luckily they got videogame references, I can't retain any political knowledge without videogame references peppered liberally throughout
It's ok to be angry about capitalism
- Thread starter XsjadoBlaydette
- Start date
Healthcare, and many other social goods that help people stay alive and be productive, are important in today's society.
Back in 1900, it wasn't so much of a big deal if several offspring died, were maimed or otherwise rendered useless, because families had so many children. However, once a society is around or below replacement rate, people become a more precious resource that can't be so casually wasted. I suspect that's why so many of the economic and political elites want the public to have a lot more babies: it gives them many more options to save money letting them die or getting them killed. Capitalists only love scarcity when they can control it as a means to jack up their prices.
a forced higher working meatsack class population also Has the added bonus of keeping wages pushed down by heightened competition for jobs by more desperate, struggling people. work more for less and be glad or else risk getting replaced by one of the hundred other hungry Johnnies with families to feed and less aspirations towards pesky workers rights
Nintendo hiding its creators.Fuck off Nintendo.
Nintendo Didn’t Price In Trump Tariffs For Switch 2, Justifies $80 ‘Mario Kart World’
Nintendo is talking about how Trump's tariffs may still raise the Switch 2 price, and why Mario Kart World costs $80.www.forbes.com
But a birthrate below 2.1 will cause welfare spending and innovation problems if done on an international scale with no radical life extension. Plus, even if AI and Boston Dynamics-style robots do all of the white-collar and blue-collar labor. You still need to feel the AI data.
society is more than productive enough by now that there is no excuse to think "welfare spending" problems are a thing. you're giving too much to your rich parasites and spending too much on bombs.
Fewer workers per retiree means a lower quality of life, fewer healthcare workers, and fewer people doing research. You can not get around that.
MrBeast fans outraged over three-day Las Vegas 'immersive' event
Some fans complained they had to wait in hotel rooms for hours and only received clearance items from his online store in a "mystery bag" for the event.
All else being equal, yes, but there are plenty of other factors that could be made to change.
fewer people mean fewer people that need needs, humans aren't fucking robot units for your cute lil nuerodivergent math games
I don't know that all this is true.
Firstly, we should probably be careful about how we express this. "Lower quality of life" for instance could be held to mean a decrease in QoL, however in practice it might only be a slower increase in QoL. Fewer healthcare workers and researchers might not mean worse healthcare and research if offset by productivity increases.
At a certain level, fundamentally fewer people means less work means less gets done. We can all acknowledge that. If there is a decrease in workers relative to overall population, obviously there will need to be certain economies made. However, what those economies are is something society can ask itself and decide in policy. We can ask how much money and effort does society piss down the drain on unimportant things. For instance, how much do we waste buying masses of clothes? The old stuff people have is fine, but they are buying a load more just because it's the new season and buying stuff was advertised at them. Do so many people need a new mobile phone every year when they should be fine for 3-4 years? And so on.
I would argue that there is a massive ton of stuff we could cut down on in order to redirect resources to keep the things you're interested in going, with substantially no loss of QoL. It just requires political will.
The less you make of something, the fewer resources you put towards it, and thus the less innovation comes from it. Yes, clothes and phone consumption aren't innovative right now. But, computers have gotten smaller, faster, and even cheaper in some functionalities. That's a consumer good that will decrease in innovation if the population decreases due to fewer personal computers being bought. And funny enough, I just bought an iPhone 16 after 4 years, and it was a pain to bring all my accounts from the 12 to the 16. And the only reason I bought one was because the wifi chip and the screen had problems. As for clothes, we could make more durable clothes, but blame your average upper-income family and their various members for buying clothes 7X like I buy groceries. And even if computers are important for Moore's law development, there are still loony people buying a new computer every year because wackjob gamedevs shop execs make games more demanding for no reason. I am perfectly fine with my 3080 TI, which I upgraded from an 880 laptop, which I used for 8-10 years, but the average consumer isn't like me.
I am just one guy; don't direct your hatred to me, direct it towards your average Republican voter, their officials.
Other factors could make it worse, it Japan, for example, where old people dominate the political scene, there can't be any social reform that could raise the birthrate, increase immigrants, or make working and living in Japan less of a chore for domestic Japanese citizens which would make the economic situation better. Instead, it's endless economic "reforms" like Abenomics and the hope that the US buys more Japanese goods, which are increasingly being outcompeted by Chinese goods.
I suspect you're far more like the average consumer than you think.
I was reading some game board a few years back and some guy was going on about how the game didn't run well on his RTX 3080 (or whatever bleeding edge card he had) and he wrote something... I can't remember exactly, but he was clearly competely deluded as to what people were generally using. He seemed to think he had a fairly standard GFX, but the most common card on the Steam hardware survey at the time was something like a 1080 Ti. Fewer than 10% of gamers were on the latest generation GFX cards, and something like two-thirds of them were on cards two generations (or more!) earlier.
