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[rotting bones]

I haven't gotten very far in conlanging, but I used something called FontForge, I think.

[Pabappa]

I made some fonts long, long ago, .... so long ago that I cant remember the names of the programs I used. I remember cheating using the old turn-back-the-clock trick so that the shareware trial period never expired. I made a font that imitated my own handwriting. That was *at least* fifteen years ago, though, and likely more, so I cant really offer any advice at all other than that it took a lot of work then to get the fonts to show up properly .... and that was even considering that I also cheated by starting with Courier New instead of beginning from sctatch. I suspect at least nowadays the software has developed the ability to let you draw directly the shapes you want instead of having to put 500 tiny beziers or whatever theyre called in the exact right spot and then repeat the process for every single letter with no ability to share elements.

______

Im reviving my website from 2010, http://pabappa.com/pics/city.html , basically just because I want to write up a grammar that uses emojis like next to obscene words, etc and have lots of pretty colors all around. And I might finally put my dictionaries online, which I have held back on for years.

[zompist]

Sorry to interrupt an important political discussion, but what would you consider the best way to make a font for conlang purposes? It seems that plenty of professional font-making programs exist, but presumably most conlangers aren't spending hundreds to create fonts for their languages.

Last time I created a font (earlier this year), I used TypeTool 3. It's $48, which is way better than their "professional" font package, FontLab. (You can however try FontLab free for 30 days.)

These are both descendents of Fontographer, which I used years ago... also way better as Fontographer used to crash regularly.

[zompist]

As for the (less important) political argument, I think it's worth looking at the rotting bones position through the ages.

1946: When has an empire ever voluntarily or peacefully given up its empire? The Europeans will hold onto India, Africa, and the Middle East forever.
1936: Liberal democracy has only led to a worldwide depression; the dynamic states are all totalitarian and will inevitably take over the world.
1896: This "democracy" idea has taken hold only in English speaking countries, and barely there. "Communism" and "anarchism" are jokes which the powerful will never allow to spread beyond a few terror attacks. European countries always win against non-Europeans.
1600: The most powerful nation in the world, Spain, which holds most of the Americas and half of Europe, is a regressive religious dictatorship which will use its new silver wealth to dominate Europe forever.
350: The Roman and Chinese empires are in tatters, beset by barbarians; the various empires of Magadha are only a memory. Civilization cannot hold.
-650: See, there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one might say, "See this, it is new"? Already it has existed for ages which were before us. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

The maximally cynical position has rhetorical and psychological advantages: you are never surprised by bad news, and you can always take the pose of a knowing observer who can mock the more optimistic. At any moment, it's hard to counter! Human history is a swamp of bad events and the perpetrators are always strong.

But, well, the maximally cynical position is often wrong. And sometimes seems most unassailable just before it collapses.

Rotting, you also seem to have a weird idea that any successful modern country is somehow due to "bailouts" by other countries. There's a very few cases where this model applies (e.g. the Marshall Plan). In most cases, that's just not how economics or nation-building work. In the case of Korea, the US's security guarantee was of course important-- but military protection does not produce prosperity. Any non-military aid was tiny in proportion to the South Korean economy.

Investment can be important, but it is also notoriously a mixed bag. For many Third World countries, it's resulted in a drain of money toward, not from, the North; plus it tends to be tied to conditions that hobble their countries and prolong misery. It's a devil's bargain: avoiding all investment doesn't lead to prosperity either.

[rotting bones]

I admit I'm depressed and not thinking straight. Nevertheless, is it fair to say I'm being overly pessimistic? The theory says increasing the size of the labor pool tends to shrink wages. We know that salaries have fallen to inhuman lows under weak capitalist economies with high populations like Bangladesh. Isn't it reasonable to expect that salaries will fall to comparable, albeit proportionally adjusted lows in a country with a high population like China once the government is weakened and everyone who can flee has done so?

It's also a bit harsh to call this the maximally cynical position. The maximally cynical position could be to parrot Breitbart talking points. That might benefit me the most, actually. Many ex-Marxists have encouraged working class credulity while enriching themselves through their understanding of economics.

As for the timeline, the British couldn't afford to hold on to India after WWII, etc. I do not condone maximum cynicism to begin with, so I'm skipping the rest for now.

