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Fantastic work by the team in taking the wonderful things mining has done for the planet and expanding it to the oceans! I'm sure once we've had our way with the ocean and left almost nothing to live that we can find a way to live harmoniously with what remains.

Do you want to be less aware in general? Or spend less time ruminating about aspects of your own personality?

I found the book "Self Awareness" by Red Hawk pretty helpful in disentangling and disambiguating some of this stuff.

Wish I could upvote this one ten times, or a hundred. Thanks for taking a little time to type it up.

This is how 3-story apartment complexes get approved in my town :)

Cognitive Liberty and Religious Liberty FTW. Medicalization implicitly promotes the idea that you should need a "medical issue" in order to have the government's permission to ingest plants and fungi that spring out of the ground spontaneously.

I'm open to proposals for an ethical basis for technological work that's better than "well it's not nearly as societally destructive as what I was building before!"

No, but imagine a world in which brain power was distributed by consensus via a decentralized ledger, rather than a bio-authoritarian central party! The crowdsourced, democratic nature of DeBi(o) would sense this problem early and avoid it in the first place. There are other solutions as well, but they all have one thing in common...you guessed it, blockchain technology!

Well, if we let our "leaders" run amok with the powers of warfare I'd expect some serious repercussions to the citizenry. "I didn't vote for him" won't get us much sympathy with our brothers and sisters elsewhere if our government is out killing people en masse.

Until we treat "unintelligent" people in our society with compassion and respect I think "intelligent" is a misnomer for the remaining demographic.

Source? I have no reason to doubt you but would love to see where those data. Most of what I heard is that "lead exposure above zero is significant" and "if you're living near an airport, especially one serving smaller plans, you are being exposed".

$GOOG stock has pretty much doubled since the beginning of the pandemic, meaning the company has been having absolutely no trouble whatsoever doing its job with a fully remote workforce for 2 years now. They don't "need" employees to come back to the office.

I was talking to a friend last week who got hired this way (initial rejection, then a position opened up that seemed a better fit). It does happen, I guess.

I'm not sure what field you're in but if you're reasonably competent, being transparent and honest with what gaps there are in your knowledge can be an attractive trait for a candidate. Someone who's forthcoming about things they're unsure about is someone you can train faster because they recognize that they don't know everything...and that trait keeps them open to learning and open to better solutions too. Sometimes people want to hear that you struggle with the same things.

All of this probably goes out the window in hyper-competitive fields but in my field for example (software engineering) where there's a labor shortage, I've found this to be the case anywhere outside of the companies that just want to test how well you remember your Computer Science degree.

Canola is a branding name to distract you from the fact that the oil is technically from the nearly un-marketable "rapeseed".

It's more nuanced than that but you could do a lot worse than that list. Fat profile matters, and smoke point matters, e.g. olive oil is great but if you're frying stuff with it you're turning a lot of it toxic; avocado oil is better for high heat.

Mice strike the best balance for science of animals who are decent proxies for humans, are inexpensive to breed and genetically manipulate, and who don't trigger much ethical backlash.

It seems to me though that the extent to which mouse biology and behavior translates well to human biology and behavior might also be the extent to which it's totally immoral. "Yes, but think of how many future lives I'll save by vivisecting this sentient or semi-sentient being..."

Both Opera's built-in adblocker and uBlock Origin on other browsers takes care of most of this nicely for me.

Correct, but if we never came up with better hypotheses based on the accumulated results of previous studies then science would have no utility and it would be pointless to perform in the first place. Is that your argument?

Here's a to-scale visual timeline of the earth's temperature change over the last 20,000 years. See if you can find anything anomalous ;)

https://xkcd.com/1732/

Neomania is dangerous. New things are usually not fully understood, and what we understand about them is usually asymmetric: the upsides are generally obvious and occur in the near term, and the downsides are generally poorly understood and take a while to become apparent. The history of science is absolutely littered with examples of this in nearly every applied field.

You may be right, but airlines are either the canary in the coal mine or an exceptional case. They operate on incredibly, incredibly small margins so vulnerability to small disturbances is, at least in this industry, totally expected. I.e. not necessarily true for other trade sectors.

Or, you know, legalize the hundreds of psychedelic plants that grow like weeds all over the world that have the same effect at an imperceptibly small fraction of the economic and environmental cost...

Anecdote featuring both: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/08/stewart-brand-talks-about-...

(Stewart Brand founded the Long Now Foundation)

Cramming most socializing into whatever bits of free time are left after hobbies seems unlikely to work for most people.

> but it hasn't put a dent in our ability to engineer the earth to suit our needs

We'll see about that when most soil is barren and most bees are gone. That is, very shortly.

It wouldn't be the first time...or second, or third, or fourth, or fifth...

Source: https://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Cha...

Us!

Well said, seconded. The tragedy of the uncommons.

Would it surprise you to hear that the plastics industry came up with that symbol in order to make it confusing to the layperson to differentiate between recyclables and single-use plastics?

"Source" (not a primary source): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g <-- which has some links to further reading/viewing and a few sources.

Not because of the highly processed and refined wheat (and sometimes sugar) that usually constitute its main ingredients?

Do you have a link to share? I looked up "Cliff Gnu’s no BS guide to sight improvement" and "Cliff no BS guide to sight improvement" on DDG and Google and the top result is this comment, with unrelated stuff below.

Edit: eventually found this: https://losetheglasses.org/cliffgnu-vision.pdf