Think the early 2000's were good? You should have been around in the late 20th century. But part the problem with both was how naive and consumerist people were. As mentioned, the middle class wasted their money on material luxuries and instead of doing anything difficult to make the future better for their children they just followed the crowd and believed whatever the TV told them. People today aren't a lot better but at least they're less trusting of institutions and in some ways a worse economy has made them less materialist (and in other ways more selfish).
We are gradually moving closer to people being able to talk about changing society back to the way things were. Currently that discussion is mostly in terms of politics and economics, but to end the "dystopian Sci Fi horror" we have to get rid of the sci-fi part.
This is almost counting the same thing three times. You can also get way more than just three sixes - count the number of points on the interior hexagon, the number of intersections and the minimum number of lines needed to draw the star. If you count other properties you don't get sixes. The number of exterior sides and vertices are both 12, the number of line segments without intersections is 18, the angles involved are 60, 120 and 300 degrees.
I totally agree. But the percentage of people with such wisdom and discipline is in the single digits at most. Even those people can't be disciplined all the time. These systems are designed to exploit human psychology. Humans on the whole aren't capable of functioning properly with these systems. It's like expecting a whale to live on land. So while we as individuals can do our best to avoid the negative consequences for ourselves and use the internet wisely, we still have to oppose its existence out of concern for our brothers and sisters.
It gives access to more knowledge, but does it actually lead to people having more knowledge? If it reduces your attention span, memory and addicts you to wasting your time then almost certainly not. You may get access to information that would have been difficult to find prior to the internet, but this is likely at the cost of remembering less, reading fewer books (or high quality information) and if you are young, getting a lower quality education. You likely also get information overload where you don't have sufficient time to process individual pieces of information, leading to less cognitive development, less recall and more stress. There's surely lots of other consequences that I've overlooked including ones yet to be discovered.
I agree the internet (as with most technologies since 1900) was a mistake. Real life relationships and community have been shattered by it and people have become dumber. Social media only made it worse. I'm not convinced a decentralized internet would be much better.
Best thing to do is stay offline unless it's for something important, not leisure. Very hard to do in today's world however.
The protection lasted 20 weeks in the rats, which Gage thinks may translate to up to a year of protection in humans.
Get a vaccine every year for an illegal drug you will never come into contact with unless you're buying other illegal drugs. This is just going to encourage more people to try fentanyl.
After arguing with Redditors recently I know most of them would be angry that anyone could oppose such a thing. "This would save and improve so many lives" they would say, thinking we can play God with biology that we barely understand without any serious negative consequences. This from the same people that would abort their own defective children - the exact people from whom lives need to be saved.
I can't imagine having a conscience so numbed to crimes against nature to think that this stuff is OK. Especially considering less than 1% of the population would stand to benefit from this, at the risk of giving people other health problems and ushering in a eugenical society that designs its own babies - something which governments and doctors can wield as a weapon over parents they don't like.
There were hardly any atheists in the enlightenment. There's a famous quote from Isaac Newton about atheists being rare. Atheism only got popular after Darwin upon the groundwork laid by uniformitarian geologists. I don't think Jews had a lot of power then either, seeing as societies were very Christian-oriented so Jews were like outcasts and often had fewer rights than everyone else. The Rothschild bankers also weren't around until the very end of the enlightenment.
How are they opposed to cleanliness? And the greatest rights to autonomy came out of the enlightenment and Protestant reformation, not under Greek, Roman or other systems.
A Medieval Era with cleanliness and autonomy would just be what if the Roman Empire or Greek Empire had modern technology.
No, it would have medieval technology and thus it would be way better than today.
I got tired of the back and forth and my response would be repeating myself.
I also think the last point he makes is a good refutation of his position and a good place to leave the conversation. Paintings depict things in a way that is comprehensible even to babies who have no linguistic or other knowledge. Many depict humans so would obviously tell aliens quite a bit about humans. And nature is much more vast than all the paintings ever made.
Elon's plan with Twitter from the beginning was to incorporate digital ID, so yes I believe this is related to that. He said right when he bought it that one of the main things he wanted to do was remove bots by requiring all users to be identified. He also said he wants X to be an everything app like WeChat is in China, which is used for all types of social media as well as payments, games and third party mini apps. Although he hasn't done this yet, I believe he's doing it gradually.
First he makes it even more difficult to use the platform without being logged in. Nitter stopped working for a long time because he allegedly wanted to stop scraping. Then he pretty much requires you to get the blue check in order to have any visibility. This means giving them a phone number and payment (crypto not supported), which is very difficult to do without leaking your identity or that of a close friend or relative. Then they caved to the UK and started to preemptively censor posts in the UK unless you to prove your age or identity. So now they already have an ID verification system in place that it would be tempting to turn on other users like those who want to get the blue check or get unsuspended.
The X premium FAQ also says that they do local pricing and may include taxes. So then they would need to ask for your location, and if they don't already require proof of this I think they will in the future.
If only more people had opted out of those we may not be in this mess today