Maybe everyone shouldn't have a car anyway. Turn on the satellite layer in Google maps sometime, and you'll see how it's affected everything about how we organize society. Life for most humans is just sitting in various boxes only accessible by car, interspersed by car rides between them.
We're a species of motile organisms. Not only do we have legs, to not use them is actively unhealthy. If we're going to just sit in chairs all the time, we might as well get rid of all this useless leg biomass and redesign our houses and offices accordingly.
It's worse than this though, because that's just the physical dimension to our existence. The car is a mediating apparatus that alienates man from his social field. Man is a social animal, and needs sociality to maintain mental stability. If there's always a car between you and members of your own species, intersubjective experiences will simply occur less, which is exactly what happened when everyone got one.
>Life for most humans is just sitting in various boxes only accessible by car, interspersed by car rides between them
And a hundred years ago life for most humans was just sitting in various boxes only accessible by walking, or horse if they were rich enough, and there were far fewer boxes to choose from.
There isn't always a car between members of our species and intersubjective experiences happen more often than they did prior to mass transit because cars allow for greater range and more efficient travel, and thus access to more people and more experiences.
There are entire cultures that have developed around cars and car ownership that facilitate bonding and community between individuals.
I'm all for reducing automobile usage and creating more walkable environments but the premise that cars primarily serve to alienate and isolate people seems wrong on its face.
All this is only true in the singular relation sense. The car has had a scattering effect. It's made the suburb possible. Most of our family members and past friends are scattered all over due to the car's existence in the first place. If not for the car, most of them would be right in your village. Not only would they be clustered in your immediate vicinity, but they would be inextricably integrated into your village life, creating a deeper social connection with your community.
The car casts every social group that temporarily forms to the wind. When you go visit your distant relative 3 hrs away, you only have that genetic connection left. You've lost the multiplicity that would've existed otherwise. The car gives, sure. That's why we ended up with them. But it also took away, and some of those costs were secondary, transitive, or hidden.
Setting aside any considerations on our side: for this war (or really any war), it's worth turning the chessboard around to look at things from your adversary's perspective as much as possible.
If you're the Iranian regime, the world is a hostile place. You're surrounded by enemies and potential enemies. In your time of crisis, the friends you thought you had are acting like they don't know you. The situation is one of existential threat. A future reality with your head on a pike is a very real possibility. You don't exactly have many options here, so maybe you play the only move you can make. It's a risky one, but it's at least bold and will be effectuating.
Interestingly, this move also attacks your real enemy: the globalized market. Iran would do well for itself in a world of 1926; in 2026, there's going to be friction.
In a sense, they're not fighting the US/Israel. They're fighting our datacenters. I'm sure the strategy for this conflict was vibe-planned to a large extent. A hyper-conservative regime like this will probably fare (at least in the long run) about as well as you would if you decide to nope out of society and go live in a Hobbesian state of nature in your local park. That might work for awhile, but eventually, the system will come for you. And that's just neutrality. Pick a fight with capital, and you'll always lose.
Yes this is pretty much my read as well. You can debate the morality or pragmatism of this war (or any war) but fundamentally there is no winning against global Capital. The US, some other country, are just vectors for larger forces.
Which IMO is why attempting to combat that from the outside is probably fruitless, and a better route is to try and gain control from the inside. Iran (or Russia, for that matter) would be dominant forces if they were integrated with their neighbors. Imagine Russia inside the EU – they'd have as much/more influence than Germany.
But they're outside, increasingly isolated, and thus open to erosion, whether in a hostile war like today's, or just by being outcompeted and culturally left behind.
Some would say Russia is very much inside the US and somewhat inside the EU through its proxies (currently govts of Hungary and Slovakia, quite possibly in the future - France and Germany).
Iran is on “death ground” as Sarah Paine would say. It’s a TERRIBLE idea to put your enemy on death ground because all they can do is fight now. We’re going to keep bombing them until there’s nothing left. Iran is going to end up looking like Afghanistan (a broken country of small feudal states) at the end of this.
Edit: By Iran, I'm referring to what's left of the current Iranian administration and military, not the entirety of the Iranian people.
You’re overlooking the fundamental difference between Iranian society and Afghan society. In Afghanistan, the U.S. was trying to bomb a place that was always a collection of small feudal states into being a functioning country. In Iran, it’s trying to dislodge a theocracy that’s taken over a country that’s had orderly, centralized administration for almost two thousand years.
I wouldn’t bet on either approach working. But a good outcome in Afghanistan was always completely hopeless. A good outcome in Iran is merely unlikely.
I agree with you that Afghanistan is a much different country. My fear is that once the entire centralized theocracy is bombed out of existence it will open the door for localize warlords to begin carving up territory. The alternative is a Khamenei 2.0 character stepping in. But then the question is, will Israel/the US not just assassinate them too? I don't know but there's no way this ends well.
I hate the idea of nation building. But I’ve long thought that if there was any Muslim country where we could pull off the feat we did in Germany and Japan—turning it into a stable democracy—it’s Iran. But that would take boots on the ground, which I don’t support. (I don’t support the assassination either to be clear.)
That’s my point. Germany already had a developed state with burgeoning democratic government. So it wasn’t a tall order to reboot it as a stable democracy. Japan likewise had already developed a modern state under Emperor Meiji.
> In Iran, it’s trying to dislodge a theocracy that’s taken over a country that’s had orderly, centralized administration for almost two thousand years.
You don't actually know anything about Iran's history, do you. Sure, back in the pre-Islamic days, Persia had two empires that pretty much set the standard for "centralized administration". After Arab invasion, it's a mixed record. The Safavid's (possibly) can be considered a "centrally administered" kingdom. To wit, Reza Shah Pahlavi's feather in his cap was that he managed to (finally after centuries) put the various provincial grandees and nomadic tribes in a box. That's basically 100 years.
A good primer background (on modern Iran at least) is "Iranian Nationalism" by Richard Cottam, 1963.
I am sure they are trying to "dislodge theocracy". We know USA and Israel are always hypertruthful about their real goals in Middle eastern adventurism. One country "doesn't" have any nukes and the other attacked Iraq because they "had" nukes. So tou should understand if different people have different levels of trust in the stated motivations.
The objective of the mission is clearly to dislodge the theocracy. The motivation for doing so is clearly US and Israeli security, not concern for the welfare of Iranians. Which is as it should be. Countries should act in their own interest, not in the interests of other countries.
The objective is bs, most probably oil and Israeli interests. After all there have been many stated "objectives" of all their past middle eastern campaigns. I literally cited an example where false lie of nukes was used to invade Iraq while the actual country lying about nukes sits scot free and is again directing another misadventure. If the USA hated theocracies so much it won't be allying with arab countries or have been propping up the "Mujahideen".
