uriel238

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Abuse of hypertube technology to make cannons

uriel238 , 4 months ago

my first guess would be Honey, I Joined a Cult

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Queen Min has entered the Chat

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/15eca78c-6401-4a0d-8e9b-978735ab1a82.jpeg

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Memento Mori.

uriel238 , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

In traditional Nippon culture ritual suicide is the final act of protest one makes, say if ordered by superiors to commit an immoral act. In the twentieth century, this translated into a if you can't take the heat... sentiment in the highly competitive corporation environments. Hence young adults had a high suicide rate when they couldn't perform well enough in school to get salaried jobs.

(My understanding of this is warching from the US and seeing the pressures on Japanese businesses to compete wit American ones. While companies on both side were rivalistic towards each other, they all influenced and were affected by the mutual economy, so recession for everybody!)

In the aughts, Japan became aware of a population crisis. Young people were not having enough children to match geriatric mortality. Also young people were disengaged from the traditional values of their grandkid-starved elders: Much like the US, and, I expect, similarly aided by the new deliberation capacities of the internet, kids realized their elders didn't care about the welfare of them or their kids, but their own legacies and, maybe, to play with the cute infant.

Which brings us to this era, in which Japan is looking to move away from the hypercompetitive, pro-suicide culture that presumably drove productivity in the 20th century.

As a note, the US typically outperformed Japan in productivity per capita, mostly because we are culturally less compliant and obedient to our authorities, hence our industrialists are quicker to replace labor forces with automation. The quicker US companies could downsize production teams and send out another batch of pink slips, the better.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Here in the states we have a long standing tradition of assassination of our elected officials.

The US also has a long standing tradition of overkill in warfare. It has little to do with our lack of respect for life, rather the assumption enemies might not me keen to surrender or may believe in the cause for which they're engaged in hostilities enough to put up an honest fight.

Shaun on YouTube makes a pretty strong case the US didn't need to drop atom bombs on Japan to secure its surrender, but the US has been really good about not resorting to nuclear attacks since then even when officials wanted to use them, as per Reagan and Trump. Human civilization continues to close on eighty years without a nuclear war.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Best. Jam Session. EVAR! 🎸🎺🎹🎵🔔🎶🎵🎵🎶💥

uriel238 , 4 months ago

I am on the receiving end of the last one, a lot.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

I think the problem is people mistake what Neitzsche's ubermensch is. Happy Sisyphus is ubermensch Sisyphus.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

I'd say it was a relief to discover the authorities who expected so much of me failed to live up to their own standards.I suspect this figures into the drive behind Camus' rebellion.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Mushroom!

uriel238 , 4 months ago

The problem with consciousness is we don't actually have a standard for it, largely because we see humans as conscious and everything else as not. But when we isolate a given trait (language, tool use, humor, etc.) we find examples in other species.

So we're in a sorites situation: We can point to clearly conscious things and clearly not conscious things, but it's rough finding an edge case that is by consensus on one side or another. Coco the gorilla might have been but turned out to be far removed (largely because she faked knowing sign language and her handlers didn't know sign well enough to see she was faking it.)

That said, our brains clearly operate through material mechanics, and when its components deteriorate, so do we. Parkinson's and Alzheimer's are serious cosmic horror: It's not just tears in rain but tears of oceanwater joining rain into the sea. We really do dissolve into oblivion, and it would take some pretty fantastic steps to assume that whatever experiences an afterlife is the same thing as the engine that lived (👓🗲).

Heck, we can't be certain the person who wakes up every morning is the same as the person who went to sleep. Continuity, like the Ship of Theseus, is the only thing that links us. And if this is the case, then you can bet your crypto some billionaire right now is looking at DeepSouth and wondering how far we are from putting their brain sim in one to run their estate from beyond the grave. If Deepsouth/EMusk was booted up the moment he died, would that be a legitimate case of immortality?

