The works of Roger Penrose have shown that it’s conceivable or potentially even provable that at the very largest scales of time and space, there is no meaningful difference between the accelerating “cold” end of our universe and the collossal expansion that began the universe as we know it, and in fact those two states are perpetually cycling, birthing new universes from the explosion of old ones. This is based on the idea that when there is no more physical mass in the universe, you can look at the universe from a reference frame that only looks at the geometry of the energy expanding through space and it’s identical to the beginning states.

I would recommend PBS Spacetime youtube channel for a lot better explanations of conformal cyclic cosmology than my feeble mind can try to relate.

How do you think all the stuff managed to get there in the first place?

You’re still thinking like a meat-monkey. There are stranger states out there than one can imagine, and that’s not hyperbole. There was no causality before expansion, because there was no meaningful interactions or spacetime in which interactions can occur.

You’re always going to have a hard time imagining this, because again, you are a human. We all are, none of us can imagine states of the universe without time and space.

I’m going to immediately distrust the motives.

Additionally, the data is self-reported surveys with questions like “Have you ever been contacted by someone from a company or corporation?” and… yeah? This part shouldn’t be surprising to any platform that allows private messages. And “Have you ever seen someone promoting a product?” and most people are going to either shrug or already have a strong opinion, it’s not very scientific for actual data on the actual traffic from bots and corporate shills, more how the human users feel about the platform.

I would much rather see an independent investigation from a technical point-of-view, which tracks the comments and timing of user comments to determine how many are actually bots just quietly gaining karma with innocuous comments, or how many are just programmed to go to certain subreddits at certain times to push a narrative.

The porn will never even go away. Pornhub might be popular but it’s a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the porn out there.

If you removed the porn from the internet, the very next day a hundred million people will all create their own new internet and finally have a noble purpose for their saved stashes.

It won’t. The average person in America wants the fastest, easiest consumable distraction or pleasure reward and takes no time to learn new things unless it’s dangled in front of them in bite-sized, easy-to-follow tutorials with quest-markers and all kinds of sparkles and chimes when they do something correctly.

They will go to some really terrible alternative that costs money. There are a hundred thousand porn sites right now hoping that they become the next big thing from all this.

I read somewhere that a lot of people don’t even go to websites anymore, they just use apps for their social media and have no idea how to enter a web address or URL.

I feel like the last of a dying breed of mighty wizards because I can configure windows and know how to manage files.

Pornhub’s audience is international, and in some countries they are far, far less backwards and socially repressed and Pornhub and similar companies get revenue without any controversy or danger of consequences.

They do NOT need these shitty states that are just going to continue to pearl-clutch and scream about “morality” as if humans aren’t sexual creatures.

I’ve had a lot of reptiles and as a result, a lot of reptile bites.

Almost every time I’ve been bit it was an accident or a response, and as soon as the reptile realized it had human skin in it’s mouth it would release. Even herbivore iguanas have a lot of pretty sharp teeth and I’ve had some unique looking bite marks, but they almost never bite intentionally.

Parrots meanwhile… they are evil incarnate, at least to me. I’ve never met a parrot that didn’t bite me hard enough to let me know it could easily amputate parts of my body if it so chose. Meanwhile I see them loving and cuddling other people, people who say things like “He’s really very loving, he never bites anyone, he’s perfectly safe to pet!”

Well SHIT son, you lived on the COAST??

Well that shit changes everything, I had no idea you overheard things out on the coast, I mean I was here ready to talk about crime stats and systemic inequality and the USA’s history with civil rights, but here is a person who heard some stuff out on the coast! I guess I should reconsider everything and stop supporting efforts to squash nazis in an industrial nazi-squashing machine.

The more you think about it all, the less sense it makes. Congrats on discovering the tiny seed of free-will we all have inside us.

I’m going to need your car keys, ma’am.

Sir, you’ve had enough and need to go home now.

As a guy who has been gaming for decades, don’t feel bad, I still look at the controller every time it says “Press X to do thing!” even thought I know by muscle memory what every button does, as soon as it references a button or keyboard key by name it’s like my brain just flows straight out my ears and I am suddenly an old grandma using technology for the first time, hunting and pecking for each lettered button.

Personal insecurity comes from lack of understanding of systems that impact you.

