vimacs2

As if anyone needed even more incentive to execute war criminals like pigs in a slaughter house.

The exact same thing could be said for the American Republic. There are millions of people living below the poverty line, a stratified society in both financial and political terms, and widespread racism and sexism.

Also, common to Rome is the notion that they are a special people who deserve dominion over the rest of the world. It might be shrouded in more egalatarian language (cue the exporting "freedom" talk) but barely so.

The only objection I have to this post that I have is the notion that there was a democracy there to begin with. Before Julius Caesar attempted (unsuccessfully) to monopolise power in the Old Republic, there was already a ever widening chasm between the farmers that made up the bulk of Roman citizenry and the people in the Senate.

All Caesar had to do was harness this growing discontent of the masses through his fake populism and having undying loyalty in much of the army helped as well.

It took just one generation after Ceasars assassination for the establishment of the Imperium and the dissolution of the Republic.

Trump might or might not be reinstated but the beginning of the end of the American experiment has already been set in motion.

The only way to save it is through a radical reorganisation of power to counter the one to come but the establishment want to keep returning to the supposed Utopia that was in place before Trump - missing the obvious fact that it was their "utopia" that lead to Trump in the first place.

Cute attempt at establishing a completely made up dichotomy but generally the politeness of a police force is correlated with how effective it is, not inversely.

If being an exporter of terrorism is all it takes to be disqualified to possess nukes, then the USA and Russia should have lost theirs a long long time ago.

Except the difference is the Americans never had to deal with a hostile next door neighbour with the personal financial and arms backing of the world's largest military superpower so this is a laughable attempt at equivocation.

You might not like the DPRK (I'm not a fan either though then again it's hard to have a firm stance on an area in the world where there is almost no non-propagandised information on) but it makes a lot of sense why somebody from Pakistan of all places would be sympathetic with their situation.

You sound like somebody who's sampled a grand total of 1 tiling wm and now thinks they know the field. You do not.

By your reasoning, i3 is a copycat of ION or wmii and shouldn't have even bothered.

There is plenty of room in the market for more tiling wm's. Yes, you can technically run i3 in conjunction with Gnome but then you are essentially losing all the QoL and floating features of Mutter including the expose view which I use heavily.

Maybe fascist is a little extreme but nationalist definitely fit the bill. Not every American thinks America as a geopolitical entity in itself is a positive thing. Hence helping them in an arm's race would be outright immoral unless if they think China is worse enough in the international stage to invoke the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" maxim which is a pretty dubious position to hold.

Seems a bit of a weird double standard there. Why exactly should Libya and North Korea not have nukes? They have powerful hostile forces against them as well. India also absolutely required nukes because Pakistan definitely does act the aggressor in several instances. Their army might be smaller but outnumbered does not mean outgunned.

Libya got destroyed by American forces because it did not have any real deterrent to invasion and Assad literally allowed NATO in to show he had no weapons of mass destruction only to then be toppled anyway.

Seems that playing ball with the Americans does not work as Iran has learned the hard way with Trump breaking their nuclear treaty. It's because America - just like China and other super powers - do not believe that international law applies to them. Might makes right in their eyes, regardless of the pompous self aggrandising crap about freedom and democracy.

You mean his damage to American hegemony, right? They tend to hate it when they can't bully countries with their oversized military so no surprise that they villanise their deterrents. The hypocrisy is pretty sickening if a little amusing.

As far as I and the majority of Pakistanis are concerned, he's a hero.

Shame for India but it's laughable to suggest that India would not have escalated into a full out ground invasion into Pakistan if they did not have a massive deterrent.

Except there are already anti-anti-adblockers out there like REEK which work very well. Their campaigns might escalate but so would the efforts of the adblockers and in a fight between an established tech player like Mozilla and even a very large old media conglomerate, I don't fancy the latters chances at winning that tech arms race especially with all the bad press their efforts would generate.

This whole argument is largely invalided by the mere existence of Brave anyway. You could argue that their crypto based mode of monetisation is not the absence of rather the reimagining of ads but regardless of how you feel about crypto, it's definitely superior for the end user and offers effective monetisation that is optional.

