There's a sense in which this isn't the most practical choice -- general purpose synths (software or hardware) and libraries available for most runtimes give you all the power you need to create the bleeps and bloops.
But there's also something good about old things and limited things being put to good use, and finding ways for creativity to thrive in constraints.
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea and all that, but this is another pgsql "solution" that is tied to the database layer, when it should be in the application layer.
I like to be database agnostic, and while I prefer PostgreSQL on production, I prefer SQLite on the dev layer. You should never have to HAVE TO use a specific database to make your APPLICATION work.
You either win big enough under the current system, with its system problems, or you never win to improve it.
Imagining better systems before doing that is just a form of xkcd’s nerd sniping.
And the biggest challenge to representative government might well be that most people are terrible at engaging it productively. Voting is the bare minimum and most people don’t vote (let alone organize and lobby effectively). Some significant portion of those that do vote can’t correctly draw a line between policies they’d like and candidates who intend to work on delivering, and that’s before we get to the portion of the population that may not correctly anticipate policy outcomes or even really understand policy as a concept.
The system has actually been functioning surprisingly well considering, and as catastrophic as recent elections could be seen as, the outcome arguably represents a reasonable degree of fidelity to the input from the electorate.
If we still hold free and fair elections, the task of those who want representative government is to change enough of the electorate first.
The Stoics are explicitly mentioned in Acts of the Apostles, but I think a better way to think about it is that the framework of "Virtue" as "Conforming to your Nature" is a very useful one for understanding the gospels, as was developed extensively starting in the mid 1200s.
Don’t forget the practical ability to dissipate waste heat on top of producing energy. That’s an upper limit to all energy use unless we decide boiling ourselves is fine, or find a way to successfully ignore thermodynamics, as you say.
We can always build a sunshade in the Earth-Sun L1. Make it a Sun facing PV panel pointing radiators away from us and we can power a lot of compute there (useful life might be limited, but compute modules can be recycled and replaced, and nothing needs to be launched from Earth in this case).
There’s really no crisis at a certain level; it’s great to be able to drive a car to the trailhead and great to be able to hike up the mountain.
At another level, we have worked to make sure our culture barely has any conception of how to distribute necessities and rewards to people except in terms of market competition.
Oh and we barely think about externalities.
We’ll have to do better. Or we’ll have to demonize and scapegoat so some narrow set of winners can keep their privileges. Are there more people who prefer the latter, or are there enough of the former with leverage? We’ll find out.
Great comment. The best part about it as well is that you could put this under basically anything ever submitted to hacker news and it would be relevant and cut to the absolute core of whatever is being discussed.
I’m acquainted with people who act and speak like they’re flipping a Hitler-Pope coin.
Which more closely fits Solzhnetsin’s observation about the line between good and evil running down the center of every heart.
And people objecting to claims of absolute morality are usually responding to the specific lacks of various moral authoritarianisms rather than embracing total nihilism.
There's a sense in which this isn't the most practical choice -- general purpose synths (software or hardware) and libraries available for most runtimes give you all the power you need to create the bleeps and bloops.
But there's also something good about old things and limited things being put to good use, and finding ways for creativity to thrive in constraints.
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