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Nevoic,

Python’s disdain for the industry standard is wild. Every other language made in the last 20 years has proper filtering that doesn’t require collecting the results back into a list after filtering like Java (granted it’s even more verbose in Java but that’s a low bar).

If Python had modern lambdas and filter was written in an inclusion or parametric polymorphic way, then you could write:


<span style="color:#323232;">new_results = results.filter(x -> x)
</span>

Many languages have shorthands to refer to variables too, so it wouldn’t be impossible to see:


<span style="color:#323232;">new_results = results.filter(_)
</span>

Of course in actual Python you’d instead see:


<span style="color:#323232;">new_results = list(filter(lambda x: x, results))
</span>

which is arguably worse than


<span style="color:#323232;">new_results = [x for x in results if x]
</span>
Nevoic,

In humans there’s a psychological phenomenon called “crowding out”, essentially it’s hard for our brains to attach multiple, powerful incentives to one activity. Generally the “lesser” ones get crowded out by the more important one.

I’m still young (26), and still feel the same way about programming, I deeply enjoy it. However, I know programmers who were passionate like me when they were younger, and that passion has been slowly drained as they continue to code professionally, and I’ve seen it come back when they move into non-programming roles (be it industry change or moving to management).

Generally you won’t find yourself wanting to program 40 hours a week, 48-50 weeks a year, for 50 years without a substantial break, and yet that’s what capitalism expects of workers. Yet you’ll continue to work because there’s a more important incentive than passion, money.

You need money to survive (food, shelter, etc.) and your brain understands those are more important than fulfilling a passion, that’s why you’ll go to work even if you’re drained mentally. You’ll continue to do that forever so long as you don’t have the financial freedom to do otherwise (which is the goal of capitalists, this is why we have COL-based incomes, so as not to overpay people who live in cheaper areas as it’d allow them the freedom to leave).

Nevoic,

The U.S spends more on military than the next 7 countries combined. It’d put up a good fight. Probably conquer Canada/Mexico in hours (I’d assume they would just concede the same way Paris/France conceded to the Nazis in WW2), and then we’d also have the advantage in Eurasia. We could nuke most of western Europe, and the only country that could really stop us is Russia because they also have a comparable number of nukes. If we successfully disarm them and are the sole nuclear super power in the world, I could see the U.S winning ww3 and becoming a global government.

Nevoic,

I don’t support the U.S, and yeah I’ve been actively trying to move away from identifying as part of the U.S. Notice the first time I referred to it in my comment I called it “it”. Just a habit, sorry if I offended you though, that wasn’t my intention.

The main issue is if I say “they” instead of “we”, the vast majority of the internet assumes you’re from Europe. I want to convey I live in the United States without identifying as part of it.

Nevoic,

I don’t trust that the U.S will always do the right thing with nukes. Maybe you have unwavering faith in the good heart of the imperialist core to never use nukes in conflicts, I’m not as trusting.

Nevoic,

I don’t know if your second to last paragraph is a meme, but all humans reject immoral behaviors that occur in the wild, not just vegans. Lions also commit infanticide so their genetics carry on and competing male lions don’t, it makes sense biologically. Yet humans don’t commit this behavior because we know it’s wrong. Dolphins rape other dolphins, which again for the furthering of your own genetics makes sense. You should implant your seed in as many helpless victims as you can, and yet again, humans don’t do this because we know it’s wrong.

Pretending like vegans are the weird ones because we’re simply consistent about our morality is wild. Non-vegans even get upset at the idea of eating dogs or cats, so it’s not even like they’re universally in favor of torturing and slaughtering helpless animals, only the ones that have been objectified by whatever culture they live in.

Nevoic,

Autonomy and choice is important, do you think less intelligent humans also deserve a right to autonomy? What about less intelligent animals? If you answered differently to these two questions, why?

Humans generally understand restricting choice is a good thing if the choice in question is committing harm. We don’t let people choose to rape, murder, etc. We don’t let people farm mentally disabled humans for their skin and meat. We don’t let people farm dogs and cats for their skin and meat. We do let people farm cows and pigs for their skin and meat.

