domain:rifters.com
roystgnr
1d ago
Oh, no, I'm mixing up the premises of 1 and 4! I'd like to say that it's the scriptwriters fault for going to the "mysterious alien menace threatens Earth and the twist is that it's actually connected to 20th century humanity" well more than once, but I'm just trying to rationalize away my own shame.
Tolkien has always had a loyal following among college-educated conservative Christians, and my mom was recommended The Hobbit at a Christian college.
I think he had a lot of loyal followings. My first introduction to Tolkien by name was in writing by Isaac Asimov (Jewish atheist), and of course modern medieval-fantasy from D&D onward is like 80% Tolkien with the serial numbers filed off.
She does love the Peter Jackson films, but insists that everyone should watch the extended editions.
Of course! Especially the Two Towers extended edition - the theatrical version didn't include Saruman's death, and without knowing that Jackson had made that change to the plot it was unnecessarily disappointing to see The Return of the King end with no scouring of the shire.
Also, you have to watch the Hobbit films either first or not-at-all. My kids got to enjoy them for what they were, not having seen the Lord of the Rings first, but then looking back after the LotR trilogy they understood how disappointed I must have been.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I mean, if, as the article suggests, sufficient quantities of valuable natural resources are found, every incentive will be there to make those services available. It's probably not going to be that much harder than building remote North Sea wells or setting up shop in Siberia.
sodiummuffin
1d ago
How is "adopt the policies of your political opponents" even responding negatively to them? Whether Trump or Harris gets a 10% government stake in Intel the result is the same, the only difference is which side supports it and what justifications they use. Would it make sense for Democrats to respond negatively to Trump by building the wall?
The only thing that would make it at least somewhat different is if the party doing it used it to somehow dictate Intel policy in a partisan way, but that isn't happening in this case and it would be short-term regardless, since after the next election it doesn't matter who was in power when it happened. It's not adopting left-wing tactics against them, Trump just genuinely believes in a bunch of left-wing policy positions like opposition to free trade and government ownership of companies.
There seems to be a recent tendency I've noticed online where people are so eager to signal animosity by throwing away their principles that they'll do it when it doesn't make any sense. For instance I've seen several cases where SJWs censored something and there were comments kneejerk supporting it as "what goes around comes around" because they somehow misinterpreted which side the censorship was coming from. If you don't have principles besides "oppose the enemy", and also you don't understand what your enemy believes, it's pretty easy to end up supporting the enemy against your own side.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Pfft.. If your megastructure isn't large enough to have its own microclimate and cloud formation, it doesn't count.
NASA swears the Vehicle Assembly Building doesn't form its own clouds. But the version of that story I originally heard isn't that it formed its own clouds, but that it did so before they put in a ginormous air conditioner to prevent it.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
And yet public health officials keep pressing for COVID vaccines for young, healthy adults and children.
Sure, but what do I have to do with that? As it stands, the side effect profile from the jab is no minimal that the harm is negligible, even if that's the case for the benefits in that age group.
You're still defending it, that's what you have to do with that. And I disagree; the typical flu-like symptoms from the COVID vaccines are already not "negligible".
Sigh. If there was a concerted effort at any point in time, it would have to have been a pan-national cover up of frankly astonishing proportions. If civilization was that good at organization, we'd have a Dyson sphere by now.
We had a pan-national shutdown of a vast array of normal activity. Civilization is clearly that good at organization; Dyson spheres are just harder. That said, the myocarditis coverup was clumsy by comparison and mostly consisted of public health officials lying a lot.
Pancreatic cancer consistently gets a podium finish in World's Worst Cancer To Get competition.
Yes, which is why it's good marketing for boosters to claim any given new technology has a chance of curing it.
So fucking what if it's expensive?
Yeah, that's the attitude that's making health care costs rise.
Drugs tend to get cheaper over time.
This isn't a single drug, it's a specific new drug for each patient.
It is not an intrinsic property of mRNA vaccines that they must be expensive and personalized, they can be spammed by the shipload when circumstances demand.
It IS an intrinsic property of this pancreatic cancer treatment that they must be personalized.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Pfft.. If your megastructure isn't large enough to have its own microclimate and cloud formation, it doesn't count.