If this is the case, we can assume that any life is a continuity of ourselves, which doesn't mean much without our memories and experiences that establish who we are. By the same argument the Ship of Theseus continues today as the USS John F. Kennedy (CVN-79), Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier as well as the Space Shuttle Columbia.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

I'd be interested in an elaboration on how you assert the person who wakes up every morning can be certain they're the same person who went to sleep the night before.

The notion that we might not be comes up in multiple places, but is largely an extrapolation of the Transporter Paradox, in which continuity is the only known link we have between some things in two states (as per the Ship of Theseus). AI programmers contemplate it when they have to reboot their test subject (which are related to, but not the same as LLMs or Generative AI projects, rather are efforts towards creating AGI). When an AI is rebooted, is it the same entity as it was beforehand? In the webcomic Freefall this is considered by robots, and while a large bloc of robots are not keen on upgrades. Mark Stanley gets deep into the discussion within the comic

CGP Grey noted in his Transporter Paradox video that sleep might be the same as a transporter event since the brain's cerebellum shuts down to a state of unconsciousness in NREM sleep (SWS sleep) and in fact, as old people approach death they experience increasing amounts of NREM sleep until, if they are lucky, they just don't wake up.

exurb1a's video Sleep is just death being shy is a philosophical look at this phenomenon.

So yeah, without any kind of established spiritual phenomenon (for which there is absolute zero evidence -- we've checked at length) the only thing linking who you are when you wake up, and who you were when you went to sleep is the consistency of the material world matching (more or less) the memories of the person waking, which gets weirder when unconsciousness extends longer than a night's rest (such as going unconscious due to anesthetic or a coma state).

Who we are is a very ephemeral state, a quasi-stable event. And we exist longer than a day of consciousness only because we define our narratives that way. And some creators like Phillip K. Dick have notoriously raised challenges to this by offering narratives in which continuity and identity are unreliable.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

As a conscious being I prove my existence by engaging with external stimuli...

...Bots can pass the Turing test, but passing the Turing test doesn’t necessarily guarantee consciousness.

This is part of the problem. We don't have a consistent definition for consciousness anymore than we have a definition for AGI. (AGI can, by reading the instructions, build flat-packed furniture, or make coffee, but would a bot that could do these things be AGI?)

We assume the people we talk to are conscious, but then they could be Turing complete bots, or a Chinese room, or a p-zombie. You've essentially argued that you cannot demonstrate to us that you are actually conscious, only that you seem so convincingly.

Similarly, if I were to argue that I'm not conscious, but an advanced iteration of an AI program practicing speaking from a private lab in Sacramento California, and in fact, have no life beyond going online and pretending to be a person, you'd have no way of establishing this as true or false.

So appealing to consciousness is useless on account that we can't actually say what it is. Again, we don't have any edge cases of anything that is nearly conscious and appears to be, but isn't, or something that is conscious but only barely. We assume that anything we can engage as human is, often leading to peculiar results like Sophia, the Robot-yet-Saudi-citizen that isn't even convincingly sophisticated.

I'd argue that we want to be more than a material chain reaction, to the point that we're frightened of considering the bare minimums that we would need to be to be convincingly ourselves.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Extra awkward since lesbianism was the German vice throughout Europe for a while.

Marie Antoinette was accused of such proclivities. (Without evidence.)

uriel238 , 4 months ago

At this point, I'd assume RTO directives should serve as indication of a toxic work environment the way Facebook account password mandates were and time-theft remedies are. These show upper management doesn't know how to manage (that is regard the workforce in order to maintain high productivity) rather see the staff as their personal service team.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

I suspect it would undo labiaplasty and appendectomies. Ressurection seems to be a fresh install of the corporeal OS. I suspect bodybuilders would be disappointed while those who live with obesity would be pleasantly surpised. Heredary cancer, previously treated might restore itself.

