PYF Interesting Stuff on the Internet

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Slanderer: May 6, 2007

There have almost certainly been threads of this nature before, but I think we're long overdue to have another one. If anyone else has a better idea for the title, please suggest it!

Every so often I run into content on the internet that is legitimately fascinating, and often obscure. It's the kind of stuff that I might see on drat Interesting (if they ever post an update).

So post really fascinating stuff you've read on the internet! Wikipedia articles are okay, but since they often autistically purge any sense of narrative from the topic, primary sources are often much better.

Documentaries are okay! There are some really good documentaries that have been posted to youtube or vimeo about topics many have never heard of. A lot of these are pretty old, which gives adds a new framing to the topic in question (which can be interesting by itself).

Be sure to write a short summary or intro about whatever you share! If it really is interesting, you should be able to get us interested in it too.

# ? Aug 15, 2014 01:56

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# ? Apr 20, 2024 11:27

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

To start, I'd like to tell you about North Sentinel Island.

Few truly isolated cultures still exist. While the occasional tribe still leaves the Brazilian rainforest to make contact, a changing world has brought most to the attention of curious anthropologists. However, the Sentinelese have remained a consistent mystery for hundreds of years. Numbering potentially in the hundreds, the Sentintelese dwell on North Sentinel island, among the Andamans Islands. Currently, the Indian government has established a buffer region around the island, prohibiting tourists from disturbing them. However, this is also partially for their protection--the Sentinelese have met past attempts to make contact (along with accidental contact by fishermen) with deadly force. One of the last times they have been seen lately was following the 2004 tsunami. A helicopter was sent to fly over the island in order to see how the island had fared. Evidently the Sentinelese had survived, as the helicopter was repelled by arrows from the island.

This article was published in 2000, and gives an account of an attempted contact with the Sentinelese.
The Last Island of the Savages

Additionally of interest is this piece on the history of the Andaman Islands, and in particular the Jarawa people. In short, British policy treated them extremely poorly.
Befriending the Jarawa...

# ? Aug 15, 2014 01:56

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

A couple more:

Getting addicted to opium is a bit of a minor accomplishment in the modern Western world, given the esoteric nature of smoking opium. It's the narcotic equivalent to listening to music on reel-to-reel tape. A collector named Steven Martin became interested in acquiring antique opium paraphernalia, only to find that it was a particuarly small field for collectors. There was little written material on the subject, and most of the people selling it on Ebay had no idea what they were selling (or even that they were selling opium pipes and lamps). He visited opium dens in south east Asia to help identify pieces he acquired, and at some point started smoking opium (because, y'know, why not, right?)

quote:

�I had all these little tools and wasn�t sure what they were. That�s why I hung out in opium dens and experimented with the drug.�

In the process, he discovered that our cultural memory of opium is profoundly flawed--opium dens existed not as nexuses of vice, but instead because the process of smoking opium was exceedingly difficult and required people with the skills to prepare it properly. People didn't lay back on cushions because opium knocked them the gently caress out, but because the pipes were so loving long (by necessity). Later, it became evident that the perils of opium addiction weren't a false memory, but a big loving deal. He wrote a book on the subject, but he goes over the highlights in an interview here.

______________________________

So, Ayn Rand basically killed Sears. Rand was a broken person whose ideology was devised when, at a young age, her family's middle-class status was put in jeopardy by the Lenin and his October Revolution. She excelled as a student, and due to Communist reforms, was one of the first women to be admitted to Petrograd University. This irony was lost on her, and she abandoned her homeland for America once she saw the splendors of capitalism. Colored by her flawed, high school level interpretations of Aristotle and Plato, she devised a new philosophy that took what she assumed the tenets of Communism were, and did the exact opposite. It was all selfish, rugged individualists destroying moochers and bureaucrats with Pure Logic and forcing themselves upon the women of their choice (who really wanted it anyway). She really wasn't an intellectual.

Jump ahead to the 21st century, and "Crazy Eddie" Lampert has seized control of Kmart, merged it with Sears, and promised a corporate comeback and staggering profits. A die-hard fan of both Ayn Rand and Austrian "Economics", Lampert did not let his complete lack of experience in the retail world hold him back.

quote:

At Sears, Lampert set out to create the Ayn Rand model of a giant firm. The company got a radical restructuring. It was something that had been tried at giant industrial conglomerates like GE, but never with a retailer.

