>TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten with its head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. "nom nom". This blog post is not for you.

How dismissive. TL;DR descriptions are excellent for determining if something is worth reading or not.

Besides that, yeah, pretty spot-on, at least in saying that kids don't understand technology. I don't consider it a real problem, though. It's just that most of us don't get technology, and it doesn't really matter but it's an annoyance that people think we do.

You'd think they'd be able to do as well as Cuba, what with all that oil.

I camp in the desert frequently, so I've got some experience with really high temperatures(not in the 50+ range, but in the upper 40s). It's not so bad if you take it really easy, but without a good supply of drinking water and shade you get problems fast.

Still have to choose between non-poverty and supporting what I believe in. Not a good choice.

First -- Just because we're better than we were 30 years ago does not mean we're good. A huge chunk of the world is still in poverty, and we have the capability to eliminate that completely but we don't use it. We still have climate change, overfishing, et cetera wrecking long-term environmental havoc that won't be fixed by simply decreasing our CO2 output. The middle east is still a bloodbath and it doesn't look like that will end any time soon. Workers around the world, even in America in some places, are being exploited as much as they were in the 20s. So no, it doesn't seem to me that the world is just peachy right now.

Second -- I can't speak for liberals, but we on the far left are still fervently optimistic. We're seeing all this shit going on around us, and we still think we can make it better if we try hard enough. However, the writer of this article seems to define 'optimism' as 'faith that everything is all right'. In that sense, no, we're just about as pessimistic as can be, and we've been pessimistic since the 19th century. All the problems we have today are fixable, but most require radical solutions that 'optimists' like the author of this article would probably shy away from.

I don't like the concept of 'voting with your wallet'. It essentially says, you have the choice of having enough money to live or being an ethical person. In almost all cases, those are mutually exclusive.

Instead, we should get rid of the system that means people have to work 12-hour shifts to feed themselves, and you have to put up with that because otherwise you can't feed yourself. It's all a vicious cycle that we have the power to break, if we choose to.

In a way it's almost as bad for them as for someone making minimum wage. Home prices in the gentrified parts of Silicon Valley are ridiculously high, so you end up "house-rich cash-poor", or you go off to gentrify another part of town and restart the cycle.

Or maybe, just maybe, we could make the loss of jobs a good thing. Who actually likes work anyway? Why do we need to do it if robots can do it? Why do we allow the Capitalists to reap enormous profits at our expense, then blame the migrants(who, let's be clear, are also shafted by the Capitalists)? Why do we hold on to this insane idea that the "free" market is a sacrosanct entity that can only be nudged one way or another, never defeated?

aeon.co, but I don't know if that counts.

I dunno, plenty of people are already in the 'increased discomfort' phase right now. A recession can only make that worse.

Also, I'm reading Disrupted right now. You're right, I think several of the lines in the show were taken straight from the book.

I think it'll happen between election cycles. Trump and Hillary are both widely hated, and neither of them is going to do much good. The bubble is gonna pop, maybe accompanied by another major recession(maybe not directly in the US, but a bad enough recession in Europe will still cause major problems), and people are going to get mad. Already, most people know that the political system does nothing for us. It will just be more and more evident.

The real question is, will it be France 1968 or Russia 1917(February, of course)?

It felt like reading an sadder version of Silicon Valley.

Clinton isn't popular at all either.

The crystal-clear outcome of this election is a new record low in voter turnout.

I use a heavily kitted-out version of firefox.

One of the more interesting things I've read all day.

And heck, even if we get very smart computers, there's still an uncountably infinite number of uncomputable problems that we'll never be able to rigorously solve.

To be fair, humans will never be able to rigorously solve those either.

electrons generally have a much smaller wavelength(which is roughly analogous to 'size' of a fundamental particle, which in principle is infinitesimal) than a photon does. Unless you want your computer to give you radiation poisoning, electrons are the way to go.

Good effort though.

I'm dumb. 76% was pre-revolution.

So I asked if maybe you were referring to a Marxist overthrow of the capital-owning class.

Yeah, basically. I was hoping to qualify my statement with "well, I pretty much believe all this, so if you want to argue it look there first".

I don't see why there's not multiple routes to that end, or why there's a reason in principle that that sort of agenda couldn't be enacted via popular vote, as opposed to a violent overthrow.

It's a pretty wide argument, but basically the Marxist view is that classes always seek to retain power. Except in a very small amount of present-day democracies, virtually the entire state is run by the capitalist(aka company-owning) class, regardless of how open the elections are. This is called a bourgeois democracy, and like all other forms of capitalist-dominated government it will always seek to keep the capitalists in power, regardless of the true wishes of the people. Thus, if the people get too uppidy, they will simply shift gears and try to appease them without giving up real power, like FDR did. You'll notice, none of FDR's reforms fixed any of the underlying problems with Capitalism, they simply made them less obvious for awhile until the capitalists rolled them back or found loopholes. Reforms have proven to be effective only in relieving some of the short-term burdens of Capitalism; they have never done anything to fix it. Social democracy does nothing long-term to fix Capitalism.

And now you will say, "well, revolutions haven't done much to that end either". I respond with the point that it all comes down to the Russian Revolution. That one revolution, in 1917, set the stage for all socialist revolutions that followed. And, as we know, it didn't go too well. It's unknown exactly why, but it's a common sentiment on the left that it was caused by a combination of military and economic external pressures in the early years, which caused internal strife that the Bolsheviks used to move power away from the Soviets(worker's councils, the basis of socialism) to the central government. Thus, you end up with strongmen like Stalin and Kruschev who ruined the dream forever.

Even so, in most cases socialist revolutions have made big changes for the better. The standard of living in the USSR shot up in the 50 years after the revolution, and that was concurrent with three invasions and a civil war. Cuba used to be your average poor island country, and now it has a literacy rate of 99% and some of the best healthcare in the world. Seems to me it's the only way to go.

What other kind of socialist is there? Utopian socialism is dead and buried, for the most part.

I think that within a generation, we will see the next FDR come to power. He or she will ride a popular mandate, their campaign congealing into a stronger central government which pushes through a sweeping set of reforms concerning climate change, healthcare, education, poverty, criminal justice, and more. Or someone leaks a sextape. Who the hell knows.

Well, as a socialist, I can't help but disagree. I think within 10 years we'll see a huge wave of civil unrest, maybe on par with France 1968. Class consciousness is becoming a thing again.

The best kind of satire.

Most of the people doing this probably have more to do with organized crime than anything. /b/tards, as a rule, don't actually leave the house.

A very neat puzzle! I actually can't decide which one is correct.

One thing I thought of was the idea of quantum superposition: sleeping bauty has not observed the coin toss, so(from her point of view) it is simultaneously heads and tails, so all the three "wakings" are equally real.

Given that, I think if sleeping beauty were an electron, she should choose 1/3 because only 1/3 of the equally-real "waking events" invilve a heads coin.

But sleeping beauty is not an electron, and the false branch is not real whatsoever, so the analogy kind of breaks down.

sure, so can a brain.

Well, see, I'm a very principled guy, so I figure if the prosperity stays the same but with a whole new set of principles, it's a huge win.

And, they have gotten a few things done, but there's not much you can do with just 3 parliament members.

Excellent. If the pirate party actually comes into power.... I can't imagine a better outcome.