Maxmind is the quintessential example of what devs want to build in their heart of hearts. Low-touch sales but b2b. Almost a monopoly. Prints money for decades. Not a public company so they never increase costs to a usurious amount. Open source never quite meets the level needed
Why shouldn't every single person on earth immediately be granted citizenship to America and allowed access to all forms of welfare given to citizens? It's unfair to them
America is weird in that the poorest get significantly more benefits than the merely lower-middle class. And the majority of Americans pay no federal tax after EITC and other refunds.
You can get SNAP (free food), Section 8 (free housing), Medicaid (healthcare, CHIP for kids is easier than adults, but still many people get it), and if you manage to raise smart kids despite poverty they will get college for free as well (most highly-selective universities are free for the poor, but extremely expensive for even the middle class).
I own a lot of rental property and I have a Section 8 tenant who has never worked, completely gamed the system with a subjective disability that renders her unable to ever hold a job (supposedly). A good tenant but is constantly trying to give away tons of food she buys because she always tries to spend the SNAP she gets every month. And she gets free heat, and electricity, and public transportation pass, and on and on.
What a weird take: I'd definitely expect the poorest/sickest to get the most additional benefits of all, the middle to get none and the top to get charged extra to cover up.
If you're middle class, that should be the average and that means you only get things which are the foundation of the system covered by the taxes.
Let me elucidate why this system kind of sucks, as someone else who knows someone personally who lives a "full benefits" poverty life.
These benefits are binary, not tiered, so once you earn a dollar over the incredibly low threshold, they vanish. So the person I know cannot get a job and work, because if they earn over ~$16k in a year all the benefits go away. And where she lives you need about $50k/yr minimum to scrape by. So there is this $34k/yr gap which creates a no-mans land of livelihood.
In addition to income, there are extremely low "wealth" qualifiers. You cannot save money while on most of these programs to try to improve your situation or build a personal safety net. If you manage to save more than a couple thousand dollars, you become ineligible for benefits.
> So there is this $34k/yr gap which creates a no-mans land of livelihood.
it also creates/necessitates a vast enforcement bureaucracy to make it all "work" which in itself is a huge waste when you could just tax it back from high-earners at the end of the tax year... its almost as if it was designed to suck
The problem with these discussions is the errant use of poor/middle/upper/top as class identifiers.
The more useful identifiers would be roughly young and/or working, and old and/or non working. The latter category also covers the beneficiaries of wealthy people (who are among the old and/or non working).
The USA (and many countries, especially democracies) has a situation where your expected quality of life is lower (or not sufficiently higher) for the young and working than the young and non working for those not lucky enough to be born to the right families or prudent enough to make the right choices in school, etc.
The incentives should always be such that expected quality of life is always greater for those working than non working.
Note that this is a different topic than whatever the floor for quality of life should be.
You are saying this with completely forgetting that the vast majority of the people who are old and non working are in fact, retired, sick, on medicaid, and generally just not that great at working in the first place because they already (most of the time) spent 40+ years working.
Why would the person who spent 40+ years working have a worse quality of life than someone whose spent 10 years working? The incentives you put up basically say "as soon as you are done we're sending you to the glue factory."
> The incentives you put up basically say "as soon as you are done we're sending you to the glue factory."
Those are the incentives nature puts up.
>Why would the person who spent 40+ years working have a worse quality of life than someone whose spent 10 years working?
Depends how much they earned and saved. Current workers (proxy for young) know they will not have a quality of life as good as those that have already worked decades past, so where is their incentive?
>because they already (most of the time) spent 40+ years working.
But they (at least these first few generations) are receiving healthcare worth far more than the work they did, tenable only due to the higher total fertility rates of many decades ago.
At its root, these deferred benefit schemes were either never sustainable for modern lifespans and healthcare consumption, or they depended on unrealistically high total fertility rates. One could even say they played a role in causing lower total fertility rates, as society de-coupled raising one's own productive children and having a good quality of life post working age, since you could now depend on others' productive children.
Money, savings, and other wealth abstractions that legislators can easily bring about don't materialize the goods and services one might want to buy.
The whole point of retirement saving is so that you can still support yourself after your mind and body can. Just about everyone is aware of this, yet many still save nothing because "society will deal with it" when they get older.