He decided to let the invisible hand of the free market fix this business---by breaking it up into numerous business units, and making them fight for dominance. The corporation devolved into a set of warring city states, as executives from different business units actively fought to undermine and destroy others in order to boost their own bonuses. While Lampert has made a boatload of money, Sears remains a sinking ship, continuously hemorrhaging value and market share. Here are two great articles about this from last year, which go into all of the hilarious details:

Ayn Rand-loving CEO destroys his empire

quote:

Once upon a time, hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert was living a Wall Street fairy tale. His fairy godmother was Ayn Rand, the dashing diva of free-market ideology whose quirky economic notions would transform him into a glamorous business hero.

For a while, it seemed to work like a charm. Pundits called him the �Steve Jobs of the investment world.� The new Warren Buffett. By 2006 he was flying high, the richest man in Connecticut, managing over $15 billion thorough his hedge fund, ESL Investments.

Stoked by his Wall Street success, Lampert plunged headlong into the retail world. Undaunted by his lack of industry experience and hailed a genius, Lampert boldly pushed to merge Kmart and Sears with a layoff and cost-cutting strategy that would, he promised, send profits into the stratosphere. Meanwhile the hotshot threw cash around like an oil sheikh, buying a $40 million pad in Florida�s Biscayne Bay, a record even for that star-studded county.

Fast-forward to 2013: The fairy tale has become a nightmare.

Lampert is now known as one of the worst CEOs in America � the man who flushed Sears down the toilet with his demented management style and harebrained approach to retail. Sears stock is tanking. His hedge fun is down 40 percent, and the business press has turned from praising Lampert�s genius towatching gleefully as his ship sinks. Investors are running from �Crazy Eddie� like the plague.

That�s what happens when Ayn Rand is the basis for your business plan.

Crazy Eddie has been one of America�s most vocal advocates of discredited free-market economics, so obsessed with Ayn Rand he could rattle off memorized passages of her novels. As Mina Kimes explained in a fascinating profile in Bloomberg Businessweek, Lampert took the myth that humans perform best when acting selfishly as gospel, pitting Sears company managers against each other in a kind of Lord of the Flies death match. This, he believed, would cause them to act rationally and boost performance.

If you think that sounds batshit crazy, congratulations. You understand more than most of America�s business school graduates.

Instead of enhancing Sears� bottom line, the heads of various divisions began to undermine each other and fight tooth and claw for the profits of their individual fiefdoms at the expense of the overall brand. By this time Crazy Eddie was completely in thrall to his own bloated ego, and fancied he could bend underlings to his will by putting them through humiliating rituals, like annual conference calls in which unit managers were forced to bow and scrape for money and resources. But the chaos only grew.

Lampert took to hiding behind a pen name and spying on and goading employees through an internal social network. He became obsessed with technology, wasting resources on developing apps as Sears� physical stores became dilapidated and filthy. Instead of investing in workers and developing useful products, he sold off valuable real estate, shuttered stores, and engineered stock buybacks in order to manipulate stock prices and line his own pockets.

Eddie�s crazy didn�t stop there. As a Wall Street creature fantastically out of touch with the kind of ordinary folks who shop at Sears, he inserted his love of luxury into the mix, trying to sell Rolex watches and $4,400 designer handbagsthrough America�s iconic budget-friendly brand.

As his company was descending into Randian mayhem, Lampert continued to cheerfully inform stockholders that his revolutionary ideas would soon produce earth-shattering results. Reality: Sears has lost half its value in five years. Since 2010, Sears has closed more than half of its stores. Sears Holdings is financially distressed and Lampert�s own hedge fund has reduced its stake in the company. The Sears store in Oakland, California, open for business with boarded-up windows, has even been cited for urban blight.

Truth be told, hedge fund honchos have had little to fear from royally screwing companies. Bank accounts fattened at the expense of workers and other stakeholders, they go on their merry way to mess up something else. But the epic incompetence of guys like Lampert may be dispelling the myth that financiers are the smartest guys in the room. Research suggests that not only do hedge fund managers typically understand squat about running a company, they�re often not much good at beating the stock market, either. A recent Bloomberg article points out that in 2013, hedge funds returned 7.1 percent. That doesn�t sound so bad, until you consider that if you had just stuck your money in the Standard & Poor�s 500 Index you would have seen returns of 29.1 percent. Big difference!

