anon234345566's comments

"a) revolution to uncover and dissolve the control networks that have been covertly put in place, or b) sedition - leaving the state, and not contributing (taxes) to its continued economic development."

Many have enough power to leverage a) or b), but very few choose to do so. Why?

Because if you somehow manage to disolve the current status quo, you'd need to rebuild a similar status quo, probably with your group deeply plugged into the newest surveillance / society control system.

> ultimatelly you would probably have accomplished very few changes, though you could obtain more power / money, but

If you're capable / resourceful enough to make happen a) or b), you probably already have lots of power / money.

Therefore, the current status quo works quite well for you, and there are easier ways to change some things (not all of them though), than going right to a revolution.

That's something you can see in most empires through history: very few were intentionally brough down by internal players. Most players just wanted to get in charge (by any means), but they were not fundamentally changing anything in the current social order.

Going against the state was (and it is), almost certainly not the best path of action.

There's clearly something going on, but nobody knows what could be.

I live in LATAM, Corrientes, AR, it is a region barely touched by the virus, and yeah, people is everywhere, social distancing is being ignored most of the time (private meetings everywhere). Initially we had fewer visitors, but for almost a month we were open to all kind of traffic (air, buses, cars), from at least 3 countries and several regions (we're a traffic hub in the Mercosur).

Right infront of my city, there's a red zone, Resistencia, it has been like that for almost 2 months, they should be in full quarentine mode, but they aren't following it to the letter, even like that, the cases are very slowly increasing, but everybody was expecting thousands of cases, they're just getting to a couple of hundreds (340 till today).

There's a lot of public transport going on in that city and in my city, so you could think, these two places should be like NY or Madrid by now, even going slowly, but no, there are no more than 340 cases in Resistencia (most of them already recovered), in Corrientes we only have 18 infected (a total of 50 cases in two months).

The health system in both cities is doing surprinsingly well, few beds occupied and ICUs cases, most COVID19 diagnosed are kept in their houses, along with their families, then, 10-15 days later, all of them are tested, the affected one usually is now ok, and in very few cases some members living with him are testing positive.

It's a kind of surprise, but the contaiment protocoal is being followed just like that till now, because it is not expanding the virus as expected (the first cases were expected to propagate to family members, and it didn't happened and it keeps not happening for most of the cases).

Obviously most of the cases - almost all - are mild, and the containment protocol was followed to keep the health system free for severe cases.

So, last week the Corrientes governor started to open all business (schools and public office are still closed), they're somewhat enforcing distancing measures, but there are thousand of people out there right now.

So we are going to see what happens from here, we are just starting the winter here, but you know, nobody knows exactly what's stopping or slowing the virus in regions/cities like mine.

zoom baby, kicks out of the water almost everything out there.

Just took a look for us to use it, and we're looking at the offer of 100 people for 20 bucks, unlimited time (quite important because these are college classes).

if there's aliens out there actually, it is critical to do not let that knowledge be confirmed in any way. Global societies at large are poorly prepared to manage the cultural and practical impact of a confirmed first contact.

Not to mention if these guys are bad, it's for our collective advantage to keep the knowledge restricted to the absolutelly minimal necessary people to manage and prepare the rest for the really bad news.

Also the current expressions of capitalism can be improved, and probably will be:

"What does the future hold for Western capitalist societies? The answer hinges on whether liberal meritocratic capitalism will be able to move toward a more advanced stage, what might be called “people’s capitalism,” in which income from both factors of production, capital and labor, would be more equally distributed. This would require broadening meaningful capital ownership way beyond the current top ten percent of the population and making access to the top schools and the best-paying jobs independent of one’s family background.

To achieve greater equality, countries should develop tax incentives to encourage the middle class to hold more financial assets, implement higher inheritance taxes for the very rich, improve free public education, and establish publicly funded electoral campaigns. The cumulative effect of these measures would be to make more diffuse the ownership of capital and skills in society. People’s capitalism would be similar to social democratic capitalism in its concern with inequality, but it would aspire to a different kind of equality; instead of focusing on redistributing income, this model would seek greater equality in assets, both financial and in terms of skills. Unlike social democratic capitalism, it would require only modest redistributive policies (such as food stamps and housing benefits) because it would have already achieved a greater baseline of equality."

"The Clash of Capitalisms The Real Fight for the Global Economy’s Future"

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2019-1...

The model doesn't fail inmediately after having consumed all the resources, because we usually don't get to that point: at certain point the costs are higher but the price of the goods hasn't improved (because somebody else has replaced the goods with technology or has started to exploit cheaper to extract resources from somewhere else), so you just drop the still available resources and get your money to other investments.

That's what's happening right now in Vaca Muerta, Argentina (which is similar to Permium in Texas).

Well, I'm not going to the end of the story in Earth resources, when everything has been depleted, but I suspect I would be rushing conclusions in that case: (even) current technology still holds some good cards to fastly add lots of new resources to our planetary whole stuff.

This, precisely.

