comic shops, some would work at burger and fry places because they like the whole fast food culture. But you wouldn't see this desperate job culture because people were there because they wanted it. If you've ever seen someone who loves their job, it's a whole different deal than the guy doing it for money, and I think you'd even see the difference.
 
I would also recommend the book ReWork. You're locked into a certain business mindset that is not really true.   

Now, about Regina... Looks like I'm out of time. Suffice it to say, the whole nudity issue is precisely because you view being naked as an invitation to sex. There is such a thing as topless feminists, people who see there as a double standard that guys can go shirtless but gals can't. Being nude, around other nude people means they see everything. That hot girl you're talking to? She knows you like her, if you know what I mean. If everyone was nude at a restaurant or even a majority of the people, they really would be blind to it.

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1609417!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/article_970/nude12n-2-web.jpg

http://www.nickscipio.com/pod/media/2012/10/Church-flashers-Unorthodox.jpg

(Contains nudity. Because duh we're talking about nudity)

Compare picture 1 & 2. The first has a guy not giving two shits what others think, the second has a bunch of oversexualized girls flashing, when actually they are ashamed of baring all (because for them it is sexual).

"Weird bodies", huh? Pffft. :D
« Last Edit: February 22, 2016, 05:38:19 pm by bulmabriefs144 »
"この世界の悪があれば本当に、それは人類の心の内にあります."
(Truly, if there is evil in this world, it lies within the heart of mankind)
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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #75 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...
« Last Edit: February 22, 2016, 08:34:05 pm by Daisuki-chan »

Daisuki-chan

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #76 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.

bulmabriefs144

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #77 on: February 23, 2016, 08:09:36 am »
I know you don't believe me. But look around your area, with a different attitude. Not, "that'll never work," but "what if we..." Yes, some ideas won't work. But let's leave those after we've tried stuff.
Culture can either be enriched or depleted. In the latter case, opportunity is lost, and jobs become a matter of having an excess of labor (read: people who are only skilled at lifting boxes and simple tasks) and a dearth of real skills. A person who has real skill doesn't need another person to hire them. They can work for themselves. 

The anti-decadence with shaming is based on a faulty premise, that decadence is from a lack of guilt. It's not, it's due to a culture that leaves us with nothing to do. This is not because he haven't had enough fundamentalist priests tell us how sinful we are. It is because we have nothing to do to make ourselves useful, and we spend all of our time hanging out on video games, social networking, or attending parties. These are not evil things. But they are unproductive, compared to being employed at something that is a real craft.  I don't need to prove this. I've lived it. When I apply myself to video games, I feel like nothing is done. When I do art or writing, suddenly I'm doing something that can add to a community. The cure for decadence is not shame, it's doing something productive. That said, I think I'll spend a large portion of today playing Skyrim.  ;D

Now, since I am really really tired of hitting the same brick wall with this (at this point we either agree, or we don't), we will move on to Regina. For real, this time. Really, let's move on to Regina.

Regina sorta reminds me of me, about ten years ago. I couldn't speak in public. I shut myself in my room. Nevermind popular jobs, I couldn't apply to any jobs. I was painfully shy. She is trying to emulate Maytag (who is a natural extrovert, unlike her), but you can tell she is still very modest. This entire sequence is funny because we have a pervert type interacting with like the world's shyest girl and she is attracted to this whole thing because she sees a world where her insecurities don't matter as much. I'm thinking about how this girl relates to all of this, and whether she could create a world where she could be more confident.

Quote
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.
     

You did? I have trouble wading through these long texts. The point, (I think) I'm making is that is the very average/ugly nature of regular people that this would be good. We have too many ads that are like "wear tons of makeup and the best clothes" trying to make girls like Regina who are already insecure even more so. If you look at a bunch of people, suddenly it's more honest. I know my body doesn't look great, but the rich white man, well, he has testicular warts. So maybe he's not as privileged as he tries to lord over people like. You stop worrying about people in a higher class than you, and realize when naked, we're all about the same. I think that's what Regina means by stronger, that she wouldn't feel so insecure about things. She could see people as they really are, rather than being hung up over the fact that she's too modest.

I think it also sounded like the focus was on, "but businesses would never allow it" rather than "we need to have the freedom to do it without making it a mandatory universal" which I also agree with. I also wouldn't like it forbidden anywhere, just kinda a choice like any other fashion choice. The idea of nude-only or nude-restricted spaces smacks of the same mentality that caused "whites only" restrooms.

