Our three weapons are…

It’s not a matter of knowledge, it’s a matter of what they want.

One may desire to be advantaged/superior to some others, and particularly nice and easy if race or gender is a convenient shorthand for knowing who is ‘in’ and ‘out’, as long as you are in the ‘in’ group of course.

So life is just plain easier if women are just supposed to sit there and please them. If the ‘natural order’ justifies that convenience, then one may be attracted to that thought. To the extent fairness and equality makes their life harder, they are inclined to be upset at that obstackle. It’s convenient if the legal and labor world gives their race preferential treatment, and other groups are left desperate enough to do whatever they need done but don’t want to do, and scared enough of the government to not get “uppity”.

Sometimes overt evil, sometimes more subconscious manifesting as being very receptive to narratives that correlate with those feelings.

Not generally, as others have mentioned, this is probably owned by the CVS and they want to discourage people from hanging around their store if they have no business with the store.

To the extent it is illegal, then it’s in the domain of “trespassing” where the private property owner can decide you are no longer welcome. So if CVS “owns” that area, it may call on you for trespassing.

Such a purpose would inform the constraints. If we are just “the sims” on steroids, then all the deep physics are absolutely utterly faked and we are just “shown” convincing fakery. If it’s anthropological, then similar story that the physics are just skin deep. If it’s actually modeling some physics thing, then maybe we are “observing” real stuff.

But again, this is all just for fun. It’s not vaguely testable and thus not scientific despite the sciencey theme of it, just something to ponder.

First, this is not really science so much as it is science-themed philosophy or maybe “religion”. That being said, to make it work:

• We don’t have anyway of knowing the true scale and “resolution” of a hypothetical higher order universe. We think the universe is big, we think the speed of light is supremely fast, and we think the subatomic particles we measure are impossibly fine grained. However if we had a hypothetical simulation that is self-aware but not aware of our universe, they might conclude some slower limitation in the physics engine is supremely fast, that triangles are the fundamental atoms of the universe, and pixels of textures represent their equivalent of subatomic particles. They might try to imagine making a simulation engine out of in-simulation assets and conclude it’s obviously impossible, without ever being able to even conceive of volumetric reality with atoms and subatomic particles and computation devices way beyond anything that could be constructed out of in-engine assets. Think about people who make ‘computers’ out of in-game mechanics and how absurdly ‘large’ and underpowered they are compared to what we would be used to. Our universe could be “minecraft” level as far as a hypothetical simulator is concerned, we have no possible frame of reference to gauge some absolute complexity of our perceived reality.

• We don’t know how much we “think” is modeled is actually real. Imagine you are in the Half Life game as a miraculously self-aware NPC. You’d think about the terribly impossibly complex physics of the experiment gone wrong. Those of us outside of that know it’s just a superficial model consisting of props to serve the narrative, but every piece of gadget that the NPC would see “in-universe” is in service of saying “yes, this thing is a real deep phenomenon, not merely some superficial flashes”. For all you know, nothing is modeled behind you at anything but the most vague way, every microscope view just a texture, every piece of knowledge about the particle colliders is just “lore”. All those experiments showing impossibly complex phenomenon could just be props in service of a narrative, if the point of the simulation has nothing to do with “physics” but just needs some placeholder physics to be plausible. The simulation could be five seconds old with all your memories prior to that just baked “backstory”.

• We have no way of perceiving “true” time, it may take a day of “outside” time to execute a second of our time. We don’t even have “true” time within our observable universe, thanks to relativity being all weird.

• Speaking of weird, this theory has appeal because of all the “weird” stuff in physics. Relativitiy and quantum physics are so weird. When you get to subatomic resolution, things start kind of getting “glitchy”, we have this hard coded limit to relative velocity and time and length get messed up as you approach that limit. These sound like the sort of thing we’d end up if we tried simulating, so it is tempting to imagine a higher order universe with less “weirdness”.

Well now the question is why they don’t put an extra AA battery in the glove box.

Yep, and I see evidence of that over complication in some ‘getting started’ questions where people are asking about really convoluted design points and then people reinforcing that by doubling down or sometimes mentioning other weird exotic stuff, when they might be served by a checkbox in a ‘dumbed down’ self-hosting distribution on a single server, or maybe installing a package and just having it run, or maybe having to run a podman or docker command for some. But if they are struggling with complicated networking and scaling across a set of systems, then they are going way beyond what makes sense for a self host scenario.

