I agree that for writing documents and for a lot of other things like editing csv files or mockups, I want to be immersed in the editor together with Claude Code, not in a chat separated from my editors
I was hoping that zed’s inline assistant could make use of the CC subscription but sadly not; you have to pay for metered API usage.
But for simple writing tasks, I hooked up Zed’s inline assistant to use Qwen3-30B-A3B running on my Mac via llama-server, and it works surprisingly well.
Capitalism is 100% a zero sum game and capitalists love to try to pretend that it’s not
The fact of resource extraction from society and externalities like pollution not being counted by capitalist because they “can’t count them “and just bundle them as externalities demonstrably destroy any concept of non-zero sum game
There are limited resources on the planet and that’s the sum.
If you want to take it even further the extraction pace is even more important than the total gross amount of resources because of inefficient allocation and distribution processes
So no the universe itself is zero some we’re not creating more Mattar and especially in the context of humans on earth the functional and numerical reality is zero sum
>The fact of resource extraction from society and externalities like pollution not being counted by capitalist because they "can’t count them" and just bundle them as externalities demonstrably destroy any concept of non-zero sum game
The article explicitly addresses this:
The fact that Capitalism is non-zero-sum doesn't mean it is necessarily positive-sum. An economy that gets out of balance can produce very negative results (which are still non-zero). Cons of capitalism: — Can not be relied on to provide adequate social services, including healthcare and education. — Can be expected to run at a cost to externalities like the environment. — Can produce products that are detrimental to well-being.
Based on your other comment [0], it seems you have a bad-faith axe to grind against this site.
Steel man: GP could be using "capitalism" to refer to the distribution of capital - financial markets - rather than the entire system. Financial markets are zero-sum as they don't produce anything and their consumption (wages, electricity, etc) is paid in by their users. They can influence wealth creation asnd destruction but that isn't part of the market itself.
If you read Prudhon thoroughly you’ll understand that his critique is that the entire concept of capitalism is based on the concept of property (undisputed) and the concept of property is an entirely made up mythical thing (disputed)
I'm replying without having read the entirety of the text you've referred to by Proudhon, but it looks interesting—thanks.
Some raw thoughts of mine if I may (feel free to add seasoning):
You mention that capitalism is definitionally zero-sum, and you seem to be facing quite a bit of resistance. I've had similar thoughts (perhaps still premature) that capitalism is zero-sum, but only (?) under a strong definition of "zero". I've not fleshed out my thoughts completely, but I suspect there are intangible/abstract dimensions along which we maintain some kind of equilibrium, regardless of what we do. "Do" here is quite abstract, but as a first approximation in the realm of economics, it might refer to any act of investment, compensation, or labour. (I may be abusing some technical terms in economics here—not my home turf.) A separate question could then emerge as to how significant these intangible/abstract dimensions are.
Actually, I'm not even sure that this is specific to the context of capitalism. However, whether something is a zero-sum game would seem relevant to systems obsessed with objective quantification, and where that quantification is heavily involved in steering moral views (or decision making), and I view capitalism as one of them.
It’s definitely not specific to the context of capitalism
capitalism however makes transactionalism the explicit structure such that it cannot coexist with any other type of ownership regime by function
That is to say, if you look at anarcho socialist philosophy it can theoretically coexist with other philosophies inside the same state and action space
Historically however, we have not found a stable equilibrium for the lived reality of our experience such that we could map it cleanly onto some discreet and identified philosophical framework
So neither anarcho-socialism nor capitalism is a sustainable equilibrium point due to the constraints of a human biological substrate
Claiming that “it could” or “can” or “is the best we can do” are all beside the point, because they ignore the intractable fundamental fact of separating human systems from all other systems
Every possible game is zero sum because the universe isn’t creating more matter or energy, it’s just moving around. How we move it around is the problem to solve and anyone using weak justifications with bankrupt epistemological foundations is just wasting everyone’s time.
