helloworld11

>At a certain point humanity's chances with the warming are zero. Just depends on how many dominoes start to fall and how fast. We could conceivably wipe out just about all life on the planet.

The hyperbole in your claim is laughable and completely unhelpful for anyone who's on the fence about climate change and climate change measures. Even the worst evidence-based predictions of the UN and the IPCC come nowhere near the extinction of all life or anything remotely in the same ballpark.

What you're saying seems to be part of a doom and gloom fetishism that has always been innate to humanity (see centuries of apocalyptic predictions under any number of pretexts you can conceive) and has nothing to do with real science, real risks and real, possible solutions. Today, for many, this fetishism happens to have latched onto climate change, and steals some of its apparent legitimacy from the fact that the underlying problem is a real one, though not a genuine doom scenario.

The Earth has warmed drastically at many times in its past, and it will survive along with life, without problems despite even our worst human-caused warming. Even with our predicted warming trends, humanity will be a long ways from being in danger of extinction as the climate changes to a warmer one because of our economic activities. As we've already done many times in our past, we will simply adapt.

The gang violence exists precisely because these drugs are black market substances, making your argument that this is a good reason for their continued illegality as absurd as it's always been when put forth by lawmakers. Also:

>but for heroin and meth I think stopping production and importation is an important step to fixing things.

Yes, exactly what authorities worldwide have invested untold billions in doing since decades ago to such effective, violence-reducing, harm reducing results...

The drug wars are an unmitigated idiocy and always have been, for ALL drugs. Worse things than these are legal and though not perfectly managed or free of harm, much less harmful than the entire shitshow that anti-drug crusades have produced. How can people not see this after 50 years of drug war disasters and immense financial, social and legal losses?

How the hell can they justify this habit of telling a developer what they can and can't work on in their own time, or making any claim to it afterwards just because someone worked at company X during the same time they made side project Y? The whole tendency seems grossly onerous and unjustifiable to me.

There's more than a great deal of evidence and different rhythms to the contrary for your blanket statement to be in any way certain. Many people live long, very productive and healthy lives not being diurnal to great effect, even if most are diurnal.

Good. My laptop is too "shitty" to handle Windows 11 despite Microfart's dumpster fire of forced automatic updates, and I get a bit of satisfaction from knowing that it can't railroad itself into my life even if I were to purposely let it.

Curiously, both of those theories above could be true at the same time: Your brain suffers prediction error or simply unexpected touch error that causes you to go into a little frenzy of laughter and wriggling at the sensation, so in response it developed a body-wide message response that says "self touching coming up, take it in stride", specifically because we all need to touch ourselves all the time and can't afford to suffer the tickling caused by light, sudden touching.

What kind of fucked up luxury bubble of self indulgent privilege do you live in with that idea? There are literally millions of families out there in the world (and in the developed world too) who support themselves, even with multiple kids, on much less than just one of these "low" $160K salaries, let alone two of them. Try living outside the world's most voraciously expensive tech bubbles of overpriced idiocy for a little while to see how the literal other 99% of the planet by some miracle live well enough to raise healthy kids. What blind nonsense some people here comment.

Worth noting that those "soft and fluffy" clumps of gravel and sand still move at 18+km per second and even one the size of Dimorphos striking the earth would easily cause an explosion big enough to completely level even the largest city (think 30 to 50 megatons of explosive energy upon impact). Or for example a comet, -mostly just a sort of dirty snowball- a couple miles in diameter would cause a global climatic catastrophe and vaporize every living thing and standing structure within hundreds of miles of its impact location.

Terrifying capabilities for such soft and fluffy, brittle things.

This and your previous comment suggest that you're either a troll or truly some unique level of narrow-minded fool. Do you simply defend and applauds any sort of self-serving government rules or characterizations of others because they have vague, nebulous state power justifications on their side? Whistleblowers often get fired or worse for "submitting to the proper authorities". History is loaded with cases of them doing just that only to be brushed off and the information they revealed to be buried even further in obscurity. Surely you can't be so dense as to not have read about just how easily and frequently this happens before labeling someone a traitor for going outside official channels to disclose conduct that even the responsible government admitted was BLATANTLY illegal in many ways?

