Ending the dominion of pain and death.


Questioning the Need for Jargon

That is pretty much literally a different language. I wonder how much of that jargon is actually essential. I find it hard to believe it’s not possible to explain these things in, well, English.

I kinda wish the space and biology naming conventions were reversed. I mean we have names for everything in space, right down to specific names for virtually every crater on the moon.

And yeah the stars are numbered but we have also given tons of actual names to comets and other things.

I think it would be useful in biology to name the specific things with specific names, not strange quasi latin translation descriptions of what things do.

Like if we’re going to call a specific cell that rolls something that essentially mean “roller cell” in latin, and the argument is that we can’t just call it a roller cell is because it’ll get confused with some other thing that is also a cell that rolls, they why not name it specifically after a god or something (like we do with space stuff.)

I suspect the god names wouldn’t even be needed, since each latinized or greek quasi word translates into something.

The translation issue is a sort of valid argument but then why not simply force scientists to publish in a completely new language like lojban, to eliminate any chance of confusion?

You telling me learning lojban is any harder than getting a phd in cellular biology? I think not.

I can’t wait till the AIs get here. They will essentially be the greatest translation and learning tools ever imagined by humanity. I could tell an AI: “Hey, translate the entire nomenclature of biology into consistent non-ambiguous simple English please, and then re-narrate this video.”

Understanding and innovation are going to totally explode when we have ubiquitous  AIs capable of that kind of data translation and juggling linked to human curiosity and imagination.

Why I don’t care about DRM.

The DRM debate to me is like the gay marriage debate: A dangerous diversion from a deeper more widespread, and more pressing problem.

(In the case of gay marriage the deeper issue is why we permit the state to regulate what is essentially a religious ritual in the first place. Marriage should not exist in any official capacity. It should not be an official status any more than the state of your baptism. I should not get a tax break or hike for participating in any religious ritual.)

In the case of DRM the deeper problem is intellectual property law (IPL) itself. DRM is part and parcel with IPL. The reason the anti-drm groups look frankly small time and a bit whacked out fringe is because of where they are attacking the logic chain. To the pro DRM crowd they are the enemy, and to the abolitionist crowd they seem like collaborators or traitors of some stripe. The anti-DRM movement seem to be a walking contradiction because if you assert or imply that IPL itself is ok, then the logic of DRM is quite sound. If on the other hand you assume that logic is bogus, then why are you limiting yourself to opposing DRM?

Anti-DRM groups by their very nature seem to imply a compromise. They suggest that the phenomenon of selling copies, selling strings of numbers, patenting numbers, is ok. They seem to say it’s just that how those laws are enforced that’s the problem.

They seem a little insane in their level of compromise. Whether or not that compromise is practical and wise politically is a separate issue. It would be like segregation era black arguing that the policy isn’t the problem, just the police violence that occurs when its enforced.

And if you think for one second this issue is trivial because games and movies, I remind you that these exact same laws apply to drugs and the food supply. Where do you think the drug companies got the legal framework that lets them charge what they want to whomever they want? Where do you think Monsanto got the idea of a terminator gene?

Compare anti DRM efforts with the people attacking the correct root, the hardcore abolitionists and the full on pirate party types who assert that the whole business model is unjust and more than a little insane. They somehow seem more serious, more credible. And there’s a whole lot more of them.

The reason a conservative 1% rules the world is because their opposition is by definition fragmented. There is only one status quo, one way it is, and there are a million different directions we can progress in.

That will always be the case, but you could at least get the progressives of whatever strike to be more effective if you could get it across to them that root problems are the ones worth curing.

Interstellar (2014) Review

This is a scene by scene generally glowing review of Interstellar.


Right away we have some awesome. The blend of re-purposed dust bowl interview footage, complete with this neat upside down dishware detail, coupled with the Sci-Fi space-jet teaser opening immediately established the film as something special, with a feeling of serious intellectual attention without being pretentious. Adding in the dusty running laptop is a stroke of genius as it nicely juxtaposes the apparent technological regression with the obvious fact that we are either in the future or a contemporary parallel era, without having to resort to telling us.

Rule one of great film making: Don’t tell the viewer anything you can show them instead.


The relationship dynamic here is excellent. It shows parental frustration along with the absolute best possible response. We see respect for the girl shown as a human being which feels not as if it’s a staged (despite literally being staged) father of the year moment, but rather a snapshot into their typical interactions. Encouraging critical thinking and empowering the child by teaching her how to think, as opposed to what to think. To bad she turns out to be pathologically dim and mean as an adult. I really hope that wasn’t the point… We get enough oppress your children for their own good rhetoric in the whole rest of culture.


Pretty sure this is the first ever drone chase through a corn field in cinema history. Again with the awesome sweet and sour flavor of high tech meets backslide, with a garnish of purpose and excitement.


Another example of respect towards children by showing them (again not telling) as competent trustworthy people. True she’s later proven to be exceptionally bright from a technical standpoint, but not to a super human degree, as is often the case in other lesser movies where they have to have some supernatural excuse for kids when they act like actual humans. The son asks insightful questions as well, so again it’s not a big “check out the mutant nerd” showcase when we see a kid with an IQ north of carrot.