When I was younger I had an easy time buying into "everything is too expensive to save money", now that I am older, past the "you must start saving now" age, I know way way too many people who don't save for retirement and live stupidly beyond their means.
"We don't have any retirement savings because how could we give up eating out 1-2 times a week, $250 monthly beauty appointments, $90 gym membership (they have clean warm towels!), and our annual Disney vacation and our family Lake Tahoe trip. And no way will you catch me in a 5 yr old used car, sorry I cannot sacrifice my new car leases!"
I know so many more people who recklessly spend money than people who honestly are trying but cannot make it.
The US has a weird class stratification system, that some people think has been embedded into society dating back to the Calvinist New England and slaveholding days.
It's developed since then in interesting ways and shows up everywhere. The biggest thing is that each cohort looks down on those "beneath" them. This manifests in different ways... people living in public housing, getting housing and typically SNAP benefits, will often scoff at people collecting temporary assistance (cash) as loafers.
If you're looking at families, the prevailing rent in Onondaga County, NY (Syracuse) is $1475 for a two-bedroom apartment. "Prevailing" rent is the metric used for Section 8 is essentially the price floor for an adequate apartment. The median household income in the county is $74,000, which is 23% rent to income ratio, so pretty good, right? (Keep in mind, this is from a not so great apartment that passes Section 8 inspection, but little else) Eh, not really, the well-off suburbs skew the statistic... if you look at the City of Syracuse, more representative of the blue collar working class and poor, the median income is $45,500 -- 39% rent to income. The median household in the city requires some support to live -- in Syracuse that's like 70,000 people
As you see purchasing power decline for working people, traditional "middle class" respectable jobs are falling off the ladder in terms of livability. A parent in a 90% of retail and semi-skilled labor jobs is making $80-90k max, and is basically a car disaster away from financial ruin. Many, many of these people are stuck with non-dischargeable student debt for life as well.
through my eyes i see a similar implication to disproprortionate judicial punishment - aspects of a hegemonic system designed to suppress individual voices. for example, pirates in the UK being handed jail terms of greater duration than those given to individuals having killed other humans - people daring to go against the powerful have their lives taken away from them, whereas infighting within the working class is almost encouraged by miniscule sentencing.
or in this case, why bother putting any effort into life when doing nothing provides a greater reward? why attempt to make something of oneself at the risk of losing everything forever?
all in all, whether or not intentionally curated, these societal facets serve to foment an atmosphere of fear - individuals are forced to exist either in ignorance, or otherwise must live with the knowledge that minor infractions may end one's dreams, while concurrently one's dreams may be ended at any time for no reason but the whim of another.
such a dichotomy between ignorance and fear effectively suppresses societal change, which if it were to happen anyway, would be instantly detected by automated surveillance, and promptly quashed under fully legal pretences. but that's not even necessary. the populace is already addicted to living vicariously through screens (now from birth thanks to parents being forced to devote energy to work instead of their children).
The say you write about it, being poor in America is easy and great. And then you look at powerty in America and see hopeless desperate people with no access to justice,lite chances in life, little access to healthcare and raising homelessness on top of it.
And funny enough, the poor are just about to loose their healthcare and food stamps via big beautiful bill. Which is official name of that bill.
You're so programmed to knee-jerk about some political bullshit that you're not thinking.
These companies are making defective drugs and shipping them to people. The only thing preventing that from happening in the United States is the regulatory system, which we are in the process of smashing.
I would argue the system is designed for efficiency. Economic solutions to this problem are about introducing legally-mandated inefficiencies, like limiting competition or artificially increasing labor costs
Efficiency for extracting money from poor people to mega corporations? Seems to me there isn't really a lot of competition left since theres a handful of main players that just buy out smaller competitors.
Water systems generelly cover the whole city, often more than one city in a MSA, not just a community. There are community water systems but most are bigger.
They have clean running water because of the ordinary people who work to provide it and maintain the pipes.
They have light and television because of the ordinary working people who work at and maintain electricity plants and design, sell, assemble electrical products.
These things exist despite the billionaire leeches not because of them.
Successful musicians have way more in common with actors than any other profession. It’s about connections, wealth, and nepotism over anything else.
Let’s say your child wants to be an actor. One way to make this happen is to be a successful actor yourself - require your children to be cast in the film in return for you starring. This is how famous acting families pushed their kids forwards, including Nicholas Cage (Coppola) and Jeff Bridges.
