It is interesting how much your "well off liberal" rhetoric overlaps with "fox-type conservative". You are both afraid of some dark skinned boogyman. Except, your plan is appeasement, while the conservative plan is self-defense.

Its also the same reason the radical Muslims can convince angry young men to blow themselves up.

I don't think the world needs any more activists.

Judging by your user number and the likely age that makes you, I suspect you are projecting your own experience here.

I believe I've passed the age of consciousness and righteous rage,
I've found that just surviving was a noble fight
I once believed in causes too, had my pointless point of view
Life went on no matter who was wrong or right

As long as you don't go so rural that you can't get high speed internet.

A better fix is not to work for a large multinational corporation.

Globalization isn't the only thing that undercuts the argument, monetary and trade policy destroys it as well.

We can very easily make the minimum wage whatever we want... we just print enough dollars and it won't matter.

People speak of a "race to the bottom" when it comes to labor... but the real thing to fear is a race to the bottom with inflation and aggressive monetary policy to gain international trade leverage. The rest of the world has kind of cringed as China has done it (and the US did it as well, with a 2 trillion+ injection through "bailouts"), but if everyone went down the same road, it could be devastating on the entire world economy.

Except they don't own guns and they keep voting for people that want to ban them. So... yeah, not going to happen.

It's the same story all over. There are plenty of open jobs. There are few jobs for people with no skills. People with no skills whine about there being no jobs.

Making it worse is that the irresponsible venture capital of the last 90s and 2000 made some people that have no skills believe that they actually do have skills.

You're not comparing just the weight of the energy storage element, but also the weight of the casing. And that has changed a lot in the last 10 years.

>Another indication that we are in a simulation is that quantum physics shows us that wave functions collapse when we observe them....

I just wanted to say that whole paragraph was frankly brilliant. Especially the part about the side-channel attack via observer effects.

>If the simulation is completely perfect, then it also must have a near infinite amount of memory as well, or else little inconsistencies would be manifest and detected.

Not really. In our universe the smallest known particle (that we now know of) is (I think) a quark. Let's say that the programmers live in a universe which is more "information dense" and thus has a pleathora of smaller particles than quarks (really I think this must be pretty much a requirement for a parent universe - one in which the programmers live). So now the programmers have several orders of magnitude (or perhaps many more) of possible storage which they can use to simulate every particle we can perceive or be affected by. Let's say that the simulation was designed to run for a million years and that we are the center of the simulation (certainty there must be a finite timeframe) then the parent universe "computing machine" only (heh) has to simulate quarks, photons, neutrinos - whatever in a million year volume of "our space". Thus the amount of memory needed in the parent universe is indeed finite and, if the parent universe were indeed more "information rich" than our own such a simulation certainkly would be in the relm of possibility for the beings living within it.

>If we are living in a simulation there's really not a lot we can assume about what's going on outside.

I beg to differ. We can probably infer a lot. For instance:

- Considering the amount of injustice, starvation, and people killed in wars we can assume that the programmers are indifferent to us , much as we would be indifferent to the millions of bacteria colonies killed off when we test a new antibiotic.

- We can infer that time runs much slower for the programmers (or perhaps that they are almost unimaginably long lived and patient) because why run a simulation that only runs in real-time?

- We can infer that (unless the simulation started very recently and is going to end in a relatively short time that the universe that the programmers live in is far more information dense than our own. The number of particle interactions which need to be simulated is limited by the light cone in the time frame from which the simulation (i.e. our earth) starts to the time that it ends. Unless this period is relatively short ( a thousand years, a million years??? ) then the number of particles which need to be simulated is enormously large. If that were the case then the "programmers" must live in an entirely different kind of universe with more dimensions than 3 (or 11 of you go string theory - whatever) otherwise there would be no room in the parent universe to keep the simulation machine. So either our "simulation" is going to be short lived or the programmers are unimaginably different from us.

I bet there are a lot of other things one could reasonably infer as well.

A couple of thoughts come to mind: one is what the nature of the simulation (if we accept the simulation argument for a moment ) tell us about the nature of the programmers? Certainly we know that, considering the tens of millions killed in our various recent world wars as well as the millions of innocent children who starve to death every year, that the whatever the "programmers" of our universe are, they have no more consideration for us as we would for various cultures of bacteria killed off to test a new antibiotic. I wonder what else we could infer about the "programmers" simply by observing our own world.

Secondly I wonder if it would be somehow possible for the beings inside the simulation to "hack" the simulation itself somewhat how a computer virus in our machines can cause unexpected/unwanted/unplanned for behaviors in our computer systems. What would you have to do to corrupt and possibly take over the program running the simulation of our universe?

Even were we to imagine some technology and technology advanced civilization capable of simulating an entire world, the minds within them, and anything that such minds can perceive and be affected by (i.e. we can perceive and be affected by atoms, electrons, quarks, etc but we can not perceive or be affected by an atom or particle say 100 million light years away) - even if we postulate such an enormous computing capacity - the capacity has to be finite. Even were the "computer" running the simulation the size of a world or a star or a galaxy, it is still a finite thing. Thus the simulation (the amount of our universe which we can perceive) must be "digitized" somehow - it can not go on forever and must break down at extremely small scales. So there must be a smallest "distance" or "time unit" and things like that in the universe in which we live. If we lived in a universe where the physics was "analog" or "fractal" (for want of a better word) where regardless of how small a time period we look at (or a distance or an energy unit) there can always be something smaller this would entirely disprove the simulation(I think) theory as the capacity of the computing machine needed to create such a universe would be infinite leaving no room for the "programmers". In our universe we do live with a physics which has smallest possible units of distance, time and energy which does not prove or disprove the simulation theory but does give one something to think about.

Though, this story would be good... Moderators?