Yeah, Trump himself has no policy commitments. He’ll say whatever he thinks is popular biased on the last thing he’s seen on television. In office, he delivers bog-standard republican policy because that’s who his cabinet gets filled with.

I don’t see Biden changing his stance on arming Israel. Trump could, but the question is whether would it last long enough to actually affect policy.

Season 5, Episode 13 For The Uniform

He does this to a Maquis settlement after they had similarly poisoned two Cardassian planets.

the special effects are really impressive, it’s worth checking out

Pretty much. Secular education tends to begin with Columbus sailing across the Atlantic and seldom ventures north or south of our boarders – let alone touch on the rest of the planet until World War 2, after which a lot of curriculums just end. Elective courses are better… which is why nearly every year at least one of the states try to ban them.

Most of our protestant schooling likes to make special note of the fact that people fled here to escape religious persecution, that this or that sect wouldn’t be possible without American Freedoms™. Hell, Mormon scripture straight up says the US is a promised holy land.

We’ve never built nuclear. We not only need a reactor, buy need to buy all the relevant skills and build all the supports to create an industry.

Oh, that does change the calculation quite a bit. I wonder if this push has more to do with those submarines than any energy considerations.

excited to see how the thorium rock-salt reactors progress

It’s a long-term investment. Once it’s built, nuclear outright breaks the pricing scheme on fossil fuel energy. Surely the prudent thing is to have both it and renewables? To have one to shore up the other?

You are looking for a Great Man of history to pin this on. You’d rather believe someone nefarious is in charge and pulling the strings from an ocean away, than to see this for what it is; an empire with no real conscious oversight. A pile of self-interested businessmen, politicians, and militarists doing whatever they can to line their pockets, profits above all else.

The US has, per capita, the largest prison population and, outright, the biggest military on the planet. If there’s a road to ‘unfreedom’, we traveled down it a long time ago.

This is somewhat confusing. He’s against nuclear power, a thing that would offset a considerable amount of carbon emissions… because building a plant is a lengthy process? It’s not as if you can’t also install solar panels in the mean time

You’d rather believe Trump is result of foreign interference, that our own institutions would never result in this without being sullied from outside. It’s fan fic, it’s Cold War nonsense.

Trump is the consequence of our political systems, of our spiteful culture, of our economics that promises success and leaves people sick, broken, and in debt. So what if the Russians had a few hundred Facebook posts? That “seed” would not have taken if the soil weren’t already fertile. Frankly, I don’t think it made a difference. We were barrelling toward Trump with or without the oh so spooky slavs typing on a keyboard.

On the one hand, you can read it as a parody of late 20th century life - like, haha imagine a caveman clocking into work

but on the other hand, Flinstones and its far future counterpart Jestsons kinda suggest an inability to imagine anything different. Automobile-ized suburban development frequently gets presented an the human ‘default’. As though we just default to this, rather than it being one of many ways cities and society could be organized.

Living, growing, changing cells are pretty damn dissimilar to static circuitry. Neural networks are based on an oversimplified model of neuron cells. The model ignores the fact neurons are constantly growing, shifting, and breaking connections with one another, and flat out does not consider structures and interactions within the cells.

Metaphysics is not required to make the observation that computer programmes are magnitudes less complex than a brain.

I like to think by the time Kirk gets the enterprise, all those spacious crew quarters we see in Strange New Worlds have been eaten up by retrofits and upgrades.

The trouble with phrases like ‘neural structures’ and ‘language parsing’ is that these descriptions still play into the “AI” narrative that’s been used to oversell large language models.

Fundamentally, these are statistical weights randomly wired up to other statistical weights, tested and pruned against a huge database. That isn’t language parsing, it’s still just brute-force calculation. The understanding comes from us, from people assigning linguistic meaning to patterns in binary.

You might as well refer to the Kardashian as a crime family. Donald Trump represents the fusion of reality television and spectator politics – of course sycophants show up, how else are they supposed to get air time?

Isn’t “the state” just cultural mechanisms extended beyond familial or interpersonal ties? There’s a threshold where the group becomes too numerous for a member to form social ties with all other members. At that stage, culture becomes a force unto itself, propagating further than the members that comprise it. That point, more than money, seems to be where exploitative behavior becomes more likely to take hold.

Like, feudal aristocracies were plenty exploitative, plenty domineering. But they didn’t necessarily need money for it; a lot of them operated on barter economies. They just needed a knife-point and a cultural belief to justify the domination. Money is just an innovation on a much older process.

You’re getting surveillance regardless of walkablity. Amazon is happy enough to hand Ring camera footage over to authorities no questions asked.

You worship the stock market and private property like a golden calf.

Hamas agreed to a ceasefire that would have released the remaining hostages. Israel turned it down.

Ah, I see, you just meant that other species don’t share our capacity for learning and adapting. Although, why do you continue to describe exploitative behavior as an instinct if you agree that it is a learned trait?

neuroplasticity is limited to what our genetics will allow

sorry, what do you mean by this? Surely the benefit of a learning and growing brain is that it can respond and adapt to situations faster than germ-line genetics ever could. Why would there be a genetic limiter, what purpose would that serve?