Bill Gates invested in one of the covid vaccines and made a ton of money. He passed it off his charity but when it came time to make the patents free that's strangely didn't happen. None of these fuckers do real charity any more than Trump did. It is always a scam and a grift.

If you gave 20 bucks at a grocery checkout you've given more of your income or hell more real money than any billionaire has ever given the charity in their lives. That's raw dollars that's before we talk about all the money they diverted into their pockets

How often do you adjust your side mirrors? For me, it's once and then leave it there the rest of the life.

As if that would make the slightest difference to anything.

You can't really boycott things anymore. For one thing the same handful of stock holders own controlling shares in every single company you would ever buy anything from.

And you can't just go homestead. Any of the land that could support you is already owned by someone else. You can try squatting but they are rapidly making that a more serious crime than murder. Used to be if you just bought land and did nothing with it squatters could move in. Land was use it or lose it for exactly that reason. Those laws are going away.

There is nowhere to escape to anymore. Except cope. You can always escape into cope. Just tell yourself that nothing bad is going to happen and nothing is going to change at least not for you personally. Bad things always happen to other people right?

It would be souless corporate but at least it would be pedo Nazis.

At least not if you're American or european. The reason Japan has a tough time just building out wind and solar is that they have very very little land. The best explanation of Japan I have ever heard in my life is take the population of California, triple it, squeeze it in the Montana and then take away half the land because it's all unlivable mountains ranges.

Japan has a genuine land shortage. Now I haven't actually run the numbers it's entirely possible that they could still power their country with wind and solar but let's take it for a moment that they can't yeah they could have a reason to run nuclear power plants.

For absolutely every other country on the face of the Earth the only reason to fire up nuclear power plants is to keep AI data centers fed without all that filthy filthy wind and solar that could potentially overtake fossil fuels before the people who own all the fossil fuels have secured their ownership of the means of producing electricity...

What I'm saying is our civilization, assuming it survives and that's all stretch at this point, is going to use wind and solar to power itself. That's just what we're going to do. You can go look up the YouTube channel technologies connections they have a long video explaining the math I can't be bothered if you can't...

But the problem is there really isn't any reason for these giant wind and solar farms to be owned by individuals. There just isn't any good reason for it. They should just be built by the government and provide electricity is a free public good. The same way we have a military to protect ourselves there are just some things that a civilization needs everyone to have. We all need to have the military keeping other countries from invading and we all need electricity. And economies of scale are still a thing so throwing up your own solar panels is just silly.

So the people who are used to owning and controlling your access to electricity don't want to give up all that power and money so they are slowing the transition to ensure that when it's all done they're still in charge and you still have to do what they say.

Meanwhile we have ai data centers who want power now and they don't want to wait and there sure should not going to bother going up against the oil companies. So nuclear power is back on the table. Which is all fine and good except well, look you've read the history of Fukushima or at least I hope you have. You know the corners were cut and you know which corners were cut. Did you know that the public blamed the engineers instead of the CEOs and suits?

When the engineers warn that these nuclear power plants are unsafe nobody is going to pay any attention to them. When the plants melt down that's the only time anyone's going to pay attention to the engineers and they're going to pay attention just long enough to blame them instead of the wealthy CEO who has an entire team of people dedicated to protecting his reputation...

I suppose the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics gives us a reason to posit something similar to "alternate realities." Published physicists who have studied the evidence in much greater depth than I have, and understand the math much better than I do, take this seriously. Were it not for them, I would dismiss it as junk science.

But even if we posit many worlds, the theory doesn't predict any means by which taking drugs would cause one to see things that reside in these completely decohered branches, let alone ones that decohered so long ago that evolution took a completely different path, producing tiny people.

I also suspect that humans bodies that are as small as rats wouldn't actually function properly, as the design would produce mechanical failures given normal human proportions. The brain wouldn't be able to contain nearly as many neurons either, meaning that these "people" would not be capable of speech or abstract thought (or really much more than rats or similar-sized animals are capable of).

The idea continues to be wildly implausible, even under the many-worlds hypothesis.

