I sometimes play out hypothetical scenarios in my head and what I'd do. I thought it would make for an interesting thread if I started listing them and getting some solutions, it might even be a learning experience as there's usually things I don't have an answer to.
So my first go:
If you broke one of your legs, how fucked would you be? How about both? That's not a threat. I was thinking about it the other night and how, frankly, I'd probably give breaking my legs a miss. My main problem is that I live up a few flights of stairs with no disabled access so I'd be trapped. I assume you can ask a delivery driver to come upstairs if you explain your position, so I wouldn't starve, but if both my legs are broken there's getting home from the hospital or going back as the legs heal.
I'd probably have to move out and live with my parents for at least a year. Do removal companies offer a service where they will pack your things up even if you don't organise? I don't much fancy my family finding my fleshlight.
It'd pay off the rest of my mortgage (I live up norf and bought the cheapest place I could even then). That in itself is a massive benefit for the rest of my life going forward. I'd probably even be able to use it as a springboard, get another mortgage and move somewhere nicer, while keeping this place on the side to rent out and make a bit of side-income. Which in turn means I could think about reducing my hours at work. Having spare time off work means I could take up a part time degree or devote time to music again and even think about making that a professional earner.
The thing is with money like that is that it doesn't have to hand you everything on a plate, it still gives you the opportunities you wouldn't have had otherwise. It gives you the flexibility to take risks you wouldn't have done otherwise. If you use it sensibly it absolutely is life changing. And this is pretty much the main thing that annoys me about most conversations about social mobility and what have you, like in that other thread- For a lot of people out there, they know exactly what they'd do to better themselves if they could. But when you don't have wealth to fall back on, doing those things is a much riskier prospect, and the hardship it entails is something people who do have that privilege simply can't get their heads around.
Even just a relatively small cash boost like that would transform my life because I'd use it wisely. In fact I'd probably only spend as little as five to ten grand of it on cocaine and prostitutes.
If we brought someone back from the Early Modern Period what do you think are the things that will shock them the most? What would be some of things we'd have to teach them to keep it under wraps where they came from?
Asking for a friend.
>>460504 That's actually once of the suggestions on boosting social mobility - every child in the country would get a cash bonus paid for with a higher inheritance tax. I don't doubt that a lot of people would piss it up the wall even if you give it at some arbitrary adult-like age such as 25, but it still sounds incredibly sensible and therefore will never be implemented.
>>460933 In all honesty, probably all the non-white people here. I doubt someone from Early Modern England would expect there to be so many Asian, black and Chinese people about.
At first I thought about something like cars, but they're essentially a mechanical horse and cart so they're a logical step of what you'd expect the future to be like. Same for things like phones being the advancement of messengers and communication. If not the ethnics then it'd probably be something like factories. If you took an Early Modern Englander and showed him how Quorn is mass produced he'd go mental.
In 1989, Boris Yeltsin - at the time the member of Congress for Moscow - travelled to the US on a goodwill visit. On a trip to the Johnson Space Center in Texas, he decided to make an impromptu visit to a local supermarket. What he saw there shook him to the core. He was astonished at the immense variety and quality of products, far better than could be found in the most luxurious shops in Moscow. He knew that this wasn't some phoney propaganda display, because he'd randomly stopped off en route at a place of his choosing. In many ways, this was one of the key precipitating events in the demise of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin spent twenty minutes browsing in a bog-standard supermarket and saw with absolute clarity that communism had failed and the Soviet system was built on a lie.
I think someone from the Early Modern Period would be most shocked by the things we take for granted. Fridge freezers, microwaves, ready meals, fitted carpets, double glazing, central heating and iPlayer. The fact that ordinary workers are nearly always warm, well fed and entertained. Louis XIV lived in the most opulent palace in the world, but he would have given you half of Normandy in exchange for a big telly, a fan heater and access to an NHS dentist.
>>460933 If they could survive all the diseases they have no immunity to long enough to get over the language barrier they'd probably be scandalised that we're all heretics.
China's ruling party is called communist, but that's more of a historical legacy than anything else. After Deng Xiaoping's visit to the south in 1992, they became something altogether different. The official ideology of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is understood by the Chinese as a novel and unique synthesis of Marxism, Confucianism and free market economics.
>>460939 What diseases would they need to worry about? Unless we're talking new tiktok dances I think we'll have more to fear from them bringing back smallpox.
China adopted a capitalist market economy to keep itself from imploding in the late 80s like all the Communist Bloc countries in Eastern Europe. It was a pact with the devil that ensured their survival as a regime. But in doing so, China violated most of the core tenets of Communist and Marxist ideology.