I blame the fact that, unfortunately, real estate prices aren't high enough to encourage that kind of vertical growth, and probably NIMBYism. Most of the world's ills can be blamed on the latter, so what's one more?
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1d ago
I wasn't thinking about it in a sort of "grass is greener" sense (I really am quite happy being invisible!) It strikes me more as a people vs things dichotomy. Like, the detailed flourishes of the attention are the draw of the work, for women readers, where as it's just not for male readers. And that isn't to say that women don't appreciate some plot, or men some interpersonal character moments. But I observe a sort of fascination from one or the other that serves as a fairly reliable tell.
And I would bet that for women authors, delivering satisfying amounts of good attentions, and satisfying comeuppances for bad attention is possibly the most important skill in their craft.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
My doctor friends told me once about Daughter from California Syndrome. I don't suppose you have an equivalent over there?
Sadly, we do. It is a human universal, including back in India. On the contrary, the fact that there's no financial incentivefor us to "do everything" means that it's easier to say no, though I have sufficient respect for my American brethren to assume they usually manage something in the end.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
For those keeping track -- I upvoted this, not because I wholeheartedly agree, but because I'm a sucker for a good villain speech.
And yet public health officials keep pressing for COVID vaccines for young, healthy adults and children.
Sure, but what do I have to do with that? As it stands, the side effect profile from the jab is so minimal that the harm is negligible, even if that's the case for the benefits in that age group. If the government was mandating that every human alive take a dose of a single spoonful of sugar, it wouldn't be the best for diabetics, but it wouldn't kill them either.
Maybe there isn't such an effort ANY MORE.
Sigh. If there was a concerted effort at any point in time, it would have to have been a pan-national cover up of frankly astonishing proportions. If civilization was that good at organization, we'd have a Dyson sphere by now.
I have worked in two countries adding up to probably 1.5 billion people and change. There was no coverup there, you can take it from someone who worked in a COVID ICU and ran the vaccination programs. The UK grabbed onto the same Moderna and Pfizer vaccines used in the US at about the same time, India opted to use a different mRNA made by Gennova, but AstraZeneca's and another indigenous "normal" vaccine came first.
The sheer scale it would take to run cover for significant mRNA vaccine related adverse effects.. In that many countries, over such a long period of time. It's ludicrous.
Are they? Or is that just marketing, because the mRNA producers are looking for applications that sound really good?
- The whole point of the FDA is to hold manufacturers accountable and to ensure that their drugs *work, . If it doesn't pass every single trial phase, it won't make it to consumers.
- Pancreatic cancer is one of many potential treatments mRNA-based care provides. You can Google that yourself. At the absolute bare minimum, it allows for a velocity of gene therapy development that is staggering compared to previous options.
What I find when searching for that is particularly unpromising -- it's a personalized mRNA vaccine to be used after surgery. Even it works, it'll be eleventy-billion dollars a dose, and you still have to have the surgery.
Pancreatic cancer consistently gets a podium finish in World's Worst Cancer To Get competition. A cousin of mine, now long gone, proves that. Every patient I saw admitted with it in the Oncology ward weren't there to bid me goodbye when I quit my job. Even the best existing treatment only ensures a 13% five-year survival rate. You die very badly, in a lot of agony.
So fucking what if it's expensive? Drugs tend to get cheaper over time. It is not an intrinsic property of mRNA vaccines that they must be expensive and personalized, they can be spammed by the shipload when circumstances demand.
I only raise this as a specific example of a highly promising treatment that is now derailed by the sheer stupidity of US politics. There are more, and there would be even more if funding wasn't cut. This isn't merely eating your seed corn, it's using it as fuel for the fire during a heatwave.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
The one thing missing is that the people inside a business who select the Health Insurer also usually is subject to the choice they make. I have watched a company switch to a cheap horrid plan, then switch back after two years when the chief HR lady had a cancer scare.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Yes, we fundamentally disagree with you on morals and the purpose of government. If we didn't, then we'd be liberals like you.
And yet Bernie Sanders supports the government buying equity in private enterprises while many traditional small government conservatives are opposing it. So I guess it's true you're not like the liberals and are more similar to the socialists instead.
Your mistake is that you assume there is a platform of universally agreed upon policies that are agreed to be universally beneficial. There are not.
