The first XKCD that comes to mind

Ellision sounds like the kind of guy that wants an unstoppable army of robot swarms.

What is the phrase that Representative Jamie Raskin recently brought up the term neo-monarchy.

The save the world plot is new.

I appreciated the capitalist / industrialist commentary that this is what Ficsit does: Drop a few pioneers onto a planet and turn it into a giant self-consuming manufacturing plant, like a bacterium infecting a cell, that feeds some remote market with hyper-processed goods.

Oh well. I expect it still to be amazing.

Can confirm Satisfactory_ has eaten 3000+ hours of my life.

I’m curious if the hypertube physics is still the same, since lobbing myself between sites, or into the sky to do surveys or climb tall hills smacks of Portal and_ The Matrix._

I hope it all still works.

The new Bacon Agaric looks nice.

Because fuck students. We always have, sometimes literally.

This is what we call a moral hazard, , when the fucked up consequences for your actions that benefit you are visited upon someone else.

Wait, are you meaning to imply no one has ever suggested drivers should be allowed to run over protesters in then us? Bills submitted to red-state legislatures have made news.

Are you sure you want to try to take this hill?

The largest single project in the world is the US National Highway System, and yet, somehow, all our public transit and trans-national train services suck.

You must love your car so much.

The opening scene to Apollo 13 (1995) features a party in Houston with NASA dudes as they gather around the television and Walter Cronkite announces as Neil Armstrong takes his first step on the moon. ( On YouTube )

I was not at that party, but I was at a party in Houston with NASA dudes as we watched the very first moon landing. My dad was a mission control guy with the black horn-rimmed glasses, white shirt and black tie, but Apollo 12, not 11 (Neil Armstrong) or 13 (the one that blew up and barely made it home).

I couldn’t walk yet, and I got that the space man on the screen was super important, but at the time I was missing a whole lot of context. The blanks would fill in with time, since the US was super proud of that moment. It’s my very first memory.

Well, it depends on whether you believe everyone is, to borrow from the US Declaration of Independence, endowed with inalienable rights.

Here in the States there’s actually a legal defense, Necessity . This is the same category under which self defense lies, that if a crime committed is necessary to preserve life and well being it may be justified or exculpable.

Usually the justifying life and limb cannot exceed the harm done by the crime. So in the case of cannibalism (which was mentioned elsewhere in this thread) one isn’t justified to kill someone else to preserve their own life, but if they happen to be dead already, it’s justified to eat their remains to live (as per the Donner Party incident – though in that case, they decided to eat their fallen after considerable deliberation)

It gets weird when, say, a mother breaks into a pharmacy and steals very expensive medicines in order to keep her kids alive because the price of the medications raises questions as to the value of a human life.

Now in the US, the courts are terribly corrupt, and thanks to prior incidents exculpation based on circumstances (e.g. Dan White’s twinkie defense) federal and state courts in the US are less likely to actually consider circumstances without some top lawyer guns making a big stink (usually hiring expert witnesses to painstakingly explain why those circumstances make a difference). So if you’re poor enough that you need to steal bread to live, you’re probably not going to benefit from a necessity defense, even when it should be valid.

Licenses are a wrongdoing against the state, and behaviors are licensed by the state allegedly in protection of the interests of the public. Licensed driving is to assure one is qualified to drive, so the wrongdoing against the community doesn’t happen until the driver is involved in an incident that brings harm to others (or to other public interests, such as the environment – driving into a lake would count).

But where this goes under necessity is that her occupation, and thus her survival may depend on her capacity to drive, and if the state is going to strip her of license, it has to take that into consideration, or deal with the consequences of motivating more crime.

Have you thought about why public transit is poorly funded and developed?

Because the automotive industry actively dismantled it in the early twentieth century and then lobbied ever since to redirect funding to highway maintenance? The largest single government project in existence in the US National Highway System.

Some people, when given a choice between cannibalism and dying of starvation will choose the former. The ones that do may choose to regret it, but they are alive to have the capacity to regret.

At the point that you are struggling to survive, any society that does not immediately render aid is no society at all (not to you), and is either an enemy, taking resources you need, or prey.

I find it unfathomable that people imagine that poor people and untermenschen should just resign themselves to dying off. It explains why the working class might resort to terror attacks to assert their right to exist.

Getting a job takes months on average. And the way our current system works, you have to lie about experience to get your first job, and then upgrade a couple of times to get a living wage with survival benefits. That takes years.

You have to eat and sleep today. If you have ongoing medical requirements, your healthcare can’t wait for a job.

Since the publishers are also trying to suppress out-of-print media, abandonware and public domain material (also fair use) and the courts are favoring the publishers over the good of the public, we know it’s no longer about promoting science and useful arts or building a robust public domain.

The companies and courts alike are breaking the social contract, hence the trmporary monopolies enstated by the agencies of the same state are invalid. Piracy is no longer a valid crime since the state licenses are no longer valid.

(They will still enforce the will of the state — ICE does a lot of raids to enforce commercial interests when it’s not massacring refugees— but that doesn’t legitimize the will of the state. It only shows they are willing tyrants glad to use violence to oppress.)

We have nothing to lose but our chains!

Does she need to work? Is commuting by public transit intolerably slower than driving a car?

It would justify the behavior.

In my case enjoying life is not something that I can simply do. I manage mental illness which features chronic suicidality, but it’s been driven into me very hard that I am at fault for my grief and trauma. But having a sober understanding of why I feel the way I do, and the social forces that drove parents, teachers and authorities to treat me the way I did helps me counter those neural processes.

This cartoon illustrates the dynamic I’ve encountered, and I hypothesize the mental illness epidemic in the US is intergenerational and compounding.

That we’re also dealing with a couple of imminent great filters the human species is unprepared to navigate hits hard for me.

My doom and gloom is catalyzed by a lot of things including, yes, a novelty cookbook that appears to be made in recognition of desperate times. It isn’t the only thing that informs my doom and gloom, and this isn’t to say I don’t have hope. But it is a Goblins at the gates of Gondor kind of situation, in which a lot of things have to go simultaneously right before we’re out of the fine mess we’re in.

The US needs so, so, so much reform. Especially regarding public transit. In most parts of the nation anything that isn’t a car stuck in traffic is for poor people who are also disregarded across volumes of needs issues.

We’re falling back to where we were in the great depression, and it still seems nothing short of violence and bloodshed will stop our ownership class from exploiting the rest of us.

In the Great Depression, it’s not like anyone was starving to death. Rather it was like they were eating flour paste and dying of malnutrition.

That we are in an era that we need the SBC speaks to how bad things are. Here in the states, we don’t have food deserts, we have food swamps, where the only thing one can get is junk food.

I’m trying to imagine how were going to get lions and bees to compete. I think all the lions want all the bees because they polinate the vert that their snacks eat.

And the lions regulate the animals that eat the plants the bees depend on.

It’s all good between lions and bees.

Kids figure out how to provide false positives in 3… 2… 1…

A Jack-In-The-Box in San Francisco (The Geary Street one) decided to keep its drive through open until midnight while the walk-in part closed at 8pm, which bugged me as a bicyclist. (They wouldn’t serve me without a motor.)

Eventually the place opened up a walk-in window for after hours service, so I wasn’t the only one bothered.