vimacs2

I'd add that even if it received funding through private enterprise, it would still be infused with the politics of said backers - whether intentionally or not.

The best you could possibly achieve is funding purely through small time (non business) donations from the public - and I'm still a little skeptical as to the scope of research that could realistically fund.

Terrible take entirely divorced from reality and filled with hubris. Just because you are not personally witness to it doesn't somehow divorce you from the animals that sustain your life either directly or indirectly. Like it or not, you are a predator.

Also, for many people especially in the southern hemisphere, hunting is still a necessary part of life so not everything is about your narrow clearly American conception of purely recreational hunting.

You can make valid arguments for veganism or vegetarianism from an ethics standpoint but claiming meat is categorically "terribly healthy" is nonsense. Veganism is not even nutritionally complete without supplements and there hasn't been a discovered hominid species as of yet that have not been omnivores.

Who is giving 5 year olds 100% pure ethanol or ethanol at all for that matter?

We don't really know because the sandtrout have been all but outright confirmed to be alien in origin - probably the only known example of alien life in the Dune universe.

Maybe this was expanded on post-Chapterhouse but I don't count those as canon.

I'll grant you that but we already have something that represents ownership in the real world - contracts. I'm not clear what advantages NFTs bring to the table for non-digital assets.

That's exactly why I'm throwing the stones. Most corporations are still merely observing NFT's from a distance but if it gets any traction and more companies start embracing it, the next step will be to legislate this fantasy into legal reality.

It's everything wrong with late stage capitalism consolidated into one and we all know that the people with power will salivate at the prospect of more money for less tangible value.

What are these "real world applications", pray tell?

They're "fine" to the extent that the vacuum is fine - they are complete non-entities with zero worth beyond what grifters and idiots attribute to them.

I will cast a hail of stones on the concept of copyright gone (even more) batshit insane with absolutely no hesitation.

Integration is not desirable though for most of the authorities involved. It threatens the existing power structures of such gated communities. It also risks creating a sense of universal worker solidarity that could lead to the resurgence of unions with actual teeth.

The whole white washing of their own cultural identity has little to do with secularism and has more to do with the ongoing war against community. The more atomised the individual is, the easier they are to sell product to and the less power they have to endanger the system.

Why do you think they keep crying about "critical race theory" while simultaneously being unable/unwilling to define it?

That's their manufactured opposing force right there.

What's laughable is the insinuation that any population would be willing to start an insurrection over the absence of fucking Facebook.

That's one way to look at it. Another is that it's a clever budgeting strategy that outsources all the expensive R&D and production costs to their biggest ally.

Israel took and continues to take billions of dollars of funding from the US to develop its military so a completely baffling example to cite.

These don't reproduce in that way though. They require existing skin cells that they then corrall into balls akin to themselves. Even if grey goo was a serious existential risk (it isn't because the classic doomsday scenario ignores energy density and heat dissipation as factors), this is not really talking about the same mechanism.

As much as I long for the day I get to see the world and myself be assimilated into grey gooey unity, the whole gray goo scenario is terribly implausible for the same reason why it has never happened despite having self replicating machines on earth for at least 3 billion years: it turns out that performing any kind of abrasion at that scale requires a shit tonne of energy, which entails an even larger shit tonne of heat.

Any grey goo candidates will rapidly vaporise themselves into cinders, even assuming they somehow manage to acquire the bordering-on-nuclear levels of energy density.

In reality, a crack team of specialised machines will always beat a sea of generics anyway so any swarm of artificial self replicators will inevitably balloon into a fully blown parallel ecology long before it acquired the bulk for Armagooden.

Yeah, that wouldn't work at all but then again, inaccurate science was far from the only problem that movie had imo.

One possible solution is to ionise the air near the walls and then use a magnetic field to contain it. This would not really prevent all air leakage but you don't really have to as long as it's substantially reduced since even the relatively diminutive size of the Elysium habitat would contain a fairly formidable volume of air. There can also be outside magnets that can arrest the momentum of the escaped ionised air enough so it falls back down to Earth. Then all you need is a tether extending down to the atmosphere with an internal air pump and you have a self contained cycle.

OP is referencing an open air habitat so a comparison with the ISS doesn't make sense. Open air designs do actually work once you scale up the size of the habitat enough. This is where we get the idea of Bishop rings which use a wall a hundred or so km in height to keep the air in. Mckendree cylinders (which are a supersized version of O'Neil cylinders) can also have end caps that are open provided you have a high enough wall.

The main advantage of open air designs is it allows you to use aerobreaking when approaching the habitat which could be a significant save in fuel.

This is true. What's happening is the THC causes a delay on the onset of REM sleep. Theoretically, this should cause a sudden ramp up of dreams when you take a hiatus from cannabis use. However, this does not happen to me personally which is strange because I do experience this with alcohol - another drug that causes a delay on the onset of REM sleep :shrugs:

That humans had a major role in the extinction of wooly mammoths is likely correct.

However this cannot be said for the megafauna in Australia: https://theconversation.com/aboriginal-australians-co-existe...

Our propensity to blame past extinctions on humans often has more to do with projecting our own civilisation's tendancies at destruction than some immutable fact about human nature.