Regardless of your feelings on crypto, it absolutely is superior than the default. With Brave, you only need to trust them. With Firefox, you need to trust every Tom, Dick, and Harry with access to Google Analytics.

Also, you can choose to disable all the crypto and still get the built in adblocking. With Firefox, you can only turn to add-ons.

Considering the fact that Firefox has had less than 5% coverage of the browser market for years now, this is not very reassuring. It's also quite frankly missing the point.

It shows a clear case of mission statement in conflict with business model and shakes my confidence of Mozilla as the champions of privacy and freedom they paint themselves as.

Keep in mind that they don't even need to make it built in, they could instead bundle ublock origin as a preinstalled add-on and provide a little bit of money to the developer. It would simultaneously improve the security and browsing experience of many of its users while attracting many new ones and funding the fight against invasive online advertising.

But big daddy Google would get so cross then and Mozilla would be forced to adopt an actually privacy respecting alternative like duckduckgo and lose a lot of their funding.

I don't want to main Brave as I currently do, both because of its use of chromium and my ill feelings of the CEO's donations to political movements against the LGBT community but Mozilla management have lost my confidence over the years despite the actual deveopers remaining world class.

Nearly every company is authoritarian inherently. It's a small group of people or even one person leveraging capital to exploit the labour of a much larger group of people for profit with zero democratic process.

I'm not disagreeing that the state should be given limited to zero say on the assembly of people but companies should not be framed as the counterweight against authoritarianism but another manifestation of it.

While I don't necessarily buy the panpsychism you're outlining, I appreciate the fact that you actually make the distinction between experience of qualia (the hard problem) and self-awareness, which we arguably already are capable of both modelling and implementing successfully.

I always found it dubious that people privilege self awareness so greatly in discussions of consciousness considering the fact that many beings that most recognise as at least sentient such as dogs and other higher mammals often lack it, and arguably many humans too (and I'm not just talking about those before the age of 4 either).

You mean via nuclear transumation? That's not chemical nor particularly practical in a pre-fusion powered economy

The problem with your third assertion is even if we accept that there is no way to prove the consciousness of others, you need to categorical deny your own and thus borders on absurdity and outright denial.

Considering the Taliban were from their inception an alliance of wealthy landlords and mullahs funded by the US to deal with the socialist and secular revolution underway in Afghanistan during the late 70's, it's no surprise.

One of the most impressive PR moves the US succeeded at in the cold war was convincing the world that the Mujahadeen were freedom fighters and not thugs for rich local assholes.

Some of your linked comment was valid but your "negative natural selection" take was just nonsense. Superbugs have nothing at all to do with vaccinations. It's the result of overly zealous use of antibiotics that gets cut before the point of complete pathogen destruction.

There are also sufficient rates of infection of even healthy subjects to warrant concern considering that Covid cases are far more serious than most Flu cases - another illness that affects the healthy far less but can still lead to hospitalisation or even death. Also, before you mention it, the fact that there are more deaths caused by the Flu than Covid statistically per year is due to the greater proliferation of the Flu virus and it's variants over Covid.

On an individual basis, you are far more likely to develop complications from Covid than Flu, even for healthy subjects.

His comment contained information (namely that the FDA process is not particularly strict compared to European standards) whereas your comment had zero information. On an objective level, he had a higher quality contribution.

Go easy on the arrogance over substance.

I don't see much connection there. Anti-vaxxers were (and in fact still are) predominantly wealthy white people but that's a function of having an excess of free time and lack of first hand experience with much death or infectious disease, not political leanings.

You are in fact wrong. It was the CIA and the military-industrial complex invested in plundering Iraq that pushed the WMD theory and the resulting war was something with bipartisan support in the USA - liberals and conservatives alike.

Not a fan of antivaxxers but I'm even less of a fan of liberals attempting to whitewash recent history to make themselves look more reasonable.

Framing the EFF's position as being against browser safety or spam protection is disingenuous.

But the effort required to build such a structure, even if physically possible is far more than building the equivalent in a swarm and the utility of such a swarm is greater especially when you consider that the typical sci-fi trope of living on the surface inside of that sphere is ruined by the complete absence of any gravity exerted by the actual sphere on that surface. This means that all of those hapless residents would instead get pulled from the surface into the star in the centre.