Regarding bailouts, I have said in another context that skill is important. Assume that I've repeated the same line in all contexts: Skill is definitely important, but it isn't everything. My main point is that tiny Asian countries had income opportunities that China does not have in proportion to its population. The US gave South Korea around $900 million until 1953, $3.5 billion in economic aid till 1970, and $11 billion in military aid till 1973. Even the military aid isn't nothing. The military creates jobs too, which increases demand. Nevertheless, let's just look at the first one. I don't know if the $900 million figure is inflation-adjusted, but if not, it comes to more than $400 per capita in 2019. I'm not trained in economics (my degrees are in engineering), so correct me if I'm wrong, but imagine a recently post-colonial economy ravaged by war receiving that kind of investment. Dismissing the proposition that this would make a difference 70 years later as a "weird idea" seems counter-intuitive to me at the very least. That Nobel Prize winning economist all the Indian papers are talking about says providing financial relief to the poor by giving them loans at forgiving rates and under lenient conditions of repayment and so on alleviated poverty in Ghana or somewhere IIRC. What a surprise. The leniency of the conditions is what matters.

The total aid America gave out to all countries till 1953 comes to $44 billion. If that's not inflation-adjusted, it comes to $416 billion. Even if America gives only $400 or so per capita to China (no recent colonialism, no war, dynamic economy), that comes to $600 billion in today's money. I haven't looked into the Korean situation in detail, but I have read scholars discussing how US aid has affected economic development in Taiwan: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2642405 Taiwan wasn't in the Marshall Plan either, right? (Edit: I believe their 1953 aid alone comes to more than $1000 per capita in 2019 dollars.)

Whether or not I'm looking at the numbers wrong, there is no shame in receiving bailouts. What isn't a bailout? Almost everything you own can be interpreted as a bailout if you add enough provisos. I think this is what premodern theists were getting at when they said God sustains creation, or even when Buddhists say that all phenomena are manifestations of the bodhisattva's compassion. This goes all the way down to the subatomic level, where pure vacuum is "bailed out" by the creation ex nihilo of quantum foam. How's that for a weird idea?

[dhok]

I think to some extent you're making the classic mistake of assuming that high salaries are somehow the natural state of things and that mass penury is some sort of deviation from the norm. But as Braudel and others have shown, this is incorrect. If you're in a pre-industrial economy (like Bangladesh until recently, western Europe until about 1750, or China until the Deng era), Malthusianism/the "iron law of wages" is the order of the day: population growth tends to eat gains in economic growth until most people are living at subsistence. There are two ways of getting out of this:

a) Mass population loss due to famine, plague, war or some other calamity, which raises the standard of living for the survivors. Volume I of Braudel has a good two hundred pages or so on the consequences of the Black Death in Europe. In particular, average standards of living from about 1360 to the late 15th century were higher than they would be until the Industrial Revolution (or the Dutch Golden Age, which was sort of a mini-IR); we know, for example, that peasants in France and Italy ate a remarkably high amount of meat during the period. By 1500 population growth had caught up with productive capacity and living standards started falling until they hit a nadir in the mid-17th century (which was, not coincidentally, an era of chaos, war, and famine).

b) Raise productivity per worker. This is the real magic of industrialization: it allows productivity per worker to rise far faster than population growth can eat the gains, and after a period makes fertility rates drop like a rock in any case.

OK, so what's going on with China? If you are an incredibly poor country where the average person is still farming with methods that haven't changed much from the Iron Age (or Neolithic, if for some strange reason they happen to have melted down all their iron tools to make fake steel), you can make incredible per-person productivity gains merely by building working roads and railways, letting market price signals handle supply chain problems instead of trying to do it by hand, creating a legal framework for businesses and halway reliable contract law, allowing peasants to farm their own land as they see fit, and hawking your cheap labor costs to attract manufacturing. But after a while, you run out of low-hanging fruit. You can get some gains from building more infrastructure (and Beijing's been doing a lot of this this decade to keep demand and employment up), but if per-worker productivity doesn't keep growing, you're going to get stuck. There is a fair bit of evidence that this is happening--productivity growth is slowing down and may even be overreported.

