domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5m ago
The galaxy is only 100,000 light-years in diameter. Starships moving at a mere 0.1 c could get from one side to the other in only a million years.
That's peanuts in astronomical time. If you can make a 0.1 c starship you need not worry about biological lifespans. 'Aliens exist but are too far away' doesn't make any sense. They could've shown up 100 million years ago and still be here. There are centuries old engravings of weird shapes in the sky, recordings from egypt, footage from modern jets and sensors.
Furthermore, our understanding of the universe is extremely limited, bordering on pathetic. 95% of the universe is 'dark' to us, we have no clue about it. Logically, that's the most likely place for the bulk of the aliens to be. Not only is it the vast majority of the universe's mass and energy, it provides a simple explanation for the apparent absence of aliens in the tiny portion we understand.
It makes no sense to play around with Dyson Spheres or largescale structures we might be capable of observing, it's not cost-efficient compared to 'dark' enterprises.
We prank the North Sentinel Islanders with drones and occasional plane/helicopter overflights, some missionaries showing up and getting killed. The real estate they control is so small it's worthless. Nobody wants to live on a crap jungle island. It's probably the same with aliens but instead of crap jungle island it's 'entire visible universe'. There's no real serious intent, more like casual observation. The only thing interesting on Earth is us.
My late grandmothers position on tattoos was that the only respectable people who had them were concentration camp survivors.
crushedoranges
25m ago
Let me demonstrate how irritating you're being.
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask Sam Brinton."
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask Anthony Weiner."
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask Jasmine Crockett."
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask AOC."
You are not strawmanning. You are weakmanning. You are not giving your political opposition the benefit of the doubt. I have a whole list of leftist politicians, intellectuals, and academics that have said embarrassing and stupid things I'd like you to defend, if you'd care to play at this particular joust.
Tiber727
28m ago
Adding onto this, this is an example of the real stupidity of this. For boardgames, it requires making lots of different little pieces. China outcompeted in manufacturing so hard that the only manufacturers left only want to deal in volumes significantly higher than most games would sell. The margins aren't there to set up manufacturing in the U.S., so the boardgame industry will likely collapse or stop selling in the U.S. before it ever does what Trump seems to want people to do.
That's the real stupidity of the tariffs. Even if you think tariffs are good, a blanket tariff doesn't care about the reality of the industries it targets.
The leg has massive arteries to power those big running muscles. Despite what various war and action movies might tell you, you slice one of those and you bleed out fast. That’s also why the arguments that police should be shooting to wound are laughable.
ThenElection
40m ago
I think Tony Hsieh of Zappos (barely) broke into the billionaires club, and he had a tattoo and threw tattoo parties for employees.
Not sure if that's a strong recommendation.
falling-star
45m ago
The average hard (cocaine or worse) drug consumer generally doesn't have the patience to wait a few weeks for an order to ship. They likely also lack the IQ, agency, or tech ability to figure out how to use the dark net market and crypto.
eee
47m ago
Why do you think it makes sense to say that the views of some random politician are emblematic of the "online racialist Right"? During the Biden administration, could I quote some random official and say that their position is the position of online radical leftists?
People accuse you of unfairly representing other groups opinions... because you don't understand their positions and represent them unfairly. And when people point out that you have done this you throw a big hissyfit. Then, you go right back to doing the same thing.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
58m ago
The fact that very few of the characters actually had any agency at all in Blindsight is a feature, not a bug. You're not reading about plucky oddballs making decisions and saving the world, you're reading about an extended game of 4D chess between two non-conscious gods in which the humans are a footnote at best. Theseus itself is an analogy for how the book says the human brain works, with the conscious actors being irrelevant at best and actively harmful at worst, and the non conscious actors being responsible for almost everything in spite of the fact they’re usually backgrounded in the plot.
Yeah, and this is where I will defend Watt’s writing in these two books, where Blindsight is his masterpiece and will probably go down as a classic of 21st-century science fiction. Sure, his characters are frequently more like plot coupons, but they’re not really the story. The story is about titanic forces moving around in the background, between the lines on the page, which is pretty cool when he pulls it off and the reader figures it out.
I think that’s basically the theme he’s always writing about, even his early Rifters series was like a first stab at that idea.
Not sure about this one as IIRC starving people were killed when trying to access grain in warehouses during the Great Leap Forward, and one of the reasons why the famine was so horrific was because Mao and co. continued to export food for political gain and refused foreign aid for at least a year or two.
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