Just give us the tools to get real, fair representation

that won’t solve the problem. people just have very different views of how the path should continue forwards. you’re not going to unite that. if you represent fairly, you might end up with a federal government that is 50% democrat and 50% republican, but that just means that everybody only gets half of what they want.

smaller countries have an easier time getting better government because in smaller countries, things are closer by, and it’s easier to just walk up to your prime minister’s house and set it on fire if he misbehaves. in the US, which is a thousand kilometers across, you can’t just walk there.

I’m actually in favor of bringing political responsibility back to the local level. That means, communities largely organize themselves, with only few interactions with the federal government.

but … it would be very un-American to fight corruption and listen to the demands of the people.

just look at this. this is such a fascinating image. it’s so surreal. how did we get here?

I still have this tab open from 5 days ago: Wife of Ex-Nepali PM Burned Alive, Gen Z Revolt Engulfs Country: Live Updates

I go back to it every day to check whether it’s still there because it feels so surreal that i think it’s somehow just a dream and i’m going to wake up every moment now and the news story will have disappeared.

understandable. I would celebrate with them if i was in brazil.

i don’t know about tiny cold fusion reactors but we definitely already have a big hot fusion reactor in the sky and we’re already using it; in fact, this article talks about exactly that.

the thing is that what really drives manufacturing is mostly two things: a growing market and cheap supply of energy.

If energy was free, approximately every country on earth would dramatically increase the amount of goods it produces. And that’s what’s happening right now: As solar power becomes cheaper and cheaper, more and more companies will have an incentive to produce more goods, simply because the costs for resources (energy) are dropping. That, in turn, stimulates consumerism.

they build coal power capacity, i.e. power plants that can turn coal into electricity.

the twist is, they’re not actually using that capacity. They produced just as much electricity from coal this year than last, even though the capacity for production increased. In other words, as they’re building more capacity, they’re utilizing it to smaller degrees, sothat the total production stays the same.

you talk about the innovations a lot, but that’s not everything there is to it.

China massively subsidized its solar panel production for 20 years, at a loss. The reason they did that is because they ideologically believed that it would eventually pay off. Without these massive investments, solar might not have grown so much and might still be more expensive than fossil fuels due to a lack of economies of scale.

If you take china out of the game, you end up with solar panels that are not the cheapest source of energy, and that massively changes the outcome. It is only because solar panels are so cheap today that we see so many of them being installed. China was simply brave enough to invest billions and billions of dollars into them, instead of leaving it to the free market. That is what china did well.

That is the long term future of humans

I agree with some of this,

once we shed the idiotic shackles of mythology and inbred conservatism.

but it should be noted that spaceflight is becoming kind of a modern mythology that describes the “fate” of humans.

I think you got some nice ideas but you really gotta work on your messaging. As it is, it’s one big blob of text, and that’s hard to read and parse through. It would be better if you can summarize your points in maybe 1-3 short bullet points, something like:

• Asteroids provide lots of rare earth minerals, and by exploiting this, the economy can continue to grow.
• We need to master technology to be the first in space and provide settlements in outer space.

This will make it much easier for other people to parse your points and comprehend them quickly.

Also you gotta be realistic and realize what’s at stake. If spaceflight takes up pace slower than you think, i.e. it takes 10 years longer for humans to set foot on another planet, that is already an economic crisis for the people alive today and needs to be tackled. Reducing the number of workers in a country is a way to reduce unemployment rate and it is simply important to realize how serious the situation is and how urgent it is to get this right. We can still do spaceflight by the way.

I think you need to take a serious look at the economics of the future and broaden your scope of intelligence.

The economy will no longer be work-bound in 20 years. More humans will not mean more productivity. If machines do all the work, humans become unemployed, and unemployment can lead to mental stress and depression in many individuals. Which in turn can cause social unrests. That is what this is about.

dude that’s not how philosophy nowadays works, like, at all.

reasoning played a huge role during the 19th and 20th century, which makes sense because it enabled technological progress and real economic growth. there’s a lot more to philosophy than that, though, including long-term thinking, philosophy of consciousness and such.

You can look at this through the buddhist worldview:

After you die, you are going to be reborn in the world that you helped create. This could be a smile on another person’s face or a project you helped realize. Especially, also children are a large part of what you helped create, so in a certain sense, a part of you is going to be reborn into them.

Then, the question is, if you could be born again in the year 2030, would you choose to? Would you think such a life is worthwhile?

Answering such a question might give you a hint of what your children would want, if they could be asked.

procreation at this point is selfish

i wonder what that means? What would a person personally get from procreating? I think barely anything. Then why would it be selfish?

I think suffering also becomes more acute the more processing power you have.

I think this is right. If you’re more sensitive, you learn more about your environment because you pay more attention to it, but you also perceive pain more intensely. That is why sensitivity is both a blessing and a curse.

Capitalists consider unemployed people dead weight.

A tree trunk is dead weight too and that’s what keeps the tree stable.

Same with society. A certain amount of dead weight actually provides benefits. It provides possibilities in case of urgencies and provides a stable environment in peace times.

Uhm, so, the problem isn’t only the unlocking but also the re-locking of the bootloader.

Leaving the bootloader unlocked while you’re storing sensitive data on the phone means that thieves, but also law enforcement, can read the data that’s stored on your phone if they guess the cryptographic key that protects your data correctly. If you’re using a 4-digit PIN, there’s only 9999 combinations, and guessing the PIN correctly can be done in a few minutes on a modern computer.

If you use a strong password, your data would be secured against thieves and law enforcement. But then you’d have to enter a strong password every time that you boot up the device, which is annoying.

So, if you can re-lock the bootloader after having installed the operating system, then an attacker can’t just access the raw, encrypted data and try every possible PIN combination on it. Instead, they’d have to go through the operating system’s user interface that’s installed on the phone, and that can limit the number of allowed password attempts down to 10 or so, so they probably won’t have access to the data on the phone if they don’t guess the PIN correctly within 10 attempts.

interesting! the landscape definitely influences the humans that live there, but i think besides plant and animal species, also things like the proximity to the sea (for shipping trade) plays an important role. the sea connects more than it divides, so regions close to the sea are natural global traders. Consider england (which is one huge island) was historically the country with the biggest navy, that sailed all across the world, to india, to china, and had lots of exchanges that way. so yes, landscape does something to the way humans live, but it’s not just plants and vegetation, it’s mostly the landscape formation, i guess.

yeah ok, i meant more like “who even cares what Israel thinks?”