"With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he's like... yeah, he's sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn't work out"
Scandanavians have been getting around without cars for millenia. Nobody had even heard of a car until just over a century ago.
Car dependent infrastructure is definitely not helpful for the physically disabled, as well as those too young, too old, and too poor to drive a car. This and a lot of other issues that the vocal and active "cars aren't the devil" crowd don't engage seriously with.
It's getting really old, and increasingly feels like trying to reason with the "Pitbulls make great family dogs" crowd.
Hospitals at the dawn of the 19th century in Europe were generally places only poor people in desperate situations went to give birth because they were hives of disease transmission.
The notion that doctors should wash their hands between treating one patient and the next was met with ridicule. Doctors were insulted by the suggestion that their hands might be unclean, so mortality rates for childbirth in hospitals were horrendous. The idea of handwashing emerged and died many times before it finally caught on, and then only at the behest of vigorous campaigning over a generation.
There is a long list of hidden costs and negative externalities associated with car dependent sprawl as well, they are well studied, but nobody want to hear that their hands are unclean. This idea one should be washing their hands a dozens times per shift is patently absurd. Physicians would be wasting hours a day just washing their hands! How would we be able to treat all these patients?
>Musk has said his critics “cannot cite a single name of someone who died” and “If there were, it would be worldwide headline news!” When confronted with the names – including those of children who died because of the cuts – Musk called a journalist “an utter piece of shit and a liar” and “utterly evil”. Musk has claimed, without evidence, that US tax dollars went to arming militants and “corrupt politicians”.
those are estimates, not data. I am asking about actual data. For example, mortality reports, piles of bodies, etc.
I understand feeling emotional about this, I really do. But the important bit is that if you make a big claim "millions of people died", you have to back that with actual evidence, not models.
> those are estimates, not data. I am asking about actual data. For example, mortality reports, piles of bodies, etc.
I think that this is an unrealistic ask, right now. Over the next 5-10 years enough time will have passed such that we can get more accurate numbers, but right now, all we have are estimates with wide confidence bounds (but narrower than they were last year).
Nope. And I hate that entire comic for poisoninh the very idea that asking for the evidence is wrong.
I'm operating in good faith asking people to show data. There is no reliable data supporting the claim that millions of people died because usaid was canceled. That's all.
I hiked that trail on August 10, 2019,
and after coming down from the summit I bivvied on the shoulder of Habrich just below the sugar-lump shaped granite summit. Coincidentally the night I slept up there was the same night the Sea-to-Sky Gondola was first cut.
The trail to the summit of Habrich starts at the gondola station, and for several kilometres follows a broad ridgeline which is overgrown and has several steep and rocky ups and downs. The path through was labyrinthine and marked by ribbon, not obvious, and I had to do some hunting around and doubling back to find my way up and down through the treacherous 4th class sections.
There was an abundance of blueberries, I stopped to snack at several blueberry patches. I was stuffing my face with blueberries. In addition to descending the wrong side of the mountain Poor Stanislov missed out on the all blueberries as well it seems.
>The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As I write, the number-one videocassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. “Beavis and Butthead” remain popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning—not just of science, but of anything—are avoidable, even undesirable.
-Carl Sagan outsmarting Mike Judge with this passage from The Demon Haunted World (1995)
Idiocracy is a fable about our time. Setting his story in the future helps Mike Judge to maintain plausible deniability, but the movie is there to validate your sneaking suspicion that everything is kind of stupid.
With the depletion of the coal and oil deposits the industrial revolution relied on the first time around, it is now locked in that this century is human civilization's only shot at reaching some kind of abstract technology escape velocity.
Crash now and there will never be a second chance, just iron age stuff in a harsher environment for however many tens of millennia it takes to have some random pandemic that wipes the descendants out occur.
I think the idea is that, the current trajectory of technology is just making problems worse. More and more powerful, capable of pulling us further and further from a healthy equilibrium as we see with global warming etc.
Theoretically, if we can crack fusion or some other source of abundant, cheap energy, we could build many of the bandaid solutions proposed today that are not feasible due to energy constraints, while transitioning society to a more sustainable path. Tilt the curve as it were.
Our psyches unfortunately aren't built for the globalized world we live in, and unless we figure out some sort of collective awakening to transcend our egos... Our best hope is likely solutions that allow the march of progress, while slowing, stopping, and eventually undoing a bunch of damage humans have done to the biosphere over our history. Definitely a moon shot, but hopefully we can figure something out.
-Guess who said that in 2014?
reply