No, no, no. This is all wrong. USB has a spin of 1/2.

Trick the billionaires into going to space, then blow the ship up in orbit?

Because you have to be occupied before you can do guerilla resistance? Also because guerilla activities require fewer personnel than an armed mobilization?

If Ukraine fell to invasion, as in like their lines collapse and they lose the territory they’re currently holding, now every Ukrainian who might consider fighting is already behind enemy lines. Instead of being concentrated physically and very obviously defending themselves you’d have a very pissed off post-invasion population able to act inside of occupied territory. Look at the resistance fighters in occupied France in WWII. Putin isn’t going to have an easy time even if he manages to push an invasion force through.

Good luck holding a country that fights as hard as Ukraine.

If you think Ukraine won’t muster a guerilla resistance fierce enough to make France blush you haven’t been paying attention.

I have to ask, when you say getting offended for the silliest of things, can you give a couple examples? People definitely sometimes get offended over really silly things, but people also tend to dismiss it as silly when they themselves are being legitimately offensive and just not really taking it seriously enough to consider it.

That’s really hard to gauge.

I drive a cab. I definitely fall into the category of people whose lives could be significantly upgraded for $5k. Some of the people I drive around are so much better off financially than me that that concept isn’t something that would ever even occur to them, while some of them are in much tougher positions. For where I am financially, I’m pretty lucky. I’ve got cheap rent that hasn’t gone up in over a decade and a reliable vehicle that I didn’t have to pay for. If things go bad I have family that can help a bit, but at the moment I operate on very little. I know people who bring in more but have way more going out and have to make huge sacrifices because of it.

But like, the majority of the people I pick up really don’t have it easy. Most don’t have vehicles, so that’s a pretty big filter in the direction of poverty in the US, but that financial category is very much built into and intended by the system and people seem to be totally fine with it. I can only assume that’s the case, given that we have suburban neighborhoods full of people with enough throw-away money to completely elevate nearby destitute neighborhoods but it doesn’t happen. And this is in Massachusetts, where we have some half-decent social services.

But, like, it’s bad. Look at it this way. The next time you go run some errands, try to pay attention to the people who are ringing you up, getting your food, all of that. Think of the sheer quantity of people working in positions that you interact with every single day in service jobs. For the most part, all of them are making no more than a few dollars above minimum wage. Most are probably within 2 dollars of it.

Wherever the average American’s at financially, there’s a lot more that those who are well off could be doing to make it better. Like, maybe instead of new marble countertops, give someone that life transforming $5k. Because it is absolutely the morally correct move, and your distressed reaction is absolutely the correct reaction.

Do something about it.

Nah, I just think it’s really silly.

If growing algae is effective at anything, why do it in a small sealed tank in the middle of a street? Most of the oxygen we breathe is produced in the ocean, regardless of where we personally are. Why would we need to stand vaguely near a rather sealed looking algae tank? If simply growing algae is effective for oxygen replenishment and carbon capture, surely we’d be better off simply growing massive ponds of it away from city centers? Like, out in the open?

It seems like green-washing bullshit to me.

Trees provide a lot more than oxygen. They provide shade, habitation for animals, and psychological well-being for humans. Dirty fish tanks don’t provide any of those things.

People are seriously in this thread complaining about roots like they’re a reason to replace trees with algae boxes. Getting some big plant-based NFT cryptobro carbon-credit nonsense vibes.

That is adorable.

Used for what exactly? To have a dirty fish tank?

Aaa! Name thief!

If only they could support their indigenous population with those kinds of numbers.

None.

Thinking about disgnosis reminds me of some of my experiences on LSD.

Several times I had these relevatory moments where the ephemeral nature of the universe and its gradual slipping into entropy over time became intimately tangible. When this would happen, I’d usually find it terrifying. I’d feel like the world was falling apart around me, because it literally always is.

But in these moments, I was so focused on seeing that entropy in a way that felt new that it would take some time to realize it had always been this way. It seemed like the end of the world, but the reality was that it was just a normal day and I was examining aspects of my world that I didn’t normally and making connections. That’s all.

Some of those connections were silly psychedelic-fueled nonsense, with whatever meaning that might lie beneath lost in some cryptic and half-undestood internal symbolism, while others were perhaps a bit more useful, but none of them were new.

To me, though, these revelations felt apocalyptic in the moment, and of dire urgency. It felt as though the realization itself presented a dire threat, as if it itself was entropy, but in reality the only thing that had changed was my awareness.

Diagnosis, to me, is a similar beast. We’re attempting to peel back the falsely self-protective veil of ignorance about our own internal workings, and we see these things as though they were new and should somehow define us. The reality is, though, that we’re just learning how to classify and examine what was already there. We’re not describing something different from what we might have assumed otherwise, we’re looking at the guts of what’s made us who we are.

For some people making those connections may lead to things that can help improve their lives. For others it can be a way to divorce a person from themselves. We’re taking the huge variety of human experience and trying to pigeonhole it just based on people that share various sets of common characteristics that some of them have found difficult to cope with or to make work with the expectations of their social context. If we’re focused on mental health only in terms of disfunction, that’s all we’re going to see when we start classifying it.

Don’t Look Up

Honestly, my YouTube consumption went down when Hipyo refused to endorse trans rights and then the Linus stuff came out shortly after. The one two punch kind of made me start seeing nearly all YouTube personalities as unhealthily egotistical and probably kinda scummy. There are some creators I like, but at this point I just really don’t care what most of these people think anymore.

I’ll always tune in for Philosophytube or Contrapoints, though. I’m a sucker for the format when it’s done well. And I do enjoy Matt Colville and that D&D animated guy.

That’s making a lot of assumptions, any of which could be wrong.

For one, consciousness as an emergent property doesn’t necessitate a continuity of consciousness. Fire is an emergent property of the proper fuel and sufficient heat, but that doesn’t mean that every fire is the same fire.

Consciousness could be an emergent property while also being unable to be transferred from vessel to vessel by destroying the body.

Sleep isn’t death, it’s sleep. If someone destroys your body while you’re sleeping, that’s a distinctly different state. Just having a break in the narrative you’re currently paying attention to isn’t equivalent to death unless we make a bunch of further assumptions.

As far as believing people who ‘came through’ a teleporter, that’s a pretty terrible decision, as we’d expect that they have no idea that their predecessor is dead. That’s the whole point. We’re hand-waving an ambiguity that’s literally a matter of living or dying.

So if you had a biologically identical twin would you be ambivalent about losing one of the two of you?

If there’s an actual stream of the same matter, where did Riker 2 come from?

There’s a book called the Crystal Phoenix that explores this kind of stuff. People will get addicted to heroin for the weekend, then upload themselves to their crystal and let someone pay to murder them horribly while their memories go into a new clone. It’s really dark.

Tell that to the second Riker.