Put another way: suppose you have a GDP per capita of $500, but your labor force has enough human capital on hand to have a "natural" GDP of about $8,000/person if you remove artificial barriers like communal agriculture or central planning of industry. You can get from $500 (China in 1980) up to $8,000 (China today) very nearly for free, just by getting out of the way. But if you want to get further than that, you have to get creative--and Xi-era Zhongnanhai ain't.

It seems really unlikely that China will ever return to its pre-Deng destitution barring full-scale civilizational collapse. This basically never happens: plenty of countries have stagnated after a boom (e.g. Argentina's still about as rich as it was in 1910, when it was the richest country on Earth--but it's no longer 1910), but once you escape from Malthusianism, the genie never seems to go back in the bottle.

[rotting bones]

Naturally, I would compare the industrial workers in China to industrial workers in Bangladesh (and so on), not the cormorant fishermen.

If you refer to my blog post, I do argue for the creation of a free environment that fosters innovation, explicitly equating it to strength in the long run. The first question is whether this is only possible by mortally weakening the Chinese state. If so, it follows that there is misery in the future of Chinese nationals. The second question deals with the extent of this misery.

I'm not the one who is opposed to innovation. You might think this is strange, but the alt right is. Nort has been writing anti-innovation posts on the ZBB for years now. Even Yarvin, who Nort agrees is too liberal, proposes replacing everything with its sleekest and most efficient iteration, and then banning all further innovation. This might make sense for some items. Unfortunately, it requires taking every single case into account. For a lot of things, this makes the list of desirables so long that it eventually gets boring, and boredom is the human Kryptonite. Different items are better for reaching different goals, and this differentiation occurs at a finer level of detail than common sense readily accounts for. Also, there are circular dependencies at work more often than one would think when you're working on non-trivial problems. Eg. The strategy that beats the highest number of other strategies is in turn beaten by one strategy that beats a fewer number of other strategies, etc. This is why an AI can never know in principle whether it has enough resources to solve a difficult, open-ended probabilistic problem. If it had more resources, maybe it would know enough to understand why it needed more resources when it had less. I would say I hope working on his cloud computing project has given Yarvin the perspective to know that his idea is unimplementable in practice; that is, if I didn't think he was trying to hit an applause light in the first place.

Also, I'd like to clarify once more that some Chinese people themselves excuse authoritarianism in the name of Chinese Culture TM, not me. Again, it's the market that rewards the most cynically exploitative course of action, not me. If you want to know the truth while living in a market society, you have no option but to gaze into the abyss once in a while.

[Nortaneous]

i don't want to not stay out of this but i really question your comprehension of a lot of things

[rotting bones]

If it's about anything else, you're free to quote facts at me.

If it's about innovation, you did write a lot of anti-innovation posts. If it's a specific kind of innovation you were opposing, you didn't spell that out in detail. My impression is that it was fairly all-encompassing. As for Yarvin, he was quite clear about his design philosophy and spelled it out over a course of lengthy posts. Eg. He said version numbers shouldn't increase. Rather, good software should count back to zero and stop changing once it's tiny, perfect and axiomatic, like a gem, just like in his philosophy of government. One of his comparisons that comes back to me is the sleekness of American aircraft design as opposed to the commie clunkiness of Russian planes. That was probably in relation to government.

[Travis B.]

Does anyone else here find the notions of "white female privilege" and "white gay privilege" problematic? Sure such individuals may be more privileged than some other individuals, but by invoking such terms you are essentially dismissing all of such individuals' struggles solely on the basis of the color of their skin, and indeed I have seen these terms being used in a deliberately anti-women and anti-gay/anti-lesbian fashion on a number of occasions. (That is not to say that queer people of color do not have it harder than white gay people, as indeed they do overall, or that they are not frequently erased from the public image of the LGBTQ movement, as the often are, but rather it is the turning of queer people into the Oppressor just because they happen to be white that bothers me, as if one has to be maximally oppressed for one's concerns to matter.)

(Sorry if I am not supposed to bring up such topics here; it is just that this has been bothering me for a while. Even though she has not mentioned these terms, my mother, who is white and considers herself a feminist, has mentioned the idea of both being too privileged (by being white) while not being privileged enough (by being female).)