People like you and me probably spend something like $1000 every ~5 years on their main gaming rig, and will maybe do just one major upgrade (GFX most likely) in between, and that will be something cost-effective rather than top end. That is probably normal. Then there are the whales will probably buy a new rig at something like $3000 or more, and spend tons in-between on upgrades, peripherals, etc. They might be <10% of gamers, but they may account for something like half of gamer hardware revenue. Of course because they spend so much they get a lot of attention from advertisers, magazines, plus all the reviews and articles about the latest gear generally, and this probably tricks people into thinking these bleeding edge tech players are much more common than they are.
Game developers have already noticed that few people want to break the bank on hardware. Go back 20-25 years, devs were proudly talking about how if you didn't have the latest GFX card you could barely play their game, as a way of boasting how great their game was. Somewhere along the line, they noticed that all they were really doing was cutting their audience and sales. These days games are designed to facilitate decent performance on what may be old hardware, and a lot of the drive for constant upgrades has thus decreased, rather than increased.
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But to sort of get back to the point, imagine that development of advanced computer hardware slowed. So Moore's law went from doubling every two years to doubling every five or ten. Who would really care?
The answer to that is "nobody".
Nobody would even really notice. It's not like there's some sort of parallel existence where this slowdown didn't occur that they could experience in order to realise. They'd still be enjoying new software, new this, new that. Human existence would still be on average infinitely better compared to 100 or 1000 years ago, and after another 100 years into the future post-slowdown they'd still be looking back thinking how much better the stuff they had now than 100 years ago.
What some people want to do is somehow step back and take some theoretical objection like "But it will take us 80 years to get a manned flight to Mars instead of 50!" The answer to that is that it doesn't really matter whether it takes 50 years or 80. It's a nerd complaint: the sort of mindset that has deified tech and seems to put the development of tech ahead of human experience. Like, we should colonise Mars because that'd be so fucking cool, with no consideration of whether doing so is any fucking use to make the lives of humanity any better, and how more usefully we could have spent those resouces on make people's lives better.
I think what happened was the Xbox 360 and PS3. Two powerful machines, though the PS3 was more expensive and took longer for devs to get their heads around its quirks, both none-the-less had explosive install bases and the main profit demographic for video games shifted. Suddenly we had years of games being developed for an unchanging hardware platform and then ported to the ever evolving one outside of some genres that weren't suited to consoles - RTS for instance. Like nVidia went from the Geforce 600 series cards to the GTX 900 series in that time frame and if my (very spotty) memory serves me, those really were the days of massive generational jumps.
-Edit: I mistakenly fixed a few grammar and/or spelling mistakes on accident: my bad, Grammarly is very overbearing.
Getting fewer medical advancements is very much something most people care about. If the next Elden Blade doesn't get released, no one dies. If the next cure for a rare type of cancer or a neurological disease doesn't get solved, it will have ripple effects on patient care. And don't even get me started on opportunity cost; more nursing homes means more resources put towards them in some shape or form, which could mean less monitoring for diseases in, say, cattle or another avian flu pandemic. And old people vote and love voting for dumb wars and shooting people who are different from them. In fact, it's very likely if we don't have more young people, we will get even more immigrant restrictions and the shooting of refugees from, say, climate change at the border.
this would only be true if society was already maximizing the number of healthcare workers, researchers, and other relevant goods and services. this is not true of the United States by any stretch of the imagination. directing resources away from the military and munitions and (shock, gasp) policing and you have more resources for everything else.
Not happening anytime soon, and even Biden increased defense spending...
Trump promises $1 trillion in defense spending for next year
Trump's plan for a huge increase in defense spending next fiscal year would mean billions more for equipment and training.
www.militarytimes.com
The second problem is that someone will have to guard the sea and trading lanes because if they go unguarded, every country will fend for itself ad hoc. Goods worldwide will get even more expensive, and you will get fewer drugs, less variety, and even more expensive ones, too. This is not ideal for a large retiree population. This includes the US, which, despite being resource-rich, cannot do, grow, and make everything. We can survive by ourselves, but not thrive by ourselves.
There's also some degree of policy confusion here as well.
The current US administration says that the USA should not be global peacekeepers or getting involved in all sorts of international conflicts and policing actions. But this is inconsistent with a large increase in defence funding.
1) What's the point in massive funding of something that doesn't do anything or produce a return? If the USA is reducing its military commitments, this suggests less budget, not more. Military funding is relatively unproductive: that money could instead be spent in ways that provide the USA more longer-term benefits. Never mind that a spending splurge is very likely to go on typical R&D boondoggles that run massively overbudget and late.
2) If the USA has a massively powerful military, it is going to use it. Some administration down the line is going to have a foreign policy objective, see all that massive military power at its disposal, and use it to reach that objective. Why would it not? The temptation is just too high, and it's not like anyone's going to legislate prudence.
So what you mean is not "there's no getting around that". What you mean is "there isn't currently political will to get around that in other available ways". The difference is worth pointing to.
Protecting maritime trade might cost a fraction of a percent of the defence spending of developed nations.
Well, there are the typical explicit answers about deterrence, hypothetical future defence of US interests against other great powers, etc.
And there's the unspoken answer: that much of the cost can be borne by taxpayers, while private sector military contractors make enormous profits, and the latter have armies of lobbyists.