A few other isolated communist countries have done the same, but with varying success. Cuba has just recently formally recognised a private business sector, after decades of fighting it and making life difficult for people who tried anyway. But it's mostly struggling. Probably has a lot to do with the embargo still.
But if they never did communism, they'd still basically be in the kind of state India is today, just with noodles instead of curry. It absolutely worked, to very effectively and rapidly industrialise a country that was otherwise a good 50 to 100 years behind the rest of the world.
You can more accurately say that the command economy system failed. The ideology, or at least the power structure based on that ideology, which if you know anything about ideology you will understand is the bit that matters, remained very firmly in place and isn't going anywhere any time soon.
>>460956 India was an effective command economy until very recently as well and still is to an extent. Much more so than China actually and still is much further back on the road to opening up. India in the 20th century and its evolution from British mercantilism to Soviet-aligned ideology and then on to wealth generation in the 90s is a fascinating topic that nobody talks about because they're not especially relevant to the global economy like China is and not really innovative either - yet.
I'd say the authoritarianism worked very well in holding China together (for now) but that's a cultural legacy dividing Chinese statecraft and Indian identity that stretches back to at least the Qin dynasty. Kraut did a good video on it and how the two have polar opposite problems in a sense:
>You can more accurately say that the command economy system failed.
But you can't have one without the other unless you seriously betray the Marxist ideals that you will no doubt keep telling people you've founded your country on. Private enterprise, even if it's within institutional confines that are absent in Western market-economy democracies, is the antithesis to Marxism which strives to collectivise means of production. The latter being such a central building block of socialism or communism that softening or abandoning it pretty much means you've no longer got a true socialist or communist system to begin with. Even if your political structures and institutions still try to adhere to it.
Who gives a shit. This is the problem with most hardcore lefties themselves- Marxism is a lens of analysis that reveals the hidden dynamics of wealth and power in a "free" society, not a prescription of how to fix it. He was an influential and revolutionary thinker, but that doesn't theories he thought up 200 years ago have to be treated as the holy text and followed to the letter.
As we already established, his theories worked very well to industrialise and uplift an agrarian economy into an industrial one, and that's not surprising, given the period he lived in. The Soviet Union was rife with problems but you can't in any fair way say it failed to make Russia a powerhouse. It went from practically medieval to winning the space race in a single person's lifetime. Where that specific, orthodox strain of Marxist communism starts to collapse is in the post-industrial society, and what to do after you have uplifted all your farmer peasants into modern workers- Because of course it does, it wasn't designed for that.
In real life, you can be a true Scotsman without being a Scotsman at all.
>>460969 > The Soviet Union was rife with problems but you can't in any fair way say it failed to make Russia a powerhouse. It went from practically medieval to winning the space race in a single person's lifetime.
Authoritarian regimes do get shit done. They don't muck about and they'll have 2000 people erecting a factory or a river dam at gunpoint. Before noon the next day. Glory be to Mother Russia!
I'm obviously being sarcastic, but it's not that communism or socialism was completely incapable of accomplishing things. I guess it's how you get there.
There also isn't one explanation why the Soviet Union collapsed. Besides its inability to embrace post-industrial modernity, one theory is that the Cold War arms race against the West, combined with an increasingly consuming war in Svalbard, caused the Soviet Union to practically spend itself broke and overstretch its government and military resources, which then led to it being unable to keep its multinational empire in line.
Fun stuff, but all in your mind. I don't want you to break anything, but those "what if" things fdall apart. Learn to fight, learn boxing or BJJ, opr krav maga, th best cure is always sprint away.
There is a reason why getting licensed to be a doorman means don't rect.
And last but not least, in your mind is not in your muscles. It takes practice!
If you were having a kid, how would you decide the name of the kid? Is there a tradition?
I ask because I've noticed that people from very wealthy backgrounds seem to have a lot more thought put into it by their parents. You can tell not just because of the pretention but they have names that sound better with their surnames. There is a certain cynical logic to it of course, your name has an enormous impact on your life outcomes owing to the prejudices that exist in society and also because of nominative determinism. Ironic that the families who put the most thought into names are the ones who it probably matters least to.
I've not thought much about it, my family tradition is to name your sons and daughters after siblings but for me they all have shite names because of the examples I've met. And the cunts haven't used my name for their kids.
