It gets the visuals accurate, but the experience includes a lot of physical sensation that is very difficult to convey, e.g. the 'wind' that pushes you back and the discomfort of going into a chaotic dissociated state. You see those things but it feels very 'real'.
I can only speak for medically-administered intravenous Ketamine, but I would describe it as like relatively effortlessly floating inside of the non-physical space inside of you and meeting yourself in metaphor, all the while completely aware. The biggest risk seemed to be temporarily becoming a relatively inanimate part of the infrastructure there, and even that was a sort of pleasant and satisfying state.
>The US are by no means innocent of terrorism and invasion of other countries, but at least with countries commonly counted as "the west", the US was a friendly nation.
>If we have the likes of terrorist states like Russia taking over, then we got some very dark times ahead of us.
Did you seriously write these two sentences one right next to the other and not see the hypocrisy in what you're saying?
We don't know much of it anymore with the decline of Europe, but for several centuries the dominant geopolitical goal of most countries on Earth was to defend themselves from European invasion. Why do you think every incremental ratchet step on the gear of Germany rearming in the last three years has been taken as serious headline news by so many?
> Why do you think every incremental ratchet step on the gear of Germany rearming in the last three years has been taken as serious headline news by so many?
Cause they started two world wars previously. The second one coupled with genocide, actually multiple separate genocides going on at the same time.
They started the first one too. They just did. Their politics was split roughly into two camps - war hawks wanting to start the war now and moderates wanting to wait for a year and then start a war.
It is not that other countries were full of saints ... but Germany did started both those wars.
You can say this but the people who need to hear it won’t listen. They lack the perspective of actually reading history to understand the scale at which people were killed before the world police era.
But even reading history isn’t enough. I think we’re fundamentally not equipped to understand what a large number of deaths actually looks and feels like. 10 deaths happening in our vicinity is an unbearable tragedy. 1 million deaths is just a number. So folks are struck by a nostalgia for a time when humans killed each other by the millions.
In some ways they remind me of the people who long for the days before vaccines eliminated a bunch of diseases.
Allow? It just happens, and when you're the weaker part in the equation, there's not much you can do against it. Where Russia and the USA give up power, China will grab it.
The EU is just about building up to the task of proper self-defence against Russia, and China is not at all interested in a world order except as it feels necessary to protect domestic order. So they do things like border-pushing against India, the nine-island line, wars of words with Japan, and surveillance of overseas Chinese nationals, but other than that they are a long way from anything like the European colonial or world war era.
A "world police" are useful to almost everyone (nations involved in international trade) for situations such as piracy or border enforcement on the high seas. OTOH being such police is a costly endeavor so most nations will do their best to avoid investment and get a free ride.
It sort of happens because in the absence of a proper world police, when one county tries to steal another countries stuff/land it falls to the most powerful decent country available to stop it. See Hitler sending tanks into Ukraine and Putin sending tanks into Ukraine.
100%. They should just step aside and let all those theocratic shit holes arm them selves with more nuclear weapons and wipe each other out. Problem sorted.
Of course you might get a bit of radioactive dust blow over the sea for a few hundred years but totally worth it.
I appreciate your optimism. I tend to be optimistic about the future myself. But there is no law of the universe that everything will work out ok. Only if we make the right decisions as a species and we don't get unlucky.
I'm quite apprehensive that the great filter lies ahead - that technology accelerates too rapidly compared to our wisdom and we end up nearly destroying ourselves. We're getting the ability to program life itself and to likely to democratize the ability to harness the forces inside the atom. Neither of which we're ready for as a species.
Maximum entropy merely implies that the temperature everywhere is the same (any other situation would necessarily have a lower entropy). You could in theory have maximum entropy at 1000K. Our universe has a ton of empty space, and not all that much energy, so the temperature at which it equilibriates is very low. It's also expanding, so the hypothetical equilibrium temperature is decreasing all the time.
It's also worth noting that the entropy can be very large, even if the temperature is absolute zero. (You just need a system with a lot of different ground-states that all have the same energy.)
> I appreciate your optimism. I tend to be optimistic about the future myself. But there is no law of the universe that everything will work out ok.
Isn't there some QM law that says that with infinitesimal probability anything can materialize at any point in space? Meaning that after everything has collapsed, you can (will!) still re-materialize somewhere in space. An infinite number of times!
I kind of wonder, in a half-assed amateurish way, if the underlying reality of our universe isn't just an extremely rare random fluctuation in a fluid-like medium at thermodynamic equilibrium.
There are multiple explanations for why the sky isnt lit up with radio and laser signals from advanced civilisation. The great filter is one explanation, that there are existential crises or threats that wipe out most civilisations or cause them to collapse to subsistence level. Nuclear war, biological weapons, ecological collapse, paper clip maximising AI, etc.
I once ran a Traveller RPG exploration campaign where one of the systems they visited looked really odd on sensors. Just fuzzy clouds and clumps and ring formations of diffuse metallic debris. It turned out it was all paper clips.
For context, the examples you mentioned are cases of the great filter lying ahead of us. The more optimistic hope is that the great filter is behind us - things like abiogenesis or multicellular life being extremely unlikely to happen. "Great filter" is just the name for "a barrier that stops life from becoming a spacefaring civilization".
