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Right Angle: Backstage (12-22-2020)

The weekly backstage meeting of the men of Right Angle has begun, and you’re stumbling in late with no plausible excuse.

Right Angle: Backstage (12-22-20)

The weekly backstage meeting of the men of Right Angle has begun, and you’re stumbling in late with no plausible excuse. We’ll glance away as if we didn’t notice, but take note of it for your official record. 

Thank you, faithful Member, for making this happen.

60 replies on “Right Angle: Backstage (12-22-2020)”

As a recent member, I need to adjust my schedule to catch all the episodes on here! To my annoyance, I get notifications on YT before the ones from this channel in my email. I know you have your hands full with other things, but it would be nice to get an email letting me know that a new video is available here so I can stay off YT as much as possible.
Not bitching, just letting you know that some of us retirees with much time on our hands want to follow your channel as closely as possible, which I DO!
Thank you for all you do on our behalf. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from an athiest!

I also get the YT notification B4 the BW ones. 🙁 I’d like to stay off YT as much as possible. I closed my channel last month & would rather go there as little as possible.

A thought experiment that you can actually see in action: Imagine that everything stays the same except one thing – it is no longer possible for people to do any form of harm whatsoever to each other. No theft, no murder, no fraud, no anybadthing. What “system” do you think just naturally arises under those circumstances?

It’s capitalism. It can’t be anything else.

Capitalism isn’t a system. The founders didn’t sit down and say, “OK, boys, we got the gubmint set up in this here Constitution thing so, now, what economic system do we want to use for this new country?”

“Gee, James, how about capitalism?”

“Sounds good to me. Let’s impose capitalism!”

Capitalism is the natural consequence of freedom. You can see this for yourself in the online game Ultimate Online. There’s a mode that most people play under where it’s impossible to attack other players or take their stuff. (There’s also a PvP – player vs player – mode, hut it’s not nearly as popular.) If you ignore the fact that it’s possible to spend real world bux to buy in-game money, and that lying is still possible so fraud can happen, you have a world where no harm can he done to anyone else and what arises as the “economic system” is – you guessed it – capitalism. You have to work and trade to be able to buy stuff. You get more if you work more. You don’t have to work but if you don’t at least hunt for food your character will die.

So there’s your proof that capitalism is an outgrowth of freedom. Not feudalism, not socialism, not communism – capitalism. It’s not imposed like all other possible systems – it requires no force to implement – it’s just natural.

Now, the best we can do in the real world is outlaw harm and defend against it because, unlike in the game, it’s possible for actual humans. Thus government and its sole justification for existing – to protect the (actual) rights of the people. É voila, the American system as originally designed.

Now how about that?

Nice description there. However IMHO you missed the aim bigtime.
The system that you describe is not what we call capitalism. It’s what we call anarchy. (and is my favorite baseline — though I’m more utilitarian than anarchist). Where the base principle is “no power to anyone”.
Meanwhile “capitalism”, as the name should suggest derives from capital, that its owners use to obtain and roll the means of production, that supposedly creates profit, that turns into capital, etc. Traditionally it *has* plenty elements of power, as the capital can be invested in political assets and all kinds of means to serve the owner beyond pure production. Also often the capitalist system starts with a nice grab of land, resources, etc and proceeds from there.
For pioneer colonies it’s natural to start from anarchy, but over time power structures seep in and they transition to something else, like inventing the “state”, and it works like a gravity seed in the interstellar mass, starts to collect more and more power that is practically impossible to keep at bay. The US wisely started with the best known constitution that explicitly tried to limit it. It was okay for decades, maybe a century, but by now almost nothing is in effect anymore.

Just one thing: Government should be prevented from involving itself in production and trade. Then there would be no incentive to buy political influence.

Nope, one more thing: Under anarchy, people can still cause harm to others. That has been eliminated in the game. You’d have anarchy if you were to play on a PvP server. Also, since it’s not a perfect analog to reality, using the game as an example naturally comes up short. In a world without the ability to cause harm, people would still always want want less expensive goods and services and more of them. You need capital for that. Some of the people will step up to meet those needs and wants. Capitalism.

Yes it should. 🙂 There’s a good reason AFAIK the usa constitution has text forbidding the congress to force someone to buy certain stuff/service. Also we could observe how it was worked around for obamacare and probably plenty other cases — the “government” once formed seeks ways to demolish all the limitations it is supposed to observe.
As for the second, yes, anarchy is just the lack of “law”, making moot the parts of what you are “allowed to do”, while not messing with anyone;s physical abilities at all. (though in the alternate system you are also not prevented from committing murder, just you will face official consequences rather than more random ones )
Altering the world to tweak ability to do something is indeed puts the analogy on a strange path. But in your online world you can still study interesting behavior. Maybe not just where you did this far. I’d suggest look into how raids are organized and what happens to participants. 🙂
And I repeat my claim that you misuse terms, just stepping up and do reasonable things — is what we call “reason” and a few other things, and “capitalism” has a different meaning. You’re certainly welcome to create your own dictionary, but when communicating with others it may not be very productive.
I suggest reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I think it would help you organize thoughts beyond having a good time.

Under socialism, I will not know how to do anything. Under capitalism (i.e. freedom), I do know how to do things. Socialism makes me unable. Weird how that is…

Under socialism, you won’t need to do anything. The state will provide. So just sit back, relax, do nothing, and enjoy your algae cake rations.

