Yes, as long as people keep focusing on fighting the technology instead of fighting capitalism, this is true.

So we can fight the technology and definitely lose, only to see our efforts subverted to further entrench capitalism and subjugate us harder (hint: regulation on this kind of thing disproportionately affects individuals while corporations carve out exceptions for themselves because ‘it helps the economy’)…

Or we can embrace the technology and try to use it to fight capitalism, at which point there’s at least a chance we might win, since the technology really does have the potential to overcome capitalism if and only if we can spread it far enough and fast enough that it can’t be controlled or contained to serve only the rich and powerful.

For a few people, this kind of thinking helps. It does for me, actually. When I feel like my life sucks it can help to compare myself to an imaginary Anglo-Saxon peasant woman during the invasion of the Sons of Lodbrok, and it actually helps to realize just how much better I have it than her.

But that doesn’t work for everyone, and even those it works for kinda need to do the comparison themselves, not have it pushed on them.

I bet some people flashed that one and such too, but I could find no indication that it was shut down because of that.

It feels like society has backslid tremendously on some freedoms in the past 15 years, particularly where it comes to prudishness.

These days we even have otherwise progressive people jumping on the prude bandwagon along with hyper religious controlling anti feminists and it just makes for such strange bedfellows.

One of the few medical things you see on TV that’s a good idea, that pointing the needle upward and squeezing until a bit of fluid has spurted out, to make sure and get the air bubbles out.

I mean, that’s a fair criticism in a way. If Bill lets you taste the chicken at that point, it’s reasonable to comment on what he let you taste. If he didn’t think it was ready enough to get your opinion on, he shouldn’t have let you taste it at all.

I feel like it should be simpler: did the culture the body came from have good enough records in other ways that we would be unlikely to learn anything by digging up the body that we couldn’t learn by studying other records? Then leave it alone.

If they failed to keep good enough records, and knowledge would be gained by the study, then study away.

Logically, slavery as punishment for crime is actually pretty reasonable and theoretically good. The criminal isn’t just taken care of by the state, thus costing the people even more, instead, they actually have to pay for their crime by working it off.

But reality intrudes upon this theoretical situation. Since someone benefits from the criminal’s work, there’s now incentive to imprison as many people as possible. It creates perverse incentives that cannot possibly be avoided.

But almost as bad a perverse incentive is the for profit prison system, even if they aren’t allowed to force prisoner labor. Because for profit prisons again have the incentive to imprison as many people as possible since that makes them more money; anything that reduces incarceration rate means less money for them.

Of course, we have both of these going for us. For profit prisons that make more money off the state the more prisoners they have, and the permission to force labor from them since the Constitution specifically allows it, thus letting the prisons make money twice off each prisoner. Yay!

Science is blue because in every 4x game I’ve ever played the science icons are some form of blue.

Lucky? From some of the other comments it sounds like you may be referencing something, but just taking the comment at face value, there is no way that is not the most horrific fate I can possibly imagine.

Assuming you’re not conscious the entire time and only ‘wake up’ when you enter a solar system to study, it’s still horrific. You wake up, completely alone. You have no body and cannot move, and your attention is directed toward gathering data on some distant points of light. When you understand what’s going on, sure, there’s a bit of a sense of wonder…but it quickly becomes tedium, maddening, isolated tedium, as you slowly drift through a star system, gathering data on each planet and its star, over the course of fifty years or so. There’s certainly bits of interesting stuff, but we are still talking insane levels of isolation and boredom. Assuming you’re somehow prevented from going insane by the software in order to keep you functional, you can’t even escape into madness.

…and then we imagine what happens if you aren’t shown the mercy of being conscious only during the few decades the probe is drifting through a solar system. What if you’re conscious the. entire. time. Once you’re in deep interstellar space, you’re alone. Able to think, perceive, experience, but in an unchanging, static existence. A year passes, and everything is so close to exactly the same that only with the precision of the measurements your tools can take can you determine there’s been any change. Ten years pass, then a hundred, a thousand. You drift, slowly, through interstellar space toward a destination impossibly far away, all while you wait, conscious, unable to die, unable to escape into madness, just…eternal…waiting. Until thankfully you finally enter a target solar system, get a few blessed decades of what, to your new perspective, seems like frantic activity. Something, finally, to do, to see, that actually changes. And then…you drift back out into interstellar space after a few gravity-assisted slingshots around this star system’s worlds, only to proceed on to your next destination, another several thousand year journey away.

This is, by far, the most horrific imaginable torture.

You probably had the same damn book I did, with an illustration of him eating an orange and seeing the wings of a butterfly coming up over it and supposedly realizing they look just like the sails of a ship and so, gasp, the world must be round like this orange!

Yeah, these projects done by one or two people could be better with a larger team, but it’s definitely not a matter of hiring a big pile of people suddenly.

The ideal size is probably a couple dozen people, but scaling up to even that will take months since the one person currently in charge has to do a lot. And it’ll almost fully pause work on the project for a while.

Cause if there’s one person, they’ve got to find all the candidates, do all the hiring, then bring people up to speed.

The real problem is if the person who made it doesn’t have the skills to manage even a small group of people.

How about if we conduct an experiment: replace all men with bears so the amount of time spent in close proximity to bears is equal, and see how the numbers shake out then, eh?

I don’t understand the complaints about the expansions for these games. Ok, there’s a lot of them? But they’re generally good. And if you don’t want them, just…stop updating and stay on whatever version you liked?

And unlike most, they make it easy to play an older version. Did I like a particular patch better and hate all that’s come since then? Easy to roll back to it. What do people want…for them to not put out expansions?

Some of them, sure, but there are a lot of stories of how many lies recruiters will tell you to get you to sign on, so a pretty significant number are genuinely bad people.

Voting does sort of make you complicit, honestly.

But guess what? Not voting also makes you complicit. So does voting in a way that has no chance of having an effect based on the current rules.

Basically, existing as an eligible voter, at least in a country where voting isn’t rigged (so like, Russians are off the hook here, for example) makes you complicit in your government’s actions.

That’s kind of a big point of being in a democratic society - we are all, every one of us, responsible for the actions of our government.

And if you don’t like that responsibility, I get it, I totally sympathize, because I agree. I hate that responsibility, especially cause I know damn well I’m not qualified to make those decisions. But I still am responsible, and pretending I’m not doesn’t change that.

We humans cannot eliminate all life on this planet. Even if we set that as an actual goal, we would fail. We can wipe out a lot, cause vast harm to existing ecosystems, but life will go on long after we make ourselves extinct.

So one thing I don’t fully understand is this: the secret service is required by law to protect the former president, but…is there anything that actually requires the state of New York to accommodate the secret service in doing so?

In theory, couldn’t the state of New York just actually throw Trump in prison, no special privileges, and also no special accommodations for the secret service?

Yeah, since we’ve designed our world for humans, the best general purpose robots will have a human shape in order to function effectively in the same areas.

I don’t usually recommend movies in situations where the solution space isn’t already limited significantly by the context, but 2001 is the one I thought of first upon reading the title, so I suppose there’s at least two of us!

I’m reasonably sure that that route neither begins nor ends in Holland. I think Holland is the western area of the Netherlands, not the northernmost bit.