papasquat's recent activity
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Comment on We need empathy, not just etiquette, on the subway in ~life
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Comment on Dune: Part Two | Official trailer in ~movies
papasquat Link ParentThe main difference is that those are all pretty external, plot driven stories. Throughout a lot of dune, but especially starting with God Emperor, a huge chunk of the book, maybe even the...The main difference is that those are all pretty external, plot driven stories.
Throughout a lot of dune, but especially starting with God Emperor, a huge chunk of the book, maybe even the majority of it, takes place in character's minds. In God Emperor, the majority of the book is just Leto's inner thoughts. The actual things that happen in that book are relatively straightforward, but without Leto's thoughts on philosophy, governance, religion, war, etc, they don't really make much sense. The story is perfectly adapted for the medium of a novel. Stuff like that just doesn't work well on a screen. -
Comment on Longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo in ~humanities
papasquat LinkI have no idea what the central thesis of this idea even is. "Fulfil humanity's potential?" What does that mean? Does that mean making as many humans as possible? Does it mean building giant space...I have no idea what the central thesis of this idea even is. "Fulfil humanity's potential?" What does that mean? Does that mean making as many humans as possible? Does it mean building giant space megastructures? Does it mean colonizing other planets or other galaxies?
I don't understand why any of these things are even worthy goals, other than "I read about them in a sci fi book once and it seemed cool." Which seems to drive, not even exaggerating, like at least half of what silicon valley billionaires invest their resources into.I have no idea what's positive about increasing the population, or colonizing other planets, or doing any of this stuff, if it's not in service of reducing human suffering and increasing human happiness/fulfillment.
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Comment on Europe's nuclear divide grows – first new plant in sixteen years comes on stream in Finland day after Germany pulls plug on last reactors in ~enviro
papasquat Link ParentI think a lot of that overkill is just a justification, because the economics usually don't make sense. Nuclear energy is almost always calculated as one of the, or the highest cost/kw/h sources...I think a lot of that overkill is just a justification, because the economics usually don't make sense. Nuclear energy is almost always calculated as one of the, or the highest cost/kw/h sources of energy. Renewables are always way cheaper, and in most cases are cheaper even with energy storage solutions to shore up their major weakness of inconsistency.
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Comment on Kenyan player expelled after pretending to be a woman to win lucrative prize in ~games.tabletop
papasquat (edited )Link ParentWe already do that. Every sport has a minor league, a feeder series, regional championships, and so on and so forth. The best women in the world, playing at the absolute pinnacle of their sport...we should split leagues by ability instead.
We already do that. Every sport has a minor league, a feeder series, regional championships, and so on and so forth.
The best women in the world, playing at the absolute pinnacle of their sport shouldn't have to play against and with mediocre men. It would be really insulting to their competence, and frankly it would be worse as a spectator also.Women that play professional sports have trained literally their entire lives for the opportunity. They've pushed their bodies to the absolute limit of performance. Over the course of their lives, they've spent more time playing the sport, training for it, studying it, and thinking about it than most people spend sleeping. On top of that all, they also possess natural raw talent that's extremely rare.
The men they'd be competing against are... not that. A good highschool soccer team could probably beat most professional women's teams. The advantage of size, strength, speed, weight, height, are just too great to overcome with any sort of talent or training, and it would be literally impossible for any woman, anywhere to play at the pinnacle of the sport. That's not only blatantly unfair, sexist, and mean spirited, it's boring. Soccer isn't even the most blatant example. If you made boxing or MMA mixed gender, no woman would ever win anything or even compete in any weight class, ever. Powerlifting? I bench more than the female world record holder at my weight class, and I'm just a random guy that goes to the gym a few times a week, I've never even considered competing. You'd just be completely erasing women from those sports.
Women's and men's sports are also extremely different. Women's hockey is played in an entirely different way from men's, women's gymnastics are a different sport entirely than men's gymnastics. The games have different considerations due to women's different bodies which affects strategy, gameplay, the types of conflict and so on. Merging them with a minor men's league would just turn them into "Men's sports, but not as good". Why would anyone ever bother watching that?
