If I were President, and I were meeting with an enemy face to face, and they saluted me, I’d salute them back.

I have not served in any military and am not aware of the official meaning of a salute.

But I have had enemies and if I were meeting with one of my enemies and they saluted me, I would salute them.

This is just based on my gut feel of the gesture’s meaning from watching movies. My gut feel is it’s a combination of:

• This handshake indicates we’re both listening intently and ready to talk
• I see you. We are the same despite our ranks, because we’ve both put ourselves here, and because we’re both equally susceptible to bullets.

I could be wrong, and I’m asking for correction if I am, but based on that I’d salute an enemy soldier if he was standing there ready to meet with me.

Thing is though, with a politician it’s different. I don’t know if Trump’s ever been shot at. Probably not. So the “hello, spiritual brother” thing that can apply to any other soldier even enemy is less there with a politician.

I don’t know. Just saying it seems natural to me to salute an enemy. Like “this sucks, maybe we can end it today” feeling to it for me. Framing the war as a problem they’re facing together.

It’s the hat that did it.

I quit drinking caffeine earlier this year and, despite having lower anxiety across the board and more of a work ethic, I got in a car accident for the first time in 25 years of driving.

Now I’m skeptical that I’m back to normal when the withdrawal wears off. I’ve been drinking coffee since I was 8 years old, and I think my brain is very adapted to it

I do all my web development on a $4000 Mac!

Just look at all my lovely color choices!

Primarily because when other people are given authority over me, they tend to find ways to shut me down.

Generally speaking I’m ridiculously good at things when I do them my own way, but I’ve often not been permitted to, instead offered “this great option the government has authorized for people”.

It’s just like I need the leeway to innovate and prove my worth based on outcomes, in order to survive in this world. I am autistic, and I draw a lot of hostility from people. The problem is, people won’t acknowledge (hence own and then turn off) this hostility. Everyone believes they’re a great person and so the mechanism by which they can actually improve is missing.

What am I trying to say here?

I guess I’m saying I don’t trust people to be consistent with their compassion. I trust people’s self interest more than I trust their compassion, and in my experience the compassion comes with rules abojt what you can’t do, and when I stay inside the same lanes as everyone else I fail hard and I generally get kicked out of things despite following every rule and performing every duty.

So because all of humanity treats me essentially as a frenemy, and doesn’t even seem to be aware of it or interested in cultivating that awareness, I try to avoid being under the power of others as much as I can, even (especially?) people who think they’re helping me.

Free markets allow the marginalized to succeed without having to cut off 80% of themselves to play the role of a correctly-shaped cookie.

Now, can you articulate some kind of “you’re abused” model of me defending capitalism that goes deeper than “you’re defending X and sometimes abuse victims defend their abusers, therefore your X is abusive”? Or is that as far as the analogy goes?

I have been abused, incidentally. Twice. Both times by people who said and believed that they loved me.

I simply do not trust people’s good intentions for me to produce good outcomes. This is why I think free market mechanisms, where everyone is only entering into deals that both parties want, aside from being morally correct at a fundamental level, is also a great mechanism for cutting through people’s self delusion.

If you aren’t buying what I’m selling, then under a free market that forces me to adapt. Requiring your consent keeps me in line and vice versa.

Non-consensual economic systems, ie the ones not based on free markets, aren’t just morally wrong. They’re also consistent in producing bad outcomes.

If you’ve got more on this “you sound like an abuse victim” angle I’m all ears but so far all I’ve seen is this “people defend abusers therefore defended things are abusive” component to the theory and that’s weak.

I could easily say that people who want someone else to take away their economic consent, for their own good of course, has been addled by abuse. I just don’t, because it’s cheap and uninformative.

Nobody says they love me during the day.

People suck at reporting on their experiences. Like, good luck knowing what garlic bread is like without eating some. “Oh just ask someone who’s eaten garlic bread. White men never LiStEn”

We (US) could run the program from our embassy. Unsure how we’d help them get money though. Can the US embassy in SK permit people to work for US companies or something, to open up a portion of the market for these people to legally work?