She asks an awesome question and gets an awesome answer. She asks why they can’t simply release the drone, as if it’s a bird. This is not presented as childish nonsense for even a millisecond. I was deeply impressed by this question. And his answer is excellent as well. He says it needs to learn to adapt like everyone else, creating a feeling of shared struggle, and mutual respect, for a machine. Let that sink in. Because it won’t be long till we have feeling machines in reality. They will be our allies but it will still be possible to victimize them. Don’t be that guy (person).


Without starting in on a massive rant about school, let me just say that in my opinion this depiction of school as little more than drones making drones, and outright lying about history for manipulative reasons is horrifyingly accurate.

And yes I picked that frame on purpose. Looking painfully, willfully, ignorant and half blind… Nailed it.

When the meat bots demonstrate total oblivity to his opposition to their indoctrination program and imply that he should somehow punish her in their behalf to stop her from thinking and stuff, he delightfully goes in the opposite direction. Again showing a parent doing at least some degree of the right thing… Opposing that odious machine, instead of feeding our kids to it like some kind of island primitives stuffing our loved ones into the volcano for (in this case literally) a better harvest.

Plug: http://underlore.com/the-tyranny-of-compulsory-schooling/


I’m guessing me and this character were born about the same time. They never say what year exactly that I noticed, but that’s the impression I get. I like the nature of his role too. He seems burnt out but still doing what he can, if fatalistically.


Here he says it’s like we’ve forgotten who we are, explorers, not caretakers. I couldn’t agree more. At some point it’s like we decided to stop willfully changing things when our ability to willfully change things is the whole reason we are alive and special.

We need to declare actual war on mosquitoes.

I love that the enemy in this film isn’t runaway technology or climate change or whatever other unabomber Luddite kind of moral, where the implied “correct” response is to go churn butter and drop our cellphones in the toilet in some futile and literally mindless effort to halt innovation. Rather the enemy appears to be the very nature of life, things evolving faster than we are, depicted as an organism called the blight which metabolizes crops, oxygen, and nitrogen. It’s a brilliant double message. Regression will kill us, and when you stand still while everything else moves forward, you might as well be killing yourself, because nature does not care about you.

Evolution is both the question and the answer. Love it.


“We used to look at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down, and worry about our place in the dirt.”


Again with the awesome respect shown children and diversity. That it’s ok to want different things out of life, different ways of life so long as they don’t hurt anyone. Wow. That is really an ethic we need right now for parents, and the world.

We need to stop trying to force everyone into the same life plan of immediate returns for the culture. When we developed farming, we showed patience in the short term for gains in the long term. We need to do that again with a universal basic income.

Simply water humanity and see what they yield. Don’t eat your seed stock. Have a little faith that the same creatures that invented culture will find a way to be useful to it.

Plug: http://underlore.com/one-possible-solution/


This bit is unrealistic and I’m sure virtually all of us called it.

I think I would have had her be in the house and answer him, then sneak into the back of the truck, and then have him hit a bump or something causing her to make a noise.

Having her already hidden in the cab while great for the character interaction is also a fairly hamfisted way to initiate the next scene.


This robot design is brave and awesome. More to follow. At first it looked silly to me, like a guy in a silver cardboard box, but that impression did not last. And while possibly being a nice nod to the monolith (especially in the very final frame of the movie) I think it also served as an instant and obvious disclaimer of the AI-as-menace trope.


Brilliant film making here. They knew not to show us his face. They did point him out though. So we know he’s going to be significant later, but we don’t know in what way. He could merely be plot context, or he could be a person. Showing us a face would tell us. Not showing us a face, kind of tells us too though, since they showed the faces of other team members, but it’s subtle and I missed it the first time.


I’m glad they cast this guy, he has deserved better roles for a long time. His agent must suck, he gets the worst roles. (Like Blackheart, omg the poor guy.)


“Everybody good? Plenty of slaves for my robot colony?” lol4r Seriously that just makes me giggle. “I have a cue light I can use when I’m joking if you like. (Human accepts offer.) Yeah, you can use it to find your way back to the ship after I blow you out the airlock. (Cue light comes on.)” ~TARS

Instantly likable. I haven’t liked a human sourced robot in a near future space movie this much since AMEE. And I have a feeling TARS/CASE/KIPP could whomp AMEE.


Docking in other movies is kind of a throw away thing but in this movie I think they treat it as properly harrowing. Imagine trying to poke a hole in your last two balloons full of oxygen and hook them together at the hole. That’s basically how amazing docking actually is when you think about it and how important it is not to screw up.


I seriously love this robot design. It screams utility.


“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I could not agree more. Though this movie does take a dump on people who like living individually. But hey, that’s pandemic Pro-aging trance for you.



I strongly disagree with her notion of nature not being evil. Setting aside the fact that nature clearly loves her. (She’s the prettiest woman in Hollywood imo, and thus very probably this whole fictional universe. Also apparently she’s an astronaut-grade save humanity genius, on the first lifeboat off the dying rock, one of the handful spared out of the billions with their lives coming to an end, so yeah, of course she’s thinks nature’s cool. She’s never left the pleasure garden until now.

Even she admits she wasn’t ready for reality when she gets back from planet tsunami.

To those of us with some perspective, the universe is quite obviously evil by every objective measure.

The shockingly vast majority of it is instantly lethal for a start, and on top of that there’s entropy and an obvious and complete lack of empathy. Simply see all arguments against intelligent design.

