Isn’t the answer infinity? We don’t know what’s beyond observed part of universe, and there’s infinity number of universes. If our emerged then there’s others.
There is no reason to expect any particular number of universes. We've observed exactly one, this one, which had to exist or else we wouldn't be here to observe that it existed.
Our universe is finite, so although it is unbounded (lacks edges) there aren't an infinite number of anything in it, galaxies, stars, M&Ms, grains of sand, atoms of hydrogen all finite.
Has that really been established? The observable universe is finite, yes, but I wouldn't think that automatically implied that the universe as a whole is.
Simply put we can't know and we can never know if the universe is flat. Now, if the universe has a curvature then we could use that as a baseline for the size of the universe, but as of so far we've not detected one.
There is no evidence that there are a infinite number of universes. All we know of is the one we exist in. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that there are a very large number of non-interacting "worlds" which may or may not be the same as "universes".
And if you meant "infinity number of galaxies" then that would require an infinite-size universe, and we don't know if that is the case for our universe. It could be, or it could be finite but unbounded.
Yes we don’t know if other universes exist. So it’s 50/50 infinity or one. Then if our universe came into existence, then probability is not 50/50, because we know that something exists, therefore something else is more likely to exist, probability towards infinity.
If you were observer of emptiness and no universe or anything existing then you would say it’s more likely there will be nothing, so probability towards zero.
Not to forget the recursion. There’s likely universes within our elementary particles or our universe is a particle in parent one.
I keep hearing about it, but never got to check out, the name suggests that it may be waste of time. Maybe it’s a fantastic project but name lets it down?
You are on Hacker News, typing on Apple, listening to Daft Punk, reading an article about Steven, the AI butler hosted on Val Town, comment chain you're replying to talks about using self hosted models (probably llama) and Raspberry Pi, yet SillyTavern is the name that trips you up?
And we have been producing enough to feed and house everyone for about 40 years now. Henry Ford introduced 5 day workweek and with the productivity trend we should be working one day a week by now.
It is not happening because in eyes of capitalism a person is only valuable and accepted if they have an occupation that produce value, whether needed or not.
Consequence of that, 50% of workforce is “bullshit jobs” made to keep people employed, like marketing, finance and such.
Because people sadly are brainwashed to be working from cradle to grave, it will take few generations for UBI to become unconditional and part of life, like we have with free healthcare (not you, U.S.).
In a similar vein: a lot of studies have shown that most of the cost of a UBI could usually be paid for by two existing expenditures, the first being current welfare programs, such as employment insurance, welfare, disability benefits, etc., and the second being the cost of the time and labor the government has to pay for to ensure that the programs in point one only go to a limited subset of people who qualify.
In other words, we're spending so much on making sure that most people don't get social programs that we could fund a huge chunk of just giving those people social programs instead.
Likewise, we spend more on policing and jailing individuals convicted of minor crimes than it would cost to implement social programs to reduce the amount of crime in the first place; the US spends more on their medical system per capita than most (any?) other countries because it all goes to insurance companies whose job is, ostensibly, to pay for medical treatment, but who spend a large amount of it on departments dedicated to not paying for medical treatment.
Studies have shown that a lot of people (mostly right-leaning individuals) would rather go without something that could benefit them (e.g. healthcare, UBI, etc.) if it meant that people they see as "undeserving" (the poor, the homeless, immigrants) also didn't get it, so there are a lot of people out there who would rather spend money keeping people from having positive outcomes than spend less money to give those people positive outcomes.
> What's frustrating is how the tech community keeps treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease.
If you think deeper, to first principles, it’s clear that disease is capitalism. I am not advocating socialism/communism, but isn’t it strange that capitalism was never reviewed or updated according to new science about anthropology, sociology, and economics? In 100 years, about 100 countries tried it, and not one country can report a harmonious society. It’s always with inequality and suffering.
Every science has new advancements and discoveries, every single one except political sociology. Why is more advanced and modern political economic system never seriously discussed? On what assumption is capitalism still being implemented? It was never working yet still it is referred as something like “word of god” that cannot be argued with.
If this was a situation in an IT company and methodology company uses constant change, it ends in disaster. After about one such cycle, management will be looking into changing processes and choosing something else instead of Agile or Waterfall or whatever is used.
For about 30-40 years now, we produce enough to feed and house everyone. Henry Ford introduced a five-day work week, which should be down to one workday by now. But instead, we got “bullshit jobs,” which are about 50% of employment in unnecessary made-up jobs to keep people occupied (marketing, finance).
And still in the AI age, a person who is born now is brainwashed into capitalism and has to find an occupation, study, and work till retirement.
Capitalism does not accept you for who you are. It only accepts you if you have some kind of occupation that brings value.
> capitalism was never reviewed or updated according to new science
about anthropology, sociology, and economics?
If taking a human-science view, then one interesting take on
capitalism is that it isn't a thing at all. It's the absence of a
thing. It's a positive freedom. There can be no "science" of
capitalism.
It allows the direction of excess human psychological energy. It is
the absence of regulation of anti-social criminal behaviours, by
creating an allowable "grey area" between moral and wicked behaviours
- what so many business people like to call "amoral". But that same
energy is innovative, creative - the destruction of what is old and
weak is part of any finite-sized system. The need to destroy, dominate
and exploit is strong in a significant percent of the population. Any
decent study of criminology is continuous with "business".
William James, in The Moral Equivalent of War [0] suggested that we
coped with this in the past by having every few generations of males
kill each other in wars - and of course implied that it's mainly a
gendered issue. During frontier times, as the European settlers
conquered America and other lands, there was ample "space" for
exploitation as that energy was directed against "nature" (and the
indigenous folks who were considered part of "nature" as opposed to
"civilisation"). Now we've run out of space. The only target left for
that energy is each other.