No, this isn't what Paine means by death ground. Paine used that to refer to Soviet citizens/soldiers that knew they would be erased/eliminated if they lost. The Iranians don't think that their opponents want to eliminate their entire civilization.
I can't help but think the 'death to America' chants going away plus the end of Iranian funding for Islamic terror/Islamic based violence will help fight Islamophobic perceptions in the US. My entire life it's seemed like a very visible section of Islam wanted my country/the West destroyed which by extension has influenced my opinion of Islam. I think a secular Iran is going to improve the perception of Islam in the West. I feel like the US and Iran have been at low level war my entire life and that Iran by their actions/words have felt the same.
Who knows. This is all pointless idiocy extending from again what I feel has been Iran waging low level war against my country my entire life. I hate it all. What did Iran think would be the outcome if their attempt to assassinate Trump would have succeeded?
and sadly Iranian schoolgirls have long been the victims of this low level war the Islamic theocracy has been waging in the name of Islam/Islamic morals:
We talk about Mosques shooting, women and girls wearing the hijab attacked/assaulted in the streets (being a woman in the streets after the sun is down always is a risk, if you're wearing anything Muslim-looking, you multiply that risk,), and a lot of aggression here.
The shah of Iran heavily suppressed Islam as well…and It led directly to the Islamic revolution. Suppression of normal political and religious expression leads to more extremists, not less.
When i talk about Islamophobia, I think about the time when my mom was run off the road by a couple of guys in a truck yelling slurs, or the woman who was stabbed walking home from our mosque, or the bulletholes in our mosque windows, or the weekly bomb/death threats.
You wield your ethnicity like a bludgeon to “win” these types of arguments but you are quite remote from the actual experience of others who look like you.
You understand that Egypt is a Muslim country and El Sisi is a Muslim, right? This is a discussion about what moderate Muslims must do in countries like Egypt and Bangladesh to keep their countries from ending up like Iran.
That comparison is ignorant. We’re not talking about Mitt Romney, okay? We’re talking about a hypothetical where polygamists overthrow the government of Utah, stone Mitt Romney to death, and threaten to do the same in Idaho. That’s the equivalent of what happened in Iran, what happened in Egypt recently, and the threat across the Muslim world.
The last time we faced a similar risk from Christianity, it resulted in a military occupation of Utah: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF3UqUH6y-M&vl=en. If that was happening now, we’d be having a serious conversation about military responses to “political Christianity.” But it’s not.
> We’re talking about a hypothetical where polygamists overthrow the government of Utah, stone Mitt Romney to death, and threaten to do the same in Idaho.
I’m morbidly interested in hearing your rationalizations, if any, for the Jan 6th protests.
Christian psychos are already at the forefront of the government, its not the end, its barely even the beginning of their insanity. And this batch doesn't yet need to engage in militantism, because...the entire government apparatus is already there for doing their bidding, but that's hardly any reason to see they aren't escalating with their insanity. I mean, Israel itself has even more of religious extremism in their government and society than present day America.
All of that is also quite irrelevant to the fact that Iran wasn't attacking the USA or Israel, Israel and America attacked them unprovoked while making a pretense of negotiating peace deals with them. I hate religion and I hate theocracies, while these are shitty countries they haven't been shitty to me, only to their internal populace. Iran also isn't the country that "doesn't have" nukes and refuses to get their nuclear facilities inspected. There is only one country in the middle east that does. Iran is far more trustworthy in the nuclear department than Israel. Israel, if it hadn't already shown how much of a reprobate traitorous liar they already are, shows yet another iteration of their old colors to the new generation. The same Israel that did the USS Liberty and so on.
edit: Holy shit and to say nothing of the reports coming that soldiers are being told this is a Holy war for Armageddon. That's literal theocratic extremism right under our noses.
It’s not even remotely similar. We’re talking about countries where (almost) everyone is Muslim and Muslims control the political system, police, etc. Moderate Muslims who can’t reasonably be accused of “Islamophobia” understand that political Islam is a danger and often take extreme measures to keep it in check.
Projecting American racial politics onto other countries is an extremely bad (and bizarrely ethnocentric) way to try to understand how the world works.
https://hackernews.hn/item?id=46885305 - He believes only property owners should be allowed to vote, and would explicitly disenfranchise the majority of US citizens.
https://hackernews.hn/item?id=45945758 - He dismisses someone who opposed a fascist dictatorship as being "antisocial" and says she was harming society by opposing said dictatorship. The most generous interpretation of that position is a tacit, rather than explicit, endorsement of fascism.
Democracies don’t arise from thin air. Every successful democracy arose from an authoritarian regime that developed the institutions of state and government. E.g. Taiwan: https://ketagalanmedia.com/2017/09/30/what-motivated-kmt-tai.... Over and over, the pattern that leads to success of an authoritarian regime that develops the country first, with democracy following when people are ready for it. Attempting to skip the authoritarian regime and jump state to democracy has usually been a failure. It results in corrupt and dysfunctional democracies, like in India or Bangladesh.
Developmental dictatorships are preferable to dysfunctional democracies, because the former at least has some hope of transitioning into a functioning democracy.
I was, but my dad was active in politics in a third world country, and worked in international development. Also, I still have family in Bangladesh so I can watch third-world people overthrowing their government again in real time on Facebook. My views on democracy and culture are directly borrowed from my dad’s crushing disillusionment with third world people and their attempts at running a democracy.
If I had to rely on my American K-12 education I’d be completely unprepared to understand what life is like for the majority of the world that wasn’t born on “socio-cultural third base.”
It is good proof the mods lie about moderation though. Regardless of what you think of this particular user, I’ve seen dang jump down even long time user’s throats for much less.
I’m on the naughty list because I pushed back on nonsense like he posts and also questioned dang’s moderating ability as a result. Blatant sexism and racism are perfectly fine here as long as it’s “polite”. Pushing back on people spouting it will get you a timeout and a lecture.
> Iran is going to end up looking like Afghanistan (a broken country of small feudal states) at the end of this.
Soooo, lateral move from 1999 with the benefit of the theocratic regime that rules over those states having a bit of hindsight this time and being keenly aware that they ought not to let themselves be exploited puppet or proxy for larger international conflict? I'm not saying Afghanistan on track to be a shining beacon of modernity in an otherwise backwards region but things are looking pretty up for them and I wish them the best.
An equivalent for Iran would be what? Next guy shows up in charge, promises a few token reforms. Bombs stop falling, protestors go home, business as usual resumes but with a little more normalcy toward the rest of the world.
