I’m glad you appreciate it, it was as much an excuse for me to unload that rant as anything else :)

But we actually get into trouble when our models of reality are poor. Our nature isn’t self destructive at all, look at how many times we’ve been at the brink of nuclear annihilation and someone said, “actually don’t”, some of them in defiance of entrenched power structures that punished them for it.

We’ve had that world ending button for most of the last century, and we’ve never used it. If we really, on an instinctual level, were self-destructive we never would’ve evolved.

I think the real problem is the power structures that dominate us, and how we allow them to. They are aberrant, like tumours. They have an endless growth strategy, which just like in malignant tumours tend to kill the host. If they’re destroyed, the host can go on to live a complete life.

And things can change fast, these structures are tenacious but fragile. Look at the UHC assassination - claims immediately started getting approved. After decades of entrenched screwing over of people, they flipped on their back the moment they were threatened. How many other seemingly intractable problems could be cut out tomorrow if we applied the right kind of pressure?

I wouldn’t put too much stock in notions of a great filter. The “Fermi paradox” is not a paradox, it’s speculation. It misses the mark on how unbelievably unlikely life is in the first place. It relies on us being impressed by big numbers and completely forgetting about probabilities as we humans tend to do what with our gambler’s fallacies and so on.

Even the Drake equation forgets about galactic habitable zones, or the suitability of the stars themselves to support life. Did you know that our star is unusually quiet compared to what we observe? We already know that’s a very rare quality of our situation that would allow the stable environment that life would need. Then there’s chemical composition, atmosphere, magnetosphere, do we have a big Jupiter out there sweeping up most of the cataclysmic meteors that would otherwise wipe us out?

All these probabilities stack up, and the idea that a life-supporting planet is more common than one in 400 billion stars is ludicrously optimistic, given how fast probabilities can stack up. You’re about as likely to win the Lotto, and it seems to me the conditions for life would be a little more complex than that, not to mention the probability that it actually does evolve.

I think it might be possible that life only happens once in a billion galaxies, or even less frequently. There might not be another living organism within our local galactic cluster’s event horizon. Then you have to ask about how frequent intelligent life, to the point of achieving interstellar travel, is.

You know why your favourite science youtuber brushed right past the rare earth hypothesis and started talking about the dark forest? Because one of those makes for fun science-adjacent speculation, and the other one doesn’t.

It also relies on the notion that resources are scarce, completely brushing over the fact that going interstellar to accumulate resources is absolutely balls to the wall bonkers. Do you know how much material there is in our asteroid belt? Even colonising the Moon or Mars is an obscenely difficult task, and Fermi thinks going to another star system, removed from any hope of support by light years, is something we would do because we needed more stuff? It’s absurd to think we’d ever even consider the idea.

But even then, Fermi said that once a civilisation achieves interstellar travel it would colonise a galaxy in about “a million years”. Once again relying on us being impressed by big numbers and forgetting the practicalities of the situation. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, so this motherfucker is telling us with a straight face that we’re going to colonise the galaxy, something we already know is unfathomably hard, at approximately ten percent of the speed of light? That is an average rate of expansion in all directions. Bitch, what?

If we did it at 0.0001c, that’s an average speed of 30km/s, including the establishment of new colonies that could themselves send out new colonies, because it’s no good to just zoom through the galaxy waving at the stars as they go past. That seems amazingly generous of a speed, assuming we can even find one planet in range we could colonise. Then we could colonise the galaxy in about a billion years.

Given the universe is 14 billion years old and the complex chemistry needed for life took many billions of years to appear, and life on our rock took many billions of years to evolve, then the idea that we haven’t met any of our neighbours - assuming they even exist - doesn’t seem like a paradox at all. It doesn’t seem like a thing that needs explanation unless you’re drumming up sensational content for clicks. I mean, no judgement, people gotta eat, but that’s a better explanation for why we care so much about this non-problem.

No, the Fermi paradox is pop-science. It’s about as scientific as multiversal FTL time travel. Intelligence is domain-specific, and Fermi was good at numbers, he wasn’t an exobiologist.

I’m sorry, which part of your comment do you suppose relates to me?

The “since 1982” statistic, unless there’s something I’m missing, is literally confusing correlation for causation.

