cortic

Its very likely that from a certain perspective the human brain might basically be a spreadsheet. Okay so the software and hardware are not familiar because evolution developed them instead of us. But we do appear to be very predictable in our actions and responses. Would the spreadsheet know if it was one? Even if the cell 'am i a spreadsheet' = 'no'?

>evolutionarily unnecessary

Grieving is an evolved response to nomadic group species, so we didn't leave useful or closely related members behind; In their absence we feel compelled to 'search' for them, or be near their carcass. Its interesting how this evolved impulse has been adapted into ritual by our developing ability to understand mortality; But its not really special in any self-awareness kind of sense.

If the limit is unreachable except in our imagination, we can think of it as unlimited. At least for the purposes of policy right now.

And i think you are being unfair conflating the current energy shortage with a hard limit that the human race may never reach. The current energy shortage might have been averted if the investment from industries like crypto, was invested in renewables..

I don't accept that energy is a limited resource, like all other resources it requires investment. Reduce investment and you get less of that resource. Increase investment and you get more of that resource at a cheaper rate (as mass production kicks in at different levels). Crypto, and any other popular industry; Invest in the cheapest energy available, growing that market while profiting from it. Its OUR job (democratically) to ensure that green energy is the cheapest energy available...

There is really no other way to fix this.

There really aren't any environmental concerns with crypto. Crypto (PoW), like any other industry, invests in energy infrastructure. The concern right now is that its sometimes cheaper to pollute than to use green energy. All our politicians have had plenty time to ensure this is not the case; We should be more than angry that they have failed.

If we establish, through regulations, subsidies and taxes, a situation where it is always cheaper to use green energy; Crypto would bring nothing but massive investment in green energy development.

For a very long time human beings talked to each other in groups that required no authority, only consensus; We've had a very hard time translating this online, karma, following, friending, subs and rules.. none of it is perfect. But adding an authority to dictate what is good discussion what is bad, comes with a host of problems in itself.

But i do agree that a benevolent dictator may be better than a functioning democracy, for a time.

One of the reasons we live so long is that the evolutionary pressure is not negative after reproduction; To begin with it takes 15+ years to raise human offspring to a stage where they might be able to fend for themselves. 20+ years to give them advantage in the environment. Grandparents relieving this burden for each generation greatly increases their reproductive success, far beyond procreation. This is of course similar to other animals, but the benefits are amplified by at least two major factors in humans. First the usefulness of inherited complex knowledge. And second, because of fetal underdevelopment due to birthing hip limitations in evolved bipedal locomotion.

Skeptical about these kinds of claims, they usually are mixing up cause and effect; People who are emotionally and cognitively healthy tend to go outside more because they are healthy, i don't know how you would control for that.

I'm on Enterprise, and you can't actually turn it off permanently, after a time (maybe a reboot, or scheduled that i can't find) it just turns itself back on, and usually knackers my nvidia drives, even though i have it set to not update drivers, and even though i killed the medic service as well ffs.

Found a trick where you basically remove windows access rights to wuauclt.exe and wuaueng.dll, causing an error code 5 whenever it tries to run its update service.. so far its been stable. Not sure if this would work for other versions.

Any amount of fear for someone following you that you can see, should be more for someone following you that you can't see. The fact that its inverse is a weakness of our psychology.

It is fascinating even reading these comments, people falling over themselves trying to define a difference between 'some guy' recording them, and cctv (which is effectively 'some guy' recording them).

It kind of reminds me of a nature program i watched some time ago, where they 'concealed' the cameras in plain sight by strapping them onto trees to get footage. Its important to remind ourselves that we are simple animals too, and when we don't see the 'guy' we don't feel the threat.

As the NSA recommend, disable Remote Desktop Services and its associated port (TCP 3389). But I'm also not saying don't update. I'm saying choose when you want to update and what you want to update. Use your own firewall and virus software, lock down your own system.

Forgive me for being glib but; Leaving a backdoor for good old papa Gates to protect you is a bad strategy.

My advice would be to take control of your own security. Microsoft do not have your best interests at heart.

>How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

wuauclt.exe and wuaueng.dll. Add 'Administrators' to permissions, then go back in and delete all permission entries. Basically deny windows access to its update system. Doesn't hurt to run Anti-Beacon as well.

NSudo as Trusted Installer to cripple security center and Update medic service, group policies can shut down most of Defender and Customer Experience Improvement Program as well as the nags about those. Also have a laundry list of scheduled tasks to kill.

Takes me days to get win 10 to run as i want, be secure (from MS) and stable, aka not just suddenly change something and mess up my work.

Its still a shadow of the operating system XP was (not that XP was very good). Just compulsory auto arrange and border-less windows alone really cripples its ability to multi-task or work with complex file sets efficiently. And the amount of bloat both in its install footprint and running services is insane.

>wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all.

I remember this, at the time we knew people who were infected (and infectious) could take more than 10 days to show symptoms, and if they didn't wear a mask they could infect hundreds. We also knew that anything less than an N95 wasn't designed to protect the wearer anyway (though as it turns out it does), but rather everyone else from the wearer. So it was really disingenuous of them to suggest your mask doesn't protect you, as they knew its everyone else's mask than protects you..

By the time it hit Italy we knew it was airborne, even if not by official measure, out government and the WHO kept this BS up for months after that.

Maybe we watch different media, as i have seen nothing about this issue. A few articles online, hidden away, nothing proportional to the seriousness of the issue.

