> Every nation that was a heart of an empire still has lingering class issues

What nation on Earth doesn't have class issues?

Nations that didn't have their own feudal aristocracies.

I've never met a "privacy is irrelevant" advocate that doesn't close the door when they go to the toilet

He literally considers Saruman the good guy, Mordor the good place, and Gandalf the bad guy (holding back technological progress)

Discussed previously e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901389

It’s based on a retelling of the story that isn’t as black and white and more based around the idea that technology and progress are good.

I haven’t read it but the premise is quite cool. Of course having Thiel as a fan kinda ruins it but I still wanted to read it sometime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer

Well if the stories where realistic the shire would overproduce people in 3 generation and then export miserable mercenaries ala afghanistan for the rest of days.

Remember also that tires (deformation) and the like sap energy too

Related "income tax when I earn the money, sales tax when I spend the money, taxes on my investment returns, it never ends!"

Yes indeed, because macroeconomics is ultimately a giant circle!

The problem with real economics is that it isn't, but since economists told themselves that it is, they have no interest in making it so.

> There is no evolutionary pressure for you to die

> what happens to organisms outside their reproductive cycle is pretty much irrelevant to natural selection

Certainly seems plausible for that to create evolutionary pressure: why have organisms still consuming resources if they're no longer contributing to reproduction / natural selection?

> Also, it is obvious that death has "levels"

Don't stop at the organism level. Your body is made of cells, cells are made of organelles, etc., but society/culture/language is made up of individuals, and those higher-level entities also compete and adapt and flourish or die. It's natural selection all the way...up

I think it can become diluted to a meaningless term, or co-opted to mean different things to different audiences (not to sidetrack from the point but the first two examples I can think of what I mean are "fake news" or "woke")

So you're not wrong at all, but I think there's also a significant difference when the personalized algorithms come into play, which can segregate people into their own epistemological echo chambers

I suppose I'd summarize as

1. I don't think we have a precise term for the actual thing, and "social media" is one loose term people use for it

2. There's a spectrum for this, maybe multidimensional:

* Does it display the same reality for everyone? For example obviously true social media will be different depending on your friends, but chronological vs engagement are different. Even new reddit and old reddit I think differ here too

* Infinite scrolling? Or specific page advancement?

* Text? Pictures? Video? (Video duration?) Each one is different

So in that respect, sure, they're all social media, but they're very different, and I think there's probably combinations of those features that result in very different effects/harms

I'm guessing they are referring to a certain synonym for idiot/moron/imbecile/cretin/dolt/etc. which fell off the euphemistic treadmill

Yeah, that's the Linus "hard R" (he thought "hard R" referred to "retard"), but it's just wrong. "Hard R" is "nigger", in opposition to soft r ("nigga"). I don't think there's even a question, that's how hard/soft has always been used. Anything else is just confusion, I think.

That would be the “Linus Sebastian misconception”

Ok, but I can't possibly be the only one who has no idea who that is, let alone what misconceptions they have.

There is a thing called Google, "Linus Sebastian Hard R" is full of information.

Twitter too, right?