Everyone has different needs and wants out of their society, but we all have the same axioms. Learning how to connect your axioms to your political identity is a very strong way to feel more connected to your community and the people you care about. Learning how the world works can help guide choices and support others who may also be struggling. Understanding how politics and sociology work gives you a window into how people are motivated and you will make better decisions.

And more than anything, the MOST important part of learning how the world functions and how science, politics, religion, emotion and relationships are all tied to each other, is that it defends you against bullshit and lies.

You and I are very vulnerable to the way others can trigger emotional responses and then use those feelings to explain an agenda. People do this all day long, every day, on every side of the political spectrum, and it’s VERY easy to get pulled into these clubs and communities, most of which are either scams or grifts trying to sell you something or trying to get you to become a walking advertisement for what they’re selling.

Politics are dumb but very, very important

I know that saying well.

And I agree. You are not learning to understand politics because you think you’re going to run for office and change the world, you learn so you understand what’s actually going on and so you can help educate others.

Seriously, everyone out there who rather just block out anything to do with politics and society and are overwhelmed by the idea of finding the path to least harm, you are only going to make your insecurity and anxiety around politics worse by ignoring it or condemning it when you see it. Forming strong values around your axioms is politics, and when you find a confident stance like “Do good things, don’t do bad things” and learn what consequences are of different attitudes and actions, you become a LOT more complete and confident and less likely to be absolutely railroaded by the very real forces out there who will exploit your apathy. It doesn’t mean you have to preach or lecture anyone, just know how things work.

Sitting it out, ignoring it, hiding from it… that feels like you’re escaping, but you are just playing into the plans of those who need you to be apathetic. You don’t get out of taking a side here, so start learning.

I don’t think any of this is even real to them. The same way that a majority of the white-nationalist 4-channers are just roleplaying and losing themselves in the storylines, as a species we tend to do that, we just get lost in a narrative because it explains how we feel.

The tankies are doing the same exact thing. They’re not impacting policy, they’re not marching for anything, they’re not taken seriously and it’s just another in-club that has its own language and imagery and secret handshakes and a unifying message to rally behind (America bad!) and instead of turning that criticism into actionable plans for changing representation and making anything better, they put on WW2 Russian Tanker helmets and have erotic fantasies about a communist uprising that will never happen.

Maybe it’s that we made the Internet so full of disinformation that everyone is just automatically refusing to listen to others,

We’ve made a vast social space where people can get validation and acceptance as easily as they can choose to be challenged and face threats to their own sense of self importance and their egos, and this isn’t to sound disparaging, we ALL have sensitive egos and all feel a resistance to facing challenges, so what will we all choose over and over? It’s natural that we seek the path of least resistance that also boosts our positive feelings about ourselves.

We’re not a rational or reasonable species, we use rational and reason to explain our emotions but those explanations are rarely accurate or based in reality.

There are a lot of creatures that have very distinct smells but you never get close enough to them to notice. Reptiles make for some stanky pets even though I doubt many of you could identify a lizard terrarium smell. Many insects produce smells as defense mechanisms but you can barely smell it as a human. Grasshoppers and many beatles in particular tend to secrete nasty smelling slime when handled, a smell that follows them around, and that’s a smell I can recall clearly and sharply.

I have a theory though that human smell has lost sensitivity because of social reasons. We used to be fantastic at chemical analysis until civilization happened and we all started using soap and telling each other that normal, every day smells are now “bad” and we need to mask them with perfumes and soaps. This made us afraid to smell things for fear that we were taking something “bad” inside us, the idea of evil or bad air goes back very, very far.

People who say shit like that don’t just need to be unsubbed from, they need a special department of the US government to land a chopper outside their house, deploy a team of skilled face-slappers to smash through the person’s window with flashbangs, tie him to a chair and just slap him across the face as hard as they can and then leave.

I would pay my share in taxes to make this unit a reality.

If I’m going to spend $20 - $30 for a burger and fries and a drink, I will go to a local diner and give the money to people who need it, and who care about their food, and what’s more, those burgers are almost guaranteed to be vastly superior in quality.

When I was young my friends and I would stop at a McDonald’s for value-menu snacks on the way to paintball or my family would stop there when traveling for convenience and cheap food.

Now that the “cheap” is gone, what exactly are they offering? For the price of one of their meals I can buy ground beef and make burgers for everyone. I’m so confused how institutions like this survive. Oh yeah, a population addicted to fast fixes of sugar and high-calorie carbohydrates.