OpenStars @ OpenStars @startrek.website

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The Rizz GOAT himself! :-P

Or perhaps not only Space, maybe just here on Earth.

Or you could get even weirder, and wonder if the reason that electrons aren't anywhere in particular is b/c they are really everywhere, at once - so maybe we are all the same entity, who just forgot?

Sci-Fi is fascinating to me, especially from the Golden Era of like Asimov and HG Wells and Arthur C. Clarke. And one thing that scifi has taught me is that nothing is beyond the bounds of imagination!:-D

And part of that is that Time itself is something that we see only narrowly, through our human perspective. But from the perspective of Energy, which as you say has existed since the dawn of Time, and will continue unti its end too, the lifetime of stars themselves is but a "short" while. Or like how we may read a long book (or series?), describing someone's entirely lifetime or even spans over millennia, but to us it takes just a few days (weeks?) to read.

Or we could get even weirder than that - this whole Universe could be a simulation, and like there's a million running in parallel, and when it grows cold or uninteresting, the Matrix-God could just start it back up again to fulfill whatever purpose it had in mind.

None of which we can properly DO anything about right now, since we do not know and cannot affect any particular outcome. Hence why we wrap back around to just ignoring it, from the practical perspective at least, and live out our lives however we wish:-). But it is fun to think about regardless:-).

Kubernetes: "I make organizing large computer systems simpler, by getting the computers to manage themselves." (translation: something something computers, but only the "fancy" ones, so she doesn't try to get you to fix her Windows XP machine at home that she plays solitaire on:-P)

Doctors: "I make sick people well".

Neurosurgeons: "The human body is so complex, so people specialize, and my area of expertise is the brain."

Rocket scientist: "I make things go up properly, rather than boom."

There is always a way. You won't convey enough to get gran to perform any of these tasks, but you can make her feel welcomed into your world just a tiny bit.:-)

And it is all the more fascinating when you think about all the other pink blobs that did not get the chance to exist like us - e.g. (non-avian) dinosaurs, but also too like chimps that can talk, walk, use tools, etc., but do not come anywhere close to our level of Mind.

Without getting into any particular religion (even though this is almost a direct quote from the description of a religion in the super-old TV show Babylon Five), in a way we are the universe (molecules) thinking about itself!:-P Our pattern may be small, but our significance large, at least to our own perspective - e.g. every human life is precious, or arguably should be; but at the same time, as you point out, on the grander scheme it's nothing at all.

I find such thoughts very freeing - like, we can choose to love, or not, rather than have that forced upon us by like societal conventions, or whatever. Namaste and junk. :-)

Hrm, but he could still think impure thoughts? Yeah, best to hit him with another blast then?! - just to be sure! :-P

A TON of people irl have their literal jobs based on / revolving around making a show that they know stuff. Don't forget that confidence is not the same thing as capability.

An example is the crowd of people that showed up at the January 6 riot in the USA Capitol - how many of them truly knew what they were doing, or even so much as glanced at the document (the Constitution) that they claimed they were trying to protect?

At the absolute highest levels of capability, ironically you find the lowest levels of needing to engage in showing off behaviors, e.g. Jon Stewart is at the top of his game, and it shows.

I will add also: it is worth learning to explain things to people, bc in the process you also should find out that you improve your own knowledge. For one thing, it is a bit like compiling code: you may think it will work, but until you put it into practice, you can never truly be certain. And for another, there is the famous quote most often attributed to Albert Einstein (possibly it wasn't him but it doesn't even matter really):

Go now, and sin no more. :-P

We've come a long way, baby! Soon we'll get to zeans and then we can finally rest:-).

Um... do they have 8 of anything, ah, else?

In contrast to the others, Reddit decided to kill itself off before most Boomers have even heard of it:-).

Plenty of money exists yes, but there is no "will" to use it in this manner - and those who would, get fired or passed over for promotion by those who move fast & break things. Stock dividends rather than programmer salaries - see e.g. all of the tech sector doing multiple rounds of layoffs rather than make documentation or do anything close to proper maintenance for the things that were just built. However, those are (always) problems for the next CEO to have to worry about.

(1) why keep apologizing? It is either true or it is not, and either way does that really help soften the blow, especially after the first time? Well, anyway, kudos for attempting to be gentle at least.

(2) this seems biased in some places - e.g. are there countries where white supremacy does NOT appear among some portion of its populace? Although I guess you mean it being institutionalized, and so widely spread. But even there, it seems not alone in that? Especially if the races involved do not have to remain fixed across the comparison.