The idea of toplessness stems from the whole idea that our society doesn't blink at this but acts downright horrified at this. As it is a double standard, it has more to do with feminism than nudism.

Aesthetically, I don't believe anyone, male or female objects to attractive women.  I think it's fine that you're lesbian. If I was born a woman, I could not see myself being into men (even when they're muscled out they're not attractive, and alot of men resemble fat hairy critters). Lastly, the point I was making were too, that (1) nudism is more honest, and (2) the women are having fun, but they look very much like they are overthinking it.

We're going to discuss #2. There was an old one-panel comic in like the 20s where a man was in a nudist colony, had attractive nude women around him. But he ignored them, and was looking at a clothed girl who had wind expose her panties. Besides being funny and ironic, the moral of this story is that the reason we are so sexualized is that we are hung up on our clothing, and think that without it, we are initiating sex. If we were ever without clothes for any length of time (it would have to be during the summer, nudism during the winter is a no-go) we would find that most of us were average, and the only sexual behavior had a necessary social component. The reason I say that this exposure of breasts is shame behavior is precisely because they give such a damn about it. I compare "Girls Gone Wild" with the topless feminism movement. There is a completely different mindset. The topless feminist views what she is wearing as "this shouldn't matter because men are allowed to go around with no shirt, it's just clothing." The Girls Gone Wild motif is more like the above picture. The problem with the latter is that it not only perpetuates a sort of female chauvinism, but the women in question are still fixated on how their bodies being naked is somehow different. They still are attached to the idea of needing clothing, seeing the loss of it as sexual, because they still have shame.

http://flipside.keenspot.com/comic.php?i=1327

http://flipside.keenspot.com/comic.php?i=1217
http://flipside.keenspot.com/comic.php?i=1219

May doesn't care if people see her naked, because she has no shame. Regina has shame, and see the difference in her attitude? For her, it is an issue, for Maytag it's really not.
« Last Edit: February 23, 2016, 08:24:13 am by bulmabriefs144 »
"この世界の悪があれば本当に、それは人類の心の内にあります."
(Truly, if there is evil in this world, it lies within the heart of mankind)
—Edward D. Morrison

Daisuki-chan

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #78 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.
« Last Edit: February 24, 2016, 01:48:51 am by Daisuki-chan »

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #79 on: February 24, 2016, 01:00:24 pm »
"Who doesn't like having a good penis?"

AbVag alters to keep his insecurities protected.

Oh, you can resume your conversation. :)
« Last Edit: February 24, 2016, 01:02:13 pm by Abstract Vagabond »

bulmabriefs144

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #80 on: February 24, 2016, 01:37:34 pm »
Of course. I always base my thinking about life as I have experienced it. It may not be universally true, but the ideal is based on thinking that "seriously, this needs to be fixed." You ignore my vision as a false vision, but this isn't the case. I am telling you what the world could be, if people who had their stuff together helped to make it so. I don't need disillusioning about what the world is, I know what a crapsack place it is. Do I know everything that can be done to improve the world? No, I only know my perspective, and that of those who have shared theirs.