> A hyper-conservative regime like this will probably fare (at least in the long run) about as well as you would if you decide to nope out of society and go live in a Hobbesian state of nature in your local park.
Sounds more like the Taliban than Iran's ex-leadership.
Pete Hegseth is hyper-conservative too. Actually all three of the main combatants are hardline religious groups.
> Pete Hegseth is hyper-conservative too. Actually all three of the main combatants are hardline religious groups.
You get downvoted for saying something that's true, and it's not even a defense of the Irani theocratic dictatorship.
Namely: at least some of the support for the war (and for Israel) in the US is religiously motivated. Religious as in "fundamentalist". This doesn't make the US a theocracy, but it does mean many of the decision makers are making decisions based at least partly on Christian fundamentalist doctrine.
There are already some reports [1] of US troops complaining they are being told they've embarked on a mission from God. It boggles the mind.
> "One complainant, identified as a noncommissioned officer (NCO) in a unit that could be deployed “at any moment to join” operations against Iran, told MRFF in a complaint viewed by the Guardian that their commander had “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ”
> "“He said that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth’”, the NCO added."
Edit: wow, downvotes for quoting a mainstream newspaper with evidence that US policy is at least influenced by Christian fundamentalists, and this without any real argument to counter this, just drive-by downvoting? Sheesh, is this what passes for debate in HN?
Now this is all conspiracy theory, but it's food for thought.
The USA's media strategy appears to be aimed at Christian Zionism to justify involvement in Israel's regional affairs. There are many influential Christian Zionists in government and politics in the US. Ted Cruz comes to mind as one outspoken example.
If you subscribe to these beliefs, all of this is perfectly rational, that this war is a signal of the end times, that the faithful should not shrink before the fight, the return of the Christ and millennium of peace are within reach.
There has also been conspiratorial speculation that one of the goals of this war is to incite antisemitism in the United States, to spur the return of the diaspora in America to the Holy Land. Israel needs bodies, if they are to realize the Greater Israel Project. Now this is all conspiracy theory, but it's food for thought.
Thanks for providing another link. I quoted The Guardian (a mainstream newspaper, whatever you may think of it) mentioning this same source, and got downvoted for it. Oh well.
There are not many Christian zionists in decision making positions in the US. You’ve named 1 person and how much power does Cruz actually have. The powerful are non Christian zionists. That much is blatantly obvious. Kushner, Witkoff, Lutnick, the entourage around Epstein, most of the cabinet of the current (non Christian president), most of the cabinet of the prior (catholic so non dispensationalist) former president. The media itself, which is used to manufacture consent is filled with, owned by and answers to non Christian zionists. Get a clue.
the people currently making decisions may not be christian but are certainly beholden to christian zionist, their largest voting bloc are reactionary suburban white evangelicals
Absurd. There are very few Christian zionists amongst Christians, and a dwindling number of Christians overall, most especially in the suburbs. Christian zionists are almost entirely poor uneducated (hence their misreading of scripture) rural southerners who have effectively zero political power outside very small regional elections where international politics have no relevance.
Evangelical pastors laying hands on Trump and praying for his success in his holy war against Iran. I don't know the overlap between Christian Zionism and evangelicals in the US, but I'm sure it's not zero.
Christian fundamentalists are influencing US policy to a noticeable degree. Nobody's saying it's the only factor.
“Christian fundamentalists are influencing US policy to a noticeable degree.”
Prove it. Cults that use Jesus’ name are not representative of Christianity. The Waco cult, Theosophy, etc.
Israel influences our policy and I can provide copious evidence of that by naming Israeli affiliated zionists in the cabinets of the past 3 or 4 presidents and by the activity of groups like AIPAC which happen to fund some of the cults that endorse Christian Zionism. The numbers and facts are quite clear.
They're fighting our datacenters. (...) A hyper-conservative regime like this will probably fare (at least in the long run) about as well as you would if you decide to nope out of society
You do know that Iran has technical universities, works on advanced weaponry, and the leader of their National Security council has a computer science degree?
It is important to at least look at things as they are, and not through the prism of orientalism.
Iran's regime is socially conservative. But so is the current US government. There is no sign that they are anti-technology or isolationist.
I agree, that's why they lasted as long as they did. It's a strategy that works, but only for awhile. They tried to use the apparatuses of global capital without fully integrating within it. That makes them an exteriority from the perspective of the market.
In the end, that (plus their essential resource flows) only make them a more viable candidate for expansion of capital's machinic assemblage. The force of the market hasn't colonized all of the Earth yet; it yet has many peripheries. There's plenty of room for expansion in, say, central Africa. It'll get there eventually, but right now its focus is elsewhere. The assemblage will always weigh the costs/benefits, then select the next best space to expand into. That's what it's doing here. The goal is to convert some of its surplus value into ingesting a bit of its frontier, and make of it its own.
Iran is firmly sided with China and Russia. China buys all their oil and doesn't want to see US/Israel expand their reach. They are very likely to support Iran.
On their end, Iran has been preparing for exactly this for decades. If anything, the complexity of the globalized market means more weak points to strike. Which in 2026 is cheap and easy with swarms of drones. Meanwhile, the US is still carrying out precision attacks with expensive ordnance which they have limited supplies of.
You should sprinkle in a few other news sources because that’s not what is happening at all.
Iran also has further escalation paths it can take. So far, they have only been targeting US-affiliated targets in the Gulf. You can imagine what would happen if they decide to expand their target list. But I think this will only happen if GCC countries decide to participate.
Everything I've read suggests the US and Israel are stomping all over Iran, and have destroyed their air force, navy, and even anti-air defenses.
I know these news are necessarily biased (e.g. do we know for a fact the three F-15E Strike Eagles were really downed by Kuwaiti friendly fire and none were downed by Iran?), but the chance of credible news of Iran putting up any real resistance is very, very slim.
Iran has been sanctioned for decades. As a result, they do not have a modern airforce, navy, or even air defense systems. So it is completely unsurprising that USIS has complete air superiority. You can rest assured that Iran has planned for this.
Their entire defense strategy post-war (Iran-Iraq war) has been centered around ballistic missiles. More recently, they “pioneered” the use of kamikaze drones (Shahed) and included their use in their strategy. Note that they have aggressively optimized Shahed when it comes to cost, ease of manufacturing, and ease of launch. Shahed drones have seen extensive combat usage in the Ukraine war.
The other “hint” when it comes to Iran’s response is the increasing estimates by the US as to how long this “operation” will last. Initially, it was a few days. Now they are saying 4-5 weeks. Edit: Looks like it could up to 8 weeks..
Long story short, until we start to see significant degradation in launches - both missiles and drones - we simply cannot say that Iran has been defeated.