This is precisely the appeal of Larry Niven's Ringworld concept. You instead take a slice of that sphere and spin it around the star and generate gravity through centrifugal force. They can take a number of configurations but the default one would give you the equivalent of 2 million earth's worth of living space inside one continual surface. This is obviously hugely mass intensive and having a ring of that kind of radius spinning at the tangential velocities required for the equivalent of one g of simulated gravity (around 1200 km/s) requires materials so magically strong that they make graphene look like soggy tissues. The only material that could do this even in the theoretical realm is magmatter, which would be materials constructed out of magnetic monopoles, something that has been predicted to exist by some but has yet to be observed.

However, you could construct one using known materials by creating a superstructure around the ring that is much more massive and orbits the other direction at normal orbital speeds for a body about an AU out from the sun with the ringworld electromagnetically suspended from the superstructure, normalising their collective momentum to zero. That obviously greatly increase the mass requirements but this could mostly take the form of hydrogen and helium which is far more abundant than heavier elements and would be usable as fuel for fusion reactors. That superstructure can contain many smaller rotating habitats and the whole thing could be used as a vast habitat for microgravity living as well - something I envision as many humans doing as living on worlds with gravity by the time we would have constructed one of these.

You also want to have a superstructure because at such a high tangential velocity, if a human being of 80 kg struck the ring from the outside, it would blow with the kinetic energy of a thermonuclear bomb. Point defence is absolutely necessary and the superstucture offers both an excellent shield covering the non sun lit side of the ring and a great platform for hosting those point defence systems. Ringworlds are also not in stable orbital configurations over astronomical timescales so you need to maintain their orbit through corrective thrust. This could be done through light sails which would also be appealing for it's mechanical simplicity.

Ringworlds are very mass intensive especially if your civilisation still has no access to unobtanium building materials and I don't think this would be something we would ever build a lot of in our particular solar system but even with that mass cost, you could easily gather enough rocky material from the sun to build a few and still have the vast majority of people living in other far smaller structures (but only relative to a star encompassing ring) in the swarm.

This comment demonstrates both confusion of the Dyson sphere concept with it's sci-fi bastardisation as well as a lack of understanding of scale, and especially of the mechanics of black hole power production. Dyson spheres (or Dyson swarms as they are often called to prevent such confusion) were never originally envisioned as a single impossibly large rigid sphere encompassing a star. They are rather a massive collection of structures that are able to utilize all the energy output of a star. This means that you could start construction on one today in an iterative fashion and immediately benefit from it.

The technology required to build a tier 1 swarm is not advanced. All you need is the ability to build a thin reflector (aluminium foil would work) with radio and a basic onboard computer. You do not even need onboard propellant because a reflector can generate the required thrust for minor corrections with solar pressure alone. These reflectors can then concentrate that light from close in to the star out to collectors further out in the system. This essentially makes your habitable zone as large as you want since you can also light entire planets this way and only utilize less than a percent of a percent of your total energy budget.

The real challenge is having good enough automation to construct and send these stations out without requiring too much oversight, and getting good enough at construction off earth (since you really don't want to deal with that gravity well). We're definitely close to having the required automation technology and we should be performing the first manufacturing off earth before the end of the next decade.

Artificial fusion can be made far more efficient than the fusion in the core of our sun, yes. However, the sun outputs enough energy to light 2 billion earths worth of surface. Moreover, it essentially contains all of both the hydrogen and rocky material in the solar system with the other bodies being essentially a rounding error in comparison, so even in a controlled fusion based economy, you would still create a Dyson sphere like construct since you would be using that star as your main fuel and mass source.

Black holes though? They make even aneutronic fusion look like a fire cracker in comparison. You're getting less than a percent mass energy conversion with even the best theoretical fusion models there are, whereas with black holes, you can get anywhere from 16% to 40% depending on the technique and mass range of the black hole. Stellar black holes have so much energy inside that they would dwarf even our star (consider that their progenitors were stars with far more mass than our own and with an even bigger disparity in power output). They also last for periods of time that make even red dwarfs look like still births. If you could make artificial ones in the gigaton and megaton ranges, then they can also make for amazing batteries. In this case, you are able to tap the hawking radiation emitted for power and this promises potentially even greater efficiencies than the stellar mass ones (albeit, you would not be gaining a net power gain here, this is strictly for power storage and potentially gravity generation purposes).

