You misunderstand, I am not saying “make sure he spends it responsibly”. Nobody has has “made” him do this at all, and I didn’t advocate for a policy of doing so. What I’m saying is that I don’t think this particular use is worthy of condemnation the way his other actions are, because in the long run I think that this specific thing will end up benefiting people other than him no matter if he intends for that to happen or not (even if the American healthcare system prevents access, which I’m not confident it will do completely, not every country has that system, and it’s statistically improbable that the US will have it forever, and research results are both durable and cross borders). That sentiment isn’t saying that it excuses his wealth, just that I think people are seeing only the negatives in this merely because of the association with Altman’s name and ignoring the potential benefits out of cynicism. The concept is just as valid with him funding it as it would be had he been condemning it instead.

The response to something beneficial being only available to the rich shouldn’t be to avoid developing that thing, it should be to make it available to everyone. The failures of the US healthcare and economic systems don’t suddenly make developing new medical techniques a bad thing. Human augmentation is another issue from curing genetic disease, though I’d personally argue that wouldn’t be a bad cause either, with the same caveat about it availability. It at least has more potential to improve somebody’s life somewhere down the line than just buying a yacht with his ill gotten gains or some other useless rich person toy would.

I’m not sure I get the universal negativity to this. Like sure, Altman sucks as a person, and an individual having enough money to significantly bankroll research like this is a sign of an economic failure, but surely curing or preventing genetic disease is just about the most uncontroversial use human genetic modification could have?

Tbf, the 10% that are real people still would represent more people than the handful of people I both know and can easily reach to talk to outside. And even then, what about when one gets home? Can’t stay out all the time

Microbes are still made of chemicals, it’s just different chemicals

Feel like God would have fit this sentiment better. There’s a decent amount of historical evidence for Jesus himself to my understanding (not the supernatural stuff attributed to him so much, but moreso that there was a guy the various stories were based off of). But an actual benevolent diety would probably make for a more pleasant world than what we have to deal with, probably why so many people care so strongly about the idea and want to believe it I’d imagine.

That’s another take of mine tbh, if clothes hold obnoxiously visible wrinkles, the fabric is too stiff to be comfortable in my view anyway. I try to avoid buying and wearing anything that needs to be ironed if I can get away with it.

Folding laundry is a complete waste of time and effort. If it’s been through the wash it’s clean, it’s not going to be any cleaner just because you spent half an hour doing laundry origami.

I don’t eat meat at all anymore, but growing up, whenever we had steaks I would always prefer it well done. It wasn’t really that I enjoyed it that way though, just that I did not like the flavor and texture of steak even cooked perfectly, my father did and kept making me eat it, and cooking it to a crisp and then covering it with ketchup and paprika was a way to make it not taste like steak anymore.

and not to mention, the tools required to create it (maybe not the best examples, but still) are already in the possession of virtually everybody.

Ive heard nice things about Amsterdam, though there’s the obvious caveat that the impression the internet gives of a place is rarely an accurate picture of how a place actually is.

Honestly, I don’t really believe people are fundamentally much different now than they were before the internet, I think people are just aware of negative events from a wider area now and that things that previously would have gotten blamed on something else get blamed on the internet instead.

Shouldn’t Spanish have the same problem? I’ve seen them abbreviate it to EEUU though, which I assume must help prevent confusion?

I have to eat really quick on workdays, so I don’t always get anything, but usually cereal, or I’ll spread applesauce and cinnamon on homemade bread if I’ve prepared some the last few days. Or recently pan dulce if I happen to have bought any recently because there’s a bakery nearby that ive discovered sells it fresh for quite cheap.

I live in the US and even my walk to the library isn’t that bad. Ive done walks that long or a bit longer as a novelty or to get exercise, but in general no, about half an hour is about as long as I “normally” like to go without looking into a bus or something.

This kind of thing is found in more than just teenagers

You can’t technically truly prove any of these not to be true, but given that if you reject all the evidence available to you for what the world is with the notion that it could be fake, you end up with nothing left to make decisions with, you might as well just take the world at face value until things are proven otherwise.

Then if we want fission in 2035, we’ll have to start now. If we want fusion by 2035, we’re probably out of luck because we haven’t even got the tech to the point where we can produce net electricity with it yet (net energy from the reaction yes, but that’s not good enough for a power plant), and once we get that we need to refine it enough to produce enough energy to be worth the cost, and then we have to actually build the power plants. If we want neither, then we’ll probably still be using fossil fuels for a significant percentage of power generation by then, because while solar is cheap and should probably be the bulk of our future energy mix, is isn’t good for some use cases

While I do agree that we should research fusion, it doesn’t really address all the issues of fission. It still has some nuclear waste generation; not from spent fuel but from the reactor walls being bombarded with neutrons, causing some of that material to become radioactive, and it will likely require even more complex facilities and so have the “you need to spend a massive amount of time and money to get a reactor online” economic issues fission has, but possibly even worse. The physics technically give you more energy per amount of fuel and the fuel is more abundant, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the resulting electricity will be cheaper, especially when both systems use so little fuel anyway.

It does avoid the possibility of a runaway reaction/meltdown I guess, but modern reactors are pretty good about avoiding that anyway. For that matter, newer (relatively speaking) fission reactor designs exist that can process waste into more fuel (not forever obviously, the fuel can’t be infinite, but enough to greatly extend the fuel supply and deal with much of the waste issue at the same time). The fission waste issue is also a bit overblown; the actual volume is very low, so just digging a handful of very deep storage facilities to stick it in is a viable option for an extremely long time.

The biggest issue for fission, imho, is that we simply don’t build very much of it. The less of it we make, the smaller the pool of people and facilities that are equipped to run it, maintain it, build the components etc, and the more expensive running it or building more becomes.

Hmm, that is fair. I would suggest making votes not federate at all in that case, except doing that would make single person or very small instances effectively be limited to sorting by new