I don't believe capitalism is a zero sum game. Capitalism is not the holy grail, but when combined with laws that balance the uneven distribution of the wealth it _creates_, and laws that protect resources and cleanliness, it turns out it is the best system we as a human species employed so far. I'm open to be proven wrong.
By pillaging and conquering nations that have abundant resources through violence and coercion
Like this is the entire history of capitalism and it’s not even close
the fact that other organizations (USSR, China) do the same thing (horde property and then use consolidated resources to enforce economic heirarchy) but don’t call it capitalism doesn’t make it any less true
They can say “communism” all day but if the functional properties of the system of the Russian Federation or CCP are that Property control is limited to a small group of elites who then use those resources to create a command economy that is purely capitalist philosophy.
> By pillaging and conquering nations that have abundant resources through violence and coercion
That's pretty much backwards. The industrial revolution was the first time in human history where people could get rich on a very large scale via some way other than pillage and conquest. If you think "capitalism" started in the late 18th century and is essentially coterminous with industry (which is quite nonsensical since you had forms of capital as far back as ancient farming societies, but that's the way many scholars choose to use the term) that's exactly what let us choose something that was not plunder and conquest.
The hording and eliteness is not a property of the capitalistic system. It might be an unwanted side effect. Imperialism, greed, urge to expand control, subordination of others are unfortunately human traits. You might attribute that behavior to any system, why single out capitalism?
Because capitalism explicitly encodes transactionalism into the social structure by alienating labor from the fruits of the labor.
There’s no period of time where that has not been true for some portion is society, but we reached a point to which there are no places where that is not true.
Certainly some people know better than some other people, and I see nothing in the guidelines that say otherwise, or say that one cannot say so ... expertise is a thing. OTOH, I think there are several aspects of your comment that go against the guidelines. (Perhaps my pointing that out does as well.)
Of course, one can dispute specific claims, with facts and argumentation.
That's a very reductionist view of economy. For starters, it ignores the entire services sector, which is like half of GDP of most developed capitalist countries. Services are an extremely clear example of positive sum - no resources disappeared from the world, as much money was gained as was spent, but on top of it somebody got something of value.
If I pay somebody to dig a ditch and I pay somebody else to fill it in was something of value created? Unequivocally no.
Whether or not that allowed somebody to survive and feed their family is entirely orthogonal to the question of the zero-sum nature of the universe
Nothing is free
energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain that would’ve otherwise gone to some other mechanical process
No free lunch theorem describes this mathematically and you can go all day reading about that
Let's stop at the first half. If I pay somebody to dig a ditch. Period. End of story. Let's assume I'm not clinically insane and I actually needed that ditch for something. Is the sum still zero?
Just because pointless things are possible doesn't mean not pointless things are not possible.
Nothing is free, but the service isn't free either. It's not free because people find it valuable, so valuable they're willing to pay for it. More than the cost of food needed to compensate energy spent. Way more in most cases. Is the sum still zero?
You’re describing positive-sum outcomes in subjective preference space.
I’m describing conservation laws in physical state space.
Preference gains don’t violate thermodynamics, but they also don’t escape zero-sum reality once you include energy, ecology, and time.
You’re doing what I’m complaining about separating Economics from ecology - there’s a very firm reason why climate changes the most important topic of our decade is because we have to merge our lived experience with the work experience and kill this embedded dualism that somehow human environments are different than the rest of the universe.
It’s like you’re trying to do control theory without energy constraints.
"Everything in economics is zero-sum because the resources on the plane are finite" is an unimaginative undergraduate-level position that adds nothing of substance to the discussion.
If you want to have a constructive conversation about pricing environmental externalities then by all means, but you need to drop this "I'm smarter than you" attitude if you want better reactions to your comments, especially if you're just going to aggressively post lukewarm takes and then insult people.
There's quite a lot of positive-sum energy the enters the environment from the giant nuclear reactor in the sky, which we have a few billion years lease on.
Money may be constant-sum but that doesn't mean what you can purchase with that money is constant, new markets emerge, others become more efficient. Many positive-sum systems are possible within a universe that is on-the-whole zero-sum.