>as a very backward future is shaping up...

If you're referring to nuclear war, why not just plainly state it? It's certainly a possibility even now. After the initial panic about Armageddon after the first days of invasion, many people have settled into vague curiosity about how the war goes, especially since the Russian army has been shown to fail so badly in so many ways (compared to what was predicted about its fighting ability at least), but the nukes are still in their silos and Putin is still left with extreme options if he really feels there's nothing bigger to lose vs "saving face".

I've commented this here before and it's worth repeating again. Any time at all no matter what digital good you're buying (especially movies and ebooks), strip the DRM if at all possible, by any means possible (fuck the laws that prohibit this, they wholeheartedly deserve to be ignored for personal use) and find a way to truly own your work. If a seller claims they sold something to you, it should be yours for as long as you want to keep it with absolutely no bullshit like this making the idea of ownership into an insulting joke forced upon people as if they were idiots.

The sad thing is that many people seem to act like exactly what these companies consider them by actually trusting to never lose access to their archives of "owned" content. Apparently, it's "just convenient". Not so much when you suddenly lose it to corporate shittiness.

Truly what a self-indulgent, privileged comment from someone who evidently doesn't share the lives, practical needs or economic circumstances of millions of people who truly, really, fucking absolutely need cars for their daily living needs. Oh hey.. Let's flippantly recommend an "ebike"... Because of course that's the perfect solution for all the ranchers, farmers, far-suburban residents and millions of people who live in neighborhoods and cities where public transit and bikes are absurdly impractical for the jobs they need to do each day to pay the bills.

Truly, some of the people on HN are incredible at taking their own little bubbles of life and just cluelessly extrapolating them outward to any situation without a single pause. It's laughable.

This foolish article might as well be titled "Infectious diseases continue to kill many people as they always have" These sorts of things are a fact of life in our world, and unless there are very specific, concrete reasons for taking special measures during specific time frames (as could be perhaps justified for COVID during a certain time), nothing except for "moving on" can be asked of society. The human world literally has no other choice, and to insist on draconian disease control measures just because hundreds a day die of X or Y infectious agent is absurd when you simply understand that many, many people have always died daily from preventable infectious vectors.

At this point, COVID is so little different from certain other previously existent viruses that no special measures are justified anymore. Furthermore, those that were applied already with many still unexplored social and health consequences not only worked only ambiguously at best, they also should have been carefully examined before being pushed even further for any reason.

I'm not sure of the quoted doctor's agenda (aside from maybe some self-serving free media publicity by playing into that same media's need for fear-clicks) but he's proposing an absurdity through emotional appeals that he himself should know to be untenable for a functional world.

Sony's cameras however have wickedly good AF, even the low-cost models.

You truly are a disingenuous apologist for disgustingly murderous police tactics, which lacked all reasonable professionalism, duty to the basic idea of policing in a remotely free country or even loosely moral barometers. No, the correct response to the warrant being served against weaver wasn't to shoot his dog after secretly invading his property in tac gear and deliberately provoking a defensive response. No, the correct further axction is not to shoot his 14 year-old son in the back or to shoot through a window at a house in which you know a woman with a 10 month-old baby is standing. No normal notion of good legal procedure or even non-moronic, non-thuggish thinking can defend these and other acts.

Even a number of police agree. Here's a claim from one of the U.S Marshalls on site:

"Many of the people the USMS used as third party go-betweens on the Weaver case—Bill and Judy Grider, Alan Jeppeson, and Richard Butler—were assessed by the Marshals as more radical than the Weavers. When Deputy U.S. Marshal (DUSM) Dave Hunt asked Grider, "Why shouldn't I just go up there ... and talk to him?", Grider replied, "Let me put it to you this way. If I was sitting on my property and somebody with a gun comes to do me harm, then I'll probably shoot him."