Your other quote on education has a strange emphasis on “short term” changes, especially given that the part regarding bans is talking on the order of decades. Presumably that is a long term effect, yes?

That paper talks a lot about changing social norms and increasing public support for laws. So if laws pass with broad public support, then presumably that broad public support is indicative of a change in social norms which confounds the data. In the end the drink-driving issue is a bad example for this kind of discussion of bans because it’s not banning things that the public broadly would otherwise want to do.

Also, the logic that the “high-risk-but-hard-to-reach” group won’t be reached by education also supports the notion that they won’t be reached by laws either. It makes this point:

Various studies, mostly of male populations, have noted the interrelationship among certain personality traits (rebelliousness, risktaking, independence, defiance of authority ), deviant driving practices (speeding, drinking and driving), and crashes and violations. Deviant driving and crash involvement have also been found to be related to a syndrome of problem behavior including marijuana use, heavy alcohol use, smoking, trouble with the law, and various other delinquent behaviors.

The obvious thing that would reach people like this is social pressure, which again is something that requires broad social support, which confounds any notion that bans have any real effect.

Sorry, but you have a bunch of sources but they don’t seem to say what you want them to say.

I asked you the question first. You won’t answer, you just deflected to a question that you now demand I answer. This is going nowhere.

If your point is that you proposed something before I asked you something, I had already proposed that bans are ineffective, which you ignored. You’re just trying to control the conversation without listening to my side. I don’t know why I’d bother with that. Someone else tried to at least answer the question, so you’re no longer needed here.

Thank you! They’re actually a similar price here in Aus, which I am not used to.

This week on How to Raise an Entire Generation With an Intimate Knowledge of Counter-Surveillance: Ban Their Favourite Social Media!

See, the problem there is to make that claim you have to be seen to give it. You have maintain the appearance of legitimacy. I’d say the US is facing a crisis of legitimacy worse than it’s had in many decades.

People forget that without the appearance of legitimacy, the whole apparatus comes down, including the monopoly on violence. People forget that the Vietnam War was ended by a revolt within the military.

I asked you first. And it’s not a simple yes/no because without the context of anti-carceral activism the answer won’t make any sense, unless you’re trying to force me into a false dichotomy devoid of context, which is not a sign of good faith.

Haven’t been able to watch all of those videos but I love the first one, instant sub. I loved the animations at the start of all the curves being constructed. I nearly showed a gif from wikipedia of that in my video but I decided it wasn’t so necessary.

That line haunts me.

Just so we’re clear: you’re not going to answer the question about whether it even works?

Why would you care if it’s legal if you can’t even say that it’s an effective measure? If you don’t even stand by it to that extent, why are you asking?

Do you think bans reduced the amount of drinking & driving, or was it education?

Like you can’t just name another thing that you’re confident I disagree with and assume I’m going to suddenly support the ban.

You’re doing the thing ban advocates always do: “thing bad”. Okay, thing bad. So how do we actually, effectively, reduce it? Because bans don’t work.

Fastest way to get an answer on the internet.

Whaddaya mean it’s a “pile of junk not fit for a river crossing”? Sounds like you don’t appreciate true innovation.

Always turn off motion blur and DoF if you can.

I would like to know more about these cheap AMD mini PCs please.

Yes, it would. Covid got around because of its long dormant period and high transmissibility. It’s only gotten less lethal over time as it’s mutated. Turns out killing your host is a poor reproductive strategy.

Not for lack of trying, the corruption of the US spreads wherever it can. When a large tree is dying, it rots from the centre of the trunk first. The rot at the core of capitalism started where the most power resides, and that’s why the US is such a horror show. You aren’t immune from it, it just hasn’t rotted as badly where you are.

If you hear David Graeber talk about it, the IMF and the World Bank’s power was shattered after occupy, countries weren’t willing to accept their terms anymore because the word was out that leaders who did that were selling out their own people. Things changed, but there are powerful hegemonic forces at work that work to stop us from hearing about it. They want us to believe we are powerless.

Just because you didn’t storm the bastille yet doesn’t mean nothing is being done. Most direct action is on the ground and invisible. That’s why it looks like decades pass with nothing happening, then overnight everything changes.