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Showing posts with the label Modernity

Universal Basic Incompetence

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  Universal Basic Incompetence Simplicius Last week a watershed study on UBI—Universal Basic Income—was published,  which you can find here . Particularly noteworthy is it was carried out by Sam Altman’s Open Research, a cutout of OpenAI, to test theories of UBI’s potential future impact on society, given that it’s OpenAI’s radical developments in the AI field which threaten to replace the human workforce with machines in the not-so-distant future. In essence, the study gave $1,000 dollars per month to 1,000 low-income Americans for three years, with another 2,000 people serving as control group with $50 a month. The money was given unconditionally, meaning they could spend it on anything they want, unlike various forms of Welfare with severe restrictions on its usage. It’s said to be the largest scale experiment of its type in America, though there have been others elsewhere, like a well-known  UBI pilot study in Finland in 2017 . The researchers aimed to answer a series of questions,

Democracy as Trojan Horse

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  Democracy as Trojan Horse SIMPLICIUS "Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free." -Solzhenitsyn More and more people in society lately are awakening to the fact that ‘Democracy’ is not only  not  all its cracked up to be, but that it may infact even be  unnatural . And I don’t mean that in the sense that Democracy has merely been institutionally diluted or perverted in the West by way of the various cultural erosions, political schemes, and overreaches we’re now so used to grumbling about. No, I mean that Democracy even in its  purest  form can be argued to make  no  sense for a modern world which has outgrown the scope for which the system was originally intended. Primarily, we’re talking about size. When applied to a country of sufficient size and population, Democracy loses its effectiveness as it devolves into little more than ‘mob rule’ of one region over the others. Of course, the ar

The Hoi Polloi Are Sick

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 Thanks to Saint Jimmy (Russian American) for recommending this article... The Hoi Polloi Are Sick SIMPLICIUS As things dwindle down to the wire, and the country is plunged into historic political divisions pitting one extreme against other, we’re dragged along in a frenzy of misdirected aggression. Paralyzed by limbic hijack, we resort to an imitation of each other’s motions—the wisdom of the crowds replaced with a teeming madness. One of the simplistic ideals we’ve adopted in the heat of struggle is that the government is solely the problem, and that as long as we can uproot the worst of the klepto- and kakistocrats—those entrenched deepstate fungi wracking the nation’s liverspotted trunk—the country will be freed, to blossom anew like a springtime meadow. The ‘System’ as culprit: always the same faceless, nameless System, or its shadow twin of ‘the Man’—as long as we can dethrone them, victory is guaranteed, and America will be free. But in those hallucinatory throes we ignore the i