Thanks for reminding me, that’s a good point.

As an American, there’s a chain of instinctive thoughts that pass through my mind when I see another news article about the US losing another piece of world dominance:

Oh no, this could hurt me! Wait, I don’t make money from these companies.

My country will lose tax revenue! Wait, massive corporations pay minimal taxes anyway, this doesn’t affect the ability for my government to function.

The Visa/Mastercard employees working internationally will lose their jobs! Corporations have mass layoffs willy nilly anyway, this isn’t different.

The executives and corporate owners will lose revenue! Wait, they’re the ones who can afford to lose income the most out of anybody.

They’ve really done a good job dismantling any reason for me to give a shit about US corporations losing money.

When I was a freshman in college over a decade ago, I was given this link to a youtube video basically asserting that all agnostic people are atheist. At the time I was fairly agnostic, and being told this felt wrong, like my thoughts were being miscategorized, but I didn’t have a great way to explain that feeling at the time. The framework above is ultimately how I parsed through that feeling to better understand myself and others. That’s why I started thinking about it.

I think a person’s belief (or lack thereof) is a reflection of how they think, so adding clarity to what and how one believes or doesn’t believe something can grant a better understanding of how they think. And I like understanding other people and how they think.

I don’t really understand how this is othering, could you elaborate on that?

I generally agree with the exception of sandbox games intended to be played through multiple times, like grand strategy games. In those cases they can be a fun way to find absurd goals to try out, like in Victoria 3 when I made the US a monarchy or made Paraguay really big!

I think the issue I consistently see in discussions surrounding theism and atheism is the definition of what it means to be agnostic vs atheist. The way I see it, there are generally five “buckets” of belief most people fit into; theist, agnostic theist, agnostic, agnostic atheist, and atheist.

In the most technical sense atheist means “a lack of belief.” But some people use it to mean a disbelief in a god, or in other words a belief there is no god. Other people use it in the technical sense, but rarely does someone clarify which use they actually mean.

So for clarity and ease of communication, I think it would make sense to use the fives states of belief above as follows:

Theist: believes there is a god.

Agnostic theist: does not hold a belief in a god, but lives as though there is one.

Agnostic: does not hold a belief or disbelief in a god.

Agnostic atheist: does not hold a belief in a god, and lives as though there is not one.

Atheist/antitheist: believes that there is no god.

Obviously I don’t expect others to enter a conversation already using that framework, and it will probably never become a common framework, but when I read comments online and someone says they are an atheist, the first thing I try to do is determine if they are an agnostic or antitheist atheist.

We just got done establishing that tariffs are not a presidential privilege! What contrivance will they think up this time to “justify” it? Or are we officially past the stage of pretending now?

You created Henry just to delay filing your own taxes, didn’t you.

We’ve already seen this over the past decade. I was skeptical of electric vehicles when I first started learning about Teslas because at the time there was something like 2/3s of the lithium available for mining compared to what would be needed to replace every vehicle on Earth with an EV.

But since then new lithium mining techniques have opened up new sources (I think the southeast US has a large amount of these newly accessible sources), increasing the raw amount available. Sodium ion batteries have made strides, and while they aren’t as energy dense stationary batteries can use that while vehicles use lithium, reducing overall lithium demand. And who knows, sodium ion batteries could still reach a point where they are viable for vehicle batteries. And of course lithium batteries have improved as well, making available lithium stretch farther.

This may come off as really pretentious, but when I’m feel a wistful melancholy for the past, I hear this short poem I wrote a few years ago called Still Here:

I thought this feeling cast away

Though here it is, perhaps to stay

Though years have passed and I have cried

My inward plea is still denied

Ya, you’re not wrong about any of that. But you seriously think the differences are big enough to say that they are not similar enough to recommend one based on the other? I think PHM reads like a single plot thread pulled from Bobiverse and expanded into an entire book of it’s own, with all the extra depth and space to dig into the sci fi that comes with that.

How are they that different? Both involve an anti-social, witty, nerdy guy put in scenarios that demand he come up with an innovative solution that’s usually science or engineering based. And they’re in space. I just finished Project Hail Mary again last week and was consistently thinking about how it reminded me of Bobiverse in tone and character, and not just because of Ray Porter.

There is X amount of natural pollen. A amount is consumed by domesticated bees, and B amount by wild bees. If domesticated bees can be provided with synthetic pollen, now there is B+A amount of natural pollen available for wild bees.

If you read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein that may give you an idea.

Otherwise, I attended Porcfest, the libertarian Porcupine Freedom Festival, back in 2016. Although it’s labeled libertarian, most folks I talked to discussed anarchy. One of the presentations I remember asserted that 8 is the optimal number of individuals in a decision making group. In his ideal anarchy individual people would assemble in groups of 8, who would then gather their groups or reps from their groups into a higher group of 8, and so on. Effectively higher level group decisions, if needed, would be made by a council that could be traced back to any individual.