Vegans have rectified this inconsistency, non-vegans haven’t. If you told me that you were fine with farming disabled humans, dogs, cats, etc. I’d at least applaud your consistency, but I have yet to meet a single non-vegan who is this consistent.

Nevoic,

This is gish-galloping, to properly address your points, every paragraph would require 3ish paragraphs, so I’d have to spend the better part of 2 hours responding, which is totally unreasonable to expect in a forum like this with a stranger you have no personal attachment to.

From what I gather, your main issues are social ostracization and false equivalencies. Using social norms to drive your moral decisions is obviously problematic, you can think of a ton of atrocities committed by humans when those atrocities were socially normalized. People aren’t born evil, with an intent to cause harm. They’re taught to be ambivalent, and can perpetuate atrocities through apathy.

As for the idea that there’s some false equivalence, you’re misunderstanding the thought experiment. Yes, eating humans is more dangerous than eating chickens or dogs, but that’s a happenstance of nature. It’s possible we could figure out a way to eliminate prion diseases and other harmful effects of cannibalism, and then farming disabled humans who process information at the same level of a cow would be morally permissible to a logically consistent non-vegan.

Of course, essentially no carnists are logically consistent. They use emotion and preference towards certain species to guide their decision instead of rationally considering when it’s okay to harm something (taste pleasure isn’t a high enough bar to inflict pain and death, obviously).

Nevoic,

Normative truths are just as foundational as descriptive truths. You use the same logic to get there. I hope you’re intelligent enough to be an epistemological nihilist, so hopefully you know the basis for all scientific and descriptive understanding of the universe is self-evident axioms. The same is true for moral truths. Harm is axiomatically bad in the same way that our senses are accurately able to translate information of an external universe into our brains.

If you disagree with the former, we can’t have moral discussions, and if you disagree with the latter we can’t have scientific discussions. This is how the whole of epistemology functions.

You’re also strawmanning me. Ought implies can, so an animal without an ability to act morally obviously has no moral obligations. I hope you somehow just severely misunderstand the vegan position, and you’re not intentionally spreading misinformation.

Factory farms aren’t us allowing them to sort out their own problems. We spawn billions of sentient creatures into torture boxes every year just to slaughter them when they’re a few months old in brutal and terrifically painful ways.

If you think that’s awesome, keep buying meat, more power to you, you’re just probably a psychopath (though I obviously can’t give you an official diagnosis).

Nevoic,

I was part of the vegan cult for years until I read this comment, thank you for saving me.

I was a wimp. I didn’t enjoy the idea of harming and killing animals, I had watched videos of animals being gutted alive and having their throats cut and squirming for literal minutes afterwards. This was uncomfortable, but only because I was a wimp.

After reading your comment I manned up and took my dog and 2 cats, strung them up while they were whimpering (which was hilarious), and slit their throats, cooked their delicious innards, and am finally able to walk again (I was only able to crawl because I had been nutrient deficient for so long despite what my libtard doctors told me).

I’m happy to live in a free country where I can do whatever I want with my property. In China I bet you can’t cook a dog because the government is just a bunch of moralizing leftists. God gave us domain over animals, and so I get to choose what I want to do with the animals I purchase.

I wish plant based diets could be made easier for people (than they already are). I also wish people were more open to the concept of fortified foods or supplements.

This is something I think only vegans can understand without it turning them off veganism. Pls don’t think I’m arguing against veganism because it’s quite the opposite. I’m identifying what I view as the biggest obstacle to mass adoption of vegan/plant-based diets: Availability of nutritious plant-based foods. However...

Nevoic,

There are a ton of resources online to offload the thought required to make meals that hit your micronutrients. The easiest and most well-known is probably veganuary. Most people participate in January, or at least that’s how it started, but you can access their resources all year.

veganuary.com/about/

Most people don’t go their whole life never trying new food, but even if you do you only need to make the transition once and then you can continue with the same recipes every week forever.