If Resurrection is open source, a branch might detect and accommodate body / identity conflicts and detect and fix hereditary conditions. Talk to your referee and temple high priestess to see which resurrection is right for you, and be sure to file an advance directives document to inform your fellow party members and resurrectionist about your post Resurrection intentions.

uriel238 , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

One of the joys is that top and bottom surgery are necessary only in a world without magic or magic-level tech. Trans folk in worlds with resurrection spells don't get surgery, they drink a potion or wear a girdle, and get a really rather complete transformation, including the capacity to bear / sire children.

Will resurrection reverse a magical sex-change transformation? Depends on how the spell works out how to restore you, and if the sex change is material or a magical construct, like an illusion.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

As per Das Kapital the owning class will always seek to influence / capture the government to serve them and not the public. Hence capitalist society always moves towards autocracy and away from serving the public.

The problem is, getting it back is always long and bloody. Since the owning class can hire armies and enforcers to assert their will, they confront a moral hazard and resorting to violence is very easy for them. They turn to strikebusting because they have no principle other than that which increases their own personal gain.

We don't know how to get there from here. We dont know how to do a communist revolution, since civil war tends to result in a string of autocracies. But the ownership class trembles at even the notion we are thinking about it.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

1930s US is apt and also not pretty.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

So the Spectre of Stockton Rush is getting around.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Nick Hanauer seems to talk the talk. He's been on the lecture circuit for over a decade suggesting billionaires need to run their companies ethicaly or risk losing it all to class warfare. It's a message that falls on deaf ears, and I don't know if he practiced those ethics while building his initial fortune.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Capitalism can't stay well regulated according to Das Kapital and we're seeing a lot of examples of regulatory capture and late-stage capitalism.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Lex Luthor stole forty cakes.

That's as many as four tens.

And that's terrible.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Hitler's Buzz Saw.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Obviously, DARPA needs to develop a pathogen that is deflected by wearing cat ears.

It's about as plausible as the gay bomb (yes, that was a thing) but they gotta try.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

12 looks just like you.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

I'm pretty sure the cultures / ideologies that dislike guys getting dick also dislike women getting dick outside a state- or ministry-sanctioned license. The only dick-getting they regard as good is the dick they're getting, themselves.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Yes! Yes! She is winning!

(I assume. If she's going for butch she needs practice.)

uriel238 , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

I can count my lucky stars my income level never dipped below the rice-and-beans povery level, but it has dipped below cereal made by Kellogs and General Mills. They're a false product like Nestlē baby formula as sold in Africa. They are expensive by the ounce and poor nutrition.

But if you are that dirt poor and have a 60 hour job then you may not have the time or energy to make rice. You're also stuck in bonded servitude. That is a profound level of fucked.

Pilnick is celebrating selling desperation food at inflated prices to slaves.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

The second ending is informed by the increase of situational sexuality in the armed forces.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

salmonella on the surface, even on the penis shoul be low risk. If you're causing lesions with vigorous pounding, that can cause an infection.

The four factors for transmission of infectious disease are: pathogen, vector, quantity and opportunity. The sooner you wash up with common body soap, the lower the risk.

uriel238 , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

You vote for Democrats to keep the Republicans from turning the US into an ideological autocracy and stepping up the genocide schedule.

Changing the state of the nation for the better requires activism at different fronts.

We're at the Secret Hitler endgame, and the fascists are winning.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Biden is not Trump, but he's also not our friend. Even if the Democrats keep the GOP and Project 2025 at bay, there is still cause for mischief.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Oh yes. By far.

Voting for public offices has become an absolute must: A vote for any GOP candidate is a vote in favor of one-party autocracy and the end of democratic (lower case) features in the US. A vote against the GOP candidate (by voting for the next popular guy, typically the Democrat -- uppercase) is a vote to slow down US progress towards this one-party autocracy.

No matter who you are, you're not going to like one-party autocracy. Here in the states, we established that when we chased off the Brits and established out own constitution. We can also point to countless other examples in which it's shit. (Iran is providing lots of current instances).