As far as news sources go, the easy recommendation is Al Jazeera. Twitter/X is also decent, but there is a ton of noise.
It is biased - interestingly less than expected on this topic because Iran is shelling them - but the idea is to read something to counteract Western bias. Asian outlets (non-Japanese) are another good source.
> The US air superiority has completely done them, it'd seem.
They're managing to successfully counterattack with strikes in every country in the region, while the bulk of their central leadership has been KIA. They still control the Strait of Hormuz and very intense naval, land, and air operations will be required to dislodge them.
If this war was started with the goal of the complete destruction of Iran, ground troops will have to go in (President Trump et. al. is already in the media telegraphing the requirement). Iran is a mountain fortress, and the home team (pop. 91 million) holds advantage. This has the potential to become and long and bloody war.
I think people in the US are seriously discounting this. The only thing that Iranian forces have to do is keep lobbing drones. You don't need leadership, heavy industry, or even a lot of drones as long as you keep lobbing them.
It takes very little for them to keep disrupting things which affect the global economy.
Even if leadership changes at the top and isn't killed, why would independent cells of fighters stop?
I think there's a huge possibility that Iran can keep being disruptive longer than the US is willing to spend $$$$$ bombing and intercepting.
One nuance here is where that $$$$ actually goes. The US has a history of diverting a staggering amount of money to the war companies every 2 decades or so. The spend here might be the goal, not the cost.
Well, they've managed to launch and land strikes on every country in the region. "Successful counterattack" is a considerably higher bar than that, IMHO.
Russia isn't moving for obvious reasons (I don't think IRGC planners even expected them to move, Putin has made it clear a 100 times he is out of anything involving Israel). But that said Putin arguably did his job already by destroying Patriot stocks and thus putting US on a timeline in terms of protection.
With China the issue is different: They have a completely different military ecosystem so it's not like they can send them their own stuff. We already saw in Ukraine that running 2 types of equipment along each other is a pain in the ass and strains logistics. China is likely aiding them with satellite imagery instead.
I think China will sit this one out. There's nothing to gain for them with direct involvement.
Any assistance to Iran (like satellite imagery) will have limited effect, and the Chinese know it. In my opinion, there's no way the Islamic Republic survives this. For any rational international actor, there's no sense in becoming involved in a lost fight.
> In my opinion, there's no way the Islamic Republic survives this.
But what if the Islamic Republic isn't a material thing, it isn't a government apparatus, it is actually the ideas and culture of a population under siege? 50-60 million Persians, and another 30-40 million muslims of other ethnicities. They have been embargoed for decades, the message that the US and Israel are evil has seeped into every corner of society there. It will not be so simple to erase that programming and you can expect a large portion of the population to resist to the bitter end. It's been over 20 years of planning to bring the USA to this point, 20 years because it was never a sure bet, and even today it's still not clear who wins. No, I think 4 days in it's too early to call winners and losers.
Russia has their hands full with Ukraine and has failed in the past to protect other allies such as Syria.
China seems wise enough to provide some support to Iran while sitting out of direct involvement in the war. China has everything to lose with war and nothing to gain. If anything, they are signaling "stability" to the Global South -- something from which the US is increasingly drifting away -- and war is the opposite of stability.
> Meanwhile, the US is still carrying out precision attacks with expensive ordnance which they have limited supplies of.
I think they have more than enough, plus Iran faces an even worse situation. Limited stockpiles of their only effective weapons, missiles and drones, and quickly running out. What's worse, by not using those weapons in huge salvoes, they reduce their efficiency... they only work if they can overcome defenses, but if they spend them too fast they lose their only effective weapon.
I think the Islamic Republic will be overthrown, but this requires boots on the ground, and it'll become a quagmire like Iraq or Afghanistan. At some point the US will declare success and leave, and from the ashes of Iran countless warring factions will emerge, an endless insurgency, and possibly the next ISIS. We've seen this happen more than once, no reason to believe this will go a different way.
Russia and China cannot stop this.
Edit: rather than downvotes, I prefer debate. Be better, HN. I realize this is difficult in times of war involving the country where the majority of HN hails from, but I trust you can do it. Engage in rational debate please.
> In a sense, they're not fighting the US/Israel. They're fighting our datacenters.
LOL. Sorry, this is silly. Do you really think that Iran hates data centers?
The best scenario for Trump is to make this a limited war that nobody even notices outside of Iran's borders. He wants to announce to Americans "see? We did what we wanted and it was over in a few days, you barely noticed it".
While the nightmare scenario is to end up bogged down in a long drawn war with global repercussions, inflation, market crashes or even boots on the ground for months and years.
Iran can't win a military confrontation with the US, but it can make it so expensive that the US will decide to back off. These are strategic attacks, their form of "second strike". Raising the price of an attack on them, exactly as a nuclear armed country would retaliate on cities and not on military bases.
> And so is being Israel with Iran right there with Hezbollah, Hamas etc... Incredibly biased comment.
How would it help any of us, to imagine ourselves being an alternate reality version of the Iranian leadership who in turn are imagining themselves being the Israeli leadership?
In order to guess what Iran does next, all we have to do is the first step, to imagine ourselves in the Iranian position, not to hypothesise about a much more competent Iranian leadership than actually exists which had the empathy needed to put itself in anyone else's position rather than call Israel and the USA un-metaphorically the big and little Satan.
Industrial economic systems (including capitalism, which is better at it, but also Soviet communism for another) will always reinvest some of its surplus back into itself. That form is either scale or efficiency, the latter of which is usually the replacement of labor with capital. It may not do this very well or as fast as it could, but that transition is always permanent, and therefore cumulative.
So, what happens when we do that? Well, for awhile, nothing. When labor is the bottleneck, then there's always more outlets for it. But eventually there comes an inflection point, where there is so much labor replacement and the bar has been raised so high, that the surplus is in labor itself. At lower tiers, its value approaches 0. Spoiler alert: this point has already been passed. Probably everyone here knows multiple surplus individuals, who have no place in the economy, and the bar for their entry or reentry into it is so high now, they can only produce negative value in current market conditions.
So, we have an ever-increasing surplus of unrealized labor. Our overlords may feel bad about that for awhile, decide to bear the burden of a mass multitude of dependents. We better hope they do, because this works fine until it doesn't. The zeitgeist only needs to shift once for it to all be over. This won't happen tomorrow, but they only need to look at the balance sheet from a certain angle once for the massive cost center to be seen as yet another inefficiency to be optimized for. On long enough time scales, the probability of any possible event approaches 1.
It seems crazy and impossible now, but imagine this notion: Software should serve the needs of the user.
