ido66667

Certain technologies are simply too abusable to be unrestricted. In fact, many technologies only exist to do things we consider wrong, so we outlaw them. Granted, many times these laws are not well enforced.

I don't know. The future of privacy doesn't look good. Maybe Ted Kaczynski was right and many of our modern technologies are antithetical to certain freedoms people in the past enjoyed, like privacy. If that is the case, then no amount of legislation can restore or save privacy. Maybe only delay its inevitable death.

If you are looking for a proven moral system, there are none. The whole idea of human rights is a product of a certain culture (western europe and its dependencies) just like the Quran or the Bible. You can't really prove something is a human rights, much like you can't prove human rights are the 'correct' moral framework. So it's all opinions really.

This is simply the is-ought problem. You cannot prove a moral statement from observation or measurement of nature. This does mean that indeed Facebook and Tor would be on equivalent grounds. The judgment between them is up to you.

I agree. I've a lot of experience with the furry community and I certainly wouldn't want to live in a society structured like that. You have issues like the extreme focus on sexuality, the constant barrage of extreme sexual content (like non-consent/rape porn) and the tacit tolerance of pedophilia and/or abuse in some furry spaces. I don't think it's healthy for someone to base their identity on a community whose main focus is pornography, and extreme forms of it, at it. It's not an issue with anthropomorphic characters themselves, but the community that formed around them and how it regulates itself. Some people I've seen even developed an exclusive sexual attraction to anthros, which basically kills their chances of having normal sexual and romantic relationships; such extreme cases are pretty rare, though. I'm not too keen on using the term "degeneracy" because it reeks of religious connotations, but I certainly see why people describe the furry fandom like that.

I used to think porn is pretty neutral in the terms of the harm it does to the consumer, but over my years in the internet, I encountered many people who invest much of their time into porn, or structure the way they view others (women mostly) based on porn and I've come to the conclusion that consumption of porn, specifically during one's teenage years, is psychologically damaging. It does change the way you view sexuality, what you perceive as attractive and your sexual preferences. I was exposed to porn at a young age and I'm pretty sure it did me no good. I worry that kids who are nowadays exposed at even younger age might develop maladaptive sexual preferences and views.

Most people I speak with generally agree that after 2016 (Trump) it became way worse.

I think your analysis is true, but it's important to add that all websites that reward posts one way or another experience similar phenomena. The way posts are rewarded tends to select for a certain types of posts. Twitter, for example, generally rewards for engagement and enforces short posts, and I think that's why a culture of political gotchas, confrontation and aggressiveness and is so prevalent there. And I know for a fact this isn't just an attribute of English Twitter. While moderation removes right wing extremist politics, mostly only on English Twitter, this only imperfectly mitigates one manifestation of a reward structure that encourages users to behave aggressively to one another. And again, if you look at non-English Twitter, even this is missing and in general, behaviour is not much different than 4chan.

We are, to put it simply, too entertained with our technologies to expend the initial effort to "touch some grass", meet people in real life. But we still need connection with people, so we invented technological tools that allow us to quickly and easily get in touch with others. Although the quality and satisfaction we get from this form of communication are much lower, it requires much less initial effort and hassle, so we accept it.

I think it's too late. We are too far down the rabbit hole in that sense. What does it bode for mankind? I don't know, but I suspect that the future won't be bright. It's frightening.

I sometimes feel like everything is burning around me, as in, on this planet. Everything is burning and yet we pretend it isn't because we are frightened of the possible consequences of acknowledging things aren't doing too great. We are frightened of real change because it might cause everything to come down. So instead we let our lives spin out of control and hope for the best. At this point I'm not even speaking about technology, but this troubles me deeply.

There are many methods to try to determine how an ancient language was spoken, all of them by definition hypothetical, but since linguistic change does follow sensical rules, and happens in gradual steps (i.e. you can almost be sure that the vowel /u/ won't shift to the vowel /a/ in a single generation, and I bet there isn't a single recorded case of that happening, simply because /u/ and /a/ are very far away from each other in the mouth and acoustically).

For instance, we have very solid evidence (but still circumstantial, and therefore this is technically an hypothesis) that the Greek letter η, that now stands for /i/, had a long eh-like sound, likely /ε:/, for this and due to many other changes, we can say that were a Modern Greek speaker to speak with a Greek from the 5th century BC, they would have understood barely anything, barring certain specific words. From tracing how the language changed, according to the extent evidence, we can probably say that this speaker, however, would have mostly (but with difficulty) understood a speaker from 12th century Constantinople in simple day-to-day conversations. At the very least, the two speakers would have the same sound inventories and similar grammar, but somewhat different vocabularies.

I still agree with you that saying one language is older than another is meaningless. At most we can say that a language is probably more conservative than others.

Using Ublock Origin you could turn on advanced mode and block all scripts from twitter domains. Not only Twitter itself will be blocked (it'll show up as a blank page, although you can disable that specifically for twitter), but all Tweet embeds will be too.

Yes, but consumption isn't going down. Even if we stabilise at 11 billion people by 2100, which is much too late and arguably already at overshoot mode, consumption will continue rising and increase resource usage, although the population remains about the same.

Those 11 billion people won't use the minimum amount of resources needed to sustain themselves (which is a very low quality of life), but use double or even triple than that.

The issue is that we cannot rely on it to actually be there, and to come in time. I agree that we cannot efficiently regulate our behaviour, but I believe that will be our end eventually, science and engineering marvels not withstanding.

You know, it seems silly to me that the choice we seem to make is rather than controlling our population, we choose having worse lives for us and all future generations. Lack of self-control will truly be the end of humanity.