I’m incredibly lazy, have arthritis at 26, probably have some mild anxiety/depression that comes up periodically and is untreated, but still am vegan because we all have to be. 3 years in and my life isn’t any more difficult because of it, it’s just better all around to not be reliant on killing/exploiting animals.

My blood pressure improved after going vegan, some of my blood tests mildly improved (I was 23 before being vegan so nothing was insanely out of whack to begin with, but they did improve enough for my doctor to make note of it). I don’t have runny shits anymore, I guess I was probably lactose interolant but I never identified as such.

Nevoic,

Using the term “personal freedom” in a liberal environment is deceiving, because often “personal freedom” also entails rights to property and other methods the bourgeoise use to oppress the working class.

Liberals have successfully merged ideas of personal freedom and capitalist freedom. It’s important that people have access to homes (which liberals call private property). It’s bad to have a leech class scalp homes (which liberals also call private property) and use their excess supply of that necessity to make a profit off working class people.

Conflating ideas is an important rhetorical strategy for capitalists that allows people to easily stomach exploitation in the name of basic personal freedoms.

Nevoic,

GPT 4 says:

That quote is from Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”. Thoreau was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher known for his writings on nature and his advocacy for civil disobedience against unjust laws. In “Civil Disobedience”, he discusses the individual’s responsibility to prioritize conscience over the dictates of laws and the role of the state in relation to the individual. The quote reflects his belief in the rights of the individual and his skepticism about the finality of democratic governance as we know it.

Nevoic,

Home ownership isn’t a guarantee, even for people who work 80 hours a week. Maybe you think the people who work 80 hours a week aren’t smart enough to deserve a home, they’re just doing “unskilled” labor and that on its own isn’t enough. An issue with that is it’s not skill that determines wage, it’s market value (we could also get into why liberals think a skilled individual deserves housing while an unskilled individual deserves to be destitute). I make $150,000 a year as a 26 year old who didn’t go to college because I have a particularly strong interest in programming that I’ve been cultivating for the last 14 years.

I know people who have similar interests in art, have put in similar amounts of time and effort, and can’t make more than 60k a year. In the next decade that’ll be me too, I’m in my mid 20s and I realize these are my peak earning years because AI is going to destroy the labor market for programmers. I’ll be lucky if I can make over 50k a year by the time I’m 40 doing this kind of work. I’ll likely be working at Walmart or a similar retail outlet if I’m lucky.

This is all good and well for capitalism. My labor serves the interest of capital as long as I’m not being outperformed by some automated system. My value as a human goes down as technology improves, so I’ll eventually be making less and less until I get pushed out of this market entirely.

The alternative world where everyone has access to a home regardless of their social status is better. People shouldn’t lose access to their homes when technology improves and pushes people out of work, but that’s what will happen.

Unemployment will skyrocket, housing scalpers will continue to demand rents, and the reserve army of labor will grow as the needs of capital get increasingly served by automation.

Capitalism will continue to serve the interests of capital until it literally collapses society. If enough of the economy is automated away at that point, the bourgeois class will have a utopia, and the rest of us will waste away by slowly starving to death or being outright killed if we attempt a revolution to seize the means of automated production.

Nevoic, (edited )

It’s not an inherent truth of the universe that the future will always require more work than the present. On the contrary, automation has the obvious potential to do the opposite. Imagine a future (that as I see it is incredibly likely) that all levels of human intellect are achieved by AI (that is, we reach general level intelligence in AI). This means all non-physical labor will be automated away. There will be no way to “improve yourself” mentally to keep up, we will all have to do physical work.

Now consider that physical work can also be automated, and the same is true of those industries. Lastly, consider that this doesn’t happen all at once, but over time. There will be stages where unemployment isn’t 100%, but rather 40 or 50% of humans can’t find work because that level of work is no longer needed.

Capitalism doesn’t have a natural tendency to fix these problems. There’s actually an entire class of people (the bourgeoise) who benefit from exploiting this growing pain in the working class. They benefit from reduced labor costs, they benefit from increased automation.

