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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • So because there’s moral limits to when it would “ever be performed”, there should be no legal limits to when it would ever be performed? Surely by that logic we don’t need laws against murder either, after all, that would be immoral and sometimes you have to kill people in self defence, so murder laws just get in the way.

    This coming from a pro choice person, I do think there’s a good justification for allowing later abortions, but as the previous poster said, it’s not helpful to pretend there’s no complexity or that there should be no limits at all.






  • But obviously they can’t force the potential victim to pay for an investigation when they’re the ones who need the report. Do you think instead that anyone accused in this way is literally incapable of countering the claims for themselves? There has to be an avenue for them to defend themselves, and this feels like the best thing they realistically could have done.

    Clearly a more thorough final report would help here, but I don’t see the point in attacking the money trail when that isn’t something that can be avoided.


  • I don’t disagree with your views on Boeing, but this incident is quite likely not related to Boeings problems, (other than their hard-earned public perception problem). Plane engines shouldn’t catch fire, but they do, whether that is rare bad luck or somebody screwed up is yet to be decided, but it sounds like this is not a newly minted plane, Boeing probably hasn’t touched it in years.

    Not that Boeing hasn’t earned their public perception problem, but accidents happened before Boeing lost their mojo, and will continue to happen even if Boeing regain it. This incident may well turn out to have lessons once the investigation is done, and some might be directed at Boeing, but that’s not where I’d put my money this time around, it sounds unlikely that they caused this particular incident.



  • Well that sucks. My favourite moment in a hidden role game was when a player won by misreading their card and convincing both of us that we were allies at the start. They ended up the only evil player for most of the game and then in the last round after we’d worked together to systematically kill everyone else (all weirdly innocents, we were both feeling guilty by this point), when they finally realised they knew there was no evil player they checked and… killed me. Total madness and a glorious victory for them. How can you be mad at that?!




  • Whilst I agree that universal consuming nanobots are a bit far fetched, I’m not sure I’m sold on the replication problem.

    Life has replication errors on purpose because we’re dependent on it for mid to long term survival.

    It’s easy to write program code with arbitrarily high error protection. You could make a program that will produce 1 unhandled error for every 100000 consumed universes, and it wouldn’t be particularly hard, you just need enough spare space.

    Mutation and cancer are potential problems for technology, but they’re decidedly solvable problems.

    Life only makes it hard because life is chaotic and complex, there’s not an error correcting code ratio we can bump from 5 to 20 and call it a day.









  • Same could have been said about electricity not that long ago. Now that renewables are building steam the switch to electricity is revealed as perfectly logical, why not the same for hydrogen?

    Hydrogen is a harder sell, thanks to the poorer density, cost of storage, and the poor efficiency of production. But given the variable production of renewables all but guarantees we’ll end up with vast amounts of excess power we can’t store, we will need a fuel we can make from electricity that we can use, and hydrogen is one of the contenders for that task. Whether it’ll be the winner is more doubtful, but something will be, we certainly will never build enough batteries to avoid giving away cheap power for things like this, and there are still things that benefit from higher density fuels that aren’t going away (planes). Accusing people of being “worse than deniers” just because they’re looking a little into the future and betting on something that might turn out to be Betamax is a little presumptuous.

    Hydrogen today is a fossil fuel. But hydrogen has a very obvious method of green production, the only problem is cost of power to produce it (thus why it’s all fossil fuels right now) but the inevitability of variable power sources like solar and wind in the future guarantees excesses of cheap power, so cost of power today is not going to be the same barrier tomorrow that it is today.

    As for the fossil fuel industries plan to use hydrogen to maintain business as usual in a post fossil fuels era, I really don’t care if they manage to use their machines as long as they stop using fossil fuels, so that’s fine with me.

    Edit: to be clear, I’m not supporting a hydrogen based economy, since that makes no sense, hydrogen is a storage medium for energy, not a production source. There have been people pushing it as a magical solution to all things, that is stupid. As a small piece of the puzzle it could fit, if we don’t find a better chemistry for high density storage of energy with simple conversion from electricity, which is as yet an unsolved problem.