WoodScientist @ WoodScientist @lemmy.world

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836

Joined

11 mo. ago

You could throw in some Sam Bankman-Fried's 'philosophy' which was just freshman-level ethics. The tech bro version of deep revealed moral truth is just they would have seen if they hadn't all dropped out of college before taking their gen-ed classes.

In regards to Musk, I would settle for having his citizenship revoked as punishment for his earlier illegal immigration.

I'm honestly not too worried about this. Trump can already effectively run for a third or any number of terms. The Republican party is now a full-on cult of personality around Trump. To stay in power, all Trump has to do is have one of his fail sons run as his successor. During the campaign, have the actual candidate largely in the background, and make it clear to all voters that his son will be running as a formality only; Trump will remain the real power behind the throne. And, once elected, Trump can continue to maintain power through the power he personally has on the party. If his son ever goes against his wishes, Trump can get on TV and immediately turn the base against the nominal president. His son may formally be president, but he's not getting anything past MAGA congressmembers without the blessing of Trump himself.

Then I guess Obama gets two more terms, because Republicans obstructed him.

Seriously. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and had pro-confederate newspapers shut down. That is what a real response to a threat to democracy looks like.

Yes. I have! Though I have heard the idea before.

Sorry, everyone who knows how to make khlav kalash has been deported.

The leader has issues a new memorandum. You will only be allowed to drink flat, room-temperature, caffeine free Diet Mt. Dew.

Seriously. There are far better inflation hedges. There's inflation-indexed treasury bonds, land, bonds, stocks, gold, etc.

I propose the opposite. Specifically, I propose we use the Burns omni-net. It sweeps the sea clean!

Nah, see it's a good thing. Like a teflon cooking pan, having PFAS in your drinking water just helps lubricate your organs! This means as you move around, your internal organs won't grind past each other, wearing themselves down. Drink PFAS, keep your organs properly lubricated.

This message brought to you by the American PFAS manufacturers association of America.

Honestly, I am opposed to sending humans to Mars, period. We shouldn't do it. It's unethical, a tremendous lapse of moral judgment just to stroke our collective egos.

There could be life on Mars NOW. There are bacteria that we know of on Earth, that if you transported them to certain locations deep under the Martian surface, would thrive. There are microbes that live in subterranean saline aquifers on Earth, and there are microbes that live in solid rock miles beneath the Earth's surface. There is no reason that these bacteria couldn't thrive equally well on Mars.

We know of Earth bacteria that could thrive under Mars's surface. Which means it is entirely reasonable to speculate that there may already be bacteria there filling that Martian ecological niche. But if we send people there...we risk contaminating it. We struggle to sterilize our rovers, but we do a pretty good job. But forget trying to sterilize a ship full of dozens of people. Our very gut bacteria are a contamination risk.

No, I think we should leave Mars the hell alone. And really, I think we have a very reasonable path forward for still producing very meaningful and important exploration of Mars. Look at how well robotics is advancing. Look at the recent Tesla event where they had all those robots wandering around, each remotely piloted by a human operator. THAT is the real future of Mars exploration.

I think we should simply wait on Mars until we've let remote presence robotic tech advance a few more decades. Then, you build such a robot that is durable enough to survive in an autoclave. You do send human to Mars, but they stay in orbit. The humans stay on a craft in orbit, and they remotely pilot humanoid robots on the surface to do the actual science work. This way, you can have exploration that has all the dexterity and flexibility of humans, as humans are able to pilot the robots in real time from orbit. And as an added bonus, your exploratory vehicles can be a lot simpler as you don't need to bring any crew or samples back from the Martian surface.

I think we could still exploit Mars as well. If we find that there is no surface life, well then setting up mining activities on the surface isn't a problem. If humans want to colonize Mars, we can build big orbital habitats from materials we mine on the surface. If, after a long period of study, we conclusively rule out the existence of Martian life? Well at that point we can start surface colonization by humans. Or, perhaps we discover a Martian deep-rock biosphere and fully catalogue it. Then maybe we discover that pretty much every terrestrial body has such a biosphere if conditions are appropriate. At that point, humans might decide that colonizing the surface with humans is worth the risk.

Anyway, I really do not support sending humans to Mars. We could potentially wipe out an entire biosphere, a biosphere that if it exists, could tell us remarkable things about how life arises and how common it is in the universe. We're only a few decades out from being able to do really good remote presence robotics. Let's just hold off on things until we can send humans that can get the full experience of being on the Mars surface, without actually being on the Mars surface.

Because of your lack of patriotism for our national beverage, the leadership has decreed that you will now only be able to drink caffeine-free Diet Mt. Dew.

In our techo utopian future, the only caffeinated beverage will be Diet Mt. Dew.

That was Hillary's platform, Biden's platform, and Harris's platform.

Let's be more specific. That's what you need to do in order to protect the oligarchy. The United States is not a democracy; it is an oligarchy. The bottom 90% of the population has zero impact on how they are governed. It has been this way for decades.

This always happens to oligarchies. It happened in Rome, and now it's happened here. The Roman Senate was intransigent, fighting for generations against the most minor of reforms to help the common man. In the end, demagogues came to power promising to help the people by fiat. Of course, most of the time these emperors served only themselves, but even the few crumbs they threw to the people were more than the old oligarchy gave them.

That's the thing though. Most Americans feel they don't really live in a democracy, and they're right. Statistically, the interests of the bottom 90% of the population have zero impact on Congress. Congress's actions only correlate with the opinions of the top 10%, and moreso the higher on the income ladder you go.

Trump is nothing new. People voted for Trump for the same reason people voted for Napoleon. A system, even a democratic one, is only useful if it produces useful results. We don't have a democracy, we have an oligarchy.

In a system as corrupt and intransigent as ours, the only way you can actually get anything done, for good or ill, is to be someone like Trump who runs roughshod over political norms.

This kind of thing is common in history. Democracies can get so corrupt, worn down, and intractable, that eventually the people just vote in someone who will rule by fiat. The wealthy cut off every avenue of democratic change, and eventually a demogogue comes to power promising to just produce change by force.

Anyone who has studied history could have predicted Trump. Authoritarianism is the inevitable consequence of corrupt nominal 'democracies' that only serve the wealthy.

I've seen those stories, but again, I really don't see anything Trump will do that Harris wouldn't have.

The big claim is that he's going to allow Israel to annex land in the West Bank. But that's been going on for years.

What about annexing land in Gaza? Well, Biden's sat by while the entirety of north Gaza is now actively being ethnically cleansed. The Israeli military has declared any remaining civilians in the area to be enemy fighters and valid targets. There are hundreds of thousands of people dead.

That is what Biden has sat by and abetted. And the big fear is that Trump might sit back while Israel annexes North Gaza? I'm sorry, but why would you think Biden wouldn't allow it? Annexing is just filing some paperwork. Hundreds of thousands have been massacred. Emptying a land of its people is a far, far greater a crime than filing some paperwork to formally annex it later. If Biden didn't have a problem with full-on ethnic cleansing, he is not going to lift a finger to prevent Netanyahu from filing some paperwork. He's already tolerated the greater crime, he won't suddenly move to stop a lesser one.

I have certainly heard things that Trump will do. But they honestly don't seem any worse than what is already happening. I think the only real difference is optics. The key difference between Biden and Trump is that Trump is an overt racist. Trump overtly hates all Muslims; he doesn't even try to hide it. And because of this, we assume that Trump will be worse for Gaza than Biden has been. But on closer inspection, there really isn't much more that Trump can do that Biden hasn't already been doing. Biden already has the "US support to Israel" dial set to 100%. It simply doesn't go any higher.