Or how about the deputy assistant director of the FBI at the time, writing in a memo that:

"Something to Consider 1. Charge against Weaver is Bull S___. 2. No one saw Weaver do any shooting. 3. Vicki has no charges against her. 4. Weaver's defense. He ran down the hill to see what dog was barking at. Some guys in camys [camouflage] shot his dog. Started shooting at him. Killed his son. Harris did the shooting. He is in pretty strong legal position."

As one of the comments above states: Let the reader decide what constitutes a reasonable attempt to serve a warrant".

>The people or organizations to which AI-churned art appeals to most desire commercial visual churn. They are the same people who would in any case have least cared about art in its more creative, communicative forms.

I specifically addressed this in my original post. You're exactly the kind of person who would possibly like this AI technology, and apparently not someone who would have an appreciation for art in its artistic, emotionally appealing form. Your disagreement is based on a misunderstanding of definitions.

All of you commenting seem to miss the fundamental point that I made: People who appreciate art for art's human aspects will want HUMAN, emotionally derived art, not a printable piece of AI-generated pixel-vomit that can then be mounted and varnished. I have nothing against anyone doing this and I absolutely don't support banning any technology that lets people explore new frontiers of creativity, but I don't see even AI-connected devices that can physically paint things replacing artists as imaginative human creators of concepts and emotional ideas expressed for other humans. To go on about how an AI could eventually paint or sculpt and so forth from its own algorithms is to miss the point entirely about this specific type of creation and the extremely old human desire to enjoy it.

Perhaps to be expected from a site so frequented by many people who spend their working lives "optimizing" X or Y gimmick for major tech giants and viewing other humans largely as simple parts of a data gathering landscape.

For artists who continue to paint, or use other physical means of expression through base materials and sell them as physical works, this entire AI art surge remains largely irrelevant in a practical sense. A buyer or patron who wants real, physical art will still need and want real, physical art, and I don't see an AI imitating much of that easily any time soon.

The people or organizations to which AI-churned art appeals to most desire commercial visual churn. They are the same people who would in any case have least cared about art in its more creative, communicative forms. And there's nothing creative or imaginative about the results of machine-generated visuals. They're the very opposite in fact, visuals created literally mindlessly.

If anything, I can see AI art giving a new breath of life and interest to real man-made art, much like industrial food production gave organic "local-grown" food producers a chance to brand themselves with a distinct, desirable identity.

I truly don't understand why everybody keeps referencing Mick West's debunking video of these pieces of UFO footage. He gives the distinct impression of being a smugly dogmatic "skeptic" who approaches this subject with all the answers set in his mind beforehand and then molds any arguments or evidence to fit what he's already convinced of, He does this as rigidly as a deep UFO nut would automatically assume something unusual in the sky is always aliens. Note that this behavior is emphatically not genuine skepticism, it's all the opposite in many ways and no more reasoned or rational than a blind belief in the paranormal.

I actually corresponded on the guy about inconsistencies in his own claims about the navy UFO videos and he gave no satisfactory justification for his extremely superficial arguments, which essentially focus on his own perceptions of inconsistencies in the footage itself and simply disregard weeks of repeated sightings, radar tracking and up-close eye-witness encounters between trained, professional pilots and the objects themselves in the air.

These are pilots who on at least a couple of these occasions observed the objects from fairly close range, in broad daylight and had their observations at least partially confirmed at the same time by also professional operators of sophisticated tracking systems (radar etc) onboard the Navy's ships.

Mick West mostly disregards all of this

Debunking with a critical eye is good and necessary but again, one sometimes one gets the feeling that certain debunkers feel a need to do so at all costs because that's their label, even if their own "rational" interpretations make leaps of logic much worse than simply admitting that something inexplicable was observed.