There is just a little hint of a regulatory framework in place and that's what causes the cost overruns. Assuming JD Vance or Donald Trump wins in 2028 then that regulatory framework will go up in smoke and they can slap these together for next to nothing coming in well under budget. Now the downside to that is they will eventually experience a catastrophic meltdown but that's a problem for the rural communities stuck with these or maybe even the suburban communities stuck with these. Not the billionaires who are going to suck down all that cash and power their AI slop with it.

Basically that's a you problem not of them problem

Coal kills but it doesn't slowly over time. The problem with those reactors is when they go, and with the weak regulatory framework we put in place after 40 plus years of constant deregulation and whining about bureaucrats, when they go not if they basically ruin your property.

Dying of lung cancer in your 60s sucks. But it's still preferable to losing all your property in America. We do not treat people without property well.

Also what you describing is called a false dichotomy. Nobody's going to build coal because it costs too much. They're going to build wind and solar farms. The only reason that they aren't doing that is it requires bigger bribes to Trump to overcome the oil industry brides. The reason nuclear power is a thing right now is that the oil industry doesn't really see it as a threat the way they see wind and solar as a threat.

2008 called and they want their right-wing talking points back. We've been able to do base load power for close to 20 years with wind and solar.

Jesus Christ I hope this post I'm replying to is a bot and their aren't real human beings still spouting this nonsense in this day and age. God that would be sad...

Three Mile Island was the closest and it was not a big problem.

The problem is that the regulatory framework that prevented 3 Mile Island from blowing up in our faces is basically gone. Ronald Reagan and the American right wings spent 40 years dismantling it.

Meanwhile we have crooks in charge of everything and a completely corrupt supreme Court.

Rather than fixing the social issues that made nuclear power slightly dodgy and unsafe we exasperated them for whatever stupid reasons. We spent over 40 years making everything worse and putting imbeciles in charge with the mentality of 12-year-old children.

Under those circumstances nuclear power isn't just unsafe it's just a disaster waiting to happen and no sane community that had a functioning democracy would allow a plant to be built in their backyard. Especially because all the electricity is just going to go to AI slop.

It's all downsides and no upsides but there's this weird thing where a certain demographic of nerd is really obsessed with nuclear power.

These are going to be quick and dirty installations in order to power AI data centers for people that bribed trump. It's your taxpayer dollars going to finance AI slop.

But that's not the real problem, the real problem here is the people who want these want them yesterday. They are not going to pay any attention to safety or maintenance they're just going to slap them up as fast as possible in a place where the people don't have enough political power to deal with the inevitable repercussions.

Meanwhile we could power basically everything with wind and solar and do it safely and effectively but they don't want you to know that or think about that because while wind and solar is the inevitable direction we're going for power generation the Epstein class wants to remain in charge of your electricity and your access to clean water.

And the funny thing is when I write it out even though it's absolutely true it sounds like batshit crazy insane conspiracy because well, it kind of is. It's like Gore Vidal used to say, I'm not a conspiracy theorist I'm a conspiracy analyst...

And yeah you can have real conspiracies that are going to hurt you personally. Deal with it.

You going to find it's the same finance bro psychopaths that are automating all the jobs away and driving all of civilization into a new dark age.

UBI is a fake solution. You can't just cut people checks. Not when everything is owned by a handful of billionaires going on trillionaires. They will just raise prices until the check is right back in their pockets. And you will still be impoverished.

When you actually look into who's pushing UBI it's so that they can't cut all the other social programs and then point to the check you get every month and say that if you can't make it it's because you aren't being moral enough and budgeting correctly so it's all your fault.

UBI is a trick by the finance bros and the Epstein class to shift the blame for poverty from themselves back onto the everybody else and not on to them for taking all the money and all the technology and everything technology builds and creates.

You're going to need to come up with a more complex solution and sending people checks. And again I don't think people like that because well, people want things to be simple and easy to understand and they want a single solution that solves the problem once and for all instead of the constant never-ending maintenance and adjustments needed to keep human civilization from collapsing.

You're going to need to find something else though. You might be able to use those checks as a stopgap measure or part of a broader solution but they are not a solution by themselves they are a trick by the Epstein class to keep us on path to the thousand years of darkness that they are planning on for all of us...

It's not "every" human brain. It's just "most" human brains.

Be that as it may, you might consider asking Gemini such a question. Of course, answers from AI aren't guaranteed to be accurate, but answers from random posters on Slashdot come with even less of a guarantee.