>>461677 Posher families tend to name their kids after their recent ancestors so the names will historically have been associated with their surname, making the pairing familiar and "right"sounding. Even if you haven't heard that exact pairing before, Anglo forenames and surnames, for example, will use a different set of phonemes than Franco or Saxon.
>>461677 I think most women figure out they're pregnant about a month or a month and a half along, which gives you about eight months to settle on a name.
All I know is that the little shits at my daughter's school tend to have the same names. Names like Alfie, Harrison or Mason. Perhaps even Jaxon. If you hear a parent screaming at a young boy in public it's likely you'll hear one of those names. These people are susceptible to fads of what current popular baby names are or naming them after celebrities or footballers; I know someone who named his kids Kylo and Ren after the new Star Wars films.
I have also noticed the people I'd class as absolute thickos seem far more likely to have had autistic kids.
>>461680 >I think most women figure out they're pregnant about a month or a month and a half along, which gives you about eight months to settle on a name.
Fess up dad-lads, how many of you ended up coming up with a name after the child was delivered?
What would you do if you became so wealthy that you and conceivably any of your descendants would never have to work again?
There's the immediate stuff, tell your boss to go fuck herself and make sure your parents are looked after but after the first week what are your plans for the rest of your life. I suspect that we're not equipped for it in the slightest but who knows, wealth could strike and upend our comfortable 9-11 lives at any moment.
I work in a terribly underfunded medical field, so I'd do at least some of what I'm doing already, but in a much, much more effective way.
I have plenty of modest and not-so-modest personal dreams that I could definitely buy my way into. I'd like to own property and land in multiple different countries (at varying degrees of remoteness), partly as "holiday" homes and partly in case shit hits the fan in a way that's out of my control in a particular region. I'd tick off all those places in the world I wanted to visit and live in, including the adventurous stuff. I'd also be stupid enough to happily splurge eight figures for one of those tourist flights into space.
Too many ideas to list, really. If you had the money to fail repeatedly and not have it affect you, the world becomes a playground really, doesn't it? Why not be an artist and a historian and an antique collector and produce wine on your own vineyards and anything else you wanted to try your hand at?
In essence, I'd spend a lot more time creating things instead of just keeping the wheels turning.
>>462680 Not have to worry.
I'd even try to have a day like Peter and just not really think but go with the flow. Not even plan about what clothes I'd wear or what I'd have for breakfast. Just have it happen there and then.
I know it sounds mundane but having enough money to never have to worry about anything really is a dream for me.
I've always said I'd keep going in to work, and just see how long I last. I work in airports so I'd have a private jet ready at a moments notice for when I decide to tell the boss to go fuck themselves.
But I think I'd last quite a while, I'd like to see if people noticed. I'd start subtle, maybe wear a Rolex to work, then maybe start showing up in an expensive but feasible car, that sort of thing. Maybe the first colleague to ask me if I've won the lottery I'd send them a million quid anonymously.
After that, I think I'd have to have something to occupy my time. Probably open a performance garage and tinker with fast cars.
I can't see myself doing anything lavish, I don't like big houses, they never feel comfortable. And I like cars but I like 90s midrange sports cars, so there's only so much I could spend on those, really.
I suppose I'd also wander around doing weird rich person stuff like talking to people at bus stops until they tell me about their being in debt and about to lose the house, then leaving them with a suitcase full of money and wandering into the sunset.
>>462766 The scenario is about what you would do with the rest of your life from that point. You don't suffer from financial insecurity so you don't have the same needs motivation that keep you productive in a capitalist society but that leaves you with the question of what you do for the rest of your life.
In a way we already know the population at large would be ruined by such a scenario thanks to lottery winners and how quickly small fortunes are lost over generations. Equally men in particular put a lot of their identity around their profession which makes them especially vulnerable when experiencing career set-backs and retirement. So it's a more serious challenge than you might think.
>>462769 Get a house and/or land on the north coast of Wales and pursue some hobbies such as learning the piano, drawing and gardening. I'd want this view for the 1 week it doesn't piss it down in Wales.
I'd travel to from time to time but I'd be content wasting my life away playing videogames and watching anime for most of my life as sad as it sounds.
It's what I enjoy after all. It may seem like a waste to another person but we're all different.
I'm aware the infinite pot of money might lead me to buy some things I may not need or want after the 1st week but I also don't see the point of luxury brands, sportscars or jewelry. I'd manage my money outside of the odd limited run and rare to find anime girl figure.
Humanity discovers a wonder gene-therapy that will dramatically raise an individuals intelligence. It's quickly made free on the NHS in the naïve hope that it will stop people tying up A&E by losing Christmas decorations up their arses.