For one thing, the Queen was rich for a list of complex reasons that largely have to do with hereditary properties and assets stretching back centuries. It's not as cut and dried as "taxpayer expense". Yes, the monarchy as an institution benefits from certain public resources, just as do all institutions in all major countries, but it doesn't do so to any obscene degree compared to a vast range of other public projects and organizations that waste enormously while being much better funded. Any major head of state also benefits enormously from taxpayer money in all sorts of ways and lives daily in the lap of luxury with enormous resources spent on his or her security, personal living "needs" and any trips they make. Despite this, I see little complaint about that much larger source of taxpayer money being spent.

There seems to be a reflexive, emotional and partly irrational hatred of the UK monarchy spending heavily and having assets and money, along with certain public benefits (which by the way are carefully circumscribed) by people who barely bat an eye at the fact that the absolute largest sources of resource and tax spending on a vast range of immensely expensive but often wasteful and even pointless things are perfectly modern government institutions that have nothing to do with monarchs. It's an absurd sort of blindness.

What the UK government spent on the idiocy of the Iraq War alone far exceeds all public funds given to the Monarchy in decades, but hey, let's complain about Elizabeth and the castles that have been in her family for centuries.

I never said that Europe didn't advance during the early and later middle ages, only that it advanced slowly compared to what happened when the industrial revolution occurred. Its arrival heavily correlates with many of the factors I described in my comment above for greater wealth and development. I don't think it's a coincidence that the industrial revolution started in the UK, one of the most peaceful and stable of states in the world at the time. Though of course, there are other factors that im missing which influenced the development of modern markets.

Bullshit. Truly, what nonsense. Europe spent centuries stagnating under the rules of multiple fiefdoms in constant attrition against each other for power, wealth, territory and so forth. Many other parts of the world did likewise for long stretches of time and in both cases, only moderate technical advancement that happened very, very slowly. It was only when certain very specific conditions of government stability, property protection, legal transparency and basic respect for individual and human rights helped certain states become prosperous. This was further helped by these states accumulating enough capital under conditions of prolonged internal peace to invest in aspects of wealth-facilitating public infrastructure. What you claim is the diametric opposite of basic reality. Asia during much of the middle ages at times fulfilled conditions of state stability, but it often did not coincide with certain other systemic requirements for widespread markets to develop. Instead, the stability was of an autocratic and arbitrary type that facilitated stagnant top-down paternalism.

The Mexican cartels are notably wary of messing with U.S police agents and police/military/border security agencies. There are isolated cases of very foolish sicarios or smaller, more irresponsible organized crime cells playing at threats against U.S border agents or at U.S agents inside Mexico but it's rare and often discouraged brutally by the larger cartels. The simple reason why is they know that with the U.S government, the subversion they regularly practice with pathetically corrupt Mexican authorities works much, much less and goes completely out the window if a U.S police agent dies by their hands. The U.S government strongly underscored this with the cartels by spending decades and God knows how much money diligently pursuing every last person they could find who had any connection to the Kike Camarena murder. The lesson hasn't been forgotten by the bigger cartel bosses, even today.

As someone who lives in Mexico since over a decade ago, and well outside the tourist bubbles, I'd say that your personal view of the situation is ridiculously rose-tinted. The violence isn't plainly visible as it's been in Syria, for example, but it's very real and vastly destructive. Not to mention the amount of homicide that goes unreported and the disappearances that likewise don't get reported. Furthermore, your own sources actually do more to back up the argument you're rejecting than to prove your own claim.

Or just you know, legalize fentanyl, because drug laws don't fucking work and have caused vastly more harm than the drugs they "stop"... People's bodies should be their own to use as they please so long as they don't harm others with violence. A simple notion that idiotic puritans just haven't been able to get through their heads for centuries by now and to absolutely no good effect.

Extinction, no. Gamma ray bursts last for anything from a few seconds to a couple minutes or so. This means that it would only saturate one side of the world with its own direct ionizing radiation. This would severely harm or kill most plants on that side along with many other thin-skinned organisms, but it wouldn't outright kill larger animals and large plants and it wouldn't directly do anything to lifeforms on the opposite side of the planet.