Obviously, most of this doesn't apply to chess, but some of it does. There are a lot of legitimate reasons why women don't play at the same level as men in chess though, and most of them are cultural/societal.
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Comment on Alternative facts - How the media failed Julian Assange in ~news
papasquat Link ParentYeah, but that's not his fault. To my knowledge, he's never done anything to associate with those guys, or even any specific political movement in the US.Yeah, but that's not his fault. To my knowledge, he's never done anything to associate with those guys, or even any specific political movement in the US.
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Comment on Why I haven't played Hades in ~games
papasquat Link ParentYeah, I agree with you. I can understand indigenous groups like native American tribes, Māori, or Aboriginals claiming sole ownership of their ancient ancestor's culture, but when you're talking...Yeah, I agree with you. I can understand indigenous groups like native American tribes, Māori, or Aboriginals claiming sole ownership of their ancient ancestor's culture, but when you're talking about a culture as both expansionist and old as classical greece, that claim rings a lot more hollow.
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Comment on Why I haven't played Hades in ~games
papasquat Link ParentIt depends on what you consider "actual Greeks". Pre Alexander, classical Greece did absolutely colonize a huge chunk of the area surrounding the Mediterranean, including parts of modern-day...It depends on what you consider "actual Greeks". Pre Alexander, classical Greece did absolutely colonize a huge chunk of the area surrounding the Mediterranean, including parts of modern-day Italy, Tunisia, Algeria, turkey, Syria, Spain and France, and black sea regions like Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Georgia, Russia and Ukraine. Those conquered peoples went on to spread their culture further outward before the Macedonians or the Romans ever got involved.
After Roman involvement, that usurped culture which at its core is still very Greek gets pushed even further, by force again. That's why it strikes me as odd for a modern-day Greek to say something like "no, ancient Greece is my culture, and depicting it inaccurately is offensive to me", because that culture was forcibly imposed on virtually every single people that we consider part of "the west" 2000 years ago. It's all of our culture, and it became our culture at the point of a spear.
I'd say something similar to a protestant taking offense at a Christian Native American's interpretation of the gospel. Like, your ancestors abandoned your sole claim to the culture once they forced other people to adopt it.
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Comment on Why I haven't played Hades in ~games
papasquat Link ParentI haven't watched the video, but will, when I get some time. There's a very important distinction though, between modern Greek culture, and ancient Greek culture/mythology. The reason Greek...I haven't watched the video, but will, when I get some time.
There's a very important distinction though, between modern Greek culture, and ancient Greek culture/mythology.
The reason Greek mythology and culture is considered "basically western" is that it kind of is. The Greek empire rampaged and subjugated people all throughout south europe, asia, and africa. Their descendants populated basically every single European country at least in part, and from that, the americas and australia. There's no part of what we consider western history that wasn't forcibly influenced in some way by the ancient Greeks.
Modern Greece or Greeks definitely do not have a monopoly on claiming an ancient Greek heritage, any more than any other modern country with an imperial past has a sole claim to their own history. When you pillage and force your culture on others, those others have just as much of a claim as the people who still live in that region geographically.
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Comment on What’s something you’ve noticed about getting older? in ~talk
papasquat Link ParentI always wondered if there was a cap to this. Like, if someone was immortal and had lived for 10,000 years, would a decade feel like a week to them? Would they occasionally be like "Wait... it's...I always wondered if there was a cap to this. Like, if someone was immortal and had lived for 10,000 years, would a decade feel like a week to them? Would they occasionally be like "Wait... it's the 2020s? I feel like the 90s were yesterday!"
Would they constantly forget what year it is like I forget what the date is?
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Comment on The vertical farming bubble is finally popping in ~enviro
papasquat Link ParentYeah, the scales we're talking about here are not even in the same universe. The US has almost a BILLION acres of farmland. Replacing that with vertical farming would still require hundreds of...Yeah, the scales we're talking about here are not even in the same universe. The US has almost a BILLION acres of farmland. Replacing that with vertical farming would still require hundreds of millions of acres of vertical farming real estate. That is, hundreds of millions of acres of buildings.
