You are conflating Marxism with China, which is just a state-capitalist powerhouse using the exact same model of enclosure and rent-seeking we are arguing against. China doesn't "hand over" automation because capitalists are better at it; the state simply socializes the risk and R&D before letting private proxies handle the commercialization. Citing a state-backed monopoly system to prove "the market" is the only way to build tech is total nonsense.
China is Marxist, as much as South Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, USSR, Khmer Rouge, Laos, etc. This is objective history. These are the "objective conditions", as Marxists say. These are facts and nothing else exists besides that.
Your idealistic, romantic version of Marxism only exists in your head. In 140 years of history, Marxism only generated the Marxist states I listed above.
It is honestly depressing how many people have swallowed the capitalist pill so completely. Most people can't even fathom a world where cooperation actually works better than a cutthroat rat race.
It leads to these total room-temperature takes that the system is the only reason we have the internet or Hacker News. It is exhausting watching people parrot the same old clichés because they are too lazy to actually crack a history book.
The truth is that foundational tech was almost never market-driven. The architecture of the computer, the internet, and the Web were all products of the public commons. They were created by people motivated by discovery and utility rather than exit liquidity. Capital did not invent these things. It just showed up late, threw a fence around them, and started charging rent on human ingenuity it had nothing to do with.
Same goes for the Luddites. They were not anti-machine, they were just anti-starvation. They did not hate the loom. They hated that the loom was being used as a legal weapon to gut their labor rights while the owners hoarded 100 percent of the gains.
Using a computer to call this out is not hypocrisy. It is using a tool that was stolen from the human commons to argue for its return. If you think we owe our progress to the current ownership model, you are not paying attention. You have just been programmed by the marketing.
Hell, the whole idea of open-source on which the entire modern tech world is based upon, which the Internet and Hacker News itself thrived upon, is completely antithetical to capitalism.
The cambrian explosion of tech exists because someone decided to give intellectual property away for free.
I agree with you. My hope and dream is that society is able to move on not by regressing to Luddism, but by restoring technology's position to service the people, as a tool for making life better, rather than to mould, measure and control humanity. Remember the sad meme that the brightest minds of our generations are thinking about how to make people click on ads. It is tragic.
I think my kids might love this. I certainly loved the original as a kid. Not even the second or third installment. The first one has always been my favorite, because it was so god damn punk rock simple.
I loved all these games as a kid and I'm 25. I played it on my DS and had Widelands on my computer.
The artificial constraint of building roads with little people acting as relays holds up today because it makes the graph theoretic nature of the problem apparent to a 10 year old.
I can intuitively see flow and choke points in a way most games don't allow. I will see a pile of junk stacked up on a given node if my road network sucks. I often attempted to build more roads. I thought it was cool seeing how stuff moved through a network.
To contrast Rimworld, I needed a theoretical understanding of graphs before I could mentally model goods' flow between raw production, storage, and secondary production. Otherwise people would just walk long distances and everything would feel slow without understanding why. I did not understand the benefit of a relay system until hundreds of hours in.
That isn't to say Settlers 1 and 2 are perfect. The lack of in-game help and tutorials killed my progress past a certain point. You will probably need to help your kid.
I read it more like "workers" being the ones who actually produce the good stuff, and "the boss" as being the entity to stick it to (as explained in the classic film "School of Rock").
It’s pretty tough to exercise or clean your house when getting out of bed feels like an insurmountable task.
Depression isn’t like an infection or cancer—it’s a diagnosis based on established criteria, as are most mental disorders. Experts may disagree on diagnosis or treatment, but that doesn’t make it useless.
By that logic, you might as well say autism is caused by avoiding eye contact—since there’s no blood test for it either.