"Everything in economics is zero-sum because the resources on the plane are finite"
This is literally the position of the field of ecology and the field of cybernetics
I live day-to-day inside of that world because that is the real world
the fact that few others live live day-to-day inside the field of ecology and Cybernetics is precisely the problem I’m pointing out
the fact that you want to deny this means that you’re ignoring the intersectionality between climate change, social and structural dynamics, industrial production, financial production, Infrastructure and all this other stuff as though they are separate they are not separate
Is pure projection to say that it’s reductive for me to demand an accounting for all possible externalities in order to have a coherent system
I’m telling you to do 10 to 100 times more work in evaluating any of these actions structurally then is currently happening and you’re trying to induce that I’m collapsing the problem into some kind of single state variable and I’m saying no you need thousands of more variables to be tracking in your head at all time and on ledgers at all time then we currently do because all of these externalities have been dumped into the ocean and nto the atmosphere effectively
When the global food supply collapses and there’s blight and drought and famine because we overextended resource extraction without identifying the long-term effects of that literally no other argument is going to hold sway
Ah, so you indeed are doing the extremely reductionist view of economy that completely ignores services. And then calling capitalists wrong. While not even talking about the same subject as capitalists. This is lalala I can't hear you with extra steps.
I'm very open to a serious discussion. But only if it's actually serious. I don't consider reducing economy to thermodynamics to be serious.
Any statement about any economy is meaningless if you're ignoring services. Especially when discussing the totality of an economic system, such as the question whether capitalism is zero-sum. I am happy to hear actual arguments how the value of services always, necessarily, by definition comes at the cost of some environment somewhere. I'm not happy to hear arguments that dismiss existence of services entirely.
I was sure you were a troll yourself after that hole digging line. My bad.
The only reason people work is that they can have food so that their thermodynamic process of biology maintains consistent - if you do not account for this then you have not even begun to think about an economy
I have a degree in econometrics
that has nothing to do with reality
economists are totally completely capitulated to capitalism as a religion
there is no other possible thing that institutional economics talks about
so if your entire point is that you wanna stay within the frame of institutional economics then like I said there’s nothing else to be said here
If you really wanna go fully into this then you can read my paper that pulls all of it together:
I, unfortunately, do not have a degree in economics. I don't have the knowledge necessary to digest your whitepaper. It would be useless of me to read it (I tried). I'm sorry.
My objection to the thermodynamic argument is that it means that no value can ever possibly be gained from any action whatsoever, both at micro and macro scale. Life is pointless, nothing matters, etcetera etcetera. While undisputably true, it doesn't make for an interesting discussion.
Capitalist model, even if fundamentally wrong, at least makes it possible to talk about value and its changes. And even if it doesn't describe real world, it still describes some kind of world. Taken purely as a mathematical construct, the world of the capitalist economic model can be analyzed in terms of game theory. And at least when I do the analysis, it comes as non-zero-sum. Not only because of services, but also because of processed goods - even if thermodynamic balance is the same, some arrangement of atoms have more value than others, usually because of their utility (copper lumps vs. copper wires, for example).
Taking away parts of the model in order to show that it's zero sum isn't very convincing - what if it's only zero sum because you took away parts that make it non-zero-sum? A much more convincing argument would be to add to the model - accept what the economists say as is, but expand on how externalities are being ignored and that if you account for them, the sum does indeed end up zero.
Note that I'm not claiming capitalism is good. I'm only claiming that in game theory terms, it is not an example of a zero sum game. The only way it could possibly be true is if there was some inherent law that any . It's much easier for me to believe the world will be destroyed in 30 years due to capitalism than that the world being eventually destroyed is a mathematical consequence of zero-sumness of capitalism.
Not GP author. I'd like to continue the conversation though. However, be warned that my view is actually closer to reducing the economy to thermodynamics. I don't intend to overturn every single point you've made, but I hope this doesn't preclude a productive discussion.
