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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I understand from your comment that you’ve read too many sci-fi books to understand what a massive resource sink that would be with negligible benefit. It’s pretty basic physics.

    We’ve already got cheap transportation, look how that’s turning out for the planet. But I’m sure burning God knows how much energy to launch more junk into space will save the world.

    We’re already approaching a critical mass of private equity space trash in orbit, what’s a few more lowest-bidder megastructures? At least the ultra rich will get their life rafts while we burn.


  • Because the world has actual things in it like people, wildlife, culture and history. Space has none of those things. Unless you’re there working as a scientist to study things that can’t be studied on earth, it’s pointless.

    As of now it’s a glorified roller coaster. At its best private space travel could be Disneyland in space. At worst it’s just rich people paying to be carried up mount everest for clout but with exponentially more resources wasted.



  • A lot of this hinges on partisan officials choosing (often) black box software and private verification companies. But that’s not even the main problem.

    If your Ballot System contains source code, the source code is researched and code reviewed, and then complied by the company and the verification agency. Both checksums must match.

    It all falls apart exactly here. With digital voting, all other security is as performative as the TSA. It doesn’t even matter if either party in this step is malicious or if the source is open/closed.

    A code review can never make any guarantees. And if there is a bad actor, checksums are not bullet proof. Especially when we’re talking about state actors, who have access to supply chain attacks and unknowable cryptographic abilities.

    And all of this uncertainty extends just as far with the hardware. Even if a voter knew what a machine should have in it, they’ll never get the access to verify it themselves.

    Even checking a ballot print isn’t foolproof. In a secret ballot system there’s nothing tying a print to your actual tallied vote other than your faith in the process.

    Stealing an election isn’t as easy as one might imagine.

    Stealing an election doesn’t have to be easy, it has to be possible with a minimal circle of secrecy. And digital voting/tallying makes that possible.

    As others have said in this thread, the most important thing is the ability for any voter to understand and personally audit the process. That’s just not possible without paper ballots and simple counting.



  • Hate to be the bearer of bad news but if you can’t relate to mental images existing in a visual sense you probably have some degree of aphantasia.

    Some research indicates that it may be a spectrum from complete lack of imagery to full five-sense detail, which might be why it’s hard to relate to either extreme. At any rate most people fall in the category of seeing an image, to the point that hyperphantasia is even more common than aphantasia.

    I have it*, but not as severe as others. Imagining an apple starts as a very abstract concept, I can’t visualize it without concentrated effort. Other people might be able go on to describe the stem, the leaves, the shade of red, the glossy wax exterior, etc… I can’t automatically build to any of that, even if I subconsciously default to a red apple the “image” may just as well be green.

    *edit: checked the vviq test and discovered the label is hypophantasic









  • As for middle school, exactly what did you learn that you think is so useful for daily life?

    Off the top of my head: basic biology so I’m not dumb enough to be antivax. History subjects that require more than elementary maturity so maybe we can avoid another Holocaust. Enough physics, ecology and chemistry that I can comprehend how climate change is happening. How basic statistics work so I’m not completely lost when someone throws around misleading data.

    None of that is automatic from a 4th grade education and is crucial to be a functioning citizen. Learning to take unquestioned GPT answers is not a substitute for actually learning any of those.

    You either went to a painfully bad pipeline of schools or were too dumb to recognize the important parts.



  • The problem is offloading critical thinking to a blackbox of questionably motivated design. Did you use it to solve problems or did you use it to find a sufficient approximation of a solution? If you can’t deduce why the given solution works then it is literally unknowable if your problem is solved, you’re just putting faith in an algorithm.

    There are also political reasons we’ll never get luxury gay space communism from it. General Ai is the wet dream of every authoritarian: an unverifiable, omnipresent, first line source of truth that will shift the narrative to whatever you need.

    The brain is a muscle and critical thinking is trained through practice; not thinking will never be a shortcut for thinking.


  • I don’t think it’s that crazy or draconian at all. You’re still free to engage in the safest way possible. You have confidence that it’s a safe location and your drug of choice isn’t cut with fentanyl. Why would there be a black market? Addicts generally don’t like buying from untrustworthy sources and passing out in alleyways.

    There’s a strange pushback to accepting that humans are physical creatures that evolved for certain stimulus. Society functions by self restraint and a social contract that says, for example, my neighbor won’t go into a stimulant induced psychosis and assault me. Its not a poor reflection on his moral character, that’s just how a human reacts to the substance.

    It’s kind of a childish libertarian view to demand full personal freedom at societies’ expense. Your freedom to use a drug anywhere at any time means that the rest of us have to distribute narcan at the library, regulate 45,000 liquor stores, hire more police to counter intoxicated driving, and expand EMS to handle completely preventable emergencies. All that to save you a weekly bus trip to the casino?

    Changing the economic system has no impact on any of that, those are the set costs of addiction. Addiction doesn’t cease being a problem because you give up on preventing it. You’re undermining the money going to social services by avoiding simple deterrence-by-inconveince


  • Any safety and recovery programs are a lot easier to manage when you know exactly where your source is and who’s using. Safe injection sites already exist and have been shown to eliminate overdoses and increase access to social services without any honeypot effect or increased drug use. Adding safe and tested drug sales to the site is a pretty logical step.

    Requiring transportation is a detail for implementation, you already need it to do anything in the USA. Unless you think every person has a right to get drugs delivered to their doorstep?


  • There’s reasonable balances between free and total access to liquor stores on every corner and locking up every bathtub moonshiner.

    A good part of the reason prohibition failed was 10,000 years of societal dependence with no alternatives. Humans aren’t built for the sedentary lifestyle and structured civilization we’ve built up and we really do need something to compensate.

    We now have the technology and medical knowledge to reliably treat mental and physical ailments, we don’t need ethanol as our cure-all. If I could snap my fingers and swap professional treatment and healthy recreational norms for traditional drugs I’d do it in a heartbeat.