From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 1 00:42:53 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 31 May 2020 17:42:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] bond villain In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <00c401d637ad$969e3970$c3daac50$@rainier66.com> >?> On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] bond villain >?It is exciting for now, though it?ll eventually become routine. I recall reading that the public kind of lost interest in the Apollo program after the first Moon landing, and then the Apollo 13 disaster happened, but after that interest seemed to decline again. >?The big deal about this flight got me is it seems an important milestone along the path to routine and far less expensive access to space. SpaceX even has tourist missions planned for next year. Personally, I want this to become so routine, safe, and cheap that it becomes boring. Regards, Dan Hi Dan, ja, the launches were very popular in the 60s. I remember the tourists from New York lining up along the river. The launches were an exciting and dangerous stunt. By the 70s, they had become safe and routine. Fun aside: one of the most memorable things to me were the people who came down in motor homes and parked along the Indian River. We thought those things were outrageously cool toys: drive you home wherever you want to go. People we knew could never afford such an extravagant toy as that. A small Airstream camper was high-end to us. These people had this enormous Winnebago luxury liner. I had the notion that everyone up north was rich. That space tourism notion is great: I don?t know what else to use the station for other than a really expensive hotel. The sooner we can sell it to Mr. Musk the better. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 1 01:28:50 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sun, 31 May 2020 20:28:50 -0500 Subject: [ExI] bond villain In-Reply-To: <00c401d637ad$969e3970$c3daac50$@rainier66.com> References: <00c401d637ad$969e3970$c3daac50$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: That space tourism notion is great: I don?t know what else to use the station for other than a really expensive hotel. The sooner we can sell it to Mr. Musk the better. spike I thought important science experiments were done there. It's the only place where you can see the stars without an atmosphere in the way, eh? Or is Hubble still hanging on? bill w On Sun, May 31, 2020 at 7:45 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *>?*> *On Behalf Of *Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] bond villain > > > > >?It is exciting for now, though it?ll eventually become routine. I recall > reading that the public kind of lost interest in the Apollo program after > the first Moon landing, and then the Apollo 13 disaster happened, but after > that interest seemed to decline again. > > > > >?The big deal about this flight got me is it seems an important milestone > along the path to routine and far less expensive access to space. SpaceX > even has tourist missions planned for next year. Personally, I want this to > become so routine, safe, and cheap that it becomes boring. > > Regards, > > > > Dan > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Hi Dan, ja, the launches were very popular in the 60s. I remember the > tourists from New York lining up along the river. The launches were an > exciting and dangerous stunt. By the 70s, they had become safe and routine. > > > > Fun aside: one of the most memorable things to me were the people who came > down in motor homes and parked along the Indian River. We thought those > things were outrageously cool toys: drive you home wherever you want to > go. People we knew could never afford such an extravagant toy as that. A > small Airstream camper was high-end to us. These people had this enormous > Winnebago luxury liner. I had the notion that everyone up north was rich. > > > > That space tourism notion is great: I don?t know what else to use the > station for other than a really expensive hotel. The sooner we can sell it > to Mr. Musk the better. > > > > spike > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 1 02:23:49 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 31 May 2020 19:23:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] bond villain In-Reply-To: References: <00c401d637ad$969e3970$c3daac50$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00e501d637bb$b0004cb0$1000e610$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] bond villain That space tourism notion is great: I don?t know what else to use the station for other than a really expensive hotel. The sooner we can sell it to Mr. Musk the better. spike I thought important science experiments were done there. It's the only place where you can see the stars without an atmosphere in the way, eh? Or is Hubble still hanging on? bill w Hubble is still hanging on, and ja we are very proud of that Lockheed product. Note that is Lockheed, not Lockheed Martin. We built that before Martin came along. Even cooler: in March or April (if all goes well) the Hubble will be joined by the awesome James Webb telescope. Oh what a time to be living. