Off when?

Save that for the four semen of the apocalypse

Sounds nice.

Anon made the right call, she only wanted him for his fries, she would have been gone once the fries were gone.

It’s a joke. I don’t think there’s really a website called Frank’s Dildo Emporium. But if there is, lmk.

And when I went there, it said Google, Cloudflare, and Frank’s Dildo Emporium all down, like of all the random sites, why pick FDE?

This trouble?

I guess there’s two kinds of ignorance at play here.

The kind I was referring to is the ignorance of high standards. If you don’t know that you can live in a state of constant dopamine drip supplied by your cellular device, because cellular devices haven’t been invented yet, you wouldn’t miss those dopamine hits that you don’t even know will exist. I think OP would have been just fine if they were born into an earlier generation. Because they would have the bliss of not knowing what future they’re missing out on.

But to your point, the constantly supplied bliss from our internet bubbles does make us more ignorant to the things outside our bubble. And these days, the things we focus on are often dictated by the corporations who make the addictive apps. So, those corporations will profit by directing away from knowledge about how those same corporations are destroying so many parts of our world. In this case, I would argue that the ignorance is still bliss. It’s just a malignant harmful bliss that distracts from the real things we should be concerned about. And in a way, if it could snap us out the destructive path we’re on, I could see how another Carrington event might actually act as a wake-up call regarding our blatant hubris in thinking that society is ever safe from collapse.

As you mentioned, there are those who live in parts of the world where they have no access to technology, still living in that blissful ignorance of pre-computerized times. But that is a social bliss. They will still be hurt by the geological effects that the industrial age has wrought. And it won’t be pretty.

So, I think I would agree with your assertion, plus an addendum. Ignorance isn’t bliss. But it was.

I look at TV shows like OP is talking about and think it might be kind of nice to live in an era where things are slower. If a library book might take weeks and you need to go into town to get a comic book, or there’s nothing to do until dinner except maybe some activity with the people in your close vicinity, it feels like a much more intimate way to experience the world. But I do remember in my early teens when the first wave of Personal Data Assistants came out, and I was wowed by the technology. I can edit a computer document right here in the palm of my hand. Keep my contacts with me, a calendar, a calculator, simple drawing programs. It felt like that device could do everything, years before smartphone was a word. Now I carry two phones around on two different carriers because I too fear a world without service. I sometimes want to go back to the slower world, so I do at times relish long waits at the DMV with nothing to do, or a power outage on a stormy night. But I hate feeling like I’m wasting my time. Even when there’s nothing to do, I’m always trying to do something, it’s just that being constrained forces me to pick different things. So, I’m not sure if it would help or hurt OP to hear that if they grew up before any of this existed, there’s every possibility they would have felt more fulfilled. Because time was something you could still get a handle on and not feel like it’s always slipping away. At least, not so much. In that sense, ignorance can really be bliss.

Based on his comment history, this guy doesn’t seem very well liked in general. Lots of incel vibes, and he does have some comments in German which I can’t read, but based on the downvotes, I think it’s safe to say his views are unpopular in any language.

Seconded. Plant life has spent hundreds of millions of years perfecting carbon capture. We’re so cocky as a species, thinking we can speed-run terraform tech and that might somehow allow us to continue our culture of constant growth without consequence.

Relying on carbon capture to fix climate change is like calling in a construction company to rebuild your house while it’s still actively on fire.

I think the universe we experience is a mathematical continuum with an added layer of probability.

The problem with trying to describe my theory is that what I’m proposing is literally the simplest thing in the universe. It is the one rule that there are no rules and that by ordering the slices of the continuum into discrete moments of time, all of the rulelessness coalesces into matter and space by virtue of being repeatable probability waveforms which can be represented in 3D space via an emergent 4D manifold.

Even that is already very dense. For more on the manifold, you may refer to the 1983 paper from J.B. Hartle and Stephen Hawking, “The waveform of the Universe.”

Imagine you want to take the first moment of time, represented as one whole, and break the next moment of time into two pieces, but knowing that the third moment of time will double again to have four pieces, you want the first piece of the 2nd moment of time to be larger, more like the whole of the 1st moment, and the second piece of the 2nd moment of time to be smaller, more like the quarters of the 3rd moment of time.

Mathematically, you can do this - at least for the first two moments. If you want a magic ratio that you can divide the whole by, and then divide the resulting number by that same ratio such that both of those results added together equal the original whole, there is such a ratio. It is the golden ratio. But it does not follow that continuing to divide by the golden ratio will get you the next four pieces that would also add to one whole, constituting the third moment of time. Rather, adding all of the rest of the infinite series where each next number is the previous number divided by the golden ratio yields, miraculously, the golden ratio.

No, if you want each moment to snap to bounds where every moment of time has twice the number of “pieces” as the previous moment, there is no one ratio where you can divide every piece by a formulaically derived ratio to get the size of the next piece.

