See, above:

In short, people tend to be motivated by profit

Only in a society that commodifies your existence and success based on the wealth you generate/hold Unless we’re changing the definition of profit to status

This is what I’m rebutting. So you see, it’s not shifting the goalposts at all. It’s staying on the topic of this comment chain. You trying to claim that humans have been majority peaceable is in fact drifting from the topic. If we’ve been majority peaceable but with plenty of profit oriented violence, that’s all that’s relevant.

The debate is whether profit appears with the advent of modern capitalism. I said people have been raiding each other for profit since the beginning of time. You failed to say anything that invalidates this.

Yay thank you for saying something instead of empty judgments. I think most of what you had to say is actually beside the point at issue, and to show how I’ll unpack this segment, which has a lot to say about this topic and what I am and am not saying.

every member of the group had access to the same nutrition and that evidence of violent skeletal trauma is significantly less prevalent than after the advent of agriculture.

Let’s go piece by piece.

every member of the group

Raiding is an inter group behavior not an intra group behavior so if this was meant to say “look humans were egalitarian they didn’t raid” it doesn’t say this at all.

evidence of violent skeletal trauma is significantly less prevalent than after the advent of agriculture

I believe this very much supports my point that violent raiding was a way of life. You said: there’s more violence after agriculture. Well, agriculture was the first time that anyone had valuable assets collected in one place: at harvest time. Agriculture freed up specialists to create items of value. More to take.

Of course hunter gatherers exhibit less raiding: first of all dramatically fewer people are supportable without agriculture so there were simply fewer groups available to raid. And hunter gatherers live largely hand to mouth so there is no stockpile to plunder.

Naturally as soon as there is something to raid, you see the evidence of that.

So what about anything you said do you think contradicts the claim that humans have commonly raided one another for spoils throughout history? Are you going to tell me that slavery wasn’t a thing next?

I think I need you to come to a point instead of just flashing your credentials. You’ve offered a lot of facts from the record but these must be interpreted. It’s that interpretation that makes you an archaeologist, not the shovel.

My claim is that raiding other humans and taking their things was common, because humans want something for nothing and will exploit each other to get it - long before capitalism and conspicuous consumption made it fashionable. I would also offer you the bear that eats the honeycomb, the snake that eats the eggs. A cow mows down grass because it gains more energy by doing so than it spends: ergo profit. Everything is about profit and most of it is savage taking.

Someone above wanted to claim that profit orientation is a modern aberration driven by capitalism’s status driven pressure cooker and that’s just garbage.

Your criticism is insubstantial and dismissible.

In short: there’s a black market of people who don’t care whether it’s stolen and for whom that might even be an added glamorous thrill.

Come on. Even animals are motivated by profit: getting more out of something than you put into it. Profit doesn’t have to mean “shareholder dividends.”

It’s so naive to claim that it’s only society’s setup and status pressures that make us care about getting better things for less effort. As if that hasn’t been the aim of every individual AND every society since the dawn of time.

The easiest way used to be to just plunder people. Take their shit. Now it’s your shit. Easier and faster than making the shit. Woohoo.

Then trade entered the chat, and it was the first time that people started to think there might actually be a better way: that both parties could walk away from an exchange better off, and that it might be in each of their interests to keep the other alive.

You mean it’s not legally binding when Marco Rubio says “tch-tch-tch… now don’t you do that.”

Yeah and even though I live in a county that has a free and easy hazardous waste dropoff service, it’s still a pain to drive out there. I’m sure a lot of people who care less than me still dump shit in the ground because their grandpa did it that way. And many cities and counties won’t even offer a hazardous waste service…

Who is “you people” and how do you get that? I just spent the whole comment talking about how we don’t allow dumping in the storm drains.

Yeah that’s a good point. Can you imagine getting a ticket because you spilled your coffee?

I don’t know if it costs far more but AWS is one big bill whereas running your own systems is a bunch of smaller expenses including real estate and employees in addition to hardware and utilities costs, insurance, etc which are harder to count. We see AWS on one big bill so the sticker shock is more palpable.

Moving to AWS didn’t just replace our services, it gave us a higher level of service reliability and availability. We would have had to double our spend to serve the globe as we really need to. AWS was the better option.

