FaceDeer @ FaceDeer @kbin.social

Basically [a deer with a human face](https://i.imgur.com/FlzELAa.png). Desp

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2 yr. ago

That's true. You've been providing it in large quantities.

Ah, one was a random bystander, then.

Do you think the hardware would be free in this scenario? It adds restrictions, it doesn't remove any.

I already did that in the comment you're responding to:

Such as "help disadvantaged people regardless of their genetics."

Or two comments previous to this one:

Why not just "disadvantaged people"? That takes race out of the equation entirely, and everyone is satisfied.

How often do you need it repeated?

It's uncaused as far as we can tell. It's always possible that future evidence may come along to add to this understanding, but without some kind of evidence you can't just make up stuff and call it real.

Flexibility is a necessary part of rationality. To use a real example from history, Newton's laws of motion explained the motions of pretty much everything we could see around us. Objects on Earth, the orbit of the Moon, the orbits of the planets, it all seemed to fit nicely. But then it was noticed that Mercury's orbit didn't quite match the predictions that Newton's laws were making. If there was no flexibility in our understanding of the universe, what should we do? Pretend Mercury wasn't breaking Newton's laws? As it turned out, we needed Einstein's newer more elaborate version of the laws of motion to account for Mercury's motion. Science always needs to be prepared for the possibility that something new will come along that doesn't fit our existing understanding and be ready to expand our understanding to account for it.

So if for example one day we discovered that putting three apples, a digital watch, and an ingot of tin in a row caused a duck to poof into existence seemingly out of nowhere, scientists wouldn't throw up their hands and declare that science had failed and the universe was irrational. They'd start testing whether the species of apple or the time the digital watch was set to made any difference in the breed of duck that manifested.

"Rationality" is perhaps a more flexible concept than what you're assuming. As long as there's patterns to reality then there will be ways to come up with rules to describe them, and make predictions about future events.

Causality, in particular, is not strictly necessary for rationality. Our understanding of the laws of physics already accounts for situations with uncaused events, in fact. Radioactive decay is an example; an unstable atomic nucleus sitting alone in space with no outside interactions will sometimes spontaneously decay with no preceding "cause". Virtual particles are another - subatomic particles can spontaneously pop into existence and then pop back out again without a specific event causing it.

There are also proposed laws of physics for handling the concept of time travel that can allow for causal loops - things from the future affecting their past selves. We have no reason to believe that this is actually possible, but if one day we discovered that it was possible then it can still be accounted for using rational means.

So I'm not really sure it's possible to have a universe that isn't wholly rational. Even pure chaos is still describable and predictable in its very unpredictability.

Vote counting is an algorithm. I think a lot of people want a unicorn and are apalled when someone offers them a magical horse with a horn because it's not what they wanted.

That's what EEE used to mean, sure. Now it also means "a company I don't like is using a protocol that I do like." That dilution of the original meaning is unfortunate, IMO.

Scotty did it for 75 years with more primitive equipment.

It was also being used in the flashback episode where M'Benga and Chapel were medics on the front lines of the Klingon war, they were using an evacuation transporter to store critically wounded soldiers who couldn't be patched up with the equipment they had on hand. Led to a difficult moral dilemma where they needed to clear the buffer to accept more incoming wounded in need of treatment.

The more routine it gets in the show, the harder it is to explain its absence.

This is almost canon thanks to Lower Decks where Lt. Shaxs died heroically in one episode and then a few episodes later was back at his post, with one lower-ranking crewman explaining it to the other with a simple "he's bridge crew" and a shrug.

Deflation is bad for people too.

Not necessarily, but in this particular case it seems bad to me. We're losing a specialized term for something that IMO warrants having one.

It could shoot back up when the Strait of Malacca gets blockaded, or when it turns out that major oil production companies depend on Chinese-made equipment, or when Russia collapses and stops selling oil to India because China dropped its military support for them, or any number of other possible knock-on effects.

The exact details are not the important thing in what I was talking about. The point is that China's economic woes will have an effect on you, not what precisely what those effects will be.

Okay, so you're fine with it. Bully for you. There are a lot of people in your society who are living much closer to the edge and will find themselves in a lot of trouble if prices for the stuff they need go up.

The point of why this is a problem is ripple effects. None of us own shares in Evergrande. But Evergrande's collapse could cause such big ripples that it's bound to affect us anyway, even way out at the fringes of seemingly unrelated economies. Your lifestyle may not be impacted directly but you'll find yourself wondering "why are there suddenly a bunch of wars in southeast Asia?" Then "why are gas prices through the roof?" And then "why are all the prices through the roof?" And finally "why are the poors rioting in the streets and burning my house? Don't they know how expensive it is now?"

That category is sparser than you might think. If China's economy collapses you will definitely see an affect on what you pay for stuff. And there'll be other geopolitical impacts too, as the countries around the world readjust priorities to account for this change.

And, just like enshittification, the term is being thrown about with such wild abandon that it barely means anything any more. Most of the time it seems to me that "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish!" Translates to "thing I like got popular and now may be used by thing I don't like."

Cory's original usage of the word gave it a useful and specific meaning. But that has evolved extremely rapidly with popular usage into the word simply meaning "I don't like this thing." Which takes away the usefulness because now it's no longer describing a specific reason for not liking it.

It'd be like if every kind of ailment started being referred to as an "infection." Concussions, sprains, hypothermia, etc, all being passed off as "he got infected." We already have generic terms for that like "he got hurt," and now when someone does get literally infected we've lost the word that would be used to specify that.

Languages evolve, sure. But that doesn't mean it's always in a good direction. In this specific case evolution is enshittifying the language and that's worth a little (admittedly futile) push-back.

It does raise a ton of questions, though. If 24th-century medical science can easily revive a person who'd been frozen with primitive 20th-century cryonics, why did they ever "give up" on people dying of things in sickbay? Stick them in the freezer and ship them to a better facility on a starbase. Having emergency freezers in shuttles or escape pods would also make sense.

Well, semi-serious. Doing this to "save characters" is obviously silly, we've spent way more characters discussing how to save characters than could possibly have been saved (and it's not a valuable "savings" regardless). But I was paying attention to the practicality, because IMO the best silly things are things you can take seriously.