I gave up on humans and this system. There are no good experiences to be made with others. Everything is a transaction nowadays and there is no altruism. Believe it or not, I am an altruist because I dont care anymore. I dont expect anything from anyone, I dont strive to be happy because its impossible to be happy with the current state of the world (at least im not ignorant enough to try and be happy). I am nice to all people. I do shit for people all the time, but deep down I am ready to jump in front of a train once my mother dies. In my country the rich preach "WE DONT WORK ENOUGH!!!!" without any public response. People gave up, we are locked in a system voting for people that don't represent our interests. We are approaching doomsday without doing anything against it, because it doesn't generate money. I'm just tired so I LARP my way through life until I finally grow the balls to end it.
I'm not disagreeing with you in regards to the state of the world, I'm addressing your suicide fantasies. Please believe me, I mean this is the most respectful way: please seek help.
I know right? I don't know what all other people replying to you are doing. I just play Cyberpunk, I finished it yesterday. I guess I'll play the new Dying Light next. Some people play golf. I don't know what other "happiness" there can be, though I am interested if anyone has anything to share that I don't know.
Huh. Are those factory building games really that good? I never tried, but I feel like I would get bored. It's like playing Minecraft in single player (I guess).
They're some of the most engrossing games I've ever played.
Factorio is the only game I ever started a session with a friend at 9pm on a work night saying "just a couple of hours" and ended up playing until 5am.
They have this kind of bad side that they almost feel productive, too, where you redesign/rebuild something and fix a problem you had and suddenly the hours spent feel like you did something worthwhile.
I find them very fun and not at all boring. I almost entire solo them but playing multiplayer with good friends who want to play productively, they're even better.
Avoid the generalizations - 'everything ...' and try to think what the countless million other ova and spermatozoa who didn't make it into the universe at all would make of your despair. Let's predict your response 'they're the lucky ones'.
> but deep down I am ready to jump in front of a train once my mother dies.
I have a similar ideology to yours but I'm not sad like this because I'm not experiencing what appears to be clinical depression.
You should seek medical intervention, it saved my life and it might save yours, which is worth saving. Intervention didn't pull the wool over my eyes about how flawed our society is or how selfish neoliberal capitalism tries to force everyone to be, it just gave me the psychological tools to maintain enough optimism to keep me alive and having enough energy to try to make changes, even if they're small local ones.
> People gave up, we are locked in a system voting for people that don't represent our interests.
There are other ways to live. Just because a huge majority of people live in these systems doesn't mean you have to as well, plenty have "opted out" without ending their lives. You could find some people living alternatively through a Food Not Bombs chapter near you, or some other anarchistic or alternative living group.
The dominant social structure isn't designed for people like you and me to thrive and be ourselves and so it's totally ok to find other people like us that want to live differently and let everyone else do whatever bizarre thing they're going to do with these enforced ways of living modern society presents.
I understand your perspective, but it's narrowly focused on the ugly parts of life.
I agree that the capitalist system is sickening and that people are too complacent in general. But the fact that you think there are no good experiences to be had with other people because everything is transactional is alarming and a sign that you lack a healthy network of friends, allies, and lived cameraderie.
By the way, being nice is not altruistic. It's something you do to avoid conflict. If overdone it will erode your sense of self.
I think your gut feeling is spot on, but your response to it is maladaptive. If you want to feel joy in life again, get involved with people who acknowledge that the system itself is broken and who strive for revolution, so you can join them in your common goal and feel a purpose in life again. Those people usually also know how to party and cook great food in my experience.
Your suicidal ideations are not a sign that people suck, but that you need to find yours.
I wish this were more common knowlegdge. Every time I see someone whether ADHD "exists" I think to myself "Dude, we decided that certain traits falling in a certain range on a spectrum warrant their own category because it might facilitate research and treatment. Whether it's real or not isn't even a question."
I just want to know whether my issues are normal and I'm gaslighting myself into thinking I'm broken or a loser, or if my specific issues are actually falling outside the norm. This way I know what treatment modalities might help, and which literature I can peruse instead of wasting my time reading up productivity advice meant for neurotypical people that will try to solve the wrong issue for me and just make me feel worse.