Mammoths also tended to live in areas of relatively low biodiversity such as the artic and tundra anyway so this does not contradict my point that historically humans have caused increases in the biodiversity in their local ecologies.

There is substantial evidence that the Amazon rainforest for instance was at least in part cultivated: https://www.voanews.com/a/amazon-rainforest-ancient-people-c...

I'd go a step further and say that technology is nature. Humans just represent another way for nature to enhance the permutation of new possibilities. For thousands of years, we acted like the animal analogue to the fungal mattes that had terraformed the continental landmasses to become livable by plants hundreds of millions of years ago.

Everywhere we went, we planted intricately organised forests of different plant species that then aided an enhanced biodiversity of the fauna too. It's only recently in our history that humans have turned from a proliferator of biodiversity to a poison for it.

My comment was more in reference to the fact that it is now legal for UK companies to dump raw sewage into the water. It means that the practice will likely proliferate to other less well funded regions.

In fairness, vaping marijuana and specifically vaping "the lower end of pure sativa" is not at all representative of the wider cannabis smoking public. In places where it's illegal in particular, you're stuck with whatever variant is currently in circulation with your local dealer and those are almost invariably high strength hybrids - because those are just more economical in a black market economy where the cash crop has ideally as little of a footprint as possible.

I hate it personally because I turn into an abject moron when I'm totally stoned - which is hard to avoid when your options are so limited. If I had a choice, I would probably go for a low strength sativa as well and maybe the occasional indica when I'm suffering from pain.

Mammals will probably get somewhat of an easier ride through the Thames since at least they're not getting their oxygen through the water.

Shame though for the rest of the country that might not necessarily be able to bankroll such a project.

Yes, very efficient. Meanwhile nearly all of the peasantry subsisted on rice and suffered from malnutrition and frequent birth defects.

Also, this has nothing to do with capitalism. It's just exchange of money which had existed long before that system first developed in the city states of Italy.

What an idiotic comment. Not liking and making rape jokes = "lacking social awareness"?

The fact that somebody would act different if they grew up in a different environment isn't an argument for anything. If I grew up in Jim Crow era America, my likelihood of being a segregationist is increased which proves nothing about the virtue of that belief.

Also, "baby burning jokes" are exclusively funny to 14 year olds and the perpetually adolescent mind. They're not considered the height of comedy in any mainstream circle.

Except it had little to do authoritarianism or communism, it had to do with the fact that at the time, telecommunication technology had not sufficiently proliferated in the rural communities for individuals aside from the beauracrats sent by Mao to oversee the project would have been able to report the unfolding disaster.

The beauracrats were ironically sent to those rural communities precisely because Mao was worried that the government was becoming overly Byzantine in it's structure so the motivation was in fact to flatten power structures. The problem is that those bureaucrats were motivated to misrepresent the level of success the agriculture project was having out of a desire for increasing their standing.

Mao primary fuck up here was in assuming that these cushy officials would somehow be "purified" by being forced to interact with the salt of the earth rural people. In fact, they just recreated the social hierarchies that they were used to prior to the revolution - using Mao as their justification which would have been fairly effective since he was fairly beloved in the rural communities at the time prior to the cluster fuck that was about to unfold.

Ultimately, the real lesson is that the myth of the "strong leader" is innately counter revolutionary. Mao should have realised this since he had studied some anarchist theory as well as what happened with Lenin when he decided to patronise his entire population and murdered all the independent worker communes and any chance of democracy in the post-Tsar Russia.

Mao tried many experiments including trying to form equitable arrangements with capitalists and land owners, and a national day dedicated to facilitating criticisms of the government. Ultimately though, a combination of ego and niavity ruined what could have been a far more successful and less destructive revolution than what happened in Russia.

Of course the modern day CCP is so byzantine in structure and dehumanising that even Mao's worst nightmares couldn't have imagined it.

Will all due respect and speaking as somebody who hates the CCP, painting the "Great Leap forward" as anything other than a tragedy borne from massive government incompetence and a breakdown of communication is propoganda.

The US keeps trying to paint it as if the CCP decided (for some reason) that what would best help their goals is to kill millions of their own population and plunge their country into a food crisis.

It would be like the CCP pretending like the mass deaths of the indigenous people of America from smallpox was intended genocide by the Europeans instead of a consequence of the lack of knowledge of microbes and the lack of domesticated animals for the indigenous peoples, except at least that lie is some level of plausible.

Yes as well as the republic itself. It's a garbage system designed to keep power out of the grasp of the commons, which only has merit in relation to even worse systems like monarchies or fascism.

Yes there was and sure, in the short term the Imperium seemed a good deal - until the wrong person takes the position of emperor which inevitable lead to mass terror and destruction. Something which had happened a number of times in Rome's history.

> It’s a shame they decided to improve upon the existing hardware and took much longer than initially expected, but that’s what life with rockets used to be before SpaceX showed rapid iteration is a better path.

Uhm, I think you're simultaneously doing a discredit to past rocket development and giving an easy pass to the mess that is SLS with this statement.

It's just shoddy project management and prioritizing collaboration with as many big donar aerospace companies as possible as opposed to what works. There is playing it safe and then there is just being complacent. The SLS is complacency personified.