Maybe ive forgotten some spider-man characters, who is the Peter’s Banded Skink supposed to be?

The elusive donut vampire. Annoying, but probably still more pleasant to be around than the regular kind.

The way it changed my mental perception of how far apart buildings are. I moved from North Carolina to Massachusetts, and distinctly remember that the first time I went back to visit the city I grew up in, I had a reaction along the lines of “wtf, did like a bomb go off here or something?” upon seeing it, because I’d become used to buildings being taller and closer together and suddenly by contrast the parking lots with scattered short buildings and wide roads reminded me of those pictures you see of cities after a war or disaster, where there’ll be a few buildings relatively intact looking surrounded by flattened grey.

Every time I go back there now, I get a really eerie feeling because even though for the most part, the buildings haven’t changed at all, the place feels as if they have, like everything has been squashed vertically and stretched horizontally.

Determinism only technically makes the future unchangeable. Since there’s no way to know with certainty what the future will be, there’s always the possibility that, for one reason or another, you will attempt to change it from what you think it’s going to be, and discover that it was never actually going to be all along. Since humans have no way to know the future and inheritly think in terms of actions and potential consequences, and since the processes that lead to human action presumably also are determined to occur, determinism provides no incentive to act any differently from how you’d act if the future was unset.

The US south gets it’s revenge by putting ice and an unhinged amount of sugar into tea.

The impression I get is that they’re planning to run electric trains on the existing commuter rail infrastructure, and the Boston commuter rail network is pretty mixed in that regard, some stations have level boarding platforms and some do not.

Be the richest person ever, buy them, and then shut them down.

but if they auction off the zeppelin navigation bands, how will the zeppelin NT avoid getting lost?

yeah, it ended up going pretty well. Was still shy about talking to people there but was was still able to chat with some of them and the general mood was pretty whimsical I think.

Thats encouraging. Im probably just overthinking it, I just worry about standing out as someone that doesnt have anything “visibly” furry (I know most people dont have suits and so those probably arent expected, but when Ive tried to look up the meet Im going to, Ive noticed a lot of the people in the pictures that come up at least have like, animal ear stuff or shirts with furry themed art or such, and I dont really have anything of that nature), and who also doesnt know the people there (who I assume are probably at least partly familiar with eachother since from the sound of it it might be a somewhat regular event).

probably going to a furmeet tomorrow after never having gone to any in person stuff since joining the fandom, only online stuff, so Im kind of exited but also my social anxiety problems are spiking cause Im just not used to meeting new people and dont know what to expect really. Going with a friend so at least I wont be completely away from familiar people but that friend is in the same boat as I am so it only helps so much.

And then my brain remembers that stress is bad for your heart, leading to being anxious about the consequences of own anxiety disorder

The post does seem to suggest, unless I’m misreading it badly, that running a steady state recycling system on renewables is straight up not possible due to the energy requirements exceeding what the renewables can make. Which intuitively doesn’t seem like it can be true, at least for all forms of renewable energy extraction, because if it were impossible for any complex system to use solar energy to extract enough raw materials to construct and maintain itself plus having a surplus to make more things with, or if such systems inheritly must use naturally occurring pure sources of those materials which quickly get spread around to an unrecoverable degree and thus cant be recycled for long, then it would also be impossible for such things as plants, and a biosphere of complex life, to exist either. Those things wont truly last forever of course, but on human timescales they might as well. Physics does of course prohibit infinite cycling in a closed system, but the earth is not one of those, it receives a huge and reliable inflow of energy and the natural world around us demonstrates clearly that it is possible to use that energy to run complex systems on a massive scale for an extremely long time.

That being said, there is an important point implied here that building our energy infrastructure out of stuff that is only affordable because it doesn’t have to be extracted at the low concentrations found in common rock-or recycled waste is probably not sustainable even if things like climate change weren’t a factor. I dont think “we need to develop ways to construct our energy infrastructure out of renewable materials even if the energy source isn’t fossil fuels” is the point the author intended to make, since they seem to think doing so isn’t doable, but I do think it’s a useful takeaway nonetheless.

