No offence taken or meant, but not everyone who likes pornography likes bdsm. In point of fact, I liked that I could find sources of straight pornography on tumblr that seemed relatively free of or light on power differentials.

Did the second sentence make the difference? If so, that were inept on my part as I was trying for self-mockery.

...and you oughtn't be anywhere near the top. Just my absolutely accurate and precise opinion.

...to me it all translates into: Atoms in living cells are magic: there is no arrangement of atoms not in living cells can duplicate some things they can do.

Not O.P.ing in this thread, it seems, for one....

Intellectual 'property', like almost all property, can be a very useful and beneficial technology---but it is a technology, human-created, and like all technologies can have down-side and will have a limited domain of beneficial usefulness---for most purposes, a laser pointer that can burn a hole in a wall is a bad idea, and twenty aspirin* are not ten times as useful as two. .

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*a.k.a. 'A.S.A.' some places, due to intellectual property rules.

I don't follow: why does living off a Universal Luxurious Income (my preference to U.B.I.) funded by machine labour not allow for self-respect?---that would be true only if 'having a job' were the only possible source of self-respect. Being a good dancer, a sincere and hard-working follower of a martial art, a student of the Talmud or the Confucian Analects or the Eddas or mathematics, someone who grows great pot or knows the finicky way you have to prepare opium for smoking--- I have great respect for all of these, and respect myself for the extent I've done any of these (even as I admit to not having done all of them).

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To use language that might draw the ire of some but which I think accurate, it is mostly the 19th-21st Century construction of masculinity in some places that equated earning your own living with self-respect---before that, what most people admired were aristos or gentlemen who by definition didn't. I mean, being self-supporting was considered desirable and worthy of respect, but it wasn't the sine qua non for self-respect. Making self-respect dependent on a job was in some way an opiate for the men who had to do them to live, and though I think opiates can be fun when not necessary, they should be treated with care.

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The only shame I can see in being supported is in the pain of those doing the supporting....

s/do them/do those jobs/1

I've done that work, and didn't like that one bit, and so since I don't think I'm fundamentally better than anyone else (note: this is different to being better at some things, at least at some times) I don't want anyone else to be forced by fear of hunger and exposure to do them when an alternative exists.

Some ancient philosophers argued that slavery were necessary in order for others to have the leisure and energy to be, among other things, philosophers. They had something of a point, although full-on chattel slavery seems a bit much. Similar arguments used to be made for serfdom---how could enough food be grown without people figuratively chained to the land and their boring-awful farming jobs?

I'd suggest that at least at the start, nations or large co-operatives own the machines that do the work and that make the machines to do the work; eventually when labour becomes too cheap to meter.... Of course, that would reduce the level of hierarchy in society, and some people seem to love that, and not just the ones at the top; it could eliminate poverty, and some people love having someone below them, especially if such 'deserve' it....

`That's my Retirement Grease!’

...to call us 'sheeple'.

Plan 9 was approved by our Great Ruler! Sure, resurrection of the recently dead Earthlings didn't seem to pan-out well, but that was due to their stupid,stupid, minds.

...a crime lasting less than one second---it legally won't exist. (Note: this is not at all true.) (It's based on a short New Zealand film I saw decades back in which a man is released because it turned out that when a relevant law were changed there were a gap between the new and old laws' domains, and his offence was in the gap. He and a mate went on to hijack a bus and charge people extra to take them exactly where they went, which proceeds they wanted to use to start a mushroom farm.)

...given the long history (centuries' worth) of bad science done in the service of confirming racialist biases, that 'race' seems to be defined so variably (an "Encyclopædia Britannica" c.1914 in my student house's library defined, I believe twenty of them), and given that wherever humans go we are our own worst Malthusian enemies (so there is no paradaisical grove where Eloi could devolve in comfort), I think rough equality were the best initial assumption, and that variations from this, apart from small, isolated, subgroups, merit scepticism as extraordinary claims. And it is exactly the right sort of élitism to say that I trust a bunch of population geneticists more than a science writer.

Of course there have been and will be attacks on this book done out of sheer 'political correctness' by those whose prejudices it rankles---but there have been similarly headless defences of it by those whose biases it pleasantly tickles. Some of these population geneticists might some be writing in fear of having their funding cut, but the better-known and -trusted the scientist, the lower the chance of it. some of them might in fact be depending on biassed [sic] summaries of the book, as Wade claims, but he uses this and the charge of political motivation as a way of dodging the actual issues raised. (In addition, a researcher might only read the sections of the book in which their [sic] work were cited and then weigh in fairly on the particular issues so involved.)

It was participated-in solely by True Scotsmen, True Christians, and New Socialist Man.