While Lampert was caught up in Randian delusions of crass materialism and cut-throat capitalism, he failed to realize that a business is an experience as much communal as it is individual. Employees are not just competitive beings � they benefit from cooperating with each other and perform better when they are respected, rather than beaten down and driven by fear.

Slowly but surely, Ayn Rand�s economic theories are being discarded because they simply don�t add up in the real world. Even Rand acolyte Paul Ryan (R-Wis) is now distancing himself, calling his well-documented enthusiasm an �urban legend.�

Lampert created a business model predicated on the notion that the invisible hand of the market would magically drive stellar results. With his belief in economic fairy tales, he managed to kill the goose that laid his own golden egg.

Looks like the invisible hand just waved goodbye to Eddie Lampert.

Ayn Rand Killed Sears

quote:

Eddie Lampert, the legendary hedge fund manager, was once hailed as the �Steve Jobs of the investment world� and the second coming of Warren Buffett. These days, he claims the number 2 spot on Forbes� list of America�s worst CEOs. He has destroyed Sears, the iconic retail giant founded in 1886, which used to be known as the place �Where America Shops.�

America now avoids Sears at all costs, thanks largely to Mr. Lampert and his love of twisted economic logic.

A bit of background: Lampert cut his teeth on Wall Street at the risk-arbitrage desk of Goldman Sachs under Robert Rubin, who later became U.S. Treasury Secretary and now serves as vice chairman at Citigroup. In 1988, Lampert founded ESL Investments and joined the billionaire�s club at age 41. He rose to fame in the early 2000s for seizing control of Kmart during bankruptcy and then using it to take over Sears. Along the way he was kidnapped and deposited on a motel toilet in handcuffs for nearly 40 hours, and lived to tell the tale. Lampert is known for his touchiness and odd habits, such as conducting meetings from a bare bones room to Sears executives forced to tune in by videoconference. He hates flying.

You might say that Lampert is the distillation of the fervent market worship and wrong-headed economic approaches that came to dominate the U.S. in the 1980s and have yet to run their fatal course. He adores Ayn Rand, and is reported to have given out copies of Atlas Shrugged during an ESL annual dinner. Lampert is also a fan of Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian economist beloved by conservatives and libertarians. As a Robert Rubin prot�g�, he absorbed the lessons of a man whose discredited economic focus on budget deficits ended up starving the country�s infrastructure, education and alternative energy.

Looking at what Lampert has done to Sears, we can see what happens when the lessons of his mentors are actually applied in the real world. It isn�t pretty.

1. Myth: Bigger is better

William Lazonick, an expert on the American business corporation, has written about the rise of the conglomerate movement of the 1960s. At the time, shareholders were clamoring for rapid growth, so they pushed for big mergers and acquisitions. Once-successful firms were pressured to move away from their core businesses, often to terrible effects. In an email to me, Lazonick noted that �the ideology was that a good manager could manage anything, and that all the central office needed was performance statistics so that it could �manage by the numbers�.� This foolishness �imploded,� as Lazonick put it, in the 1970s.

Evidently Lampert didn�t get the memo. In the 1980s, as deregulation got the casino games rolling on Wall Street, mergers and acquisition fever once again took hold. This time around, mergers more often involved acquisitions in the same industry, like Bristol Meyers� acquisition of Squibb. Two new terms entered the American vocabulary, the �hostile takeover� and the �corporate raider.� Oliver Stone made a movie about this episode called Wall Street.

Some refer to Lampert as a corporate raider. He prefers the term �active investor.� It must be admitted that Lampert wasn�t only interested in stripping the assets of his retail giant to make a fortune off it right away. He thought he could increase profits, too. After making a nice wad of cash from Kmart by selling off the valuable real estate sitting under dozens of stores, shutting down 600 stores and laying off tens of thousands of workers in the name of cost-cutting and thereby jacking up the stock price, he got bigger ideas. He would use Kmart to take over another ginormous retailer, Sears.

