Those phones were really convenient, taking just as much place in your pocket as needed, screen covered from being scratched by keys and other items.

Actually convenient keyboards.

It’s just that why make ergonomic, optimized for the task, price-efficient things when a piece of useless crap called iPhone makes you more.

I swear, for market economies to work you need to outlaw advertising.

There were not “affordable”, they were allocated. One could somehow improve the chance of being “given” that via connections.

And if you changed a workplace, it could be taken back. It wasn’t yours.

Except with supposed technological advancement and bigger efficiency it’s supposed to become more affordable on a competitive market, yet it doesn’t. It just becomes cheaper for the construction companies.

Soviet serial housing was better planned. There were intended green spaces and microdistricts (those didn’t turn out very well, it became apparent that they are convenient to small crime).

It’s not really “capitalism”, it’s an oligarchic system where everybody having power feels that it’s very good for them. Ask Sergey Brin if he wants to change anything. It’s the same in construction and everywhere, because why wouldn’t it be - an oligarchization of one sphere of economy leads to the same in others.

At the same time the ideas of authority and law in the Soviet space were kinda similar to what your “land of the free” is developing now. Easy to forget that in USSR your boss knew all your history of past employment, and when you’d be leaving could write something so nasty there that you’d never work anything better than janitor after them. Or that a kid living with their family in one small room of a communal apartment in a Khruschev-era serial building could go as guest to a kid living with their family in a three-room apartment in a Stalin-era special building, both given by the state, see and eat something there that they would never at home, and that was the normal degree of inequality in the USSR.

BTW, yeah, I’ve gotten a taste of mentioning the Soviet elites the justice against whom still hasn’t been restored in any way, - so my family lived in a two room apartment in a Stalin-era building (my grand-grandfather was a railways analog of an infantry general, and my grandmother is one of the architects of the Boguchan hydroelectric station), and judging from Wikipedia, Sergey Brin’s family lived in a three room apartment in such (it’s also there who his parents were). That’s about who those immigrants were who could afford to be otkazniks for a few months\years before leaving for the USA. Jackson-Vanik was basically targeted at a small subset of the Soviet elite with Jewish ancestry. Soviet antisemitism was sort of a Soviet version of “first world problems”. Again, my grandmother’s sister’s family also emigrated then.

And in western stereotypical portrayals of “how people live in (ex-)USSR” of late 80s and early 90s they too often show such living places. As if that were normal.

Yet the absolute majority didn’t.

So, one of the reasons Putin could do what he did, - the absolute majority saw how people who didn’t live too badly in the first place got an opportunity to be “liberated” and play “discount USA”, while their own workplaces which would feed them somehow stopped doing that.

It’s a very particular feeling of collective injustice when those who benefited most from a system dismantle it and blame it on those who benefited less.

So, getting back to Soviet bloc housing, interpeted as Khruschev-era. It wasn’t so bad, considering the green around and the fact that people would move there from actual wooden barracks. And Stalin-era housing wasn’t bad at all and still isn’t.

No fucking way, but mah direct democracy …

So. Switzerland doesn’t really have fully direct democracy in the necessary sense. It’s still an old nation-state with laws made in the olden day when you had to compromise. There are many cases where the “direct” part is optional and requires interested people to assemble signatures yadda-yadda. Not good enough to counter a campaign for legal change with a goal. That aside, its system encourages it to have politicians as a thing. Which means that for some issues it will always drift shitward.

It also has separation of 3 kinds of government by degree of locality, but not separation of the “an entity ensuring food safety can’t regulate telecommunications” or “an entity regulating police labor safety can’t regulate riot police acceptable action” kinds.

(Which is why I usually refer to my preference for a kind of “direct democracy” as a revised one-level Soviet system with mandatory rotation, plenty of places and sortition to state worker roles, despite that not having very good connotations.)

If you mean native American reservations, then it’s possible to leave them, there are no barbed wire fences and machine gun tops, and in general it’s not the same.

If by “ethnic” you mean not “white”, then there are probably plenty of variants.

There’s a counterpoint to that. In real hard truth, nobody is anonymous and creative handles can be traced back to a name easily.

But having pseudonyms affects human psychology. And makes people post things they wouldn’t want to be traced to them. And do things.

