magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1d ago
No one who says "[x] do/don't care about [y]" mean that "literally every individual within the group [x] do/don't care about [y]." This is common sense and shouldn't need to be explicitly stated in a discussion like this.
Especially on the Internet, "common sense" isn't so common that relying on it to avoid conflict is wise.
I will quote the literal text of the rules here:
Sometimes this means that you'll feel very silly by adding a bunch of qualifiers (popular ones include "I think", "I believe", and "in my experience") and couching everything in unnecessarily elaborate language. That's OK! Remember, the goal is for people with differing opinions to discuss things; if padding a statement with words helps someone not take it personally, then that's what you should do!
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Edit: an additional and critical counterargument; gay people are not the only people who can contract AIDS and HIV.
They aren't, but because it spreads far more easily from penetrator to penetratee (making women largely dead ends) the most-at-risk population is "people who get fucked by men who got fucked by other men" (i.e. gay/bi men and women who fuck bi men). "GRID" is pointing at something real even if it somewhat overgeneralises.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
Should one, given the tension with the other apparent failure mode being like "courts fine megacorp the statutory maximum of $1m for illegal practice that earns them >$1m per interval between successful court cases in profit"?
The general solution is contempt of court - i.e. the first time you do it, you get "illegal practice, $1m and you're ordered not to do this again", and if you do it a second time, you get "contempt of court, penalty is whatever the hell we want". Contempt of court has very few hard limits because the whole point is to patch this loophole by allowing unlimited escalation in case of defiance; I know the statutory maximum in the USA for individuals is life imprisonment, and for corps it's probably something equally dire.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
But can you explain why accepting 4 million Chinese immigrants next year would be a problem, but at the same time "Asian immigrants to America have done wonderfully, and there should not be any meaningful effort to stop them from coming here".
I'm going to take a different tack than @Hoffmeister25, and say "modern Mainland Chinese are a considerably-bigger threat than other East Asians and to some extent even legacy Chinese". Specifically, the PRC actually does maintain a degree of control over its diaspora, particularly those educated there (its internal propaganda is far more effective than its external) and those with hostages close family members there, which poses an obvious NatSec risk in the not-so-unlikely event of crisis; "don't import a large, organised enemy force" is like Rule 1 of immigration policy.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
So Linux Mint runs on most normal hardware (Intel/nVidia/normal SSDs/screens)?
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
You and @FirmWeird do make a solid point. I would note that the dissent against TQ and blank-slate is substantially larger and higher-brow than UFOlogy despite the efforts to stamp it out, but this is a weaker argument than the one I made. Mea culpa.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
· Edited 10d ago
Okay, I'll try to provide an intuition pump. It's somewhat biologically implausible, and exaggerated, but it might help you understand why people find your reaction bizarre.
There's this big family. They don't exactly look like other people; their mouths are a bit big and they're unusually hairy. There are ugly rumours going around that they're all really low in IQ and have a habit of biting people, but you figure it's probably just prejudice based on their looks.
Then, breaking news: back in 1930 a mad scientist a century ahead of his time experimented on the family's patriarch without his consent and spliced his DNA with wolf genes.
Does this make you believe the rumours are more likely or less likely to be true? And, separate from the question of whether you value liberty over eugenics, do you think that spreading those wolf genes across all of humanity is good or bad?
(I mean, I suppose that given the entire paranormal romance genre I have to admit that a significant chunk of the population finds dangerous half-human hybrids "cool", but still.)
Aside from that, "So Africans are even cooler than I thought?" likely came across as a bit sassy under the circumstances.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
· Edited 10d ago
So I'm boycotting Microsoft, due to user-hostility in the newer versions of Windows, and due to bankrolling the apocalypse OpenAI. The former reason means I'm basically looking at Linux. Recommendations for a noob-friendly distro and "Linux noob manual"? Particular needs include ability to run Wine well and high stability (i.e. few OS crashes), although those sound pretty basic. Low power use would also be nice, although my needs in that regard are quite modest (like, if the OS's hogging over 10% of a current-gen processor, that's bad).
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
West Africans (and other Sub-Saharan Africans) have an estimated 2%-19% of their genome derived from an archaic hominin ghost population.
Really? Could you provide me with some further reading?
Neanderthals or Denisovans (both of whom have introgressed into modern humans, especially Eurasians)
IIRC, Denisovan admixture is only significant among Austronesians, though East Asians have a tiny amount.