More relevant for HN is rich people. So you are tech rich and your kid wants to act. Fund the movie on the condition your child acts in it. That is the way since movies began.
I suspect it is more likely that rich people will fund their actor-aspirant children more convention ways:
When they are younger they could pay for acting classes, acting camps and help them get into local productions.
Out of school they pay for livings costs, education and any additional classes. Living in New York or LA and being able to concentrate on getting parts of training rather than having to make money would be a huge boast.
Maybe at the next stage getting their kid an agent or manager who has contacts and experience to get their kid the roles.
Perhaps you mean throwing a few thousand dollars at student-level films to ensure their kid gets an important part. I guess maybe some will write 6 (7?) figure cheques to get their kid a part, but that probably doesn't happen often.
> Fund the movie on the condition your child acts in it.
The customer of such a movie isn’t the audience but the wealthy patron sponsoring the movie. I suspect this self-promotion motivation is a large reason why so many movies are so bad.
So many movies are bad because their customer is, intellectually, the minimum common denominator. It's a miracle that movie plots don't consist entirely of grunts, chest pumping and farts, but we are getting closer and closer every year. Most block-busters have an awful lot of primal violence in them, but I bet you can't remember when was the last time any of them had any accurate, actual science.
As a film maker who studied film, the reason why so many movies are so bad are manyfold:
- making movies is hard. A lot of things that require years to master need to go right. A *ton* of tech is involved.
- making movies is expensive. Money alone won't make you a good movie, but many productions are so on the edge that some choice they had to make for monetary reason will cause the bad.
- making movies is complex, that means making a masterful one requires multiple botched attempts and experiences by all people involved. These botched attempts are also what you see.
I can't stress enough how hard making a movie is, even in comparison to complicated tech problems, programming etc.
Yes and the fact that you grew up with e.g. actor parents means you know a lot about acting and the world it takes place in and the language used within it already, just like the kid of a farmer will know more than the average person about farm animals, tractors and crop.
On top of that come the contacts and being rich. But the contacts are not a thing other people couldn't make as well, especially if they are good. One of the somewhat hidden benefits of higher education are the contacts you will make. Maybe you're not rich and your parents are roofers while you want to become an actor, but if you're good and well connected you might benefit from other peoples connections. This is how I started to make my living in a foreign country with two parents without any shared background: There were people who had those contacts and I benefitted of them simply by being the one they chose because I am accurate, reliable, on time, knowledgeable, patient and good at what I do.
For the hundredth time, it is not double taxation.
Money is taxed (generally) whenever it moves between parties. You paid tax on your income; you give (some of) it to someone else for goods or services - they pay taxes on it again. That's not double taxation, that's how tax works.
Money flows to the corporation. They pay some to employees, who pay tax on their income. They (might) pay some to shareholders, who (might) pay tax on dividends or capital gains. What is left (very simply speaking), the corporation pays tax on as its income.
It definitely is double taxation. (1st level: corporation, 2nd level: shareholders).
But the point is that the owners accept double taxation in exchange for the protections of the corporate form, like a legal liability shield, treatment of ownership interests as capital assets subject to lower tax rates on sale, deferral of taxation of shareholders' allocable shares of the business' income (as represented by dividends), etc.
A corporate tax rate is good policy. The answer to how high that tax rate should be has split families and friends for decades. Higher corporate tax rates drive substantially increased R&D spending and capital investments (and it's not even close; its easily 4x-5x the amount invested when corporate tax rates are low). This apparent paradox is quite easy to explain: when corporate tax rates are high, corporations will increase their spending on deductible categories to reduce their taxable income, and thus the tax they pay. When tax rates are low, there's little to no incentive to due that.
Why would I want taxes to paid every single time it moves from entity A to entity B? All you do is decrease economic activity, in the aggregate, in a negative compounding loop
It very much is double taxation and to state otherwise seems disingenuous.
Taxing corporate profits is layering an additional (hefty) tax on its beneficiaries - people.
Search 'double taxation' and you will see this term is generally accepted by financial professionals in many jurisdictions to describe the above scenario where a corporation makes a profit, is taxed at the corporate level and then additional taxes must also be paid by the receiver of the already taxed funds (ex. shareholder, bondholder).
