"Your a Mentat, Harry."

I love going to the movies!

It is weird to me that the FSF feels that they even have to justify this.

Glulam primary beams have cross sections such as 10â x 30â. Thatâ(TM)s about a foot wide by 2 and a half feet wide.

These are not 2x4 sticks.

â¦should grant every US citizen 100GB of disk space on its own cloud network.

Why bother spying, when you can just have the people park their stuff with you in the first place?

It doesnâ(TM)t take a second for a human to do it. It is so fast as to be nearly automatic, and is integrated with a hundred thousand other considerations as well. What might take a full second is internalizing the instruction, cuing the photo, formulating the answer, and then issuing a spoken response. But if you just glance around the room you are in, you will automatically identify lots and lots of things, without even having to formulate the query.

The percentage of the US federal budget that goes to military is actually pretty small- it is about twelve percent. The vast majority of the US federal budget goes to social spending like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and tons of âoelittleâ programs like housing assistance, income insurance, education, roads, etc., etc.,. When I look at the US federal budget, I see something that actually looks pretty dang socialistic, given that the vast majority of our tax dollars go to public goods programs.

(And I feel the need to emphasize: the Department of Defence itself can easily be understood as one of the most holistic and comprehensive socialist programs in the United States. It is the only point where you have an entire whole-life comprehensive culture of its own that needs to meet every need, and provides comprehensive and far reaching benefits to the men and women who serve in it. I canâ(TM)t think of anything that quite compares to it in the entirety of US culture.)

In short, I do not any more believe this persisting myth that the Defence department is eating up everybodyâ(TM)s opportunities. You could completely erase the Department of Defence, put that money elsewhere, and it would hardly make a big difference. The contribution, at average, from an American citizen to the Department of Defence is about $2,500 per year. If you think thatâ(TM)s going to fuel massive changes at your school, and in health care, and unemployment insurance, and social security payouts, and Medicare payments, and on and on⦠â¦the math just does not add up.

Pointless? Thanks to the debates, most everybody I know who was against nuclear, now thinks that it is very important to the climate crisis. Attitudes have definitely shifted in the last twenty years. Why did they shift? Because of the open debates. Did people change their mind the moment you said something? Probably not. It takes time for people to chew on things. But it has definitely resulted in a change of perspective. At least in my neck of the woods.

No. The timescales are on the side of my argument. The diameter of the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years.

If just one alien civilization figured out how to travel at 1% the speed of light from Star to star, it would take about 10 million years to expand from one side of the galaxy to the other. That is a very small length of time, because if life is common enough for there to be, say, hundreds of civilizations developing in the galaxy, over its billions of years of history, then the spread of their beginnings would most likely vary by far more than just 10 million years.

If civilizations make machine superintelligences, then why do we not see machine superintelligences all over the place? They should have probes and satellites at a minimum, in every star system by now.

The weakness in that argument is that something has to happen to every single other civilization in our galaxy. It takes only one single success, to puncture the bubble.

My understanding is that the majority of the problem has to do with permitting and inspections. Are they planning to do anything to accelerate and ease permitting, inspections, and other such non-manufacturing related processes?

I have noticed that every time the price of housing goes down, there is fear and panic in the news. We are wedded to the idea that the home is an investment and its price shall only go up, and that if the price does not go up, something is very wrong:

I have never had a problem with self-checkout. I have been to plenty of different stores. I have suspicions about the motives of the anti-self-checkout people. They remind me of the people justifying Oregon laws that require that some guy is paid to pump your gas for you. If you want to not self-checkout, or for me, when I have too many things, there is always the checker available.

Plot twist: Human beings are in the clutches of self-winding watches, everywhere.