Ironically, this truth is actually good news because it means we are completely justified, when not outright compelled, to do what we need or want to do with it.

It only deserves, and only responds, to our actions. It doesn’t care about our feelings one way or the other, and it doesn’t care what we do to it or with it either. This makes all sentient life so precious, and everything else entirely ours. That is completely beautiful to me.

“Is a lion evil because it rips a gazelle to shreds?” ~Dr. Privileged

Uhh, yes actually. And so are we for permitting it. Indeed it’s infinitely more evil than some teenager torturing strays to death because at least the teen will out grow it or get stopped eventually, and can’t measure its victims by the million, and it didn’t create a self replicating machine that requires wholesale daily execution of torture and murder simply to keep breathing.

I mean think of the staggering malevolence of that. These prey animals are functionally toddlers, and even without lions, their life is hellish, and that’s just a tiny segment of the torture factory called life.

No, we need to cure this planet, not prolong its sickness and lethality. Nature is evil, and we need to face that fact, and we will or we’ll die, expressly because of that evil.


I love how he instantly jumps at the chance to free Murph of her school slavery. He made the decision faster than he could take the breath it took to convey the fact that he had made it.


His explanation of why the wormhole is spherical is both informative and elegant. The hole in the paper thing happens in other films, but this is the best version so far because it explicitly explains how a wormhole is faster.


The wormhole travel scene is just marvelous. Doing it all with morphing and lens effects (as in image transformations, not like camera lens effects) is just brilliance.


This concept of “the bulk” (space beyond our three dimensions) is nicely depicted here, but I imagine the real thing would look far more nonsensical, where as this looks like roughly the inside of a crumpled ball painted with moving star fields.

I think the inside of such a thing would defy visual processing for us and would look nonsensical and pretty much like an image processing artifact collection. Distance and depth perception for example would probably be very broken.

Thinking about that makes me think of the concept of truly toxic information. Like the trope in stories where seeing something from beyond can drive you mad. Well, if our senses are inputs, and our minds are processors, it should be possible to crash that processor with input only.


Beautiful. Also, is anyone else reminded of the laughing man logo? 😛 “I thought what I’d do is pretend to be one of those black holes for awhile.” 😛





CASE being super cool :) I love how their whole body is dynamic like that. Sharper and narrower, reconfigured as needed. Simply beautiful.

Sadly, the death and lost years because of this are due to refusal to obey orders, and really it’s unrealistic. The effects of the time dilation should have been anticipated, and the cached data would have made it obvious.

It’s harrowing and moving and important, but also an example of the idiot ball trope. How did CASE not notice and mention the waves? How did the telemetry not make the situation obvious? Do these things not have black boxes? It strains credulity.

CASE says “The data Doyle received was just the initial status, echoing endlessly.” And they didn’t notice the identical timestamps? The data didn’t have timestamps? Please.

Still, rule of cool applies, because holy crap waves, robot running/rolling, drama, etc.


Nope, you were never ready for reality. And frankly I’m pretty pissed that CASE didn’t simply throw her in the airlock and then grab Doyle. I think he would have. I think this is humanity injecting that typical sexist crap of male life being worthless intrinsically. Pretty sure plot wise CASE would have made a better effort to save both of them had they both be Anne Hathaway.

Anyway, they get back and they’re told they’ve got years of messages stored, but that apparently means like 4 messages total… Kinda skimped on this part too. I guess filming all those messages would have been like filming another movie. Still, this problem should have, could have, been averted at the script level.


Another problem with the messages thing is that they are insane and ignorant. From the farm guy I can kind of understand but from the physicist girl who literally lives at nasa? No. Also Doyle said they already knew what to expect navigationally, so they had to know about Gargantua. Someone in the years at nasa during the silence should have said “Hey you know, maybe it’s a relativity thing, what with wormholes and all.”

Coddling anger in perpetuity is another sexist problem in culture. It’s like at no point does society universally say to a girl “get over it” but is says that crap to guys Virtually instantly.

Like if I were in her position, if my dad were in space like that, and there was any chance he’d ever see the messages, I would transmit every week at least till I was dead for exactly the reason that time is relative. It’s wildly unrealistic that they didn’t psychologically, or at the very least betrays literally mind numbing pathology.

But again, it makes for good drama I guess.


I thought that they were going to play with the idea that time while paramount, is also meaningless. Though the movie didn’t go as far as I’m thinking, it definitely came far far closer to an actual understanding. (Kpax, Primer, and the HG wells the time machine remake touched on this indirectly.)

What I at first interpreted as a eureka moment, was actually her (finally) seeing through the greatest intellectual scam of all time and a classic argument against secrecy in any agency with decision making authority. There is no way he’d have kept everyone running in circles with a bogus math problem if more than like 10 people saw it.

This goes back to her not being a mutant. She’s smart but obviously not that smart. You can’t spend decades teaching a smart person how to be a carpenter and then sell them on the notion that a table just won’t work because you don’t know how to measure to get the legs even.


I like this idea that subjectivity matters. She said it in a kind of flowery monogamy rhetoric way for a scientist, but hey, writers are writers, and the point got across.

I like the idea that subjectivity has a merit that science ignores because it is by nature blind to it. The idea that the line between experience and events has some degree of meaning above and beyond what is the equivalent of an arbitrary decision or a delusion.