There was a time when it seemed that everything is insecure. That time didn’t end. Just with HTTPS everywhere and encrypted everything and with glossy appearances people have genuinely lost all understanding of the real world.

They think, metaphorically, that if there’s no name written on their door, everyone who asks can’t learn who they are.

There is also the fact that during Y2K, we didn’t have as much reliance on computers.

And we still shouldn’t.

Uniting the reliance upon long-range electric connectivity (radio, PSTN - but that now depends on computers too), the reliance upon computers (like mainframes), the reliance upon microcontrollers, the reliance upon personal computers (like Amiga 500), the reliance upon fast encryption helped by computers, the reliance upon computers used for mining cryptocoins or some beefy LLMs, the reliance upon computers capable of running Elite Dangerous, and the reliance upon computers capable of running devops clusters with hundreds of containers, - it’s wrong, these are all different.

An analog PSTN switching station shouldn’t care about dates. A transceiver generally shouldn’t too. A microcontroller doesn’t care which year it is, generally.

With an Amiga 500 one can find solutions, and it’s not too bad if you don’t.

The rest is honestly too architecturally fragile anyway and shouldn’t be relied upon as some perpetual service.

That’s also why LARPers of past scary people tend to be more cruel and trashy than their prototypes. The prototypes had a bitter solution to some problem, the LARPers are just trying to be as bad or worse because that’s remembered and they perceive that as respect.

That’d be because extrapolation is not the same task as synthesis.

The difference is hard to understand for people who think that a question has one truly right answer, a civilization has one true direction of progress\regress, a problem has one truly right solution and so on.

I personally think that the additional component (suppose it’s energy) that modern approaches miss is the sheer amount of entropy a human brain gets - plenty of many times duplicated sensory signals with pseudo-random fluctuations. I don’t know how one can use lots of entropy to replace lots of computation (OK, I know what Monte-Carlo method is, just how it applies to AI), but superficially this seems to be the way that will be taken at some point.

On your point - I agree.

I’d say we might reach AGI soon enough, but it will be impractical to use as compared to a human.

While the matching efficiency is something very far away, because a human brain has undergone, so to say, an optimization\compression taking the energy of evolution since the beginning of life on Earth.

Ah. Yeah. So when I first went to uni, I had long hair, oversize jeans and in general for me it seemed kinda hippie, but apparently made a different impression.

So there’s a moment when I stand talking to others from our group, feel a so-o-oftish touch on my shoulder and a male-made-feminine-with-effort slow voice “hi, my name’s Rustem”. I was fucking terrified.

So, not gay, but being autistic I might sometimes look that for normies. Broken signals might be perceived as gay signals or something like that.

Not really. A normal thing for most functional states 50 years ago. A comprehensive pipeline of training and preparation for various industrial and military roles.

From first aid to orientation on terrain to radio knowledge to flag signals. Flight clubs, other relevant sports, small arms disassembly and assembly. What to do in case of an emergency. Chemistry, electric engineering, mechanical engineering.

Computer games weren’t a thing, and cheap small drone planes too. But this is pretty normal, except nothing is official, because today nation-states prefer gray schemes.

And why is “non-biological” a limitation?

something that cannot, even in principle, be replicated in silicon

As if silicon were the only technology we have to build computers.

That’s him advocating for wider adoption of prison culture or what?

Also I think I’d be dumb to try to make Röhm’s stormtroopers my role models to learn empathy and kindness, and they were much into that. Or Spartans.

There’s that story about a boy who cried “wolf”.

Unless you literally mean “being put in camps”, you shouldn’t use this as a metaphor for less dangerous events.

Also … why do you even think it would be better otherwise. A reminder - the other mainstream option was that party that didn’t even care about picking a popular enough candidate. Almost a kingdom inside the nation. They literally imitated Idiocracy, thinking that’ll be popular.

Anyway, as someone in Russia - I both appreciate that you over there still have some democracy and wish for you to see the fake parts of it as early as possible.

If there’s a way to easily pay directly for pooled resources in the Internet, then you don’t have to use what big companies milking you in some other way provide.

So it would seem that what I’m proposing is less like slavery. But you do you.

By the way, nobody is forced to become a politician, so yes.

They might agree.