lawpoop

I'm mulling this over... It's an interesting idea for sure. I'm not sure that it can't be reduced to human populations in general, which makes it more like the super-organism Wilson describes.

OTOH, not all human populations are states, as in countries, and arguable that is the "organism" said to be reproducing itself....

Viruses rely entirely on the host cell's proteins for all of their replication. They don't metabolize anything themselves, nor do they create their own copies of themselves. The host cell creates copies of the virus.

> viruses are debatable under this definition

I think it's a thin pro-argument. Viruses are completely dependant on the host cell and the host cell's metabolism. The host cell's protein unwraps the jacket, and the host cells' proteins replicate the viral DNA/RNA payload. The virus does not reproduce itself, and it does not metabolize anything. There are no inputs to a virus.

Whereas living cells, give them the proper inputs, and they metabolize energy, catalyze reactions, and create copies of themselves.

Well EO Wilson posited certain eusocial insect colonies, including bees, as a super-organism. I think the idea has some currency in biology. The idea is that Darwinian selection is acting upon the colony, so it is the unit of evolution. Remember that eukaryotic cells are a symbosis of two prokaryotic cells.

Not sure how often or even if countries self-reproduce.

You mentioned "any time in history", and for most of its history, the US was explicitly a white supremacist state. Legal segregation only ended in the 1960s.

Yes, other places in the world were like this, but that's irrelevant, isn't it?

There was a definition I encountered in high school, which I never found a source for, but seems to be pretty robust and address many of the non-living things other definitions include.

This definition is a rubric of several qualities:

1. Metabolizes energy

2. Stores Information

3. Self-replicates

#1 rules out crystals; they are formed by outside forces, they don't metabolize themselves. It also rules out viruses and prions; they don't ingest any "food" to perform metabolic activity. #2 rules out fire; it doesn't store information in a DNA-like molecule or anything simliar. It's purely a chemical reaction. #3 is the obvious thing that differentiates non-living things like rocks from plants and animals.

Even during times of black chattel slavery, when native Americans were forcibly removed from their lands, and Asians and Middle Easterners were suing in court to be recognized as white, so they could enjoy the benefits of first class citizenship?

The point of Elite colleges are the networking, not the education you get.

Linklater's Tape (2001) takes place entirely inside a hotel room, no cheating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_(film)

> looking back, I feel quite foolish to ask too much information in one go

To the contrary -- you are wise to learn from your mistakes : )

Is the amount of chemistry, then, or length of signal transmission, the measure of consciousness?

What is the implication for the conscious experience of the camera?

> While I am as baffled as any/many at having subjective qualia appear so "real"

Appear so real compared to what?

Are you claiming that your experience of your own thoughts are subjectively more real than your experience of your sensory perceptions?

If you don't think it's a problem, then it's not. There's no real way, presently, to prove there isn't a difference.

Likewise, I could say there is no difference between my experience of satiation after eating, and the experience of a garbage can being filled full. If you don't think there's a problem with that, fine. No way to show there isn't. However, people inclined to agree with your film example might not be inclined to agree with my satiation example.

Is there any difference between light falling in your eyes and your experience of vision, and light falling in a corpses eyes, and its experience of vision? Does a corpse experience vision as much as you do?

"Tweatrise"? "Twitter" + "treatise".

Just spitballing here.

It's all relative. If you already have enough energy to crack water, fueling a rocket is not a worry.

So fast food restaurants came into Europe without a concurrent marketing and advertising push? They just built the restaurants and people came, because it was tasty, fast, and cheap?

Neither of those are plentiful on Mars.

How do you fuel the rocket on Mars?

Doesn't account for why this would be happening more recently.

In the past in Europe, was fast food actually slow, expensive, and not that tasty?

OP means cacao

This is actually a genius application. I hope more HN readers read it and this meme spreads.

> Is that something being researched currently?

Sort of, but actually more no.

The way the equations in quantum physics work, this just happens, and there isn't any accounting for distance or space. That's just how it is.

Now, that seems to contradict our intuitive understanding of physics. Things can't be just linked like that without some force or information traveling between them.

So there are a few different interpretations of that quantum weirdness:

1. That's the way things really are, and our natural perception that things don't work that way may have helped us evolve to this point, but is actually wrong on the quantum scale

2. There is a hidden variable (the communication part, like a pilot wave) and we just haven't found it yet.

Actually, I think this is more a risk of marijuana, which in the US, is prescribable in several states, legal in a few, and decriminalized in most.