No, I literally said the opposite. Different people may have different views on what policies are good, but presumably they all still work towards what they think is good policy. If you believe that government owning businesses is good, then you would work towards it. If you believe government should stay out, then you would work towards that.
I get the feeling you didn't actually read a thing I said given that it literally has the words.
Now people might disagree on what is best for growth, what is best for the people, and what is best for the country but we should expect them to pursue their ideas in the same way if they care about America, towards ideas they think are good.
If you can't be bothered to read the thing you're writing a response to, then there's little reason to engage further with you.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
Pre-Peter-Jackson, sure, knowing the name "Frodo" marked you as an ubergeek, but today they're still top-100-lifetime-gross movies; when The Return of the King came out it was like top 10.
Yeah, she’s been a fan since the 80s! Tolkien has always had a loyal following among college-educated conservative Christians, and my mom was recommended The Hobbit at a Christian college. She does love the Peter Jackson films, but insists that everyone should watch the extended editions.
You're not mixing up 1 and 4, are you? Everybody thought 1 was dull but loved 4.
Nope! The Motion Picture with V-ger was a movie I really enjoyed. It could be slow but the V-ger accumulations over time and the sequence of them flying in to the center of the mysterious spaceship was so epic that it impressed itself on my memory. I also like 4, and as an adult I like it more than 1 because of the character moments (and Spock swearing) despite thinking that it has a weaker overall concept than 1. “What if the voyager probe gained sentience and RETVRNED to Earth?” is just a more interesting premise than “what if whales seek revenge on humanity?”
Yes, we fundamentally disagree with you on morals and the purpose of government. If we didn't, then we'd be liberals like you.
That's not as much a decisive argument then an acknowledgement of the facts.
Your mistake is that you assume there is a platform of universally agreed upon policies that are agreed to be universally beneficial. There are not. If you disagree with this, name a policy, and I'll show you its partisan sides. You can't technocrat your way out of politics. What is your good and effective policy is my bad and harmful policy. The bad and inefficient parts of policy that I support are called tradeoffs that I can live with.
It would be very nice if the institutions were run by liberals. I wouldn't mind being governed under liberal rule. But the people who ruled in the immediate past were not liberals, and were not constrained by liberals. It is the failure of liberals to rule properly that has led to this point and given the choice between the terrible experiences of the past, I'm willing to gamble on the excesses of the current regime. If no one cares about liberal principles, then at the very least the power of the state can crush the oppressors and petty tyrants of the previous decade.
Allowing liberals to be in charge again will only lead to tyranny, because liberals have no defense against the feminine prerogative of the progressive class. If the state must be powerful, if it must be strong, then it must avenge these slights to win my vote. I don't want a government that lets these people off easy. The men and women of the previous regime made an enemy of me, and made promises to sweep me into the dustbin of history. Now they quiver in fear and beg for mercy that I do not have, and demand the continuation of privileges I made no promise to give.
Ha ha. No. You call it revenge: I call it justice, finely ground and granulated.
And you may object to this. But to that, I say...
"If you kill your enemies, they win." QED.
ulyssessword
1d ago
I never got down to a single task. I failed a few times to
get a full set of chess pieces, when I didn't know exactly what they were , orconnect the boiler to the garage or pumps or,get the secret garden after assembling the power hammer ,
or make progress on your spoiler. At that point, I dropped the game. I was also keeping an eye out for
NewCharlesInCharge
1d ago
NICE in the UK
I would've thought Parliament had enough C.S. Lewis fans to avoid this name.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
Say that instead, there was some proto-cause that created God and then blipped out of existence, because that's just how reality happened to happen.
From my point of view, that's incoherent. If there is an eternal uncaused cause it cannot stop existing. If it stops existing it's not the explanation for the grounding of being right now.
Let me try to give my best response to the question:
Let's say there is a uncaused cause that created matter but did not directly will our existence in a special degree. In addition to unformed matter it created Elohim , who then went on to do 95% of what is described in the Bible. I say 95%, because to accept that the God of the Bible is not the uncaused creator of the universe requires me to ignore the parts of the Bible that say He is. Most notably (but not solely) Acts Chapter 17, where St. Paul explicitly identified the God of the Bible with the uncaused cause of Greek Philosophy.