I think it costs a ridiculous amount because we moved over services that were built on self-run data centers where chron jobs were not billed on CPU cycles in a transparent way. Now they are. We can probably cut the AWS bill by as much as half through intelligent refactoring and optimization. Smarter data retention periods, killing off shit that isn’t worth it etc.

I think the big danger is that we have an 80% that are living hand to mouth and the main way to make money off of them is through their numbers, and jacking prices on life essentials to the absolute limit they can bear.

Then we have a 20% who are wealthier than the bottom 80% and these folks actually program the robots and run our economic system, and are paid well enough to buy the fancy products, etc. This 20% buy double what the 80% do or more and constitute a whole economy unto themselves.

The big game is convincing the 80% they can move into this 20% somehow. This keeps them from revolt, along with the fact that the 20% control the media and so on and work against wide messaging of even the existence of the problem let alone a revolutionary solution. Of course the absolute top fraction of that 20% have more wealth than everyone else combined and exert the most influence, largely through the 20% professional class that they allow to live in relative luxury.

Right now that top fractional 1% are asking themselves “hm, could AI shrink the 20% to 15%? That would improve our profit margins and shrink the only class of people with enough power to really disturb us.” Because the “we are the 99%!” crowd are really 20%ers most of the time. 80%ers are consumed by their immediate challenges of survival and the ill side effects of poverty AND above all the hustle to move into the 20%.

It’s an interesting comparison with pre-revolution. France where the 1% lived on the backs of an agrarian 99%. With the introduction of that magic 20%, the 1% are vastly more wealthy than if they lived off of pure agrarian peasantry. And they’ve created a buffer between them and the bottom tier that largely manages the masses for them, pacifying it with the promise of mobility. I don’t think anyone consciously plans this shit but if they did they’d be high fiving themselves for their absolute genius.

The fact that that happens is not a reason to allow free dumping into the storm drains though. There’s not a ready solution for motor oil drips that happen to leak from a truck. There is a solution to homeowners wanting to dispose of 4 quarts of oil after an oil change.

The dumping laws make sense, this was just a stupid application of them.

This is one of those times it pays to actually read the article. The fine has been thrown out. Whatever patrol men ran up and fined her for polluting waterways were clearly overzealous and the council threw the charge out when she appealed it.

The storm drains in my area all have prominent “no dumping” signs on them, because they do drain to sensitive waterways that would impact wildlife and the environment if they were polluted. But I think the main thrust of this is keeping people from dumping their anti-freeze and motor oil and old gasoline and paint and shit like that.

So on the one hand, I kind of understand the instinct to say “hey don’t dump your shit there, that’s a storm drain” but obviously a few sips of coffee isn’t going to hurt anything.

At my work there was a big push to get things out of our own isolated data centers and into AWS because we had some services that were really very vulnerable and not equipped to serve a global distributed audience well. AWS solved that problem for us and our devs liked working with it. However now our AWS bill is so high that we’re pushing everyone to reduce it. I guess that makes sense. We’re not going back to self-hosting, just optimizing and reducing. But it sure feels like whiplash from “get everything into AWS” to “we have too much in AWS.”

A non-Fediverse person wouldn’t know Mastodon, would they?

Usually I say it’s like a thousand different tiny Reddits that all subscribe to each other. No central owner, no central operator. If any one of them gets unruly, the others can just shun them.

THEN I sometimes say “do you remember Mastodon?” And half the time they are like “oh yeah! That Twitter alternative!” And I say yes like that but for Reddit.

A billboard costs money. A cafe also has your brand name on it but can be operated at a profit.

I don’t know what this is really all about but I’m just thinking through possibilities. It could definitely just be a stupid marketing fad. The number of eyeballs a cafe will get in a metropolis like Seoul is tremendous. If they had a cafe in every town across bumfuk suburbia that would be another story.

I mean LOL maybe???

It seems like there are probably ways they could do that without calling so much attention to themselves.

Like a LAN party just a lil bigger.

His crime goes unpunished a lot, unfortunately, at all levels of society. But this is just absurd. He doesn’t get to call himself the Duke of Derpingshire anymore. Oh no! And the fact that they let him continue to be a prince because “what can we do he’s a prince” 🤷 ! How about cast him out, disembowel him in the town square, hang his remains in a gibbet from the battlements. Like the kings of old!