Which is not to say that I encourage recklessness with psychedelics, but that forasmuch as that is a concern with LSD or psilocybin, we're got bigger fish on our hands. Marijuana is much more available than either of those.

One thing that jumps out in this sentence is that, grammatically, AAVE uses negative concords (double (or more) negatives), like Spanish or French, instead of the "standard" English "not any", etc. (which I forget the name of.)

Interestingly, double negatives were standard in English up until about 200 years ago, when English speakers wanted their language to be more like Latin-- that is, civilized and refined. So they changed it.

An interesting part of AAVE is that is has verbs conjugated by tense and aspect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_En... . Aspect is something standard English doesn't have a grammatical case of.

How can one tell if the price coincides with intrinsic value?

If you and I looked at a chart of the history of btc prices, where would the match points be? In between highs and lows?

What is the "actual" price?

Can you point to a day in the past when bitcoin was at its actual price, instead of in a swing?

How about today's price? Is it in the swing, or is it actual?

I suppose at a very high level your thesis might be true, but at a practical level, I don't think it is. The banks have simply seen it's cheaper to eat the cost of fraud (and ensure the victim has the burden of proof wherever possible) than implement stricter security measures.

This goes from the transaction terminal to the bank's server room.

Europe has had chip cards for over 20 years. In the US, it was very recently implemented; only in the past year.

It wasn't that the US banks were occupying some "sweet spot" of retail transaction risk/reward; they simply didn't want to shell out the extra bucks to send people cards with chips in them. Neither merchant nor bank wanted to pay for chip-reading terminals. So, nobody budged until just the past year.

I don't know whether it was legislation, or perhaps the growing cost of credit card fraud (i.e. card skimmers, etc), but for whatever reason, it certainly wasn't a "sweet spot". We've had chip technology for 20+ years, they just didn't want to pay for it.

Insofar as human history, there is pretty good textual evidence that a guy running around Palestine called Jesus attracted followers and was executed by the Roman state. We have as much evidence for that guy as we do many other historical figures. I shouldn't have to mention this, but I feel compelled: the claim of historical Jesus is not any kind of theological, religious, or supernatural claim (i.e. that any miracles occured).

The problem is that intelligent autodidacts confuse the disciplines of science (developing theories and performing experiments to provide potentially disprovable evidence of universal, timeless laws of nature) and history (the study of written texts about events that occurred in the past) and the types of evidence acceptable to both fields. Hint: they're completely different.

The problem is that, if you want to advance a historical theory claiming that there was no historical guy called Jesus who inspired the gospel, you have to come up with a compelling theory, based on historical (written records from the past) evidence describing who built the first churches, who wrote the first gospels, why they made up a story about a Palestinian Jew who was crucified 300 years ago, and why that story was so compelling it caught on with the masses and elites alike.

Or you could just go with the idea that there was a guy running around the middle east 2,000 years ago, who pissed of the Jewish and Roman elite, so much to the point that he was executed. And about whom miracles were claimed to have been performed.

The thing is, for all religions developing where we have iron-clad evidence (Mormonism, Scientology, etc), it always starts with a charismatic leader who attracts a following. Throw a rock in India, and you can find any number of gurus who are said to be capable of levitating, not eating for long periods of time, etc. etc. There is nothing really extraordinary about the story of Jesus, comparatively speaking.

If you're going to make a historical theory that Jesus never existed, but instead was invented by someone else, you have to identify that someone else. In fleshing out your theory, you'll probably want to say why they invented it, and why it caught on, when many other small cults and gurus petered out.

Christianity didn't arise out of nowhere in, say, England in 1500.

It's the recent "Zeitgiest" conspiracy theory "documentaries" that float around on the internet. They just note similarities with the New Testament and old Egypto-Greco-Roman myths/cultic practices and say "See? This is where it came from".

You're right; it's not based on and scholarship or methodology. It's just simple associational reasoning. "These two things are similar, so therefore they are the same".

>> I'd like to know, how do you feel about the legality of cigarettes and alcohol.

> I wish they were illegal. I don't see any societal benefit with cigarettes, and I don't drink alcohol so am only left to deal with its consequences.

Weren't the consequences much, much worse when alcohol was illegal? That was the era when the word "gangster" was invented.