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Jun 1 05:21:55 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 31 May 2020 22:21:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Is a copy of you really you? In-Reply-To: <8ABC3630-0D4D-4B3D-988B-1244DB8A72E8@gmu.edu> References: <8ABC3630-0D4D-4B3D-988B-1244DB8A72E8@gmu.edu> Message-ID: On Sun, May 31, 2020 at 7:43 AM Robin D Hanson wrote: > > On May 30, 2020, at 6:17 PM, Keith Henson via extropy-chat wrote: > > Robin D Hanson wrote: > > (re my objection to copies) > > I disagree; I wrote a whole book describing a reasonable world where many copies are made: > >> And you might be right, nobody has a lock on what the future will turn >> out to be, certainly not me. > >> However, I have two objections. My work in evolutionary psychology >> leads me to feel very uncomfortable about using humans as a model for >> building minds. Humans have traits like capture-bonding and those >> which lead up to wars that were selected. Having one of those (or ones >> we don't know about) activate in a powerful AI seems intolerably >> dangerous. > > > That same argument would suggest trying to eliminate the human minds in meat brains, as well as those in artificial brains. We tolerate meat brains (no choice actually) because most individual humans have relatively litle power to mess up the world. What concerns me is giving a human mind copy vastly more power in an artificial brain. Humans seem to have evolved psychological mechanisms that detect "looming privation," resource shortages, and for good evolutionary reasons respond by attacking neighbors and taking their resources. (After a perious to build up xenophobic memes.) Consider a raw human mind mapped into a powerful AI with substantial enhancement. Would such a mind have increased concern about a future resource crisis? I suspect that might be the case. Would this concern turn on the evolved psychological mechanisms and lead to an irrational path to war? I don't know. However, I would suggest caution. > But if you see human brains as holding most of the value in the world, you?ll want more of them. Within limits, yes. Falling income per capita seems to flip the behavior switch into war mode, while rising income per capita seems to turn it off. Rising income per capita seems to be what caused the IRA to go out of business. Optimum human numbers might be a lot higher than the current, especially if we spread into space. But I suspect that very large numbers where the resources per person were sharply limited would not be a good idea. >> The other objection is right out of economics. If it is cheap to copy >> something its value falls to the marginal cost. I.e., one Michael >> Jordan is valuable, at least to him. 10,000 of them would have an >> interesting time finding teams to play with. > > > The fact of diminishing marginal value is not at all an economic argument against larger quantities of anything. I don't understand economics, but this feels wrong or at least incomplete. If you have a poker chip and there is a way to make them cheaply by the thousands, well, you are not hurt and may be better off if you have use for lots of poker chips. But if you, yourself, are duplicated by the thousands, millions, or billions and there is some limit on the number of poker chips that can be made, then a large numbers of copies of you are going to make you poor in terms of chips. It seems to me that there is a fundamental difference between things that can be owned and things (people?, ems?) who owns stuff. If an ems' mental organization is copied from humans, are they more like people or poker chips? Keith PS Jack Vance's story "The Last Castle" describes the revolt of the "Mechs," an alien race that has some similarites to ems. > But, as I freely admit, you might be right and a vast number of copies > could be the path to utopia. > > > I?m not claiming utopia; I?m not sure the concept is even coherent. > > Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu > Future of Humanity Inst., Oxford University > Assoc. Prof. Economics, George Mason University > See my books: http://ageofem.com http://elephantinthebrain.com > > > > > > > > > From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Jun 1 10:52:16 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 06:52:16 -0400 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Sat, May 30, 2020 at 11:32 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > *>Ja I know, this guy?s a comedian, not a scientist. But this commentary > has a ring of truth to it:* > > > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28I5WyLp15o&feature=youtu.be > Those remarks were made on May 1 and today is now June 1, since those words were spoken at least 40,442 more Americans have died of COVID-19 and many times that number have gotten very sick. Incidentally while I was watching the current riots on TV I couldn't help but wonder if the most damaging thing about them is they could be virus super spreader events leading to an explosion of new cases and a new wave of death. On the one hand they were outside which is good, but there was a lot of running around yelling and exhaling and coughing due to tear gas which is bad. In 1918 there were bond parades in Philadelphia and Detroit and today they are known to have been super spreader events for the flu even though they were held outside, so that's not encouraging either. If we see a big spike of new cases in about 2 weeks then we'll know. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Jun 1 12:18:05 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 08:18:05 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Is a copy of you really you? In-Reply-To: References: <8ABC3630-0D4D-4B3D-988B-1244DB8A72E8@gmu.edu> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 1:25 AM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > * > What concerns me is giving a human mind copy vastly more power in an > artificial brain. Humans seem to have evolved psychological mechanisms that > detect "looming privation," resource shortages, and for good evolutionary > reasons respond by attacking neighbors and taking their resources. (After a > perious to build up xenophobic memes.) Consider a raw human mind mapped > into a powerful AI with substantial enhancement. * I have doubts about your theory but even if it's true I don't see it or Darwinian Evolution in general playing a significant part in the future; the evolution of memes will be more important than the evolution of genes because minds are involved thus it's vastly faster. And the faster minds become the faster memes will change. Rather than worrying about outmoded behavioral programming inherited from our stone age past I'm much more concerned with what will happen when we have full conscious control of our emotional control panel. Suppose there was some task that you knew you should do but don't want to because you're naturally lazy and the task is dull, so you just turn one knob on your emotional control panel and now you're no longer lazy, now you love nothing better than hard work, and you then turn another knob and now you find your job of putting thousands of caps on thousands of toothpaste tubes to be utterly fascinating, fulfilling, and endlessly enjoyable. It seems to me that having too much self control would lead to a positive feedback loop, and those things tend to head for extreames and rarely produce anything productive, they usually end up producing either no output or an explosive output. Sometimes literally explosive. * > if you, yourself, are duplicated by the thousands, millions, or > billions and there is some limit on the number of poker chips that can be > made, then a large numbers of copies of you are going to make you poor in > terms of chips.* If there is a consensus among the many copies of me that there are just too many of us then we could decide to merge back together. The resulting being would then remember doing different things in different places at exactly the same time, but that would be OK with me. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 1 12:58:48 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 05:58:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] ring of truth On Sat, May 30, 2020 at 11:32 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: >Ja I know, this guy?s a comedian, not a scientist. But this commentary has a ring of truth to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28I5WyLp15o &feature=youtu.be >?Those remarks were made on May 1 and today is now June 1? Do you suppose the video would be different if made today? How? >? watching the current riots on TV I couldn't help but wonder if the most damaging thing about them is they could be virus super spreader events? but there was a lot of running around yelling and exhaling and coughing due to tear gas which is bad? Heeeeeyyyy business opportunity: disinfectant teargas! >?If we see a big spike of new cases in about 2 weeks then we'll know? John K Clark If there is, will it be the cop?s fault or the rioters fault? I would blame those rioters who went to the event in spite of their not feeling well and those rioters who defied the social distancing guidelines. Perhaps it is the governor?s fault for failing to temporarily ban murderous riots. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 1 13:17:57 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 06:17:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <008601d63817$1171eb10$3455c130$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Sent: Monday, June 1, 2020 3:52 AM >>? the current riots ? could be virus super spreader events? John K Clark >? disinfectant teargas! ? These riots have me thinking about the future of retail. (I do that a lot.) In California they recently decided that larceny of items of value below 950 bucks is a misdemeanor, which makes it functionally legal. Remaining retail stores are particularly hard hit, for now they not only need to compete with steadily growing online sales from outfits with lower overheard, they now can fall victim to anyone walking out of their stores with whatever they want. The local constabulary will probably not even show up if a homeless person walks out with a new sleeping bag and tent. In response, the local sporting goods store doesn?t carry those items anymore. This leads to problems: https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/modesto/modesto-big-5-worker-attacked-by-customer/103-11aecb0a-b275-4b0f-86f3-4c87cf7c298f We have a Big 5 nearby which recently threw