diff --git a/capitalism.md b/capitalism.md index 16835fe..dc3b097 100644 --- a/capitalism.md +++ b/capitalism.md @@ -17,18 +17,19 @@ The following is a list of just SOME attributes of capitalism -- note that not a - **[slavery](slavery.md), oppression, loss of freedom**: In capitalism people are slaves firstly as workers -- in work time, so called [wage slavery](wage_slavery.md) -- and secondly as consumers -- in "free" time. Banks create inflation to devalue money people save so that they have to work constantly for their whole lives as products are getting progressively more expensive. More and more essentially unnecessary spending purchases are forced on people -- new smartphone every year, mortgages, gas and maintenance to cars, new clothes according to fashion, insurances etc. Practically no one has a truly free time nowadays. - **extreme waste**: Bullshit products, [bullshit jobs](bullshit_job.md) and the need for constant dynamics on the market force to waste energy, material and human work just on keeping everything in motion, even if purely arbitrarily. Corporations keep reinventing and reselling slightly modified version of already existing products, one group of people is creating something while another group is destroying it, just to keep everyone occupied. Byproduct physical waste such as plastics and chemicals are dumped in the environment and pollute it for decades, even centuries to come. - **[antivirus paradox](antivirus_paradox.md)**: Sustaining and artificially creating negative phenomena so as to build a business in [fighting](fight.md) it, to keep and create jobs ("firefighters starting fires"). - - **[artificial scarcity](artificial_scarcity.md)**: In order to be able to sell something, that something has to be scarce, an abundant resource such as air cannot be sold. Once technology emerges to make some resource abundant, it threatens those who have a business in selling that resource. This creates the huge interest in keeping resources scarce, sometimes by force -- corporations are even known to physically destroy food etc. - - **[artificial obsolescence](artificial_obsolescence.md)**: Similarly to artificial scarcity, to keep businesses running companies have an interest in making people consume even things that could otherwise last them even whole lives, so we see the phenomena like people being forced to buy new phones every every year. There used to be the famous light bulb cartel ([Phoebus cartel](phoebus_cartel.md)) that fined any bulb manufacturer that made long lasting light bulbs, bulbs were forcefully made to last for a short time. [Apple](apple.md) has remotely decreased the performance of older [iPhones](iphone.md) when new ones came out. There are countless many more examples. - - **artificial crippling of technology**: It is the norm to create + - **[artificial scarcity](artificial_scarcity.md)**: In order to be able to sell something, that something has to be scarce, an abundant resource such as air cannot be sold. Once technology emerges to make some resource abundant, it threatens those who have a business in selling that resource. This creates the huge interest in keeping resources scarce, sometimes by force. Corporations are known to routinely destroy food that can still be eaten, and other goods as well. Corporations indirectly conspire on keeping resources scarce by artificial obsolescence, outlawing old products as "unsafe" etc. + - **[artificial obsolescence](artificial_obsolescence.md)**: To keep businesses running companies have an interest in making people consume even things that could otherwise last them even whole lives, so we see phenomena like people being forced to buy new phones every every year. There used to be the famous light bulb cartel ([Phoebus cartel](phoebus_cartel.md)) that fined any bulb manufacturer that made long lasting light bulbs, bulbs were forcefully made to last for a short time. [Apple](apple.md) has remotely decreased the performance of older [iPhones](iphone.md) when new ones came out. There are countless examples. + - **artificial crippling of technology**: It is nowadays the norm to create a high tier product, such as a CPU or a car, and then artificially cripple some of the manufactured units (limit car engine power by software, burn parts of the CPU, ...) so as to sell them as a lower tier of that product. It is cheaper than to separately invent several tiers of the product. So it costs the same (actually less) to create a high end CPU as the low end one -- we could all be using high end CPUs, but the poorer of us are forced to use the forcefully crippled versions, because "capitalism". + - **purposeful incompatibility in technology**: In market competition products of one company will often be incompatible with products of the competition on