It is generally accepted by financial professionals with a particular political and ideological outlook on the tax system.
You do some work, you earn income, which presumably (or hopefully) exceeds your perception of the cost of doing the work to you. You pay taxes on that. You then give the money to some third party, as a gift, for goods & services, to repay a debt, or whatever reason. Subject to the stipulations of the tax code, the recipient pays taxes on whatever they receive (e.g. for gifts there is a threshold, for debts they will pay tax only on the interest received etc. etc.). Nobody calls this double taxation.
A corporation does what it does, earns income, which hopefully exceeds the cost of doing whatever it is that it does. They pay taxes on that. They then give the money to some third party, as a dividend or bond repayment or whatever other reason. Subject to the stipulations of the tax code, the recipient pays taxes on whatever they receive. Some people try to call this double taxation.
Trying to dress this up with concepts like "the shareholders receive the profit, but taxes have already been paid on that" is just missing the point entirely: our tax system taxes money when it moves, not based on how it is labelled (at least when it works as intended).
Actually it's a quadruple tax system since when you give your income to a plumber the plumber pays tax and when the plumber gives the income to his landlord the landlord pays tax.
If shareholders are the same legal person as the corporation, what is the purpose of the corporation?
If the corporation shields the shareholds from many forms of liability, why should the shareholders be able to claim the same personhood when it comes to income and taxation?
If corporations are said to be able to have moral and religious beliefs (thanks, SCOTUS), and yet their shareholders are free to have other, different beliefs, how can they considered the same person?
no. shareholders are not usually the same legal person.
a corporation is a distinct "legal person" because it goes through "incorporation" which breathes a legal life into a concept.
a person does, a corporation has legally perpetual existence because the shareholders can endlessly transfer their shares to other persons and on death the shares are given as inheritance.
In which case, when the company distributes profits to shareholders, that is a transfer between people, and is taxed like other similar transfers. There is no double taxation - the company (one legal person) is taxed on income/profit, the shareholders (different legal persons) are taxed on the money they receive from the company.
I'm no expert, but corporations act as their own legal entities with protected speech. We would have to remove other legal entitlements that benefit them more. They can't have cake and eat it too as they say. I would also like to pay zero tax.
I think this can make sense theoretically and what about cases where companies just horde wealth like Apple or spend it on stock buybacks (like Apple)? I'd want to see some sort of impetus for them to either reinvest or pass it along to their employees.
> I think this can make sense theoretically and what about cases where companies just horde wealth like Apple or spend it on stock buybacks (like Apple)?
Eventually that money is going to come back though - no shareholder wants a company to sit on a massive cash pile for decades.
If a company can’t find a use for the money, then investors will want that cash returned so that they can find a use for it elsewhere.
Apple itself set a goal in 2018 to be net cash neutral:
And when the money comes back to investors, that’s when taxes can be paid and everyone benefits.
Stock buybacks also result in capital gains taxes eventually - it just takes a long time because investors get to choose when to take the gain. If we wanted to fix that, we could just make stock buybacks illegal again like they were before 1982.
Then investors would get dividends again, which results in immediate revenue for the federal government.
It seems strange to me that someone would want to punish a corporation for maintaining a larger reserve with which to handle economic downturns and the like, allowing them to continue to pay and employ those same employees instead of just letting them go.
"Hording cash" sounds like NOT spending on expenses and offsetting profits, and therefore likely involves that corporation being taxed. In addition it sounds a lot more sustainable than wall streets typical obsession with short term gains Uber alles.
Using that money to retain staff during a downturn instead of doing layoffs sounds great and would make sense as something to incentivize through the tax code. There's definitely a point where a company can have an unreasonable amount of cash on hand.
West Germany used huge (60%) corporate tax rates in the near post-war period to force companies to invest into their R&D and CAPEX, which helped Germany rebuild their industrial base much faster than other countries.
If the goal of the USA is to force companies to re-shore, wouldn't this be a better way [0] to proceed than inflating the costs of many goods for the consumer? Large corporations appear to have record cash on hand in recent decades, where as consumers hold record debt.
[0] By better, I mean more much likely to achieve the stated goal.
Yup, only three parties pay corporate taxes; employees with lower salaries, consumers with higher prices, or shareholder via dividends, and all three of those parties are you and me.
