Always warms my heart to see the amount of respect these athletes have for their competitors. Sometimes people are awesome!

Was this the root cause??? Hahahaha

This is the way.

Command statement = an action

Question statement = a status

Hard to tell if this is a proposal to fight over hardware or an offer for free stuff.

I choose to believe the former because it makes me chuckle more.

I heard a hypothesis that the first human made consciousness will be an AI algorithm designed to monitor and coordinate other AI algorithms which makes a lot of sense to me.

Our consciousness is just the monitoring system of all our bodies subsystems. It is most certainly an emergent phenomenon of the interaction and management of different functions competing or coordinating for resources within the body.

To me it seems very likely that the first human made consciousness will not be designed to be conscious. It also seems likely that we won’t be aware of the first consciousnesses because we won’t be looking for it. Consciousness won’t be the goal of the development that makes it possible.

They all have access to the Internet now. This would be much more detrimental to learning if other resources weren’t in everyone’s pocket.

And this is why learning history matters. It gives context for these friggin bizarre norms that accumulate. It allows us to realize when the norms are useful, we’re useful and are no longer needed, or we’re always just humans being weird.

Ok stupid question time. The temperature during the Cretaceous was on average hotter than the 3.9C increase stated to halt photosynthesis. There was certainly photosynthesis going on then, how is that possible? Do we assume the plants had enough time to adapt to that new temperature, changing their photosynthetic machinery to work at higher temperatures than today?

Russian assassination are pretty clear. Anyone with half a brain can put the pieces together, but there is just enough plausible deniability that there cannot be direct retaliation legally or politically. It is a clear threat but just barely veiled enough to avoid legitimate retaliatory action via legal or international responses.

It feels disingenuous to remove morality from the equation. Morality clearly played a role which is why thinkers like Frederick Douglass are still remembered to this day. Clearly there were other forces at play- political and economic which shaped how this played out, but morality was certainly involved.

Gonna get a little preachy here - skip this part if you don’t wanna hear that.

All of American history from the Revolutionary war to today can be summed up with people trying to reconcile the conflict of individual freedom and equality. Those two cannot coexist, and a boundary must be placed on one in order to allow the other ideal to flourish.

The civil war is a great example, individual freedom allows one to own another person if that is their desire. Equality says that your individual freedom cannot impede another person’s. This means slavery cannot exist in such a value system and equality was valued above individual freedom.

The current abortion debate has the same bedrock conflict. Does an individual’s personal freedom allow them the right to stop being pregnant if they wish? Well equality says the unborn child should be considered, as the choice to terminate violates their individual freedom to exist.

Let me be clear - in this post I am not advocating for either side in the abortion debate. I am merely trying to show that most of American history has been defined by trying to draw the line between the two founding principles of the nation.

This is such a stupid headline. It gives no context for that number. Is that big or small compared to other years? Is it big compared to other countries’s military contractors? What does ‘made’ mean? Is this revenue or profit?

It’s obviously intended to make us outraged because it’s a big number, but the article actually said it went down by 3% last year. Why wasn’t that the headline?

This whole article feels very click-baity to me.

This is an interesting take that some institutions have interest in keeping a slow and low level conflict going indefinitely. I have to admit I haven’t heard or considered this perspective. Most of the evidence provided though can quite easily be described by pure reactionary measures to the situation though. The examples provided like grain and oil speculation do not require a conspiracy of interests prolonging the conflict to explain why we saw those markets respond that way.

I do t doubt that some groups could benefit from a prolonged conflict, but I don’t see any direct evidence from your post, just a narrative that implies it’s possible. I think it’s a great idea to pursue this line of thinking, but I’m not personally convinced at this point.

Fantastic post, even though I don’t agree with your conclusions!