Yeah, that’s what I mean with conjunctive instead of disjunctive.

The original idea is the stereotype of autistic children who start screeching when something happens that they don’t want.

The underlying phenomenon is people failing to cope with discomfort induced by things others don’t perceive as uncomfortable. I’m not a psychologist, this is more an informal way to express my own experiences.

For example, a person (possibly, but not necessarily autistic) with sensory issues may find grocery store visits unbearable if the lighting of that store triggers that discomfort, or the hum of the AC, or the general noise of the place. Trying to ignore this discomfort may work for a while, trying to block the triggers may help, focusing on some reward or comfort may help the brain hold on to more pleasant thoughts, but if those fail, eventually the brain will reach a point of overload.

It’s particularly bad when some method of coping suddenly fails or the discomfort spikes suddenly. If I was trying to make it through a grocery trip by promising myself some comfort food, then reach the shelf where that food is supposed to be and find it empty, that cuts quite a gash into my mental barrier. Some noises, when unexpected and loud enough, can bring me all the way from “calm” to “overload” in an instant

The exact reaction can differ, with some options being less visible. I usually enter a type of dissociation where only the most routine things still work (like beelining for the checkout, paying and getting the fuck out of there, rest of the grocery list be damned), but since I still function to some degree, it might not look like an overload.

The most visible reaction is probably when the “dam” trying to contain the discomfort breaks so violently that it turns into acute pain, with the result looking much like you’d expect someone in acute pain to react: screaming.

Thus, the most noticeable expression of Autism in people you don’t know is probably when something seemingly minor sends them over that edge. You don’t see the buildup, you don’t see the other ways people deal with the discomfort, you might not even understand the discomfort itself, but you see a child suddenly breaking down and screeching.

There are other things too, like breaking from established patterns, but this is getting top long already. The mechanisms is similar, in any case: The break from the pattern produces discomfort, a sudden break producing sudden discomfort, which can lead to the same kind of overload.

Really, the metric we should be looking at is (f+a)/b where f is some subjective weighted measure of functionality, a of aesthetic value and b describes the bloat.

That’s multiplicative, no? Conjunctive rather than disjunctive.

I suggest to remedy what must clearly be a misunderstanding, we give him a deep and personal insight: Cut him off from all of his assets, give him nothing but a set of cheap clothes and kick him to the curb.

Of course, we’d need to make sure his billionaire buddies don’t help him, but maybe we can just enroll them in this experiment too.

Actually, they might just promise someone a reward once they get access to their funds again, so we need to make sure that this can’t influence the experiment. Maybe we could just seize the assets without giving them back? With their hard work, surely they can get back to where they were, pulling bootstraps and all.

When he called them shitholes, I’m starting to think that might have been geopolitical tsundere.

Is it 13? I bet it’s 13. Bloody thing keeps making trouble.

You mean like Sulla?

When the counterattack drives you back and you lose all that ground again: Suprised Pikachu

Man, I gotta get around to making some of these myself. I just never have the time, tools and ideas all at once.

If anyone is interested in a historically nuanced look at the topic, this blog series is enlightening.

(You knew this was coming, didn’t you?)

Idiots participate in Bigger Idiot scheme, upset to find out they’re the Bigger Idiot.

Hard to predict.

This act broke the taboo against violence and shattered the perception of powerlessness. Turns out there is something you can do against these assholes, and it’s not as unpopular an option as you might have expected.

It may inspire imitation, emboldening other pissed victims. It may scare the other CEOs into treading more carefully. It might embolden progressive politicians to challenge the status quo, now that they see how popular that can be.

Or it might end up a big ball of hot air that doesn’t do anything. Like I said, hard to predict.

He uses a pencil, paper and a mechanical calculator to tally up the bill, which I absolutely understand when your career is in IT.

When the alternative is either having to search, evaluate, compare, select and configure an application for that purpose that you’re never quite happy with, or to scope, design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, eternally find things you wish you’d done better, refactor, realise you’re spending your free time on doing more of your job, regret your life choices, resolve to only make this last improvement and then call it good enough, renege on that promise to yourself a week later, burn out, curse that damn app for ruining your hobby…

…yeah, using the most trivial low-tech solution possible does look rather sensible.