I'm not going to go into great depth, because frankly I'm tired about talking about this, but I'll give you a bullet point. Please bear with me, and don't pick apart point by point. Some of these points are nonessential, as I am ADD, and tend to non sequitor.
  • I have found that some of the biggest issues, frankly, is people wind up being bullied into jobs they hate. If the only reason you go to work is because you are afraid of being homeless, seriously, maybe you should just get in your car and drive away. Because that's a damned shitty reason to be working.
  • Maybe I've been reading you wrong, but it sounds like you're advocating "people should just suck it up and do whatever job people have decided they belong in." Feel free to correct me on this. About that, I have had my family tell me over and over "you should be a computer programmer" because you're good at it. Ummmm, as a hobby, I like to game program, but major businesses use hard code (C++ rather than a game engine) which kinda draws the fun out of it (I like the artsy parts of it, making graphics and the plot). I do help family fix their stuff, but I would loathe doing nothing but it. Also, I should point out that while I like the artistic side of this, I HATE MATH. Likewise, I have had alot of well-wishers try to push me into jobs over the years. It took alot of years to realize what I liked to do as a hobby wasn't necessarily what I want to be stuck at. At the library, I now am able to help people with the computer without being typecast. That's cool.
  • Not only is this kinda stupid to have this trend, but it's dangerous. I have seen people who were given jobs they hated by their dad. What tends to happen is they try to do a bad job. In a major field, like medicine, however this means someone dies. Even in the food industry, fragments of metal, glass, rats, etc could mean a major problem to someone, all because one twit hated his job and was ashamed to speak up about it. Think about this scenario With me so far? Now, think about the shoddy quality of consumer goods. TVs, VCRs, clocks, whatever, all these things used to last alot longer, and people cared enough to repair them. Now consumer repair people are few and far between, and yet the price of goods is crazy. It continues to go up.
  • I am basically not in favor of the suit and tie culture for job interviews. What we are thinking we are telling people is to have respect for the employer, and to have a professional image. What we are actually doing is practicing social stratification (you have to be rich enough to afford formal outfits to get a job that will pay the bills, begging the question why you need the job if you can afford expensive clothing), and teaching people to value image over accomplishment. I do advocate looking one's own personal best, but not creating a fixed uniform.
  • From my experience, I grew up with a parent who was from that period. Who believed in such jobs, that conventional work was key to success. But I found that I was generally not happy even interviewing. I also found that the advice he would give me did not work. I wanted to be outside alot, and it showed. They could tell I wasn't comfortable, and no surprise, I wasn't hired. I'd get pushed into more interviews, and more, and more. Meanwhile, I was doing garden work and relatively happy if underemployed. But I'd balk everytime I was told "you need to go out and get more work." This from someone who hated formal jobs. And it didn't help me. The jobs I did get tended to be bottom-rung and almost a toxic atmosphere. So no, I have a very definite cause for seeing it differently from the "just suck it up and do the work, even if you hate it." You should like your job. If you don't what is the point of doing it? That's 10-40 years of your life lost.
  • I didn't say "everyone gets a dream job." I meant "everyone ought to make a go at working for themselves." We don't need commercial or government interference on the job market. We need more entrepreneurs. A job is nothing more than doing something, and having someone pay you. I saw a movie last night (Not One Less) where little kids were moving bricks over 2 hours to pay for travel to the city. The construction worker had not employed them to do this, they just did, and begged money. The difference is more than semantic. Everyone getting a dream job sounds like there is a government handout. What I'm talking about is people getting off their asses, stop looking for others to solve their problems and find your passion. The people who don't want to do this, are welcome to try to impress some guy that isn't worth their time into hiring them. Even from conventional jobs, deciding whether you want to be a farmer or retailer, is a hell of a lot better than reading the paper and passively applying to what seems popular. You will be stopped on the first question, "why do you want this job?" (Answer: you don't, you are only using it to pay rent until something better comes along, then you'll quit suddenly)
  •   Also, skills are developed, not innate. That's a misconception, we all can work to be at least average at a skill, and harder work can catch even someone without inborn skill (talent). In fact, people who start with talent tend to average out unless they also have a strong interest or drive, because they don't have to work at it. There isn't some inequity of skill. There are other inequities however, such as overpopulation of desired jobs, discrimination, and wealth and other advantages. But skill is what you work at.
  • Culture is something that enriches a community by connecting people with their dreams. Let's use an example of two towns. One is a boring megacity. It has plenty of industrial centers, but they've gone the way of Detroit. They closed down, and now people don't know what to do. They expect to do retail stuff but... there is no income because their town is Boring McGeneric. No tourists visiting, bringing in new money, no money to repair old buildings. The town is dying. This is basically the mining town problem. On the other hand, I have an actual town to use as an example: Bisbee, AZ. It was a former copper town, but after it got kinda run down, the hippies and hipsters came in. Now it's an artsy town. It isn't super big, but it seems to have plenty of tourism, and this means cash flow. There are businesses, everything from wiccan shops, to ghost tours, to health food stores, coffee shops, this is a town that has culture. Another example: Cape May, NJ. Same deal, only it is even more wildly successful as a tourist center, and they have ALOT going on. Recessed business? Not a chance. People do what they want, and have things to do.
  • Mincome sounds like a buzzword, but I'm gonna address a bigger issue. Well, two, really. The first is cost to live. This is a coined word, not an economic term. What I mean by that, is that when you have nothing, the difference between having nothing and having something is what it costs an employer to pay you minimum wage. The more deflated the economy, the more easily an employer can hire, making a difference between not having any income and having some income and having enough income. Higher minimum seems like it would be an easy fix, but it doesn't help the guy struggling to get hired. He needs an easy job, and one that is expendable if it isn't to the worker's taste, that won't make the employer try to prevent employees from doing their own stuff. This isn't to say I'm in favor of how conservatives like the pay system, but we don't need a higher minimum wage. We need more people paid ABOVE the minimum. Which comes to the second point, income must be able to keep up with housing, gas, and food. If these are priced out of range, we have what is called wage slavery. Wage slavery is when people ostensibly are making a ton of money, but when you break it down into food, clothing, shelter, and transportation, they are either breaking even or actually losing. If you are making enough for rent only after 3 weeks of work, you are scraping by, and definitely not meeting standards of living. This is criminal.