Software that does things the user doesn't want, like try to trick money out of him, waste his bandwidth, or fill his screen with unwanted ads used to have a name: Malware. We've redefined that term to mean when a non-BigTech firm does those things, but the definition used to be functional, not attributional.
RMS warned us of this day, and now it is here. You don't control your data or the code that operates upon it. That would've sucked in 1990, but since then, we've migrated our entire lives into that code/data. The degree to which it embodies your very existence is the degree to which you have lost control over your life, which for most of us is total. You lost that control but it didn't disappear; it is now owned by someone else, commoditized and exchanged, redirected and engineered. Enjoy the ride if you can, because you're just in the passenger seat.
There is no free Google product. You pay for all of them with your data, your privacy, and your attention.
Your data is worth far more to them than a $13/month subscription fee. In fact, if you do pay it, the data becomes even more valuable, because you're now guaranteed to always be logged in. You're also likely to use it more to get more "value" out of your purchase, generating even more value (for them). Finally, you've also identified yourself as the kind of person that pays for things that should be actually free.
Worse than all of this, when you use Google (or any of these malware/spyware companies), thanks to network effects, you don't just pay for it with your freedom, you pay for it with some of everyone else's too.
Setting aside whether the payment with my data is worth it - I don't understand why youtube would be in the category of "things that should be actually free". They have server costs, and employee costs, and they pay out to creators - somebody has to pay those bills.
It would be better if there was a better value proposition, instead of “pay to get what we removed”.
It’s not as though free users listening with the app in the background is somehow an additional marginal expense as opposed to them listening with the app in the foreground.
It actually is a marginal expense. There are two main reasons.
For music videos there are different licensing terms for listening vs music videos. So if they don't appease the licenser than their contract will be less favourable.
And of course ads will pay less for people who aren't looking (although his is technically lost revenue, not an expense).
This is the trade-off to connectivity and removing frictional barriers (i.e., globalism). This is the economic equivalent of what Nick Land and Spandrell called the "IQ shredder". Spandrell said of Singapore:
Singapore is an IQ shredder. It is an economically productive metropolis that
sucks in bright and productive minds with opportunities and amusements at the
cost of having a demographically unsustainable family unit.
Basically, if you're a productive person, you want to maximize your return. So, you go where the action is. So does every other smart person. Often that place is a tech hub, which is now overflowing with smart guys. Those smart guys build adware (or whatever) and fail to reproduce (combined, these forces "shred" the IQ). Meanwhile every small town is brain-drained. You hometown's mayor is 105 IQ because he's the smartest guy in town. Things don't work that great, and there's a general stagnation to the place.
Right now, AI is a "capital shredder". In the past, there were barriers everywhere, and we've worked hard to tear those down. It used to be that the further the distance (physically, but also in other senses too, like currencies, language, culture, etc.), the greater the friction to capital flows. The local rich guy would start a business in his town. Now he sends it to one of the latest global capital attractors, which have optimized for capital inflow. This mechanism works whether the attractor can efficiently use that capital or not. That resource inflow might be so lucrative, that managing inflow is the main thing it does. Right now that's AI, but as long as present structure continues, this is how the machine of the global economy will work.
This is hogwash. It's incel and eugenic reasoning wrapped up all together.
Not every smart person (or even most) are engineers, and of the ones that are they don't all move to tech hubs, and the ones that do not all of them can't get laid.
And I'll give you a great reason why it's hogwash, the "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in Singapore are the same "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in their home town
I agree with you that STEM don't hold a monopoly on intelligence.
> engineers that can't get laid in Singapore are the same "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in their home town
Maybe so, but not for the same reasons. Back in their home town, they cannot vibe with anyone because the few who might be compatible have long since left. In a STEM hotspot, they go to an event and meet compatible people, but it's 11 guys for every 3 girls, so unless they are top dog in that room, they aren't going to score.
IDK the dating scene in Singapore. I frankly didn't even know that Singapore was considered a tech hub. I was using it as a synonym for a tech hub because that is what I assumed the author was doing.
Higher education is strongly associated to lower fertility rates. Especially for women, but for men too. So no the argument doesn't ignore the existence of smart women. Smart women (and men) just far less likely to reproduce, statistically speaking.
If your answer to that problem is less women should attain higher education and take care of raising children instead, we just fundamentally disagree. Women have an equal right to education and working as men do.
The charts you refer to show an environment where the responsibility for care work is heavily skewed to the detriment of women. If men took up a bigger part of raising children, it would be easier for couples to do that. But the vast majority of men don't.
We can blame the individual for the cost we've outsourced into him. When he collapses under that load, we can attribute it to personal shortcomings. Some people survive, even thrive, in the current environment, after all. We've coalesced a plurality of games into a single one, and in a sense, it works great. We have our smartphones, AI, online shopping, and targeted advertising.
Notepad now has Copilot built right into it, after all. That wasn't going to happen by now if we took the human psyche as a given and built around that.
Heh, I've just realized about 2 years ago that it's worse.
Cities are people shredders. Based on the information I've found, cities have lower fertility rates than rural areas and this has been the case ever since they were created.
I absolutely love cities, but with ever increasing urbanization and unless we make HUGE changes to facilitate people easily having kids in cities (and I'm talking HUGE, stuff like having stay at home parents for the first 6-7 years of their childhood, free access to communal areas that offer all the services required to take care of kids of any age, free education, etc), humanity will probably not be able to sustain a population of more than say, 1 billion people. Probably much fewer.
Which I guess, could work, but we will be in totally uncharted territory.
And then AI comes in and things become... very interesting.
Apologies but either I don’t understand your post or it is nonsensical.
What relevance does AI have to being an IQ shredder if the talent has gone into (productively) developing capable AI?
If anything, AI completely disproves your notion of IQ shredder because this is an instance of lack of barriers actually hastening progress. Look at all the AI talent. Very few are American or ethnic Americans.
AI is an attractor. In general, attractors absent barriers have the potential to act as a resource shredder in the context of an ecosystem where stability was predicated on said barriers being present.
I called AI a "capital shredder" because I'm asserting that it is one (of many) by comparison to a more even distribution of capital investment. The non-attractor small town where the capital that would have gone into a self-reinforcing progress cycle has it redirected into an external context. If you don't care about that and just want more AI, then no worries, because that's what we're optimizing for.
I was trying to limit my point to something clear with linear reasoning, but AI is indeed also an IQ shredder in both the immediate and transitive sense. For the former, it's an aggregator of talent. From the perspective of the small town (both domestic and foreign), its best human resources have been extracted.
