the party standing for freedom

That died with the Hayes Administration.

it is just becoming possible to have an infinitely persistent entity

You’re just describing a library. And we’ve had those for millennia.

That said… we’ve had libraries for millennia! Imagine all the alternative universes in which Euclid’s Elements or Plato’s Republic or The Analects of Confucius or Naturalis Historia or On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres were lost before they could become cornerstones of human understanding.

Imagine a world in which we never developed the capacity for language or the faculty for written text.

And yet, despite stockpiling weapons for the next eight decades, never again.

Maybe that’ll change in the next decade, but hopefully we can keep 1945 as the last year nuclear weapons were used for a bit longer.

They killed Lincoln but they couldn’t kill the abolitionist movement. Congress ratified three of the most progressive laws written in a century and the Freedman’s Bureau took to the job of enfranchising and rehabilitating millions of black ex-slaves in the subsequent decade.

Pick up a copy of W.E.B DuBois’s “The Souls of Black Folk”. What he describes is, at it’s heart, a revolution in how our country treated men and women of African descent. It set the foundation for the next century of civil rights and paved the way for a modern era in which the core racist underpinning of the country are totally upended.

That kind of fundamental change would not have been possible under a Breckinridge administration, nor would it have been possible if the Union had been crippled into submission at Gettysburg or Antitem.

Lincoln was the tip of the abolitionist spear and critical to what came after. But he was not alone. And he was by no means the most radical voice within his party. His martyrdom became the bloody shirt that Republicans rallied under long after the war had ended.

Oh yeah, I love people who stick SQL lookups in a For Loop. Even better, the coder who puts conditional if (but no then/else) clauses around a dozen raw text execution commands that fire in sequence. So you’re making six distinct lookups per iteration rather than answering your question in a single query and referencing the results from memory.

Internal screaming

Well, you don’t want to waste space by adding the same file path twice

Christ, if you could see the abysmal efficiency of business tier SQL code being churned out in the Lowest Bidder mines overseas…

Using a few terrabytes of memory and a stack of processors as high as my knee so they can recreate Excel in a badly rendered .aspx page built in 2003.

Tom Cruise is a great example of love the actor, hate the man.

Tom Cruise is a mid-tier actor given top-tier roles.

they can’t imagine what actual fact finding looks like

Facts aren’t useful for setting policy if people don’t believe in them. Just ask any climatologist.

The common rube doesn’t understand jack shit.

Everyone has their area of expertise. “The common rube” at the hospital can be a professional cab driver who has half the city memorized or a sports buff who can tell you every significant baseball stat going back twenty years or a vagrant who has survived by mastering a litany of social protocols unique to the homeless population or a musician who has an entire arcane language for their craft.

As you specialize, you develop a jargon for the minutiae of your field. Which does go to your underlying point

Your research may further the understanding of a small group of people, possibly see some practical use, but the general public can’t directly make any use of it.

More broadly, they wouldn’t have the opportunity to leverage the research productively. If you need an electron microscope or an industrial boiler or a large population of waterfowl to make practical use of a piece of research data, most people aren’t going to be in the position to find it useful.

That said, expanding the pool of expertise is also supposed to be a major role of the academic system. If people in or adjacent to your field have trouble understanding your research output, it isn’t easily transmissible to people who do have an opportunity to leverage it.

One of the reasons why you have these large populations of sports buffs and musical talents and cab drivers bouncing around is thanks to the improved mechanisms of education distribution. Finding a middle ground between specificity and accessibility is critical if you want to grow your population of specialists.

If I might interject.

One word mean many thing to not same people.

Use special word for special job. Special job doers no get dizzy. All know special word mean same thing.

Special words job help make many people with not same word skill talk gooder.

Oh shit, he’s good. He DDOS’d me right back.

At high concentrations, its still fucking awful for us. Easy to forget that the atmosphere is still only 21% Oxygen and 78% Nitrogen. Even setting aside the risks of fire and explosion at higher concentrations, this highly reactive substance degrades the nervous and musculature system.

You wouldn’t want to wander around in a fully oxygenated environment for the same reason you wouldn’t want to drive your car through a lake of gasoline.

I would have to assume there’s some ecological pressure they’re either experiencing or shielded from. If they’re under environmental pressure, they are either exceptionally developed to endure environmental changes or they’re adapting to the environment in ways that don’t reflect in their physiology. If they’ve just found a niche biome where the ecological conditions are fairly static, and they’re well suited to the environment, what changes would you see other than some generic genetic drift?

You need to pretend you live in a democracy or the administrators will take away the illusion.

He will be exempt. The areas that he lives in and the things that he does will not be tagged as “criminal” on the data system that he has the contract to administer.

That’s always how these systems work. You don’t worry about getting dragged into the Saudi Consulate and bonesawed to death by intelligence officers when you’re MBS, because you’re the boss and the guy getting bonesawed is your employee.

For the same reason, you don’t worry about getting spied on when you’re the one who owns and operates the big surveillance infrastructure because it exists for your benefit.

I’m not sure what people think AI was ever going to be…

The heavy investment in AI is coming under the assumption that these advanced processes will replace huge portions of the human workforce.

So we don’t need lawyers, because we just put prompts into a Law AI and it gives us a verdict. We don’t need doctors, because we just put symptoms into a Medical AI and it gives us a diagnosis and treatment plan. We don’t need salespeople, because we just put the product into a Marketing AI and it spits out a bunch of comvincing ad copy.

the concept of what a brain is will probably be questioned as well.

We already connect our brains to our computers. We just use screens and keyboards as our interface.

I suppose you could argue that a guy with a calculator or a camera or a chat app is mentally different than one without it. But I think the goal with AI is supplementing human minds, not complementing then.

So much of the drift has just been marketing. Rebranding a Markov Chain stapled onto a particularly large graph as Master Computer from Tron.

The planet could simply exist further back from the sun where the R^2 property renders the energy more diffuse.

Or perhaps we’d use the reflected soundwaves to navigate with echolocation much like we use reflected light waves to see.