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
Point of order: a 10g bullet at 99.99999% c would impact with the power of 480 megatons. I wouldn't want to be at ground zero, but the Earth and even humanity would trundle along just fine.
There are more-ridiculously-overpowered weapons humanity has thought of, though, even discounting "add more nines". The Nicoll-Dyson beam is basically something any civilisation with a Dyson Swarm can just do - specifically, use half the satellites' power beams as a phased-array laser, for a galactic-range beam that burns the atmosphere and oceans off a planet within an hour. There's always the black hole gun; drop a black hole into a star and it goes nova (wiping out everything in the system; space habitats won't save you here). And, of course, there's always the option of actually sending forces (directly or via something analogous to a Commander from Total Annihilation).
Short answer is that actual alien attack in the reasonably-near future is basically a "you die, no save".
Of course, this is not to say that space colonisation is a bad deal from an X-risk perspective! There are lots of risks that becoming multiplanetary removes. Grey goo, ice-nine, terrorist geoengineering, most bioweapons (the exception being intelligent ones), and so on. And, of course, in the limit if we don't leave Earth at some point in the next billion years we all die when the oceans boil. Alien attack is just not one of them.
The one thing I would say is that I'd prefer we colonised, um, almost literally anywhere in the Solar System that isn't Mars. Mars is one of the few places we can check lithopanspermia as a theory, and it's also kind of a shitty choice in general (it's got an atmosphere, but not enough of an atmosphere to block radiation well enough or survive without pressure suits/domes, and the relatively-high gravity prevents easy deep excavation to block radiation that way or easy return to Earth due to the gravity well). Deep cities on asteroids (or even Luna!) and cloud cities on Venus are better ideas; Mars just doesn't have much to recommend it and the Mars-like places in the system to check for lithopanspermia are very few so destroying one just for the meme value seems crazy.
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
Not actually sure with that one; did the Nazis not know that radio waves bounce off things? I'm pretty sure they knew they could be transmitted and received.
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
Atomic weapons are specifically the case I was thinking of where this wasn't true; the basic science of the neutron-induced-fission chain reaction was known to all parties in WWII (hence the Uranverein). The Manhattan Project was an engineering project to build a working device.
I don't know as much about the history of radar stealth.
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
Can you point to some in the last century? It's gotten harder over time, after all.
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
· Edited 12d ago
Oh, sure, there are ways and means to thrust. Like I said at the start, I'd totally believe pulse detonation and nuclear-thermal jets (for the latter, basically take a jet engine - turboprop, turbofan, turbojet, ramjet - and replace the combustion chamber heating the air with a small air-cooled nuclear reactor; now you have a jet that doesn't need refueling for months). They built one of the latter in the Cold War (Project Pluto).
Ion thrusters and magsails should be physically plausible, too, although I'd assign lower probability simply because TTBOMK they've got inferior performance to more-conventional propulsion (in atmosphere, at least; space is a whole different kettle of fish).
The reason "sphere" makes me think "balloon" is because balloons are one of the few cases where spherical shape makes sense, although I suppose if you wanted to troll people you might choose a suboptimal shape to confuse.
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
Sure, but in a lot of cases this leads to "random scientists not part of the conspiracy could find it". Again, many of the facilities that are built aren't in the USA. And if your conspiracy includes all high-quality scientists everywhere (e.g. the Science Adventure series of VNs), your conspiracy is isomorphic to the Illuminati.
Secret engineering projects are substantially easier to conceal than secret basic science, due to basic science being universal and thus independently discoverable.
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
You don't just need to sequester the physicists; you need to sequester their equipment, too. Notice the sheer scale of facilities used for fundamental physics work these days; you're not hiding a 500-kilometre synchrotron. And a lot of the facilities that are built aren't even in the USA.
The necessary co-ordination to keep this straight quickly approaches Illuminati-complete.
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
I'd be surprised if the US government was mining antimatter in the Van Allen belts and storing it in Area 51, but not if they had stumbled on a room-temp superconductor. Maybe I'm out of touch?
These are both fairly plausible. We're not that far from a room-temperature superconductor; there are materials currently thought to do it under diamond-anvil-cell pressure, and then it's just a matter of engineering to build something that can sustain that pressure while letting current in (i.e. fabricating large diamonds enclosing the stuff while doping part of it enough to conduct). And that's worst-case; there might be something better. As for antimatter, I'm not sure you can get high enough with balloons, but military orbital launches aren't that rare.
