I would assume that, since humans sometimes pretend to not be human, that would simply be a subset of human behavior, and so what would make the comment make the most sense wouldn’t be “looking for behavior atypical for humans”, but rather " looking for behavior that humans arent able to engage in no matter how hard they try". What that would even be in a text based system though, I’m not sure. Typing impossibly fast maybe?

Id imagine its Trump himself they think theyre fooling there. Its a gesture that feeds his ego, in the hopes of getting favorable treatment later.

That might mean something if there were any realistic chance that this would result in something better and more democratic, but both given how Trump acts and how US intervention in Central and South America typically goes, odds are that whoever they find will just be a puppet dictator out to extract resources to the benefit of US companies.

I think that everyone should afford to have kids, and if they cant, they need to be provided the resources do so.

If people were to say that people shouldnt have kids because of most other unchosen life circumstances (for example, “you shouldnt have kids because you belong to a cultural/ethnic group that we dont like”), that sentiment would be seen as prejudice. If one was to go further and suggest that government policy should reflect this, that policy would be seen as an injustice. But if people say “you shouldnt have kids because you’re poor”, that’s somehow seen as wisdom, and advocating that government policy reflect this by cutting off support systems is somehow seen as an acceptable position to hold. Given that people dont exactly choose to be poor, I find this inconsistent.

In any case, kids are not merely some expensive luxury. They are both something that any society needs a certain number of to sustainably function (since obviously, a society simply cant exist without people, and people dont live forever), and which represent a significant amount of generally unpaid labor to raise. Not everyone needs to have them, and some people just arent good with them or dont want them, but when your society’s birthrate is below what is sustainable in the long run, telling some of the people that actually do want to have kids not to, because you expect those people to pay for everything themselves without help from the society that eventually needs those people, is a stupid policy, and not exactly fair. Why should everyone else get to avoid the consequences of an aging and declining society, but expect only those that choose to be parents to pay for that?

I just think that dying is unethical in general and represents a maximal state of suffering (well, more a minimum of non-suffering, since you have no capacity to experience anything when you dont exist anymore, not maximal suffering in the “hell” sense. I know many or most people would disagree with me on that point, but its not something I feel like spelling out my reasons for at the moment.) I also do not believe in the concept of deserved suffering (that is to say, in my view suffering as punishment only has value in its capacity to rewire a person’s future behavior, and that once you have achieved that so as to cause them to live without continuing whatever harms have led to the punishment, anything more is wrong, no matter what they’ve done, even if they were literally the most heinous person of all time). If you’re actually in a position to execute them, then youre in a position to take their money and power too, pointing out that they rarely face justice isnt actually relevant to this, because if your legal system is too corrupted to hand out a jail sentence and make it stick, its also going to be too corrupted to hand out a death sentence and go through with it. These people arent wealthy because they’re inherently good at making money, they’re wealthy because wealth begets wealth and they either started with some or lucked out somewhere or have relations that have it, so if you both take their wealth and the wealth of their friends and relatives, how are they going to get it back?

Emotions aren’t entirely rational with a clearly thought out process to justify why one should feel them. In any case, its common enough for people to assign the general actions of people within a group to the group as a whole (which isnt really fair or a reflection of reality, but can be pragmatic at times and requires less thought and information than judging on an individual basis, so it makes sense that people’s brains are wired up to do it even if its not always desirable). This can get extended to the groups one is a part of oneself, to include those whose membership one did not choose. And the US at the moment has even worse than typical leadership, has a great deal of power for that leadership to abuse, still has free enough media for people within it to stand a good chance of knowing about at least some of it, and if youre here on lemmy youre probably running into people with a somewhat higher than normal awareness of a lot of the historical abuses previous Americans have perpetrated just because it leans left and anti-establishment and those things get talked about a lot in such spaces.

You misunderstand, I am not saying “make sure he spends it responsibly”. Nobody has has “made” him do this at all, and I didn’t advocate for a policy of doing so. What I’m saying is that I don’t think this particular use is worthy of condemnation the way his other actions are, because in the long run I think that this specific thing will end up benefiting people other than him no matter if he intends for that to happen or not (even if the American healthcare system prevents access, which I’m not confident it will do completely, not every country has that system, and it’s statistically improbable that the US will have it forever, and research results are both durable and cross borders). That sentiment isn’t saying that it excuses his wealth, just that I think people are seeing only the negatives in this merely because of the association with Altman’s name and ignoring the potential benefits out of cynicism. The concept is just as valid with him funding it as it would be had he been condemning it instead.