Relation with production is irrelevant for the purposes of being a shredder, but this system does generally serve for increased production of a sort. That's why we ended up with it. The small town doesn't get its factories, local governance doesn't get good programmers, etc. Those resources are being redirected into getting us to wherever AI is going to go because that's what the global economic machine desires right now. Likewise in the past for NFTs, crypto, cloud, etc.
To personalize this: I was drawn to an attractor and rode one of those waves myself, and, at least economically, it worked out great for me as it probably has for others here. However, this system isn't a free lunch.
It looks like it’s working as expected then? This is what I would have done with AI if I had complete authority to decide where money flows and what people should do.
Maybe you should look into why that is. Or specifically look at the scores and grades of students applying to grad school in the US vs who is admitted (this isn't a recent thing either) by country. If anything, we are probably behind where we should be because we don't admit the best into the best schools. We admit those that don't need grants (usually because their government pays instead).
What amazes me about this theory is that being the 115 IQ guy in a town where the next guy is 105 isn’t better than being the 115 IQ guy in and office averaging 120.
Or put more plainly, being a big fish in a small pond is not better than being a small fish.
Why not just not compare to others because it’s easy to game anything?
Just look for patterns and then act out of self interest. Nobody is coming to save you.
I’m no high IQ person but if I can figure out how to get a STEM job without STEM degree, make money by getting lucky at a unicorn, invest and sell for profit and invest again (only losers HODL so others can take profits), then there’s really no excuse why someone else can’t.
And I’m originally from a country that has like 70 IQ nationally or so it is said. So I’m not a genius, maybe the only quality I have that makes me different is I don’t know how to quit until I meet my goal.
More people should stop crying and be a man. Our ancestors literally survived against nature and each other so we could post here on HN. I don’t mean being able to lift 500lbs like a caveman either.
Exercise your brain, it gets stronger too because I have a hard time understanding concepts sometimes, but taking steps to break it down and digest it in pieces helps me. Takes a bit longer but hopefully you have tomorrow.
What’s the alternative. Keep the smart physically separated, can never collaborate to make anything paradigm shifting and we just prod along with small town paper mills and marginally better local government?
Within the Landian system, I suspect he'd say the answer is economic "territorialization", the economic equivalent to the mechanism originally defined by Deleuze+Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus based on the territoriality of earlier work.
It's the process where social, political, or cultural meaning is rooted in some context. It's a state of stability and boundaries. For just the economic, the geographic would likely be the centroid of that, but the other vectors are not irrelevant.
One could argue that we suffer to the degree we are deterritorialized, because the effects thereof are alienating. So, we need structure that aligns both our economic and psychological needs. What we have is subordination to the machine, which will do what it's designed to: optimize for its own desire, which is machinic production.
Note that none of this is inherently good/bad. Like anything, a choice has trade-offs. We definitely get more production within the current structure. The cost is born by the individual, aggregating into the social ills that are now endemic.
Land himself has suggested a very anti-human solution to the problem of "IQ shredders":
"The most hard-core capitalist response to this [IQ shredders] is to double-down on the antihumanist accelerationism. This genetic burn-rate is obviously unsustainable, so we need to convert the human species into auto-intelligenic robotized capital [a]s fast as possible, before the whole process goes down in flames." [0]
[0] Nick Land (2014). IQ Shredders in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition
I think the only solution is territorialization if you want to preserve the human. If you don't care about that (or think that it's not possible anyway), then yes, accelerate.
We’ve had 50 years of genetic engineering and it’s about time we started using it. I wish someone with more central authority like China starts doing experiments of genetically altering humans to start making super humans. We have the technology, it’s only ethics holding us back. So what if a few thousand people (preferably volunteers) die in experiments, we should just make sure they’re condemned (like death row or terminally ill) and carry on.
California had a great mechanism for this in their land grant colleges, which back before the protests of the Vietnam War were required to offer the valedictorian of nearby high schools (or the person with the highest GPA who accepted) full tuition and room and board --- then Governor Ronald Reagan shut down this program when the students had the temerity to protest the Vietnam War --- it was also grade inflation to keep students above the threshold necessary for a draft deferment which began the downward spiral of American education.
Yeah, more separated would be ideal. Local government (and churches or other organizations) should have strong incentives to keep talents in their hometowns, or at least their home countries. Imagine how much stronger technologically the EU would be now if their skilled workers didn't get brain-drained to the US for decades.
It's set by people for whom the clock serves as a mechanism to garner alarmist attention whenever they feel short of it. In so doing, they diminish not just themselves, but science as a whole.
At best, the clock is indeed a measuring device; one not of our peril, but of the anxieties of a group of otherwise non-notables. In that sense, it figures that it'd say we're closer to "doom" than during the Cuban missile crisis, because that's the intensity of current vibes, particularly if you're a modern activist plugged into the techno-socious of reactionary negativism.
We’re closer to “doom” than in 1962 because Kennedy wasn’t a narcissist with Alzheimer and Khrushchev wasn’t an old KGB agent on a vengeance.
The leaders around the world now are the worst we’ve had since the 1930s. And now they have a nuclear arsenal that can destroy the world at their whim.
Was in one of those chain book stores recently and decided to stop by the philosophy section. It was tiny, only taking up part of a single shelf in a huge store. I was surprised to find about half of the titles were on Stoicism and closely-related topics. There were many pop-psych texts about applying Stoicism to modern life. I guess it's been having a moment? Interestingly, it was right next to the massive self-help section.
I have a notion that both the ancient West and East experienced a chance to align with systems of thought that reject desire, either in part or whole. In the East, that was more successful and stuck around longer. Unfortunately for us, it remained a fringe notion (think how we would react to a modern Diogenes). However, we never completely forgot, flirting with similar ideas from the direction of Christian piety, the synthesis of Eastern thought that occurred in the counter-culture era, and the psychoanalytic frameworks of Lacan, Deleuze+Guattari, and others. Now that our desires are being exploited against us by the tech that mediates our very existence, it makes sense we would seek defense mechanisms. There's trillions of dollars of economic force out there creating, curating, and capturing desire. It's probably worth stepping back and asking how being embedded in that structure is actually affecting us and the degree it's aligned with our innate interests.
In the west, we've had a long, deep split between what ordinary people rely on (religion and self-help) and respectable academic philosophy. Philosophy rooted in religion has a strict requirement to scale down to serve masses of people. Philosophy rooted in academia has a strict requirement to scale up to allow practitioners to flex their elite skills and show that they are worthy of scarce academic positions. Academic philosophers pay lip service to the idea that philosophy can and should be for everyone, but in practice, they shy away from anything that could compromise their primary pursuit of a career and academic prestige.
As a result, they mostly respond to efforts to reach a lay audience by distancing and criticizing. They are really harsh on the compromises inherent in meeting lay audiences where they are.
