• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 29th, 2023

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  • At a certain point, even with an ever-expanding number of lanes, everyone having their car becomes limiting not freeing. Because we’re all on the roads all at the same time all the time, it takes longer to get places and we have to spend more of our time planning on the off-chance there might be traffic because a short drive to Tacoma could be 30 minutes or 2 hours. It doesn’t make you feel free to do what you want, because everyone else is also using their freedom to the point that everything is clogged and backed up all the time and everyone is so tired of it all they’ve taken to driving like maniacs since the pandemic.

    This is what toxic individualists don’t understand about collectivism: sacrificing a little bit of freedom can get you more freedom in the long run. I sacrifice the freedom to kill random people and in exchange I get freedom from most of the fear of being randomly murdered. I sacrifice the freedom to throw mercury in the garbage and I gain freedom from mercury poisoning. I sacrifice the freedom of driving straight out of my driveway onto a big ugly stroad and I gain the freedom to walk safely out of my front door onto a nice quiet street.








  • I don’t think there’s any way to knit a tubular sock on straight needles; the geometry doesn’t allow it. You can knit a sock flat and then sew it up into a tube, but it would look different from the comic.

    Edit: actually now that I’ve thought about it more, I think there is a way but it would be super annoying (slip every other stitch so you’re knitting the back and front of the tube at the same time, that might work…). Basically the equivalent of writing a letter by writing every other word and then going back to fill in the rest. Possible, but no reason to do it.







  • Here’s a post by one of the coiners of the term: https://xriskology.substack.com/p/tescreal-faq

    We cannot know what Musk actually believes, of course. He claims that longtermism is “a close match for my philosophy,” and has made other statements suggesting he’s a longtermist (see question #3). However, it is possible that tech billionaires like Musk came across longtermism and realized that it provides a superficially plausible moral excuse for what they want to do anyways: colonize space, merge our brains with AI, and so on, while ignoring the plight of the global poor.

    Longtermism and the other TESCREAL ideologies naturally appeal to tech billionaires because these ideologies tell them exactly what they want to hear: not only are you excused from caring about “non-existential” risks like global poverty, but you are a morally better person for focusing on space colonization, jumpstarting the next stage of human evolution, etc.