At this point the downside is that if that debate is the best he can do then he’s absolutely going to lose.

If he does make it to Election Day without dropping out or dropping dead then yeah we may as well vote for him, but that seems like a terrible position to be in.

I disagree with this, I think the Republican Party is waning and they’re now in the sweet spot where they have a large enough base to enact a fascist takeover but not enough to win by appealing to the electorate. If they aren’t able to change the rules in their favor in the next couple cycles I think they become further marginalized and lose their chance.

That’s not to say we won’t face a similar problem again after we have a party realignment, but I do think the GOP specifically has a limited window in which to seize power.

There is an interesting catch to this argument, which is that in a human body we can eliminate pain by using general anesthesia or nerve blockers. Locally the body still reacts to damage but the actual person doesn’t experience any pain because it isn’t communicated to their consciousness. If we accept that being unconscious precludes experiencing pain then it follows that consciousness is a pre-requisite for pain.

On the other hand if it’s still unethical to inflict damage on a living thing without consciousness then is it unethical to operate on a sedated person even though they don’t consciously experience pain?

I mean same, but inevitably it will also hurt everyone who buys oil which is pretty much everyone in America. Still it has to happen

I genuinely feel like the climate is just a no win situation from a political perspective. Any real solution has pretty serious tradeoffs so either you take small low impact steps which are panned as being too little too late, or you take bold steps that hurt some significant group economically.

Not even close. Despite the hype being pushed by tech companies the latest wave of AI has extremely niche use cases and it’s already beginning to plateau.

What kind?

I mean that’s not really a problem specific to EVs. But yeah I also drive an aging car because I don’t want one with 10x more failure points.

I do love how much torque my electric stove can put out while stopped

Are you asking him why he can’t fix the world?

Yes the obscure and little known fundamental theorem of algebra

My first thought was that a couple cops are going to get hurt in traffic accidents and then their union is going to point to the increased injury rate as a reason for further militarization

The problem isn’t that the energy is too cheap, it’s that there’s too much of it, which is why it’s so cheap. An electrical grid can only support so much power and there is no cost effective way to store enough energy to run the grid for any appreciable amount of time, so it all must be used or else the system becomes unstable.

Because they would have brownouts overnight and when the weather was bad.

Don’t give them any ideas

I always thought the Chinese Room argument was kinda silly. It’s predicated on the idea that humans have some unique capacity to understand the world that can’t be replicated by a syntactic system, but there is no attempt made to actually define this capacity.

The whole argument depends on our intuition that we think and know things in a way inanimate objects don’t. In other words, it’s a tautology to draw the conclusion that computers can’t think from the premise that computers can’t think.

Dude what? Bears don’t give a shit about you. Unless you charge the bear it’s going to be fine.

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Yeah people really do like to pretend putting pocket change into savings will somehow add up to a 7 figure nest egg.

For context: $400 per year for 35 years (making some assumptions about your age) with 8% average market return (probably optimistic tbh) and you wind up with a whopping $84k to retire on

So yeah, shits fucked

I think that people don’t really understand what it means when they claim they have no plans to retire. My in-laws are always saying things like “I’ll work until I die” while they take out debt to go on vacations but they recently brought up that we should make sure to get an extra bedroom for them if/when we buy a house. The disconnect is infuriating.