The dishonesty and politicization surrounding the vaccine - yes, from both sides of the aisle - is what's really going to set us back hard in the future.

The right's straight up Covid denialism and the politicians that fed into it is literally murderous.

The left may have been better intentioned, but their inability to grasp human nature - ie, when you try to suppress competing viewpoints, even if they are based on faulty or even flat out false information, it just lends them credence and Streisand Effects them - and their virtually religious refusal to admit at first that the vaccine didn't prevent infection, and later to admit there could be side effects won't do them any favors either. It just makes people less likely to trust them in the future.

Coming from someone that's worked in long term care forever, and still has PTSD from what Covid did to the cohort in our care. Almost one in five lost. And have fortunately lost virtually no one to Covid since the vaccines came out. Yet at the same time, one of the ones who ended up with serious side effects from the vaccine. Which isn't even unexpected. ANY medical intervention has side effects.

This should never have been politicized. And the next pandemic, we're going to pay the price for it having been.

I'm always in the middle on this argument.

In principle, I'm utterly in favor of the personal choice to die with dignity. The fact we give our pets more mercy in the end than fellow humans is disgusting.

In practice, I worry about implementation and a capitalist society that may push people towards choosing death over cutting into an insurance company's quarterly revenue.

The ever scientific part of me is truly intrigued to see what happens when the oceanic currents shut down. Will we just see warming accelerate, or will it as sometimes theorized, dump us straight into an ice age, as cold (and now fresher and with a higher freezing point) water fails to circulate and caps the northern hemisphere in a nice shiny ball of ice?

The rest of me wants to know why Zuck is building a prepper cave in Hawaii and how I get in on this.

Stupid backwoods superstitions. They didn't have a single duck to weigh them against?

It's going to get ugly before it gets better. Yield curves inverted for an absurdly long time. M2 falling like it is for the first time since the Great Depression. Stocks are absurdly overvalued. The national debt hitting the point of no return. Housing market beginning to stagnate and both personal debt and repossessions are going for record highs. Virtually all jobs recently added are government jobs in one way or another, meaning they're recycled money out of our deficit spending and not contributing to actual growth, while the private sector is only adding part time jobs. Meanwhile the first rumbles of job losses are happening - tech, automotive, etc.

Housing, stock market, and everything else are essentially bubbles, and we've been kicking the can down the road for over a decade by now with artificially low interest rates. The correction will not be pretty.

#4 | POSTED BY MSGT AT 2024-03-14 05:22 PM | FLAG:

An understandable misunderstanding. Boeing is just still in the beta.

Love him or hate him, I HIGHLY doubt Musk would endanger his government welfare golden goose of Space X by selling to Russia

Alex Jones was right. They're turning the kids into gay frogs!

Seriously though, they're finding microplastics and endocrine disrupters in everything. It does actually make you wonder how much that contributes to the increasing number of LGBT+ vs just increased social acceptance.

No matter how you slice it, this pun is just bad all around.

I don't have a horse in this race, but I really wish both sides would get their ideology into something resembling coherence.

You got liberals that absolutely lose their ---- at the heresy of someone like James Damore a few years back suggesting some diversity goals are unattainable because men and women naturally have sexually dimorphic brains, and some of those differences manifest in differing interests and pursuits. Clearly the brain is not a gendered organ, and men and women are exactly the same - unless they're trans, in which case they're totally different, more like the opposite sex of the body.

Or conservatives. Still in the 1950's, men and women are completely different, and that's why men think logically, and women can't math or science, which is why they belong in the kitchen. Unless they're trans, in which case clearly the brains are the same, and physical sex is the only reality, not gender.

Could you two sort this out maybe? Mix and match until at least one of you has a full hand?

Of course the US government isn't hiding it. They've passed it all in to corporations to hide it, so no FOIA issues.

Lol, one explanation I've heard anyway. The whole thing honestly is fascinating. Clearly there's something flying around that can travel through multiple mediums with no effort, accelerate fast enough to turn passengers in a conventionally propelled vehicle into so much gooey red paste, and confuse the heck out of both civilian and military pilots. There's been too much evidence released NOT to believe something unidentified (key word) is freely moving in and around our airspace in ways we don't understand. Options are aliens or advanced military tech and well - the answer is never aliens.

How mind numbingly dumb can climate deniers be? Ten years ago you could look at satellite images taken from the first satellites on and watch the visible regression of polar ice caps year over year. Mountains losing glacial caps they've had for millennia. It's only been a couple years since I've been scuba diving either - it's not just the Great Barrier Reef, although that will be the largest loss - reefs from Florida to Hawaii are bleaching out. And science denial? It's not like a tenuous theory. Nature provided us a damn science experiment cosmically right next door. You know, Venus, the planet with the CO2 atmosphere that's substantially hotter than the planet TWICE as close to the sun as it is.

Oh, but one winter was randomly cooler in a local geographic area? Remind yourself that when starving because farmland has to turned to desert. I'm sure it will take the edge off the hunger.

Oh come on! Now they're going after aspiring soap opera actors just looking for work?

As the Handmaiden Turns was going to absolutely corner the Florida housewife market.

Whatever happened to good old laxatives and a bully just finding themselves in a really crappy situation?

#7 | POSTED BY JOE AT 2024-03-08 11:44 AM | FLAG:

Best news I've heard all day!

So you are also for defunding the police?