> Services are an extremely clear example of positive sum - no resources disappeared from the world, as much money was gained as was spent, but on top of it somebody got something of value.
I think it's very hard to fall back on services being positive-sum on a gross basis (i.e., 0 inputs, positive outputs) to justify that it is positive-sum on a net basis.
What kinds of services actually consume no resources? I could agree that, in isolation and on a marginal basis, a particular exchange of services for money might deplete a negligible amount of (physical) resources, but when you consider the operation of the entire industry (supposing a mature industry, i.e., that there is an industry to speak of), can it really be said that the entire industry consumes no resources? A prototypical counterexample is any service that relies on physical equipment: I would view that physical equipment always incurs wear and tear, and this is potentially substantial for sufficiently large industries. The wider umbrella here are all the other various externalities of the service.
(A good rebuttal to the physical equipment counterexample is actually where we've mastered the materials science well enough that, miraculously, the wear and tear outlasts the lifetime of anyone involved and hence where the equipment feels impervious to wear and tear... I resort to time horizons, which is another aspect of "scale". Something like GDP [growth] tries to normalise for time scales, but sadly I see this as falling prey to the same shortcomings as any kind of prediction activity.)
Personally, I consider it reductionist to try and measure every transaction with a currency value and then aggregate for a GDP. (The next key phrase in this train of thought is "Goodhart's law", which happily also gets addressed in the OP site [0].) However, I do also appreciate that this is a really fundamental paradigm in modern implementations of capitalism to attempt to uproot.
One way through which I can appreciate that capitalism is non-zero-sum is: across multiple different dimensions/axes/facets of measurement (currency value may be one of them), transactions incentivised by capitalism are not "zero" on all of them simultaneously. Under capitalism, it is that the transaction is positive by currency value which incentivises its own execution.
But there are lots of service industries where an undue focus on the currency value pushes us towards undesirable outcomes (necessarily on some axis besides currency value or GDP). For instance, some services are just innately incompatible with commercialisation. (Arts and culture comes to mind as one. Basic research is another.) When you attempt to offer/conduct these services under capitalism, you invariably need to moderate/regulate/limit the offering due to capital constraints. As in everything, moderation is sensible, so the next question is: are there enough people with enough influence thinking about whether we've gone too far? In a system where garnering influence is highly positively associated with accumulating capital, the answer seems self-fulfilling...
EDIT: I just realised that the "G" in "GDP" is "gross", for being gross of depreciation ("wear and tear"). This is a pretty big revelation for me, since it probably sheds some light on why I think GDP gets undue focus. Nevertheless, I think the principle of what I said above still stands.
There is a big difference between being zero-sum and the sum being zero. A zero-sum game cannot end with any other outcome but the sum of zero. Non-zero-sum games can end with the sum of zero but can also end with other sums. This last part is what makes capitalism not zero-sum, even if in practice the sum is zero (which it isn't but that's a separate point).
I focused on zero-resources-needed services because they're the easiest example. They don't make much of the overall economy, but they do exist - tutoring, standup comedy, basic massage to name a few. Because no resources are used, you don't have to quantify the value to prove the sum is positive, you just need to prove the service isn't completely pointless. A proof for services that do use resources is also possible, but far more complicated and requires quantification of value, which is always a very contentious topic in and of itself. Like, you already contended it before I even invoked this concept, that's how contentious it is.
Externalities exist, sure. And are often omitted in pro-capitalism arguments, sure. But to argue that externalities make capitalism zero-sum is to argue externalities always exactly match whatever value was gained by capitalist transactions. Which is even harder to prove than the already dubious argument that externalities are larger than the value of capitalism.
I only brought up GDP to highlight that services are a big part of modern economy, so any model of economy that assigns no value to services is a wrong model, because it will not match the actual flow of money within a real world economy. I strongly believe models ought to be useful.