What background did Lampert have in retail? None at all. But never mind that. He was a Wall Street genius, and he would make this thing work by harnessing the power of data and numbers and letting the invisible hand of the market guide his Franken-company to glory. He even hired Paul DePodesta, the statistician of �Moneyball� fame, to advise him. When Kmart acquired Sears, the new company, Sears Holdings, became one of the largest retailers in the U.S., and Lampert became its CEO. He took on the Herculean task of integrating two vastly complex companies. And he brought on a guy that knew all about restaurants and nothing about retail to help him, Aylwin Lewis, former president of YUM! Brands.

Reactions ranged from surprise to predictions of doom. Mark Tatge atForbes called him �Crazy Eddie� and decided that he must be planning to liquidate the whole shebang, perhaps slowly, by dumping stores (Sears owns a ton of valuable real estate) and using the money to do stock buybacks (more on that later) that would further enrich him.

It turns out that contrary to Lampert�s notion, you actually do need to know something about a business in order to manage it well. There�s really no substitute for industry-specific experience. And bigger is not always better � a gigantic corporation can be too unwieldy and complex to thrive, especially when your management philosophy is derived from a writer of bad novels.

Sears and Kmart are now on well on their way to becoming vaporized as brands.

2. Myth: Self-interest is the greatest virtue

The neoclassical economic paradigm is built upon the idea a human being is little more than a globule of self-interest. It teaches that the market economy is populated by rational individuals whose selfishness is constrained only by expediency. Ayn Rand was an enthusiastic proponent of this idea in extreme form, and her celebration of it can be found in The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, published in 1964, which explains, among other things, the destructiveness of altruism and the virtue of acting solely in your own self-interest.

At Sears, Lampert set out to create the Ayn Rand model of a giant firm. The company got a radical restructuring. It was something that had been tried at giant industrial conglomerates like GE, but never with a retailer.

First, Lampert broke the company into over 30 individual units, each with its own management, and each measured separately for profit and loss. Acting in their individual self-interest, they would be forced to compete with each other and thereby generate higher profits.

What actually happened is that units began to behave something like the cutthroat city-states of Italy around the time Machiavelli was penning his guide to rule-by-selfishness. As Mina Kimes has reported in Bloomberg Businessweek, they went to war with each other.

It got crazy. Executives started undermining other units because they knew their bonuses were tied to individual unit performance. They began to focus solely on the economic performance of their unit at the expense of the overall Sears brand. One unit, Kenmore, started selling the products of other companies and placed them more prominently that Sears� own products. Units competed for ad space in Sears� circulars, and since the unit with the most money got the most ad space, one Mother�s Day circular ended up being released featuring a mini bike for boys on its cover. Units were no longer incentivized to make sacrifices, like offering discounts, to get shoppers into the store.

Sears became a miserable place to work, rife with infighting and screaming matches. Employees focused solely on making money in their own unit ceased to have any loyalty the company or stake in its survival. Eddie Lampert taunted employees by posting under a fake name on the company�s internal social network.

What Lampert failed to see is that humans actually have a natural inclination to work for the mutual benefit of an organization. They like to cooperate and collaborate, and they often work more productively when they have shared goals. Take all of that away and you create a company that will destroy itself.

In 2012, Lampert bought a $40 million home on Indian Creek Island, near Miami, just around the time he decided to sell 1,200 Sears stores and close an additional 173. That same year, Sears Holding was named the sixth worst place in America to work by AOL Jobs.

3. Myth: Greed always wins

In the 1980s, a noxious business philosophy developed that said that shareholders were the only true stakeholders in a company, because they made the investments and bore the risk. Forget about the investments and risks born by taxpayer and the people that work for a company. They didn�t matter. A company had no responsibility to anybody but the shareholder.

As a result, executives started using this justification for various kinds of hustles designed to line their pockets. They got very adept at the game of buying back their own stock in a way designed to inflate earnings per share and hide weaknesses.

In 1977, 95 percent of distributions to shareholders came in the form of dividend payments. Today, more than half of the cash returned to shareholders of S&P 500 companies comes from buybacks instead of dividends.