#6 | POSTED BY DONNERBOY AT 2024-03-08 11:31 AM | REPLY | FLAG:

Mistake me for a republican because I criticized democrats somewhere? I'm not independent because I'm a centrist. I'm independent because I think democrats are just republican lite and need to do better to earn my vote. Neither here nor there in this thread.

As for defunding? Not precisely - but they need to lose the wannabe military equipment.

What I'm for is police accountability. They have the power to make life and death decisions, and they should be held to a higher standard for that. You don't get to make mistakes in those circumstances, and they should both be indicted more readily and face harsher penalties than someone not committing crimes "under color of law." Not should civil asset forfeiture be a thing, damages caused when they decide to play Rambo should be mandatory to cover, "immunity" is absolute bs, and they should either be directly responsible in instances like this, or minimally forced to carry insurance so bad cops can be priced out if nothing else.

It's absolute insanity that the military has to answer to UCMJ and rules of engagement when dealing with enemy combatants, yet LEO's get away with almost any abuse against their own fellow citizens.

What it doesn't have is "consciousness", because we don't actually know what that is.

#18 | POSTED BY CORKY AT 2024-03-08 10:20 AM | REPLY | FLAG:

That doesn't mean it does not have it. Probably one of the most fascinating aspects of AI really.

I've always held consciousness is just a recursive loop. Metacognition. The brain's perception of itself as it perceives external or internal input. So it's possible any sufficiently complex system programmed with the ability to self-reflect could result in consciousness. Of course, just how much complexity would be necessary - no idea. In order to mimic a human brain, not only complex, but dynamic. Strengthening and pruning connections, not just gates, but the equivalent of analog gates that can vary signal intensity. Which might necessitate a computer which can rewrite it's own code, possibly even alter its own hardware.

But that seems like something that gets out of control fast. A brain has limits to its size, neuroplasticity, speed, etc. A computer that could do all that would have a chance at exponential increases in intelligence.

A. Get out and vote

B. Don't take all these polls too seriously. Just saw one making huge headlines all over ... the sample group was 1000. And that's probably mostly people who still use landlines.

How long until they make one capable of altering and improving its own code, I wonder?

The trouble is, in every one of these systems I've read about, there's been at least one programmer or admin it scared the hell out of - and yet they all drive on, because "it's going to get made either way, and it's better if they're there to try and shape it first."

Now take it out of their paychecks instead of taxpayer's dollars.

"Mommy's" been dead a long time, and no, democrats didn't "leave" me, I just got tired of republican lite bs. Offer me someone with real anti-war convictions who's willing to stand up to corporations, break up monopolies and oligopolies, and start fighting for single payer and better opportunities in higher education (like increasing public education to at least k-14 or a trade to rival European states in the global market) rather than just half-assing it by paying off some people's student loans, ahem, or why are you wasting my time? And yeah. I might vote Republican until they get it right. Because I've watched 20 years of pitiful "progress" and my patience is running out.

Oh, Sabine Hosenfelder is the first to come to mind.

I read it. But it will get passed around among dems, not many republicans. I just think the common "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing dems seem to have with Liz is disconcerting. To say the least.

This sounds like a fantastic movie, maybe with the guys from Super Troopers.

When her best moment was a vote in favor of poverty, I am afraid to ask what her worst moment is!

#23 | POSTED BY SNOOFY AT 2024-03-06 04:41 PM | REPLY | FLAG

I don't know, but I'd still share it with her. All 15 seconds.

Democrat warmth towards Liz Cheney seriously grosses me out.

I've been independent since about 2010, once Obama proved little more than Bush III in any of the issues I cared about (Patriot Act, NSA domestic spying, secret FISA courts with gag orders, illegal wars and nation building, rescuing banks and Wall St while letting Main St lose their homes, starting off the healthcare debate with "single payer is off the table, etc) so I gave Trump a little more chance than the more partisan democrats would have.

Rather than the visceral hate so much of the left felt for him, I mostly found him to be precisely what I expected. Bumbling, not highly competent, achieved a couple good things, screwed up the SCOTUS worse than I imagined - biggest thing I didn't expect was the cult of personality he formed among republicans. I really expected they'd all distance themselves from him, not want any part of the ship going down, and it would turn into 4 years of him just not getting anything done and the nation would carry on. Wow. Was I wrong. Seriously. Wow.

But there was one thing I LOVED to see. Starting with Jeb - and that was him just driving out and making the old guard neocons, the mass murdering warmongers of the Bush / Cheney era absolutely irrelevant.

If you judge presidential success in part by the disgustingly low bar of how little they take part in the great American tradition of - as Carlin put it - bombing brown people, or how many new laws they make like the Patriot Act to eviscerate our Bill of Rights, Trump was oddly successful, a step in the right direction finally. Objectively, in terms of damage to the world, I'd call him a far better president than Bush. Take it for what you will. I was Army when Bush was president, and people I loved and served with never came back. From the wrong goddamn country, at that. I'd put the noose around his neck for war crimes myself if I could, so I'm willing to admit I may not be the wholly rational one there lol.

So of course, Liz, who 100% willingly carries on the sins of her father, hates Trump. But it utterly boggles my mind to see Democrats praise her as one of the last sane or honest republicans. Trump is just an unintelligent narcissist doing precisely what they do. She's pure calculating evil, the type willing to commit genocide so long as it keeps the family business rolling in cash.