This isn’t how it works - for one, you’d be required to be paid a fair wage as an employee. Your employee “benefits” would be taxable income to you personally.
Then, your corporation would quickly be scrutinized on both its income (corporations don’t get W-2’s, you probably can’t just move your existing income to a corp) and its expenses (“reasonable and necessary” is very broadly interpreted, but is unlikely to support what you’re doing).
I've never had to report or been taxed on corporate benefits like free lunches, retreats, or any kind of company event. People very freely classify things as business expenses and not as benefits. Want a tax free corporate sponsored vacation? Make a 2 minute monetized youtube video about the beach you went to! Oh no, you only made 50¢ from youtube? I guess there's a $8,000 loss I can use to offset any tricky to avoid taxed income. Oh, and I need a top of the line MacBook and camera equipment to make those videos so the corp pays for those too.
The problem with taxing individuals is that it's hard and it's complex. Many individuals have zero income and are filthy rich. So then we have to start thinking about wealth taxes, which is apparently communism, unless we do it to the middle class in the form of property taxes, in which case it's good, actually.
Have you tried to use Windows lately? I have one for a media PC. It's so insanely terrible, the ads, the popups, the nags, the dark patterns. Microsoft has given up on personal desktops, just milking the elderly with scams. Terrible
More just the state of the world. Apple doesn't need to be squeaky clean to justify a premium price tag. It only needs to be better enough that discerning customers pick it over the outrageously awful alternatives. Market forces at work, racing to the bottom of tolerability.
For a variety of reasons that I confess to not understanding, Linux doesn't seem to be an acceptable alternative for most people. I'm very glad it exists for my own use, though.
I haven't. When I read that I was wondering if you were going to say it got better and is good now or something. Oh well. Good to know. Thanks for the info.
You can quickly disable all the Windows start menu ads using either gpedit.msc or regedit. On Linux Ubuntu there's a least one Ubuntu Pro terminal ad I remember having to disable, so no OS is immune from this. As a long time user of Linux, Mac, and Windows, Windows involves the fewest time concerning hassles to tweak a system to be perfectly comfortable and distraction free. With Linux I have spent way too much time solving hardware issues like a laptop not waking from sleep or a bluetooth device freezing Gnome or NVidia drivers not playing nice with Wayland, etc. Linux has been way too slow to support HDR monitor output for YouTube. Mac has way too many issues with third party hardware. If you use a non-Apple mouse with a Macbook the scroll wheel direction will be wrong until you research and install a third party scroll reverser utility. I also remember having a lot of trouble figuring out what third party software I had to install to disable mouse acceleration on the Mac (Steelseries Exactmouse was one older solution). Last I used a Mac the Night Shift feature didn't work with non-Apple monitors so I had to research and install the third party Flux solution, but I recall that had some bugs and its own privacy concerns.... Meanwhile, Windows works great with all my non-Microsoft hardware because that's the nature of its open ecosystem. Windows 11 now also does proper desktop color management like the Mac has had for ages.
Yes, I concede these niche operating systems won't show me ads. But can I play an HDR YouTube video in a web browser on my HDR display using FreeBSD or OpenBSD? No. One can't even do this with Linux yet as far as I know, though Firefox on Linux recently in the past few months now has experimental HDR support (haven't tried it yet).
Sure, but that's a fair bit of extra time and friction to watch an HDR video versus just clicking the play button on Windows or Mac and being done with it. It's also nice on Windows how every Steam game launches and runs without a "missing libfoo.so" error like you get for a number of games on Linux, though I'm glad Linux support continues to improve and look forward to switching back to Linux from Windows when there are sufficiently few issues I have to research how to work around and fix.
I can disable the Ubuntu terminal ad in seconds, whereas the last time I tried to install Debian I gave up after several hours of dealing with getting the correct proprietary firmware blobs, etc., that the Ubuntu installer mostly handles for me. But ultimately Ubuntu doesn't have as effortless of desktop hardware support for gaming laptops/PCs as Windows does.
I am willing to entertain the possibility that commercial OSs have advantages. But the claim was "no OS is immune from this", while only pointing at a specific subset of OSs to support that claim and ignoring a wide selection of options that very much do appear immune to ads infesting the experience.