I think that was most of what I wanted to discuss. About that, anyway. Everything else I could say is just fluff. Aren't you glad I didn't go into great depth?  ;D



I'm gonna blue this out so I can focus on points rather than trying to respond to an entirety.

Quote
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.

I would agree. The government needs to butt out, stop criminalizing "indecent" exposure, and let people wear whatever. The feminism comes in, as soon as we have men going around saying "well, she was naked so I raped her. Cuz she was asking for it." Any progress to nudism would butt heads with these assholes.

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.

By honest, I mean that many of the lies our culture rests on (like shaming women for not looking like Barbie) get unfounded once nothing is left to the imagination. Yes, clothing freedom is essential. But this would also be a great tool to break social castes.  Hmmm, maybe that's why it's forbidden.

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.

This is not even my opinion. I have read about nudist retreats/colonies, and what they personally believe. They usually have a distinctly non-romantic non-sexual outlook on nudity, the clothes are just clothes according to them, they go about business as usual. Here, I can even find examples.

http://www.justluxe.com/travel/luxury-vacations/feature-1915997.php


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.

And that's the point I was getting red in the face about above. Whether or not my idea of utopia could work (maybe not), the opposite is a dystopia, a world where people are shamed into doing jobs they hate. I believe the Matched series by Ally Condie has a good representation of society when people have no real choices. Shame is powerful motivator to make people do a number of violent impositions.

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).

If you feel shamed about it, we shouldn't talk about it. Feminism should be about equality, but I've run into a number of feminists that appear to like using shame tactics themselves.

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.


Value? Pffft. I currently work at the library with two other women. I'm trans as I say, about to go into surgery, but I like women. These two are sisters. The older one is married, so kinda off limits, but even so I've decided the one who interests me more is the younger sister. Unlike the older one, who is super tall and skinny, she's kinda short and plump. Do I see her as having less value? No. Not only is she adorable, but I really value our conversations, even if sometimes we don't agree. Because of this, even unmarried, the older sister naked would kinda be like "meh." The younger sister on the other hand, I think I'd be extremely interested in seeing her naked. What I meant by honesty, also extended here. One of the lies is the one you told here, to yourself. It's subconscious so you may not even be aware of it. It goes as follows:

People will reject me if they see how I look really.

Trust me when I say that this is NOT the case. The very first thing I noticed when I was transitioning and wearing women's clothing more often, was that contrary to my suspicion that everyone would notice and get offended, I saw that generally people either did not not notice, or actually pretended not to notice and were pretty easygoing about it. If you were naked in a setting where many people were naked, your real friends would treat you exactly the same, strangers would stare but it makes no difference because they would stare anyway. Not one person would bring up that your body type, whether short/tall, black/white/other, male/female/intersex, fat/skinny makes you less "valuable." The people who care about you would still be okay. And the rest aren't "valuable" enough to warrant consideration.

Also, I have seen alot of attractive women over the years. It seems to be more about region and culture than averages. As in, you think of average as median weight. The "average" woman is below that median, and I've seen everywhere from model thin (size 2ish), to what most men think of as average (8ish) to what actually is average (roughly 12 or 14).



These women here? All of them are technically average. All of them, in fact are likely to get dates. There is a rather wide average, and then outliers or overweight or underweight. Most do not even mind the outliers unless it looks like you have health issues. I was tall and superskinny (for the male average) for my entire high school, roughly 5'11" and 120lb. I wasn't starving myself, I just had fast metabolism. I like a size 8 about as much as a size 12. 30 is about when I worry for her health, but is she ugly? Less valuable? NO!!! Stop hating yourself.