>>468087 Most of my suffering seems to have come from being too smart for my own good. If they ever develop something that increases your intelligence then they should also develop something that decreases it so I have the choice to dumb myself down and be happy for once.
>>468087 The older I get, the more I start to question that intelligence as a concept even really exists. So many people who are clever at one thing are so epically retarded in other ways that I just don't believe in "intelligence" as people generally perceive it. So I might take your special therapy after a year or two, but I wouldn't be one of the first volunteers because it sounds like complete snake oil to me.
>>468094 I think you can recognise intelligence more by its absence. In Flowers in for Algernon (or that monkey from Futurama) it uplifted them from an IQ score that ranks as disabled but in doing so introduced them to a new existence they had to contend with.
For me; it's a tough one as what even am I if not for a collection of competencies overlaid by experiance. Would how I exist and who I am change if I added a hundred more points to the old noggin? Or to get depressing, if I went down the path of mental degradation, how far would it take for the flame of me that people will recognise slowly vanish?
I once knew a guy who was incredibly quick with numbers and made in excess of 100k a year from his top level rail networking job. He was the clumbiest arsehole I've ever known with absolutely zero self awareness or common sense.
I'd probably wanna take the limitless pill gene-therapy but what would it achieve if everyone is doing it?
>>468096 Intelligence is the capacity to learn. I believe it's broken down into numerous types, including analytical, logical, social, etc.
Psychometricians use a measure called g factor, which is based on a straightforward statistical observation - people who are good at one intellectual task tend to be good at most others. If you think back to your school days, this will become fairly obvious. The kids in the top set for maths or English tended to also be in the top set for most of their subjects and vice-versa. There's some degree of individual variation, but the overall correlation is extremely strong.
Having a high level of g doesn't make you automatically good at everything, but it does make it much easier for you to pick up new skills. people with high g tend to remember things more easily, identify general patterns and fundamental principles, and solve complex problems with less effort. People have different interests and will invest their time and effort differently in acquiring particular skills and knowledge, but that's not the same thing as "multiple intelligences".
There are lots of other factors that we often confuse with intelligence, but are really very different. Doing well at school or work relies on personality factors like conscientiousness and agreeableness - a clever person isn't likely to do especially well if they're very lazy and refuse to conform to the system. Conversely, you can probably think of people who aren't actually especially bright, but do very well because they work hard and play the game.
Executive function refers to the ability to control your attention and inhibit your impulses; it's somewhat correlated with g, but only fairly weakly. ADHD is essentially defined by executive dysfunction and people with autism often have serious issues with executive function. A lot of people with these conditions have high g and are capable of excellent performance under the right conditions, but are also very erratic and unreliable because they just can't focus on tasks at will. Clever people can still do very stupid things if they aren't paying attention or haven't bothered to think something through.
People often use the term "emotional intelligence", but that's really a misnomer - what they're describing is a set of learned skills (and to some extent a collection of personality factors), not an innate trait. We all know clever people with poor social skills, but there's not anything innate and fixed about that; those people could readily learn to be more sensitive and empathetic if they were inclined to do so.
It would be interesting to see if I had to. I have a pretty good grasp on intelligence based things like acquisition of knowledge, reasoning and problem solving, and it seems the more intelligent you get the more depressed you are, presumably because of the crushing knowledge that the world works in terrible ways.
But if everyone was Very Clever, you'd like to think we'd end up in the sort of universal basic income, work-if-you-want sort of utopia, and I don't think more intelligence would help unless I really wanted to work on something that's currently beyond my scope.
However, I'm not that optimistic, it would probably quickly become a race to become the richest smart bloke and be exactly what we're living through now, just more awful because you'd be able to justify working beyond your morals more easily if you're smart enough.
I also think the people who might need the wonder drug most would refuse to take it because, well, they wouldn't even take a vaccine.
I think, without trying to sound like a cunt, I am on the edge of being intelligent enough to risk assuming that everyone else is a fucking idiot. I don't like it, but every time I see someone else's work I typically have a criticism (that I keep to myself) as I know I'd have done it a better way. I feel the most guilt for this when I see a tradesman hasn't put my mums door handles on perfectly straight or I see a wire that was cut back too far to my eye, because I have no training other than googling things when I do them myself, who am I to judge a professional? But it's always a little niggling thought in my head about how I wish someone had done something more efficiently or just, done it properly.
