CarbonIceDragon @ CarbonIceDragon @pawb.social

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2 yr. ago

The dragon capsule worked though? You may be thinking of starliner, which is Boeing.

Not to mention the societal costs that inevitably come from people being sick

I think there is something they can do, or more to the point, there's a reason the birthrate is so low there. I don't think it's a coincidence that some of the most overworked countries on the planet have such low birthrates. Taking care of children is labor, unpaid labor at that, that has a lot of other expenses associated with it. What I think they could do, is compensate people for it, not some pittance that doesn't cover a fraction of the costs of raising a child, but an amount that would actually be sufficient to make having a kid or not, with a parent (either parent) home at any given point for them, a financially neutral decision for a family (to include the opportunity costs of not working) rather than a very expensive one.

Evolution being what it is, it would seem implausible for the average number of kids people actually would want to have, if it wasn't a burden on them, to be lower than replacement, else the human species wouldn't have come to exist in the first place. For individual people, sure, everyone has their own feelings on the matter, but averaged across society, one would expect most people to desire kids enough if they could manage it to keep the population at least stable.

It would be incredibly expensive, yes, and so the tax burden it would create would probably be unpopular, especially among people that didn't personally gain from it, but continuing the status quo is nothing less than extracting the abstract resource that human labor can be thought of as, at an unsustainable rate. That situation will either end willingly or it will end in collapse.

It's an issue in any economic system. No economy built with any current or near future technology functions without human labor, which people can no longer supply once they get old enough for their health to decline, regardless of who owns what.

I swear every time I play that game, half my army ends up being pawns, the weakest piece.

I get the idea, and I'm not opposed to things like that, given that they don't seem likely to worsen the situation and might extract some kind of concession from Israel, but I don't expect that it'd be likely to actually work. Israel is not, for it's similarities, exactly the same as South Africa and Nazi Germany (the latter of which, for that matter, didn't exactly collapse just because of economic sanctions), and sanctions have their limits, else for example North Korea would have collapsed long ago, along with a whole host of other regimes that have gained the ire of significant parts of the world for one reason or another.

Dismantling it unwillingly requires someone doing it have sufficient military power to defeat Israel by force of arms. Who might that be?

It's also not realistically achievable without somehow convincing Israel to willingly dismantle itself, given that a) a significant disparity of military power exists between it and Palestine, which isn't likely to reverse any time soon given that it is nigh impossible for Palestine to build an economic base sufficient to rival Israel while under effective occupation and b) that it is an open secret that Isreal possess nuclear weapons, making some kind of foreign invasion suicidally untenable. Actually launching those weapons would be an extremely dangerous move of course, but a state facing a clear and imminent outside threat to it's existence is exactly the kind of situation where someone might contemplate it.

The most likely thing to work out that I can envision would be if foreign support can at least shore up what remains of Palestine enough to give it sovereignty and at a stretch some means of deterrence against further attack. All that really achieves admittedly is a two state solution, which doesn't result in a Palestine with particularly favorable geography, but if it results in peace there's the hope that the hatred involved can cool with time and new generations until some kind of union can be proposed without the resultant state being at risk of collapsing into a genocidal state again.

I think they're more creepy in a eerie rather than actually scary sort of way, kids tend to give me "uncanny valley" to an increasing degree the younger they are. I don't hold it against the kids themselves mind, they can't exactly help it, but I prefer not to be around young kids if I can help it just because they make me uncomfortable and on edge.

Unless you define "on earth" to be "below the Kármán line. The Earth's atmosphere is probably to be considered part of the planet, else gas planet like Jupiter get difficult to talk about consistently. Atmospheres don't have a proper "cutoff", they just get thinner and thinner until they gradually become insignificant, so some cutoff is going to have to be arbitrarily defined to make the distinction useful.

There'd be no point in drawing myself an avatar if I wasn't going to use it

They dont work, because not lie detectors at all. To my understanding they're basically just a tech-assisted version of trying to tell if someone is lying by trying to watch their emotional reaction. They might be able to tell you if someone is stressed, under the notion that someone lying will be more stressed than when telling the truth from the effort and worry of being caught, but that isn't really true necessarily.

Realistically, doesn't randomly killing people harm capital, in so much as it would mean they must have more staff to cover the work of an unknown number of murdered employees afterwards, lose money spent training anyone that gets killed, and have a slightly smaller workforce available that also is more proficient at violence?

They do arguably have a point to existence I think, in that it is virtually impossible to create a completely ideal set of laws, and so there are always going to be cases where a person is technically guilty of breaking a law but hasn't done anything that punishment is appropriate for, or who is probably falsely convicted but has failed to prove it and run out of appeals and resources. They have a serious potential for misuse, but literally any power does, electing the kind of person that would misuse them will always cause problems of some kind.

I sometimes wonder if really serious reptile hobbyists, the kind that'll have like a whole room full of terrariums, have to deal with suspicious cops. Reptiles like warmth, heat mats and lamps take power, one of the most popular brands for heat mat thermostats is technically meant for controlling indoor plant heating, and if they want to grow live plants in any of their animals habitats they might need grow lights too.

It wasnt really an argument at all, except for the part that randomness isnt incompatible with determinism. I dont have a proper scientific reason for suspecting the future already exists, it just feels somehow "simpler" since it doesnt require assuming that the time dimension is somehow particularly different from space dimensions.

Tbh I dont think that this is actually incompatible with determinism, since the mechanism by which the future is predetermined doesnt necessarily have to be that all causes only have one possible effect associated with them. I mostly suspect the universe is deterministic because I suspect (though this is only a suspicion that I cannot prove) that the universe has block time and therefore that, even if random events with no clear "this must lead to that" chain exist, the future is predetermined merely by "already" existing along some time axis. Sort of like how if you had a character in a flipbook roll a die, and nothing earlier in the flipbook forces the die to have to land on one particular number to keep the plot self-consistent, the outcome of the die will still always be the same, because the pages where its result is shown already have been drawn.

If nothing matters, then it doesnt matter that nothing matters, so while I technically am a nihilist, since I dont see a plausible mechanism for how some kind of objective purpose/meaning could exist, I dont really think much of it. If nothing matters there is no reason for me not to care about whatever I arbitrarily happen to value anyway. Expecting the universe to find those things important too just feels kind of self-centered somehow.

sorta makes me think of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPd3_nUnKK8

Fight what exactly? Determinism either is or isnt how the universe works, it isnt like some sort of external force of finite capacity that can be resisted by some application of effort. If it is true, then you have no choice but to act the way something like you would act, and the way humans are wired to think is in terms of choices and the possible outcomes of those choices, even if the choice you make and the thinking that leads you to it is inevitable. If it is not true, then the possibility of making different choices exists, but it doesnt look any different to you because you only get to perceive the result of following one set of them.

The thing about determinism is that while it may be an interesting philosophical exercise, beyond being difficult to maybe impossible to prove or disprove, it isnt really relevant to much. A deterministic universe looks, feels, and acts to us exactly like a nondeterministic one would.