Happened in the UK as well, Boris (and to be fair the WHO) told us masks were counter productive. That they might get you to stand closer to people and touch your face more, increasing your chances of getting Covid.. All presumably to save a mask shortage; But we know, and they should have known, that the public doesn't buy the same kind of masks that our NHS buys and there never was going to be any shortage.

This encouraged examples like; people walking up to you in the supermarket explaining why you should take your mask off. It lead to some number of deaths, probably 10s of thousands in the UK as this policy lasted for six months and it undoubtedly was part of the reason care-homes were hit as hard in the first wave.

Now here we are a year later, and no one has been held accountable, no talk of this in the media, no anger. Not only were we treated like children, we were treated like children by incompetent heartless leaders that got a lot of us killed, and there seems to be no corrective process for this.

>A house has intrinsic value. People can live in a house, store things there, or rent it out. Its value was not put into the system, it simply exists, period. Even if the market crashes, a house is still useful and can appreciate again. Its market-value is dependent on both demand and usefulness. The second variable doesn't change.

Let me answer that by showing you a mirror perspective of your point;

Crypto has intrinsic value. People can use Crypto to exchange or store value bypassing dangerous intermediaries and structures of control. Its value was not put into the system, it simply exists, period. even if the housing market crashes, a crypto currency will still be useful and can appreciate. Cryptos market-value is dependent on both demand and usefulness. The second variable doesn't change.

Now the point here is that the mirror argument is about as right as yours. You can imagine ways crypto will devalue, i can imagine ways your house will devalue. You can imagine using your devalued house for things that are useful to you, i can imagine using a devalued crypto currency for things that are useful to me.

>To put this in simplest terms: Every cent someone makes from whatevercoin, has to be put into the system by someone else. A house appreciates in value since living space is a scarce commodity facing growing demand...it's sarcity and thus its appreciation in value is a natural process caused by usefulness and demand.

You just fell over your own point there. Both houses and bitcoins go up in price if the demand for them goes up or the supply of them goes down... calling demand 'put into the system' when you disapprove changes nothing.

Also there are plenty of people who use houses as 'tokens of value' only to flip them when the market is favorable, and there are plenty of people who use crypto as a functional currency when other options are unfavorable to their circumstance.

If you are going to change the laws, why not just make pornography legal and use the freed policing to go after illegal hacking of secure devices...

I don't remember except that i found it significant, i tried to find the article i think it was a university that did the study, if i find it i will post it.

>Tesla has a safety record that’s not unimpressive compared to the 36k...

But when Tesla cars were then compared to similarly priced cars; that record dropped through the floor.

Your argument is probably the most important and fundamental argument against surveillance there is. The reason it will be ignored is; For a million years our defense against other humans have largely been tribal, what i call the zebra defense, "I'm just like everyone else [in my tribe]", implying that if you pick on me you must also pick on my 'tribe'. This has evolved socially into statements like "I've nothing to hide". And its so deeply ingrained into our nature that we will accept mass surveillance believing that it will only be used against 'enemies' of our 'tribe', criminals, immigrants, etc.

I've found the only compelling argument is to point out that enemies will invariably use the system against us; e.g. you have nothing to hide? You want to hide your children from predators, you location from burglars, your identity from identity thieves, your blood type from gangsters with kidney problems. In short you have everything to hide from someone and a lot of someones are watching you through the surveillance system.

>It seems that you have completely missed the past four decades of renewable energy decreasing in price by a factor of 100x.

And it seems you have completely missed the fact that investment from crypto miners helped to bring this efficiency saving about, if there wasn't so much demand, there would be nothing to invest in R&D and infrastructure that inevitably lower prices.

Crypto, or specifically PoW acts like a guarantee of sale under a certain price per KwH. It used to be necessary for governments to guarantee power prices, and offer subsidies to encourage investment in their countries infrastructure. PoW in part replaces this necessity and encourages companies to invest in renewable, efficient, power production.

Fossil fuels being used to fill demand of any sort is its own problem. We need global carbon taxes on a Montreal Protocol level to incentivize any excess demand (investment) to target renewables. -But with this, crypto would be a great boost to renewable technology, guaranteeing a minimum return for business investing in Research and Development.

So he is turning down real investment in renewables in the hopes that other more agreeable investment materializes out of thin air.. meanwhile his plan crashes the price of renewable energy endangering those industries and shrinking the market.. allowing established fossil fuel industries a bigger share. genius.

"Every watt of renewable power generated to power a crypto miner," IS investment in renewable energy.. which he would rather was not invested in renewable energy. I don't see any other way to interpret that, unless you think that paying monies for renewables is somehow not 'investing' in renewables.

So you are against investment in renewables. That is not as progressive as you think.

The problem with free choice is that people often make the wrong choice. -The Chinese Communist Party and Michaelt the Libertarian.

That's a really great question;

There are important conversations within the LGBT that would be really interesting, but asking questions that could be construed years later as homophobic, no matter now innocent can publicly destroy people.

I'd love to have a discussion breaking down certain ideologies, including the merits as well as demerits of certain controversial groups. But this could actually cross into criminal in the UK with the interpretation of some laws. And certainly come back to haunt me years later publicly.

The definition of what is racist, xenophobic, and homophobic is different from person to person, mod to mod. There are plenty of rational opinions within controversial topics that are just not allowed. This is compounded with the problem of social media that don't allow anonymity, as laws in some western countries actually criminalize rudeness.