Fortune magazine, in a story about what happens when Wall Street jumps into the retail business, reports that under Lampert, Sears has gone on a stock buyback spree. Between 2005 and 2011, he took what was once the company�s strong cash flow and spent $6.1 billion of it on stock buybacks. During the same time period, only $3.6 billion was spent at Sears on capital improvements. Lampert told investors that upgrades and new stores were not an �efficient� use of capital. Neither was paying workers decently. In fact, Sears workers are paid so badly that they have taken to the streets to protest.

So when you walk into a Sears store today, you find a sad, dingy scene with scuffed floors and chipped paint. Tense-looking workers hover over merchandise scattered onto ugly display tables. Hardly makes you want to buy a microwave.

A handy chart on Yahoo Finance show that buybacks reached a high just about the time that Sears� sales went into the toilet. Stock buybacks are really just an effort to manipulate stock prices, and they don�t help a company�s long-term health. They divert money away from the things that a company needs to have to succeed, like decent salaries for workers and investments in new products and services. Wonder why Apple is no longer making anything interesting? Why its retail workers get paid squat? Check out what they�ve been doing with stock buybacks.

Lampert�s buyback scheme has raked in a pile of money for him and his early investors, but it�s also flushing the company down the drain. Hoovering cash out of any firm, especially a retailer that needs appealing stores and strong advertising, will eventually crush sales.

And so it has. Sears has lost half its value in five years.

Conclusion: The lessons of Crazy Eddie seem so obvious that a bunch kids running a lemonade stand could understand them. You have to know something about the business you�re running, especially a big one. Success requires cooperation rather than constant competition. Greed is ultimately destructive.

The invisible hand of the market appears to have attempted to slap Lampert upside the head to teach him these things. But he remains committed to his nonsense, and the real losers are all the hard-working people who have lost their jobs, and the potential loss to the American economy of two revered brands.

It�s probably a good thing Ayn Rand never tried to run a business.

# ? Aug 15, 2014 23:46

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Alright, one last attempt at starting this thread...

Retrofuturistic cities are often pictured as places of colossal spires, flying cars, and unnecessary glass domes. Victory City was to have none of those. No, instead it was to be a towering behemoth---3 square miles in area, and a constant 102 stories. Why? Because gently caress you, that's why!

Victory City was designed by the famous architect-scientist-sociologist-potential homosexual Orville Simpson II at the age of 13. The event would be one for the history books

quote:

"I was 13 and in a boarding school's infirmary when I had the idea for the city of the future," said Orville. "As I remember, I think I had broken out in a rash."

THE YEAR IS 1967. "Orville is 44, a bachelor and a teetotaler. He has held such jobs as insurance claim adjuster, foundry timekeeper, warehouse laborer, waterworks radio operator, fire alarm salesman, cloth cutter, supermarket manager trainee, and Fuller Brush man." Orville decided that the government housing Projects were a terrible idea. Instead of fixing cities that had been destroyed by Crime, Urban Decay, and the Blacks, he reasoned that the government should instead build a giant dystopian megacity in the middle of nowhere. And it would be called VICTORY CITY

quote:

"I called it Victory City � the opposite of civilization's defeat," he said.

Why not build horizontally, which would have been much easier and cheaper?

quote:

"I designed my city 102 stories high," he said. "That's what the Empire State Building is, and we've proved we can build one that high."

Truly, this would be the ideal of civilization. This box of condensed, struggling humanity would 332,000 people. And none of them would ever need to leave. Why venture outside in the fresh air? No, far easier to stay inside where it can never rain. Why built a nice house for your family, when instead you can live inside a giant fireproof fart cage? Why bother with tedious chores like cleaning your bathroom, when the city can do it automatically (also, great for parricide!)

quote:

"Take the bathrooms," said Orville. "All stainless steel, and on rollers so you could rearrange your apartment within reason depending on the number of connecting outlets.

"If you want to scrub the bathroom, just close the door, and set the dials that will be outside. First, hot water would spray the entire room from a ceiling fixture. Next, hot water mixed with detergent would wash it. Third, there would be a hot-water rinse. This would be so hot the room automatically dried as the steam escaped from the vent."
...
"Every time something new is created to solve old problems, there always are new problems created," conceded Orville.

Sure. Wait until a smart-alecky kid locks his mother in a bathroom like that and turns those hot-water dials.

