iNow

Who gets to decide which people die and by what method their life terminates? His position also ignores the cost of externalities and how often new costs get imposed on society by businesses who won’t ever pay them.

Noted. Thx

The number of humans is far less relevant than the way we use and exploit resources in aggregate

Please don’t invite him to infect yet another thread with off-topic conjectures from that one book he read that one time from that one author about shame

One can be an agnostic theist or an agnostic atheist, but not just agnostic. As Genady rightly mentioned, agnosticism is about knowledge whereas theism/atheism is about belief. Agnostic theist. Agnostic atheist. Agnostic by itself is an orphan misplaced. I find that people who call themselves agnostic tend mostly to lack the courage of their convictions and rather often just fear the social consequences of openly sharing with others that they lack belief in the mass delusion about a bearded cloud surfer who cares if you masturbate or “nature as magical wizard” more broadly.

There’s also an absence of evidence of an invisible dragon sleeping beneath my chair right now and an absence of evidence that pink unicorns gain the power of flight by collecting concentrated leprechaun farts. In this scenario, there is more than “only one correct conclusion” regarding existence or just validity, and it’s not “we simply don’t know.” The god conjecture is no different in this regard, regardless of which god you mean among the millions we’ve invented across the millennia and which now lay dead in the graveyard of human mythology.

Not playing golf is not a sport. Not collecting stamps is not a hobby. Not believing in god(s) is not a belief system, nor a religion.

That makes sense and I’m glad you clarified, but even the idea of a book being “wrong” is just like… one opinion, man. /thedude

Georgia officials finally crack long-open hamburglar case. All abducted children previously ensnared to alphabetize stolen confidential documents have been safely returned to their families. This story and more tonight on Dateline.

It takes a ridiculous amount of engineering and resources to 1) reach other planets and then 2) make them habitable for us for more than a few years that we’d likely realize a far higher return for a much lower expenditure simply by focusing those same energies and resources here on Earth fixing the things which made us wish to flee terra firma in the first place.

Or they were deemed to be so ridiculous as to not warrant wasting time responding.

I reject this point on at least two distinct fronts: 1) We CAN, and very often do, teach things to others about a topic even when lacking a full understanding ourselves. It happens all of the time and every day across the world. We teach the parts we DO understand even if our own understanding is limited... even at the university level this is true (case in point: we don't "fully understand" blackholes nor QM, either) 2) I posit that there is no such thing as "full understanding" and that there is ALWAYS room to learn more and grow and add to our existing knowledge. The wisest students recognize that the more they learn the more they realize they don't yet know. Our understanding is always fractional and provisional, so your threshold criteria for teaching here is itself impossible to achieve.

It’s a shame people still use gay as a slur or pejorative.

Velocities "bigger than c" are not possible based on current understanding and evidence. In fact, it's not even possible for a velocity to reach c if the object under discussion has non-zero mass (has any mass at all). If you must invent fictions regarding how the universe behaves in order to support your assertion, then perhaps it's time to acknowledge that your assertion is itself also fictional.

It is remarkable how very often the person working 3 or 4 jobs is making several commas less than folks who take an occasional business call while swinging at a golf ball or sipping cognac. Take two equally talented people and the one who works harder will tend to do better, but hard work is not the rocket ship to prosperity it once was. In fact, it seems the harder you work these days the less you get paid. We're racing to the bottom, and we're winning.

In many/most regions of the world these days...

I’d go so far as to say Putin actively wants extra attention on this, and that if it was in fact a missile strike that reminds folks that he has weapons available that mercenary groups like Wagner lack… it’s a reassertion of power… overdone and amplified precisely because he’s become so weak.

Likewise here. That’s why I included that point and you received it as I did.

Was your vehicle air conditioned? How many flights of stairs did you have to carry loads up when elevators were invariably broken or being serviced? Did you drive after Black Friday or the days after Amazon Prime Day? Curious to better understand how closely YOUR experience was aligned with the modern median experience today.

The leader of the air force, a General, who was close to Prigozhin was dismissed by Putin a day or 2 ago. There were 3 pilots on the plane, so incapacitated pilot isn't likely. Officials in the area confirmed that Prigozhin was on the manifest, and Wagner commanders confirmed he (and his top Lieutenant) were both on the plane that went down. According to PBS Newshour, an image posted by a pro-Wagner social media account showing burning wreckage, a partial tail number matching a jet previously used by Prigozhin could be seen. Certainly possible. Multiple individuals in the country have changed their names to Yevgeniy Prigozhin to help obfuscate his travels, and flight data suggests he boarded a private plane in Moscow Wednesday but the transponder was cut only minutes later. So... maybe? However, my take? He was on a plane and that plane got shot down by a missile (given the way it fell out of the sky suggested an explosion).

I’m shocked!!! … that it took this long to happen

One cannot be passionate if they can’t first survive. See also: Maslow

Not at all. You’re still learning the general gestalt here. Your brain moves quickly, is full of huge ideas, and you’re probably used to being the smartest person in the room. Here, however, it’s a big room with lots of very smart people and we’re all seeking to improve ourselves and each other with clarity, calmness, and patience. Ask more. Assert less. When others in the room know more than us, stop to watch and listen. Don’t lose your passion. Just slow it down a touch, and recall that answers often already exist and don’t need to be reinvented from whole cloth.

Ahh

Unless, of course, pursuing that path causes escalation with existing nuclear powers like China and NK who may actively seek to prevent that outcome from being reached.