May I ask what your impression of "the sum" is? Namely, what is "the sum of a game" to you? The question may sound slightly opaque (and, sure, maybe even pedantic), but here are examples of some aspects I am trying to garner:
• Do you see it as a single number (e.g., representable by a single floating-point value)? If not, how alike to a number is it? To what degrees does it lend itself to ordering (higher/lower/equal) and aggregation?
• Do you think the concept of "the sum" has a consensus interpretation (consensus across people, say)? For a particular game, do you think its sum has a consensus determination?
I'm less settled on precisely those aspects, and I think they tend to mask aspects that are worth clarifying/examining. Please do not see this as my claim that my stance is absolutely the only valid one. However, without a unified stance on these aspects, it feels hard to contribute further to the discussion.
My contention is that "a game" cannot be condensed down to a single number. (More specifically, I think that it should only be done so in a way that is unequivocally universal and objective. If this doesn't exist, any discussion should begin on more general premises, rather than the premise that a game can be condensed down to a single number.) From the perspective of evaluating whether capitalism installs incentives that result in a better world, I view it as overly simplistic to think about "a sum" and then consider whether that sum is zero/nonzero/positive/negative.
Of course, these are models, and I judge the merits of a model based on its ability to be useful. But here I really consider that such a simplistic model is a hindrance. I don't mean hindrance in the sense that it necessarily results in poor decisions being made (partially because the model seems to come with an intrinsic notion of "poor"). It's a hindrance in that it seems too ubiquitously adopted, to the extent that discussions on the alternative are hard to initiate/sustain/come by.
As a result, I think there is a lot more elaboration needed before landing on this dichotomy:
> But to argue that externalities make capitalism zero-sum is to argue externalities always exactly match whatever value was gained by capitalist transactions. Which is even harder to prove than the already dubious argument that externalities are larger than the value of capitalism.
Namely, I don't readily see that there is a dichotomy in the form of either (1) "externalities always exactly match whatever value was gained by capitalist transactions" or (2) "externalities are larger than the value of capitalism". The dichotomy doesn't easily stand to me because it seems attached to an oversimplified way to compare outcomes/merits of a game ("exactly match whatever value", "larger than the value of").
Your argument would at most prove that you can't have a positive sum. But it doesn't say anything about not having a negative sum.
We CAN needlessly increase entropy without that benefiting anyone. It's easy.
The sum doesn't have to be zero.
And, of course, once you agree that the sum can go negative. Then we can work on trying to avoid that. Game theory doesn't actually care all that much about any finite offset. Whether the maximum we can reach is 0 or ten quadrillion, it's all the same to the theory.
> energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain
Your assertion that "energy comes from somewhere" seems to be borrowing a concept from thermodynamics and apply it, at the scale of the entire universe, to an opinion about the properties of economic/political system.
Our planet, as a system, is unequivocally energy-positive. We are inundated with energy from the sun. Does that mean capitalism is positive-sum on Earth?
Humans can’t convert sun energy into biological energy. We aren’t plants.
However we eat plants and we eat the things that eat plants. So do you consider plants and animals part of your environment or not?
Is the basic requirements for having an economy being a set of humans in a society that has language and culture and exchange?
There’s no free lunch
Human activity takes from the non-human environment.
Under an abstracted society which you could call capitalism if you like these resource extractions are done with no view to externalities and we know this because even in a basic undergraduate economics degree you will be told companies do not price externalities and there are no pricing mechanisms for externalities outside of Reactionary measures historically
Again I’ll reference here the entire history of ecology and cybernetics has tried to make this abundantly clear that these are all connected and the fact that you seem befuddled about these connections tells me everything I need to know about this conversation
"The gap between intention and execution was small, but it was enough to keep the project permanently parked in the someday pile." Well said!
This is my experience with agents, particularly Claude Code. It supplies sufficient activation energy to get me over the hump. It makes each next step easy enough that I take it.
Funding for basic science and medicen should be a bi-partisan winning issue. It is good for America. It is good for the world. It helps eventually lift the poor. It helps business. Its something the government can and should do that is hard for private business to do. It helps human knowledge. I'm motivated to reverse this trend.
