domain:city-journal.org
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Texas is freedom land
3m ago
How is this CW?
I guess I should be glad that the final frontier isn’t also, somehow, a referendum on Donald Trump. That impulse is at war with the one that tells me this is dumber than a sack of primitive, ferrous construction equipment.
In unrelated news, have you read The Dark Forest? Not for the apocalyptica. For the galaxy-brained strategy, agreed upon by the best and brightest of all humanity, of giving global power to one shmuck. Truly, something that could never have been created in the Western canon.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4m ago
I don't think Indian soldiers count as "human capital" exactly, and either way we are already at the point in the tech tree where meat soldiers are starting to get obsoleted by drones. As for the other two examples, the Archimedes one seems like a fairy tale, and the Bible "record" does not seem particularly compelling either given that it was written by Israelites as part of a larger book singing the praises of their own wise men, so they would have all the motivation to make up a story to make them look good. Compare the wall of modern fiction where audience/author avatars get abducted by foreign cultures and placed in in improbably influential roles (like the waste heap of isekai manga), or older ones such as Marco Polo's fanciful claim about being made a government official by Kublai Khan's court.
Sloot
6m ago
Impossible; your internalized speciesism is just showing. With their empathy and higher education levels, aliens would beyond such bigotry and would understand that—if not for socioeconomic factors and institutional speciesism—humans would be just as capable as they are.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9m ago
Considering that @hydroacetylene explicitly said, quote, "Earth still produces plenty of geniuses, and indeed plenty of not-genius tier but highly capable engineers, technicians, etc.", I assume that at least he specifically meant creative intellectual ability when talking about "human capital". Whether aliens would be interested in us as slaves for their menial labour is a different question, but that would certainly require certain additional circumstances (such as them having the technology to build us habitats in which we can be employed to do work they need, but not to just automate the same work or terraform our planet for themselves).
Gaashk
14m ago
Sure. That's in the drunk college student, but way way faster realm. Nice to have, provides consumer surplus at free tier or $20/month, but probably not $200/month.
Shrike
15m ago
Often for the kinds of physics described for UAP phenomena the things that would have to be wrong are not, like, the nuances of quantum field theory. It is shit like "conservation of energy was wrong."
Obviously it would depend on the very specific incident in question but a lot of times the claims "requiring" extreme energy fluctuations come from data like radar returns that don't give any insight into the mass of the object being observed or even if it is a material object. A lot of claims about UAP are assumptions stacked on assumptions stacked on assumptions in a trench coat. These trench coats are often based on a core observation that, while very interesting, doesn't prove much if anything about "the laws of physics" and our understanding or lack thereof even if the observation itself is 100% accurate as reported.
(This is without getting into the fact that a lot of weird stuff like warp drives and propellantless space travel are theoretically good physics.)
Quantumfreakonomics
16m ago
Good god it’s a slow news cycle. We’re actually speculating on whether or not a nearby comet is aliens.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19m ago
...Have you never heard of Slavery? The Triangle Trade?
Human capital != creative intellectual ability
If the sentient insectoids could do warehouse work, there would be millions of them in the inland empire in a few years. That goes double for Victorians or Saudis.
Gaashk
25m ago
Word processors already look for typos that are actual words, but don't make sense in the current context, without applying AI. More and better autocorrect is about in line with the original thesis -- they're good at spreadsheet scale tasks, which is useful but not a huge amount of a given person's job. I'm not completely sure what professional editors do, but I think it's probably a bit deeper than looking for typos.
Crowstep
30m ago
Mainstream science told you to mask up and get the covid vaccine too.
More likely to be the other way round, don't you think? People who feel a compulsive need to travel are going to be drawn to occupations that let them do so. Combine that with the tendency of children to do the same job as their parents et voila.
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