I guess I’m not so clear on what portion of their fucked status is coming from law, what’s coming from culture, and what’s just the desperation of total poverty as a result of arriving with nothing.

Is it difficult because airlines and whatnot won’t carry them, or because the receiving country won’t let them immigrate due to being “stateless”?

Are they stateless in a way someone coming from Bolivia to the US isn’t, because NK’s outside of some globally-recognized state system? I’ve never considered this before.

May your microwave’s beep volume increase 1% per week indefinitely

We need to get a lot better about this kind of thing now that the cost of generating fake but structurally believable content/information has dropped.

Web of trust has always seemed like it’s for geeks so far. We need to enter a new phase of our cultural history, where competent knowledge of cryptographic games is commonplace.

Either that, or the geeks need to figure a way to preserve civilization link monks in the dark ages, trading accurate science and news among their tiny networks, while the majority of insecure networks are awash in AI-generated psyops/propaganda/scamspeak.

Or, we might get lucky and AI are inherently more ethical as they get more intelligent, as a rule of nature or something.

It’s nice to imagine speech, in general, being a natural environment the human brain is evolutionarily adapted to. And speech among other humans is an environment we’re adapted to. We implicitly assume certain limitations in people’s ability to spin bullshit while keeping it error-free, for instance, so we have an instinct to trust more as we hear more of what a person is saying. We trust longer stories more, and we trust people the longer we know them.

But AI, even if it’s not fundamentally different than humans - ie even if it’s still bounded by the rules of generating bullshit vs just reporting the truth - can still get outside our natural detection systems just by being ten times faster.

I guess what I’m saying is this is like that moment in the Cambrian or whatever when all the oxygen got released, and most of the life just got fucked and that was the end of their story. Just because a niche has been stable for a long time doesn’t mean it’s always going to be there.

Like, imagine a sci fi story about the entire atmosphere being stripped off of Earth, and the subsequent struggle for survival. How it would alter humanity’s history fundamentally, even if we survived, and even if we got the atmosphere back the human culture we knew would be gone.

That’s the level of event we’re facing. We’re in a sci fi story where the air is turning off and we all need to learn to live in vacuum and the only things we get to keep are the parts we can transform into airtight containers.

It might be that way right now, but instead of airtight it’s cryptographically-secure enclaves of knowledge and culture that will survive through the now presumably-endless period of history called “Airless Earth”.

Like having the atmosphere was the intro level of the game. Like in Far Cry 2, when you go to the second area, and it’s drier and more barren and there’s less ammo and cover and now they have roadblocks.

Our era of instinctively-navigable information is over. We’re all in denial because the atmosphere doesn’t go away, so we can’t deal with it, so it can’t be happening, so it’s not happening. But soon the denial won’t be possible any more.

How are those things self-serving?

Exactly! He needs to find himself a more compatible partner, but she’s lying and preventing him from learning this.

Right, because “humanity” has nothing to do with hyper isolated, filtered microsocieties.

You explained how one business relies on growth, in order to enrich its stockholders.

That is not the same as saying how the entire economy needs to expand.

Also it doesn’t differentiate it from anything else, since literally everything (I’m using the word phenomenon in its most literal form here — feel free to challenge me on any phenomenon) must grow or cease existing.

Right so we give it a magnetosphere.

Terraforming Mars essentially means pumping more energy and gases into its climate system via whetever method, while the problem here on Earth is that we’ve pumped too much energy into the climate system and we’d have to somehow get it “out” again.

So because one problem is too much X, and the other problem is too little X, those are distinct problems that don’t inform one another?

Yes. It’s the good ones who are assassinated. And no not by Trump. Not by Presidents. By hidden people you haven’t heard of.

Guess we’ll never know unless someone wastes the energy to find out.

Who cares?