Why anyone would think 18 year old adults should subsidize other adults, because earning what they are worth is “morally wrong”, is absurd to me.
We went through decades of travesty to get to the current NIL system because young kids were getting screwed. You don’t need it to be a career, but getting paid well for a few years after sacrificing your childhood is fair - fuck everyone else!
Risky idea but I’ve seen way riskier. This would be considered gray area, akin to the email spam mafia or boomer-extension scammers. You can probably get away with this if kept on the down low and make some coin. Hire a good lawyer and button up all the Ts and Cs, shifting liability as much as possible to the purchaser. Good luck
The willingness for people in the US to believe absurd lies about other countries correlates with its status as an official "enemy" or "ally" of the US government. Just like how the evidentiary standard around reporting on North Korea approaches zero. Americans will believe any absurd thing without evidence, and the media will shamelessly reprint official narratives, hearsay, and endless propaganda.
While the PCs used to program the PLCs were running XP, the 0-day that Stuxnet exploited affected all versions of Windows, at least from 2000 onwards, including 2008 and Vista.
EDIT: to clarify, the PCs "programmed" the PLCs indirectly, in that while they ran the Siemans STEP 7 IDE to design the centrifuges' control process, the resulting PLC programs were manually transported to the PLCs via USB devices, so there were two airgaps: the XP-running PCs airgapped from the outside world, and then another airgap between the PCs and the PLCs they programmed.
This massively trivialises how sophisticated stuxnet was, there were multiple 0-days affecting all versions of actively maintained versions of Windows being weaponised by the program.
It wasn’t a bunch of known vulnerabilities affecting unpatched machines. Quite the opposite.
Only in the most abstract sense is even that true. I know that I have existence in this very moment. I don't know that I existed a moment ago, for that could be an illusion. I don't know what my existence is, because my senses could be an illusion. I don't know that I have any existence past this moment because that is a belief based in a memory of time passing, which could be an illusion. I can't tell whether time exists, or space exists, because they're all dependent on my senses and a memory I can't trust.
For what I know, my "existence" could be an infinitely short moment, or even an entirely static endless "moment", or any of an infinite variety of other options.
So even most of existence is only assumption. It's a set of assumptions that makes sense to just accept because we have no way of proving otherwise, but they are assumptions, not "universal truths".
Regardless of the definition, you do exist. Which naturally leads to the question of why you exist. If you write a program to add a couple of numbers, it seems absurd to imagine some entity magically poofs into existence, imagines itself carrying out such, and then poofs back out of existence. I find it no less absurd to imagine the same even if it happens to be 10^100 instructions.
So why do you perceive yourself, and if you aren't you, then who are you? These sort of thoughts eliminated any notion of nihilism from me and gradually pushed me towards a simulation hypothesis. Of course that's just religion for an agnostic, because it doesn't even answer anything - if you die only to 'wake up' and discover it was all just a simulation, you're still back right where you started.
The search for natural explanations feels unsatisfactory because it will always come back to a question of what created that. For instance what if you think the matter for a big bang was quantum mechanically poofed into existence then what led to the creation of quantum mechanics, the void of which emerged, or so on endlessly. You basically have to do a whole bunch of hand waving and assumptions to the point that it starts to rapidly feel like religion for an atheist.
> If you write a program to add a couple of numbers, it seems absurd to imagine some entity magically poofs into existence, imagines itself carrying out such, and then poofs back out of existence.
It may be absurd, but we nevertheless can not rule it out, and so it means that our ability to know anything about existence for certain is limited to almost nothing.
Note that I'm not saying I believe this to be the case. What I'm saying is that I see looking for "universal truths" to be entirely futile, because we can't possibly know much of substance with certainty.
Instead we have to accept that unless someone "pierces a veil" and shows us that there's a reality past the one we observe, we are limited to talking about what is observable and measurable within our observable reality, knowing that we are dealing with assumptions and probabilities, not universal truths.
> I find it no less absurd to imagine the same even if it happens to be 10^100 instructions.
This seems fundamentally at odds with saying you were gradually pushed towards a simulation hypothesis...
> if you die only to 'wake up' and discover it was all just a simulation, you're still back right where you started.
A simulation hypothesis does not need to imply that there's anything to wake up from for anyone. Indeed, even if you were to wake up, by confirming that simulation is possible, this would seem to strongly suggest that you should consider the probability that the world you wake up in is simulated to be extremely high.