That's (rough estimate), 30 times more building space than every single unit of housing in the US; hundreds of millions of detached homes, condos, apartment buildings. Building this stuff would be at the cost of literal hundreds of trillions of dollars and require completely reshaping every metropolitan area in the country. The economics are just so far off so as to be not even worth considering past some back of the napkin math.
It's the same thing with carbon capture, or large scale desalination, or any other of hundreds of pie in the sky technology solutions that are supposed to save us from disasters we created without requiring any sort of actual change in how our society works.
The real solution here is regulation and stricter enforcement of land management practices, just like the solution to water shortages is banning wasteful uses of water and growing crops that are suited for the environment, and the solution to climate change is emphasizing mass transit and ending oil and coal subsidies.
People want so hard to believe that we can be saved without changing our behavior even slightly, if only we're creative enough and trust in the tech bros.
It sucks because we have solutions to all this stuff, but instead, we'd rather pretend we don't and make a bunch of people rich by hoping they have the silver bullet.The only real niche I could think of for vertical farming is fancy bougee places serving food for 4x the normal price to rich people so they can say "this was grown in an expensive high-tech greenhouse by robots 15 minutes away". It's not an efficient way to feed people though.
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Comment on The vertical farming bubble is finally popping in ~enviro
papasquat LinkI never understood the economics of how this stuff was supposed to work in the first place. There's a common problem with techbro futurist types where they fail to understand that the reason we...I never understood the economics of how this stuff was supposed to work in the first place. There's a common problem with techbro futurist types where they fail to understand that the reason we currently do things the way we do them isn't because people aren't creative enough to apply technology to problems, or because we haven't developed the technology to do them differently, but because the hard economic facts of a situation mandates it.
Vertical farming requires land (usually in an extremely expensive metropolitan area), a purpose-built building, a ton of niche technology to plant, water, monitor, and temperature control crops, very expensive specialized workers, an enormous power bill, and a lot of other extremely expensive things that traditional farming doesn't. The only advances is that it uses less land and gets crops closer to people who use them. But both land and transportation are cheap, so there's no real economic advantage to doing it.
I always treated this stuff in a similar vein to hyperloops: something that would never actually reach real production levels, and somehow managed to con a bunch of very rich nerds out of a lot of money just by virtue of being sci-fi-ish and cool sounding.
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Comment on I tried using AI. It scared me. in ~tech
papasquat Link ParentWorse. It will make it worse. I used to be a techno optimist, of the breed of 80s and 90s nerds that thought information wanted to be free, that the internet would democratize learning and...Worse. It will make it worse. I used to be a techno optimist, of the breed of 80s and 90s nerds that thought information wanted to be free, that the internet would democratize learning and dismantle the old hegemonies, that embracing the open-source movement and internalizing the rugged rebellious hacker spirit would free everyone and usher in a better world where people were rational, educated, and reasonable.
That hasn't happened at all. The technology that created the internet, built largely by people from Caltech and Stanford and MIT with that same attitude was co-opted by corporations and people who used it to get insanely rich and tighten control over society instead.
I lack any sort of optimism for AI either. Its already controlled by large corporations. Open-source implementations of large language models aren't even close, and the computing power they require to train will always mean that they lag behind closed source corporate backed implementations. The potential for cutting labor costs using large language models is absolutely huge, and our economic system isn't set up to distribute wealth created by efficiency gains by its very design. Every increase in efficiency will continue to just make a few people richer and everyone else poorer.
I fear that things are going to get a lot, lot worse.