This comment is like saying to somebody explaining the increased rate of car crashes with people talking on phones as a consequence of divided attention as saying that has nothing to do with that and it's because we're genetically conditioned to only focus our conscious attention on one task.

Mechanics and second order effects matter. Reductionism is a useful conceptual tool but it isn't a good representation of wider reality because things are more than the sum of their parts.

You seem to be missing the fact that genetics are simply encoding the proteins and it is the biological feedback systems mediated by dopamine that are actually driving our actions.

For me, this was the true dealbreaker as otherwise, this ticks a lot of boxes for me. It seems like such a clear cost saving move without any benefit to the customer and makes the already steep price unbearable.

A lot of excellent points though it's completely inaccurate to frame the fall of the Soviet Union's scientific progress due to their hierarchy replacing the "prior capitalist one" when the former lead to the mass industrialisation and rapid economic growth that lead to the USSR being the first nation to conquer space flight whereas under the latter, the USSR was an agrarian society suffering from food shortages and mass poverty. The decline of Soviet science and economy had more to do with NATO and American restrictions on trade and movement than something self imposed by the Soviets.

Capitalism is completely compatible with hierarchies and censorship - indeed one could argue that capitalism is completely incompatible with a true flattening of hierarchies since it rests on the ability of an owner class holding a monopoly over the means of production. The majority of dictatorships around the world use capitalism as the basis of it's economy. Following the dissolving of the USSR, Russia continues to be authoritarian and arguably more so than the USSR was past the Stalin era.

Aside from that, I think it's a little premature to frame the internet's ultimate effect on the world as reducing the ability of the government to censor the population when it's only been around for less than 30 years and we are already seeing mass adoption and development of both censorship and surveillance tech that goes beyond even the wildest dreams of 20th century era dictators.

I don't really buy the argument that most technology is invented in systems with freedom and equality either. It just sounds more like something we want to believe than something borne out by data. The internet and rocket ships were the product of the military - an institution that has more to do with using force to enact the will of it's host nation on others and limiting their freedoms than preserving the freedoms of their own, especially for superpowers like the USA and the CCP, which are effectively immune to conquest by military force.

This is in fact the same for the Silicon Valley and most private industry, you only think all this tech is the product of your freedom and equality because all of the actual extreme inequality and lack of freedom is kept compartmentalised to the global south through long and convoluted supply chains. It's not really freedom if only 10% of the actual people involved in the sustaining of an economy have any semblance of it -leaving aside the observation that for even this 10% that represents the average US citizen, their actual democratic agency in the state or in their job is vanishingly low.

"easily disproven lies", what lies exactly?

Even a Jew stuck in a ghetto in Nazi Germany enjoyed significantly better privacy at home from both the state and capital than a wealthy citizen in a typical western liberal nation today.

Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany in fact prove the exact opposite of what point you think you're making. They were foremost in using the "magic tech" of their day - telecommunications and motorised vehicles.

Even then, they had several rebellions and uprisings that were able to develop thanks to lacking the degree of surveillance tech found today.

Power which was extended through the use of said technology. I'm fine with focusing on regressive hierarchical systems as the fundamental root of oppression but pretending like the information and mechanical technology introduced in the late 19th century to early 20th century did not massively increase the reach of the state is just being ridiculous.

Prior to motorised vehicles and the telegraph for example, borders were almost impossible to enforce on the general population without significant leakage.

Ironically in spite of powered flight, freedom of movement is in a sense significantly less than even 200 years ago when it comes to movement between countries that do not already have diplomatic ties to one another allowing for state authorized travel.

Incidentally, this is part of why many punishments in the medieval age were so extreme - the actual ability of the state to enforce the law was so pathetically limited by today's standards that they needed a strong element of fear to attempt to control the population.

Thanks for sharing your story and it was definitely relevant. I find that many people demanding solutions with complaints are not really looking for a solution, they just want you to shut up.

I see this a lot actually in politics as well. They think they are successfully browbeating you with their "hard truths" but what they're really showing is they lack imagination and the ability to evaluate their own position critically.