Unfortunately, "Griefing people we don't like" is the central defining principle behind everything the current administration does. It's the promise that got them elected. And they really don't like scientists and medical professionals. This is not going to be reversed until we get griefing out of politics.
> there wouldn’t be different ideological factions in the first place.
Maybe I’m just very jaded, but I don’t think this is true.
Our values are significantly more aligned than we generally believe, however as long as there is power to be gained by creating the illusion of a difference of values, there will be factions dedicated to ensuring that illusion is maintained.
The republican party is explicitly anti-science. One of the ripple effects of the anti-science agenda is an anti-education mentality among republican civilians. An educated populace is the enemy of the U.S. right wing.
Wife worked in a construction firm in South Texas. Firm owners were a half-hispanic family. It was a decent sized firm, millions of dollars turnover and recipients of millions more in PPP loans, special state contracts, and tax breaks due to being half Hispanic and "woman-owned". They also firmly supported T and believed in qanon stuff. They believed something to the effect of, scientists have sold their souls to Satan in exchange for technological progress.
It was not really shocking. What was shocking is that how similar vibes prevail within silicon valley, as it became clear days after him winning the election.
So scientists shouldn't be allowed to hold their own political opinions, or organizational leaders shouldn't be allowed to exercise some autonomy with regards to the culture they foster, or educated people shouldn't tend to favor the political tribe that focuses on constructive solutions, or what? What is your specific critique here?
Whatever it might be, it seems like we could have instituted a targeted reform for that specific problem rather than self-immolating our educational institutions and continuing to hand the reigns of world leadership to China.
It's a solution. No other solution has worked, or been proposed.
Remember Brendan Eich? He was excommunicated because of a personal political view, allegedly because "he lost trust of the community". So yeah, being right-wing is faux-pass in tech and academia, therefore the left has no argument against people being defunded / fired because of personal political opinions. But we're talking here (see my other post) is institutional far-left policy (DEI meaning explicit racism and sexism against white men). No wonder they have totally lost trust of the community (like half the US), to be seemingly beyond reform, up for restarting from scratch.
I think this is the crux of your misunderstanding. I did not say the scientific institutions were self-immolating - I said you were self-immolating. You're not torching some independent other. You're burning the foundations on which the strength of our country lays.
It's also frightening how often I hear this same refrain of griping about instances of "the left" transgressing upon a certain value, as justification for discarding the entire value - did those values ever matter to you, or do they not? Because the way I see it, the entire point of values is something you stick to even when others trample on them, giving society at least a chance of converging around stability.
For example: I'm a libertarian. I did not like what happened to Eich and I certainly understand the oppressiveness of DEI run amok. I have spoken out about those, dissecting the nuances in those issues modulo my own values. But now that those issues are being used as anti-intellectual rallying cries to tear down our institutions rather than reform them? I'm done. I'll choose the tribe that believes we should at least try to have a society.
I agree with your reasoning, I guess we just have different values.
I value science, defined as unbiased pursuit of truth.
I personally don’t see politically biased institutions that care more about far-left propaganda than truth, as foundation of anything good or wholesome.
But science has always had to fight against the prevailing political winds. Galileo. So has engineering, for that matter. Traditionally one had to hold their tongue and keep their eyes from rolling when some non-productive bureaucrat would wax poetically about the virtues of mega golf or owning a boat. Then for a while these topics included prescriptive diversity and performative inclusion. Now I guess we're back to mega golf and boats.
Do you foresee what remains of our scientific institutions after Trumpism actually being unbiased? Or biased but of the type you are willing to overlook? Or do you merely see the Trumpist bonfire as a stepping stone to having ~zero large scientific institutions which will technically satisfy your criteria?
Brendan Eich did not simply give a commentary on his economic policy. Brendan Eich went so far as donating not insignificant amounts of money to make sure a significant portion of the population - of which many of his users and employees are a part of - do not have equal rights.
I am so beyond tired of this trope.
What, nobody ever faces consequences for hurting other people? We just have to tolerate intolerance forever with a smile?