In an ideal society, we’d all benefit from these tools. That’s not how capitalism is setup, and for as long as capitalism exists there will be a class who is actively trying to gatekeep those benefits to just their class. They’ve done an incredibly impressive job at regressing social progress in the last 40 years, and capitalism is built to exist exactly in the sweet spot it’s been in for the past 150 years. Humans see its failures, and we’ll continue to swing back and forth within the bounds of what our overton window clearly allows, desperately looking for a solution somewhere within the bounds of capitalism to a problem inherently tied to the system.

We fundamentally don’t need a class of people with social interests directly opposed to 99% of the population. The bourgeoise doesn’t need to exist, despite liberal attempts to try to band-aid capitalism endlessly to make them behave. They’re not a group of people to be tamed, it’s not like they’re some source of infinite wealth and prosperity that also happens to yearn for evil, they’re just a sociopolitical class that steals/extracts wealth and value out of the economy for their own benefit.

Nevoic,

The bourgeoise have only existed for 200 years. Capitalist realism is the ridiculous position unsupported by almost the entirety of humanity’s existence. Even if you think utopia is a dream and there will always be rulers, claiming those rulers always have to be bourgeoise is obviously ridiculous.

I understand some people think human intelligence is some special product of the soul or biology, something that can’t be captured by silicon. Like there’s something special to carbon that allows for sophisticated processing that’ll never be matched by technology. I’ve never seen any evidence of this, and so I don’t believe in a soul or whatever magical fairy dust you think makes carbon special.

AI will match (and most likely far exceed) human capabilities in intelligence. Maybe you think the bourgeoise class will hire humans out of the goodness of their hearts, and I’d say you’re foolish for believing that. Once AI can match and exceed human capabilities, humans won’t be hired. It’s not that hard to reason out.

If you’re at all in the field of AI, you’d see how much faster this is all coming than experts originally thought. AGI was estimated by the industry to be about 25 years out, 2 years ago. Now it’s estimated to be 10 years out. Humans are terrible at understanding exponential curves. Unless we get massive regulation in the AI industry to slow it down, in 1 or 2 iterations we’ll hit AGI.

Sure, philosophers (myself included) will continue having debates about whether it’s sentient or conscious, but the bourgeoise aren’t interested in that, they just need raw performance. GPT4 already exceeds 50-99% of college students in all fields in performance scores (bar exam, AP exams, biology olympiad, etc.). Yes, college students are far from experts, but not as far as you might want to believe when it comes to scaling in information technology.

Nevoic,

I’m talking directly about data that has been released, and about the potential of AI. It’s wild that you have an inability to imagine more than 3 days into the future. Yes, AI doesn’t currently exceed human intelligence. I don’t know why you think 2023 is the end-all for technological progress.

I also didn’t realize I was talking to someone who didn’t know what the bourgeoise was. Nobles and lords were not bourgeoise, they had fundamentally different relationships to capital. If you want to redefine the word and use it in a way nobody ever has, go for it, but it makes conversations with other humans unnecessarily complicated.

In the future, only use words that you understand the definition of, or if you insist on making up your own definition, make that clear from the start.

Nevoic,

Yes I know what you mean now, I didn’t know what you meant when you fabricated your own definition and didn’t inform me of your special definition that nobody else uses.

In the future, when talking to people, it’s best to either use widely accepted definitions or make it clear that you’re using your own for god-knows what reason.

By the actual definition of bourgeoise, which is what I was talking about, I’m obviously correct. If we adopt your definition where you’re just using it as a synonym for “ruler”, I won’t claim to know the future. Maybe AI will be a benevolent dictator, or maybe we’ll have a proper dictatorship of the proletariat, or maybe we’ll have a proper free society. Who knows. But capitalist realism is still an absurd and stupid position considering it’s only been a thing for 200 years (unless you’re also redefining capitalism in your world where you just make up your own definitions of everything).

Nevoic,

I’m glad you brought this up, because yeah we’re all selling our bodies and time. I wouldn’t say this means we consent, though. We don’t need to change what consent means to make capitalism sound better than it is.

If you’re “incentivized” (e.g will be starved and punished otherwise) by a system to do something you hate, you can’t call that consent.