The impact isn’t enough to justify any dogmatic thinking, since prayer obviously doesn’t do anything to reality. But still, I have this nagging feeling that there is something to the notion that subjectivity is real in some way beyond ethics and experience and compassion.

She notes and asks that we love people who have died, where’s the social utility in that. The movie treats this like a good argument, but it totally isn’t.

Death worship is an evolution of basic corpse disposal. A disgust response leading to adaptive hygiene tradition.

Also it was critical for the development of culture, which is ultimately a shared behavior and perpetual memory system. Think about what we do with the dead. We idealize them. We in essence raid their experience for mistakes to avoid and successes to replicate. This is the nature of what we call legacy. Loving the dead makes perfect sense.

But the core point that love and presumably other emotional links to consciousness and qualia of experience have some objective future meaning stands as a possibility.



More petulant, literally incredible, narcissistic, thoughtlessness. To believe that her character could believe her father knew, when she herself missed it for 20+ years is completely insane. She would simply not actually think that way without a brain tumor or schizophrenia.


They speak of relativity and quantum mechanics being irreconcilable, again, I remember thinking that some future plot twist was going to be an assertion for time being an illusion and that you can reconcile them so long as you take time off the table.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I plan to one day have the AIs subtract time completely from the math of both and see if they can be merged as so many have tried to do after having done so.

I think our failure to sufficiently automate math is directly responsible for us not having the computational power and software flexibility to attempt this.

This is something all humanity should be given the tools to play with, without having to be lifetime code and sycophantic ivory tower specialists. The code is complicated, the ideas are not.

And our continued embrace of intellectual property law continues this drag on our advancement velocity.


I mean think about it. We carry around devices that can more easily plot a chunk of weather and render a false world in 3d in real time than solve for X when in point of fact the processing power could easily fit in calculator small enough to swallow.

Why? Because like my barely human cheating macro economics teacher once said: The world needs janitors too. This lack of processing democratization and automation is basically a math based religion. A dogma of what math means and who should have access to the tools to make it accessible.



I knew it was all bull the moment I saw KIPP in pieces. I don’t think any film fan failed to see that betrayal coming. More liberal use of the idiot ball to make us plebs feel smarter than the astronauts :)


They talk about having half the answer, and interestingly I think that’s somewhat close to the actual case.

I think humanity should try a brute force math attack on the theory of everything (toe.) Like decide on an arbitrary size limit on the final equation, fix the variables we know for a fact to be true, and simply generate and check equations till we get ones that fit. I find it hard to believe that humanity would be unable to check if a (or the) TOE was correct if it were printed on a tshirt from the future.

I feel like it could be done like bitcoin mining.

All meaning can be altered by context, and obviously QM and relativity aren’t actually mutually exclusive since we’re sitting here in them physically reconciled.

So then really it shouldn’t be any more complicated than generating that mathematical context, that key, that password, at random and test it until we find one that works.

Even if that definition or context adds up to the subtraction of one thing that allows GR to merge with QFT, it should still be possible to test and objectively exclude candidate solutions.

The top of the list of “passwords” I’d try is the removal of time, and the rejection of the notion of superposed states. The cat is either dead or alive. The math should proceed on the basis of it being one of the other. (Hidden Variable for the win.)



This is totally us. Altruism vs selfishness, fighting wastefully on a spec, in a frozen sea of death.


The robot at the last minute yells for the professor to step back, like only now does he detect a bomb, presumably planted by the lying scientist. (Named literally man, I might add, which is either sexist or misanthropic or both.) But why bother? Why not simply erase the incriminating data? Doctor the archives? Hell, order the robot to help you do it.

This whole thing is just silly. Frankly I think it’s because of a rather gross impulse to kill off main characters so that we can have a nice monogamous tied off “happy” ending.


TARS bookin’ it. :)


So TARS just saved all of humanity by not trusting all of humanity. Awesome :)


So this super genius astronaut is supposed to what, be so nuts that he forgot what would happen here? He remembers how to fly a space ship but forgot how sensitive docking is? Hell, even I knew and I didn’t need all the overt narrative clues.

Silly. Seems like a really simplistic way to continue the non-suicidal-men-are-bad shaming campaign. I’m tired of being told how expendable I’m supposed to think I am just because I have boy parts.


I hate when movies and people do this. When they talk about talking instead of talking.

“Listen to me” she says, but he is listening. He can’t help but listen. So instead of talking about talking why don’t you just say. “Hey psycho, you’re aware you’re about to blow yourself up and doom humanity right?”

Futility trying to reason with psychosis would have made for much better dialog. But no we have to have instance number fifty thousand of the pretty girl crying or almost crying.

This crap is not going to age well. I’m reminded of the difference between Barbara in the original vs the remake of night of the living dead.


“Docking.” Hehe. Awesome :) But if there was a second port, why not start by racing to that? I would like to assume he ran down the possibilities and concluded it wasn’t possible with opposition but given the other plot absurdities, I’m doubting anyone put that much thought into it.


“She’s got no heat shield.” Uhhh. Duh? It’s a mobile space station not a landing craft. What a dumb thing for an astronaut to say to another one.


It’s ironic that those flaps are there showing that the entire docking system could be made a lot more self aligning. It’s like the makers of this space station never saw a garden hose or air compressor quick connect, or mid air refueling interface.