Social-"ism" etc are projects to try controlling that nature by
reducing "individualism" (and insecurity-based consumerism is an
obvious first target). It's major fault is that the anti-social
criminals tend be want to be the ones doing the controlling - just
wearing the mask of civility and preaching the primacy of "the group".
If we cannot change human nature we must find a new outlet for that
energy. Space exploration as a new frontier always looked good, but in
reality it's something we are unlikely to achieve before
self-destructing the technological civilisation needed to support it.
That leaves little else but a kind of cultural revolution. The
pharmaceutically catalysed version of that in the 1960s is worth
studying to see where and why it went wrong. See Huxley.
Any realistic systematic change would need to address this "problem"
of the individual ego, creating some new focus that is the "moral
equivalent" of war.
Capitalism is a positive choice to grant the positive right of extreme property ownership.
Light property ownership is when this toothbrush is mine. Normal property ownership is when my house is mine. Extreme property ownership is when your house is mine, that section of airspace over there is mine, precisely four tenths of the revenue generated by the billboards on the Eiffel tower is mine - using a heavy dose of the legal system to artificially extend the principle of ownership to all sorts of things that aren't naturally property and things that would naturally be someone else's property. This is a positive action done on purpose by the legal system, not merely natural default like me owning my toothbrush.
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Did you know one of the common pesticides in the USA but banned in the EU interferes with hormone levels in certain species, making them way more individualist? One of those species is humans. Still a positive freedom?
> capitalism is that it isn't a thing at all. It's the absence of a thing. It's a positive freedom.
This is very wrong. Capitalism fundamentally requires abstract property rights (i.e. someone can own a thing they have never even held or seen, much less used), and it requires a state to provide very strong protections for those abstract rights.
In the absence of the state imposing such a property right regimen, you wouldn't have capitalism, since it'd be impossible to accumulate capital if the only way to own property is to physically use and/or occupy it.
Importantly, capitalism is not the same as free markets! Humanity has had free markets in one form or another for most of its history, but capitalism is very recent historically speaking.
The notion that socialism is always anti-individualistic is also wrong. Left-wing libertarianism is a thing, and goes back to the earliest anarchist writers (who literally invented the term "libertarian" as a political label - and they didn't have the likes of Ayn Rand in mind when they did that). There's even free-market left-wing anarchism.
We're talking about two views of "capitalism". I think you're talking
about the kind in textbooks on economics and Marxism etc. I'm talking
about the lawless, insane festival of destruction and human misery we
see today. To my mind, it is a an absence; the absence of law and
reason.
We're talking about the same thing, actually. To be clear, I'm not pro-capitalism, quite the opposite. But the "festival of destruction and human misery" that you're talking about is caused by massive for-profit entities that only exist because the property rights system in capitalism allows and even encourages unbounded accumulation of capital (hence the name!), and with that, economic and eventually political power. That power is why megacorps can bend the law, and why their ignorance of reason does not lead to their immediate demise (as it would be in an actually free market, meaning the one with numerous meaningfully competing actors). Capitalism taken to its logical conclusion is the absence of free market because everything is monopolized.
I like your ideas and suspect we're far more on the same page than
not.
Nonetheless I compare what we call "capitalism" to chameleon music
artists like David Bowie (no disrespect intended to that wonderful
artist), who change radically with time, constantly shapeshifting and
reinventing. Our grandfather's "capitalism" is unrecognisable from
its namesake today.
People often level the accusation against communism that "it has never
actually been tried in practice", and I think the same is also true of
capitalism. Maybe in the years before just before 1929.
Anyway, what I see today is not a recognisable ideology. It's just a
bunch of criminals getting away with it and an effectively lawless
USA.
You’re right and those are interesting books. And yes, people will not be able to live with alternative to Capitalism.
That’s why, I think the only way for human race to survive is to have multi-generation transition plan, people must understand that in their life time it’s not going to get better and fair. It would happen in maybe two generations, or over 50-100 years time span.
And it would have to happen in one country first and then propagated to others.
This historical period will be remembered by being a cause for legislation to introduce strict testing for mental illness in government positions.
Ask any psychologist and it’s clear what it is, but they won’t say it publicly because of Goldwater “rule”.
fact is they have the most dangerous and destructive mental illness known, and they captured the power exactly because of their disorderly mindset.
Yet for months and years everyone is observing and discussing what people with a serious mental illness are doing when they are given highest post in power and unlimited money.
This is very different from “lay-diagnosing” every introvert kid as autistic and every jittery kid as having ADHD.
There’s _a lot_ of reliable material from his direct actions over the years to accounts from people who’ve worked or dealed otherwise with him closely.
There’s more than enough of it to make it possible to fill in a DSM-5 questionnaire and see what the outcome is.
This is the equivalent of the "mentally ill lone wolf" rationales given for American mass shootings.
What possible difference would a psychological test make when an pre-existing felony conviction is not enough to keep him from voting, but also to actually sit as head of state?
What is happening in America simply doesn't happen without broad-based, implicit, systemic support at all the important decision-making junctures. In 2017, several of the highest-profile executive orders were slapped down in court within days. In 2025, the government is not even pretending to abide by court rulings on their EOs, and are detaining people without charge and revoking their visas without due process.
Anyone noticed that if you enable the “browse internet” in ChatGPT, it becomes very dumb? It abandons all its intelligence and produces mostly incorrect results.
Like it’s being passive-aggressive, “Oh, you don’t like me as I am and want to augment me with search, let me show you how it is if my brain was only search!”
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