Parenthood has taught me that anyone who thinks they don’t want kids should absolutely be free to follow that and not have kids.
It’s also taught me that all of the cringe goofball nonsense is 100% sincere. Being a parent changes the human brain in weird ways. Which is good, because babies need someone to clean them up after they puke on themselves and shit their plants so hard it gets in their hair.
(Parenthood can be considered a necessary mental illness.)
Space launches via catapult are entirely possible on earth. We don’t do it mostly because the engineering scale is dramatically larger, not because of how we math.
The laws of physics seem to be consistent throughout our universe, so any claim that an alien race could travel through space without math is what skeptics call “an extraordinary claim”.
I dont really see how a contrarian “what if they’re just too weird” stance is even helpful in a discussion about why math is the closest thing we have to a universal language. If an alien civilization is too weird to grok math, I dont see how we’d ever be able to communicate with them at all.
If the aliens have godlike powers I think we can presume that they would either be smart enough to figure us out or else weird enough that talking to them isn’t worthwhile.
Literally every civilization we have ever encountered evidence of has math and language. If an alien has neither, and is not smart enough to figure us out, then they’re likely not the sort we could communicate with on even the scale of our communication with plants and insects.
The sun is the big one. What we call “visible light” is just the band of the em spectrum right around Sol’s peak. A larger\hotter star would have that band shifted dramatically bluer, while a smaller/colder star would be redder.
For instance, what if they don’t have the concept of symbolic representation of objects/concepts in visual/auditory ways?
Then how did they manage space travel?
Rocket science demands math. You can’t get to orbit if you can’t figure out both the rocket equation, orbital dynamics, and sufficient chemistry to power your launch engine. And you don’t even realize that orbit is a thing if you don’t have enough math to realize that the lights in the sky are things you might be able to stand on.
We have sapient non-human life right here on earth that doesn’t have the concept of writing. And since they don’t they didn’t build cities or civilization and we keep them in zoos and nature preserves.
If a spacefaring race is so utterly alien they don’t even have a concept of counting how did they manage space travel?
And, like I said, math only works for the (presumably large) subset of aliens we could eventually talk to.
Counting is kind of basic. From one-two-three you can get fairly quicky to yes-no, and then comparisons, and with yes/no/more/less/same you have enough to fuzzle out whatever squak gigors.
Aliens we could talk to at all wouldn’t be cthulu or q. They would live in the same basic reality we do, with entropy and gravity and the same elemetnts and stars. (They WOULD likely see different colors than we do, unless their sun was the same temperature as Sol and their planet the same size as earth)
If the scrawl says “episode IV” it was already fucked with.
Star Wars mananaged to have each movie retcon something, including the first one. ;)
Money is fungible. $1 from pot tax, lottery tax, or DMV fee spends the same in the general ledger, and any pretense to the otherwise is just make believe.
(If your state implements a lottery “for education” and raises $10 million, the near immediate result is reducing general fund outlay to education by $10 million.)
Sexualities are only useful as options on the dating app.
Whether you describe yourself as “asexual” or “demisexual” (or "straight’ or “gay”) only matters when you’re looking for a new partner and need to choose how much “what do you mean by that” you want to put up with.
The EU is about twice the size of the USA…
In FOSS you’re paying with your time and plausible feedback / contributions.
You nailed it in one.
Wars are fought to knock down opponents. No war has ever had an actual goal of “make that country happy”.
As I said before, the war part of Gulf War 2 was a resounding success that ended the Bathist tyranny in Iraq. That chaos replaced it was not a failure of war fighting which might have been solved by more bullets and bombs, but rather a failure of the post-war peace.
If Gulf war 2 was a “loss” because it led to chaos and civil war, then WW1 was the biggest loss in history since its end led directly to.tne Nazis. Which i suppose is a reasonable philosophy., except that it would utterly neuter statements about the USA not winning many wars with “nobody else does either.”
Social media sites live as advertising vehicles. Being able to show numbers related to users showing links helps them sell advertisements.
It’s reportedly why Bluesky redirects links in the app to a referrer – so websites can see how much traffic they get from there and have a reason to post on the network.
Whether or not this is a good thing, and how much tracking is acceptable, is an entirely separate discussion. (Which should really include words like “I regularly donate to my Lemmy instance” or their equivalent…)
It’s not so much a philosophical challenge as a grammatical question.
Was the egg that the very first chicken hatched from a chicken egg, even though it was laid by a non-chicken?
If I waved a scientifically-advanced biotech wand and impregnated a chicken with a small dinosaur, would the resultant egg be a chicken egg even though a dinosaur came out?
I think you underestimate how long a telegram can be.
Not everyone who sent telegrams was as poor as Victor Hugo inquiring about the English sales of Les Miserables by sending a single '?"
The “global war on terror” ended with a rather dramatic raid that killed bin laden. And the war part of Gulf war 2 was an obvious victory.
But winning a peace is a fuckton harder. And we haven’t done that since Vietnam.
No, I would not keep seeing a doctor who demanded I consent to AI to continue being a patient.
Just as I’d stop seeing a doctor who said they now want to ban all vaccines. Or who demands that patients go to their specific church. Or requires that we give blood.
A doctor who asks to use it, however, is entirely tolerable. I don’t mind if my doctor has an LLM look at my MRI scan to help find precancerous growths, and neither should you. But “talk to this chatbot instead of a triage nurse” is an unacceptable level of care.
One of the virtues of the EU is that it counteracts the balkanization that let people make ignorant statements like “[ part of] Europe is better than [the average part of] America”
If you separate America and Europe into similar-scale subdivisions (local schools, postal codes, sports teams, etc) you’ll find the two areas are broadly scattered on most metrics which aren’t things like “native English speakers”, “uses metric”, or “has a passport.”
“Europe” has a bunch of countries that do some things better than the typical American experience, but there are a lot of things that the USA and it’s internal states do better than the typical European experience.
(For the easiest example, look at trans rights. Some parts of the USA are Iowa and some parts are fiercely transclusive; some parts of Europe are as LGBT friendly as NY and some are TERF island. )
There are two things you appear ignorant about.
First, while gender and sex are not the same thing HRT can be absurdly effective and adjusting the latter to match the former. There are humans out here who look and act “obviously” manly or womanly, despite privately being female or male respectivly. And that’s before we consider surgical options.
Second, human sex is not that simple. Take the IoC’s “trans women” ban, where they are now testing for the SRY gene. Except that there are cis-women who are XX with a copied SRY from their fatber’s Y, and XY humans for whom the SRY gene is dormant, or whose testes never developed, or who are testosterone resistant – and have appeared feminine since birth. Its entirely likely the IoC will wind up banning more cis women than trans women.
Taken together, these facts lead most people to conclude that the only fair thing is to take people at their word. Sure, doing so means you may need to treat some apparent “bearded women” and “men in dresses” contrary to your initial perception. But most adults do that anyway for literally every other aspect of humanity, and unless you’re a sexist jerk the sum total of what you’d need to change is just pronouns and salutations.