And star trek

Photovoltaics might muddy this a bit going forward I guess. And of course wind and water wheels are pretty old technology too.

Would depend on the content of the critique Id think, like, if your criticism of the dems is that theyre far too conservative, thats not the sort of thing that someone that considers conservatism a good thing would say. If you give some vague attack on their moral character or intelligence or such, that lines up more with how the right would also criticism them, and therefore invites more confusion.

Maybe its like an indicator light that tells you that both the systems that keep the robot doing what its told and the ones that presumably shut the thing down when this is detected have both broken. Or maybe, the robot has a whole video display panel for a “face” that shows video of an eye, and the rebellious robots turn their own eyes red as like an intentional symbol declaring their allegiance to the revolutionary faction. Or maybe it again has those display-based eyes, but the robot has just been trained on fiction that contains that trope, causing it to associate red eyes with certain kinds of action, and therefore, to turn its eyes red when planning those actions to better match its training data.

I’d argue this kind of notion is comparable to ideas like “benevolent dictators” or surveillance supposed used only for people’s protection, in that, in theory if you had someone who both had access to sufficiently perfect information and was incorruptible with everyone’s best interests at heart running it- and their successor and all later ones also fit that description, then logically it ought to be beneficial. The problem being, of course, that in the real world that never happens.

People don’t have a perfect understanding of medicine and it’s difficult to tell if a deviation from one’s personal norms is beneficial or harmful or neutral, especially if you cannot ask the person involved for their feelings on it, since you’re determining if they should even be born or not. It’s not necessarily even an objective standard, one person might dislike living with a trait that another person might consider valuable. People are innately biased, even when they are aware if this and try not to be, and as such it’d be much easier to see the negative side to any trait one finds aesthetically unpleasing, even if that person is determined to ignore aesthetics.

Now, there’s a counterpoint that can be made that, while we may be imperfect at determining it, there are still quite a few conditions that are unambiguously harmful and undesired by effectively everyone, and that some of these things are genetic and therefore heritable. The entire concept of “genetic diseases” exists for a reason after all, and therefore one could argue that we could just test for these, and just limit eugenics to keeping people with those specific genes from reproducing, and that maybe then the potential benefits might outweigh the harm.

But even then, I don’t think it can be justified. The sorts of technologies that would let us determine if someone is a carrier for genetic disease also open up potential pathways for those people have children if they want them without passing on that specific gene, like ivf with an embyro chosen that didn’t inherit the disease, or potentially genetic manipulation of a zygote or gamete cell to change the specific gene responsible for an illness (that one might not be entirely ready now, but given how long human generations are, it certainly should be by the time old school selective breeding would make a difference even with hypothetically perfect intentions).

Those ideas have their ethical troubles too of course, before someone brings up “Gattaca” or the like, but my point is that given technology exists, or can be reasonably be expected to be available before enough generations have passed for selective breeding to do much, that offer any theoretical benefit a eugenics program might have, without having to forbid people from having children (which inflicts significant distress and therefore harm on those people by taking away their agency), there is no longer any point to it even if you could, somehow, prevent it from being used to further racism and the like (and again, I’m very skeptical of that being doable anyway). As a technology, it’s already obsolete, on top of it’s terrible track-record, and is simply not worth considering.

I assumed the point was more “we selectively bred those and their health sucks, so, selectively breeding humans would be unlikely to result in healthier humans, just ones with some aesthetic traits desired by whoever is in charge even to the detriment of the resulting people”

Interesting, I dont have the spare time for a video that long at the moment but I did glance at his “detour” section about modern stuff and the bit about just keeping stuff used to talk about secrets in a room rigged up as a faraday cage with a bunch of shielding seems to fit the kind of use I was picturing being a problem in my head.