purpose, so as to discourage consumers from buying it. Technology corporations create their own "ecosystems" for consumers into which they are trying to lock them. - **preventing progress, sustaining status quo**: Capitalism is extremely hostile towards social progress (more leisure time, ...), i.e. the main kind of progress. It is also, contrary to popular belief, against technological progress -- the established corporations want to perpetuate their established businesses and will attack and destroy new ideas that endanger it (i.e. electric cars vs fuel powered cars, ...). -- **[fascism](fascism.md)**: Capitalism is based on fascism, i.e. extreme hierarchy and "tribes" of which each fights to death for its self interest. This fights happens between companies themselves, between state and companies, different departments inside companies, between workers and employers, between brands on the market etc. +- **[fascism](fascism.md)**: Capitalism is based on fascism, i.e. extreme hierarchy and "tribes" of which each fights to death for its own self interest. This fight happens between companies themselves, between state and companies, different departments inside companies, between workers and employers, between brands on the market etc. - **no long term planning, irresponsibility**: Companies need to make immediate profit, it's extremely rare to plan longer than 5 years ahead. Managers hired to new positions are expected to immediately increase profits and they won't stay for long, so they simply do whatever it takes to create immediate profit without considering any long term consequence such as pollution etc. -- **extreme lowering of quality of products, deterioration of [art](art.md)**: Despite capitalist propaganda, capitalism doesn't lead to increased quality of product -- on the contrary it seeks to find the MINIMUM quality that will be accepted by the consumer. In seeking to minimize manufacturing cost of a single unit, companies save money wherever they can and rather invest in marketing etc. -- for example instead of paying several experts to produce a good, well fact-checked documentary, only one man will be paid to create the documentary with the focus on it being "fun and engaging" rather than factually correct. Art is hasted, produced on short deadlines, littered with product placement etc. +- **extreme lowering of quality of products, deterioration of [art](art.md)**: Despite capitalist propaganda, capitalism doesn't lead to increased quality of products -- on the contrary it seeks to find the MINIMUM quality that will be accepted by the consumer. In seeking to minimize manufacturing cost of a single unit, companies save money wherever they can and rather invest in marketing etc. -- for example instead of paying several experts to produce a good, well fact-checked documentary, only one man will be paid to create the documentary with the focus on it being "fun and engaging" rather than factually correct. Art is hasted, scheduled, produced on short deadlines, littered with product placement etc. - **[plutocracy](plutocracy.md), i.e. loss of (true) [democracy](democracy.md)**: In capitalism only illusion of democracy is sustained, there is no rule of the people, there is rule of the rich THROUGH people, as the rich are who make the laws and actually take the ruling positions and who have a tremendous power to manipulate masses via private media. State is becoming more and more the tool of corporations rather than a protection against them. -- **[monopolies](monopoly.md) with unlimited power, degeneration of competition**: The naive ideas of capitalists that markets will magically regulate themselves quickly falls apart, basically no one believes it. In a competitive market monopolies arise in a short time who will prevent any competition from even arising. Can a tiny starting company compete with an established corporations with billions of dollars at their hand? No. The corporation can defeat them by gigantic marketing, unfair practices (unfair prices etc.) despite fines, by buying them, legal trolling, negative internet reviews etc. Once a monopoly without competition exists, the few advantages of competition disappear completely. A corporation doesn't respond to demand, it creates the demand. It can do whatever it likes, it can set arbitrarily high prices, create arbitrarily shitty products and so on, no competition is pressuring it to do otherwise. +- **[monopolies](monopoly.md) with unlimited power, degeneration of competition**: The naive ideas of capitalists that markets will magically regulate themselves quickly falls apart, basically no one believes it. In a competitive market monopolies arise in a short time who will prevent any competition from even arising. Can a tiny starting company compete with an established