• 14 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • R&D implies a problem that can be adequately phrased as “we dont have the technology yet”. That could maybe be said of sanity and intelligence to a limited degree- though you would basically need to be able to replace a number of mental health professionals with a simple test, which isnt a trivial problem, but for “maturity” the issue isnt so much that we havent figured out how to make such a test, its that “maturity” in that sense of the term simply isnt an objective trait that exists with a broadly shared definition, just a general vibe where people disagree on what even makes a person fit. Its like suggesting we make a test for how “cool” potential moderators are. No amount of technology can do that in an unbiased way, because its a purely subjective trait, bias is literally all there is to go off of.





  • 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.




  • Honestly to me cough syrup tastes so incredibly bad as to be worse than the coughing. The cherry flavor has literally put me off of cherry flavored anything (except actual cherries) ever since childhood because it’s my mental default for “tastes like nasty medicine flavor” now.


  • Honestly I actually liked BZ more than the original, but it’s difficult for me to figure out why exactly. I play those games a bit differently from the proper way, I basically ignore the plot beyond what is needed to get the tools and location I want and mostly just play them to build and decorate bases in a pretty environment with survival elements to make the base feel like it has design requirements and resource constraints, like Minecraft almost, but I’m not going to say that BZ has prettier environments for that either. Might be the creature design, my favorite subnautica critters are mostly in BZ, though not all, and they feel like they fit together more tightly than the ones in the first game, if that makes sense, like one can look at certain features and get a greater sense of them all seeming to descend from a few common ancestors.