Yes, we want progressive policies. Heck, I want massive reform and in some cases radical abolition of current establishment systems. We're not going to get those just by voting. Nor are we going to get them simply with violent revolution. We have to actually try again and develop new systems, and then get them ratified by everyone, and all that time autocratic power is going to be tempting whoever has military power.

(The French Revolution, for example, started in 1789, but had to be reconsidered and revisited for nearly a century, with the occasional decade of uneventful constitutional monarchy before the regents started rolling back civil rights, and the guillotines were rolled out yet again. The third republic was established in 1870, and France became secular -- established freedom of religion -- in 1905. Revolution is long and bloody.)

Support your local mutual aid organizations. Help out when you can. If the federal government shuts down, check in on federal employees and help out as you can if they get in a jam. Don't cross picket lines, and check in with striking laborers. All this helps the resistance last longer than the autocratic movements until they ouroboros themselves through their own internal corruption.

That's where we are in the States.

uriel238 , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

The reverse happened. But I'm GenX so that might be normal?

I was given the full American Exceptionalism battery of civics propaganda in my public schooling, and I believed it all even more than my peers. It might be a neurodivergent thing, being credulous and actually believing what my teachers taught me.

I also took economics 1A and 1B in my early college career, which was all capitalism centric. (They talked about command economics, usually as a counter example, highlighting the problems it has.)

I was kind of an asshole, but I was young.

Then SCOTUS gave Bush the presidency, and that was weird. He was creepy even before 9/11 but then that happened and, well, all the conservatives went full evil. When my dad was telling me that yes, Donald Rumsfeld is right that waterboarding is not really torture (Narrator: Waterboarding is, in fact, commonly classified as torture by the scholarly consensus) and that extrajudicially detaining and torturing people because they're Arab and Muslim is entirely acceptable, I had a reckoning and an internal identity crisis. I knew that torture was what Darth Vader did to Leia to show that the Galactic Empire was evil through and through, and Vader didn't flinch at the grisly tasks.

In the next decade civil rights, including ones established in the Constitution of the United States, started getting massive carve-outs. The bill of rights didn't apply whenever national security was invoked. FBI was sending NSLs left and right telling people they're now FBI informants, yet were obligated to keep that secret on threat of being disappeared. (NSLs are still a thing, BTW.)

Officials were openly engaging in war profiteering. Halliburton was getting fantastically rich. Also Texas, by way of Enron was fleecing California. The rolling blackouts were featured in Monsters Inc. ...as was the scream extractor, possibly the best representation of late-stage capitalism at its most extreme.

We talked a lot of enhanced interrogation and extraordinary rendition and black sites. Signs of the surveillance state started manifesting even before Edward Snowden dumped a ton of data to news agencies.

Obama got elected. There was tons of talk about Hope and Change. Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize just for not being George W. Bush. Neither hope nor change were forthcoming. In fact, the Subprime Mortgage Crisis starting in 2007 resulted in some massive bailouts (about $1 Trillion) to some really big companies. If your company collapses, I had learned according to Capitalism 101, it means your business model is bad and it deserves to collapse, so this bailout didn't make sense from the ideological perspective. A lot of other people noticed it and formed OWS and protested until New York City turned off all its cameras and sent the police in to anti-riot them.

Then in 2014, Michael Brown was shot in dubious circumstances, triggering the Ferguson unrest. Police uniforms lined up pointing their assault rifles like they were at a firing squad, what I remember was poor weapon discipline, and the sort of thing Red Goons from the Soviet Union did in movies starring Clint Eastwood or Chuck Norris. Troops and troops of police officers pointing their guns like they're ready to start shooting into the crowd. Then when the policing hour happened at night, they gathered up in their MRAP and started tearing up the streets (literally) firing their tear-gas grenade launcher willy-nilly, just gassing the whole neighborhood for no peacekeeping purpose. It was terrifying.

