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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • If I had to choose between global high speed internet access, and ground based astronomy, I’d pick the Internet every time. I’d completely blot out the sky forever if that’s what it took.

    We don’t need ground-based astronomy to learn about the universe, I’d rather encourage more space-based astronomy. Or build some observatories on the moon if you really want to build on a solid space body.

    However, Starlink is a for profit company run by Elon Musk. I don’t really want them doing it, because they’re not going to provide unlimited global Internet to everyone. So as the guy said, the idea is good, but Starlink is bad, although it is currently the only such option.


  • The irony is that if they put it at or near the end of the video, after I have learned that I like whatever I watched, I am much more likely to do so, because I often really do just forget to like things, and a reminder near the end would in fact make me go ‘yeah, this was good, I’ll do that’.

    But if they ask me to do it at the beginning, I won’t do it until I have seen enough to decide I do in fact like it.


  • Yeah, while there was mockery it didn’t come from ‘official’ sources. They called him serious names and didn’t ridicule him. They made it clear he was dangerous, but they also gave him respect like a serious candidate, contender, opponent, rival.

    It probably would have worked from the beginning to just laugh at him, IF it was coming from the actual political establishment. If Clinton had essentially based her entire campaign around ‘hahah…oh wait you’re serious? Let me laugh harder.’ there’s a good chance he would’ve crashed and burned before ever getting off the ground, I think.



  • In order to go back to having two decent parties at this point, I think the Republican party needs to die.

    So it really would be good if any remaining Republicans that follow the principle of ‘even evil has standards’ would openly join the Democrats. Then a couple elections go by as most remaining Republican offices are taken by Democrats, then the Democratic party splits.

    Not the best possible outcome, but probably top ten as far as potentially realistic ones goes.








  • I mean, it’s well understood that there’s a host of health benefits from regular exercise, and it’s also pretty well established that habits built during youth tend to be the most ‘sticky’ that we continue for the rest of our lives.

    Given these two facts, I suspect that there are in fact studies that show those who participate in regular exercise programs during their school years are more likely to maintain a higher level of fitness and gain the derived health benefits.

    That said, it’s likely a small but statistically significant increase, not a massive easily observable difference.





  • We could start with holding police officers responsible. It’s great that they charged this one, but why aren’t the other police there being charged as accomplices since they took no action to prevent the shooting?

    So here’s a few simple starter thoughts.

    1. Establish an external agency with the mandate of prosecuting police. They have their own prosecutorial system, their own investigators, their own prosecutors, their own courts and their own judges, completely unconnected to the prosecutorial system the police work with. You cannot have the same people that work together one day and rely on each other be the ones to investigate each other, it doesn’t work. Not even a separate ‘internal affairs division’ is enough.

    2. Any police officer who discharges their weapon, for any reason, is immediately suspended, and any pay is withheld until an investigation for why the weapon was discharged is completed. The investigation of course is conducted by that external agency.

    3. If a police officer discharging a weapon causes injury or death, all police officers on the scene are suspended and their pay withheld until the investigation is over.

    4. If the police officer who discharged their weapon is charged with assault, murder, whatever, then all other officers at the scene are charged as accomplices, unless they took proactive action to prevent the first officer from committing their illegal action. Think of it like felony murder - if you and a group of friends are committing a crime and someone is murdered, you are all prosecutable under felony murder even if you had no direct hand in the murder at all.

    That’s probably a good start, it may not solve all the problems, but it’d be a lot better than what’s being done now, which is very, very little. I’d say an even better thing to do in addition would be to have every current police officer purged and never work in law enforcement again. All police organizations kinda need a clean slate with fresh people and no organizational momentum and culture carryover from how it’s happening now, because a lot of what needs to change is organizational culture, and just altering the rules is more difficult than rebuilding a completely new organizational culture from the ground up.




  • They aren’t using it, no, but that doesn’t mean the scientific method can’t study what they do and come to an understanding of it - probably a better understanding of it than they have, since as you say, they aren’t using it. It’d just take a few decades of study probably to have a much stronger understanding of how it works.

    My point is just that people draw this weird line between ‘science’ and ‘magic’ as though they were incompatible. In a world in which magic is real and useful, science can study it.