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diogenes4

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you'll reliably get a lot more NIMBY response from "set up a nuclear power plant in the neighbourhood" vs. "set up a gas power plant in the neighbourhood"

I don't associate the term "NIMBY" with either scenarios, just housing. I don't think there's much value to overloading it. It's not like anyone's trying to put a nuclear power plant in the middle of Boston to begin with.

I'm not one to ever defend the institution of policing or the court system that feeds and protects it, but cops do not have general immunity. They have qualified immunity from civil cases in some places. The primary friction from prosecuting police for criminal behavior has been and will continue to be DAs unwilling to prosecute (for various reasons, some reasonable, and some nefarious).

1. Most people don't have anything interesting to say.

2. People who do have interesting things to say deserve to get paid for their work.

3. Other platforms (e.g. TikTok) provide a more natural medium for interaction and response.

4. If you're just aiming to write, there's always journals. I journal and I find it very satisfying.

5. Obviously, people still blog, even if the scene is dominated by capital's obsession with SEO.

BB(3, 3) is Hard 3 years ago

Spacetime (might be) infinitely large, but that doesn't imply that there is infinite matter or energy.

That said, this is kind of a dumb argument because far lower k values have lower BB(k) values already exceed the apparent information value of the universe at any given instant. Maybe there is infinite energy and matter, but that's also irrelevant if we can't perceive more than a finite subset of it.

Edit: well, i guess what would matter would be the information value of time, multiplied by enough bits to store the machine—I'm not sure i'm literate enough in the area to compute that. But, assuming that the heat death of the universe reaches a single (possibly compressed) end-state, it should still be finite—it's seeming quantized, anyway.

I'm "convinced" that the "defund the police" was planted to discredit the movement to reform the police.

"Reform"? You mean spend billions more on training so they can ignore all the criticisms levied at the institution? By any metric defund" is bad, reform is worse. Unless the goal is to change nothing of course, in which case "reform" is clearly preferable.

God forbid we agree on any kind of concrete, measurable policy goal....

I don't understand the fear—we have always lived in a society where truth exists in terms of degrees of certainty, and virtually any statement about the world can only be true with less than perfect certainty. Vagueness and ambiguity, floating signifiers, and the difficult-to-articulate impact of connotation ensure that we live in a state of constant uncertainty.

And, of course, there are always self-motivated incentives to directly mislead people about the world. If we really want to minimize the uncertainty that comes with relaying statements about the world around us to each other, we need to minimize the personal gain that can come from obscuring reality from each other. As I see it, this is inherently at-odds with the inherently narcissistic nature of market economics—there's nothing inherently special about that but being the primary mechanism of power in this world.