I can’t think of a single thing built in the last century that will still be there in a thousand years. We may still build some cool stuff, but none of it is durable anymore it seems.

Is this meant to be sung to the cadence of one of Tom Bombadil’s songs? I dunno why that’s just what felt right when I read it.

The funny thing is he might be the one in the right, if we examine with logic.

A mayor probably has no particular skills or abilities to help personally in that sort of situation, and if he was doing his job correctly in the past, then everything in his power to do would already have been done. The appropriate experts are ready. Emergency plans are in place. There’s backup plans, and backup plans for the backups, all carefully considered and planned by the best people the mayor could get to do them in the past.

But humans are weird and have stupid ideas, so we want to see the mayor in his office, giving interviews, or even better, at the site of the disaster, helping. Except the most the average mayor is likely to do in an emergency situation is get in the way and be a distraction.

That’s the sad thing - your city’s mayor may or may not have done a good job, I have no idea, but the average mayor will definitely be attacked if this happens and he doesn’t make a show of ‘helping’.

Contingency plans. Yeah. Sure. I don’t think there are any that most of us can make. There aren’t any countries I could move to that would be any better I don’t think. I’m too old, I don’t have degrees, my only job qualifications aren’t particularly in demand because the training for them is fast, and the only family connection to citizenship elsewhere I had is insufficient because it’s too many generations removed from me.

I suspect the cast majority of people who would be even worse off than me under another Trump/Republican administration are in just as bad if not worse a position.

I forget the details because it’s been a long time since I saw the relevant episodes, but I had the impression that Lore was treated incredibly shittily by the colonists on that planet and he developed those personality traits because of how he was treated.

Counterpoint: toaster 1 looks like Hitler. Use toaster 1.

They don’t say it, they don’t even acknowledge it themselves, but they view this in the same way a credulous middle ages individual would view making a deal with the fey. The right set of words, the right incantation, will grant you power over them whether they want to acknowledge it or not.

That’s the mental image they have. If you ask them how these secret laws are enforced and what actually obligates the judges, police, government, etc to follow the rules, they won’t admit the magical thinking, though they will babble and make up nonsense that sounds, to them, like genuine explanations but is in truth gibberish.

At the end, though, that’s what they’re doing…they’re chanting mystical incantations that will bind the Queen of the Faeries to their will and prevent the fae from doing harm upon them or impeding them.

But they don’t even take the cautionary parts of the tales to heart, for even if you should succeed on pulling one over on the Faeries, they are wily and patient, and someday they will trick you into giving up the protection you thought was unbreakable. Just as even if they actually managed to stumble upon the correct legal maneuver, it is likely the system will be back to get them one way or another.

If I had to choose between global high speed internet access, and ground based astronomy, I’d pick the Internet every time. I’d completely blot out the sky forever if that’s what it took.

We don’t need ground-based astronomy to learn about the universe, I’d rather encourage more space-based astronomy. Or build some observatories on the moon if you really want to build on a solid space body.

However, Starlink is a for profit company run by Elon Musk. I don’t really want them doing it, because they’re not going to provide unlimited global Internet to everyone. So as the guy said, the idea is good, but Starlink is bad, although it is currently the only such option.

That article reminded me of that politician who said women’s bodies would prevent pregnancy from rape. Clearly he had so little contact with women he confused them with ducks.

Roaming the earth means roaming all - or at least a very significant portion of - the earth, not some very isolated region. So I would say yes - if some tiny population of mammoths was still alive in some limited area at this time, they were not ‘roaming the earth’.

No, but they should be public to everyone, and not hidden unless you jump through hoops.

“AI”, especially art. I’ve spent years trying to learn to draw on and off and have never gotten good at it, but now I can use words to create illustrations I want in a level of quality and detail I could never dream of.

Now I just want the interface to be easier and more able to understand natural language and be capable of making directed changes better.

None of this makes sense, but you can at least follow the nonsensical chain of events if you know the full story.

Well I think it can be fixed with technology because fixing it doesn’t violate any laws of physics.

A more pressing question however is whether we humans will obtain or develop the necessary technology and put enough resources into using it, soon enough to make a difference to us. And on that question my magic 8-ball says “Outlook not so good.”

It’s not implying he can’t be bothered, but that the machine can do a better job.

…which may be true, depending on just how bad he is at writing. Like, I was just watching this classic the other day. If this guy writes like some of those people, the machine may infact be better.

That said, for most people it’s stupid, and the tech isn’t able to do a better job at expressing such things.

Yet.

Thank you, I understand better now. So in theory, if one of the other search engines chose to not have their crawler identify itself, it would be more difficult for them to be blocked.

I’m kind of curious to understand how they’re blocking other search engines. I was under the impression that search engines just viewed the same pages we do to search through, and the only way to ‘hide’ things from them was to not have them publicly available. Is this something that other search engines could choose to circumvent if they decided to?

That first edition version looks like a dog’s head with horns and pointy ears to me at least, and that’s kinda what I was referring to.

Admittedly the 2nd edition version looks a bit less doglike, but I still see similarities with some breeds.

It’s not a mistranslation that caused it, kobolds were both described and illustrated as doglike until 3rd Edition where with no explanation they simply changed it and decided they were lizard like/draconic.

I do think the new version of kobolds is an interesting creature, but truthfully they should’ve just come up with a new name for this new creature instead of just completely changing the kobold.

We could start with holding police officers responsible. It’s great that they charged this one, but why aren’t the other police there being charged as accomplices since they took no action to prevent the shooting?

So here’s a few simple starter thoughts.

1. Establish an external agency with the mandate of prosecuting police. They have their own prosecutorial system, their own investigators, their own prosecutors, their own courts and their own judges, completely unconnected to the prosecutorial system the police work with. You cannot have the same people that work together one day and rely on each other be the ones to investigate each other, it doesn’t work. Not even a separate ‘internal affairs division’ is enough.

2. Any police officer who discharges their weapon, for any reason, is immediately suspended, and any pay is withheld until an investigation for why the weapon was discharged is completed. The investigation of course is conducted by that external agency.

3. If a police officer discharging a weapon causes injury or death, all police officers on the scene are suspended and their pay withheld until the investigation is over.

4. If the police officer who discharged their weapon is charged with assault, murder, whatever, then all other officers at the scene are charged as accomplices, unless they took proactive action to prevent the first officer from committing their illegal action. Think of it like felony murder - if you and a group of friends are committing a crime and someone is murdered, you are all prosecutable under felony murder even if you had no direct hand in the murder at all.

That’s probably a good start, it may not solve all the problems, but it’d be a lot better than what’s being done now, which is very, very little. I’d say an even better thing to do in addition would be to have every current police officer purged and never work in law enforcement again. All police organizations kinda need a clean slate with fresh people and no organizational momentum and culture carryover from how it’s happening now, because a lot of what needs to change is organizational culture, and just altering the rules is more difficult than rebuilding a completely new organizational culture from the ground up.