This explanation is also the reason why finding basic life (say, bacteria) in the Solar System would be a cause for worry - if life evolved independently twice in the same star system, it would imply abiogenesis isn't that unlikely - thus strongly suggesting the great filter is still ahead of us.
Could the great filter be something like developing language? That's something that seems quite rare (only one species on Earth has it). If so, then discovering bacteria in the Solar System wouldn't be such a cause for worry.
> Could the great filter be something like developing language?
Perhaps it's a combination of factors?
Dolphins are social animals that appear to be capable of complex communications among themselves, but don't have hands to manipulate their environment the way we can.
Another interesting one I've heard is getting into space, period. It's possible that there are other technological civilizations out there, but all stuck under a few hundred km of ice or on a 2-earth-mass monster where it's impractical to reach orbit.
Earth may only be special in being in a sweet spot between Mars (too small to hold an atmosphere or protect from cosmic radiation, hence no life) and Gliese 832c (with its low-orbit velocity of something like 15km/s, hence much less practical to put stuff in space).
You can also get shielding with a thick enough atmosphere, or being under a solid ice/rock crust. But both of those also make it much harder to reach space.
> The Big Freeze (or Big Chill) is a scenario under which continued expansion results in a universe that asymptotically approaches absolute zero temperature.
The worry is that not only will we be utterly destroyed, but that the destruction will be so thorough it will blow backward through time erasing all events that ever happened and making it so that we never even lived. That means everything we experience right now didn’t happen, we are just seeing a probability of what could happen but didn’t because it’s all destroyed. These lives mean nothing.
Imagine they told you that when you die, not only will you be gone, but then they will go back and undo everything you ever did and basically make it like you never existed at all. It didn’t happen, you never happened.
It happened, therefore it happened somehow, someplace. What’s the difference between something having happened and not having happened? It doesn’t intrinsically mean anything.
In addition, most humans learn to accept that there’s a good chance nothing they do will have an eternal effect on reality without needing any strange frameworks.
"The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam" - Carl Sagan
And that pale blue dot means nothing in a cosmic scale. Stop worrying and enjoy the incredible fortune of being alive.
Why? What exactly are you dreading? That our understanding of the universe and science involved might have some serious flaws? If so, won't we just adjust our understanding to something that matches the observations?
Don't worry it will be a problem for the future politicians and universe expand protections groups. "We have to stop the universe expansion, the universe is expanding faster than expected" they say.
Would the restaurants prefer I just cook at home or order pick up with no tip? It's an unworkable business model if the direct exchange for the menu price is not enough. There used to be the service of walking your food to you and refilling your drinks a couple times that restaurants claimed the charity was for but it makes no sense when you're picking up directly.
I'd say it's okay not to tip, so long as you tell the person who would have received it your intentions, in advance. Only fair they adjust accordingly.
I get why someone wouldn't like it. But it's not a battle you can fight at that scale. The wait staff get paid $2.13 an hour. They feel the pain, not the business or the American fetish meisters.
You're right and it would need collective action to rectify, and even then you'd encounter some not insignificant amount of those in the service industry who'd loathe a fair minimum wage in lieu of relying on tips as they'd see it as crippling their income.
How it should be and how it is are immensely detached, I think we can all agree on.
How? Tipping is friction and makes you feel bad, by not doing it I'm incentivized to eat out more often. What matters to me are small businesses, if I help the workers but not the small businesses there'll be no job for them tomorrow.
It's worth noting that servers at restaurants are required by law to make minimum wage. If their actual wages (the minimum the employer can pay them, called the "basic cash wage") plus their tips do not bring them over minimum wage, then their employer is required to make up the difference. So if nobody tips, the business winds up having to pay more.
So you're likely hurting both the worker and employer, and making it more complicated for both of them.
Specifics (basic cash wage value, etc) vary by state.
Anecdotally, from my friends who work in the service industry, this is also a law that is often simply ignored -- so in lean shifts, workers can go home with less than federal minimum wage. Not a good scene.
I'd be willing to pay more taxes to help the economy, but most people are against this. In the mean time I do my part by eating out more often and visiting small businesses.
I can't figure out if your posts here in this thread are in jest or are serious. Please excuse me if they are in jest...
> I'd be willing to pay more taxes to help the economy, but most people are against this
They are against this because paying more taxes does nothing to "help" the economy. Where do you think tax money goes? It doesn't go to people's bank accounts to pay for rent, groceries, car payments, utility bills etc. or any of the places that would directly contribute to the economy.
> In the mean time I do my part by eating out more often and visiting small businesses.
And as already discussed below - you are also screwing over the employees at those businesses. Quite literally costing them money they could make by serving someone who will tip... so they can, you know, pay for rent and contribute to the economy.
>you are also screwing over the employees at those businesses
Not to open this argument but it's not the patron's job to ensure the staff are paid appropriately. If servers don't want to run the risk of not being paid at least minimum wage, they should ensure their conditions of employment guarantee it and the business should reflect it in their prices.
I have yet to see anyone suggest donating to food banks. Anyone can complain that the government should do something, but if you're not willing to volunteer your own disposable income, you shouldn't expect others to. The average software engineer can probably feed an additional family of four with no effort.
Y’all keep acting like we’re stupid but without collective action at scale or a large cultural change, all you’re doing by not tipping is making some poor persons night miserable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2IRKuS3sSE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65XfIpJdlEY
reply