corporations with billions of dollars at their hand? No. The corporation can defeat them by gigantic marketing, unfair practices (unfair prices etc.) despite fines, by buying them, legal trolling, negative internet reviews etc. Once a monopoly without competition exists, the few advantages of competition disappear completely. A corporation doesn't respond to demand, it creates the demand. It can do whatever it likes, it can set arbitrarily high prices, create arbitrarily shitty products and so on, no competition is pressuring it to do otherwise, people have no choice than to to subvert. - **[poverty](poverty.md)**: Despite capitalist propaganda, not everyone can be successful in capitalism (if everyone could retire at 20, why doesn't everyone just do it?), and it is a fact that because [money makes money](money_makes_money.md), the gap between the poor and the rich is becoming wider and wider (as of 2020, 8 richest people owned as much wealth as the whole poorer half of the population). Poor people are pushed into loans, getting into debts, working multiple jobs, while their health deteriorates increasing their depth on medical bills, decreasing their ability to work more etc. - **torture and killing of people**: The poorest, mostly in third world countries, including children, are forced to hard labor that destroys their lives. Whole cities live off of processing waste coming from first world countries, e.g. disintegrating used ships with primitive tools, no work safety, breathing cancerous fumes etc. -- **money and profit above everything**: By definition capitalism advises ONLY to maximize one's profit, any other values such as human well being, peace, preservation of life environment or progress are subverted to the goal of profit. As other values are often in conflict with profit, profit wins. +- **money and profit above everything**: By definition capitalism advises ONLY to maximize one's profit, any other values such as human well being, peace, preservation of life environment or progress are subverted to the goal of profit. As other values are often in conflict with profit, profit wins and people suffer. - **[fight culture](fight_culture.md), extreme hostility between people, disappearance of morality**: The very basis of capitalism -- competition -- nurtures people towards self interest, self centeredness and hostility towards others while suppressing good attributes such as sharing, love for others and [altruism](altruism.md). With this morals decline. Furthermore the system of overcomplicated laws are starting to replace morals, people as "is it legal?" rather than "is it a good thing to do?". This creates a society of dicks and psychopaths who are additionally rewarded for their immoral behavior by becoming "successful" and wealthy. In long term this serves as a natural selection of Darwinian evolution, immorally behaving people are actually more likely to survive and reproduce, which leads to genes of psychopathic behavior becoming more and more common in society -- under capitalism good people quite literally become extinct in the long run. - **[fear culture](fear_culture.md)**: To keep people consuming and constantly engaged a tension has to be kept, comfortable people are undesirable in capitalism. So there is constantly a propaganda of some threat, be it viruses, terrorism, pedophiles on the internet, computer viruses, killing bees etc. - **[consumerism](consumerism.md)**: To keep businesses running people need to consume everything, even things that shouldn't be consumed and that could last for very long such as computers and cars. This leads to creation of hasted low quality products (even art such as TV series) that are meant to be used and thrown away, repairing is no longer considered. @@ -41,12 +42,11 @@ The following is a list of just SOME attributes of capitalism -- note that not a - **[surveillance](surveillance.md)**: Companies want to analyze behavior of people, manipulate them, target ads, spam, train neural networks on their data etc., so there is an interest in applying surveillance. Indeed, this is exactly what we see in practice. - **extreme [brainwashing](brainwashing.md) and propaganda**: [Marketing](marketing.md) becomes extreme in capitalism, utilizing advanced psychological tricks and repetition to the point of becoming a torture, with the goal of teaching people brand loyalty, consumerist behavior etc. Application of this brainwashing even on children has already been normalized. Entrepreneurs create cults of personalities. There is now even a "legit" job called an [influencer](influencer.md) whose sole purpose is in spreading corporate propaganda on the Internet. - **criminality**: This is a direct consequence of poverty and diminishing morality. -- **instability**: Lack of long term