in the towel. It is now to become a Chick-Fil-A, which is fine by me, for I buy all my sporting goods online, but I cannot buy a CFA value meal 1 deluxe online (oh those are good, ja?) The current quarantine has demonstrated the practicality of going entirely to online sales. This jump-started a process which has been practical for some time, and has enormous benefits, starting with the obvious: the recipient takes the risk of theft rather than the vendor, which helps reduce prices for everyone. It reduces traffic. It allows greater competition among vendors. It reduces some high-risk low-pay employment, but it increases lower-end employment opportunities (to contract delivery drivers.) It frees up real estate in former retail which can be converted to homeless shelters. By cutting out one of the middle-humans, it increases incentive to shorten supply chains, which helps localize manufacturing, which brings jobs back home from overseas. Anything else? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Jun 1 13:17:43 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 09:17:43 -0400 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 9:01 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > *Perhaps it is the governor?s fault for failing to temporarily ban > murderous riots.* Perhaps it's the police commissioner's fault for hiring murderous cops. Typically it takes between 10 and 20 minutes for a hanging person's heart to stop, the cop kneeling on George Floyd's neck managed to stop his heart in 8 minutes and 46 seconds. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 1 13:41:43 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 06:41:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] ring of truth On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 9:01 AM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: >> Perhaps it is the governor?s fault for failing to temporarily ban murderous riots. >?Perhaps it's the police commissioner's fault for hiring murderous cops. ?John K Clark Clearly they had a bad apple on staff. Having worked with organizations (Boy Scouts) it is clear how difficult it is to select a group of people while filtering out every bad apple and still avoiding discrimination. No matter how carefully it is done, people can hide their bad intentions and character flaws. Google on teachers caught with students. Note they don?t even bother with men, for that is so common. The above query returns almost all women, for that is a fun novelty which still makes the headlines. All of these teachers made it thru the screening process. In scouts, we have the decision for accepting leaders resting with a group of volunteers, none of whom are professionally trained to spot bad apples, all while under the threat of lawsuit if they discriminate. We see that professionally-trained employment experts (indemnified from personal liability and covered by state funding) make mistakes, plenty of them. But a privately funded volunteer organization is sued to bankruptcy for missing the occasional bad apple. We have bad cops. We get that. Regarding the riots: there are at least three elements in play: the locals protesting police brutality, the opportunists from outside the area wishing to score on some loot, and anarchists from outside hoping to create chaos for political gain. The local constabulary report that most of those they manage to arrest are in the second two categories. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 1 13:55:39 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 08:55:39 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I don't think that there is anything at all positive about the protests. Are they sending a message to the people that think this is OK? No. Nobody thinks this is OK except perhaps for the white supremacists. Millions of dollars of damage and looting affect totally innocent people. Oh yeah, and some people get killed. What a waste of a human being. Protesters showing up with guns and rifles. Nothing good about that. Police get hurt too. If I thought that protests would do the slightest bit of good I would not say what I said above. But I don't. Men are going on trial for murder, so the government did the right thing. What else can they do? bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 1 13:56:59 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 06:56:59 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00bf01d6381c$853c7560$8fb56020$@rainier66.com> On Sat, May 30, 2020 at 11:32 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: >Ja I know, this guy?s a comedian, not a scientist. But this commentary has a ring of truth to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28I5WyLp15o &feature=youtu.be We are seeing the worldwide new cases go up as the southern hemisphere numbers go up (it?s flu season down there, with more people indoors, while the northern hemisphere has fewer.) Now I am again thinking about herd immunity. We recognize that it is inherently difficult to know if herd immunity is a significant factor, for the antibody tests are known to be unreliable if the immune system reacted quickly upon exposure and just took care of the virus (the antibodies are too sparse and difficult to detect.) We have two models of a similar virus: the 1918 epidemic in which the second season was brutal, and the 2003 SARS outbreak, which apparently was stopped (by herd immunity?) after one season. A vaccine was never found for either of the previous pandemics. Now we face the second season of Covid-19 with way fewer options to shut down society: the second time around, a larger segment of the public will not follow orders. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Mon Jun 1 15:30:09 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 08:30:09 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1E2FA703-A2F0-4B44-80D0-EFC539995A88@gmail.com> On Jun 1, 2020, at 6:26 AM, John Clark via extropy-chat wrote: >> On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 9:01 AM spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> > Perhaps it is the governor?s fault for failing to temporarily ban murderous riots. > > Perhaps it's the police commissioner's fault for hiring murderous cops. Typically it takes between 10 and 20 minutes for a hanging person's heart to stop, the cop kneeling on George Floyd's neck managed to stop his heart in 8 minutes and 46 seconds. The whole legal system works to dampen disincentives for police violence: A few years old, but basically still true: https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/8/13/17938234/police-shootings-killings-prosecutions-court Had George Floyd?s killer and his four accomplices been civilians, they would?ve all been arrested on the spot and probably charged by the next day. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 1 15:55:46 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 08:55:46 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <008601d63817$1171eb10$3455c130$@rainier66.com> References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <008601d63817$1171eb10$3455c130$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <014301d6382d$1d9d7330$58d85990$@rainier66.com> From: spike at rainier66.com Sent: Monday, June 1, 2020 6:18 AM To: 'ExI chat list' Cc: spike at rainier66.com Subject: RE: [ExI] ring of truth > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Sent: Monday, June 1, 2020 3:52 AM >>? the current riots ? could be virus super spreader events? John K Clark >? disinfectant teargas! ? Imagine using an aqueous ammonium hydroxide solution instead of teargas at the riots. It isn?t specifically toxic in the doses one might get in a crowd dispersal event, but makes a great surfactant and disinfectant, which is why it is used in Windex. We all know what happens when we get a good whiff of that stuff: owwwww, damn. Heh. That?ll disperse a furious crowd grabbing up the Nikes. It will not leave a trace of residue, it will have few if any long-term health impact in those concentrations, it is cheap and will even kill bugs. Hurt like hell, but less than rubber bullets. What if? there is a big Antifa riot where the constables used ammonium hydroxide, then we discover that the people who were gassed do not catch Covid but those at the same riot who did not get a whiff of the stuff catch it? That would be a kick in the ass. If it turns out that way, just remember you saw it here first. {8^D spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Jun 1 16:01:39 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 12:01:39 -0400 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 9:43 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > *> Clearly they had a bad apple on staff.* > It's not that simple, there were 4 "bad apples", one was a murderer and 3 were accomplices who just watched somebody being strangled to death right in front of them for 8 minutes and 46 seconds and they did absolutely nothing to stop it even though they were armed and their job was to uphold the law against murder. The fact that all 4 were at the same place at the same time makes me suspect for statistical reasons that such "bad apples" could not be all that rare on the police force. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 1 16:55:14 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 09:55:14 -0700 Subject: [ExI] predictit gone? Message-ID: <018801d63835$6c5ee9b0$451cbd10$@rainier66.com> Since Robin Hanson is back among us and may be considered the father of meme betting, he might find interesting the latest development. Robin started Ideas Futures, which was a play-money betting site. We had a blast playing that back in the long time agos. Plenty of us who think about the future realized it would eventually morph into a real-money version, which it did. Many of the patterns on real money sites are ones we saw and learned well on Ideas Futures. On Predictit and the other real money sites, such as the most popular betting is on which candidate will win an election. One of the predictions I made about real money sites is that they will all eventually take the money and run. This of course never happened on play money betting, which is why I liked that better: Robin was never tempted to grab up everybody?s play money and flee with it to Tahiti, which is why he is not there now, sipping Mai Tais on the beach with bikini beauties tending to his every whim. But? Apparently whoever runs Predictit is there now, for the site