407 karma · joined February 2, 2021
You're also assuming that she did not just disable her lock code prior to giving the phone for repair. For a non-tech person, it's a reasonable assumption that somebody might have trouble fixing a device that they're locked out of.
Black people are the most consistently anti-police demographic so I don't know where you're getting the idea that it's "young western kids" that are propagating the anti-police rhetoric.
Most heavy industrial processes and power generation have substantial ecological consequences so I envision nearly all of this being taken off world into orbital factories and power collectors. Microwave wireless energy transfer has achieved greater than 80% efficiencies in the lab and solar power collectors in space can achieve a 24/7 operation and park themselves in geosynchronous orbits so a mini dyson swarm around Earth could power the world's economy comfortably and be far more distributed and safe against shutdowns. Manufacturing in microgravity offers unique opportunities and advantages for many processes in industry and the advantages of floating in vacuum cannot be understate for bulk transportation of goods.
There is a trick that exploits the conservation of momentum that allows for very cheap transfer of cargo and people from and to Earth without having to rely on the magically strong materials of space elevators: by having a ring of ferromagnetic material around the Earth that rotates and greater than orbital velocity, you can then have an outer shell around it that is either at rest or moving in the opposite direction (preferably at the rotational speed of the Earth that can be kept suspended from the inner coil via a magnetic field. As long as the net momentum of the inner and outer ring is zero, it will remain stable and now you have a platform that is at rest relative to the ground and from which you can have cable cars running to the ground from without requiring fictional materials. One thing to note is that with these largely stationary (save for counterbalancing against the rotation of the earth) platforms is that you are still experiencing most of the earth's gravity when standing on them. This makes it a good option for long term habitats for baseline humans. Of course, because it has a coil that winds around the entire circumference of the Earth, you can use it to propel one hell of a mass driver for cargo to the point where you could just not bother with chemical rockets altogether and rely on magnetic trains to do most of the heavy lifting into LEO with ion drives or solar sails are for long term maintenance.
This formula works for every planet but it makes the most sense to target Earth because of the highly challenging escape velocity it imposes on our current launch capabilities. This allows you to skip the rocket equation and as a consequence make travel to space genuinely affordable with potentially less than a dollar per kg costs. Once you get to space, travel is actually incredibly easy since you have mostly empty space between you and your target and there is no air resistance to slow you down.
We can also protect the Earth from coronal mass ejections and asteroid strikes and even counteract global warming by dimming the sunlight received from earth by a percent or two. This won't magically turn the clock back on climate change but it would be one hell of a slowdown to allow for other changes in our manufacturing and energy generation processes.
Besides that, extrapolating from very recent trends in population dynamics in "developed" (which is such a relative term anyway) countries that overpopulation is not going to be a problem anymore is absurd. People do on average want to have kids and the real reason why some countries are beginning to go below replacement rates of growth has more to do with the collapse of the middle class and the uncertain economic future of many young adults. Once we have radical life extension technology (something I consider largely inevitable) and people in their late 80's are still as sexually virulent as if they were in their 20's, we are likely to see another population boom within this century. While we could probably continue to house more people past a trillion within Earth, you are going to have to start either living more frugally or damage the ecosystem or at least reduce it's priority.
An Ecumenopolis (planet-wide city) could actually be a very comfortable place to live and house many trillions but it's a process that is inherently destructive to the landscape and life as it is now. You are essentially turning the entire surface (and ideally some or all of the interior) of a planet into a machine - and a lot of that would be necessary once we are talking multiple trillions because at that scale, we have a very different heating problem from the comparatively measly effects of greenhouse gases that are already wrecking havoc on our ecosystems. When you have that much waste heat being generated on a planet, you need to start constructing giant radiators that extend out of the atmosphere on space towers. Once you have such numbers, even if less than a percent of the population have any wish of colonising other worlds, you will have billions of colonists and our entire solar system will be colonised.
There is also the undeniable appeals of claiming territory over a truly virgin land without the evil of colonialism over past natives. That land might be hostile as it is but the opportunity to transform it into an oasis of life is going to become a more and more attractive proposition once have a truly abundant and clean source of energy because matter then becomes the real bottleneck. Land prices on Earth will continue to rise to the point where suburbs in the form of O' Neil Cylinder habitats will become the suburbs and rural area of humanity. Or if we switch to a form of land allocation that does not involve money, we would still commission the construction of rotating habitats to keep the population density of Earth below a amount (what amount that is depends both on your values as a civilisation and the degree of verticality of your settlements.
Good
However, outside of a building containing high profile media companies, many Israeli strikes are far from being as careful. You can waffle on and on about how heroically and nicely they fire air to ground missiles in cities from a safe distance but in the end the raw numbers don't lie. Compare how many Palestinian's have died since this conflict started compared to the Israeli's and it's plain that this isn't a "war", it's a massacre.
