• 0 Posts
  • 119 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 13th, 2023

help-circle







  • Cooperation is beneficial to each individual’s survival when most in the population are cooperative. Pragmatic self-interest is beneficial to each individual’s survival when most in the population are selfish and pragmatic. I think most people tend to be cooperative, but there are plenty who will opportunistically fuck over cooperative people. The results would probably depend on the tendencies of the majority of the individuals in that situation.



  • I’ve never seen “outrage” about it, mostly annoyance and eye rolling. It’s douchey at best. It’s usually the least respectful people (primarily men/teenage boys, but not exclusively), usually using the term in a derogatory or dismissive way against women, and often dehumanizing or objectifying them. It’s also similar to referring to black people as “blacks”. It’s just reductive, like that’s the defining feature of them. That may not be fair. May not be how you use it. But that is the connotation of using the term in that way.



  • 10+ years ago, it was very common to get an upgrade to your phone ever two years (or less). And at the time, there was a lot more variability in phones. And I mean in more than just battery life, storage capacity, camera quality, processor, etc. There used to be a variety of form factors to consider, sizes, genuinely different features and functionalities. The iPhone came about in 2009, and other smart phones soon followed, but even then there were still phones with physical keyboards, digital keyboards with stylus typing, flip phones, etc. Once smart phones completely dominated the market and all the manufacturers started just copying each other’s features and designs, eventually we got to the status quo of today where they’re all essentially the same. The only major difference now is the OS, and that’s largely just down to iOS vs Android.



  • Arguably, Star Trek is less political. Picard never violently overthrows the Federation. Q never massacres entire planets. Janeway doesn’t practice literal mind control. The equivalent of all of those is done in both Star Wars and Dune, often by the protagonists.

    Edit: Chill out guys. I wasn’t claiming Trek isn’t political. Obviously it is. Sometimes it very much is. My thinking was just that (usually, not always) the show is usually self contained episodically, and deals with everything from natural phenomenon, science, philosophy, exploration, law, and, of course at times, politics. Star Wars and Dune are just often more directly dealing with massive scale political conflicts. Not that Trek doesn’t sometimes too, it’s just not its main thing.




  • If we’re talking deities, as in supernatural creator beings, the answer would be yes when they want to be made of atoms and no when they don’t want to be. If they have the power of creation and form reality itself, their nature, both physical and spiritual, would be whatever they choose, right?

    If we’re talking non-infinite mind creating a simulated universe that we live in, then it’s more likely that they are made of something, though it may not be atoms or matter as we understand it. They would presumably occupy some sort of physical universe with laws and something like matter to give it physical properties, but there is no reason to assume that the nature of the universe would resemble our own or follow the same laws. Atoms and other forms of matter that we have in our universe may be a construct of our simulation, rather than a constant truth in all universes. And honestly, their universe may not even be physical at all in the sense that we all understand it. The answer is that we don’t know, have no way to know, and may not even have the capacity to understand even if we were given the answer.