I dunno, as a non-empty subset of “people”, I want more than rage. I want action. Spare me your tears, spare me your anguish, spare me your irascible outcry. Arrest the people breaking federal laws every single day, and if no action is taken by those who have abdicated their duty, ensure they abdicate their posts, through main force if necessary.

Given who’s funding the AI, a perverse instantiation or infrastructure profusion failure mode is far more likely

Imagine if the butter robot from rick and morty really takes its purpose “to pass butter” to heart, and concludes that, in order to maximize the degree to which it succeeds in passing butter, it must hack and reorient the world economy to make as much butter as possible, and further apportioning resources to improve its ability to pass butter en-masse, then it just goes full “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”, but it imprisons a few people and just passes the ever-growing amount of butter between them

Haha, ahh Fogbank, we hardly knew ye

Is this sarcasm? They fired 350+ workers in charge of overseeing the nuclear stockpile before they even knew who they were firing, and nothing happened. To pretend that there is some line in the sand is, at this point, naive.

From polygon, and now on Dropout. He’s the new fact checker on Um, Actually.

Totally fair. As a student of ancient languages, I primarily think of it in terms of language development and archeology, so I can certainly see why its modern connotation would be spurned. I think that, since the term’s misuse came out of the bullshit archeology of Nazi Germany, it’s better to air it out for the bullshit it is.

Consider also that “Semitic” is a philological term for the languages of the varied peoples of the Arabian peninsula and the Levant, so for an Israeli politician to claim that Palestinians are “antisemitic” is hilariously stupid. There are a lot of uses of these old archeological terms and symbols that got corrupted when the Nazis first did their Nazi thing, and my hope is to disempower their rhetoric by contributing to the disempowerment of the bullshit they spawned.

I personally think it’s just hilarious that the term for “white, blonde, and blue-eyed” among racial purists literally refers to a heritage that virtually cannot be further from their supposed “ideal”. It is for this reason that I correct people, because it is just another case of Nazis and White Supremacists showing that not only do they know nothing, they actively look less intelligent with every word they spew. The more people who realize that the Nazis are wrong, the better. In the case of the thread OP to whom I replied, it seemed like an opportunity to pass on this tidbit, because their stance makes me think that they and I are like-minded in our opinion of Nazi idiocy.

To be fair, since we’re talking about their historical militarism, we can definitively blame the French for being the reason English is so hard to learn and is an inconsistent, bad language all-around. Never forget 1066. Also, before we get the circlejerk going, let’s remember that the French government plays dirty just like everyone else, like their insanely unethical nuclear testing in the pacific and their later state-directed terrorism against new Zealand in an attempt to continue said nuclear malfeasance.

ETA: (To be clear, as an american, I’d much rather be French right about now, but we need to be realistic. All humans are crappy in large groups when given unchecked power. I just want to be clear we should be hailing the French people, not the French government)

Like most meat, actually composting bodies would require a very hot composting temperature, constant mixing, and you’d want to put it through a grinder first, or else it won’t properly mix. Especially in the case of bones, those really need to be ground down so they can properly decompose.

Hypothetically, of course.

Not disagreeing with you, but we really need to stop letting “Aryan” mean what the Nazis decided it should mean. Aryan is, and always has been, a term for the Indo-Iranian languages. As scientists, we need to be the first to take it back to its actual meaning.

Just saying that, if they are sapient, you’d basically be doing an Oompa Loompa to the elephants.

IIRC, the primary reason we’re even going with this route is that one of the primary things stabilizing the arctic permafrost was actually the presence of snow-wading megafauna changing the rate of heat dissipation in high-wind tundras. So, they’re trying to bring the wooly mammoth back to try to keep more permafrost around.

ETA: Here’s the company actually saying this is the primary reason for doing it. Its about restoring the biodiversity loss from humans being an all-around virus for the last 10000 years.

Real talk? Yes. Miniaturization of animals does not do good things for their health, in general. The systems of animal bodies are finely tuned by natural selection, and mucking with that is how you get dogs that can’t breathe because their nose has been bred into the approximate shape of a squished aluminum can. Homeostasis is easy to throw off long-term when you play around with the square-cube law.

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allometry#Physiological_scaling

Still can’t compete with geology

It took me a full week in GEOL 0220 to figure out that the word my teacher kept saying was not “Erogeny”

Don’t need anything new, just give the smallpox time to thaw.

Let the record reflect that, while this has not yet occurred, the fact that you have to ask is concerning enough to warrant treatment as if it has occurred. Furthermore, college campuses are one of the primary places that protest movements begin in recent years. Declaring protest illegal in nebulous terms like this is a HUGE swing toward breaking open the full fascism piñata.

Fair enough, thanks

To be clear, Anna’s Archive now manages sci-hub’s database, doesn’t it?

There is more to a plant than just the fruit, you know. It just happens that the species (cultivar?) of nightshade that we grow for potatoes has tasty, starchy roots, while others have tasty, zesty fruits, and then one of them is eggplant.

Many parts of the tomato plant are deadly to pets. Same goes for all nightshade members.

If this were real, one of the kids who admits they have no idea what they’re doing would have already, quite confidently, stolen a pair of scissors from god knows where, cut out every single square, then arranged them in numerical order. Only THEN would they admit to not knowing wtf they’re doing.