I don’t know that that’s a good plan, but it may get your mind going on how to think about the topic.

Good thing his name was Maxim, can you imagine how lame a Minim gun would have been?

Do you understand that they are saying the “trust me bro” is going to come from somewhere else, if not religion? Elon Musk and his claims over the years are a great example.

I highly recommend you give the South Park episode “Go God Go” a watch. It’s pretty funny.

Basically, life goes on regardless of whether something goes well or poorly. This is meant to help someone feel better when things go awry because they can move past it and there will be future opportunities for things to go well.

The ambiguity of that “it” is doing a LOT of heavy lifting here, but I see what you’re saying : )

“Why are data centers bad for the environment?”

Computer servers use a lot of electricity when they run. I believe most data centers are focused on data storage and retrieval, which means there are upswings and downswings in their usage as demand to access that data increases and wanes, so it’s not always running at 100% power consumption. My understanding is that AI data centers are primarily used for training new models, which means they are nearly always running at or near 100% to maximize training.

Not only does this consume a lot of electricity from the grid to run, but a significant byproduct of servers running is heat, requiring strong cooling systems for the data center, which ironically uses even more electricity. I think they use a lot of water cooling to achieve this cooling as well since water is good at absorbing, moving, then dissipating heat. I’ve read comments that this makes the water difficult to reuse, but I don’t know why that would be the case.

In short, they use a lot of electricity to generate heat that then needs even more electricity and water to manage.

“Wouldn’t this cause American ai innovation to slow down?”

Sure, this could cause the base level processing power available for training to taper off, but I think that would actually breed more innovation in making better training methods that use that power more efficiently. I recall a lot of early Chinese models being just as good for end users as American models despite being trained on less processing power. That sounds innovative to me.

I would liken it to video game optimization. When gaming tech was weaker it was more necessary to optimize games to run on the limited hardware. Modern gaming consoles have enough processing overhead to achieve the same thing that developers can get away with less optimization, which ironically can lead to worse performing games than when that overhead was missing.

On a space station more than a space battle, but Titan AE had a scene that made good use of this. The station is old, and early in the scene the gravity generator goes on the fritz, causing everyone to float until some percussive maintenance gets it working again. When bad guys show up Matt Damon shoots the generator to cause some confusion and let him escape faster by pushing off toward the exit.

I have a lot of thoughts and feelings related to the book because, while there is a lot of garbage in it, the core thesis spelled out at one point in the last third I think is very worthwhile and came at a time in my life (just turned 21 when I first read it) that it helped shape my political views. As another commenter said Heinlein was never very consistent in the politics portrayed in his stories, which I’ve understood as him exploring various views more than wholeheartedly endorsing any one of them.

First, the garbage. It’s pretty clearly pro military, as the in-book government was established by veterans seizing power and the primary path to having political power (being a voting citizen as opposed to a civilian) is through military service. There’s lip service paid that it’s any kind of civil service (Neil Patrick Harris’s character goes off to a research lab for experimenting in the book), but it’s only a sentence or two. No source on this, but my gut says Heinlein probably wanted to explore the idea more but was hampered by the fact he was writing a space military adventure and needed to focus on that. There’s also a lot of 50’s values espoused for separating genders into different groups and that spanking your kids is good no matter what the “bleeding hearts” might say.

The biggest difference that bothers me between the book and movie is how soldier lives are valued, best displayed through the tactics humanity uses. In the movie humanity uses almost the same strategy as the bugs. Get a lot of troops, equip them about as cheaply as possible, then send swarms of them to deal with bugs. Mass casualties are a given. The book is one of if not the first example of power armor turning a soldier into almost a one man army. It’s stated at one point that a single soldier is about as effective as 1000 bug drones in combat. This, along with statements from multiple officers throughout the book, shows me that individual soldier lives are actually valued in the book, and that while they are spent they are not wasted the way they are in the movie.

But for me, the most important takeaway from the book is a lecture given to Johnny Rico during officer school where the instructor lays out why service is required for citizenship. Essentially the goal is to ensure that the only people making decisions on behalf of society (ie politicians and the people that vote them in) are putting the good of that society over their own personal wellbeing. The service citizens go through is meant to weed out selfish people by putting them through difficult experiences where it would be in their best interest to quit rather than continue. While I doubt the book’s system would actually achieve that, I do think that the value of society-serving rather than self-serving voters and politicians is correct and probably the most important thing that a society could achieve (not that I know how to achieve that). It’s the first thing I ask myself when deciding who to vote for now, “does this person actually care about the people they’ll be representing or are they just interested in having power?”