Oh dear lord in heaven, I’ve apparently become a Dickensian villain…Did I just recreate the poor houses? Oh dear. Yeah, maybe separate rooms are better. There’s spartan, and then there’s “we built a prison.”

Seriously. I want a world where everyone can have the basics of subsistence without qualifications. UBI is one way to do it, but even direct provision is fine.

Universal healthcare is an obvious one, but for as wealthy as developed countries are, providing basic food and shelter shouldn’t be that difficult either. For food and shelter, I think we should just offer anyone that wants it the basics of life.

Every county should have a government depot in it that you can go and get a certain quantity of basic staples per month. Rice, beans, flour, that kind of thing. It need not be fancy or the best food on Earth, but enough of what people need to keep them alive. And you keep the demand for the service reasonable not by putting in place applications and qualifications, but simply by personal preference. Not many millionaires are going to go down to the depot every month and get their government-issued bag of rice, even if they could if they wanted.

Same thing with housing. There should be state-run dorms or boarding houses in every city in the country. Need a place to stay? Go down to the city dorm. I would build them just like college dorms - small shared rooms with bunk beds and communal cooking/bathing facilities. And anyone, from the richest to the poorest, can stay there if they need to. If Bezos wants to go live in the government dorm, he can. You keep demand for it low, and the cost of providing it reasonable, through personal choice. Most people don’t actually want to live their whole life in a dorm room. Keep things clean. Keep them sanitary. But keep them simple and utilitarian.

Even within existing capitalist societies, we can provide for the basics of life for everyone. And instead of putting strict requirements, you open the programs up to all. You keep the demand for the services low by focusing on utilitarian versions of the benefits you provide. Anyone down on their luck can stay in the government dorm if they want, but very few people actually want to unless they really need to.

You have to be willing to walk away from and ignore corporate media platforms, or else they’ll never be defeated. And content creators need to also learn to not post their stuff to these platforms.

Biden also announced he wasn’t enforcing the law. The TikTok operators saw the writing on the wall and realized they need to bend the knee to Trump.

Don’t get too hung up on specific dates. Laws are not some physical law like gravity that are present and universal. They exist within a fuzzy context of enforcement and interpretation.

Biden made clear he wasn’t going to enforce the law. Trump made clear he was going to make a decision based on how well Tiktok flattered and bribed him. So that’s exactly what they’ve done.

Due to two facts:

1. The samurai class in Japan officially lasted way later than you probably think

2. The earliest primitive fax machine existed much earlier than you probably think.

It is technically possible for Abraham Lincoln to have received a fax from a samurai.

There’s no evidence it ever happened, but it technically could have happened.

Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly.

Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly. There is no path going directly from your eyes to your conscious awareness. Rather, the subconscious collects sensory input. It uses that input to create a virtual simulacrum of the world, a big internal 3D model. That internal 3D representation is what you, the conscious part of your mind, actually interacts with and experiences.

You ever wonder how weird it is that people can have intense, debilitating hallucinations? Like schizophrenics seeing and hearing entirely fictional things. Have you ever seen a camera produce anything like that? A flash of light, a distorted image, dead pixels, etc? Sure, those kinds of errors cameras can produce. But a camera will never display a vivid realistic image of a person that wasn’t ever actually in their field of view.

Yet the human mind is capable of this. In the right circumstances, the human brain is capable of spawning entire fictional people into your conscious awareness. This shows that there is an elaborate subconscious processing layer between what our conscious mind observes and direct sensory input. Your conscious mind is basically experiencing a tiny little internal version of The Matrix, entirely generated on its own wetware. And this subconscious processing layer is what makes hallucinations possible. The processes that produce this internal simulation can become corrupted, and thus allows hallucinations.

This architecture is also what makes dreaming possible. If your conscious mind only perceived things upon direct sensory feedback from the eyes, ears, etc., how would dreaming be possible?

You are essentially experiencing reality through an elaborate 3d modeling version of an AI video generator.

Many will say that World War Three cannot happen, that nuclear weapons will prevent it. However, this assumes that World War Three has to be global thermonuclear war, rather than some repeat of the previous world wars.

Cities don’t have to be leveled for nations to fight a world war. The US fought two world wars, and we never had our cities and infrastructure decimated. What I can imagine is a future world war where all the major players fight the war in the same way the US fought the two previous wars. Both sides contribute massive resources, adopt wartime economies, throw their whole populations behind the effort etc, but at no point do the various combatants directly attack the main territory and population centers of the other side. You could have a conflict where both sides lost millions of troops fighting it out in some third party territory, but the nukes never fly as all sides realize that invading the home territory of the others is suicide.

I just always imagine that those ads are the vivid hallucinations of a patient in a mental hospital.

Morning? You mean good forenoon to you sir!