Why would you otherwise oppose Eich’s private bigotry against gays but ignore educational institutions’ institutional bigotry against white men? Both were the topics of my post you first replied to and the rest of this thread
Have you tried researching the topic? Very quick search:
- Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi expressed a desire for her lab to reflect social justice and actively works to foster a diverse and inclusive environment following events such as George Floyd's murder. (also runs a chem/bio/med lab at Stanford)
Every job requires a somewhat politically neutral attitude, at the very least on the job. And of course "neutral" will be judged as leftist by people on the right and rightist by people on the left. So look past that. And that includes not getting into political fights with the rest of the company and not being so politically "out there" that your company gets attacked on the street.
My employer requires that too, even if we've never explicitly discussed that.
I bet universities are easy targets and so require a very low risk political profile from their employees. That was definitely somewhat leftist-affiliated after George Floyd's murder, and frankly, given what happened, I don't see that as particularly unfair. I see myself as pretty rightist, and I am of the opinion that what happened to George Floyd was a serious fuckup against rightist ideology. Everyone deserves a chance. And when they fuck up, another chance. To me, that is rightist. And that means the police must avoid killing people when arresting them.
I don't understand today's political movements. What I appreciated about leftists was that 40 years ago they were going to bring technological advancement and freedom from religious lunacies and use that technological progress to give everyone an easy and fun life. Progress meant nuclear fusion, fixing diseases, ... "progress" DID NOT mean just letting people steal clothes, or, let's be honest, letting terrorists kill Jews and others in the name of getting muslim votes. That, to me, is NOT leftist, but obviously it is to a lot of today's leftist movements. Yes, antisemitism was a part of leftism 40 years ago, let's be honest, but it was definitely not the rage-bait sole-issue-with-us-or-we'll-kill-you focus of the left it appears to be today.
What I appreciated about rightists that almost absolute equality was the very core of rightist ideology. Color, nationality, religion, ... everyone gets a chance, no one gets a free ride. No guarantee of success, but the possibility is sacred, and if you do fuck it up, you get another chance. So, to me, George Floyd was a pretty fucking serious screwup against rightist ideology and so I think a lot of people supported that effort despite it being "leftist", in that most of the protests were organized by leftist organizations, and those protests did more damage than was acceptable.
But to me, George Floyd was very much NOT OKAY from a rightist perspective, and so justified a strong reaction against what happened.
Is it really so hard to see past the affiliation of the screamers on the street? Leftists have the same idiocy going. Not many leftists support even moderate islam, hell, not many muslims do, never mind terrorism, it's only "the party" that does. Today "if you're not with us you're against us" is so deeply ingrained in BOTH leftism and rightism and muslim organizations and maga and ... and I don't swing that way.
I see myself as pretty to the right, but if you're going to let the police kill black people by casually suffocating them during arrests, I am not with you. In fact, I prefer just letting people steal from shops to that. So if you force that particular issue, you've lost me. Find something else.
That’s exactly the reason the research and development funded by government grants is rarely done in the private sector: It isn’t immediately profitable, and we don’t know for sure if it ever will. It’s important to put man-hours behind even theories that will seemingly never be useful (“trash”), both because it is impossible to know for sure, and because that is the underpinning of science.
Exploration for exploration’s sake, knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Not everything learned by the human race needs to be immediately useful; it all contributes to a vast tapestry.
Not to mention that if we focus solely on profitability and utility, we do bad science: Why do you think we have a reproduction crisis? Because reproducing experiments isn’t sexy nor profitable, so no one is incentivized to do it.
Yeah sure :) The motivation is actually really that simple. I was searching for a markdown editor similar to Obsidian with a terminal user interface, but I couldn't find any that really fit the needs of a proper markdown tool like Obsidian. Though Ekphos isn't yet reaching what Obsidian is capable of, we're surely getting closer and closer. But I want to take only what really matters from Obsidian, so it doesn't get bloated and people can really focus on writing the markdown
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