Destroy senescent cells and you may have cured Alzheimer's.

Prevent cells from becoming senescent in the first place and you'll have cured human aging as we understand it.

Is that technology decades-to-centuries away? Doesn't seem like it. We've inserted hTERT into cells' genomes and permanently prevented senescence. Of course, randomly dropping genetic code into the genome tends to break shit; what's viable at the cell level is not necessarily viable on the organismal level.

So for decades we thought: what if there was a way to temporarily give cells the message to produce enough hTERT to re-lengthen their telomeres?

Maybe just a few fake instructions to make the protein that didn't come from the DNA itself. Maybe... something like... ...an mRNA vaccine? You know, the kind we just gave to 60% or so of the entire human population?

PornHub, the largest and most public streaming site, is also the site that's incredibly diligent about verifying the age of its actors and banning the most extreme and controversial kinks.

So PornHub will indeed say "Well, this makes it impossible to do legally business in Arkansas, so we'll go ahead and block all IP addresses from Arkansas."

Do we really expect www.barelylegalslutsofczechia.me to follow suit?

Do we really expect this to *protect* children?

Yeah, but think of the video games they'll have. Full VR with characters who can use AI to respond appropriately to any situation.

I mean, seriously, fuck Venice, I want *that*.

They'll melt in your mouth... not in your hand

It's a word that used to have a definition. "Chemically incompatible with the biological functions that sustain life."

Now it has no definition. It means, approximately: "You have just said something that the average suburban 28-year-old woman living just outside of Portland would likely disagree with."

>Web forums are everywhere but Reddit had community.

I would disagree with that. A "community" is, at mininimum, a group of people who know who each other are.

Reddit is a "forum" that would never fit into any physical forum. To them, everyone is just another anonymous asshole. Banning any given one of them has no meaning, because in ten minutes, another will fill their place.

When you say "Well, we're not going to pay you in money, but we *will* pay you in the power to throw your weight around, declare the supremacy of your own ideology, and ruin people's days"... ...well, what kind of person do you *think* is going to be attracted to that position?

Whatever device you posted this from, I can assure you that its manufacture was not carbon-neutral. Nor was the process of shipping it to you.

>20 years ago, it would have been painless unless all your wealth was in oil company stocks

This is absolute nonsense.

The oil companies' stock prices aren't a result of them somehow getting paid to burn all of the oil in the ground. The oil companies' stock prices are a result of the fact that they *sell* the oil. To everyone. In order to allow us to do everything we do now that we couldn't do two hundred years ago.

If we had stopped them from selling that oil (which would have required military force, not just a few regulations on paper), the pain would have been felt by everybody.

Well, nature gave us a perfectly good pandemic a few years back, but instead of holding COVID parties, we took the stance that every possible year of human life must be preserved at all costs.

Well, sure, there's some theoretical work.

I suspect the solution, if there is one, likely lies in massive-scale carbon recapture. Not the post-combustion capture we're doing at power plants, which is too little to have any impact, but global carbon recapture.

And how can that be done? Well, possibly with biotech. We've run the numbers on questions like "What if we cultivated vast fields of bamboo and seaweed and sequestered them miles underground," and they don't really show much promise. But perhaps if we could engineer a photosynthesizing organism that divided at a rate far beyond what natural selection would lead to on its own...

Whether solutions like that are "on the horizon" is really a question of whether we invest trillions of dollars into them or not. The modern Internet did not seem to be "on the horizon" in 1985, and we built that thing lightning-fast because that's where we put all of our money.

Never mind that if the country you live in cut its carbon emissions to *zero* - if it literally enforced national Mennonite-style living, whether or not that was going to lead to a massive famine - the planet would continue to warm.

In America, liberals point their fingers at conservatives and say "It's them doing it." Conservatives point their fingers at China and say "It's them doing it."

Then both of them drive their cars to restaurants and eat beef and then drive back to their houses that are three times the size of what they need and go on Amazon and order bullshit they don't need and have it shipped across the Pacific Ocean so they can say "look at this neat thing I have acquired; it is neat and it makes me feel happy; I should order more neat things."

It's not a "those guys are doing it to us" problem. It's a "Humanity radically changed its lifestyle after the World War era and we like it a lot more this way" problem.

It's open-source for all individuals and small-to-medium organizations. And large organizations are free to examine the source to their hearts' content, just not to commercialize it.

The perfect is the enemy of the good, and that is certainly open enough for me.

Sadly, since it's Meta code, I can't get very excited. I can't think of a single time their team was successful at making anything remotely approaching revolutionary.

...this was part of a SETI project. The alien in charge said: "Okay. We just turned a star into a fucking strobe light. If there's anyone out there, they'll definitely see it."

And now the signal has reached us. Unfortunately, that alien has been dead for a little over nine hundred years.

Yes, that's exactly right. Squabbles is a woke Gab.

I hung out there for a couple weeks, and they are twice as heavy-handed with their moderation as Reddit. And the site's creator steps in to personally remove whatever content he doesn't like. Not a good sign.