The big three hardly make any cars anymore. It's all SUVs, crossovers, and trucks.

That's hilarious calling me a soft lefty.

It's no dig by the way. It's reality. As a conservative voter I reserve my harshest criticism for them since they are ostensibly "my kind of people" and they know better. While my values in most ways align most closely with many who call themselves Conservative, I would be willfully ignorant to not call attention to their many failings as a party, as well as the rank hypocrisy that so often accompanies right-wing politics these days. I've been a party to some very honest discussions with our local Conservative representatives in the Legislature and Parliament. Our local guys are generally honest but do get caught up in the Party line rather than represent the actual needs of their constituents, as do all MPs from all parties.

I may have little in common with [Ll]iberals but I can understand how they come by their positions.

The problem with midsize trucks is that they aren't actually much smaller than a full size truck now, except that for some inexplicable reason the box is about an inch too narrow to put a sheet of plywood in the back. Also these midsize trucks are nearly as expensive as the full size and, like you say, they don't get significantly better fuel efficiency than the full size truck. Given these facts it's no wonder North Americans prefer the full-size trucks.

As for the Lightning, it is a reasonably good fit for the farm. I burn tons of gas putting around checking on irrigation. Electric would do it except for a couple of issues: curb weight and overall price. The weight alone gives me pause as I drive in soft fields and don't want to get stuck all the time, or leave horrible ruts.

Ironically the people that actually work for a living and need trucks are such a small market compared to those who just want to drive around luxury trucks as as status symbol. So we end up having to buy trucks that really have way more bells and whistles than we need (carpet for one). Trucks that are meant for trades people do exist and they do sell pretty well. They also tend to be just one color, white. But I'm glad I still have some options.

The reality is far more nuanced than that. Despite Trump's attempts to make it otherwise, the economies of Canada and the US are deeply intertwined as are our banking industries and law enforcement. As a general rule, Canadian companies and the Canadian government cooperate with American authorities on issues of copyright infringement and other intellectual property issues. The US commands a tremendous amount of extrajudicial power over its allies. You can argue whether this is out of intimidation or out of a sense of shared, common values. This includes, often, extraditing the accused after a certain amount of due process in Canada.

One thing that's always bothered me is that the Conservative Party has always rolled over to every American demand. Since both American political parties are to the right of any party in Canada, I guess they deeply admire American muscle and what the US lets corporations get away with. I suspect this propensity is the biggest reason they lost the last federal election.

Not troll! It's absolutely true. Parent post is +1 insightful.

I do but the publishers take most of it and give the authors only a pittance. Unless of course the author is one of the few that has become wealthy from their most popular books.

Is Linux an OS by your definition? A recent slashdot post linked to a web page where Linux runs in webasm. It boots and runs /bin/sh as init. You can run a few basic commands including top. But it surely can't run firefox or anything "useful." Come to that my router runs Linux but I can't run "anything" on it. So it must not be an "OPERATING SYSTEM" then according to you.

Your car analogy is nonsense by the way. The engine is clearly still there. Only the steering wheel and seats have been removed. Car is totally functional though.

Yes when running MS-DOS software you could say it was a shell. But in 386 it ran in protected mode, something that MS-DOS surely didn't do natively. I consider windows 3.1 to be it's own operating system that incorporated MS-DOS as a part of it. I used many MS-DOS shells in my day and windows 3.1 was way more than that. Windows even required its own drivers separate from DOS.

I happen to dislike Douglas Hofstadter, actually. He isn't nearly smug enough.

The halting problem isn't unsolved at all; there are simple programs that can be fed into the testing framework for which the behavior is impossible to analyze, i.e., undecidable. Perhaps you got "unsolvable" and "undecidable" mixed up.

The original formulation of Pascal's wager is actually quite interesting—it's a game-theoretic probability analysis, described long before game theory was devised and when probability was in its infancy. Pascal's mugging targets the assumptions of the wager rather than its logic: in his writing, the nature of the divine is regarded as immutable, certain, and consistent with church doctrine.

To judge Pascal's intellect we really have to look at the context in which he was writing—the middle of Europe and the height of the witchcraft scare—and observe that he seems to have omitted the possibility of a demon (the sort that witches were alleged to commune with!) posing as a fake god, an idea that was explored extensively in early Christian heresies such as Gnosticism and Marcionism. Moreover the seventeenth century, Huguenots (protestants) were all over France, and so all of his readers would have been intimately familiar with questions of which doctrine was more authentic.

A lot of authors in this period heavily self-censored in order to avoid conflict with the state. Although the Inquisition was no longer active in France, the church had an immense amount of power, and running afoul of it could cost one's livelihood or worse. (Not to mention the sensibilities of patrons.) In some cases we only know an author's real position on occult subjects because of texts that were published posthumously or barely circulated; Isaac Newton, for example, wrote way more on magic and alchemy than on gravitation, calculus, or optics.

