You're still pushing your AIPAC-approved view of history without providing any citations which challenge the prevailing view which you're disagreeing with? You religious wingnuts are tiresome.

The "it is a simulation" idea is essentially religion for techno-freaks. All it does is defer or not answer the question "who made/runs the simulation?". As such, its value is at the same level of entirely conventional religion, i.e. none or negative.

Indeed. We should. In particular, we should face that humanity is making a mess of things and work on fixing that.

Yes to the first part, "it depends" to the second part. In particular, you can design a simulation so that being in a simulation _can_ be detected from the inside, just not with absolute certainty. Compare, e.g. how malware can detect running virtualized for some ideas.

And conversely, any non-secular perspective includes made-up crap, i.e. lies. Your point?

What it says is that should this be a simulation, it cannot be modelled theoretically from the inside. That is neither surprising, not particularly difficult to prove. It essentially is something that in most cases will follow from incompleteness. My expectation is that unless specifically designed to allow so, no simulation can be modelled fully by theory done on the inside.

Obviously, this result does neither prove not disprove that we are in a simulation.

That's our experience, but if it's simulated, how would we know? You think that's air you're breathing?

Prove it's there when no one is observing it.

They said ice wasn't grabbing citizens but they're well over 100 on that now so your optimism is misplaced. They don't have to do anything. They could do anything with you.

Their job is to piss us off to increase engagement. They're doing it.

From Google's FAQ

Will Android Debug Bridge (ADB) install work without registration? As a developer, you are free to install apps without verification with ADB. This is designed to support developers' need to develop, test apps that are not intended or not yet ready to distribute to the wider consumer population.

Obviously, ADB can't distinguish the cases of (a) an app developer who just wrote an app using ADB to install an APK on their device for testing and (b) any random person using ADB to install an APK on their device for whatever reason they like. This means that random people can use ADB to install APKs from unverified developers.

Well, if that were the point of the system, you'd be right, but it's not. The point of the system is to make it hard for malware authors to distribute malware to large numbers of users without getting quickly shut down. This system doesn't "scan apps" at all... Android just won't install downloaded APKs that don't have a Google-provided signature on them, but it will install ADB-installed APKs without a Google-provided signature because app developers need to be able to build and test apps without having to send every version off to a Google server for signing.

I don't know about more explanatory power, but here's another theory for you: Consciousness doesn't really exist, at least not as far as we know. What we perceive as our own consciousness is just a result of the effort of one part of our brain to generate explanations for the results of computations by another part of our brain. The process of generating explanations requires a little bit of recursive analysis that looks like introspection and self-awareness, except that nearly all of what it's allegedly introspecting is actually completely opaque to the computation that generates the explanations. Note also that there needn't be any actual correlation between the generated explanations and the computation that is being explained (there's actually pretty good empirical evidence that our explanatory systems are just as good at explaining something we actually disagree with as something we decided, BTW).

Now, why did we evolve such an explanation engine? Because it was adaptive for a communal species, of course, especially when coupled with another ability that co-evolved with it: Rich, detailed communication (speech, and more). We developed the explanation engine so we could use the explanations to convince others in our community that our unexplained computation results (decisions, actions, etc.) are better than theirs. This development was both communally adaptive, because battling explanation engines (people arguing with each other) actually result in the construction of better joint computations, enabling the community to make better collective decisions and thrive, and individually adaptive because the better explainer is able to get their way more often and increase their status within the community.

So, within this theory, your questions are all pretty easily answered: (1) Consciousness is just an illusion that arises from the layered structure of our brains, which are, indeed, purely physical objects, though incredibly sophisticated. (2) This apparent consciousness and the logic circuitry that underpins/enables it closely matches evolutionary adaptiveness because it is actually an evolutionary process: The explanatory engine operates by generating, testing and selecting postulates, just as evolution operates by generating, testing and selection genotypes. (3) Consciousness is illusory so the question of where to draw the line doesn't make sense, but you can also clearly see that rocks don't have anything that might appear to be consciousness because are no computational processes going on in them. Cities might, however, especially when you note that human cities contain institutions that both compute (make decisions) and attempt to explain those computations, but we'd really need a much more precise definition of "consciousness" to attempt to answer this question. Such a definition is impossible, however, because consciousness is just an illusion anyway.

From the summary:

In its blog post, F-Droid warns about the impact on users and Android app developers. "You, the creator, can no longer develop an app and share it directly with your friends, family, and community without first seeking Google's approval,"

You can still develop an app and share it directly with whoever you want without registering, you just have to convince them to use ADB to install it, rather than clicking a link on a web site or downloading from an app store (like F-Droid). This adds a lot of friction and requires your potential users to trust you quite a bit more, because it feels like they're taking a bigger risk, even though there isn't any actual difference in risk. I expect that we'll start to see apps packaged with ADB for a "single-click install" from a Windows machine, to reduce the friction as far as possible. Users would still have to do the dance to enable developer options, enable USB, then tap "accept" on the ADB key popup, though an installer could (and probably will) walk them though that.

Also, although I don't think details are available yet, Google says there will be an option for "limited distribution accounts" which don't require any fee or ID verification, but can only distribute their apps to a limited number of devices. For people who just want to share with friends and family, this should cover them.

Food was a significantly larger percentage of disposable income in the 60s and 70s. And, as I mentioned before, that steady decline in the money spent in food was actually offset to a large degree by an increase in eating out (or ordering in). If we still ate at home as much as we used to, the drop would be even larger.

They often do if they are rich.

Desktop Firefox is great. Maybe you meant mobile Firefox, which has had terrible unpatched memory leaks in the JavaScript implementation for years and years. I have to kill Firefox several times a day on my phone. On my desktop it typically works fine without runaway memory use until I reboot for some other reason.