The whole thing should be spinny, floaty, and self aligning to a reasonable degree. Like I said earlier, docking is already scary. We need not make it more so.


I mean come on, look at that. I can think of about a billion better ways to do that. Magnets and a steel ring come to mind. There’s no need for teeth there. Yes I’m aware of the need for torque. That can be dealt with also.


I like that she cares about the TARS’s life :) I also like that Cooper later proved to be perfectly willing to do what he is ordering the robot to do. So he’s not really being a jerk here :)

I totally fell for it too. I didn’t see it coming.


“See you on the other side…” Wait what? I finally started to suspect, a whopping 5 seconds before it happens.

Of course the whole probe in a black whole thing to me was crap, but I was delightfully wrong. Apparently you totally can safely enter the event horizon: http://www.quora.com/Interstellar-2014-movie/Why-does-the-concept-of-Spaghettification-not-apply-to-things-entering-the-black-hole-in-Interstellar


I wish they’d stop having her cry, it’s like the girl constantly falling while being chased through the woods. I’m not saying she shouldn’t cry. I’m saying a real woman of her context wouldn’t cry. If she was this prone to breaking down and sobbing under stress should would never have been cleared for the helmet. The math instruction alone for being what she’s supposed to be requires borderline pathological detachment. And that’s before being one of the anti-extinction team.

To be clear this whole thing wasn’t about mass, since they didn’t release the booster stages immediately before activating subsequent stages, it was about other resources I suspect, but mostly about doubling down on the quantum data hunt.

Good call imo.


I think they should have gone a different direction here. Like just silence and blackness and then wormhole. Have his whole ship (powerless if you like) trapped in the library tesseract, and he decides to EVA. There’s no plot reason to force him to eject. Frankly I think they just wanted to show him being all manly and screaming for the same reason they keep making the girl cry. Because sexist.



The library tesseract is cool. It reminds me of the idea of being trapped in a mirror.

It’s actually an awesome targeting interface for a gravity manipulation array. As neat as it is the first time, it’s really neat later thinking about it.


“…I don’t know but they constructed this three dimensional space inside their five dimensional reality to allow you to understand it…” ~TARS

Neato :)


“We brought ourselves.”

That bakes my noodle more than the vase.


He says “they” chose “her” but no. M ore likely there is no choice in play at all. More likely they realized that they had to act to fulfill their own timeline, and that action was encoded in that same time line.

It’s like a version of yourself appearing in your room from the future with plans for a time machine and instructions for when to go back and give yourself the instructions.

That’s the only kind of time travel that can work. Fulfillment actions and observation. Time doesn’t exist. What you did already happened.

“How do you know?” TARS asks, and Cooper says “Because I gave it to her.”

Like TARS said, they didn’t bring you here to change the past because there is no changing the past, the past, like the time machine, simply is. Time travel, like time itself is the illusion of power.

See also: http://underlore.com/what-if-skynet-isnt-trying-to-kill-john-connor/


What happens now is we put you where we know you end up.

Path of least resistance.


“Auto self destruct, T Minus…” “Knock Knock.” ~TARS lol4r again.

I love all these robots. I bet poor KIPP was awesome. I imagine him as being awesome at the level of GERTY.

See Also: http://archiveofourown.org/works/300083


We have “cryo sleep” and we’re letting her die? That’s murder or suicide. Pro-aging trance indeed. Logan’s Run comes to mind. Same thing ethically, admit it or not.

See also:


Wait, if no body believed her when she said he’d come back. Then why are they reacting to him that way?

They built the house shrine thing… Yet the family is like they don’t recognize him? WTF is wrong with these people?


More robot awesome.


Yeah we couldn’t possibly let him live. That might imply a non-monogamous future. Can’t have that right? So I guess those 90 kilos of eggs are going to die in the fridge while adam and eve 2.0 play nuclear family on the space rock.

Which reminds me of the inexplicable future society. How are they still orbiting Saturn? Why aren’t they through the wormhole?

I’m starting to feel like that station is the leftover cultist boat and the bulk of humanity is long gone. Or something seriously disturbing and screwed up happened before the gravity station launch.


Doesn’t look like she’s “Settling in for the long nap” to me. If so all that stuff needs to go back in the box.

P.S. Love the monolith in there :) CASE for the win :)

Selling Digital Copies is Fraud

From here: https://plus.google.com/+BrandonSergent/posts/H2bXafPq6qt

Recouping cost of production does NOT justify any future price, that’s a logical fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy

Yet thanks to coders we have an entire market sector and “intellectual property” concept based on it. IP in itself interestingly being a contradiction in terms, reminiscent (in that it is also a religious insanity) of so called “intelligent design.”

Because if we didn’t have a whole generation of aggressively acquiescent tryhard hall monitor tie-licking gamers, so used to kissing Gabe and EA ass, that they literally no longer can detect exploitative contractual terms, to the point they they argue in favor of having their legal recourse forcibly removed (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2848908) we might have some meaningful local opposition to this bullshit, but instead we have a legion of COD players screaming rape and racial slurs into bluetooth headsets only pausing to open another redbull, pay another 50$ for what should have been free or fanmade DLC, or dogpiling in the community any voice of dissent with a warped and sexist work ethic so toxic and backwards even the tea party hasn’t yet gone that far.

