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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I understand from your comment that you’ve read too many sci-fi books to understand what a massive resource sink that would be with negligible benefit. It’s pretty basic physics.

    We’ve already got cheap transportation, look how that’s turning out for the planet. But I’m sure burning God knows how much energy to launch more junk into space will save the world.

    We’re already approaching a critical mass of private equity space trash in orbit, what’s a few more lowest-bidder megastructures? At least the ultra rich will get their life rafts while we burn.


  • Because the world has actual things in it like people, wildlife, culture and history. Space has none of those things. Unless you’re there working as a scientist to study things that can’t be studied on earth, it’s pointless.

    As of now it’s a glorified roller coaster. At its best private space travel could be Disneyland in space. At worst it’s just rich people paying to be carried up mount everest for clout but with exponentially more resources wasted.




  • A lot of this hinges on partisan officials choosing (often) black box software and private verification companies. But that’s not even the main problem.

    If your Ballot System contains source code, the source code is researched and code reviewed, and then complied by the company and the verification agency. Both checksums must match.

    It all falls apart exactly here. With digital voting, all other security is as performative as the TSA. It doesn’t even matter if either party in this step is malicious or if the source is open/closed.

    A code review can never make any guarantees. And if there is a bad actor, checksums are not bullet proof. Especially when we’re talking about state actors, who have access to supply chain attacks and unknowable cryptographic abilities.

    And all of this uncertainty extends just as far with the hardware. Even if a voter knew what a machine should have in it, they’ll never get the access to verify it themselves.

    Even checking a ballot print isn’t foolproof. In a secret ballot system there’s nothing tying a print to your actual tallied vote other than your faith in the process.

    Stealing an election isn’t as easy as one might imagine.

    Stealing an election doesn’t have to be easy, it has to be possible with a minimal circle of secrecy. And digital voting/tallying makes that possible.

    As others have said in this thread, the most important thing is the ability for any voter to understand and personally audit the process. That’s just not possible without paper ballots and simple counting.



  • Hate to be the bearer of bad news but if you can’t relate to mental images existing in a visual sense you probably have some degree of aphantasia.

    Some research indicates that it may be a spectrum from complete lack of imagery to full five-sense detail, which might be why it’s hard to relate to either extreme. At any rate most people fall in the category of seeing an image, to the point that hyperphantasia is even more common than aphantasia.

    I have it*, but not as severe as others. Imagining an apple starts as a very abstract concept, I can’t visualize it without concentrated effort. Other people might be able go on to describe the stem, the leaves, the shade of red, the glossy wax exterior, etc… I can’t automatically build to any of that, even if I subconsciously default to a red apple the “image” may just as well be green.

    *edit: checked the vviq test and discovered the label is hypophantasic



  • As for middle school, exactly what did you learn that you think is so useful for daily life?

    Off the top of my head: basic biology so I’m not dumb enough to be antivax. History subjects that require more than elementary maturity so maybe we can avoid another Holocaust. Enough physics, ecology and chemistry that I can comprehend how climate change is happening. How basic statistics work so I’m not completely lost when someone throws around misleading data.

    None of that is automatic from a 4th grade education and is crucial to be a functioning citizen. Learning to take unquestioned GPT answers is not a substitute for actually learning any of those.

    You either went to a painfully bad pipeline of schools or were too dumb to recognize the important parts.