However, you can derive a perfect equation for a ratio of reduction for the size of each piece if instead of increasing twofold each moment of time, the mathematical size of the universe increases by a factor of euler’s number for each moment of time. (Euler’s number, for any unaware, is an irrational number like pi or the golden ratio–it goes on forever, only approximated at 2.718. It is the factor used to calculate rate of growth rate as the growth compounds on itself. If you have a dollar with 100% annual growth rate, and compound it only at the end of the year (once), you’ll have 2 dollars. If you compound it twice, meaning you’ll only apply a 50% growth rate, but you’ll do it twice, you’ll have 2.25 dollars from the 50 cents you made mid-year experiencing 50% growth during the second compounding. Compound 4 times a year (1.25)^4 and you get about 2.44. Compound an infinite number of times and you get the irrational number e.)

So, if the universe’s size increases by a factor of e every moment instead of a factor of 2, you can find an equation that creates a ratio which smoothly descends from the golden ratio, approaching 1, as the ratio that each unit needs to be divided by the previous unit to prevent any division between moments of time if they were unraveled back into a single continuous string rather than 4-dimensional space. And we start thinking about the internals of moments of time less as discrete units, now that each moment has an irrational unit size, and think more around a descending density as you move from each moment of time to the next. But a vastly increasing size offsets the density to keep the sum total of any moment identical to the total value of any other moment.

But this does not yet explain why matter or the fundamental forces exist to begin with, how that 4D manifold is supposed to emerge from this theoretical curve. And the answer is that there are an infinite number of possible curves that can fit this ratio regression. There’s the simplest one, which solves the problem as simply as possible. But what if you add a sine wave to that? Within the bounds of a moment, the sine wave will go up and also down, canceling out any potential change in density totals. But maybe this is slightly less likely than the more simple curve. And a sine wave that goes up and down twice, with a frequency of 2, even less likely. And the higher amplitudes, higher frequencies, all even less likely, but still possible.

But why would the universe be calculating frequencies of sine waves as probabilities? And I believe it’s not so much a calculation as it is a natural relationship between the positive and negative directions, starting at 0. If you have a moment where the size is e to the power of 0, its size is 1. And you can proceed with the universe I described where the size increases by e every moment, trending toward infinity, or you can move backwards on the number line where e to the higher negative powers trends toward 0. The math should all be the same, but inverted. An equal but opposite anti-verse. I believe that matter arises from interactions between the shared probability of what is likely to happen in either universe at any given moment of time. And from either universe’s perspective, they both see themselves as the positive direction where the math of space trends toward infinity and the other universe is the one that gets smaller and smaller. But because they both look the same internally, they are effectively the same universe, thus the shared probability.

So, these infinite frequencies and amplitudes of sine waves overlaid on top of the lowest energy curve create stable collections of frequencies also known as eigenstates, which can be combined into the sort of manifold Hartle and Hawking described, where 4D space and time becomes an emergent relationship between the underlying waveforms of probability and the spatial organization of layers and layers of mathematical curves that are not identical but do rhyme, in our universe seen as fundamental particles.

That is what I believe. I think we’re living in virtual spacetime continuum that emerges to more coherently organize huge swaths of mathematical probability waves that in concert represent what might or might not be at any given level of complexity.

Which seems like a lot of words to explain that we definitely don’t exist for sure because the fact that we’re here indicates we only probably exist.

Great. Glad we cleared that up.

He’s moved on to another plane.

Patrick, that’s not where eyelashes go.

“Wow, I must say you’ve aced the technical. There are a lot of other strong candidates as well, but feel free to grab a complimentary mirror on the way out.”

“Thanks, I’ll reflect on that.”

This might be more mainstream than what you’re looking for, but this is the video that I think of from that time.

I canceled my sub, but sadly not out of principle on the AI thing. I just accidentally hit the button that accepts an upgrade to the family plan and it didn’t look like there was an easy way to undo it so I just killed the whole subscription.

I can believe this - that Trump was paying Epstein for pedophile shit and Clinton never got involved. I also find it pretty easy to believe that despite never being involved with Epstein, Bill Clinton is a scumbag and a rapist, considering the numerous allegations against him:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_sexual_assault_and_misconduct_allegations

It’s not proof per se, but with politicians these days, I believe it’s most accurate to find them dirty and corrupt until proven otherwise via their legislative actions (to wit, I’m not holding my breath vis-à-vis 99% of Congress).

I remember being thrilled to move from floppies to a 16mb flash drive for my school assignments, even if I did have to constantly download and reinstall the USB Mass Storage drivers for the Windows 1998 sp2 computers in the library which reset every night. And the transfer speed was SLOW.

The fact that you can get a terabyte flash drive now, which can hold 62,500 of my school assignment drives, is mind blowing to me.

It’s end times like these I wish I believed in God.