Going the whole distance in QWOP

I don’t know if the type of matter matters, rather I’m basing in on the idea that measurement collapses the wave function, and consciousness does measure things

There’s a lot of possibilities.

My top contender would be a desire to explore, which probably requires consciousness. Given that we have pretty much no idea what leads to consciousness, it can be guessed (dubiously) that if it arose more easily then we’d have an explanation by now. It could be that it’s an extremely rare phenomenon, and there may even be other planets with “intelligent” but mechanistic beings that act entirely for their own survival and don’t build civilizations or explore much.

Second would be intergalactic and to a lesser degree interstellar travel. If we assume both 1) intelligent civilizations are extremely rare and 2) faster-than-light transportation is impossible, it could be that everyone is just too spread out to make contact.

Third, and the one I most feel is right but it requires pretending I understand quantum physics (which I don’t) and probably offending many that do, is the notion that the concrete universe is not large but small and has no objective existence independent of our respective perceptions, and any part of the universe that’s invisible is a mere wave function that will only have concrete reality upon our perceiving it. I make the further dubious assumption that conscious beings can’t be part of the wave function. So there.

I think it makes sense to care more about problems that are solvable. If anyone out there has a realistic plan to reduce the suffering of the people of Gaza in any sort of lasting manner, I’ve yet to hear it.

But people spray painting the library? Yeah that can be solved. Report them to the police, take pictures. No tanks necessary.

I’d suspect it’s reaction to large cultural shifts in the last couple of decades - including gay and trans rights, George Floyd and increased racial integration in media, me too, etc. For whatever reason, perhaps loss aversion, many people tend to react angrily and violently to change and the threat of change. Perhaps it’s analogous to how communist movements in the early 20th century led to fascist movements a decade or two later.

I also don’t think it’s the US only, so you can’t put it all on Trump. I’d argue Trump and similar figures around the world are the result of the above counter-reaction.

The heat hasn’t killed me yet

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We talk about positive things.

Like Linux.

According to wikipedia:

Under a minimalist definition of democracy, rulers are elected through competitive elections while more expansive definitions link democracy to guarantees of civil liberties and human rights in addition to competitive elections.

Feel free to edit if you disagree.

But that started happening a lot less once modern science and its principles gained mainstream acceptance, say 1900 or so. Yeah back when the “experts” were interpreting bible passages to determine physical laws or poking around corpses to guessing how the human body works with no verification, the experts were wrong a lot. But while things have been tweaked a lot, it’s hard to find any widely accepted scientific expert conclusion occurring after 1900 or so that’s been proven flat-out wrong.

As productivity increases, artificial scarcity becomes necessary to maintain pre-existing levels of inequality.

Do-gooder derogation

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According to the report, the sales decline came from all across Asia. Net sales were down in Greater China (PRC, Taiwan & Hong Kong), Japan, and the Rest of Asia Pacific, while the Americas and Europe saw an insignificant change that can be rounded up to 0%.

This makes sense. Apple has its status as “the one and only smartphone” in the US, but in other countries buying a phone that costs a tiny fraction as much is probably a bigger draw and has less social stigma.

We need Yahoo back. Just a bunch of categories, where anyone can put their site under the right category.

No, I’m gonna sit back and laugh as a bunch of guys who couldn’t schedule a meeting at the four seasons try to overthrow the world’s oldest democracy.

Bumble is pretty much the only one they don’t own. The only other one I can think of is coffee meets bagel, does anyone still use that?

• Trump’s lawyers would argue that Biden can order Trump’s execution without any punishment, but that it would not cause him to win the next election because the military and other federal officials are not immune and are “obligated” not to follow illegal orders. So basically the argument is that illegal orders are unlikely to be followed.
• Problem with this argument is that the president has the pardon power, which means he could promise to pardon people for following his illegal orders.
• But the problem with that argument is that some believe the president could pardon himself, so maybe that situation is already a reality even if the president is not immune
• What would actually happen? It seems like in both Watergate and Jan 6, some people did refuse to follow corrupt orders. But in the case of Watergate where there was more time and a more intelligent corrupt president, that wasn’t itself a major problem. In Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, he forced his AGs to resign until he landed on future Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who carried out Nixon’s illegal order to fire a special prosecutor. The bad news for Nixon is that the move was so unpopular it eventually led to his resignation as he probably would’ve been impeached otherwise.

I mean the guy isn’t ugly, he just has the dumbest haircut I’ve ever seen

According to the mercedes website the cars have radar and lidar sensors. FSD has radar only, but apparently decided to move away from them and towards optical only, I’m not sure if they currently have any role in FSD.

That’s important because FSD relies on optical sensors only to tell not only where an object is, but that it exists. Based on videos I’ve seen of FSD, I suspect that if it hasn’t ingested the data to recognize, say, a plastic bucket, it won’t know that it’s not just part of the road (or at best can recognize that the road looks a little weird). If there’s a radar or lidar sensor though, those directly measure distance and can have 3-D data about the world without the ability to recognize objects. Which means they can say “hey, there’s something there I don’t recognize, time to hit the brakes and alert the driver about what to do next”.

Of course this still leaves a number of problems, like understanding at a higher level what happened after an accident for example. My guess is there will still be problems.