[Vijay]

I don't know what you've seen, but I understand the point of these terms to be that although other people may have privilege over you (generic you), you can still have privilege over other people, too. I have male privilege over a white woman, but she also has white privilege over me.

[Travis B.]

I don't know what you've seen, but I understand the point of these terms to be that although other people may have privilege over you (generic you), you can still have privilege over other people, too. I have male privilege over a white woman, but she also has white privilege over me.

My problem really is not with the notion of privilege unto itself, or its being applied in an intersectional fashion, but rather when it is used in a dismissive fashion. One's concerns should not be dismissed just because one may happen to be more privileged than another individual. For instance, just because one person is a queer white person and another person is a queer person of color does not mean that the former person's issues related to being queer should be dismissed. And my real objection here is that the terms I mentioned, "white female privilege" and "white gay privilege" are often used specifically in a dismissive fashion, as if one's being white negates any other concerns one has, such as those related to being female or those related to being gay.

[Vijay]

Can you provide some examples of that? Because I don't think I've seen it.

[Travis B.]

I ended up on Tumblr, and found mostly complaints about people who happened to be white and happened to be female for a variety of reasons.

[Travis B.]

Looking on Google for "white gay privilege" the ghits I get seem to be mostly about how white gay people are collectively oppressing/erasing queer POCs, and that pride month is really only for white queer people, even when many of the individuals at Stonewall were POCs. The sense I get out of these ghits is that they apply judgement broadly, to white queer people in general.

[Vijay]

I don't know where you're getting the idea that saying people need to pay more attention to POCs who are women or gay or whatever somehow erases white people who are also women or gay or whatever. Because that's all I see in any of those so far - people are saying these events and such don't acknowledge that POCs face certain challenges that white people don't even though POCs also face a lot of the same challenges that white people do.

[Travis B.]

I don't know where you're getting the idea that saying people need to pay more attention to POCs who are women or gay or whatever somehow erases white people who are also women or gay or whatever. Because that's all I see in any of those so far - people are saying these events and such don't acknowledge that POCs face certain challenges that white people don't even though POCs also face a lot of the same challenges that white people do.

From what I'm seeing from looking around, "white female privilege" is primarily used derisively towards individual women (e.g. in one thing I saw that was viciously attacking Elizabeth Warren specifically), rather than towards white women in general, whereas "white gay privilege" is essentially aimed at all queer people who are not POCs, insinuating that they are collectively oppressing queer POCs.

[Vijay]

...I mean, are they wrong? Elizabeth Warren definitely has certain privileges over people of color, and a lot of things that are made by and for queer people (Pride, Grindr, what have you, I know those are weird examples I picked lol) were also made by and for white queer people. Queer POCs are left out of those things in ways that queer white people are not. Of course male privilege over Elizabeth Warren and straight privilege over white queer people are still relevant, just not in all contexts; for that matter, privilege itself is not relevant in all contexts. If I punch you in the face for no goddamn reason (I promise I will never actually do this), it's my fault I punched you, and I don't get to scream "white privilege!" to get out of it.

[zompist]

I ended up on Tumblr, and found mostly complaints about people who happened to be white and happened to be female for a variety of reasons.

"Some people are angry on Tumblr" is about the lowest level of crisis possible.

We've had this conversation before, and I don't see that you've added anything new to it. You recognize explicitly that PoC get the short end of the stick in many ways, but you're bothered that some of them are upset in ways that you, a white person, don't approve of. They don't seem to be attacking you personally, so why is it even your business?

[Travis B.]

I probably do not have a interest personally in the matter, of course, being neither female or queer. (My comments were originally motivated by being irked by Medium posts which started getting emailed me even though I don't remember asking for them to be emailed to me - I get the impression that Medium is if Tumblrists started writing lengthy blog posts to expound on their views.) In general though my objections are based on applying some sort of responsibility to groups of any sort based upon some attribute not of their choosing who have taken no particular actions on their own part. Of course this sometimes results in positions unpopular to some, e.g. I don't blame people born in Israel (or even people born elsewhere, in case of those fleeing anti-Semitism in their own countries) for the actions of the Israeli gov't or the settlers unless they can be personally blamed for such, hence my opposition to BDS.