The response to something beneficial being only available to the rich shouldn’t be to avoid developing that thing, it should be to make it available to everyone. The failures of the US healthcare and economic systems don’t suddenly make developing new medical techniques a bad thing. Human augmentation is another issue from curing genetic disease, though I’d personally argue that wouldn’t be a bad cause either, with the same caveat about it availability. It at least has more potential to improve somebody’s life somewhere down the line than just buying a yacht with his ill gotten gains or some other useless rich person toy would.

I’m not sure I get the universal negativity to this. Like sure, Altman sucks as a person, and an individual having enough money to significantly bankroll research like this is a sign of an economic failure, but surely curing or preventing genetic disease is just about the most uncontroversial use human genetic modification could have?

Microbes are still made of chemicals, it’s just different chemicals

and not to mention, the tools required to create it (maybe not the best examples, but still) are already in the possession of virtually everybody.

Shouldn’t Spanish have the same problem? I’ve seen them abbreviate it to EEUU though, which I assume must help prevent confusion?

I once found a random food court bathroom that has hand dryers that work amazingly well, and I was genuinely surprised by that when I stumbled on it. I’m guessing it probably is just more expensive or uses more power or something and places cheap out on them.

It’s kind of a relief in a way, of all the ways “fascists war department leader calls all the generals home suddenly for a meeting” could go, raving about aesthetics is probably one of the least immediately dangerous for everyone else.

The side effects of using that thing would explain how crazy some of the billionaire types have been getting of late I suppose…

My understanding has been that one of the main purposes of the UN is to attempt to prevent or deescalate wars, by providing a forum for diplomacy. To that end, the kinds of people liable to start wars are exactly the kind of people one would encourage to attend it. Now, it may not have exactly proven very good at that (though it’s a bit hard to say when we can’t look at what history since it’s founding would have looked like without it), but still, kicking those guys out doesn’t actually do anything about what they’re doing, it just tells them that you don’t like them, which they probably already knew.

Then if we want fission in 2035, we’ll have to start now. If we want fusion by 2035, we’re probably out of luck because we haven’t even got the tech to the point where we can produce net electricity with it yet (net energy from the reaction yes, but that’s not good enough for a power plant), and once we get that we need to refine it enough to produce enough energy to be worth the cost, and then we have to actually build the power plants. If we want neither, then we’ll probably still be using fossil fuels for a significant percentage of power generation by then, because while solar is cheap and should probably be the bulk of our future energy mix, is isn’t good for some use cases

While I do agree that we should research fusion, it doesn’t really address all the issues of fission. It still has some nuclear waste generation; not from spent fuel but from the reactor walls being bombarded with neutrons, causing some of that material to become radioactive, and it will likely require even more complex facilities and so have the “you need to spend a massive amount of time and money to get a reactor online” economic issues fission has, but possibly even worse. The physics technically give you more energy per amount of fuel and the fuel is more abundant, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the resulting electricity will be cheaper, especially when both systems use so little fuel anyway.

It does avoid the possibility of a runaway reaction/meltdown I guess, but modern reactors are pretty good about avoiding that anyway. For that matter, newer (relatively speaking) fission reactor designs exist that can process waste into more fuel (not forever obviously, the fuel can’t be infinite, but enough to greatly extend the fuel supply and deal with much of the waste issue at the same time). The fission waste issue is also a bit overblown; the actual volume is very low, so just digging a handful of very deep storage facilities to stick it in is a viable option for an extremely long time.

The biggest issue for fission, imho, is that we simply don’t build very much of it. The less of it we make, the smaller the pool of people and facilities that are equipped to run it, maintain it, build the components etc, and the more expensive running it or building more becomes.

I don’t really get the thinking that he’ll run for another term. In order to do that, he’d need to not just defy some court order, but throw the constitution out in a way so blatant that even the people not paying attention could see it (given that the two term limit is common knowledge). And if he does that, why would he do it in the form of “I’m running in another election”, even if rigged, rather than just declaring “my term no longer expires, I’m president for life”?