It's not clear to me what sin even is if it's not a crime against existence itself, but I guess sin is now some kind of crime against Elohim. So then he saves us from our sin by sending His son to die for us. In doing so he makes some kind of paradise afterlife possible. I feel like this soteriology needs to be worked out much further, but that's a lot to unpack and I don't think matters too much to the question.
But accepting all that, I would owe this Elohim a debt. He would be a cool dude, a role model, praiseworthy. I should probably listen to what he said to do.
Would he be as awesome as the God I worship right now? No, he would not be. Would he be a god? In the same way Loki in Marvel is a god. At least he intentionally willed my existence so that makes me belong to him in a certain way? But does he actually have the power to do that? Or is he relying on the power of the actual First Cause, and the actual First Cause could constrain him from creating me. It gets messy. I think the most confident thing I can state without doing a years worth of research into a hypothetical is that he wouldn't be as awesome as the God I worship right now.
Since Gnosticism’s God was too perfect to ever have any reason to do anything, he didn’t create anything – not even Heaven.
God did not have to create anything, but choose to create out of an overabundance on generous love.
Gnosticsm can be right on some things and wrong on others. Just because Gnosticsm in general is a Heresy doesn't mean that only the opposite of what they taught is true. They taught Jesus is divine, Gnosticsm being wrong does not mean that Jesus is suddenly not divine.
Gnosticsm holds several incorrect teachings that is incompatible with what you would call Creedal Christianity. The most obvious is that matter is evil. This is contrary to the Gospel. What I would consider the actual biggest problem with Gnosticism is their belief that there is some kind of knowledge, secret words, etc, that is not publicly taught by the Apostles and their successors which is necessary for true paradise.
There were Gnostics who taught that the body is evil - so just commit sins of the flesh. It doesn't hurt anything but the flesh which is evil already.
There were Gnostics who taught that the body is evil - so flee from all bodily temptations and live an asture life because desiring things of the flesh is like desiring dung.
But all Gnostics agreed that the only way to the best afterlife was to learn some secret code phrase only they knew, to know the true history of the Divinities, to learn something only they were peddling.
That is what made them so horrible and it's also why I think the Internet has brought in a reign of atheistic gnosticsm. We spend all our time dissasociated from our bodies following the influencers that claim to have found that one weird trick to understanding Geopolitics or how to live longer. But that's another topic.
Classical Christians are not necessarily Platonist either. I don't believe in a world of forms. Classical Christians don't have to be Aristotelians either.
Tanista
1d ago
BSG, on the other hand ... "The humans haven't figured out what the Cylons are doing" is a compelling premise, right up until you add "the BSG writers are humans" and complete the syllogism.
RDM complained about Star Trek tropes and went out of his way to avoid them, only to then fall into the basically-unbuilt mystery box nonsense we had to deal with for a decade after Lost launched (to add insult to injury Lost probably also paid off its myth stuff much better than he did)
magicalkittycat
1d ago
I mean I don’t think I’ve seen anyone in a position of power have concrete plans that they stuck to even at risk of losing.
Well you're not losing to begin with if the policies you think are good are the ones being implemented. Is Bernie Sanders losing when Trump got stakes into Intel? No, he was supportive, he wants government to own more businesses.
Sanders might be losing on other topics, but he wins here and he knows it.
TBH, looking at how people in power actually behave, principles are not how you understand government.
I'll agree you with there. Politics does not do a great job selecting for people who value the health of the nation over their own personal fantasies and desires. They might have some values, but if it's between "benefit myself" and "benefit the country", well we see that the first often wins out. It's a known issue of pretty much any system that those who seek power are disproportionately those who wish to use it for their own personal gain.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
this leads off with abstractions ('the country', 'the left'), but no acknowledgement of a relationship. Even the traitor allegation is framing it as treat to the abstraction (hate the country). Even that treats the action as an initiation, as opposed to a response, as if treason is a state of being unprompted at odds with a natural/healthy state of behavior.
And how does this make a meaningful difference? Bad policy as a response to bad policy is just more bad policy. Imagine for instance if the response to leftist rent control was a rent floor rather than not enacting price controls to begin with.
This is wrong in the same way that 'the organization decided to do something' is wrong. Organizations do not make decisions. People in organizations make decisions.