Yeah, who knows? Maybe they’ll make “people cakes” a part of their “green new deal”.

If/when the socialists gain control we will see that what we’ve seen from them so far is merely scratching the surface of the depths of their depravity. IMO

More like your Soylent Green rations. At some point the overlords will decide to reduce the population even further than they are with the rona and vax (elderly) and not want to pay for food production (because it’s just less they can pocket) and use the corpses of the selected group to feed the workers in the camps.

“…because you know much more about it than I do…”

How many people believe that, much less admit it, about themselves in these days of everybody being an expert on everything?

First external hard drive I ever bought, circa 1986, held…

…wait for it…

…wait for it…

…ten megabytes!

And I was thrilled to find a special driver that increased it to 30 Mb! At work I had just overseen the installation of a 3 million dollar VAX/VMS cluster that had about 950 Mb across 3 disks in a cabinet about the size of a washing machine.

You were behind tech… in that time ST225 and 238 was mainstream even on the wrong side of the iron curtain (20/32MB, almost the same thing but one used MFM and the other RLL “encoding” the latter enjoying 50% more density. With the separate controller card.) The tail of soft sector era, I had two of them in the XT, and they picked up bad sectors fast, so monthly routine was to low-level format one drive — PKARC the data to the other, than back. even pkzip was not yet invented. Moving to ATA drives was a revolution in the coming years.

That was it, MFM vs RLL. That’s what made my disc bigger. I’d forgotten.

And PKARC! ‘Oly chit that was a long time ago. Still, I cut my programming teeth on an IBM 3090 with punch cards. Before that it was some kind of console that only printed it’s output (A monitor? That’s crazy talk!) and used paper tape.

Back in the late 90’s-early 2k’s, I worked for Toshiba in their portable computing division.
There was a display in the engineering department showing the disc size needed to store a megabyte of data from the dawn of the computing age until (ATT) present.
It started with a 14″x 70mm tape reel. Went to an 8-stack of 12″ discs, through several iterations of disc platters, down to fractional slices of 5″ discs, and ended up at their brand new 500mB 2″ HDD, which was the core technology of their new line of laptop computers, which were an industry defying 1.2″ thick! (the laptops, not the HDDs)
I always thought that that display was the most eloquent statement of Moore’s Law I had ever seen.
The final exhibit in the display was a hair thin sliver of a single platter in a 2″ drive.

Ah, the good old days. I ran a similar system for the military and we had 8 of those spinning disk washing machines in a walk-in frig.

A smile on Bill’s face in the thumbnail and a joke from him in the first minute? Good to have both back! We’ll still Turn Around and fix the country, even so.

“…up to your earballs…”

Funnily enough, in Irish Gaelic “eireaball” (pronounced “earball” or “erriball”) means “tail.”

So I understood Scott to say “you’re up to your tail in…” before I realized what he actually said.

Here endeth your foreign language lesson for today.

I had an earlier Iphone and refused to use my fingerprint or facial recognition. Call me crazy, but seemed “Snowden” creepy.

Yeah, I’ve never set up fingerprint or face recognition on my phone. I don’t trust the bastards.

Not that it makes much difference, probably.

I’d love to see Hollywood, on set, subjected to the egalitarianism they seem to want. Everybody gets paid the exact same. Sure the extras and low level crew get a nice raise. But the above the line talent, department heads and such are gonna take nasty pay cuts. And since we can’t give everyone a trailer, no-one gets trailers. And on, and on…
I wonder what the gala opening in Moscow for “Battleship Potemkin” was like. Compared to say… the opening of “Rise of Skywalker”.

They porked up the relief w/ a bunch of wishlist bills that have been laying around. They were all tacked on to this must-pass bill and sent to the lame-duck President.

All that pork is simply to pay off, bribe, or launder for themselves billions of taxpayers $$. They are destroying us from within on all sides.

Hah, because I am light sensitive I use an extreme blue light filter (actually several) on screens and consequently I cannot tell the difference between saffron and salmon (frosty or otherwise). (And then there are the skin tone issues.)

There was a episode of The Flintstones, the only one that I remember the plot of. Starts out w/ Fred bitching about how hard his job is and how long he has to work. And there’s Mr. Slate just sittin’ in his office smoking cigars. Well the Great Gazoo turns Fred into the boss, switches places w/ Mr. Slate. Fred finds out just how much and how long Mr. Slate works and how much pressure he’s under. At the end of the ep., Gazoo switches them back. Fred is ecstatic to get back to his easy, low pressure time defined job in the quarry.

Hey Scott, thanks for recommending that hard drive. I’ve been needed to replace the NAS that went paws-up for a while now. I’d never even thought of an external SSD for the Mac Mini I’m using as a media hub. But I needed 2 terabytes. Bought the drive just now.

We must have been watching at the same time, you hadn’t posted yet when I did, and I was wondering, “where is my friend Fluffy Goat? He always live blogs when he watches Backstage.”

I’m hoping Scott is able to follow through on his promise to make this site snappier. Right now it’s too pokey to be here much.

Agreed! I am also hoping that we can create a private “Den” chat room on the Parler app to be able to have better and real time conversations. They are supposed to implement the Dens in January…

Apparently he isn’t signing it. He’s countering with 2000/person, rework the Bill, and waiting the 10 days he has to veto.

Thanks for getting this weeks Backstage posted so early. Normally I have to wait. Merry Christmas Everyone the traditional Happy New Year sounds a little hollow but at least hopeful.

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