The actual attitude towards Palestinians by many Israelis including officials is positively blood thirsty and genocidal. I've seen enough interviews on the streets of Tel Aviv to be deeply concerned. The population have grown increasingly radicalised and right wing by decades of IDF propaganda and there seems to be little recognition of their common humanity with the Palestinians. They will not be satisfied until the entire Palestinian population are either purged or driven from Israel.
There is no possible way to reconcile the requirements of a egalitarian democratic society with a Jewish ethnostate. This is the reason why they push for a "Two State" solution even though it's a farce and Palestinian territory has been eroded away more and more with Settlements that are illegal by international law. They do not want to the Palestinians incorporated into their society because they want to maintain a Jewish majority. There is no way that desire can be achieved without ethnic cleansing in the long term and we are seeing more and more brazen actions towards that goal.
The solution is both obvious and incredibly hard: Get rid of the two states and make it a single democratic state with full civic and political rights given to all inhabitants. The hardline Zionists of course will never stand for it though so it's never happening without a radical revolution in Israeli society.
I am personally sick and tired of arguing with somebody who thinks I should treat an aspiring ethnostate with anything more than contempt so this will be my last post to you. Feel free to have the last word.
I will urge (probably uselessly) that maybe instead of listening to IDF and US propaganda, you look at news in countries that don't have financial and political interests tied up in multi-billion dollar arms deals and territorial acquisitions. I don't listen to RT for details on Ukraine after all. Good night!
They have lied repeatedly before about how their attacks did not hit non combatants only for later UN reports revealing that the majority of deaths were civilian. They even bombed offices for Al Ghazeera and AP News recently in Palestine, likely in retaliation for testy interviews and coverage. Am I supposed to believe that those were holding Hamas as well?
And you never said anything about Hamas's motivations in the first place. You just treated Israel's actions as being justified as a given so don't give me this bs about how you're somehow being fair in your coverage when you're transparently biased towards Israel.
And as for your question, while I do not condone any attacks on civilians or civilian infrastructure (which already makes my moral compass better than the IDF's), I absolutely support resistance by the Palestinians against their violent and illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing efforts by Israel. You don't get to cry about your right to self defence when you're the ones who they're trying to defend their homes against.
Imagine if the US were taking more and more territory from Mexico while illegally evicting and assaulting Mexicans to make room for US settlers. Let's say that they then made it impossible for Mexicans to leave or enter a narrow strip of land and denied them medical treatment and severely restricted food and water access. That and prior to the attack of the cartels, let's say 6 years ago, the US launched strikes against the Mexicans where a later report by the UN found that 80% of the dead were civilians.
Imagine then if that drug cartel itself was originally placed into power by the US to avoid the formation of rival organisations that the Mexicans could choose between.
No, it's not that we don't lack naunce, it's just that we don't flinch away from ugly reality by labelling it as a "very rich area" just because it concerns an empire we are a part of as opposed to the enemy.
For all of your indignation on the fact that I refuse to play apologetics for your favourite hegemony, you have not made one real counterargument for why my view of the US and their role in the wider world is incorrect.
I'm very proud frankly to hold the "extreme, no nuances opinion" that imperialism is bad and for that matter ethnic cleansing and the intentional bombing of civilians. You apparently disagree, seeing as in an earlier comment you dismissed such charges against Israel and Saudi Arabia as if they are wild accusations as opposed to a matter of public record for the wider international community and the UN.
I'll let everybody else decide which of the two modes of thinking we could do less of in the world.
Yes, it makes sense for them to ban buying conflict minerals since they want to hold a monopoly over that ability themselves. Bolivia is one of the top suppliers of lithium to the US and has suffered dictatorships, election interference, and ongoing far-right paramilitaries financed and trained by the US and it's allies.
The US has NEVER done something to "stand up for what's right", every action they do is calculated to help themselves. If they are condemning or condoning anything, it is for their own self interest. This is how they can simultaneously call out the ethnic cleansing of the Uyghurs by the CCP while simultaneously not being able to even condemn the killing of Palestinian children on record when being asked repeatedly by journalists. That's because China is a rival but Israel is an Ally.
They'e only recently publicly recognised the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire because relationships between the US and Turkey have grown increasingly strained. If they had any moral authority, they wouldn't coddle their friend's war crimes and hold them to the same standards as their enemies.
Ok then, how about the fact that the US has been funding Al-Qaeda affiliated organisations to promote act as opposition to both Iran and Saudi Arabia's ideological and political enemies.
What about what went down and continues to go down in Southern and Central America where entire villages are being murdered in cold blood to discourage workers from organising for their own best interests and against the interests of the US? There are dozens of military and paramilitary organisations in Columbia and Bolivia that use arms and training provided by the US and allies (Israel in particular) to brutally put down worker uprisings and efforts at unionisation. Some of this training from the IDF in particular involves intentional maiming of members to drive up fear through the population against the idea of going against the regional power. Violence for the sake of spreading terror among the populace is terrorism by definition and the IDF have been both inflicting this on the Palestinians and training other groups to do the same on their own people.