planning, fragility of the market, pushing workers to poverty, creating extreme interdependencies, eliminating self sufficiency and other phenomena pose great dangers of market collapses, violent strikes, disasters and even societal [collapse](collapse.md). -- **need for extremely complex market control and laws, burdening society**: As corporations are absolutely unethical and pursue evil goals such as enslaving workers and abuse of consumers, there have to be an extremely complex set of constantly evolving laws and bureaucracy just to somehow "make corporation behave". However laws are imperfect and corporations work 24/7 on bypassing them as well as on attacking and eliminating the laws themselves via lobbyist etc. This creates a constant, extremely expensive legal war (which eventually corporations will likely win). -- **purposeful incompatibility in technology**: In market competition products of one company will often be incompatible with products of the competition on purpose, so as to discourage consumers from buying it. Technology corporations create their own "ecosystems" for consumers into which they are trying to lock them. +- **instability**: Lack of long term planning, fragility of the market, increasing wealth gap, pushing workers to poverty, creating extreme interdependencies, eliminating self sufficiency and other phenomena pose great dangers of market collapses, violent strikes, disasters and even societal [collapse](collapse.md). +- **need for extremely complex market control and laws, burdening society**: As corporations are absolutely unethical and pursue evil goals such as enslaving workers and abuse of consumers, there have to be an extremely complex set of constantly evolving laws and bureaucracy just to somehow "make corporations behave". However laws are imperfect and corporations work 24/7 on bypassing them as well as on attacking and eliminating the laws themselves via lobbyist etc. This creates a constant, extremely expensive legal war (which eventually corporations will likely win). - **uncontrolled growth**: Capitalism is likened to [cancer](cancer.md) as it requires a constant uncontrolled growth which on a planet of limited resources inevitably leads to a catastrophic scenario. - **hyperspecialization, loss of self sufficiency**: Entities (people, cities, companies, states, ...) lose self sufficiency as they hyperspecialize in some task and in everything else rely on someone else. This complete dependence creates slavery and danger -- in an event of a blackout for example people cannot survive as they cannot make their own food. -- **loss of humanity**: In capitalism humans are just consumers and resources -- corporations now routinely use these terms (*human resources department* etc.). People are brainwashed to no longer even take offense in being called such terms. People's worth is only in how much he can work or consume. +- **loss of humanity**: In capitalism humans are just consumers and resources -- corporations now routinely use these terms (*human resources department* etc.). People are brainwashed to no longer even take offense in being called such terms. People's worth is only in how much they can work or consume. - **abuse of animals**: In capitalism animals are just products and resources, they are kept in very bad conditions just to be killed for meat or other purpose. They are slaughtered by millions just so we can overeat to morbid obesity. Maximizing profit dictates no money should be spent on animal comfort. - **endangering existence of all life**: The mentioned lack of long term planning, irresponsibility and instability along with creating a dangerous overdependence on technology and interconnections of self insufficient states and cities is just waiting for a disaster such as [CME](cme.md) that immediately collapses the civilization and consequently endangers all life on Earth e.g. by meltdowns in nuclear plants or possible nuclear wars as a consequence of panic. The absolute preference of immediate profit is hostile towards investments in future and precautions. diff --git a/lrs.md b/lrs.md index c209a06..6c2c9e8 100644 --- a/lrs.md +++ b/lrs.md @@ -68,13 +68,14 @@ Apart from this software a lot of other software developed by other people and g Other potentially LRS software to check out may include [TinyGL](tinygl.md), [scc](scc.md), [uClibc](uclibc.md), [miniz](miniz.md), [nuklear](nuklear.md), [dmenu](dmenu.md), [sbase](sbase.md), [sic](sic.md), [tabbed](tabbed.md), [svkbd](svkbd.md), [busybox](busybox.md) and others. -It is also possible to talk about LRS data formats, standards, designs and concepts as such etc. These might include: +It is also possible to talk about LRS data formats, [protocols](protocol.md), standards, designs and concepts as such etc. These might