Elon Musk is not an idiot. He was hired by other rich people like the Saudis to destroy Twitter, to prevent further incidents of public protest organization like what happened in Egypt and the Occupy movement. The degradation of the platform is intentional, and the amplification of right-wing voices helps to chase left-leaning social activists off of the platform. There is no equivalent platform for in-the-moment organization of protests.

• Define illegal.

Because these US assets are present at the express request of the Kurdish militia, which is formed by the people who actually live there who got sick and tired of the oppression of the religious fundamentalist regime after Assad nerve gassed his own citizens.

During the Syrian civil war that began in 2011, a Kurdish-dominated coalition led by the Democratic Union Party as well as some other Kurdish, Arab, Syriac-Assyrian, and Turkmen groups have sought to establish a new constitution for the de facto autonomous region, while military wings and allied militias have fought to maintain control of the region. This led to the establishment of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) in 2016.

Supporters of the AANES state that the events constitute a social revolution with a prominent role played by women both on the battlefield and within the newly formed political system, as well as the implementation of democratic confederalism, a form of libertarian socialism that emphasizes decentralization, gender equality and the need for local governance through direct democracy.

reference

These are the people that the “US assets” are supporting, against the religious extremist totalitarian state of the Syrian Arab Republic.

The country is a totalitarian dictatorship with a comprehensive cult of personality around the Assad family.

reference

So the US assets are present “illegally” from the perspective of the Assad regime.

Syria remains a one-party state with an extensive secret police apparatus that curtails any independent political activity.

The ruling Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party governs Syria as a totalitarian police state, through its control of the Syrian military and security apparatus.

There is no independent judiciary in Syria, since all judges and prosecutors are required to be Ba’athist appointees.

Syria’s elections are conducted through a sham process; characterised by wide-scale rigging, repetitive voting and absence of voter registration and verification systems.

The authorities are accused of arresting democracy and human rights activists, censoring websites, detaining bloggers, and imposing travel bans. Arbitrary detention, torture, and disappearances are widespread. Although Syria’s constitution guarantees gender equality, critics say that personal statutes laws and the penal code discriminate against women and girls. Moreover, it also grants leniency for so-called ‘Honour killing’.

There is no reason at all that any thinking person should give a single fuck about what the Assad regime wants. We should be cheering on anyone that makes an effort to oppose them.

It doesn’t work in anything beyond a small agrarian community with simple needs. It’s as much a fantasy as the idealized small American town of the 1950s. There are no closed-loop economies.

Which farmer is going to provide me with eggs every week in exchange for my work as a web server admin? Will the farmer be obligated to provide the carpenter with food for the rest of his life after building a house? A one-time trade isn’t going to keep the carpenter from starving to death. What exactly would an astronaut, or a philosopher, or a quality assurance engineer or a geologist offer in trade for basic sustenance or medical services?

Complex work requires a complex economy. A complex economy requires an abstraction for value (e.g. not barter) to allow for compensation for abstract and long-term tasks.

In the future, you swab the inside of your cheek and then insert the swab into a port on your computer, which squeezes the swab to recover the cheek cells and then processes them. Congratulations, you have added 10TB of storage to your computer.

Further thought: downside - your data can be directly linked to you because it is encoded on your own DNA.

I feel like the vibration is going to induce microfractures in the photovoltaic crystals, no matter how well the panel is protected from debris.

Yeah they can’t fight Chrome, they are Chrome.

Ah yes, the evil government system that gets in the way of good people trying to run digital Ponzi schemes and collect ransomware payments.

Bad gubmint.

Sort of… but saying that the government can issue as much new currency as they want is disingenuous and this is addressed later in the video, but it literally says that the tax money is “destroyed”… this is not really correct.

The value of a government currency like the dollar comes ultimately from confidence in the US economy. If the economy produces value, then the dollar represents a piece of that value. If the economy is unproductive (less value is produced) then tax revenue is lower, and less new money can be issued.

So to close the circle, your taxes do pay for something… the government’s capacity to issue new money, which it then uses to pay for government services &etc. Saying that “your taxes pay for nothing” is kind of a pointless argument over semantics, because without the tax collection the government would not be able to pay for anything.

Thank you for sharing, I had not seen that. Fucking hell. Nature is scary.

The cruelty is the point.

Is it sexism? It’s sexism isn’t it.

Don’t like Mastodon, huh?

Well duh. Kind of missing the point though.

What if I hire a dozen people to randomly, individually go and pick all the fruit and bring it to me, and then I make a profit reselling what they collect?

Tragedy of the commons

Also connections to nerve cells are not constant. Some connections are strong and the nerve cell is more likely to activate when triggered through one of them while other are weak and need stronger signal to trigger (someone who knows biology can rephrase this part better). so with 50 million connections of varying strength simulation becomes much more difficult.

I don’t see why adding weights to the connections would be particularly difficult. Even if the weights need to vary over time or by other conditions, that could be included in the simulation. It might be a bit more complex, but current neural network systems already do variable connection strength between nodes.

The other thing is that 99% of the time the brain respond to outside stimuli. You see something, signal is sent to brain and brain make decision based on the input.

In this case you have absolutely zero input.

This should be very easy - if we’re simulating the presence of sensory neurons then we can certainly simulate some input stimuli on them.

Simulate it how? you need an initial state.

I don’t see why this would be true, and anyway how do you know that the connection map doesn’t already represent an initial state?

Miyazaki Airport was built in 1943 as a former Imperial Japanese Navy flight training field from which some kamikaze pilots took off on suicide attack missions.

It was originally a military airfield during the war, which explains why there are bombs in the ground. Not exactly a comforting thought… I bet it’s hard to detect a bomb that’s been buried for 80 years and had a foundation laid on top of it.

So this is basically a physical map of the cells and their interconnections. We also know quite a lot about how the individual cells function.

So… if we simulated the behavior of all those cells and connected them as described by this map, and basically just turned it on… would it behave like a fly? Would it respond to stimuli as if it were a fly?

The computer needed for that would probably be the size of a building and eat electricity like candy, but it’d be interesting - the functional brain of a living creature reproduced in software.

What, guns aren’t enough compensation?

Floating solar farms make use of water surfaces that would otherwise go unused. Plus, by shading the water below, floating solar arrays help reduce evaporation – an added bonus in arid regions like this one.

The dual benefit makes this seem like a no-brainer, but I suspect there are some careful considerations needed before floating a high-voltage system on a lake… I wonder how much risk there is from wind.