This training and arms that Israel provides to these far right groups are directly subsidised through the billions in dollars that the US transfers to Israel yearly. This is no charity. The US has direct economic and political interests in keeping Central and Southern America under a tight thumb for both the rare earth metals there and the oil. They use the IDF to perpetuate fascist regimes abroad instead of direct support because of how bad the PR got during the 80's and 90's.
What about the plundering and destabilisation of Afghanistan and Iraq and how it has radicalised the region and formed dozens of terrorist groups that are now conveniently targeting surrounding nations which have not the best relationships with US empire. The leaks exposed by Julian Assange conclusively show that the US intentionally struck civilian targets including medics so don't bs to me that the Drone strikes (which btw were also being used illegally across Pakistani borders and murdering civilians) was strictly above board.
I invite you to make the case for how Russia and especially North Korea are somehow worse than the US in terms of state sponsored terrorism or even more traditional crime such as drug trafficking (Colombia remains one of the largest cocaine producers in the world with almost half of all cocaine controlled by the paramilitaries there) but I think you fail hard.
What about the fact that the US has been sponsoring military and paramilitary organisations in central and Southern America for decades to fight against attempts at unionisation or socialisation efforts to help ensure their control over the rare earth metals and oil there? There are death squads that have mowed down entire villages after being informed of talk about unionisation as well as driving away indigenous tribes who happen to live in areas that are inconvenient to the interest of US multinational companies.
Are you also somehow forgetting the war in Afghanistan and Iraq that was perpetuated for decades after the given reason for invasion were dealt with for the transparent motivation to plunder the resources there? More than 200,000 civilians dead (and that's on the optimistic side of projections) as a direct result of actions from the US army.
All of these examples I gave are crimes that the US are currently engaging in and even with that restriction, this is far from a complete list. If I expanded it out to what they have been up to in the last 5 decades, then it would be a lot longer still.
If you don't see the US as dirty, then I don't know what standards you are operating under.
I also don't buy that consumers are really to blame for this anymore than somebody born in a society that believes in the divine rights of kings is to blame for being a monarchist. Corporations and their friends in media and government influence or outright manufacture the overwhelming majority of the culture that is projected onto people. Is it really a surprise then that most people have internalised the precise world view and expectations of their purchases that is convenient to companies?
If it turns out that wormholes are impossible, a future internet powered by neutrinos (presuming we discover/invent a material that can absorb them consistently in a compact way) would be the next best thing.
I also completely disagree that we should ever sugercoat our language when addressing practices that have clear malice and greed behind them. Prioritising the feelings of some millionaire/billionaire shareholder over the thousands to millions of customers being exploited and short-changed smells of messed up priorities frankly.
The only people this approach genuinely "pushes" away are a group that you cannot expect to act in good faith in the first place - the companies deliberately obstructing the right to repair. You don't ask them nicely to do something they have zero profit motivation towards. You force them by enacting legislation or creating enough of a backlash that they calculate that supporting Right to Repair is better for their bottom line.
The problem isn't with the Drake equation, it's with the pop science articles that extrapolated things from it way beyond the original intent or scope.
You don't immediately bomb a school taken hostage by a terrorist group because if you're not a sociopath, you value the lives of innocent children and teachers over the deaths of terrorists. My point was that we wouldn't accept this logic in any other context but when it comes to Palestinian lives, they are suddenly nothing but furniture surrounding the baddies.
What they could do that would stop me condemning them is to abandon the occupation and settlements in Palestinian land that are illegal by international law and cease the evictions and indiscriminate attacks on Palestinian civilians.
While you're at it, they could also stop funding and training far right militaries and paramilitaries in South and Central America. I'd prefer if their state sponsored terrorism not be reproduced elsewhere.
It is not an understatement for me to say that I abhor the US empire as a whole and their destructive effects on the sovereignty of the larger world. However, when I'm reading about a NASA project, I don't have the knee jerk reaction of "it's American! BAD!!!" That's because while there is some political gain to be had from the prestige of a space agency, there is very little direct economic or military advantage and the main purpose is scientific enrichment which has been beneficial for humanity as a whole, not just the US. NASA astronauts, scientists, and engineers may have their own nationalistic biases but I don't doubt that their primary motivation is a love for space sciences and they tend to have a more cosmopolitian view of humanity's future anyway. The same was true of the Russians and the Chinese who worked in this sector.
Now, there could be case to be made that the CCP could decide to hoard the scientific data for themselves and refuse to share it to the wider public but until I see this in action, I will remain cautiously optimistic. Roscosmos (formerly CCCP) were able to collaborate with NASA despite their host nations being mortal enemies on the wider world stage so I don't see why the CCP would risk hampering their progress by becoming isolationist when it comes to space research
Furthermore, this is a monumental achievement considering this is the first successful non US landing on Mars and was achieved on their first try! the countries are able to send probes there, the more data we can gather and that's always a net good.
Now if only the Russians could manage to dissolve the curse they seem to have when it comes to Mars rover missions, then we could have a seriously potent race.
It's like when people gave credit to Hitler for infrastructure projects such as the Autobahns which were already in progress before he took office.