Based on what I’ve seen, I’d also say a homelab is often needlessly complex compared to what I’d consider a sane approach to self hosting. You’ll throw all sorts of complexity to imitate the complexity of things you are asked to do professionally, that are either actually bad, but have hype/marketing, or may bring value, but only at scales beyond a household’s hosting needs and far simpler setups will suffice that are nearly 0 touch day to day.

Bad publicity is relative.

The “bad publicity” when he is an odious asshole? His base loves that, they think they all should be able to say that stuff out loud.

Legal problems? Well they firmly believe it’s just a conspiracy to witch hunt and every case serves only to fuel their persecution complex

Anything else? Lies by the liberal media, they see the truth on Fox News. When Fox News even reports on it, then they shun them and off to newsmax or just their favorite Facebook posts.

Keep in mind that the founding fathers were guilty of what would have been considered a lot of grave crimes by England, which was formerly the jurisdiction that applied to them.

So they probably wouldn’t have had a huge appetite for blocking political rights of criminals given their recent standing.

Yes, depends on what’s the behavior of just sitting around outside, getting rained on a bit, sitting in a humid warehouse, exposed to bugs and rodents.

If hypothetically it only breaks down if shredded and mixed into compost, then it may be interesting. However in such a case you’d likely struggle to reliably identify and segregate it from the rest of the plastic waste stream to apply this special treatment without putting bad plastic into the mix.

Of course, glass is brittle and in most cases loves to break into sharp pieces, so people don’t love it for a lot of applications, particularly in packaging/shipping. When glass is involved, it generally demands more packaging to protect the glass from breaking.

In this case, the potential doesn’t relate to climate change, but to pollution. It might make carbon a teensy bit worse, but probably not enough to matter (and growing the algae would presumably more than offset that tiny bit).

I do wish there was a sign whether this would be realistically cheap or not. That is the key as to whether it could be single use plastics.

In terms of the process, it looks like for now it needs to land in a compost heap with a specific microbe. I am concerned about the practical chance of this particular plastic finding it’s way to the special compost heap without getting mixed in with other plastics.

Depends on the use case.

Reading the article, it doesn’t seem like it just disintegraties after 7 months, this material has to be under compositing conditions with a specific microbe due 7 months.

There are applications where this would probably be an unacceptable possibility, but I’d imagine the vast majority of single use plastics would be fine with this. Packaging may spend months or even years doing it’s job, but it won’t be under compost conditions during that time.

Don’t know that I’d characterize it as being “victims”, their media outlets have chosen to fuel anxiety and anger that was already there.

The media is culpable for pouring fuel on the fire, but the fire was already there. They are emboldened to be loud since they find such loud agreement from media and online, but they already were thinking the same basic things.

While I see a lot of posts that would have this problem, at least the discussion are a bit more balanced compared to when the same stuff would happen on Reddit. So for example fuck cars is about the same in terms of posts, but here I tend to see a bit more back and forth and a balanced perspective on how the comments are up voted. On Reddit, any comment vaguely questioning the circle jerk will be down voted into oblivion and receive nothing but angry replies.

The amount of apolitical posts is a bit disappointing though.

I’ll say that at least a few months ago, on a brand new system I went to YouTube and it looked pretty much like this, with a fresh history and no login. I thought it was unusual and then I logged in and they mostly went away.

We like to assume thoughtless content must mean bots, but I think real people are plenty likely to read that first paragraph and jump straight in to comments.

I know how it sounds, but it happened and it was very much not “and everyone clapped”.

It was not in some big venue, there was no audience for the exchange.

There was no wittiness in some snappy comeback, it was a plain statement of looking at the author.

There was no satisfying element of him realizing he was wrong or spinning out somehow, just a continuation of his argument largely unabated. This was in spite of the fact that it wasn’t some big complex phenomenon, it was a very specific problem with a provably correct solution (mathematically speaking), but he had already decided there could be no solution so he wasn’t receptive.

Things happen, though it’s rare that things go down on such a publicly standing satisfying way as documented on these internet stories.