I started with LoadingReadyRun (@LoadingReadyRun) because I’ve been a fan of their work for many years now. I’ve found a couple of authors I’m fond of: Charles Stross (@cstross) and Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself). George Takei is a good one to follow as well (@georgetakei).
He seems like a lovely man and is generally interesting. But he has an opinion on everything even when he doesn’t have any knowledge of the subject. So can be a difficult follow on occasion. If that happens, don’t unfollow but put him on mute for a few days.
Your politicians, along with business leaders, have made sure to remove those places as much as possible.
But I have to ask: Is talking not allowed in American libraries? Cause where I live, libraries are places where you can sit, talk, eat, drink, play board games, and of course read. There’s different rooms for different activities.
Some libraries have this in the US, but not all. Also a lot of funding to libraries has been cut over time. Due to this a lot of libraries that once had these features no longer do.
Her bio: “crypto researcher & critic, software engineer, wikipedian”
She is follows the developments in the crypto/blockchain world and explains them to lay audiences (she thinks it’s horse crap and a scam). Right now, she writes near-daily updates on the Sam Bankman-Fried trial.
“web3 is going great” is her creation: @web3isgreat
They still exist in most towns and cities, and if not a mall, a strip mall usually has some inside portion. Smaller with less options, but still fits the bill.
Oh that would make sense. I’m in the Midwestern US and mostly we just have strip malls and regular shops (and Walmart of course) in our town of 13K. Malls around here are only found in the larger towns of ~50K or more.
I have $150k in mortgage debt on a house worth about twice that. Plus a couple more years car debt.
What really gets me is my health insurer severed relations with the county in May and I got hospitalized two weeks ago. So now I will owe the $8,000 out of network deductible. That pisses me off.
We could very easily vote on most issues ourselves using the wide array of technology at our fingertips, with a similar or possible better sense of security than what politicians currently provide.
But the only way for that to happen is for politicians to make it happen, and who would vote to eliminate their own job? No one.
Hmm… I’m not sure I agree with this completely despite politicians obviously being problematic. At least at its core, the rationale is that the significant majority of people aren’t aware enough of all the contentious (or even mundane) issues in society, so we elect people we trust to make our decisions for us. I just checked Canada’s recent bills in Parliament, and the voter turnout for something like this would be almost nothing:
Bill C-16 - An Act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums of money for the federal public administration for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023
Obviously our current system is very easily corruptible and that needs to be addressed, but getting rid of politicians altogether wouldn’t necessarily fix our society, despite how terrible they’re making it right now.
Who would draft new legislation? I know it’s not just politicians that do this but their staff helps a ton. I just don’t see a good system of John Everyman drafting a bill that makes sense. That said I would like to see politicians get fixed cause the system is clearly broken.
Well, the second problem would be figuring out who curates the system. If you’ve ever voted on a referendum you’ll probably know what I’m talking about. You can make any proposal sound awesome/horrible if you leave out the right details.
If you’ve ever organized to resist a referendum you’ve probably also experienced the “we’ll just rephrase this and try again later” effect, wherein special interests just need to stubbornly keep pushing until the opposition voters get sick of participating in the polls.
I don’t think these are unsolvable problems, but they do inherently require setting up a representative beaurocracy of unelected technocrats – an apparent oxymoron. It’s gotta be someone’s job to run the machine and ideally you want them to be looking out for the people above all else.
So, how to play kingmaker? Well, if we take literal kings & elected representatives off the table, what remains is a model akin to academia, wherein credentials & seniority are prioritized above most else. It’s not a bulletproof system (none are), but if you squint hard enough the EU sort of exemplifies what this model could look like – just replace the delegates with smartphones, essentially.
It grabs attention. Tell everyone the world is getting better daily, the long term trend of violent crime and war is actually trending downwards. We are making progress towards elimination of diseases, hunger and poverty. No one bats an eyelid. Say the world is verging toward WW3 and imminent destruction is here and everyone pays attention to you.
Its easy to be in a fatalistic mindset. Its easy to say its all going to shit, What’s the point? It’s difficult to be positive. Its difficult to take action. No matter how small. Its difficult to see the ultimate impact of small positive acts. But every small act can and does make a difference. At least to the person it benefits. Its even more difficult to face the fact that all the positive can be easily undone by one guy pressing a button. Its difficult to keep trying despite that fact.
You are human. That’s what it means. That entitled old bitch who clearly cannot (or just won’t) realistically estimate the space left on drifting doors. She clearly wanted to get rid of that poor mofo after she was done with him. Freezing and suddenly clear in her rich-kid mind she just didn’t want to spend her days in the backseat of damp old-timers and his breath was awful, all those rotten teeth of the working class.
No clue why we need AI for that, we can arrange our mass extinction perfectly by ourselves by just continuing on this road. 🤭
At this moment, I think the main issue is that we as a species don’t think enough of our mass extinction. For some strange reason, most people (at least in ‘the west’) think they’ll survive whatever happens, nuclear war, climate change,…
However, no matter the method of our extinction, I guess most people thinking about it think it would be bad. From nature’s point of view we’re just “a species” and when evolution in this direction proves to be a bad route, no big loss.
Unless in possession of a crystal ball, nobody can say what is bound to happen to our species as climate changes take place.
Like any other species we are vulnerable to extinction but as many physicist have underlined, the highest risk for a civilization is its start. After a certain point is achieved, a civilization can become technically immortal.
Yes maybe humanity will adapt and survive, but adapting in this case will mean witnessing billions of deaths and a very poor quality of life and much shorter life expectancy for the survivors. Imagine entire nations having to relocate because their homelands are now unsuitable for human life. That will not be a pleasurable experience for anybody and will lead to wars and genocide.
An per your question: the same that qualifies you or me, which is being alive and capable of observe and extrapolate possible outcomes through thinking.
Then why are we taking their opinion over our own?
Typically, when people cite something like that, they defer to an expert in that field. In this case, maybe an anthropologist? There’s nothing in the training to be a physicist that prepares them to understand the early stages of civilizations forming, let alone is longevity.
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