Ben Taylor @VoxDei@qoto.org

@cstross Fusion power actually worries me. Because it comes with the implicit assumption that when our power is "clean" we can use as much of it as we like. And we can't: Earth can only shed waste heat via well-understood radiation into space. Which isn't enough if our power usage continues to increase at its current rate, even "clean" we cook ourselves within a couple of centuries.

@freemo @trinsec But a) it's not just wages, it's also safety and other conditions and b) it's easy to establish what your competitors' wages are. No collusion is required, it's just supply and demand.

Also c) we aren't talking about entities with equal power. An individual worker generally has essentially no power over their employer to force them to negotiate things in good faith, but must accept what they are given. Only in negotiating collectively does that change, and even then it's still imbalanced, because only strikes give a truly effective lever, and those are a nuclear option.

@freemo @trinsec But from the workers' point of view, whether the company is gouging its customers by price fixing is irrelevant to how it treats its staff. If the company is telling its workers to work in ways that are unsafe, or it is failing to reward them adequately for their work, why shouldn't they band together to stop it?

You are conflating collective action by people with collective action by companies. The latter is used to extract wealth from customers (people) and give it to legal entities that are not people (companies). The former is the opposite. Since we want wealth in society to sit with people, where it can do some good for them, not in a company's bank account (or their shareholders'), it is reasonable to permit one and forbid the other.

Collective action by workers created weekends, paid holidays, paid maternity care, safety standards for workers and a variety of other benefits. Without it there is nothing to counterbalance the power imbalance between a company and its workers. Companies have huge resources, workers do not, they have to have means for their own protection.

@freemo @trinsec All strikes are is people refusing to work. If you say "No matter what you do to your employees, those employees are obliged to either accept it or resign (and then be unable to feed their families)" then what you have is slavery.

Incidentally, if you're going to invoke contract enforcement to counter that, when you look into it employment contract law in the UK is utterly toothless. Other than setting wages, employment contracts here are legally barely worth the paper they're written on.

@mwl @cstross @lilithsaintcrow That's the first time I've seen someone say they can't find information because of AI-generated noise swamping the signal. I'm sure it won't be the last.

Out of interest, how do you tell the difference? I'm sure some things make elementary errors, but some presumably don't, while still not being trustworthy. Or is that the problem?

@jack @A_C_McGregor Well, the article describes the side-eye as being missing from the original, and once it's been pointed out it does look pretty fake...

@keith @darwinwoodka @A_C_McGregor If you say that's what you're doing, sure. If you claim it's truth then you're just contributing to the degradation of political discourse in this country.

You don't beat the liars by lying more. That just lets them argue everyone's the same and who cares if I have no integrity, because neither does my opponent.

@A_C_McGregor Yes. Except it's fake. I'm no Tory fan, but there's enough real shit they've spread around without needing to resort to making things up.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/aug/02/labour-mp-criticised-for-sharing-doctored-image-of-rishi-sunak?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

@daskeit @ravenonthill @cstross @FeralRobots @xriskology

Is it? I'm not a philosopher, I haven't read Kant et al, so maybe I'm way off. But it seems to me that all the perception of time passing is, is the perception that event B follows event A (whether or not it actually does).

The actual nature of time and what we would perceive in its absence is irrelevant to the question of whether we would eventually get bored, as long as our brains continued to process as before (and therefore we would perceive time whether it existed or not).

And if they didn't continue to process as before (much more likely, IMO!) then we have ceased to be human. At that point, you have died and been replaced by something that just thinks it's you.

@daskeit @ravenonthill @FeralRobots @xriskology Actually @cstross there's a Laundry idea for you. A Christian sect that has worked out how to actually bring about the Second Coming, for real, and with absolutely everyone to spend the rest of eternity in heaven. Any true Christian is surely duty-bound to support that, and yet a bit of thought reveals either it's an utter horror, or else you have lost the capability of boredom and are therefore no longer human.

@daskeit @ravenonthill @cstross @FeralRobots @xriskology (In case it wasn't obvious, I am arguing that heaven is another fictional utopia. Just one that, unlike the dictatorship of the proletariat or whatever libertarians think their end-state is, its proponents aren't expected to actually produce when they get the chance.)

@daskeit @ravenonthill @cstross @FeralRobots @xriskology Yeah, but if time isn't passing, how are you experiencing it? If you can think, time is passing in some form, and at that point it's probably worse because it'll take you about ten minutes to get bored, and then you're trapped.