jaycifer

Right, but I’m having some trouble connecting that summation of supply and demand to your implied disconnect between productivity increases and supply. Were you specifically talking about scenarios where there is no space for output to grow, only input to shrink?

For instance, four people extract 1 ton of raw material in a day. A new machine means it only takes two people to extract that same 1 ton, but the size of the material patch stays the same so you can still only operate the one machine rather than using all four people to operate two machines. Thus increasing productivity without increasing “supply?”

How would that not be part of supply? If productivity doubles and is rolled out across the board, wouldn’t supply double as well? I mean, the total work being done would probably drop such that the supply isn’t actually doubled, but if supply was the constraint before then wouldn’t it settle somewhere between that doubled amount and the original, directly translating that increased productivity into increased supply?

Yeah, just like the U stands for oonderwater in SCUBA, or the P stands for potographics in JPG!

Based on my experience playing Railway Empire, passenger cars with people and their luggage is significantly lighter than a freight car of the same size loaded with cargo. This means it takes a lot more energy to get the freight moving at a higher speed, and maybe more importantly a lot more to stop (I think it takes 3-4 football fields for a loaded freight train to stop from 30mph). So just having passengers allows the train to travel at much higher speeds. Speed is something more valuable for passengers because they want to get where they are going sooner. Freight is more about total throughput volume so it may be better to have one heavier train carrying twice much at a slower speed than two trains have the size each moving faster. So while you could have a mixed train it's not going to be as fast as the passengers want due to the heavy freight cars slowing the train down and won't carry as large a volume as the freight customers want because some cars are being taken up by passengers.

• Decorating. That’s fair and relatable. The only stuff on my walls are what I got from my dad over the years.
• Style. If you wear clothes, you have a style. You don’t need to constantly buy new clothes to give a modicum of thought to how you present yourself.
• Just do things. I don’t know where you live but the zoos around me are free. Walking through a park is also free and something. I went to a gamer meetup a couple months ago that was free. If you look for them, there are options that don’t involve spending money but can be rewarding.
• Challenge yourself to do something. My challenge to my self each week is to write for 15 minutes. It’s great, gets my mind stretching a little thinking the new thoughts I’m putting to paper. Why would I stress about that the other 99% of the week? You can be happy with where you are while still wanting to better yourself.
• Get out of your shell. I take it you don’t like the society you live in. Fair bet is there are ways you think it could be better. Do you think those changes will materialize while you sit at home? Get out and meet people. If they want you to do something imperialist tell them no, that’s against your values. If they stop talking to you get out of your shell to meet other people. If they keep talking to you then you’re one step closer to building a society you actually want to live in.

I’ve been wanting to for a few years now as the service gets worse (where is my playlist radio?) but have been complacent. This is the last thing to push me over my limit. I’ll be transferring my decade-worth of playlists this weekend.

Having seen the movie, I think it’s actually a decent setup for the plot. The crux of the conflict is that programs can only exist in the real world for 29 minutes before dissolving, and the good mega corporation and bad mega corporation want the “permanence code.”

This time limit adds tension to the real world scenes in a pretty compelling way, because the good guys only need to escape capture for that half hour before gaining some respite. This is reinforced by the moments of viewing the world through the programs’ eyes, which always include the countdown to how much longer they have. There were times I thought “oh they only have a couple minutes” without stretching my suspension of disbelief beyond what’s required to watch a movie where flesh and blood can be digitized by a laser.

It also allows more interplay between the real and digital world that I felt was lacking in the older movies. Those ones call the digitized humans “users,” but it never feels like they are that different when they are in the console rather than at it. This movie has a lot of scenes that cut between the bad guy sitting at his desk typing in commands and the programs in the grid of his computer hearing them as orders and treating him with reverence appropriate to a machine. There’s a hacking scene where you see the programs from one server grid break through the literal firewalls and cut through antivirus programs that does a good job feeling like an abstraction of what is happening in the real world scenes.

All that said, I went to this movie for the soundtrack and pretty visuals, and while the light bikes and such in the real world did look cool, they would have looked a lot cooler in the digital world. There’s one action scene that is, and it is the coolest part of the movie.

I thought it was fine. I was surprised to find the stakes were interesting since I was just there for the visuals and the soundtrack. The visuals were cool, especially in 3D, but I only really noticed the soundtrack a few times. The jet ski scene was probably the coolest part of the movie.

Well, add one to the tally, what are those?

Ater freshman year of college I learned there was a local brand of chocolate milk that is the bees knees. I started drinking a gallon or two a week, it was a problem, but I was also experimenting with weed for the first time and it was so good.

After a few months my buddy told me he had this stuff called DMT that you smoke through a meth pipe he had acquired for the purpose. So I sat down and as I leaned back from the hit and reality morphed I shut my eyes.

The world was technicolor, composed of rings and rectangles moving toward and past me. There he was, the figure, a cross between Slender Man and Truth from Full Metal Alchemist, a blank white face except for the big grin. He radiated pure love, and as we looked at each other a cascade of similar figures swirled round the periphery, filling me with a sense of love, acceptance, and belonging like I had never experienced.

It was during this time that the voice came close to my ear and spoke to me, clear and purposeful: “Hey, lay off the chocolate milk.”

It was so obvious that I immediately responded back with a thought, “Oh yeah, thanks!”

I continued to float through bliss for another minute or so before fading back to reality, and just like that my chocolate milk intake dropped to once every month or two.

What you are saying sounds like two concepts/problems closely related but distinct to the teletransporter thought experiment, the hard problem of consciousness and the problem other minds.

In terms of the hard problem of consciousness, I think Parfit assumes a level of consciousness in his arguments or he wouldn’t be talking about it. It’s been too long since I read his works to say how he views that consciousness arising, but the setup of a person’s body being destroyed and recreated lends itself toward the constitution view, although I also think that would conflict with his point on personal identity. I think some level of dualistic/idealist separation of body and mind would be required for the continuation of consciousness across bodies.

Your actual argument of whether we as outside observers could know that the teletransported’s consciousness is continuous, we can’t. At least I don’t think there’s a foolproof way of knowing the minds of others. I think the best we could do is watch the person. If they step out of the teletransporter, stick their thumb pointing at the first and say “Boy, I’d hate to be that guy,” there was probably a break in consciousness. If they pull the lever, point at the first teletransporter station and say “I came from there to pull this lever,” I’ll believe the relation R is conserved. And if they do both, I’ll chuckle and buy them a beer.

Hokay, here we go again.

In philosopher Derek Parfit’s teletransporter thought experiment, he differentiates between two major concepts: personal identity and “relation R.”

Personal identity is an individual person as that specific individual. If the teletransporter copies a person to one place while destroying the original, then a new personal identity is created.

Relation R is the stream of consciousness that connects a person’s mind from one moment to another. Parfit compares this to a billiard ball rolling along a pool table, as you can track the path the ball travels without the path breaking. It’s the memories, hopes, values, and goals a person carries with them.

He argues that as long as this relation R is maintained, that is more important than maintaining a personal identity. So he would argue that it is not you pulling the lever, but it would be you in all the ways that matter.