I'd be somewhat surprised by either, but there's no obvious reason either'd be a Can't Happen.
Presumably you could just thrust against the magnetic field at an angle, yeah?
Nope. Meissner effect always pushes from stronger field to weaker field, and at any point on the Earth's surface that direction is fixed. Ferromagnets pull in the opposite direction.
As I noted, tacking is a thing; you can sail in (almost) any direction despite the fixed wind direction at any given time, because you can use a boat's keel to prevent movement in one direction (sideways) while allowing it in another (forward/back). But a sphere specifically can't do this, because it's symmetrical; it offers the same drag in all directions. Also, now that I think of it, the ability to tack into the wind is also reliant on being able to angle the sails, and I don't think you could do that here.
And when you see "balloon holding still in 120 knot winds" what do you think?
Tether(s). Or engine(s), I suppose, although technically that would make it an airship and not a balloon. Again, though, you really want ground-crew observations to rule out optical illusions regarding movement (even then there are still some possible ones).
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
It seems clear at this point that there is some phenomenon that the UAP people are observing and documenting, be it the nj drones, tic tac, gofast/gimble, pilots, whistleblowers, or any of the other stories we’ve heard for quite a while now. Government developed weapons or surveillance platforms seem like a fairly reasonable assumption here.
Oh yes, obviously. My personal assumption is "Chinese balloon drones intended to gather intelligence". I'm only sceptical of the "and therefore it's aliens or Clarketech!" explanation.
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
I mean, actual negative mass might be physical. But the basic research needed just isn't there, and it would seem pretty hard to hide a facility better-equipped for fundamental physics experiments than the civilian ones.
The first link seems very dubious in a lot of ways. You can't just strengthen the Earth's magnetic field - at least, not without an attractive force that cancels out the repulsion from the Meissner effect. I also don't see a way that this could be used to thrust a sphere in arbitrary directions; tacking is a thing (although not as much of a thing as in water), but a sphere has no keel to tack with. When I see "spherical craft" I think "balloon", and when I see "balloon moving very fast as seen by something moving very fast" I think "you misjudged its distance from you".
NB: I say that antimatter production wouldn't be impossible to hide because a purpose-built antimatter-making accelerator (which would be far more efficient than current accelerators) wouldn't actually need to be all that big, and because the van Allen belts have antimatter in them which could possibly be tapped without being world news.
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
The drones spotted over NJ in December were Chinese kit equipped with gravitic propulsion systems.
No. Pulse detonation I'd believe. Nuclear I'd believe. Antimatter I'd be dubious about, but the stuff you'd need to fuel it isn't impossible to hide. Gravitic, no. Not even if you count "total conversion via black hole" as "gravitic"; an accelerator big enough to make one of those is too big to hide, and if they'd been in use for decades one of them would have gone boom (with a force greater than every nuclear weapon on Earth put together).
Tech like this would be extremely dangerous for obvious reasons. Reasons that would explain the secrecy.
I'm sorry, if you're talking about straight-up antigravity, they're not obvious to me.
If gravity has been cracked, it potentially means that other wild stuff like zero point energy is also on the table.
I'm sorry, but somebody's been filling your head with nonsense.
Zero-point energy is not a type of energy. It's just any energy that can't be extracted, and thus is part of the effective "zero point" of your scale. "Extracting zero-point energy" literally means "extracting energy that can't be extracted", which is by definition impossible - either you can extract it or you can't.
Any time somebody talks about "zero-point energy" as a power source, that's an immediate "this guy has been suckered by pseudoscience".
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
'I totally would enlist but medical deferral'
You reminded me to check whether the Reserve would, in fact, take me (I'm guessing the answer is "no", but...).
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
Well, why don't you do something about it? Oh, you're posting on Twitter. Am I supposed to believe that out in the real world you're doing manly violent things and preparing for The Day? I don't.
I don't know KR all that well; could you elaborate on why you are so confident?
magic9mushroom
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15d ago
The problem is that this depends on reliably appointing someone trustworthy and competent to a position of extreme power, at which point you could just use that mechanism to appoint officials.
What you mention is a weakness of the movement, but the biggest reason I can see for why it's in retreat is the boring "Elon Musk spent $100,000,000,000 to damage it, and actually managed to hit something important".
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