[talove]

Axie Infinity isn't interesting as a game, but as a model it is.

The other day I was going through air port security. I had to wait 10 minutes for one of my bags to be screened a second time. I happened to be waiting while some type of manager was doing a huddle for a new shift of employees about to start.

The dumb shit the manager was telling the group of 12-15 TSA workers was abhorrent. Just really vile statements about how to interact with people going through the security lines.

It dawned on me that the only rationale for this completely useless facade of stress inducing security was simply that these were low-income workers who needed a job, and we're subsidizing it through various types of taxes.

I believe Axie Infinity is dumb, but so are much bigger things around us that we talk much less about. However, Axie Infinity is a good model for a way of creating economies to support people who need jobs. What might help society is if, instead of time wasting games, and meaningless security jobs we paid people to learn valuable skills through a gaming like system.

[pydry]

The TSA was created and Afghanistan was invaded because America felt like it needed a proportionate response to 9/11.

Locking cabin doors was sufficient to prevent it but didnt "feel" like nearly enough.

[throwaway0a5e]

Afghanistan was invaded because the people in charge of it were tragically unwilling to turn over their unruly house guests and we were tragically unwilling to demand they do so in a contextually appropriate way. I think it is probably one of the biggest tragedies of foreign diplomacy in recent US history.

In hindsight the Taliban probably could have negotiated a "we'd love to get rid of the terrorists but we need your help" deal and then just let us pump them full of military aid on the condition that they add the groups we want to their list of persecuted people. It's not like we hated them out of principal. These were the same guys we armed to kick out the Russians. Taking a page straight out of the South America playbook would not have been that big a stretch.

[pydry]

>Afghanistan was invaded because the people in charge of it were tragically unwilling to turn over their unruly house guests

The Taliban were invaded because they refused to hand over bin Laden without the US supplying evidence that he was guilty.

It's hard to overestimate just how much the US was baying for blood at that point. It's plausible that waiting for evidence might have meant paying a high political price.

This bloodlust was later channeled into manufacturing consent for the invasion of Iraq.

[slx26]

Agree with the first part of the comment, but at the end, when you say:

>> "what might help society is if [...] we paid people to learn valuable skills"

We actually have plenty of very qualified people, both with academic titles and without them, but many of them are still doing jobs that don't "make society better". The problem is that we used tech to cut the time and labor required to do most things, but we haven't freed that time for people, we only keep distributing the benefits of those "improvements" unevenly.

And the real problem is that even if you were to redistribute them evenly, when there's low pressure, abundance of resources and an environment that provides more than what you are consuming, any species will start having more offspring, until the pressure increases and you are in trouble again (kinda like a malthusian trap). We could only escape that limit if we were able to create unlimited space habitats or our population growth rates were slower than the time it took us to find and travel to new planets. Some might argue that the systems will self-regulate, but self-regulation only happens in high pressure states, and that means that a lot of people is suffering under them.

The fact is that we don't need much, and we already have it. The problem to solve is not to become better or faster or more efficient at producing and creating more. The problem to solve is to collectively find a compromise on how much we want to have and design mechanisms to keep us in that sustainable lane. Not sure that's possible, but it's the only approach to "help society" that I really believe in.

[bagels]

What were the vile statements?