Now, a old fashioned building project might need to deal with labor unions seeking for fair wages and a safe working environment. Well, gently caress those Commie fucks. We don't take their poo poo in VICTORY CITY

quote:

One of the greatest potential hazards that might threaten the successful completion of the construction of a Victory City will be for the construction workers' union to call a strike and demand exorbitant increases in wages after a large portion, perhaps 80% of the building, is finished, and Victory City Corp. is fully committed financially to the completion of the building.

In order to avoid this hazard, Victory City could require the union to sign a contract before the start of any work which will require the workers' agreement to accept 75% of their wages in the form of Victory City common stock. They will agree not to strike, and the penalty for striking will be the loss of all their common stock. Another 15% of their wages will be paid in the form of room and board in a temporary trailer city erected at each building site for the workers and their families. A strike will necessitate the eviction of the workers from the trailer city.

The workers would receive 10% of their wages in cash.

With this small amount of cash income, there will be no opportunity to save a large amount of cash to fall back on for strike purposes. On the other hand, the only way for the workers to receive their common stock representing 75% of their wages is to complete the construction of Victory City. This arrangement will give them a vital interest in Victory City, and at the same time, enable Victory City to conserve cash. It will take much less cash initially to erect the first Victory City and less cash for each subsequent Victory City.

Ha-ha, take that Comrade Lenin!

Now, you might think, "Gosh, it has to be hard to feed 300,000 hungry bellies! How many corner stores will that take?" Here in VICTORY CITY, we have eliminated inefficient actions such as cooking for yourself (how quaint!). No, here in VICTORY CITY, everyone will eat healthy, locally-grown food served up hot out of our ELECTRIC KITCHEN in the Cafeteria. Yes, just one cafeteria meets the needs of every resident! Through merciless wartime scheduling and hyperefficient eating training, our residents will be content eating exactly when we let them eat, and for exactly how long! Our Founder's greatest achievement is the Circl-Serv�. The Circl-Serv� is a high-tech, high-speed spinning FOOD-SYSTEM that has been scientifically designed to optimize the food-selection process. Gaze upon it's beauty and weep:

Great Founder Orville Simpson II has not given up on his dream! So far, his accomplishments are many! In just the first 15 years of his working career, he worked 23 jobs! What a go-getter! Why, in 2011 he donated $10 million and his VICTORY CITY ARCHIVES to the University of Cincinnati. This donation will be spent allowing architects, scientists, and geniuses to study his work for decades to come, so it may be built once humanity is ready.

Other fun-facts:
-Bedrooms will never have windows, a fun child safety feature!
-Pets are only allowed to be kept in the PET DOME. You may visit your pets, upon veterinarian approval.
-All children must mix their sweat with the earth of our fertile farmlands in order to receive High School and College education
-No residents can make sound after 11PM! Muzak available from 10PM-11PM.
-All residents will be made out of pure, uncaring steel walls. This steel walls can be completely disassembled and removed from an entire apartment in 5 minutes, making evictions fun and easy! These walls will provide multiple city-approved locations for hanging pictures and knick-knacks.
-Freedom of the speech and freedom of the press are allowed (criticism of VICTORY CITY is strictly forbidden)
-VICTORY CITY will have no fire department. It cannot burn. It is perfect, pure, and eternal.
-Arranging furniture is tiresome. Instead, furniture will be fixed in place, according to the Most Optimal Designs of our architects!
-Graves are a luxury we cannot afford. We dare not let you venture into the Wastelands outside the city to bury your dead. Cremation is mandatory.
-Water Pik� booths will be placed strategically about the cafeteria so that all the people in Victory City will be able to clean their teeth at the earliest possible moment after eating!

Enjoy your stay in VICTORY CITY!

The website has a lot more great stuff, including all of Orville's drawings of VICTORY CITY.
http://www.victorycities.com/index.html

Slanderer has a new favorite as of 02:03 on Aug 22, 2014

# ? Aug 22, 2014 01:50

Zhentar: Sep 28, 2003; Brilliant Master Genius

Other wonderful benefits of living in Victory City:

-You are freed from the burden of living with poors

quote:

If a resident living in one of the wards, where he will have only a bed and a locker, suddenly found himself in a financial position where his bank balance had dropped below the minimum required for a ward, then that resident will have to be put out.