I think it’s a symptom of the age-old issue of missing QA: Without solid QA you have no figures on how often your human solutions get things wrong, how often your AI does and how it stacks up.

Imagine you have a sandwich to spare. You could really use a drink though. There’s a hungry guy with a drink to spare, and he’d give it to you in exchange for the sandwich. That’s trading.

Now imagine you run a sandwich shop. You need things like bread and toppings. If you just give your sandwiches away with nothing in return, you’ll run out of ingredients. No more sandwiches :(

So you need someone to give you sandwich ingredients. They also don’t just want to give their things away, because they also need other things.
Not everyone who has bread or toppings to share needs a sandwich though. A baker, for example might need flour. The miller might need grain. The farmer however does need a sandwich.
So to get your bread, you’d trade your sandwich to the farmer for some grain, that grain to the miller for flour, the flower to the baker and finally get your bread.

That’s a bit tedious though, so instead you all agree on a token of some value representing the work you put in to make this. You give your sandwich to the farmer in exchange for such a token, then go to the baker and trade it for bread. The baker trades it for flour, the miller for grain. That token is money.

Now, how do you get that token? Someone needs to have it first, after all, and give it to the farmer so the farmer can buy a sandwich. They’ll want something in return too, eventually - maybe they don’t need anything right now, but they will somewhere down the line, and they need to have that token back for that. That’s a loan.

Now, the farmer gave the token back, but the lender gave them a larger set of tokens. They used it to buy a better plow that helped them cultivate a larger area, netting them more grain they can trade for tokens. After giving the loaned tokens back, he’ll still have some left over. That’s profit.

Now one farmer starts gathering more tokens, because he got particularly lucky, and offers some to other people in exchange for a share of their land. Those other people had a bad year and desperately need some food, which the tokens can buy. In the long run, trading away their land will leave them off worse, but the short term is more important. That’s exploiting the misery of others.

The lucky guy, on the other hand, can’t work all that land himself, so he offers to let the less lucky ones work on his land in exchange for a portion of the tokens their work brings in. Again, they need that money to compensate the fact they now have less land, so they agree. That’s labour.

Notice how the lucky guy gives them a portion of their labour’s worth? He keeps the rest, for the privilege of owning that land he bought from them in the first place. That’s landlording.

He uses some of his profit to pay others to enforce his claim to that land. He uses some to buy more land. He uses his control of the majority of grain supply to leverage the miller into selling his mill too (although a skilled miller is worth a lot, so the lucky guy keeps the poor miller on as a labourer too). That’s concentration of wealth.

Eventually, he can use all that surplus to buy draft animals and more plows to make the farming even more effective. Obviously, his own lands benefit first, then he lets the poorer farmers pay to use these as well. By controlling the means of production, he forces the labourers into dependency at unfavourable terms. That’s exploitation.

Now, all that extra money from surplus grain can fund more things that aren’t food production. That enables the development of specialists in other areas, and due to it being non-perishable, the money can also be allowed to trade things across greater distances, because merchants can now use it to buy food and other things along the way instead of having to trade locally. Technologies, tools, material and luxuries all reach a broader customer base. That’s an economy.

Of course, due to the majority of the money being controlled by a few lucky people, those people end up affording most of the luxuries while the rest has to work hard for a living. That’s oligarchy.

Eventually, the steam engine is invented and heralds an age of industry. However, setting up factories to effectively harness the productive capability of those machines requires a lot of up-front investment for the machines, space, infrastructure and administration required to operate it efficiently. There just so happens to be a group of people with the wealth to fund all these things, and just as they controlled the land, the grain supply, the mills and so on, they now control the means of production.

Now imagine if the poor farmers were bailed out by a communal fund instead - a form of social safety net to catch them that they all pay into in good years, knowing a bad year won’t ruin them. They could afford communal draft animals and plows, they could fund an administrative apparatus to enable all those advantages of a monetised society, a military to secure them against the jealousy of greedy neighbours, all without parasites growing fat off of their sweat. Pretty sure there’s a name for that too.