Screw IPL and anyone who defends any facet of it. You should all go make meat helmets and try to patent the question mark, because you’re obviously not equipped to be making public policy decisions.


See also: http://torrentfreak.com/how-shall-the-artists-get-paid-isnt-a-question-its-an-insult-130818/


From: http://steamcommunity.com/app/49520/discussions/0/618456760265591662/

TLDR: I agree with the OP.


Do not confuse agenda with incompetence. As game theory teaches us, appearing irrational is often a strategic aid, so to in this case is appearing incompetent.

I already own bl2 and I get no reward for buying the dlc. In fact it’s not even possible to buy the dlc all in one go. It seems all future updates and content will be monetized as paid DLC anyway, so essentially I’m punished twice.

Firstly for having the game already as described above. Secondly for getting into a game that is apparently always going to want more money. Maybe in 20 years when finally they are done milking this cow and all the dlc is done and packed and included in a bundle. Or (god willing) we get IPL reform that guts this entire model.

Anyway, this is intentional. They are quite clearly trying to drive off potential customers that would complain or resist being continuously exploited, because economically, one monied mark is worth at least a dozen savvy/ethical buyers. (Thanks Blizzard/Jobs.)

It’s all about low hanging fruit and exploiting addicts.

So many monied people in the western economy are essentially spending other people’s money anyway by way of having exploitative jobs, so even though they are buying with wages they ostensibly earned they still have a detached quasi third person perspective with regard to the ethics of spending.

OP and others assume that getting a foot in the door is a market benefit to them but it isn’t. It’s not so much about foot in the door as it is finding the right door.

As others and OP have said, this is all essentially squeezing money out of work already done. It’s a bit like a carpenter making a chair and then plugging the chair into a chair scanner and selling plans for the chair at the same price rate he would sell whole new chairs.

Our machines build the chair, we pay for the materials and the machines and the logistics of delivering the plans, but we are prohibited from gifting the chair we just made, or modifying it, or selling it, etc etc. This is a cultural logic error. We have copyright law for data authorship, and we have property law for objects and they are different, but then we craft this weird exploitative hybrid and call it intellectual property, as if once a number gets large enough it stops being a number and starts being an object.

That’s insane really when you think about it. Take the number 5 + X for example. In the previous equation, how must the value of X be to make an apple fall out of my computer? Apparently the answer is somewhere equivalent to the check sum of the borderlands game directory. We have concluded that the number, which is borderlands, is an object that it’s fair to sell. And that it is further ethical to hit control v and send, and sell it again, and again, forever.

That is ultimately our thinking because all arguments about labor are fallacious because they represent a sunk cost fallacy. Work being hard doesn’t entitle one to anything. Just ask a career waitress or garbage man if she or he really get paid what they’re worth.

I could dig a football field deep hole in my yard with a spoon and then charge you all for pictures of it. That doesn’t mean I’m entitled to 45$ an hour for that project over and over. And it gets even more shady when you realize they essentially used a backhoe in the form of a whole culture of programming tools and development technologies to make the job easier or even possible.

They didn’t write the game from scratch in machine code, they no doubt used tons of previous technology and software. Essentially I’m saying that stuff like this is a collective public good, and that mercenary intentions aren’t the only ones. Yeah maybe if there wasn’t a profit motive this EXACT game might not exist, but I think we’d have other better things in it’s place if it were simply not legal to behave this way as a publicly operating corporation.

Principled opposition to this entire line of thinking is dog-piled off steam, at best. I expect this thread to be no different. I won’t be subscribing to this thread. I’m essentially just going on record and then leaving. Kinda like the modern version of pamphleteering. Take it or leave it.

Essentially inside the steam community at least, if not culture generally, is it not possible to engage in any behavior as a dev or publisher or distributor that would be universally considered shady.

2K and other such outfits are in fact lauded as being social Darwinist victors when they find new and clever ways to exploit and punish its customer base for profit.

Basically what I’m saying is these suggestions about what they should do, are completely pointless and missing said point. They (devs etc) know the solutions. They have rejected them by even being in this market sector. They don’t share your principles.

They know what the “right” thing to do is, but that’s not their objective. The objective is money, by any means necessary. That in some contexts means cultivating the illusion of incompetence, such that we give benefit of the doubt and open our wallets while making a suggestion while they nod, smile, take your money and say “you might have a point, I never thought of that” when in point of fact they heard it 5 minutes ago.

It’s kinda like how even the super geniuses in movies latch on to the idiot ball from time to time to make the audience feel equal to greatness. It’s a mind hack. That’s what all these sales are. It’s all essentially free money for them.

It’s like a kid selling rocks off the street for 75% off some arbitrary value. It’s pure profit objectively. We don’t owe him anything for his time spent giving it a try or learning how to pitch stone soup.




Thorium Needs Salesmen

The United States won’t adopt thorium until circumstances force it on them. Honestly I don’t see it happening until post singularity unless someone in the thorium/nuclear community whips out a public relations salvo of a whole different type to what we’ve seen before.

Something that gets people emotional on both sides. Something that understands and accepts the realities of partisan politics.

We need a political apparatus like the libertarians had circa ron paul’s presidential bid. And we need a PR apparatus skill level on par with Edward Bernays.

