helloworld11

Joined 5 years ago

Karma
1,381
Submissions
684
Member since
Feb 23
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Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
Apparently, based on contemporary accounts, opinion was varied, but they were meaty and easy to catch. A bit of selective breeding would probably make them ideal poultry farm animals.
Comment · 3 years ago
But nowhere near as captivating for media soundbites and news posts. The dodo is one very symbolic bird and just about everyone recognizes it right away.
Comment · 3 years ago
Also worth noting that dodo birds were reportedly very tasty and meat-rich, so farming millions of them as a resurrected species for food is hardly out of the question.
Comment · 3 years ago
If you founded a company that actually, really, visibly de-extincted the very famous,, deeply recognizable, colloquially-adopted dodo ("dead as a dodo, "dumb as a dodo", etc), and then had a literal dodo-looking dodo bird walking around in some game preserve for all the world to see, finding funding via dodo leasing would be the least of your monetary inflows.

VC money would rain down upon you like mana from heaven and the publicity would garner your company so many indirect financial rewards that you could later move on to all sorts of things. Not to mention the IP and patent rights you'd presumably create along the way with your cloning process and related procedures for future profitable use.

Comment · 3 years ago
"But crypto is a terrible idea. People who violate banking regulations are criminals, Why do we need cash? I pay for everything with my card, it's sooo convenient!" Say many naval-gazing, privileged people on this very site who've never had to deal with the grotesquely regular bullshit of third world banking and government finance...
Comment · 3 years ago
Get "canceled" in your own work or social sphere, or in social media in a way that filters down to your work or social sphere for saying, writing, being recorded doing (or saying) something that doesn't fit the dominant ideological narrative of modern culture, and maybe you'll rapidly find out just why and how some people get scared of cancel culture. Sure, Stalinist show trials or Maoist purges these things in our modern western world certainly are not, but examples abound and in a non-lethal modern context, they can be very damaging indeed.
Comment · 3 years ago
Second this recommendation. I loved Contagion, and watching it during the early days of our own very real recent pandemic put a whole new spin to an already great film.
Comment · 3 years ago
Deep Impact doesn't quite deserve a place with the others. Its depiction of an asteroid impact and many other things is surprisingly realistic considering the source material.
Comment · 3 years ago
If the magnetosphere disappeared tomorrow, completely, as it did on Mars at one point, it would take literally billions of years for our atmosphere to totally degrade away. It would take at least tens of millions for it to degrade appreciably. The magnetosphere of Mars failed just 500 million years after our red neighbor formed, and even after the several billion intervening years, and after having started with much less overall atmospheric bulk than Earth, Mars still has some atmosphere left (very little to be sure, but we're talking about billions of years of being bathed in solar wind and radiation). In other words, if our magnetosphere disappeared tomorrow, you likely wouldn't have to worry about major atmospheric failure for many generations of your family's lives.

Caveat: Even with the atmosphere fully present, the magnetosphere does indeed stop many charged particles that a gas barrier does not, and this would definitely be an immediate problem to surface life to some extent (how much is debatable however). We'd also be much more susceptible to electronic and electrical grid damage caused by a much larger percentage of solar storms that would have previously been too weak to do much because of our giant magnetic shield..

Comment · 3 years ago
For many of them, not even that. Is Socrates outdated, or Thomas Jefferson? How about Picasso? The first of these is widely believed to have been what we would today call a pedophile (this being common in his culture and time), the second was a slave owner and the third was an abusive, jealous womanizer.

Or how about Gone with the Wind itself: The novel and book deal with many universal themes of families, love and human ties being destroyed and deformed by terrible circumstances outside of individual control. Many, many victims of political and social tragedy from any time in history right to the present can easily identify with that central concept without being completely blinded into flippant, fashionable woke dismissal by focusing only on the type of society portrayed in the book and film. The movie's central emotional drama is nearly universal to human history. This is why it was so enormously popular, and its central emotional concept still is today.

Comment · 3 years ago
The very idea of art becoming "outdated" because of changing political and social norms is absurd. Even if most of us no longer share the sentiments behind a piece of human cultural history or its creators, doesn't mean we should reject it as a part of our history or not be able to appreciate something of it at the very least for reasons of historical learning. A vast proportion of history's most interesting thinkers, creators and writers were full of flaws that in some cases would today be considered literally criminal, should they be erased from modern appreciation because of this foolish idea of "outdated"?
Comment · 3 years ago
A certain site that has the words "The" "pirate", "bay" and org in its URL. It's where a friend of a friend that I know through a second cousin stumbled upon their frequently used copy of Office 2007 (and quite a few other things)...
Comment · 3 years ago
That they make up a small proportion of the population is indisputable. Just check disposable wealth demographics. That they tend toward greater average intelligence than many in the average is certainly much more debatable, but at least in terms of access to better education resources, yes. Though I think that yes, on average, many of those who made their own wealth are better at problem solving and planning than the average.
Comment · 3 years ago
For many people disgusted by seeing a person like Holmes having it easy despite being egregariously guilty of criminal offenses against others in several terrible ways, it's not hypocrisy in the way you try to describe. Instead it's simply being angry that a justice system which regularly hammers much poorer people into the ground for often very minor offenses then treats a wealthy criminal like her with kid gloves in specific ways.

One can support reforms against punitive justice and still be disgusted by something like this, or one can also support prison reform while considering Holmes's crimes bad enough to merit a fairly strong degree of punishment in this specific case. Basically: complex subjects like this are full of nuance, and strawmen need not apply to and honest debate.

Comment · 3 years ago
In general, wealthy people make up a small proportion of the population and tend (though not always) towards greater intelligence, or at least education, than the average. Both of these factors make them less likely to show up in prisons in general. It doesn't have to be about connections and special favors. Sure, many wealthy people can afford better legal defense and the justice system definitely makes things easier for them, but the rich do indeed go to real-people prison if they fuck up badly enough and get caught doing it.

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