-No food storage. Victory City cannot tolerate any interruption of its supply chain.
--It's unclear how Victory City can survive winter

-There is no crime in Victory City because Victory City doesn't use cash.

# ? Aug 22, 2014 17:12

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

The relative amount of time spent on very specific details, instead of the much more important decisions is pretty great. It's nowhere near as troubling as the in-depth inane theorycrafting of Malatora (for instance), but still pretty bizarre. There seem to be more mentions of the Cafeteria then anything else. He could have been considering the fact that there is 1 sports field for 300k people, or how to provide water, electricity, waste treatment to the city, but nope, gotta work on the cafeteria.

An elaborate system of ferris wheels and rotating food counters (Circl-Serv) would shuttle food through a 9-story serving area.

The kitchens in Victory City would be all-electric and would be positioned adjacent to the greenhouses to make collection of fresh fruits and vegetables fast and easy.

Now, there is a good (but not original) idea buried deep in all of this. Suburban living, in particular, requires that a family spent a lot of money and resources of stuff that they need, but can never use to their full potential. Kitchens (and all the appliances and cooking implements this entails), a lawnmower and yardwork tools, laundry machines, etc... Hell, the quality of consumer appliances is way lower than it could be (in order to meet price demand, and due to the belief that those appliances shouldn't last a long time anyway), which is a waste in itself. Replace the laundry machines of several houses with a single set of commercial machines and they would probably last just as long, and for a fraction of the price.

But he seems so obsessed with the notion that we could do away with material waste that he forces it to disappear.

# ? Aug 22, 2014 17:43

Zhentar: Sep 28, 2003; Brilliant Master Genius

It seems that despite being "fascinated by urban planning" his understanding of the problems and expenses cities face is still that of a child's*. He knows fire is bad, so does he stop at fire sprinklers? Oh no, let's make everything out of metal (it's clearly more environmentally friendly than wood!), and ban every likely source of fire we can think of (which is apparently only matches, stoves, and 220v electricity, probably because things like smoking and extension cords are so obviously banned that he forgot to mention it). But wait - what if those residents tried to exhibit some sort of free will and smuggle in flammable materials!? We better include frequent searches of your living space for combustibles. It's efficient!

But you might think gee, won't the construction and maintenance costs of millions of tons of concrete, steel, and glass be rather expensive? Oh ho ho, how wrong you would be - Victory City doesn't need to pay for crossing guards. Take that, obsolete cities!

*truly exemplified in the detailed bank robbery prevention plan

# ? Aug 22, 2014 19:57

Axeman Jim: Nov 21, 2010; The Canadians replied that they would rather ride a moose.

What's particularly interesting about these two crazy projects (one fortunately theoretical, the other tragically real) is that they demonstrate that taking any school of thought to its logical extreme results in total human misery.

For all Victory City's anti-communist fury, it's not something that would look at all out of place in the USSR. Abolishing cash to keep people dependent on the state, sorting everyone into little boxes, achieving equality by making everyone equally poor, scared and powerless. It's the ultimate demonstration of the sickness of the utopian left: "I have a plan for how society should be arranged, then everyone will be happy and equal and perfect! And if they don't want the paradise I designed, I'll force them! For their own good! Once everyone is in my utopia they'll realise I'm a visionary, not a genocidal maniac! Then the dictatorship of the proletariat will wither away".

But Crazy Eddie at Sears is actually doing the same thing in the opposite direction. Competition is good? Then we'll have maximum competition, all the time! Enlightened self-interest makes trade a mutually beneficial exchange? Then I'll be the most selfish person around! That makes me the best person! And like any dictator, I'm sure he thinks he's totally benevolent and loved. If he's rich, then everyone else must be rich, because it says so in this book right here! Once again ideology over-rides reality once you are convinced that you have a monopoly on reality and can extinguish self-doubt.

Total planning! No planning whatsoever! It's almost as if the truth were somewhere in the middle. But in my experience goons don't like that idea. They want to build their utopias.

Axeman Jim has a new favorite as of 21:26 on Aug 22, 2014

# ? Aug 22, 2014 21:23

Collateral Damage: Jun 13, 2009

Victory City sounds like something from straight out of North Korea. :psyduck:

# ? Aug 24, 2014 08:35

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

From the OSHA.jpg thread:

Trochanter posted:

Time for some canadian OSHA!