That's a pretty weak take. The difference between philosophy texts on ethics and the better self-help texts are just the difference between pulp fiction and classic novels. Time needs to pass before anybody is willing to go "actually, this is worth analyzing". That said, there's a lot of self-help that isn't philosophical (or, more exactly, don't attempt to defend the philosophy that they present the conclusions of).
Consider the difference between. "Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultry" and "you shouldn't kill or sleep with your neighbor's wife because both actions cause more harm than they provide benefit, which ought be our goal because the conclusions of such a cost/benefit analysis closely align to most people's natural sense of right and wrong". The former is a statement of morals. If you include the "...because God said so, and God is always right", then it becomes an ethical argument, like the second. The key is arguing the why down to axioms, and defending those axioms as superior to other axioms.
A self-help book like "How to win friends and influence people" provides rules to follow, to achieve a desired outcome, and attempts to explain why the rules work. It doesn't spend much, if any (it's been a while) energy arguing why you should want the desired outcome, or if the desired outcome is actually a good thing.
> Time needs to pass before anybody is willing to go "actually, this is worth analyzing".
I think that's exactly the problem: the assumption that philosophers should assume, by default, that self-help is unworthy of their time, and only pay attention to the rare cases that happen to have philosophical merit.
They could take a more active interest to questions such as, how can philosophy improve self-help literature? What kinds of ideas should ordinary people with low to average education consume? The wide array of values, goals, and philosophical approaches would make it a contentious and lively conversation.
But philosophers tend to vacate the field and leave it to mercenaries, culture warriors, and amateurs. When they do speak about it, it tends to be in symposiums or on podcasts aimed at college-educated people with a special interest in philosophy. That's as far down as they're willing to dumb it.
Philosophers don't "vacate the field". Many, maybe even most ethics texts are directly applicable to one's life. It comes with the territory of a field based around asking "What ought one do?".
They do tend to enjoy less market success than the less rigorous slop, but that's a symptom of a much broader problem in the world: Someone dedicated to doing something well is at a disadvantage versus someone dedicated to winning. It's the whole "anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job" Douglas Adams quote, it's why it's still not the year of Linux desktop despite having offered the superior OS for years, it's why IKEA has practically killed the market for quality furniture, and it's why damn near every corporation you can name is lead by some ghoulish psychopath. In most competitions, you can simply get a lot more mileage out of optimizing for the competition than you can squeeze out of the underlying skill. So the dude optimizing for selling books is going to knock the socks off the one trying to rigorously convey a robust ethical framework.
If you can fix that basic flaw in society, I think we should probably start with the more pressing matters than who's selling more self-help books.
To me that sounds like philosophers not being willing to lower themselves to meet people where they are.
There are plenty of professionals who don't let arbitrary standards of rigor get in the way of communicating with people. For medicine, there's an entire subspecialty of public health professionals who specialize in crafting communication for broad audiences. They don't target only the people who are capable of processing communications of a certain rigor, and they don't retire their specialty because advertisers will always have the upper hand.
Not to mention that many fields are taught as school subjects, so they have to be presented to literal children. Of course the school curricula of history, literature, and science are taught with naivete and lacunae that would be travesties if judged by professional standards, but historians aren't calling for teachers to stop teaching a dumbed down version history to children. They accept the necessity of it and debate how best to do it.
That seems like a rather cynical take. I think you’re conflating philosophy as guidance for how to live (stoicism etc) and philosophy as more of a science to explore unanswered questions, which are naturally going to have very different practitioners and audiences?
The latter can be applicable to the former. Traditionally the connection was acknowledged, with Socrates the prototype of the philosopher who believed that happiness, ethical living, and philosophy were inextricably linked. Obviously philosophy has come a long way since Socrates, but academic philosophers continue to give lip service to the idea that philosophy can be valuable in everyday living, if not in ethics then in processing information, critiquing arguments, and understanding the origins and limitations of ideas.
I think we've known since the time of Socrates that the practice of philosophy is not the practice of happy living. Philosophers tend to be miserable. Socrates himself chose to drink poison over moving to a different city. I think most philosophies, despite their myriad differences, agree that what people tend to want is not what philosophy will give them. Maybe some of the answers philosophy yields can be applied to increase happiness, but philosophy in practice tends to produce questions.
Most philosophers would not agree that yielding questions instead of answers makes philosophy unhelpful, nor that the happiest life is necessarily the one in which pain is most successfully avoided.
Christian thought remains diametrically opposed to Eastern philosophies, at least when it comes to religion. Rejecting desire in an attempt at eternal life is quite different from wanting to escape existence as a whole and return to non-existence.
Strictures which successfully regulated desire crystallized over the ages into particular forms of tradition and morality. Hence early conservatives like Carlyle and Chesterton were anti-capitalist: they saw the economics of desire as a corrosive force that would break down and nullify the experience of centuries as encoded in customs, tradition and other social bonds.
That’s a fair caution, and I agree with the broader point. For what it’s worth, this is a human-written account that I edited for clarity and length before posting. Tools like GPTZero tend to flag any structured, carefully written text—especially summaries of emotional events—regardless of authorship.
I think the more important question isn’t whether the prose sounds polished, but whether the situation described is plausible and whether the discussion that follows is useful. People are free to be skeptical; I’m mainly here to hear from those with relevant experience or practical advice.
Being careful about narratives cuts both ways, including being careful not to dismiss difficult stories solely because they’re uncomfortable or well-articulated.
Why bother? If you run updates, it'll randomly crap on all your custom settings anyway.
You win, MS. I thought I could keep a Windows box around for the occasional game and as an emergency backup for when I need random peripherals to "just work". I give up. The current Windows box (which I barely use anyway) is my last one.
My gaming PC was the only one left running Windows. 10 Pro which I paid $200 for just a few years ago. Last time I booted it up, Minecraft wouldn't work, and I couldn't update anything, even the game. Funny, no other games had issues continuing to support Win 10.
I put Arch on it last week and couldn't be happier. My 3080 is working just fine. Rocket League is even better on Proton than native Windows; turns out Java MC is a nice switch from bedrock, and my kid that I play with agrees, so we'll play that version together instead.
I have a tiny partition with unregistered Win 11 just for Roblox now. I tired to put MC on there, in case we wanted to do bedrock once in a while, but now the MC launcher is, for some reason, tightly coupled to the Microsoft Store, and if you're not logged into that, you can't play MC, not even the Java Edition, so that's the end of Windows MC for me.
It is like the old “Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing”.
Windows only costs what-ever-portion-of-you-new-machine's-price-it-is⁰, if your time, privacy¹, attention², and just your general desire to be given some respect³, are all worth nothing.