Organizations, in being controlled and owned by people do in fact make decisions. Organizations are just a group. If the group members (or owner of the group if it's legally theirs) makes a decision, then the group itself can be said to have made a decision.
Of course if the people in it change over time, we expect the group itself to change but it's still just that, reflective of the humans within it.
When people make a series of decisions over time in regards to, and affecting, other people, this connection is a relationship. Sometimes the established relationship is amicable, and sometimes the relationship is hostile.
People responding negatively to a hostile relationship are not traitors. Nor does their response to hostile relationship come off as them never believing the words they were saying.
Ok I agree that when leftists implement bad counterproductive and unhealthy policies like high corporate taxes or price controls or whatever other economically/freedom damaging policies, it's understandable to react negatively. But I don't see why that would lead to the response of joining in on the self harm.
If leftists are stabbing the nation, why grab a knife and join in on the murder? Your comment doesn't answer this, it just assumes that saying "bad relationship" explains why I should want to harm our nation and our future.
Dirty_DemSoc
Registered Demoncrat
1d ago
assuming that services are available
Kinda the main stumbling block, tho, innit?
rmtodd
1d ago
Battlestar was self-consciously made by former Star Trek writers to avoid problems they thought Trek had (and to be much darker in a post-9/11 world).
Specifically, Ronald D. Moore had been a writer on DS9 and went over to Voyager after DS9 ended, but left Voyager not too long afterwards due to disagreements with the producers over storylines, basically in that they were reluctant to take seriously the implications of the premise -- that Voyager is on its own, without support, and their situation should be getting more and more desperate as time goes on. There was an interesting interview some fanzine did with Ron Moore after he left where Moore more-or-less ranted on this subject at length (and I wish I remembered the name of said fanzine and knew if that interview was online). It's interesting to think of that interview in light of the Ron Moore edition of BSG, which is more or less an attempt to "do it right" in this respect for both Voyager and the original BSG (which was also rather inconsistent on the whole issue on how desperate the Last Surviving Human Refugee Fleet is -- one week everyone's fleeing the destruction of the 12 Colonies, the next week everyone's whooping it up on the casino ship like nothing's wrong...). I like to imagine that every Friday night after a new episode of the Ron Moore BSG aired, Moore prank-called Brannon Braga and said "See! That's what Voyager should have been like!" and then hung up.
Which is not to say that Ron-Moore-BSG is not without its problems, they're just different problems -- the main one being that Moore tried for a massive story arc like JMS did in Babylon 5, but didn't want to spend the time obsessively planning out 5 years of stories like JMS did, so he decided to wing it as he went along. The thing is, Ron Moore is almost good enough for this to have worked, for a while anyway; the wheels didn't start seriously coming off the thing until season 4.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
The rest of the post makes arguments I consider weak but this bit is laughable. Groups do not, in fact, stay principled easily. That's the entire problem.
Obviously a group over time as people change out can not be guaranteed to stay the same group, and that's not a claim I make. In 100 years a FIRE org owned by Random Joe JR could be a fighter against free speech.
But currently within a reasonable timeline of being owned by the same people, their consistent behavior marks a consistent belief of the people who compose it.
bonsaii
1d ago
The "death panel" is not a uniquely socialist horror. It is an inescapable feature of any system that deals with scarce resources, which is to say, any system in the real world.
I think you've put it perfectly here. I wasn't intending to use it as a counterpoint, instead I was just interested in how they might respond. I think a QALY-based calculation is a transparent and reasonable approach, at the very least moreso than the convoluted mess we have now, but I find a lot of people will, as you say, find the calculus unsettling.
This isn't some big secret either. I have had such discussions with dozens of families, and not a single one has had a problem with it, or withdrawn their relative to go elsewhere, as they are at full liberty to do.
I find this particularly interesting. I suppose there are significant UK/US cultural differences in this regard, because I cannot imagine such a thing going well over here (My doctor friends told me once about Daughter from California Syndrome. I don't suppose you have an equivalent over there?).
When have the Democrats nationalized a private company?
Consider also that this is simply retarded. It's not Trump or Republicans who will own $INTC, it's the United States Government, and so in 3.5 years it'll likely be handed to "Democrats".
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