NotSuspicious

Yes, these are good ideas too.

One of the things that has most pissed me off about these papers is that VASP is proprietary and requires a license to use.

Yes, it should.

> Folks made the exact same arguments about alcohol and marijuana.

Maybe those people were right? Prohibition decreased the amount of people addicted to alcohol and the number of people who beat their wives. If we had a more hard-line response to alcohol instead of the half-in/half-out wishy-washy nonsense that was Prohibition enforcement maybe less people would have their lives ruined by alcohol to this day. Singapore famously goes hard even against cannabis and they are a vastly more functional society crime-wise than Oregon. I know from personal experience that when cannabis was decriminalized where I am the drivers in my area became much worse. I don't use Uber anymore here because almost every time I enter a car now it's too often clear that the driver is high.

I wonder if Americans are ever going to realize their incessant penchant for 'freedoms' with regards to drugs/guns/speech/ certain corporate policies / etc are harmful to the only goals that matter to a society: the flourishing of the population. I wonder if America will ever have an adult in the room.

Yeah, OP's timeline is incredibly off. It has absolutely no bearing to reality.

> However you'd find also thousands, millions in fact, of happy people who used the services of psychics, mediums, astrologers, crystal healers, taro readers, shamans, reiki practitioners, remote viewers.

Maybe, and I know this seems like a crazy idea, we should look into that? It seems like a pretty big blindspot to dismiss all of that outright because the mechanism of action isn't yet understood or because it clashes with philosophical views that were common among some academics who died last century.

Visualization is a skill that can be trained. Close your eyes for a few minutes a day and visualize and mentally "reward" yourself during the brief glimpses when the visualization is hyperreal. Eventually you can tap into it easier. It's very close imo to lucid dreaming. An easy way to help kickstart it is move around in 3D space in the imagining. Sometimes interesting stuff happens like if you are visualizing a fireplace you will suddenly feel a bunch of heat as though a fire were in front of you.

Definitely some interesting features there. I'm actually a little surprised that Reddit never used karma as a virtual currency of any sort. It seems almost like a no-brainer from an engagement perspective.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ has a lot of blogposts that go over low-tech solutions to problems that were otherwise lost to history. For example, solar panels in the 1910s, early industry that used rope to transport power over several kilometers, the original peat-powered industrial revolutions, etc. Extremely fascinating stuff that most history books I've seen tend to miss out on. And they've compiled their posts into books you can buy

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/offline-reading/

https://www.lulu.com/search?contributor=Kris+De+Decker&page=...

Comparing "God-of-the-gaps" to the UAP/UFO Phenomenon only makes sense if there is abundant, first-hand evidence for God that goes back several generations at least, is seen in numerous, opposing human-cultures and only can be ignored by debunking paradigms that vacillate wildly between a smug misunderstanding of pop-epistemology and the deeply, irrationally conspiratorial.

Actually, now that you mention it . . .

https://www.ufohastings.com/

https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/

https://www.uaptheory.com/

There are plenty of series and movies that use more-contemporary cultural values to mask bad-storytelling. I really don't see how Pixar is at fault for this, however. How is this relevant to the failures of The Good Dinosaur and Elemental, for example?

I am a bit envious of your apparent lack of akrasia. I read a similar argument to yours by Abraham Maslow ("Motivation and Personality" I believe?) and have the same reaction then as I do now. The inner worlds of different human beings can be radically different. Sometimes we forget that and assume our experiences or ways of experiencing are universal. Some people have aphantasia, others (more lucky perhaps) don't have akrasia or at the very least can sufficiently overcome it by bringing to mind whether or not one wants to do the task at-hand. Not all of us are so blessed, although all of us could probably benefit from weighing the costs and benefits of doing tasks that we believe need to be done but still have resistance to doing.

The "Marseyverse" exists. It really only has individual subreddit-websites. Each website is a fork of Ruqqus code (which itself was a failed-reddit clone that forked reddit's code) Examples would be

rdrama.net watchpeopledie.tv themotte.org ovarit.com

All full-reddit clones that I know of have failed miserably. And many reddit communities have tried establishing off-sites and failed. The factors for success seem to be:

1. The communities were banned or hampered on reddit 2. The communities have a unique culture 3. Some people in the community take on the responsibility for developing/maintaining the offsite 4. The users of the community donate money to keep everything running (a la SomethingAwful)

This entire comment chain is missing the fact that there are many UAP sightings in China and one of the reasons the US isn't being mum about this anymore is because China is exploring the phenomenon without all of the West's weird religious and secular hangups about the possibility of nonhuman intelligence.

Why would this be the case? I would naively think that since the chips can only be made in a fab and the rest can be made basically anywhere that that wouldn't be true.

It looks like they aren't since they said it will use an M2 chip

I'm having trouble understanding what this means.