I learned in the 1970s a congressional order required FBI to catalog all officer-involved homicides and report annually to the BJS. They hadn't. Only civilian volunteer groups had been tracking killings and brutality by law enforcement. Several news agencies started after Ferguson. One of the beats on Techdirt already was about police being stupid or drawing their guns early, or SWATTING the wrong house and rendering it unlivable. Oh yeah, social engineers discovered they could get a house raided by police with big guns anytime they wanted to, and it became an occasional tactic in COD PvP.

In 2015, I was long read about the faults of capitalism, the failures of government, the rise of regulatory capture, the police state, the surveillance state and rising wealth disparity (which was a big deal in my college Macroeconomics class -- this is how you get your civilization to collapse to social unrest). I'd also taken a deep dive into moral philosophy so I understood why torture is generally frowned upon, and I didn't have to take my cues from George Lucas.

From there, I was a few breadtube videos away from going totally Pinko Commie, but I less adhere to any given ideology so much as specific ideals (e.g. Everyone gets fed. )

Strangely, a Bolshevik chorus follows me around everywhere I go.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Yeah, it's super evident when the RIAA and MPAA sent ICE to New Zealand to raid the Kim Dotcom estate on grounds of media piracy. They actually used other ambiguous charges like conspiracy and espionage which are what the US legal system uses when they don't like what you're doing but don't have a specific crime against it. It's been over a decade and its still in court.

ICE also was raiding Florida repair shops for servicing Apple products without an Apple license, one of the events that drove the current right-to-repair movement.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Duke Cannon sells Naval Supremacy, which might be F4 Tomcat soap.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Bay Rum is a pretty universal go-to when looking for default masculine smells, a mix of actual rum and the bay tree in the west indies. Nowadays it's artificially produced so YMMV.

Modern flavor science mixes leather, woods, salt, industrial tones, oil, plants and liquor for masculine products to mixed effect. (again YMMV) My wife actually prefers some for men products since she finds sweet fruit and flower scents overbearing.

Sadly Mrs. Meyers only makes Iowa Pine in cleaning products and then in limited runs during winter holiday season. Their flavorists really nailed it. Duke Cannon's Illegally Cut Pine is a passable alternative.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

If you buy it, expect advertisements for baby products in your spam.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Here in California, its normal for guys to get hygiene products for wives, partners, sisters, etc. Though in the cities no one cares who wears what either.

I'd assume in other states it's normal for guys to do the household shopping. Maybe not in Texas or Florida.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

My thought is, um, yeah? That's why we let them merge.

The freaky thing is drivers who criticize other drivers as if they can hear, or the other car AI can and cares.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Rabbit tracks!

Train tracks!

uriel238 , 4 months ago

I assume the jet thing is just an excuse because Taylor Swift is the target du jour of the MAGA movement. They don't care about the jet use of anyone else but are actively making up shit about Swift.

This isn't about principles. It's just about othering.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

They were able to fuck up the web partially with SESTA/FOSTA.

Of course they're going to keep doing it. The internet is too much of a threat to the plutocracy by leaking when they do evil shit for their ill gotten gains.

They want to make the internet nothing but Amazon and Hulu.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Recently they've been playing Cult of the Lamb. But I don't know what they actually spent it on.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Well, to be fair, I don't have a peer reviewed report. It's one of those things confirmed by a run of anecdotes, much like the phenomenon of miscarrying mothers blaming the Hell out of themselves, even when there's clearly no rational reason they could be at personal fault.

Informed by anecdotes, it makes sense. Someone dying from a medical issue or an accident is a lot more happenstance, where a suicide is also a statement, even when it's not accompanied by a suicide message. More so in that it happens in different regions and among different demographics, sometimes by a wide margin. It implies nurture (contrast nature, like genetics) is a huge factor, and people off themselves when society treats them like shit.

So yes, there appears to be a lot more introspection. A suicide involves more and wider grief than falling off a ladder or having a stroke, more of the time. Or at least it seems so when you research incidents of suicides. Since we don't budget harm research and disease control as much as we used to, we have to guess more and rely on less data.