Zompist Bboard Again

I don't think 'replicators' that we just ask for a food and they molecularly assemble it with magical laser beams are ever going to be a thing, but making food with machines is, well... we're kind of very good at this, us humans. A lot of what we drink is already totally artificial: you take whater,...

'extrovert' and 'introvert' are not natural categories but labels on a spectrum, it seems to me: people can be more or less extroverted and so the reference magnitudes would move mapping points in the distribution. to say it numerically, let's say average extroversion now is 2, and very extroverted ...

yeah! the soviets did a similar thing, and in chile we're kind of doing that as well: the guys writing our next constitution (the one we have is kinda shite, written by a pinochet colaborator and so on) is, as I understand it, the first constitutional assembly in modern history that's both gender pa...

In a way, this is very common in premodern societies. I remember reading something about the ottoman government, for example, having some institutional method of giving representation to ethnic or religious groups, something like "the christians get a guy at court" kind of deal. the estate...

A great many premodern societies had characteristics of limited democracy, but I think it's important to distinguish democracy (the general principle that it's good if the ruled have a say in how they're ruled, or by whom) and Democracy (the concrete and historically specific system that emerged fro...

Sure, those are totally tenets one can base a rationalist conreligion around. if you're good with those, I suggest the following steps: > apologetics and exegesis: it seems to me that any healthy rational religion has to have conventional ways of countering whatever arguments are most the obvious -g...

Na, that's not right. or, rather, perhaps it is in 21th century but, throughout history, religions that aren't about mystical stuff but rather about social values has been a big deal, I think mostly for nobles. believing oneself superior on account of some 'rationality' others(tm) don't have is also...

I wonder if the ancient chinese, or africans, or indonesians had such hereditary, endogamous occupational clans. seems likely tbh

Man, this thread sent me down a rabbit hole about traditional finance around that whole area that's been quite enlightening. I had been munching on ideas about how would an economy work amongst ancient peoples, maybe even pre-money, and this really suggests things. The thing with OP's system is that...

I haven't delved into those beyond basic systems: citizens/noncitizens, aristocrats/commoners, etcetera. a good thing to consider when making one is how such systems come to be. In india, for example, the caste system was deeply influenced by colonialism, and seems to have started with the coming of...

I very much enjoy worldbuilding notes, nakari speardane, biblaridion and nguh. xidnaf's great but doesn't produce anymore. there's also a few small channels which seem to have come out of the nguh discord. a few more were here if i remember https://youtu.be/n9_ORjsbd0M

Actually I think his latest episode of conlang critic is about how the 'conlang critic' formula is kinda shite, so i mean... yeah.

Even if people did always vote for less taxes, them not going down wouldn't be surprising: there are many such issues where even though most people agree with something the ruling class won't implement it, and it won't be done. here in the mecca of neoliberalism this is trivially common.

Man, I may live in a ivory tower but in my ivory tower people use public transport. Unless you work in the suburbs, nobody uses a car for daily trips here unless they can't do otherwise. A mildly annoying hour on the train translate into two hours stuck in traffic at rush hour. Real estate is, by t...

Ah, no, no, totally, you're gonna still need buses for big trips, uber self-drivies look more to me like a last-mile kind of solution, maybe last five miles. Cars are certainly bad for the environment, but this can be mitigated a lot by, again, not acting like it's 1940: cars don't have to be the si...

Quick question. is there a way in linguistics to speak about how commonly a word is known? something like the centrality of a word to its lexicon? for example dog is a word everyone knows, but sparkplug is something a speaker of English could get by without knowing what it is (beyond just a car part...

everybody loves cars, man. they're small, comfortable, private, convenient. the only thing that's shitty about them is you have to park them. why aren't we making self-driving cars into fleets and just renting them out from apps again? the bus is just so 20th century, man. drag. sit in benches along...

me and a lovely chick are really hitting it off. looks like im getting a gf that is nice and soft.

Is that even the point? I can and will endlessly criticise my government for handling the pandemic terribly, and point at New Zealand as what we could've accomplished if we'd not dragged our feet until the last possible moment. oh please do, politically it's the correct take and I tbh do the same, ...

Well, my own country could be lying too, for all I know, though not by that much. And zomp's point is very much true, plenty of liberal countries have done well: it's just more impressive when a poor country does it. and China might be very big and strong and scary, but it is categorically not a ric...