The facts are already on our side and 99.999% of thorium and nuclear advocates think that more facts will help. Like using a tool box composed entirely of flathead screwdrivers trying to assemble a car.

I made Thorium Now as a layman to try and be an interface between the hard core science nerds and the rest of the species, but the same thing that keeps scientists from ruling the world keeps nuclear techs from being able to persuade anyone below (or even at) their intelligence level.

They are by definition specialists in the wrong field. What we need is advertising, but there’s no immediate profit in our “product” and our culture isn’t configured to parse situations like this anymore.

In the past this was exactly the kind of thing (long term diffuse profit, short term diffuse losses) that government took care of in opposition to market forces (tragedy of the commons) but because our market systems have in effect become our government via political corruption (ironically also a result of a public relations deficit on the part of government) (See also: http://www.mayday.us) that function is essentially no longer present in our culture except in a decadent way, the corpses of old programs now being picked apart by the vultures of immediate political expediency and the insatiable greed of the 1%.

Debate Citation:

I share this as an example of what I’m talking about. The only solution to the problem the nerds can come up with is “make them like us” (via) “education.” And having spent their entire lives in a fact based world the last thing they can handle is being informed that facts are powerless politically unless they are deployed as a technology. (Anything less, even an argument for a technology, is insufficient unless there is zero resistance and the cost is low, neither of which are true in thorium’s case.)

If it’s not obvious, I’m Brandon.


Let’s not go the rout of manipulative propaganda. Let education be your guiding light. Put the facts on the table and we can have a civil discussion of what is humanity’s best option.”Education isn’t about conveying facts”
+Brandon Sergent
This is the kind of propaganda we need to stay away from. Let’s spread the word about nuclear technology because the truth does not need spin.

http://energyfromthorium.com/2014/04/01/2050-fearing-fear-itself/“What is the Answer? Education, education, and more education is needed to break the cycle of fear. Perpetuating conspiracy theories and blaming the non-development of thorium on big corporations, big banks, and other big energy companies needs to stop for any serious grassroots education efforts. Thorium advocates also need to raise their profile by going to mainstream websites and commenting intelligently and posting links to where the public can go to find more information.”

Brandon Sergent

For everyone who isn’t an intellectual coward. Education demonstrably ISN’T about conveying facts.Oh the epic irony, since that is a fact, and my conveying it has zero power to enlighten old Albert here.http://underlore.com/the-tyranny-of-compulsory-schooling/ <-< there’s a reason the unschooling and “education” reform movements exist.


Did you guys just sleep through the last 50 years? Alvin HIMSELF couldn’t convince anyone of anything with facts alone.

Why do you think congress is nearly devoid of PHDs? (Honoraries don’t count.) Why are heads of state never scientists?

And Albert, you do realize I founded this place right? I’m very well educated on this topic. Proximity and post moderation alone forced it on me :) Knowing the truth before most other people coupled with a desire to convey facts is why I made this place.

How much more evidence do you need that your view is the one in need of revision here? Still the same irony. No matter the length and density of the parade of facts I present to you, you’ll go right on thinking what you find comfortable to think.

For anyone else who wants to know why:

If you always do what you’ve always done you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten. And in nuclear case that means paranoia and medieval peasant pitchfork and torch grade fear.

Nuclear will not be adopted because of facts because the facts haven’t changed in 50 years.

For a little lesson in the power of propaganda: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16wwln-freakonomics-t.html?scp=1&sq=the%20jane%20fonda%20effect&st=cse&_r=0

Now granted they were willing to lie, but even if we aren’t we still have to bring emotion to the table because that’s the only way to counter people like Helen Caldicott.

We have to make this MATTER to people if we expect it to ever happen in the west before it happens in china/india, and frankly even then.

P.S. I was president of my college by the way, I saw proof of this with my own eyes from the inside, and the epic rise of college tuition prices and the pandemic replacement of PHD college administrators with MBAs is just one of dozens of facts that will do nothing to dissuade people from climbing into a five figure life debt for no good reason.

And my dad’s career is in the college system. I grew up back stage. Honestly I should have realized the impotence of facts much sooner, but that’s just evidence of how impotent they are isn’t it. Literally right in front of me all day for years, and still I kept blaming other stuff.

I mean seriously, how do you think demonstrably broken policy finds advocates? If facts were the only thing that mattered politics would be much more uniform by now. We all have library humanica in our pockets.

In response to your duplicate comments:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+WillieZenk/posts/F98ziSLdqib?cfem=1You don’t even know what fascist means obviously. You remind me of Dave’s younger self in red dwarf calling everything he doesn’t like cryptofascist heheh.And you’ve presented no counter arguments. (Note my lack of shock.) Because you are terrified of me being right. And there are no counter arguments.

Persuasion is a science. You don’t know who Edward Bernays even is 😛

Your emotions are preventing you from parsing facts. And that’s why facts are basically meaningless as persuasion tools unless they are deployed via a technology to impact human self interest.

The irony here is like glacier thick. /giggles

Willie Zenk

When I say that education is important to the nuclear cause, I’m not referring to the educational system. I’m talking about sharing my own knowledge with those who are in my small sphere of influence. To +Brandon Sergent​ ‘s point, spewing endless facts to someone (especially in the comments of an online article) is rarely, if ever, effective. But we do need to continue sharing those facts (rationally and respectfully) for those who are honestly seeking answers. Unfortunately, many people online are simply seeking confirmation for their preconceptions. I have no time for such people. My most productive advocating has been face to face, calm, 2-way conversations. This is education–factual education, tailored to the individual (milk before the meat).