I already feel like we live in a pretty bad cyberpunk setting; the kind of places I read about as a kid and thought "wow that's truly awful, luckily no one would allow corporations to become that powerful", but we literally live there now. I can't help but think it's going to get even more unbelievably oppressive.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
papasquat Link ParentIf you have friends to play with, I can highly recommend Barotrauma. The game is amazing and allows for some pretty over the top ridiculous emergent gameplay. There are also a lot of logic gates...If you have friends to play with, I can highly recommend Barotrauma. The game is amazing and allows for some pretty over the top ridiculous emergent gameplay. There are also a lot of logic gates and electronic gizmos to play with and create interesting stuff if you're into that sort of thing.
Bridge commander felt very railsy and limited to me, more of a theme park ride than a game.
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Comment on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 | New trailer in ~movies
papasquat Link ParentI feel like a lot of the MCU's art style is very samey. Iron man's technology looks very similar to Hank Pym's technology, which looks very similar to the US Government/SHIELD's technology (like...I feel like a lot of the MCU's art style is very samey. Iron man's technology looks very similar to Hank Pym's technology, which looks very similar to the US Government/SHIELD's technology (like falcon's suit), which looks similar to wakanda's technology which looks very similar to kree technology to me.
I feel like a lot of these things start off with a strong identity which becomes very samey as time goes on.
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Comment on Chinese spy balloon flies over the United States: Pentagon in ~news
papasquat Link ParentSpeculation on it is pointless. The intelligence community in the US has some of the most intelligent, specialized, and well trained people in the fields of intelligence/counter-intelligence the...Speculation on it is pointless. The intelligence community in the US has some of the most intelligent, specialized, and well trained people in the fields of intelligence/counter-intelligence the world has ever known. We don't have access to the information they have, because by the very nature of that data it cannot be made public. Even if we did, we don't have the expertise and context that the people making these decisions have.
Any stab at, what, from an intelligence standpoint we should do/should have done about it has as much credence as us (laypeople) arguing about what kind of metal a nuclear reactor should use.
There are arguments to let it float, there are arguments to try to capture it, there are arguments to try to shoot it down. Many of those arguments are perfectly valid from what we know. There's a lot we don't know though.
Maybe it was the right decision, maybe it wasn't, but we don't have the context or expertise to say whether it was or wasn't. This is frustrating to a lot of people but it's kind of the nature of the beast.
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Comment on Why not Mars in ~space
papasquat Link ParentSure, but to put that into perspective, 800 million years ago, not only did humans not exist, animals didn't exist. It took around 800 million years from life to go from sponges to human beings....Sure, but to put that into perspective, 800 million years ago, not only did humans not exist, animals didn't exist. It took around 800 million years from life to go from sponges to human beings. Can you imagine how different we're going to be in 800 million more? Throw in the breakneck speed of technology and its eventual integration into the human body and the needs of "human" colonists millions of years in the future is something we haven't the faintest clue about. "Humanity" could exist purely as code running on powerful supercomputers and controlling robotic bodies in a few thousand years. Who knows what it's going to look like in a few hundred million?
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Comment on Why not Mars in ~space
papasquat Link Parentbecause the sun's expiration date is billions of years from now, being on mars won't help us, and humanity will look nothing like it does today when that happens, if it even exists in a form we...because the sun's expiration date is billions of years from now, being on mars won't help us, and humanity will look nothing like it does today when that happens, if it even exists in a form we can still classify as human. There's no need to spend hundreds of trillions of dollars, trillions of man hours of effort, and put a lot of real humans at risk for something that may or may not affect us in 3 billion years.
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Comment on Why not Mars in ~space
papasquat Link ParentYeah, that's not why I said that though. Earth would survive all of those things. There's literally no chance a volcanic eruption could end all human life on earth. Climate change also has no...Mars doesn't have plate tectonics, ergo it can't have volcanic eruptions, so I'm not sure if you're trolling. Mars doesn't have a hospitable climate and barely has an atmosphere to retain any heat, so climate change would never be a human-ending scenario on Mars. The likelihood of asteroids hitting both Earth and Mars, wiping out humanity simultaneously is vanishingly small. A CME would hit Earth and miss Mars because Earth and Mars are rarely aligned at the same time and Mars is much, much farther away from the Sun's reach, lessening the impact. Similarly, a supernova blast could hit Earth but miss the red planet. Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere to speak of, so protection will have to be present in other ways, making loss of its paltry magnetic field moot. Mars doesn't have nuclear weapons on it, so we couldn't nuke ourselves. Mars doesn't have a biosphere, so plagues wouldn't be an issue at the same evolutionary pace as is possible on Earth.