If you had a system where women were raised and then presented with the option of either having sex with you & being allowed to participate in modern society, or being discarded in the wilderness, not being allowed to even build anywhere/make it on your own because all the land is owned by either private individuals or the government, then those women aren’t free.

As we agree, just by changing the demand from “have sex” to “do manual labor” or “rent out your mind so someone else can own the product of your thoughts (IP)” doesn’t change whether or not it’s consensual.

Nevoic,

What’s actually being punished? Would she have been sentenced to 8.5 years in prison if she pushed an 87 year old who was slightly less frail and instead of dying sustained major injuries? Would she have been sentenced if she pushed an extraordinarily healthy 87 year old who knew how to gracefully fall and sustained no serious injuries?

It seems that the act of pushing alone isn’t enough to sentence a person to nearly a decade in prison. There was likely no intention to kill, though that was the outcome. What if she sneezed on the 87 year old, and in a fit of panic the 87 year old fell over and died? Again, no intention to kill, though that would still be the outcome.

I think it’s clear this should be punished more intensely than sneezing, pushing an old person would very commonly result in serious injury, so this is definitely assault.

Atheists, is there anything religious that sticks with you to this day?

I am Ganesh, an Indian atheist and I don’t eat beef. It’s not like that I have a religious reason to do that, but after all those years seeing cows as peaceful animals and playing and growing up with them in a village, I doubt if I ever will be able to eat beef. I wasn’t raised very religious, I didn’t go to temple...

Nevoic,

Yeah choosing to abstain from eating certain animals for moral reasons (dogs/cats/cows/horses) and not others (pigs/chickens/fish) is definitely weird. Though the majority of people in western society fall into this category, you just moved one more animal across the boundary due to normalization. If you were brought up with pigs, chickens, and fish you’d probably abstain from those too.

The real question to ask though is despite normalization, what’s actually the right thing to do? Is it actually okay that some people eat dogs, cats, and cows? Or is it wrong to do this?

People should put more effort into reconciling this dissonance, because slaughter and oppression is not a matter we should leave up to the normalization of society to decide. Society has countless times normalized immoral things.

Nevoic,

Within the context of one person’s career, socialism on its own can do quite a bit to transform people’s relationship to their workplace. No longer would your job be at risk because you’ve all done too well and it’s to “cut labor costs” while profits soar. No longer would you be worried about automating away your job, instead you’d gladly automate your job away and then the whole organization could lower how much work needs to be done as things get more and more automated.

Democracy would massively improve work-life balance.

Of course this comes with problems, all of which exist in capitalism (how do we care for people outside of these organizations who won’t have access to work, for example). But if I had to choose between market socialism and capitalism, the choice is pretty clear, and it’s something much easier for liberals to stomach.

Nevoic,

As an extension to this comment, digital media is a perfect example of pure artificial scarcity. You can at least imagine a world where food or homes are scarce, it’s not our world, but it can be imagined. The same is not true of distributing digital media, and yet it’s still artificially scarce.

Without scarcity in capitalism things lack value. That is extremely problematic.

Nevoic, (edited )

“post-scarcity” in this context doesn’t mean “everyone gets everything they want whenever they want it”. Maybe I want to own a planet, but there aren’t enough planets to go around, and nobody actually believes in a future where everyone can get their own planet.

When talking about these things, it’s best not to assume the most ridiculous interpretation of what the other person is saying. e.g instead of reading “post-scarcity” to mean “everyone gets everything all the time no matter what”, read it to mean “everyone gets what they need”.

also for what it’s worth, I’ve been an ethical vegan for several years after being a die-hard meat eater and literally convincing people close to me to move away from veganism/vegetarianism exactly for health reasons (I had the same misconception you did about veganism). After actually going vegan, doing absolutely no meal planning, no exercise, no calorie counting, still eating mostly frozen food and pickup, my blood pressure as a lean 6’1 mid 20s male has gone from pre-hypertension to normal levels. I get my blood checked regularly and I’m far healthier than I was when I was downing popeyes, jersey mikes, and five guys several times a week. And I’m not just eating salads or whatever, I’m usually having vegan buffalo “chicken” or beyond burgers.