In fact, the core of your dismissal to my image of what reality is and could be, is based on a different essential notion of what people and reality is and could be. You view stuff in terms of value. I see things, in terms of ranges, I have been fat as a child, then super skinny, now I'm about average. I have been everything from rich parents, to poor and out on my own, to making enough income to live independently, to making some but not enough to live independently. Everything is able to change, including society. Also, listen to this song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIy3n2b7V9k

I have known people who later became at least marginally famous. A kid in my school became part of an indie band that produced a song called "Hooch" that I think was either covered or they changed their name (I think they were originally gonna call themselves Mulch but either they became Everything, or Everything covered their band).  So, who are we to say what your "value" is?
« Last Edit: February 24, 2016, 02:26:01 pm by bulmabriefs144 »
"この世界の悪があれば本当に、それは人類の心の内にあります."
(Truly, if there is evil in this world, it lies within the heart of mankind)
—Edward D. Morrison

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #81 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...

Daisuki-chan

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #82 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.

sunphoenix

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #83 on: February 25, 2016, 02:23:12 pm »
"Who doesn't like having a good penis?"

AbVag alters to keep his insecurities protected.

Oh, you can resume your conversation. :)

LOLS! I think he should quit while he's ahead.. he's getting dangerously close to putting his foot in his mouth.. and getting a uncomfortable & awkward silence ..meaning she's not trying to judge  him and having a hard time of if so she has nothing to say in reply..! :)
"...no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free.  No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything - you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is Kill him." - Robert A. Heinlein

bulmabriefs144

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #84 on: February 26, 2016, 07:34:04 pm »
I really loathe lengthy discussion on politics. I like religion. And the focus of my religion, is a better world than this one. It may not be possible now. But don't you think a better world, regardless of the model, is a thing worth aspiring to? If not, then we can end our discussion here, because you have missed the point. This world could be better, I firmly believe this, even if I have no fucking clue how to do so except I can't do it alone (I need someone to be able to work on the flaws of whatever idea, and make it work). But it currently isn't. 

I don't think Brion wants a religious discussion, and I don't want political factionalism (as far as I see it, both parties are selling horse crud), so we're gonna move on, mkay? Whatever, you win the debate, I don't care. But I do want this world to be better.

Instead, we're going to talk about parallels. Crest mentioned a similar locale for being taken on a date. I'm going to mention another one. Dark Goluth.

http://flipside.keenspot.com/comic/book0/fs01pg10.html

Obviously, this parallel is here to remind us of something similar in this situation. The question is, what? 
"この世界の悪があれば本当に、それは人類の心の内にあります."
(Truly, if there is evil in this world, it lies within the heart of mankind)
—Edward D. Morrison

Brion Foulke

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #85 on: February 26, 2016, 10:09:57 pm »
I just want to point out that there is a forum section for debates, and that you should feel free to use it for this kind of thing.  You can have all the debates about politics and religion in there that you want.

It's also okay to talk about that kind of stuff in here when it relates to the current chapter.  But maybe try not to post pages and pages of stuff.

Daisuki-chan

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #86 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?

bulmabriefs144

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #87 on: February 27, 2016, 02:04:39 am »
I just want to point out that there is a forum section for debates, and that you should feel free to use it for this kind of thing.  You can have all the debates about politics and religion in there that you want.

It's also okay to talk about that kind of stuff in here when it relates to the current chapter.  But maybe try not to post pages and pages of stuff.

Sigh... Look, I don't even LIKE debate. It's exhausting, and I see my mom and dad having a heated argument everytime it happens. I don't have the whole mentality to stay detached from it.

The passage about the New Jerusalem resonates with me, so I dream of seeing and/or building a better world, and theorize as to how this would be. Debbie downer over here wants to spend four pages picking apart why that would not work in the real world. Okay, we get it, people are too self centered. Maybe I'm too idealistic. Maybe I'm also entitled to my dreams.

And maybe I don't like to see four pages of telling me that I'm an idiot. Can we keep this discussion and not debate, Daisuki?!? I do like to discuss things. I don't like to argue.
"この世界の悪があれば本当に、それは人類の心の内にあります."
(Truly, if there is evil in this world, it lies within the heart of mankind)
—Edward D. Morrison

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #88 on: February 27, 2016, 09:21:54 am »
So, back to the story... Is Crest finally going to get laid?!


Daisuki-chan

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Re: Chapter 45: discussion
« Reply #89 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.