Yeah, that's not why I said that though. Earth would survive all of those things. There's literally no chance a volcanic eruption could end all human life on earth. Climate change also has no chance of ending all human life. An asteroid would have to be many, many times bigger than any one that's ever been recorded to hit earth to wipe out human life. There's no chance of a CME hitting earth with enough power to end all life. ANY electromagnetism from outside the solar system would necessarily hit both mars and earth due to the sheer distances involved. Even a very low divergence laser beam after a couple of light years will become far, far wider than our entire solar system, let alone something completely divergent like a gamma ray burst. Mars doesn't have nuclear weapons, but any nuclear war sufficient enough to wipe out all human life (already probably impossible) wouldn't also somehow forget about the self-sustaining colony on mars. Any plague with a long enough incubation time to not be detected before it could wipe out all of humanity (again, probably also impossible) would absolutely be spread to mars too.
It would be very, very, very hard to wipe out all human life on earth. The stuff you listed would cause a massive, insane loss of human life and probably the end of modern civilization as we know it, but not the end of humanity. Humans are adaptable, and if we supposedly have the technology to live on mars, then we absolutely have the technology to survive anything but the absolute and total destruction of the earth's crust. That leaves almost no failure scenarios short of a rogue moon happening to wander into the solar system. Mars is less habitable than just about any environment that exists on earth, and if there were really a need for a "lifeboat for humanity" why haven't we just colonized antarctica, or the bottom of the ocean? It would be way easier and would protect against virtually everything that mars would. Cities and civilizations just don't exist without there being an economic incentive for them to. You can't just force it.
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Comment on Weekly megathread for news/updates/discussion of Russian invasion of Ukraine - January 19 in ~news
papasquat Link ParentThe problem is that war is different than it was 60 years ago. A war with Russia likely wouldn't stay conventional for very long. I have no doubt that the US could dismantle Putin's government in...The problem is that war is different than it was 60 years ago. A war with Russia likely wouldn't stay conventional for very long. I have no doubt that the US could dismantle Putin's government in a few months, but what then? Install a puppet regime and fight off another 20 year anti western insurgency?
What's different about Russia that it wouldn't become another quagmire where the US feels it has an obligation to stick around to provide stability and avoid a strongman taking over the country again?
If anything, I think Russia would be an even tougher insurgency than Afghanistan was. The country is absolutely huge, with a strong anti western sentiment amongst the massive population, with some parts that are more or less uncharted even to this day, the weather is harsh, and there's a massive amount of heavy weaponry that's been proliferated throughout the country after 30 years of post soviet corruption. As an added bonus, if you thought IEDs and suicide bombers using homemade and makeshift explosives in Iraq and Afghanistan were bad, what happens when they have access to nuclear weapons?
Well, I don't agree with your first point. Intervening in a violent altercation isn't vigilantism by any definition of the word. It's nice to say that people should stop and notify the authorities while someone is being attacked, but if I was in a chokehold, seeing my vision creep in and feeling the life quickly leave my body, I would really want someone to step in and stop the guy from killing me rather than letting the police know so they can show up 15 minutes later to dispose of my corpse properly.
It's not generally a very good idea from a self-preservation instinct, and I've never been in a situation like that myself, so I don't know what I would do, but I'd like to think that in a situation where a vulnerable person is actively being killed in front of your eyes, at least someone would muster up to courage to stop it from happening, despite the danger and risks.
Police aren't there to stop crimes generally. They're there to deter them, take reports after the fact, and investigate them. If you're a victim of a violent crime, the police being called will almost never actually help you. You're on your own with the people around you.