It's possible Pascal was not the theological bootlicker we've remembered him as, and, frankly, it's hard to imagine he never considered the flaws of the Wager, considering the messy world he lived in. Unfortunately there's no room for nuance when it comes to the popular narrative of, "child prodigy mathematician drinks too much communion wine and tragically starts spouting nonsense upon reaching adulthood."

Funny you should mention Amazon reviews. I just posted a review where I point out that the set I was given and indeed nearly all the Star trek TNG box sets for sale on Amazon are counterfeit and buyers should beware. Amazon flagged it as not conforming to community guidelines. Anytime that might hamper business is apparently against their rules.

I honestly don't know what to make of your comment. I understand you are attempting to be funny, but honestly I find the sentiment you express quite frightening because a significant number of powerful Americans actually think that democracy is harmful and people shouldn't have a say because they are too stupid, too poor, or the wrong race. In fact those people have been so successful that only 63% of those registered to vote actually participated in the last major US election And only approximately 73% of people who could have registered to vote did so. That means the election was decided by only 48% of US citizens. Of those who didn't vote we know apathy is certainly a big factor, but GOP voter suppression efforts have been wildly successful and are ongoing. The GOP is certainly not in favor of making voting easier for citizens to do, sadly. They even oppose making election day a national holiday, which is really telling. Voting is a privilege for the upper middle class and above, provided of course they vote GOP. And gerrymandering ensures that large groups of people who do not vote for the GOP get no representation. Pretty pernicious what is now going on out in the open.

China has all one time zone. The entire country of on Beijing time because CCP. If anything it makes all the time issues that much harder. Now you can't just think of time zone. You have to know what time they get up and go to with in different cities. Sounds horrible to me.

Then breathing is animal abuse, and we're all humongous jerks for existing.

Alright. Let me take the gloves off and be serious, since your other new response was a shitpost beyond reckoning.

Trivialism will not help you: the generation of consciousness is undecidable because we do not have a concrete definition of it.

The intended meaning of my comment was that the subjective experience of consciousness, like the Internal Revenue Service, is probably an emergent phenomenon built upon an immensely complex framework. "Missing the forest for the trees" comes to mind—if you're looking at the fundamental interactions that enable the atoms of the trees to exist, you'll never figure out that the trees were planted to spell out a message when viewed from orbit.

This gene, HAR1, is a non-coding RNA that we have known for decades is the smoking gun for human intelligence. It is key to the development of our language skills and absent from chimpanzees. If the authors of the paper were serious about studying the emergence of subjective consciousness, they would throw all their energy into deciphering how this gene influences brain development, then walk backward up the taxonomic tree, repeating the same diff-and-analyze operation until they reached nematodes, which have only a handful of neurons and are so simple that the average person can memorize all of the possible interactions and behaviors of those cells.

There is no room for a God of the Gaps when it comes to nematodes. They can be emulated by a Turing machine with perfect fidelity. They have no subjective experiences beyond those experienced by the billions of macrophages inside of you or a simple paramecium.

Interestingly all of these things thrash around wildly when they receive a fatal injury, ostensibly for the same reason we do—the pain is overwhelming and movement is an efficient way to introduce a competing signal that dilutes the misery. To the layperson seeing this through a microscope for the first time may be a bit horrifying as it seems rather relatable. But it isn't part of consciousness—resisting it is. It's just instinct, the result of a web of signalling molecules and proteins trying to minimize feedback loops caused by negative stimuli.

With all that said—the Simulationist argument is almost always made in bad faith, or as a result of someone acting in bad faith trying to plant seeds in the minds of others. It has long been a thought-terminating cliche wielded by nihilists and eschatologists to justify apathy and other actions that devalue life on this planet. Deciding whether the universe was constructed or not does not matter, because there are no tangible consequences of simply possessing a yes/no answer to that question. Belief will not tell us how to find bugs to exploit, nor will it give us proof we could ever escape from it. To do either, we would need actual direct evidence of artificiality that rules out all alternatives, and even that may not yield any utility.

However, advocates of nihilism do have something to gain from disseminating Simulationism—they get to push narratives about how it is fine to abandon social responsibility. In milder cases of internet-poisoned solipsism, they think it's fine to screw up (because nothing is "real"); more severely, Millerite cultists believe that a completely antisocial value system (donate all your money to the church and wait for the Rapture) is the optimal approach to life. Most dangerous are the oligarchs pushing this narrative: if you do not care about the universe, then you probably don't care about politics and won't stand in their way when they shred public institutions. This is basically what happened in post-Soviet Russia, though they didn't have to work nearly so hard to achieve it.

Because of these manipulative ideologies, anyone who promulgates or advocates a belief in Simulationism needs to be dealt with harshly and cynically to discourage them from openly proselytizing to the public. Unfortunately the battle is, in the main, very much lost for now, but so long as we know how to recognize the enemy we stand a chance of outliving them.