The practical universe ends where the solar wind meets the interstellar medium. Baring scifi plot contrivance extra-luminality, this is it for us.

The first step to keep eggs in multiple baskets is to start with the cataclysmic greenhouse effect in the first basket.

Wanna colonize space? It’s a centuries long undertaking, and you should start from a stable foundation. Especially considering, any long term habitation is gonna be fostering an ecosystem from scratch, so you kinda really wanna model that on a stable ecosystem.

What is the motivation behind the money? Why are they really doing this?

We want to colonize Mars and maybe the Moon, not because it is easy, but because we have a mistaken belief that it is easy!

Asking “Cui bono?” will get you most of the way to an understanding of what’s going on… but sometimes there is no benefit, and rich powerful people are just acting on mistaken assumptions. Like, the assumption that a livable Mars (or any other body in the solar system) will take anything less then slow grueling highly sophisticated intricately organized staggeringly terribly carefully coordinated work for like 12 human generations.

Valve doesn’t just do lootbox gambling, they practically spearheaded the practice. And like a decade before it really started to take off industry-wide.

That’s a fair interpretation.

It’s still repeating industry talking points. At the core here is an assumption: that a computer program is capable of reproducing the phenomenon of consciousness. It’s what the pitch is, that they’re building software capable of replacing human labor. For that to be true, it also has to be capable of everything else humans are capable of, include war and ecocide. Industry talking points. Advertising.

I fundamentally reject the premise. We understand computers very thoroughly. We have a lot of computers. We don’t understand the brain very well. To suppose that a computer is capable of what brains do, that’s just wishful thinking.

You’re essentially insisting that this market bubble is in fact historically completely different from every other market bubble that’s come before… which is what people always say in a market bubble.

Care to give an example of something higher?

This isn’t criticism, this is taking everything the AI guys would like you to believe, and saying it’s true but while shaking your head rather than nodding.

I mean yeah, but we should be clear that - in so far as these computer programs pose an extinction risk beyond what we’re already facing in climate change - the risk is from degrading social reproduction of knowledge and expertise. Fucking up education, to the point where nobody knows how to maintain or repair key infrastructure, they try to ask the chatbot.

In a few states, its illegal to pump your own gas. An attendant has to come over and do it for you. Maybe that’s what they want?

You are off your fucking rocker if you think Bush 43 either understood or respected the laws and institutions of the country. We were dealing with a Constitutional Crisis every other week during the last two years of his Presidency.

I did not mean to say he “respected” them, far from it. But he did successfully reshape them. Bush did more to redefine US policy in the 21st century than any other president to come after. What does it matter that he ran up against constitutional crises, when the Democratic administration to succeed him just adopted most of his changes as the new normal?

I’m trying to say that while Bush reshaped and redefined US institutions for those to come after, Trump is just breaking them. There is no way for a successor administration to use USaid, because there just is no USaid anymore. And I suspect Dems will shrug and accept that world as the new normal as well (hell, they’ll probably keep ICE largely unchanged and claim its different now that they’re in the drivers seat).

I think the front row is what you’d “normally” wear.

I don’t know that its ever been quite as much a moron as this guy. Dubba was dumb, but not “rip out USaid” dumb.

Love 'em or hate 'em, most presidents (or at least their cabinets) understood that the laws and institutions of the country were all broadly weighted in their favor, even if that meant occasionally accepting this or that particular limitation.