include: - **[ASCII](ascii.md)**: Text encoding. - **[fixed point](fixed_point.md)**: Fractional number format, as opposed to [floating point](float.md). - **[RGB332](rgb332.md)**, **[RGB565](rgb565.md)**: Simple [RGB](rgb.md) formats/palettes. - **[bytebeat](bytebeat.md)**: Simple and powerful [procedural](procedural.md) music technique. - **[farbfeld](farbfeld.md)**: [Suckless](suckless.md) image format. +- **[gopher](gopher.md)**: Simple alternative to the [Web](www.md). - **[json](json.md)**: Simple [data](data.md) text format. - **[lambda calculus](lambda_calculus.md)**: Minimal [functional](functional.md) language. - **[markdown](markdown.md)**: Very simple document format. diff --git a/selflessness.md b/selflessness.md index e93972c..6177e80 100644 --- a/selflessness.md +++ b/selflessness.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ Selflessness means acting with the intent of helping others without harming them Selflessness is about the **intent** behind behavior rather than about the behavior itself; for example being a [vegetarian](vegetarian.md) (or even [vegan](vegan.md)) for ethical reasons (to spare animals of suffering) is selfless while being a vegetarian only because of one's health concerns is not selfless. Similarly if a selfless behavior unpredictably results in harming someone, it is still a selfless behavior as long as the intent behind it was pure. (Note that this does **NOT** at all advocate the "[ends justify the means](ends_justify_the_means.md)" philosophy.) -In the real world absolutely pure selflessness may be very hard to find, partly because such behavior by definition seeks no recognition. But an example that comes close may perhaps be [Langar](langar.md), the big community kitchen run by [Sikhs](sikhism.md) that prepare and serve free [vegetarian](vegetarian.md) food to anyone who comes without differentiating between religious beliefs, skin color, social status, gender etc. Sikhs sometimes also similarly offer a place to stay etc. The mentioned ethical vegetarianism and veganism is another example, as well as [LRS](lrs.md) itself, of course. +In the real world absolutely pure selflessness may be very hard to find, partly because such behavior by definition seeks no recognition. Acts of sacrificing one's life for another may a lot of times be seen as selfless, but not always (saving one's child in such way may just serve perpetuating own genes, it can also be done to posthumously increase one's fame etc.). An example of high selflessness may perhaps be so called [Langar](langar.md), a big community kitchen run by [Sikhs](sikhism.md) that prepare and serve free [vegetarian](vegetarian.md) food to anyone who comes without differentiating between religious beliefs, skin color, social status, gender etc. Sikhs sometimes also similarly offer a place to stay etc. The mentioned ethical vegetarianism and veganism is another example of selflessness, as well as [LRS](lrs.md) itself, of course. **Selflessness doesn't mean one seeks no reward**, there is practically always at least one reward for a selflessly behaving individual: the good feeling that comes from the selfless action. Selfless acting may also include physical rewards, for example if a programmer dedicates years of his life to developing a [free](free_software.md) [public domain](public_domain.md) software that will help all people, he himself will get the benefits of using that program. The key thing is that he doesn't use the program to harm others, e.g. by charging money for it or even by using a license that forces others to credit him and so increase his reputation. He sacrificed part of his life purely to increase good in the world for everyone without trying to gain an edge over others. diff --git a/triangle.md b/triangle.md index 6b46253..c9bb975 100644 --- a/triangle.md +++ b/triangle.md @@ -51,3 +51,4 @@ Triangles also play a big role e.g. in [realtime](realtime.md) [3D rendering](3d **Winding** of the triangle says whether the ordered vertices of the triangle go clockwise or counterclockwise. I.e. winding says whether if we were to go in the direction *A -> B -> C* we'd be going clockwise or counterclockwise around the triangle center. This is important e.g. for [backface culling](backface_culling.md) in computer graphics (determining which side of a triangle in 3D we are looking at). Determining of the winding of triangle can be derived from the sign of the z-component of the [cross product](cross_product.md) of the triangle's sides. For the lazy: compute *w = (y1 - y0) * (x2 - x1) - (x1 - x0) * (y2 - y1)*, if *w > 0* the points go clockwise, if *w < 0* the points go counterclockwise, otherwise (*w = 0*) the points lie on a line. +[Sierpinski triangle](sierpinski_triangle.md) is a [fractal](fractal.md) related to triangles.