Uriel238 [all pronouns]

And match the red on the poster!

< James Bond Opening Boilerplate Sting >

The logic is that if we should be able to detect orbital teapots but can’t find any that it may indicate time travel is not possible, or at least never readily available for MIT students to engage in practical jokes. Because they totally would.

Like Roko’s Baskilisk it relies on a lot of presumptions that we cannot immediately make. We still struggle to detect teapot-sized satellites in the inner solar system. Time travel may exist but may never be freely accessible. There may even have been a task force to intercept all the teapot-placement missions before they launched, or a good reason not to frivolously drop objects into the past such as teapots. We might even have evolved to where we just don’t consider trolling each other as appropriate behavior.

As with many of my hypotheses, it’s more of a thought experiment than an actual conjecture of the real world.

It may be related to all the trolling we do to each other, such as deckpeckers, left-handed smoke shifters, snipe hunting and soft-punching contests.

It may not make reasonable sense at all, but humans are silly muppets.

It’s why I hypothesize that teapots in space (between the Earth and Mars, orbiting the sun) would be almost certain evidence that time travel to the past becomes possible and cheap, and if we ever attain the capacity to detect distant teapots and don’t find any, that may be evidence that time travel is not possible, or at least cannot be made cheap enough to be used for practical jokes.

As a society, for instance, we tend to think that telling kids that Santa Claus exists is unproblematic, because doing so protects certain values – such as children’s innocence and imagination.

Santa Clause may be a fun myth, especially if kids receive presents from Santa for Christmas. But it does not protect children’s innocence and imagination.

Though this raises a question if kids received mischief-enabling presents from Jesus (A Red Ryder BB Gun comes to mind) that might improve their take on their personal Jesus.

Humans don’t have the technology to manipulate society to deal with the climate crisis. But then we can’t get a four-day work-week in the US because a handful of billionaires oppose it.

So far, we’re showing about the impetus that cyanobacteria had when it was their turn to kill off the planet. It would have been better if they could have stopped multiplying but they couldn’t help themselves. We can’t help ourselves either, just with extra steps to reach the same position.

University of Missouri, I believe. (Sent to me from there.)

In my case enjoying life is not something that I can simply do. I manage mental illness which features chronic suicidality, but it’s been driven into me very hard that I am at fault for my grief and trauma. But having a sober understanding of why I feel the way I do, and the social forces that drove parents, teachers and authorities to treat me the way I did helps me counter those neural processes.

This cartoon illustrates the dynamic I’ve encountered, and I hypothesize the mental illness epidemic in the US is intergenerational and compounding.

That we’re also dealing with a couple of imminent great filters the human species is unprepared to navigate hits hard for me.

My doom and gloom is catalyzed by a lot of things including, yes, a novelty cookbook that appears to be made in recognition of desperate times. It isn’t the only thing that informs my doom and gloom, and this isn’t to say I don’t have hope. But it is a Goblins at the gates of Gondor kind of situation, in which a lot of things have to go simultaneously right before we’re out of the fine mess we’re in.

In the Great Depression, it’s not like anyone was starving to death. Rather it was like they were eating flour paste and dying of malnutrition.

That we are in an era that we need the SBC speaks to how bad things are. Here in the states, we don’t have food deserts, we have food swamps, where the only thing one can get is junk food.

Sink plungers without the flange work better on sinks, in my experience. So it’s nice to have one of each.

There are different builds for drainage snakes for sinks and toilets as well.

One way to be a better neighbor is to get a good drain snake and lend it out as needed.

Clean it first. Then clean the sink after using soiled plumbing tools.

You should vote regardless (downballot blue votes also help resist the creep towards obe-party autocracy).

At the same time, be aware of efforts that might be active in your area to disqualify you:

• Voter suppression
• Registration purges
• Intimidation (threats)
• Intimidation (actual violence)
• procedural shennanigans
• outright election fraud
• violent coup d’etat

Yes. Fixed!

To be fair, in 2008 Obama and Hillary Clinton were viable candidates (despite not being a white Christian rich man) because the US public was really tired of Republican shennanigans, and of the Bush administration specifically. While McCain seemed reasonable Sarah Palin was scary and the McCain campaign took its cues from the ur-Maga Karl Rove / Tea-Party Republican talking points, who were only onto public benefits if no-one else got them.

Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize for simply not being Trump Bush and admitted as much it was rather silly when he promised to work to rise to the level of deserving it.

Sadly, Obama retained a lot of Bush policies and was more neoliberal than we needed.

I really thought after Bush, we’d never vote for a Republican president again, nor would we allow one to win by the EC. I was wrong and the US paid for it dearly. So I’m really sore and bitter about the whole affair.

Metatron: …Loki nor Bartleby would ever be allowed back into Paradise.
Bethany: Were they sent to Hell?
Metatron: Worse. Wisconsin

I think the disagreement is not if Hell exists, but its properties. Having watched the most recent main segment of Last Week Tonight the Palestinian underbelly of Hebron sounds pretty hellish. And there remain military hot zones where the soldiers of belligerents are killing each other over irreconcilable differences, or at least the disagreements of their overlords playing their games of thrones.

As for afterlife, well, we haven’t found any mechanism by which afterlife happens. Once you die, your brain stops working. Your story ends.

This seems to logically follow. The copy of a copy of a copy paradigm. We train AI on what humans like. By running stuff back through the trainig data, we’re adding noise back in.

To be fair, we already add noise, in that human art has its own errors, which we try to filter out using additional data featuring more of what we want and less of what we don’t want.

Who, exactly, trusts this third party?

I’m so used to getting treacherously betrayed by third parties distrust is my default setting.

I can only speak about my cat, for whom the solution has been mostly to make sure he has sufficient fresh scratching cardboard.

Trimming claws helps but he doesn’t like it. I get a partner to distract him, but mostly he keeps his claws in good, if sharp, order.

If the scratch pads are too dusty or too used, he’ll start favoring the sofa, but sometimes he’ll do that for sake of mischief, getting away with something. He seems to like to test that we’re paying attention.

What is more interesting to me is he could have persons of interest detained and disappeared as per the still-active surveillance, national security and anti-terror states from the aughts and 2010s.

I would avoid doing anything to Trump directly as the US wouldn’t want to martyr him but it would be delightfully ironic to detain the SCOTUS associate justices for sake of their own safety where they can stay at black sites within earshot of the screaming.

In the meantime there are Heritage Society members and other thinktank analysts who have been caught on hot mic or text discussing policies that would drastically change the character of the United States, that are contrary to the spirit of the Constitution of the United States and parallel to the indictments in the Declaration of Independence.

So it would be entirely justified to introduce them to the US secret detention system and possibly to the enhanced interrogators to remind them what kinds of presidential power they endorsed in eras past.

I’m sure they plan to remind Trump of these resources when Trump wants to make someone sorry they were born.

Right I’m having a hard time not embracing my inner Magneto when I imagine being in Biden’s shoes. After all, these guys made it very clear what they will do to me when they have half a chance.