I’d have guessed Zooble because of the whole changeable body parts thing…

Thanks, just watched the pilot and it looks really good. Which character did people think was trans and why?

Okay, this comment thread has convinced me that almost noone here actually reads anything but the headline. I think I’m gonna resign from Lemmy too… Is there somewhere online where intelligent adults have conversations?

Billing and Sherman have some pretty robust statistical controls to address these kinds of alternatives. Worth reading the paper.

Fully spoiled food is inedible, but there’s a long window of pathogen growth before that point, which can be lengthened further by spices. Why would some meat not be consumed immediately? Because life is messy, people make mistakes, and animals are large.

Yes. But if surveyed at a random time, including now, I’d be most likely to be classified as NEET.

Then why does people’s preference for spicy food correlate to local food pathogen prevalence?

See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9586227/

To elaborate a little further. “Just not eating” something is a modern luxury. For most of our history, you ate everything that was available or (someone, usually your youngest kids first) starved. The argument isn’t that spices cover the taste of rotten food, but that they actually kill the pathogens that make humans sick, making more food edible for longer. This is a spill over from these plants’ long evolutionary arms race with phytotoxins. Cultures in places with high food pathogen prevalence, where spicing makes a real difference to survival, develop a preference for spicy food, despite their initially aversive taste. Cultures in cold climates with few food pathogens don’t.

I do high skill work that pays a lot. I could do a lot of it and have a lot of money, or do a little and live modestly and not work much. I chose option two.

Oh, also, no kids. Also, live somewhere where labor demand is high but supply low.

Just curious, and I’ll admit it’s too my discredit that I’m even engaging, but why are you behaving this way?

What?

Government funded and administered health care systems being a form of risk pooling and insurance are not controversial ideas. These are standard definitions.

I’m not sure where you’re getting these ideas. Why would taxpayer paid services not be a form of risk pooling? There are hundreds of countries around the world with government run health systems, or government funded and privately run systems, or private-public partnerships in various forms. Pooling taxpayer money to fund health care for those individuals unlucky enough to need it absolutely does make it insurance.

I recommend reading the Wikipedia pages on “universal health care” and “health insurance” if you’d like to start learning about these topics.

I’m an academic statistician who discusses risk and related concepts with experts every day…

I mean, I agree with the first part fully, but I think what you mean is that we shouldn’t have for-profit corporate run insurance.

Any socialised health care is a form of insurance—a way for us to pool the risk of large bad events, so that everyone (or a lot of people) pays a little so that a few people aren’t totally destroyed by the catastrophe. The alternative to having insurance is that we let people die when rare but really bad things happen. We absolutely should have insurance, but we should all share the cost equally, or the rich should pay more, rather than a few people massively profiting from running the enterprise.

But, however we run it, we’ll need to treat dental differently from medical because of what I said in my first comment

This makes perfect sense from the supply side. Very few (younger) people need expensive medical care, so we can pool the risk. Almost everyone needs some, regular dental care, so it’s more like a savings account than insurance. I’m not claiming that the insurance systems in any given country aren’t exploitative, just that medical and dental insurance should be different.

How fast can this ship go? Depending on how far in time you go, you’ll need to spend a long time traveling through space to get to where Earth was…

The Earth is traveling along an elliptical orbit around the sun, the sun is orbiting the Milky Way, the Milky Way is traveling along a curved trajectory. Why, if you kept your momentum, would you end up on Earth?

Lol.

I actually agree with most of your statement, except for “DIRECT”. That’s not part of my claim, and it shouldn’t be a goal of yours.

The terrain has been rigged so that all the direct, the locally advantageous, locally practical solutions lead back to the same toxic equilibrium. We are stuck in a historical basin of attraction and need to escape it.

The only long-term stable/viable solution, the only solution that honours our responsibility to future generations, is to avoid the immediate direct solutions, the ones that the manipulated incentive structures are set up to anticipate, and to do what you described. I’m not claiming it’s easy, or likely to happen, merely that it’s our only chance to save our species from itself.

Counterargument: it makes sense to support whatever system would create the best life for everyone, rather than just creating good experiences for you while others are forced to struggle and suffer, because you aren’t a selfish arsehole.

Another version: it makes sense to support whatever system creates the most good for everyone AND is most stable, because the countless future generations matter far more than you.

Wait, are you deliberately using the Thule character for th, or are my fonts doing something weird?

The scale at which we exert political control has been increasing consistently for, approximately, the last 10k years. The rate has been accelerating too. There’s no reason to believe that the current hodge podge of 300 or so regional factions (nations) is the natural or final solution, and every reason to expect that political/economic power will escalate to the global level, and soon.

We should be focused on ensuring that transition is peaceful and collaborative, that the solution we converge on is fair and sustainable. We should especially be concerned with preventing that transition from being a dominance play by the players currently holding the greatest defacto power (i.e., economic, transnational corporations, and military, the USA).

One major impediment to this is the idea that all we—the ordinary people all over the world—can do is fight amongst each other at a national level about relatively trivial social issues (i.e., by voting for the marginally less bad alternative in our national elections). We can, and should, organise and strive for a democratic, fair, well-designed global political system that keeps economic power in check.

Other major impediments are the lies that a) the only alternative to the current system is totalitarian communism, or other 19th century political models, and b) that we—you and I—need to have a perfect solution in hand already. We can demand, via our respective nations, that the world’s best minds come together and design the best system possible, and that was transition to that system peacefully and rationally.

The trouble is, the world isn’t neatly divided into oppressors and victims. Each human has many, many identities and factional affiliations—mother, Christian, Mongolian, nerd, working class, jogger, AI avoider, manager, voter for whichever party, drug non-user, scientist, tribe member, entrepreneur, posh, conspiracy-recogniser, ethical shopper, activist, Perth resident, woman, etc, etc, etc.

What determines which of those identities is salient at any given time? Which of the lines that cross cut our societies defines who will fight whom when violence becomes the norm? Those are hard questions.

The kind of violence you’re advocating for—populist violence, mob violence—isn’t a targeted, controlled force that you can unleash on a specific target. It’s a breakdown of the social contract, of the sense of safety and trust that keeps people following the co-operative rules of civil society. Before unleashing it, you want to be confident that the lines people will divide along when their lives, their families, their future are at risk are actually rich-vs-poor.

That does not seem likely today. Reasons:

• historically, the lines along which our species have divided for violent factionalism have been ethnicity and geography. These are the natural attractors. Convincing the masses to see themselves differently (i.e., the people who look/speak/think differently to me are my friends, the people similar to me but richer are my enemies) when the shit hits the fan takes serious effort and preparation.

• the information networks that shape how people identify themselves are controlled by the rich, they are actively working to prevent this.

• people today, in my experience, seem to most strongly identify with left-vs-right political affiliation (possibly due to that network manipulation). If anything, this is the fight they’re itching to have: to defeat the other poor people for their different opinions about transsexuality, etc.

The seven richest people in the world all own media networks. They know that violent societal breakdown is a possibility and are much better prepared to channel that chaos to their advantage than you are.

This doesn’t mean that you should give up. But advocating for violence at this point is inviting disaster. That violence will hurt you, not them.

That would be nice 🙂

Yes, this we agree on. It’s likely impossible and we’re running out of time. But that doesn’t mean that violence is an effective solution. It will just accelerate the decline into factionalism, a state in which the wealthy will be even more advantaged.