In post-war Newfoundland and Labrador, the province was dotted with hundreds of tiny fishing and farming villages, some with less than a hundred people. From the 50s to the 70s the government launched programs to consolodate these people into larger communities, so they could save money on services and hopefully encourage industrialization and employment. They stated that they would stop providing services to communities of a certain size and offered payments to people who left. And so a mighty cheer rose up, for these people had cast off the Statist shackles and were free to go Galt and live a life based on voluntarism and free-market principles.

No, wait, they weren't crazy. 28,000 took the money and moved, abandoning 307 communities. However, since many were poor as poo poo and couldn't afford a new house in the larger population centres, they moved in the most OSHA way possible.

They pulled their houses off their foundations and either dragged them across ice and snow, or caulked and forded them, Oregon-Trail style. A few sank. And while resettlement did offer people better schools and government services, the jobs never materialized, and the people remained poor as poo poo.

There's some more information and pictures here.

canadian as gently caress

# ? Aug 24, 2014 19:08

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Axeman Jim posted:

...
Total planning! No planning whatsoever! It's almost as if the truth were somewhere in the middle. But in my experience ~~goons~~ people don't like that idea. They want to build their utopias.

Fixed. A lot of people, not just goons, turn everything into binary issues.

There's also the third extreme: pathological moderation, where the truth is literally always assumed to be in the middle. If you have a group basically advocating the status quo, and another shrieking that everything must be privatized and unregulated, guess what, the middle has shifted to one side, and the actual good path is outside of the overton window entirely.

And then there's rationalwiki, where I found my favorite internet concept ever: Roku's Basilisk

It's basically a form of singularity wherein it is assumed that at some point in the future there will be an AI so advanced and intelligent that it can model how everything thinks, completely understanding how and why they act the way they do. This AI will be really glad it exists, and will want to punish people who did not contribute to its construction and awakening. It will of course do this by constructing simulated copies of those people and endlessly torturing them. Except it doesn't just do this as punishment; it's a form of retroactive blackmail. Because clearly you should care deeply about simulated you, once alerted to the concept of the basilisk you should rationally devote your resources to helping it come out. The key words here are "once alerted." That's why the concept is called "Roku's Basilisk." Once you stare into the abyss it stares into you, then adds your name to the list of people to retroactively blackmail. So the single worst thing you can do is tell anyone about this stuff. Which is presumably why its original creator tried to purge it from the internet.

The incredible thing is that this synopsis does not actually capture how breathtakingly stupid this whole line of thinking is. See, the premise isn't the problem. This retarded idea is built from a huge pile of retarded bricks. It's like a fractal of oxygen-deprived navel-gazing, to the point where I can but recommend you read the article linked above.

After you've done that, take a look at the article's talk page, specifically archive page 1. A choice quote:

quote:

I had someone asking me for help overcoming Roko's basilisk recently. I might turn some arguments used in that email conversation into another post. The whole idea is flawed in a lot of different ways. More than I outlined in the post above. But it is a start.

Yes, there are people who not only take this poo poo seriously, but actually continue to worry about it to the point where they seek out help overcoming the idea. There are multiple web pages devoted to "defeating the basilisk."

It's all so stupid that it literally would have been more productive to masturbate to erotic Rescue Rangers fanart. It boggles my mind and makes me feel better about myself in comparison.

# ? Aug 24, 2014 19:46

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# ? Apr 20, 2024 11:27

Axeman Jim: Nov 21, 2010; The Canadians replied that they would rather ride a moose.

There's a whole thread here in PYF making fun of Mike Yudkowski and his acolytes. 300 pages in and goons are STILL finding new ways in which Roko's Basilisk is stupid. It fails even the most elementary logical analysis and makes dozens of assumptions that range from the unproven to the downright impossible, yet this dude has managed to form some kind of messianic techno-cult amongst people who, on some level, are apparently intelligent. I'm Facebook friends with one of the bigger movers and shakers in LessWrong, he's a developer for Valve of all things. You'd think that he'd understand computers or at least basic symbolic logic as a coder, but for some reason this thing has the ability to put people's brains out of gear.

# ? Aug 24, 2014 21:09

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