Wealthy or young professionals who can make a significant amount more money in America vs. Canada, which is generally the same thing.

The CEO was basically a nobody. A rich nobody, certainly, but a nobody. I didn’t know of his existence before he was killed, and I’m sure I’m in the same group as a majority of Americans and the rest of the world. Likewise, I don’t know how who replaced him. So why would there be division? You’ll get some objective, impersonal “He was a father and husband, this is terrible,” and some objective, somewhat more emotional “He made his money by refusing sick people care,” but there isn’t a lot of arguing because even though it was very real, it’s still in the realm of the hypothetical for most people. Even kids killed in a school half a world away is more real, and more emotional, for most people because they have kids, will have kids, or were a kid in a situation not too dissimilar, and it could have been them if not for their different circumstances.

Those spoilers deserve an upvote.

Similar for me. In the moment, talking about dying doesn’t feel like a joke. After you’ve seen enough and come out the other side, death doesn’t feel significant or threatening enough to have to worry about joking about. I feel like those who joke about killing themselves have either never felt like doing it or have confronted it and moved on.

And suicide jokes are probably best kept for groups where you know where people are. A lot of people mask being suicidal by joking around and putting a lot of work into being upbeat, often surprising those who only know them superficially when they commit suicide.

I have an Oracle cloud account for access to their free VPS. I’m part of a virtual TTRPG playing with my kids and their friends over half the continent and don’t have to deal with fighting to get computers to see a server on my home network. I’m operating in the cracks, living off the crumbs of their paid services, using barely enough of their resources to even count as a rounding error. It’s a win for me.

…as long as they aren’t bombing stuff.

Which brings up interesting questions about liberty and if you have a right to help people who can’t ask for help or don’t want it.

Kind of want to say, “I’ll take your guilty verdict and raise you a Jan 6.”

Well, things went about as well for Japan’s royalty as it did for Japan in general when they lost WWII.

Their government was an imperial model during WWII. Unless they killed off the royalty, why would you assume they had no descendants?

Why would being in a simulation require that those who create or maintain it only observe?

Edit: I misread, merely observing is certainly a possibility.

There is a difference between maximum age and life expectancy, just as there is a difference between life expectancy at different ages. The life expectancy at 25 in Roman times was about 70 years old. All of our advances have added about 10% to a person’s life span after they got past childhood diseases, the recklessness of youth, and serving in the military in the case of Romans. And I’m not entirely sure of the relevance of a genocide in Israel to Xi’s prospects.

Immune suppression drugs have their own risks, and the older you are, the harder surgeries are on you. Even if they have cloned organs, how does that help systemic frailty?

Life expectancy at 25 hasn’t changed dramatically in the last 2000 years, less than 10 years in most parts of the world. Life expectancy at birth has improved dramatically, and that isn’t doing much for me, Putin, or Xi at this point. Certainly, the improved healthcare afforded to Putin and Xi is going to help their life expectancy more than the average. All that said, a lot of improvements have happened in the last couple centuries, mostly based on our knowledge. Sure, exponential growth isn’t going to happen forever, not even in gaining knowledge, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen in biology for the next century. If it does, extending life expectancy at birth to 150 could be quite conservative.

I always found The Scientist by Coldplay to be a pretty upbeat song about the death of a loved one. And Viva la Vida upbeat, and all about the fall from grace.

Bad simulation design?

I wasn’t setting an upper limit. There is good evidence we are closing in on some of the causes of the symptoms of aging, as well as gaining evidence that dealing with the symptoms may reduce the effects of aging. If we only have those basic tools in the next 100 years, I could see lifespans being pushed to 150 to 200 for the typical person. If we can also deal with the lesser regenerative capability of the brain, I could see people living for centuries. As you said in other comments, there are a lot of interconnected pieces, and just fixing one or some of them won’t be as useful as fixing all of them, which really takes transplants off the table as a general solution, but also means we may see limited increases in life span rather than getting past the tipping point of life extension research outpacing the gain it gives you, eg., extending lifespans more than one year per year.

I honestly believe people could live to 150 within the next century and if organ transplants are part of it it will either be due to cloning or far better control of the immune system than we have now. I don’t expect those advances to be soon enough to help either of these guys, no matter how much money they have.

I’m pretty curious about the C2, as well, but don’t live in their market, and don’t want to pay 100% of the phone cost in shipping fees, etc. And after all that, I have no guarantee of support. As for the €60 per year, my latest phone is an S22 Ultra, half of whose features I no longer use due to the updated Samsung TOS. I can absorb that cost for the sake of updates, if they’d let me.

Well, yes, dumping irradiated water into the ocean was always an option. So long as the power-generating components aren’t the same as the desalination components, you’re good as far as the potable water is concerned. This isn’t much of a solution for the irradiated water, though, any more than just dumping it into the ocean was in the first place.

It really depends. Osmosis is a chemical process, so if the source of the radiation would be filtered, then it would remove the radioactive component. If the water is made with radioactive isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen, it would just flow through.