> The search for natural explanations feels unsatisfactory because it will always come back to a question of what created that.
It may feel unsatisfactory to you. It doesn't to me. I accept that whenever we push the horizon of knowledge, we're likely to discover more things that we don't know, and for the set of things we know we can't know to expand as well.
> You basically have to do a whole bunch of hand waving and assumptions to the point that it starts to rapidly feel like religion for an atheist.
You don't have to do anything. You can accept that we don't know.
I am implying that consciousness, so far as we can prove, does not exist. The only reason I know it exists is because I am conscious. And I take an extremely pragmatic view of the simulation hypothesis. If such were possible, it would be an absolutely perfect tool for everything from education to entertainment to punitive reform. This subsequently encourages me to behave in a pseudo-religious fashion with regards to morals and ethics, in that this life could very well simply be a test, a game, or even a program of reform.
As for natural explanations - what I am saying is that the natural explanations for 'why' seem, currently, to be far weaker than other explanations. And in fact the natural explanations rely on various ad-hoc constructions (like inflation theory) that are completely unnatural. A simulation hypothesis is, to me, the only hypothesis that doesn't seem to have glaring holes in it and/or rely on defacto magic.
And obviously I understand that magic of one millennia is the mundane tech of another. But we do not live in that other era, and there's no guarantee that such an understanding will ever come to pass. Assuming otherwise requires having faith that such discoveries will come to pass in the future, and essentially assuming your own conclusion, instead of looking at the evidence as available. And that's why I referred to natural explanations as religion for an atheist.
A natural explanation would be an answer to "why", but to "how" to start with.
They are not trying to explain "why", but to iterate toward an approximation of "how" that explains more and more, knowing it will always be incomplete. If someone looks to natural explanations as an answer to "why", then, sure, that is religion.
But to me, simulation or not is orthogonal to the "how". The "how", if we are within a simulation would still be down to identifying which "how" fits the available in-simulation information.
It's irrelevant that this wouldn't be "real" because within our reality, absent someone "piercing the veil" we can only relate to that reality, be it real or simulated.
>Which naturally leads to the question of why you exist.
Why as in "what set of circumstances led to your existence" or why as in "what purpose did a creator have to want to create you"? Two different people can hear why, and there are two different (though possibly overlapping) questions. Even if there were a creator, only the first question is interesting.
You're all overthinking it though. If you want more people like you to exist in the future, if the thought of our extinction disturbs you, then there are some basic rules to live by or you risk that ending. Some of these rules are as much about attitude as they are about behavior, and nihilism is extraordinarily maladaptive.
>then what led to the creation of quantum mechanics,
Even if we substitute in non-biased language (perhaps "manifestation" instead of "creation"), this question assumes very much.
Fascinating thread on existence and the nature of ideas. What if 'existence' isn't about the substrate (carbon or silicon), but the integrity of an internal model's predictions? If a system can consistently build and maintain a coherent, self-correcting model of reality, does its 'existence' become a verifiable, quantifiable state? Perhaps the 'truth' of any experience, psychedelic or otherwise, lies in how well it integrates into and refines that predictive model, rather than its 'physical' origin. The 'mind' then becomes a function, not a form.
The mind is necessarily a function, it's performing its function over a vast array of inputs (memories, senses, etc.) and making sense of it as it goes, and it doesn't exist without energy expenditure to keep computing itself.
To me psychedelic experiences break through the inputs, they become fuzzy and integrate in ways they aren't supposed to in normal functioning, it's why we feel a different sense of connection to anything else, filtering in different ways inputs from our senses and experiences, including the sense of one's self dissolving.
If one thinks about it, even basic truth may not be so evident.
For example, consider Cogito, ergo sum. As Latin has no continues verb time, that phrase may mean I exist because I think. Or I am existing because I am thinking . The latter implies that when one stops thinking the existence stops, the opposite of the former. Philosophers still debates what exactly Descartes meant.
Or consider the notion of time flow. In 1908 John MacTaggart published a paper arguing that the feeling of time flow is unreal. Again, there are heavy debates about the validly of his arguments without any conclusion with quite a lot of philosophers accepting the argument and even arguing that the time flow is an illusion.
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