The ozone layer would then of course shrink worldwide, yes, and this would collapse a large part of photosynthesis, causing a probable food chain collapse, but we're impressively adaptable and at the very least, millions of human beings would stay alive sustaining themselves with food grown or raised under adaptive conditions. The rest of nature would also adapt based on what survives, as it always has with previous cataclysms. This would probably help us too.

In other words, humanity would suffer terribly and billions would probably die, especially since this kind of event would be so sudden and unstoppable, but we wouldn't all die and the many survivors would repopulate as the ozone layer regrows too (which would happen over a few decades since it regenerates itself from solar radiation). But yes, bad. There is a theory that a gamma ray burst caused the Permian-Triassic event, the Great Dying, and 95% of life on Earth was extinguished during that time, though much of it was much less adapted to unexpected radiation than many lifeforms on Earth are now, so things could be less severe next time.

Just to note, despite the media hyperbole they get, a stray gamma ray burst directly bathing our earth would probably not do anything close to what you described. Probably worst case scenario: total ozone layer depletion. Bad, very bad for the food chain and for a large part of photosynthesis, but not cataclysmic in the sense of being a sterilizing event.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...

I'll leave aside the wider issues of climate change for a moment and address sea level rises alone, since it's one of the big scary points due to fears of mass coastal migrations inland.

Anyhow, for a bit of perspective, NASA's own research on potential sea level rises argues that in the worst case scenario for climate warming, we should see a rise of just over a meter by 2100 and a possible rise of 5 meters by 2300. Now, if you like, go to, for example (though it only focuses on the United States) NOAA's map tool for visualizing different levels of rising water. (1)

See for yourself what a one meter rise looks like and then also a completely drastic 300-year 5 meter increase. To be sure, both would be major problems for millions of people and huge tracts of coastal land, but bear in mind that these people and the governments/private interests/individuals responsible for those areas would have from ONE TO THREE centuries to prepare.

This is a lot of time even for slow measures at current technology and resources to prepare remarkably well. It's reasonable to suppose that over the next 100 years (barring some other different catastrophe), we'll have even better technology and resources at our disposal, especially if the water visibly starts to go up and coastal fresh water table salinity starts to grow large enough to cause crop failures. At least as far as sea level rises are concerned, solutions are completely manageable.

The doom scenarios for rising oceans are grotesquely overblown by a large base of people who just can't seem to emotionally help themselves in not specifically and forcefully insisting on catastrophic situations, despite millennia of humanity showing just how adaptive it is and despite the literal best science on the matter arguing for something that is much less catastrophic when actually examined.

1. https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/#/layer/slr/10/-11581024.66377982...

NASA sea level rise predictions https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148494/anticipating...

>At this point, anyone still be held has been proven to be directly or indirectly guilty

Proven you say? So much proof that they continue to be held without even having been charged (never mind tried and convicted on so much supposed clear evidence) for crimes years after their detention.

elementary school level basic rules of justice: If you have evidence, you use it to bring forth charges quickly, otherwise, shut up and release whoever you're holding. The U.S government certainly doesn't lack the resources to just proceed with a trial.

It's extraordinary how much hysteria the overturning of Roe vs. Wade has created. Despite the new federal decision not in any way being a ban on abortions (the federal government has made many efforts to stress this part by the way), despite it being grounded in pretty decent constitutional reasoning about states' rights, and despite the fact that abortion rights are legal and heavily supported by voters in most U.S states, there are people painting the picture as if it meant a near immediate return to some early 20th century notion of reproductive rights.

You yourself: flatly stating a lie (or if we're being generous a grossly lazy mistaken statement) about things in your state despite the contrary being completely and very easily verifiable in just seconds. This seems to be an exaggerated attitude shared by quite a few internet commentators on this issue, to an emotionally irrational degree. It's absurd, and I say this as someone who fully supports abortion rights in the widest ethically defined sense of the idea.