Zompist Bboard Again

The revolution that brought the current regime to power was 76 years ago, which certainly qualifies as several generations. The decades-long stability of China and many other dictatorships demonstrates that they can endure indefinitely without war to topple them. For that matter, it's been nearly f...

global supply chains would certainly collapse, but that doesn't mean returning to medieval tech. people know how to operate lathes, how to build rudimentary forges, how to make basic steam machines. not everyone does, of course, but there's a fair amount of people who can get started with a vast he...

The question would be how much of the modern technology and machinery would survive that allows less than 5% of the people to work on farms and to feed the other 95% who do other jobs in a modern post-agrarian, post-industrial society. If we go back to traditional, low-productivity agriculture, bil...

It took me like 5 minutes to create this lol. Dunno if any human would do it that fast. theres an old saying: you want it fast or you want it good? Why do you assume that these two things will remain opposite? AI progresses at a fast pace. Even if LLMs exhaust their potential for improvement (and t...

It took me like 5 minutes to create this lol. Dunno if any human would do it that fast.

Remember that publically available genrative AI has been around for only 2.5 years, best available models are essentially equivalents of Commodore 64 in the world of personal computers.

Japonic, if not Future Japanese itself. What was the model, the prompt? Did you ask only for a text, or are there additional explanations? Did you gloss it yourself? Gemini 2.5 Pro in Google AI Studio. Prompt: "Create a conlang descended from Proto Japonic with Old Norse phonology and phonotac...

I do want to hear answers then!

@zompist
What's so controversial about my views?

I do believe that stable societies will emerge - this will take time. Over a century IMHO.

@zompist: One thing that the US has to a higher degree than Europe is income inequality. GINI coefficient for the US is 0.42 while it's 0.36 in China and 0.29 in Germany. As for the Middle Ages - crime rates were very high back then. IIRC murder rates were in the range of 20-50 per 100,000 while tod...

@zompist: If you look at, say, homicide rates - they are significantly higher in poor countries with weak (underfunded, corrupt etc.) law enforcement. Now imagine that your country (US?) goes back to basically medieval level of development - what happens? Also remember that you don't need to be a ps...

100% AI made. Guess the language family: Spēt fīðr tōkral tō fītsk nī ūmar ār, fōtomp tō tāsk kōt nī. /speːt fiːðr toːkral toː fiːtsk niː uːmar aːr | foːtomp toː taːsk koːt niː/ (All people free and equal in are-born are, dignity and just-things in.) Kālr sāðkrār ār kōtwar tō kōkr sēm. /kaːlr saːðkr...

@zompist: The problem is that when social order breaks down, antisocial elements benefit the most. In normal conditions these individuals are kept on a short leash by the law enforcement but during anarchy they are free to realize their "potential". Although that's probably how the state o...

Of course I don't want humanity to go extinct, by no means! By the way - politics, religion (or at least the way it's implemented), culture etc. - are largely products of material conditions of specific time and place. Western liberalism (democracy, individualism etc.) are a byproduct of the Industr...

Ok... No idea whether it should be here or in off topic subforum Let's say that at some point between 1980 and 1985 a worst case scenario nuclear war breaks out between the West and East. Vast majority of Europe, North America, East Asia (China, Japan, Koreas, Taiwan) are devastated by an almost uni...

@zompist

Thanks for your answer.

Was that avocado reference intentional?

@Raphael

Note that in 20th century command economies the planning was done by hand while nowdays we have powerful computers with stuff like AI and Big Data

(Non economist here) In short - it's a theory developed by Mises and Hayek saying that a centrally planned economy can never match the efficiency of a market one because due to lack of price signals, the central planners will never be able to correctly determine the demand for each product, and they...

What might a mix of Confucianism, Mohism and Legalism look like? I guess a mix of Confucianism and Legalism might well look a lot like traditional Western right-wing politics, but I don't know enough about Mohism to know how it might fit into that. Here are the basics: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wi...

What might a mix of Confucianism, Mohism and Legalism look like?

Being the global hegemon doesn't mean running everything. Even at the height of US power in the 1990s the US didn't actually run the whole world. But it was the strongest power by far. Preserving the "unipolar moment" has been the goal of every US administration since then. It's the same f...