I don’t advocate veganism based on health benefits (veganism is an ethical philosophy), but vegan diets are baseline much healthier than the baseline for non-vegan diets. You can’t go as wrong with them as the vast majority of Americans do with their diets.

Nevoic,

If by “have merit” you mean “has some positive aspects”, sure. Every system has merit. Slavery had merit (slave owners got cheap cotton). The Holocaust had merit (antisemites felt better). The issue is weighing the merit against the negatives. You can’t just say two systems have positive aspects and call it a day.

Are you a fan of democracy or authoritarianism? Capitalism is a system where productive forces are driven undemocratically, in the name of profit instead of by worker democracy. The commodification of everything exists in a world of private property:

  • our bodies (labor power)
  • our thoughts (intellectual property)
  • the specific ordering of bits on a hard drive you own (digital media, DRM)
  • the means of production (which exist as a result of collective knowledge, infrastructure, and labor)

These things being commodified and privatized are ridiculous in any democratic, non-capitalist system.

However, these ridiculous conditions are absolutely necessary in a capitalist society. Without them the system falls apart. And as society continues to progress, the situation gets more and more ridiculous.

What about when AI “takes away” jobs for 50% of Americans (as in capitalists fire humans in favor of AI)? That’ll collapse our society. Less work would be a good thing in any reasonable system, but not in capitalism. Less work is an existential threat to our society.

If we ever have an AI that is as capable as humans are intellectually, the only work left for us will be manual labor. If that happens, and robots get to the point of matching our physical abilities, we won’t be employable anymore. The two classes will no longer be owners and workers, they’ll be owners and non-owners. At that point we better have dismantled capitalism, because if we don’t then we’ll just be starving in the street, along with the millions who die every year from starvation under the boot of global capitalism.

Nevoic,

I didn’t compare capitalism to slavery. I said the word slavery. The first paragraph wasn’t demonstrating a comparison, it was demonstrating a principle (principles are universalized, comparisons aren’t). The idea that every system has positives, but those systems can still be horrifically bad.

I don’t know if it’s emotion that’s clouding your reading comprehension, I hope it is, because then you can calm down and have a reasonable conversation. If it’s not, then this conversation isn’t worth having because you won’t understand half of what I’m saying. Literally 50% of your last message was you misrepresenting what I was saying.

A capitalist society cannot enact socialist policies. It can enact “social” policies. These policies are inspired by socialism, and often advocated for by socialists, but the policies themselves are not socialist policies. Capitalism is an economic system where the means of production are privately owned, and socialism is an economic system where the means of production are socially owned. If private (not personal) property exists, it’s not socialism. It’s not necessarily capitalism (you could have other systems with private property), but in our world it always is.

Welfare capitalism, where these social policies exist, is a well established ideology that has been around for about 80 years in any serious form, and yeah welfare can be used to address some of the negative tendencies of capitalism, but it doesn’t fix them. It’s applying a band-aid fix, not addressing the problem. In the real world what this means is there’s a class of people always working to remove those regulations and welfare because their class interests are opposed to ours.

Class distinctions cannot be solved with a regulation, they have to be solved with a societal restructuring. Our legal system does not support the idea of abolishing private property and by extension classes.

Nevoic,

Surprised this is getting as many upvotes as it is. It totally depends on context. I’ve seen posted 35 mph speed limits on 6 lane roads where every is going minimum 50mph, even with cops in the flow of traffic. I’ve also been on 2 lane roads (e.g opposing traffic is directly next to you) and the posted speed limit is 55mph.

If you’re doing the speed limit in the second one, well done. If you’re going 15-25mph below the flow of traffic in the middle or fast lane, because of a posted speed limit, that’s a problem.

Nevoic,

I’ve seen people get pulled over for doing 60 in a 65 on a highway where everyone is doing 70-85, because it’s dangerously slow with only 2 lanes.

And it’s 6 lanes because of how much traffic there is, forcing people to weave around someone going 10-30mph below the flow of traffic is dangerous.

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