(3) what America seems to absolutely excel at, imho, is lying to itself. Especially the Midwest - e.g. the East and West know about such stuff and try to fight it, the South knows and just doesn't allow talking about it at all, but people in the Midwest (for anyone wondering why these terms, e.g. no "North", it has to do with its history, expanding from the 13 colonies westward, and now the terms depict cultural zones rather than geographic ones) have drunk the coolaid and seem to honestly believe that e.g. racism is a thing of the past - or at least like the South they would prefer that people not talk about it. However, this too was not an "America first" issue, itself having been inherited from England when it broke away. The thing is, England - itself a monarchy at that time - grew up afterwards (somewhat, see e.g. Brexit), and the USA grew up too, but yeah still remains deeply scarred by its past, and more especially by its continued present.

One example is how America sent a man to the moon first. While a significant accomplishment, the USA was not the first in space, nor has it showed much interest in the moon since then, especially lately when all the "firsts" there are being made by China and India, and the USA has actively given up rights to moon territories in exchange for deep-sea oil drilling rights. So... a half-point then towards its credit, or more like a full one but historical rather than modern?

Another example is nuclear fission technology, which is widely known to have been developed in the USA, ofc, but by German scientists who were fleeing the fascists at the time. This one actually deserves far more than just half a point though, imho, b/c while America did not put in the investment to develop the educational infrastructure that would have led to this discovery on its own, it did capitalize (a good choice of wording?:-D) on it, and also the USA is where those scientists chose to go (okay so... the latter may have had large geographic reasons behind it as well, as in the USA was not being actively bombed by Germany like the UK was, at the time). Similarly, one school of thought is that this is how the USA originally got its start in its industrial revolution, by the theft of many architectural plans taken from England. In contrast to those kinds of starts though - and here my knowledge is shaky so take this next part with a much more heavy grain of salt - the USA seems to not be keeping up with most other other nuclear-related technology developments since then, involving fusion (except perhaps that recent discovery that might have single-handedly reversed that whole course? so I dunno).

Computers, on the other hand, represent a full, solid, and MAJOR point towards the credit of the USA, right? As well as, for better or worse, the development of the internet (officially at least, it started in Universities within the USA, though that may have just been the modern form using packets, with some signal-passing having happened elsewhere first, and yet even then the first telegraph signals were passed in the USA, so at any rate this seems a solid point rather than a stretch).

So anyway, it is not all lies and smoke and mirrors - lately it seems that way, and ngl if Trump wins the USA may legitimately join with Russia or at least stop opposing the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, which would free Russia up to start building itself back up in order to continue its expansionist agenda. So the USA at the very best can be said to be "unstable", and an "unreliable ally", but with a MAJOR caveat that corporate interests are starting to become more powerful than actual nations, in recent years. So BUSINESS arrangements are likely to remain solid, even if government ones can be reversed at the drop of a hat. This too is something inherited from England/UK, and the rest of the World, but the USA definitely has drunk the coolaid on that, to the point where like if Apple or Google were to pick one political party, the other would not have much chance and may quickly die out.

But don't miss out on the flowers or the forest for the sake of examining the trees: the white supremacy angle is only one small piece of this much larger puzzle, that has tentacles EVERYWHERE, world-wide even, and it is not only racists that support the authoritarian regime - there are other parts of that too.

Btw I want to give a shout-out to a tremendously awesome resource: Crash Course US History, and also many issues are discussed at a deeper level in the Crash Course World History, e.g. an episode on Capitalism and Socialism, and 19th-century Imperialism, multiple episodes on Globalization, etc.

We do something about it: we giggle:-).

Yeah it's a managerial function involving skill and time and therefore money, but if it doesn't directly translate into profits for the corporation, then who has interest in that kind of investment these days?

As people are saying, a true psychopath might not even question themselves. That said, it is probably a spectrum and we all may have such tendencies - and I mean like 100% of the population, as a shared human condition, to lie somewhere on that spectrum. It seems a good thing to me to examine myself in that manner and maybe dial down, or perhaps even dial up, those things. Especially when others misuse the words, twisting them to suit their own perspectives - e.g. calling someone "unstable" if they want to escape them, the abuser.

Also there are generational differences, and even generational (and other) traps - e.g. a lot of older MAGA parents in the midwestern USA have been abandoned by their children, who want to do things like "take the vaccine" (which I chose to highlight the discussion since it is a decision involving fully literal life-and-death consequences, plus also likelihood of permanent brain damage, which is what we now know long-covid to be), so in such cases is it truly the children who are being "unstable" and "aggressive" to leave, or rather the fault of the parents who attempt to force their christofacist belief structures onto their children, leaving no room in the latter to have their own thoughts or desires?

These are complex, weighty matters, and won't be resolved quickly, but are good to think about regardless.

Uh... no? It seems the price of admission to be Putin's lapdog though - he will help you, if you help him, but he also wants dirt on you first. He even provided all the necessary materials - the hotel room, prostitutes, camera, and videographer, he's so helpful that way!:-D

Oh right, the real end-of-line! :-P

They are a Trump appointee... I bet the correlation there between those who, upon being investigated, end up proven dirty, will be astonishingly high.