I only speak up if I have absolute confidence that my knowledge might be taken seriously, like at work, but I still pick my battles and still feel awkward about doing it, even when it's actually my job to do so.
Anyway I think if I was smarter I'd be a cunt, or perhaps this flaw of being the "I wouldn't have done it like that" bloke is actually a limit of my intelligence rather than a feature of it.
>>>468100 >We all know clever people with poor social skills, but there's not anything innate and fixed about that; those people could readily learn to be more sensitive and empathetic if they were inclined to do so.
Not to nitpick your otherwise very good post, but I'd also push back a bit on the idea that "emotional intelligence" is about sensitivity and empathy. I don't know whether the academic literature has a more defined meaning, but the way "EQ" is commonly used is so flexible as to mean almost nothing. Social norms are heavily context dependent, so I would argue even naturally sensitive and empathetic people have to learn them.
>A lot of people with these conditions have high g and are capable of excellent performance under the right conditions, but are also very erratic and unreliable because they just can't focus on tasks at will
I've never been diagnosed with either but if that doesn't describe me I don't know what does. I'm good at things but my mind is just all over the place and I can't make myself focus the way ordinary people seem to be able to.
I used to have one of those annoying lasses at my old job, who always went on about how she had ADHD. I don't think anyone took her seriously because it was full of that kind of boomer attitude where any and all mental condition may as well be made up, but what pissed me off is that she had really done pretty well for herself despite this supposedly crippling condition. She didn't seem to have any issues with timekeeping, got through uni alright, had a decent career ahead of her by the looks.
I've never once asked for sympathy based on anything like that but whenever anyone has wondered why I just can't make it to work on time, that's likely the explanation. If anyone has ever wondered why I am clearly intelligent but just can't make progress in a career, that's the likely explanation. Would it ever "work" for me to start blaming it on this condition? No. Do I want to? No.
Don't know what I am really saying with this but just... I am very bitter that life has been very difficult and I have carved myself out this little niche despite how much of an uphill battle it has been every step of the way. And people will still look down on me, and other people will still piss and moan and get sympathy when they've had it so much easier. Ain't right is it.
Lads put your thinking caps on for this one: What if I went to a local men's sauna with gloryholes, do you think that I could get my dick sucked without having to do anything gay in return?
Trying to find an accompanying picture revealed that there's a surprising amount of dicks on wikipedia commons.
Yes, especially if you make it known that you're straight. A lot of gay men have a thing for straight guys, to the point that it's a standard theme in gay porn.
>People spend one-third of their lives asleep. What if employees could work during that time … in their dreams?
>Prophetic, a venture-backed startup founded earlier this year, wants to help workers do just that. Using a headpiece the company calls the “Halo,” Prophetic says consumers can induce a lucid dream state, which occurs when the person having a dream is aware they are sleeping. The goal is to give people control over their dreams, so they can use that time productively. A CEO could practice for an upcoming board meeting, an athlete could run through plays, a web designer could create new templates—“the limiting factor is your imagination,” founder and CEO Eric Wollberg told Fortune.
http://fortune.com/2023/11/30/lucid-dream-startup-prophetic-headset-prepare-meetings-while-sleeping
This is probably seeing the first models ship later in the year so what do you lads reckon. If we could control our dreams and use them for productive activity what would you use it for? How quickly do you reckon this technology would become ubiquitous for workplace activity - say you do that corporate L&D in your sleep for a few hours?
>>470380 I would resist any attempt to monopolise my rest time for labor. Sounds fucking hellish. Would like to force the CEO to have to work when awake and asleep for the rest of their rotten life.
>>470380 I suspect dreams happen for a reason and making a habit of replacing them with 1) conscious thought that's 2) on a specific theme, is going to have significant negative outcomes. We wouldn't have evolved to spend one-third of our lives hallucinating wildly in a defenceless coma if it wasn't strictly necessary to function.
My guess is mid to long term users will start developing symptoms of sleep psychosis and early onset dementia.
>>470380 It genuinely astounds me how gullible you pair can be some times.
Once again though, I am ashamed of my own inability to pull off a proper techno-scam. It's been blatantly clear for half-a-decade now that you can claim any old bollocks and stand a good chance of some VC money falling into your lap.
>>470386 VC money in the UK tends to be pretty poisonous, from what I've seen and experienced. Better off just rinsing some crypto muppets imho.
Maybe it's just that the companies I was involved in weren't nearly scammy enough. Ah, except for a 3D printer bunch, they were fantastic, but that wasn't VC, that was a well executed pump & dump run from the shell of a listed company.
