Thank You! Someone finally said it! Thumbs are fingers and anyone who says otherwise is huffing blue paint in their grandfather’s garage to forget how badly they hurt the ones who care about them the most.
The last time I got a text that was obviously from a scammer I beat them to the punch with “I have a big bitcoin mining project but I need seed money. Are you willing to invest?”
As a mathematician, I tend to disagree with this common truism because it limits one’s ability to think about transfinites and suggests there’s a widely agreed upon technical definition of “number”.
Behavior is influenced by genetics as well as environment. Certain individual animals are more genetically predisposed towards violence than others. Certain breeds of particular species tend to have more of these individuals than others. So, it is possible to have a breed that is violent in that: if you take a random sample of that breed where the individuals are subjected to an identical rearing process more of those individuals will be more violent than average than the average breed has individuals who are more violent than average. (I realize that sentence is probably difficult to digest, but I’m not going to spend 20 more minutes working on this).
Given the data that we have on pit bulls, I think they’re a violent breed. Not all pit bulls are violent, but a pit bull is more likely to be violent than a golden retriever when the two are raised in the same environment.
This is why I treat kids with respect and understanding. Everyone I meet may know something I’ve never even considered, and it’s worth the time to at least hear them out. It also means that kids tend to trust and respect me without me needing to try to assert any authority, so that’s good.
Minor but important point: the grey goo scenario isn’t limited to the surface of the earth; while I’m sure such variations exist, the one I’m most familiar with results in the destruction of the entire planet down to the core. Furthermore, it’s not limited to just the Earth, but at that point we’re unlikely to be able to notice much difference. After the earth, the ones who will suffer are the great many sapient species that may exist in the galaxies humans would have been able to reach had we not destroyed ourselves and damned them to oblivion.
I’m sorry, but you’re incorrect. To imagine the worst case scenario imagine a picture of the milky-way labeled t=0, and another picture of the milky-way labeled t=10y with a great void 10 lightyears in radius centered on where the earth used to be.
Every atom of the earth, every complex structure in the solar system, every star in the milky-way, every galaxy within the earth’s current light cone taken and used to create a monument that will never be appreciated by anything except for the singular alien intelligence that built it to itself. The last thinking thing in the reachable universe.