In short: no-one "has" ADHD. We just decided that people on the lower end of the spectrum in the "ability to concentrate" trait deserve a bit of a boost from otherwise illegal drugs to function in the society. Being in this lower end is called "having ADHD".
I'm a bit wary about arguing with a psychiatrist, especially if it is Scott Alexander, but ADHD is clearly not just "low ability to concentrate". It is hard to explain to normal people without phrases like "executive function paralysis" but it is a severe illness, and not some variation of a norm.
I would also challenge his premise about boring monotonous work is ill suited for humans, hence the ones with ADHD are people who can't do it (as good as others). ADHD people can do boring monotonous work for hours, month after month, and often not even struggle with that. On the other hand some banal easy (and short!) tasks, which won't even register as a task for normal human, will leave ADHD person in shambles, unable to even think about it.
There is lots of bad shit going in on the ADHD brain, it is certainly not just "20% worse concentration" debuff.
As someone taking adhd meds, I think you’re missing this person’s bigger point.
You can be stuck for decades, as I was, taking advice that won’t work for you, until you figure out that you can get a medical solution that instantly enables all of those pieces of advice becoming usable.
It is not a coincidence that those pieces of advice weren’t working, they were never going to work unless preceded by medical help.
Many people pre diagnosis suffer the equivalent of taking years of running advice and wondering why the stay behind before noticing they’re missing a leg and it won’t work until they get prosthetics.
If it’s not optimal, it’s useless, isn’t it? You can’t run as fast as the others, so why bother running at all? You just can’t do it. None of the advice about running will ever apply to you unless you can afford a prosthetic that works with your ailment that you can wear all the time.
That’s not true, of course. You are not relegated to a category of defunct by simply existing without a leg. You can learn to get by without it — many do — and you can learn to excel without it.
When you exclude yourself based on blankets of labels, you miss good advice. Much advice about “running” has little to do with having 2 legs: Breathing, clothing, hydration, nutrition, time of day. Pacing advice can even apply when you run with an implement.
For some people this is their entire reality, having to fight against categorizations that split them into complete ability and disability.
For some others, they don’t even know there’s a fight to be had. They give up before knowing they had any chance at all.
It’s troubling for something like ADHD, where a constellation of symptoms are possible and some do not apply to you personally.
You can’t read because you have ADHD? It may be true. It may also be true that you have been forced to read things you’re not interested in, something rendered practically impossible by this disorder, and someone has labeled you as a non-reader due to your differences. It may also be true that you haven’t discovered Terry Pratchett, and you’re actually quite the reader with the right material.
For some even more others, they feel able with their medication and useless without. Luckily for them, their medication lasts all day, medication shortages do not exist, and their psychiatrist will always prescribe their medications forever.
>For some even more others, they feel able with their medication and useless without. Luckily for them, their medication lasts all day, medication shortages do not exist, and their psychiatrist will always prescribe their medications forever.
The sarcasm there is unwarranted. Need for a treatment, when it exists, is orthogonal to its convenience. If you need an organ transplant to live, you need it regardless of whether you have donors and hospitals available or whether the lifelong meds they require can run dry at some point.
As for your larger point, to be clear, I understand the idea you’re trying to convey. Diagnoses can be limiting for some people either internally (limiting self perception) or by external judgement.
I don’t deny that, what I’m saying is that I feel you’re (probably unintentionally) falling into a different extreme that is just as damaging to others, which is to deny the need or convenience of treatment for those for which _there is no successful alternative_.
Shutting down a person through a label is harmful, dismissing their limitations because that would be labelling is harmful as well.
For the point of advice, advice can and will be harmful when it assumes realities that don’t apply to you.
To leave the analogy aside and give actual examples, methods to keep organization and accountability like checkboxes or diaries will not only be failed tries to those who need meds, but also reinforce a feeling of inadequacy as the user now feels lacking in discipline to commit to the method. Lack of self steem and negative self perception (lazy, messy, uncaring, etc) is a way too common comorbility with ADHD for a reason.
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