That’s kind of my point though. The large majority of active voters in America don’t have a damn clue what they’re actually voting for. Many democrats don’t vote, but those who do generally do so because they’re informed and invested in politics. Most Republicans vote, largely because their pastor tells them to and tells them who to choose.

If voters were required to have an informed opinion in order to vote, I bet you’d see a significant change in those percentages.

But none of this is practical anyway, it’s a bad solution to a bad problem. It’s basically unenforceable and any way that it does get enforced is going to be a net loss of rights and representation. I don’t like this idea. I just have a hard time coming up with alternatives at this time. It is clear to me that the situation we have now is not tenable. I just don’t know where to go from here, and it seems nobody else does either.

Ah yes, tell us more about how Russia’s sudden invasion and annexization of Crimea following Euromaidan was the fault of US backed Ukrainians.

Best case, you’re going to blame this on the fact that native Ukrainians staged a revolution to remove their corrupt president that was trying to buddy up with the sovereign that has been abusing and betraying them since 1941. To which I say, good for them. The annexation of Crimea came during the power vacuum following that when Putin saw that his good buddy sycophant Yanukovych had been removed by a hostile electorate. Putin saw his slaves trying to make a break for freedom and decided to bring his fist down on it.

Exactly. America was born as a nation because last time someone tried some bullshit like this we shot them all dead and moved out.

We’ve seen an awful lot of history repeating itself these days.

If they’re smart they’ll take the hint. But we all know how likely that is.

Yeah, EMPs aren’t hard to do. Pretty much anybody could do that to anybody. You don’t need a nuke for it.

Yeah, I agree, that’s why I didn’t vote for Trump.

Things like this are what make me struggle with the question of whether or not some sort of voting license would be a bad thing.

It would, of course, unequivocally be a bad thing. But would it be worse than this? I don’t know anymore. On one hand, every living human deserves a free and fair voice in the choice of their governmental representatives. On the other hand, maybe you should have to prove you know what you’re voting for before you’re allowed to vote. Because a popular vote decided primarily by “vibes” from criminally underinformed voters is not something that any republic is able to survive long term.

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They’re the same picture

Finn didn’t need a badass prosthetic left arm because the cure to male loneliness is Jake the Dog.

You’re supposed to be celebrating the more widespread adoption of federated software and a break away from centrally controlled corpo environments in general. This is the public retaking the internet for themselves.

If you don’t like the particular content, cool, don’t go there. I don’t go on Mastodon either but I can appreciate why it’s there.

There’s quite an awful lot more than that, actually

MARS, Inc? Like the candy bar guys?

I definitely have not, and now I have. I’m unsure if I should thank you for this or not.

I feel like it takes the sport out of it if the fish is dead though. The whole sport of the carp throwing is that a carp absolutely can kick a grown man’s ass and flop to freedom if he isn’t careful. You leave a carp alone long enough and those things turn into damn near coelacanths. They’ll eat your dog. Manhandling one of those suckers into a parabolic arc is going to take skill, strength, planning, and luck.

I would watch carp throwing as a competitive sport, they aren’t going to make it easy

Actually, legislating that FSD be required in all cars would go a huge way towards shoring up all the problems with it. The most dangerous thing on the road is another living human, and computers can’t adjust for the inherent chaos that we living humans bring to the road. Remove the humans and you have a way smaller problem to solve.

Teslas especially can’t cope, and keep running over kids and cop cars because Musk has forbidden them from installing the proper technology to solve their problem. LIDAR isn’t a magic bullet for this but it’s pretty damn close, and it’s way way better than just using visual sensors only. Elon is just so high on his own farts that he won’t allow Tesla to use LIDAR on their cars, despite every other FSD-attempting manufacturer seeing great returns from it and rapidly outpacing Tesla’s first mover advantage. But they’re trying to solve the wrong problem, making a car see and drive like a person. People are terrible at driving. They need to make the car drive like a computer. If all cars were required to have FSD and humans weren’t allowed to drive anymore we’d have a functioning auto-pool within 10 years. Maybe less than that if measures were put in place to ensure cross-car communication on the road. If every car within 100 meters of you is sharing sensor data and telling each other their speed, heading, and braking, you’d never see another car-to-car accident in your life.

Point being, we already have the technology to solve this problem, what we don’t have is the technology to solve this problem on the same roads that people are already driving on, weaving around their old manually-controlled cars that they’re driving in. Building FSD-only roads could solve this. Changing motor vehicle laws could solve this. But neither of those are going to solve it without significant headache or push back from the public. The real problem is that we’re trying to solve both “cars can’t drive themselves” and “people drive like rabid orangutans” problems at the same time. Remove one of those problems - say by restricting or removing manual driving - and suddenly a proper solution is easily within grasp.

Please note that I am NOT saying that this is a good idea, not least of which because myself and most people I know drive a 20-40 year old car and would be unable to switch to a new self driving car unless the government literally provided me one and bought my old car. And if we DID try to enact that across the country we’d run out of g-men in the first week because they’d all be shot dead by farmers and truck bros when they showed up to try and repossess the vehicles. Not to mention the fact that a government provided car is inherently untrustable by anyone, anywhere. The logistics on this would just be insane, and the best case way to tackle it would be to phase it in like they did with backup cameras. But there’s a problem here. Every new car may be FSD-enabled but the FSD they have won’t be able to be used - because the road is still full of live dumb-ass primates. So 25 years down the line maybe 94% of cars still on the road are now FSD enabled but nobody has ever used the damn thing and most people probably aren’t going to want to start then. So at this point you’ve only sort of solved the distribution problem (although not really, even then, because a single human-operated car on the road can fuck up everything for all the automated cars by acting unpredictably and potentially not being linked in, and there will always, always be at least one poor bastard driving a 50 year old beat-to-fuck Toyota no matter when or where you are) and we run right back into the same societal adaptation problem we had before, just with the can kicked down the road.

So like, tl;dr, this wouldn’t be an awful idea if we weren’t all human beings. I guess that’s true of a lot of things. If we could just do it in one big flush and just tell people “this is the way things are now” and have them listen and cooperate, it’d be a great solution. But as with many things it’s the “getting people on board with the plan” part of the plan that makes it, in my opinion, soundly impossible.

Aaand I’ve just spent the better part of half an hour talking myself into a circle to basically agree with you. Lovely. Cheers 🍻

Pretty much none of these are based in any sort of evidence though. This time we have concrete evidence that our environment is in a runaway loop past the point of repair. We have guaranteed proof that we have already destroyed our planet’s biosphere. The melting ice caps by themselves are already a self-sustaining heat loop even without additional help.

This is not “I declare that Jesus will return in 184 months and then the rapture will happen” like pretty much every other prediction of apocalypse. This is not “the Mayan calendar runs out this year so the world is going to end”. This is not “the Bible said we’re going to have Revelations this year”. This is known fact.

as an adult I realize that we all need to change our own hearts and start treating each other with respect

As a kid I believed that cooperation and mutual respect would lead us down the path to a wonderful future. I believed very strongly in the power of love and good sense. I still think this is true but the world has proven to me, brutally and repeatedly, that we don’t live in an environment of cooperation and mutual respect.

As an adult, I’m done treating conservatives with respect. One-sided respect and attempts at compromise is what got us into this nightmare hellscape to begin with. Respect is earned, not given. And I refuse to respect those who will not reciprocate it.

“Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man. You take a step towards him, he takes a step back. Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man.”

Some of this is the reason why your teleporter has an operator and isn’t automated. The teleporter knows you’re wearing shoes or skis because the operator has specified your parameters. The computer might not know where shoes end and floor begins but O’Brien does.