But here, let me save you the effort by posting Gemini's reply:

While researchers are still isolating the exact chemical compound inside Lanmaoa asiatica—which is unique and unrelated to classical psilocybin "magic mushrooms"—neuroscience and psychiatry offer a fascinating framework for why a chemical can cause such a highly specific, repeatable flaw in human perception.

1. The Disruption of "Size Constancy"
To understand why the people are tiny, we look at a neurological concept called size constancy. Your brain continuously performs complex mathematics to ensure that when a friend walks away from you, you perceive them as moving further away, rather than physically shrinking—even though the actual image hitting your retina is getting smaller. This relies on a highly calibrated feedback loop between the primary visual cortex (V1), which processes raw shapes, and the visual association cortices, which interpret depth, distance, and context. When a toxin disrupts this communication channel, it causes a specific sensory distortion called micropsia. If the brain tries to project an object or a memory into the visual field while the size-constancy machinery is offline, the object defaults to a drastically scaled-down size (often measured at exactly 1 to 2 centimeters by patients).

2. The Brain's "Pareidolia" and Object-Recognition Hardware
Why does the brain specifically manufacture human figures instead of just shrinking the existing room? Human brains possess hyper-specialized, dedicated neural architecture designed to recognize faces and bodies, primarily located in the fusiform face area (FFA) and the extrastriate body area (EBA). This hardware is so sensitive that it causes pareidolia—making us see faces in electrical outlets or burnt toast. When a psychoactive compound overstimulates or uncouples these specific regions, the visual system begins firing "spontaneously." Because these circuits are hardwired exclusively to process human attributes, the hallucination cannot be an abstract geometric pattern. The brain is forced to piece together the chaotic neural static using its strongest, most deeply ingrained template: the human form.

3. The "Release Phenomenon" (Deafferentation)
Lilliputian hallucinations are not exclusive to mushrooms; they are also the hallmark of Charles Bonnet Syndrome (where people losing their eyesight see tiny people) and certain stages of Parkinson’s disease. The leading neurological theory for both is the release phenomenon: Under normal conditions, a steady stream of real-world data from your eyes acts as an "inhibitory" brake, keeping your visual association cortices from running wild. If a toxin suddenly blocks or alters this sensory input, the brain's internal dream-generation software is "released" from its brakes. Left to its own devices, the visual cortex starts pulling random information from memory and projecting it into the physical room. Because the interactive physics engine of the brain is still online, 97% of these hallucinations interact realistically with the environment—marching across actual tables or ducking under tablecloths.

The Neuro-Chemical Frontier: Classical psychedelics like psilocybin primarily bind to serotonin $5\text{-HT}_{2\text{A}}$ receptors, causing geometric distortions and emotional shifts. Because Lanmaoa asiatica causes a clinical syndrome completely distinct from a typical psilocybin trip, scientists believe its active compound targets entirely different pathways—likely involving acetylcholine or gabaergic networks, which directly control attention, reality-monitoring, and visual gating.

They changed the rules so that they could put it into index funds even though it's not a safe investment and does not belong in index funds.

Talking with some coworkers they were talking about how all this crap is going to get stuffed into their 401ks and the only solution they could come up with it to stop it from looting all their money was to form an LLC and individually pick stocks for your 401k like you're a fucking day trader or something. Which completely defeats the purpose of a 401k as a place to safely Park and invest money for long-term retirement.

We don't want the AI bubbled burst because as much as it sucks for memory and storage prices it's the only thing keeping those jackals busy so they don't come for what Little we have left. On the other hand it's going to use so much water and electricity we are going to have to deal with it somehow and I don't know how we deal with that in a country with trillionaires...

Is there any other evidence of their existence, such as missing food or other supplies that would be consistent with ongoing need, not to mention unexplained pollution, etc?

No.

Do multiple people report seeing the same people in the same spot at the same time when they take these mushrooms together, under controlled conditions where they cannot hear each other's descriptions?

No.

While we have no logical way to disprove the existence of alternate realities, there is also no good reason to posit their existence, especially when we can objectively determine that these mushrooms are hallucinogens, which are known to produce false sense data. You are free to believe in whatever crazy nonsense you like, but don't try to act like there is any sound philosophical or scientific basis for such belief.