Brandon Sergent


+Willie Zenk #naileditYou can wake people up right in front of you because they are already emotionally invested enough to be (or by being) alone with you.Facts are icing, making people want to hear them is the cake.

P.S. I know what you meant by education. They’ve intentionally made the terms a false equivalence as part of the sales pitch.

It’s an intricate elegant hideous system.

To understand the difference between education and learning, explore the difference between a compulsory school and a library.

The entire philosophy is different as is beautifully explained in the post I reblogged that no one will read. :)

The anti-nukes are making much more hay, not telling the truth than the nukes are telling the truth.

Brandon Sergent

+Ed Pheil I agree. I think the prudent thing to do is to make every effort at the entry level to tell the truth in an emotionally engaging way.It sounds maybe ghoulish and exploitative, but considering the stakes and the facts (which are emotionally palatable to us already) I would really like us to engage with the anti-cancer communities.An abundant source of actinium 225 is by all accounts ethically urgent as an anti-cancer weapon.

If we can frame these technologies as anti-cancer it would enable us to achieve a number of rhetorical victories:

1. Counter the notion that radiation=cancer in the public mind.

2. Open the door to challenging the Linear no-threshold model by pointing out the millions of cases of radiation being a safe and effective therapeutic and diagnostic tool.

3. Counter the FUD, and trump the abstract death cult hyperbole of the anti-nuke crowd with real contemporary lives saved and lives in need of saving. Seriously, if I had a child sick with leukemia and I realized that nuclear policy was denying or had denied my son or daughter an outright cure I would be a hurricane of rage and in your face activism. Counter-protest, child’s faces on placards, open letter to Helen and the like, etc.

4. We could use it as a filter to identify the fanatics by cornering them into admitting that they would rather people die of cancer than see a nuclear reactor go online somewhere in the desert.

And all that’s just off the top of my head and I’m not near as smart as the upper bounds in this community. We could do SO much better.

But first we have to fucking admit that facts alone vs this kind of entrenched bullshit is about as effective as geisha fans vs tornado season.

Comments on Season 3 of American Horror Story

TLDW?: Everyone goes to hell, no one deserves it. (no not even her)

Your revenge fantasy is not worth even in theory the opportunity cost or the ethical cost.

In the context of this show it would seem that hell gets everyone. Perhaps that’s partly because everyone is so keen on vengeance and punishment. Ironic that the deserve to punish should manufacture justification to punish. Makes me ask who benefits. Who setup this cyclic system of never ending karmic debt? And why is no one opposing it?

Complaining about a tv show, letting it get to me, it’s not as trivial as you think because any story about magic could be a story about technology and like it or not these options will be presented to our species, and as we open up and grow we may learn that some of these concepts of existential context, hells, heavens, spirit worlds, could have real world analogs and we will have to deal with them.

I like having at least some idea of what I’ll do in basic classes of strategic eventuality and in the context of this show the lack of vision and stupidity is appalling. Firstly you have a pointless adherence to tradition which betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what tradition is and therefore a profound degree of stagnation.

The seven wonders, among which are telekinesis, pyrokinesis, divination, resurrection, etc is one where they visit hell and come back. The achievement being the escaping part. One of their friends doesn’t escape. The didn’t do this test last. They admitted to reordering the test schedule at whim, it did not occur to them to sort the tests in order of failure lethality.

Imagine the stupidity and psychopathy that betrays. In this context if that’s how witches are, then they should be killed. It makes you wonder if the hunting organizations are actually a good idea.

How do they not declare war on hell? How do they not invade it to recover their friend? And if they utterly cannot by dint of cosmic law, they why on earth would they put such a risk before actions as trivial as setting a fire, or playing hide and seek, or teleporting?

The take away from the whole series is as is often the case a reminder that either people are really really stupid, or mean, or tv thinks why are. The fact that I am basically the only one that I know of that writes this way tell me it’s not merely that third one.

The take away feeling is one of disgust on many levels.

Feminists should hate it for the lack of intellect alone of the supposedly immortal female characters, let alone the rest of the cast.

At one point a character demands to be executed for her crimes for an internally valid political reason, but the response reminds me of school in that we have a demonstration that it is not the administrators that are in charge but rather the bell on the wall.

The autocrat of the witches political structure does not even consider simply decreeing a change of tradition. A rather mind numbingly stupid tradition I might add. At the very least they could update the method of execution to something both more effective and less barbaric, and perhaps most importantly, less sycophantic. Why duplicate the simplistic thuggery of your prejudicial foes? Especially considering that the one being executed had already been executed once.

I think I’m coming to grips with the fact that I simply no longer believe democracy is a good idea. I look at the world and this notion of collective self rule is proved a sham on every continent. Always some minority rules the majority by deception or force. At what point would we even in theory admit that it’s unworkable? That like all difficult tasks a specialist, preferably one trained from the cradle for it, would be best at it?

There is a lot wrong with this show.

I tried to publish this also as a netflix review but got the disgusting “Reviews must not exceed 2,000 characters.” How pathetic.

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