I would add, there are some DL/ML business components which are in heavy use in some industries which given the companies size are giant productions deployments of "IA" (not expert systems or other automation technologies), so you could say we are actually living somehow in the principle of a golden age of "IA" (DL/ML techniques), but DL/ML techniques - at least what is known publicly to be the state of the art - has some practical limits (i.e. power consumption to traing useful models), but workarounds for those limits are being heavyly studied or solutions are being tested (as we speak indeed).

What's here for sure, it's a golden age of data: you can extract (meta)data from almost everything running on a CPU/GPU, the "likes" in everything are the users training models, not exactly the models you imagine (because you can associate/correlate some scenarios - "a birthday party at the office" - with others you would think are a lot different - "a christmas party at the bar" - but they'are not so different actually, and the features found by the training are more or less - it should be a % - interchangeable.

So yeah, every "like" out there is training something behind the scene.

given the current state of the art of IT, any close to AGI system most probably would need capacity close to a couple of datacenters (maybe a nuclear reactor close to them to provide power).

Before stating "AGI was delayed" I would double check what's running in any massive DC complex built in the last 5 years, and more interesting, how much power are they using compared to standard datacenters.

If AGI is actually "discovered" at some point, it will spoted by leaked information about power consumption (any money dump in that kind of technology would be seriously disguised probably).

Not a fair comparison, actually, when you browse the Netflix catalog you can only find a certain amount of titles, let's say 200-400 hundred movies/series.

This shows better if you use the numbered categories. Not much ago, I went to browse something like "scifi/terror" and just found maybe 16 movies. Other categories offered similar quite reduced catalog.

I'm not in US, but I suspect many customers around the world are looking Disney+ to add a service/more options (and many are already paying at least for two streams).

But what would be the geopolitical effects of having found the ruins of an old datacenter, under the dust of a couple of millions of years, old hardware, looking like maybe 500 years more advanced than the state of the art on Earth.

You would know there's tech out there, the first able to reach to it will have the edge over the rest for centuries ahead.

The effects will be massive, no one dolar, yuan, yen, gold bar would be left unspent in the quest to get there and learn before the others.

nobody knowing there's actually aliens out there would ever leak anything if they're sure there's certain danger in doing it so. If they found something and nobody is saying anything, not leaking a word, there should be a really important reason for that.

so things got really serious and we need to get out there as fast as we can

Lots of people like to think about alien vessels, UFOs, in a positive light. But very few though about how would world powers would actually react to dangerous aliens, like something that could just drill into your advanced air defenses without leaving any trace all available sensors.

One possible outcome could be just to agree to keep their presence under plausible deniability, just till something lands somewhere infront thousands of witnesses (considering our simulated scenario, based in the current situation, "very public" actions are not the alien's playbook).

The other obvious outcome should be to precisely coordinate military presence in the planet, trying to cover any territory with some kind of military response - the ASAP one+highly guarded airspace close to key infrastructure/cities in the planet - in case of detections / ingress of UFOs.

Kind of obvious, you would need to agree with ALL the players, Russian Fed, China, India, and a dozen more. The nuclear players with missiles capable of targetting stuff in low orbits should be the premium resources,

Space related industry should be developed at accelerated pace, and attempts to reach close things in the solar system would be at some point almost a monthly thing.

There are a tons of ones, many which you won't find in any scifi book, because the scenario where you just watch UFOs (IF you can detect them), trying to do something on the planet without knowing WTF is going on for decades is not a compelling base for anything entertaining

I decided to share a bit. Some of you already shared about differents effects of THC in different people. This is an example. We need this drug intensively tested, without any political or cultural bias.

Well, I'm the mother of a 5+ years old kid, and we are using THC oil with him, under medical control. My kid had been early diagnosed with a case of extreme anxiety at the age of 2-3 years old (you can't precisely diagnose this), imagine it as a case of autism without several syntoms; he was already well into the second year being medicated with risperidone + carbamazepine which allowed him to have a more or less standard life.

But, starting at 4 years old the stress related to extra requirements in school began to be highly crippling for him again. Then we asked our neurologist about THC.

We were advised by him, and then contacted a parent of an autistic adult who regularly use THC to be able to function (preventing extremely violent reactions).

So we tried it, precisely dosifying the oil, without leaving the other drugs. THC works in my kid allowing him to remain calm under extreme stress.

It is really a process but the main - under the table, because is illegal here to use THC, not talking about giving it to kids - medical advise is to use THC like ibuprofen. If you see the kid is having a bad time trying to control himself, you give him a dose of oil. If the kid is going to have a stressful day in school, you give him a stronger dose.

I have personally never consumed drugs previous to THC. That was because when I buyed the oil, I tried it to know exactly what effects would be going through my kid. With new batches of oil we use to test it in minimal doses (this is a requirement from the neurologist: we buy oil specifically made for medical purposes - more expensive - but the process is handmade, and different batches could be slightly more soft or stronger in its effects).

If you have a medical issue with a kid, and you're out of solutions, then you usually get to this point. That was my case, and the cases of several parents with I have contacted since we started this path.

THC as you could probably read in many sites in the internet could have a lot more effects in people than causing anxiety and delusional states of mind.

What the article says could be just true, but as with many legal drugs, for example diazepam, the effects are REALLY different if "standard" person consumes it, than when a person with extreme anxiety uses it.