I kept Windows on my main home PC when 10 tuned up (I very nearly switched then) because of games & DayJob compatibility, and a side-order of laziness. These days I game very little⁴, DayJob stuff never touches my personal equipment, and panel-beating Windows into being less annoying is much more effort than Linux on the desktop⁵, so that is the way I've gone.
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[0] Very few people buy Windows directly. Standard UK pricing for Win11 Home is £119, but I doubt more than a few people pay close to that much.
[1] Even if you pay for Enterprise licensing, I'd easily believe that without jumping a few hoops there are still potential issues here for the truly concerned.
[2] Adverts on the 'king start menu and elsewhere? Get stuffed. No, I didn't want to consider installing “Keeper of the Golden Bollock”, or whatever that game was that popped up as an option when I was starting keepass on the [day job] laptop the other day…
[3] I consider the pop-ups and other nagging inserts, for adverts and extolling the virtues of CoPilot & other things, that only have “yes” and “maybe later” buttons with no “leave me alone, I know it exists, when/if I want to look at it I'll let you know” option, as signs of disrespect.
[4] That industry has pushed me away with irritations too, and I have significant other hobbies now.
[5] Linux has been my core OS server-side for decades, but aside from my University years and the netbook era that MS killed, I've not used it significantly elsewhere⁶ for long periods.
[6] caveat: I'm counting Android as different enough to be considered something else, more so as the walls around that garden are slowly inching up.
Even upgrading to Pro is not enough to completly remove all the junk in Windows without an unreasonable amount of effort. Enterprise is easier to debloat but that is not as easy to come by for the average user.
There is a difference between fiddling with configurations on Linux to fit your personal preferences and turning off all the bloat included in Windows out of the box.
I have two perspectives on this, as a user and as a Windows admin. And I apologize in advance that this turned into a bit of a rant.
As a user all these things are at best annoyances to work around and at worst borderline malicious. You can easily remove the ads in the Start menu, uninstall the built-in apps you don't need and turn off the things you don't want. Sure upgrading to Pro offers more options to turn off some (but not all) of the bloat in Windows. However a significant portion of the tweaks needed to turn things off either needs Pro to get access to local group policy or diving into the registry to adjust dozens of values, and this is not something I consider accessible by average users. And there are some things like the constant reminders to sign-in with a Microsoft account that cannot be disabled in any way. I am aware that there are de-bloat scripts which preform these actions automatically for the less technical users, but asking users to run random scripts as the first thing to do on a new system to fix issues sets a bad precedent and is not something that I think should be widely encouraged since that behavior can be easily exploited since the users that need those kinds of tools may not fully appreciate the consequences of their actions.
With regards to malicious behavior take OneDrive. By default OneDrive will start on login then prompt the user with a system notification to sign-in to OneDrive to backup their files and the only options it gives the user is to either say "Yes" or "Remind me later". The only options to stop this are either to uninstall OneDrive or apply a setting via GPO to stop OneDrive from generating network traffic until a user signs-in. And in the security center if you don't sign-in to OneDrive it will always display a warning that your files are not protected because you are not using OneDrive, and as far as I know there is no way to disable that on editions other than Enterprise even if you uninstall OneDrive. For the average user the easiest way to make these annoyances go away is to sign-in to OneDrive. I cannot tell you how many people have come to me complaining that they signed in to OneDrive and now all their files have disappeared because OneDrive moved everything to a different folder then removed all the local copies of files that had been synced to the cloud and because their computer was not connected to the Internet they could not access the files that now lived only in the cloud.
I think OneDrive is a prime example of the issues I have overall with Windows these days, it effectively gives the user as little agency as possible in using their system by constantly nagging them to enable things they may not want or even understand with the only options presented being to just do what it tells you.
As an admin I have a much poorer opinion of the work required to completely de-bloat a "clean" Windows install. In addition to all of the above let's consider the Start menu. In a Windows environment it is not practical to manually remove the offending shortcuts in the Start menu since those are set in each user profile and I am not going to follow every user around to manually clean up their Start menus every time they login to a new computer. Pro editions of Windows 11 actually do have the ability to customize what shortcuts appear in the Start menu by default for new user accounts and this does allow for removing the ads. However that particular Start menu layout policy can only be set by an MDM, it seems Microsoft has made the decision to not provide a group policy option for applying a Start menu layout in Windows 11 like they did with Windows 10. This means if you are exclusively managing Windows with an on-prem Active Directory you can't remove the ads from the Start menu using a managed policy.
You can upgrade to Enterprise which does have a simple option to turn off all the consumer features, however I know of exactly zero businesses that will pay the significant extra for Enterprise just to disable these annoyances that everyone is already used to.
Microsoft has turned Windows into a tool that does everything in its power funnel users to Microsoft cloud services. The user experience is being actively degraded with all the nagging and forced usage of their services such that the path of least resistance to get rid of all that is to give up and just sign-in with a cloud account. Now to be clear, I don't have a problem with Microsoft offering these services and I can see how they can be useful things for some people, the problem I have is the way they are going about it.
It is great that we have so many people working to make sure we can de-bloat Windows and turn it back into a usable platform for those of us who don't want any of these forced features. But at the end of the day this is software that we are paying for that does not respect its users.
Because we're intersubjective beings. Difference in intelligence level alienates one from the other. Past two standard deviations, anything like a "meeting of minds" becomes impossible. The only mutual interactions past that delta are economic ones (money exchanged for goods/services).
Hegel declared the Cartesian cognito can't exist in the singular. Lacan, Deleuze, Husserl, and many others said the same, that the subject is a function of its dialectic with the other. Dasein is Mitsein. There is no complete subject, floating in space by himself. Without an other, the subject cannot exist, at best becoming an object, at worst psychotic. Either way, isolation is a process towards annihilation.
If you're smart, find other smart people for authentic interaction. Likewise if you're not smart, though the problem there is easier for statistical reasons. Find them, turn off your parasocial pacifiers, and talk. You'll know it when you've found someone compatible, because you'll be able to emulate their mind, and they yours. It's not just a nice to have, but a need, a necessary component for survival. Without it, the sane you will cease to be, replaced by a zombie or a madman.
We're a species of motile organisms. Not only do we have legs, to not use them is actively unhealthy. If we're going to just sit in chairs all the time, we might as well get rid of all this useless leg biomass and redesign our houses and offices accordingly.
It's worse than this though, because that's just the physical dimension to our existence. The car is a mediating apparatus that alienates man from his social field. Man is a social animal, and needs sociality to maintain mental stability. If there's always a car between you and members of your own species, intersubjective experiences will simply occur less, which is exactly what happened when everyone got one.
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