suddenly went dead yesterday and is not back today. https://www.predictit.org/ No biggie to me: my total investment there is 17 bucks. Theoretically they are holding 73 dollars of mine (my initial investment from 4 yrs ago plus winnings) but I realized all along by studying the betting volume that whoever runs the site was holding an ever-increasing pile of money. I realized it was only a matter of time before she realized the future profit potential of keeping the site pales in comparison to the immediate profit of skipping town with everyone?s money. I have always treated that 73 bucks as play money, knowing that this (and every other online betting site) is a Ponzi scheme. I didn?t know when, but there was little question of if: this site and every other growing real money betting site will eventually terminate with the CEO?s disappearance, taking everyone?s money. If anyone knows otherwise with regard to Predictit, do offer me a clue please. Perhaps the CEO of Predictit was shocked SHOCKED! to learn that GAMBLING was is going on in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Mon Jun 1 16:58:35 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 12:58:35 -0400 Subject: [ExI] predictit gone? In-Reply-To: <018801d63835$6c5ee9b0$451cbd10$@rainier66.com> References: <018801d63835$6c5ee9b0$451cbd10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Spike- FYI, it's up now so your $17 appears safe! On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 12:56 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > Since Robin Hanson is back among us and may be considered the father of > meme betting, he might find interesting the latest development. > > > > Robin started Ideas Futures, which was a play-money betting site. We had > a blast playing that back in the long time agos. Plenty of us who think > about the future realized it would eventually morph into a real-money > version, which it did. > > > > Many of the patterns on real money sites are ones we saw and learned well > on Ideas Futures. On Predictit and the other real money sites, such as the > most popular betting is on which candidate will win an election. > > > > One of the predictions I made about real money sites is that they will all > eventually take the money and run. This of course never happened on play > money betting, which is why I liked that better: Robin was never tempted to > grab up everybody?s play money and flee with it to Tahiti, which is why he > is not there now, sipping Mai Tais on the beach with bikini beauties > tending to his every whim. > > > > But? > > > > Apparently whoever runs Predictit is there now, for the site suddenly went > dead yesterday and is not back today. > > > > https://www.predictit.org/ > > > > No biggie to me: my total investment there is 17 bucks. Theoretically > they are holding 73 dollars of mine (my initial investment from 4 yrs ago > plus winnings) but I realized all along by studying the betting volume that > whoever runs the site was holding an ever-increasing pile of money. I > realized it was only a matter of time before she realized the future profit > potential of keeping the site pales in comparison to the immediate profit > of skipping town with everyone?s money. > > > > I have always treated that 73 bucks as play money, knowing that this (and > every other online betting site) is a Ponzi scheme. I didn?t know when, > but there was little question of if: this site and every other growing real > money betting site will eventually terminate with the CEO?s disappearance, > taking everyone?s money. > > > > If anyone knows otherwise with regard to Predictit, do offer me a clue > please. Perhaps the CEO of Predictit was shocked SHOCKED! to learn that > GAMBLING was is going on in here: > > > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Mon Jun 1 17:02:28 2020 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 13:02:28 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 9:57 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > If I thought that protests would do the slightest bit of good I would not > say what I said above. But I don't. Men are going on trial for murder, > so the government did the right thing. What else can they do? > The cop in question had a series of complaints and zero reprimands. Policitians and law enforcement leadership could do a lot more to prevent police brutality. Police unions are too powerful, Qualified immunity gives cops carte blanche. Militarization of police forces has to stop. The drug war has to end. Citizens of all races have put up with poor treatment by the police they hire to "protect and serve" them. They tried peaceful protests--remember the NFL taking a knee?--and that wasn't acceptable. This has been a problem too long to expect the victims to be patient and polite. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 1 17:18:43 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 10:18:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] predictit gone? In-Reply-To: References: <018801d63835$6c5ee9b0$451cbd10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <01a001d63838$b3e6f4f0$1bb4ded0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] predictit gone? Spike- >?FYI, it's up now so your $17 appears safe! Thanks Dylan! Ja, 17 bucks or 73, depending on how I look at it: kinda like Schrodinger?s cat. Those are virtual dollars in there. My prediction stands: even if not now, then eventually, this site and every site doing the same thing will suddenly disappear without a trace. There is no real legal infrastructure to stop it, or any willingness to chase down the newly rich perp. So? over time the incentive to skip town increases like the rising waters behind an earthen dam. Sooner or later, the collapse comes. If they allowed me to do so, I would introduce a scaled meme, where people can bet on the date Predictit will fold and flee, taking your money. I suspect Predictit would not allow that meme. {8^D I will leave my 17 or 73 virtual bucks in there for now, just for the entertainment value and the insights it produces. spike On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 12:56 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: Since Robin Hanson is back among us and may be considered the father of meme betting, he might find interesting the latest development. ? Apparently whoever runs Predictit is there now, for the site suddenly went dead yesterday and is not back today. https://www.predictit.org/ ? spike _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Jun 1 18:25:16 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 11:25:16 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Is a copy of you really you? In-Reply-To: <8ABC3630-0D4D-4B3D-988B-1244DB8A72E8@gmu.edu> References: <8ABC3630-0D4D-4B3D-988B-1244DB8A72E8@gmu.edu> Message-ID: I note: we are including copies of each others' emails in this chain, and replying to them as if they are the originals. > Are they the originals? Or are they close enough that for all practical purposes they are? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Jun 1 18:43:42 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 14:43:42 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Is a copy of you really you? In-Reply-To: References: <8ABC3630-0D4D-4B3D-988B-1244DB8A72E8@gmu.edu> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 2:28 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: * > I note: we are including copies of each others' emails in this chain, > and replying to them as if they are the originals. Are they the > originals? * > No they're just copies, and that's why regardless of the topic I've never been able to convince anybody that I'm right about anything. Nobody on this list has ever seen one of my glorious *ORIGINAL* Emails, all you've seen are humble copies of them, if you had seen the *originals* then you'd all be instantly convinced that I've always been right about everything. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 1 19:23:49 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 12:23:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Is a copy of you really you? In-Reply-To: References: <8ABC3630-0D4D-4B3D-988B-1244DB8A72E8@gmu.edu> Message-ID: <01f101d6384a$2e0c9440$8a25bcc0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Is a copy of you really you? On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 2:28 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat > wrote: > I note: we are including copies of each others' emails in this chain, and replying to them as if they are the originals. Are they the originals? >?No they're just copies, and that's why regardless of the topic I've never been able to convince anybody that I'm right about anything. Nobody on this list has ever seen one of my glorious ORIGINAL Emails, all you've seen are humble copies of them, if you had seen the originals then you'd all be instantly convinced that I've always been right about everything. John K Clark Think of the bright side John: you can blame your copies for those posts that appeared to come from you. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Jun 1 22:05:38 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 15:05:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Is a copy of you really you? Message-ID: John Clark wrote: On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 1:25 AM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > * > What concerns me is giving a human mind copy vastly more power in an > artificial brain. Humans seem to have evolved psychological mechanisms that > detect "looming privation," resource shortages, and for good evolutionary > reasons respond by attacking neighbors and taking their resources. (After a > period to build up xenophobic memes.) Consider a raw human mind mapped > into a powerful AI with substantial enhancement. * > have doubts about your theory but even if it's true I don't see it or Darwinian Evolution in general playing a significant part in the future; I agree. My work in this area is looking at what stone age evolution has left us with in terms of psychological traits. I find it terrifying that human behavior can switch into modes that give rise to the many violent episodes in historical times and ongoing ones like the current rash of destructive riots. But I am not entirely confident about the end of Darwinian evolution. I sincerely hope our civilization does not fall, but if it does, it will not be the first time. That could put Darwinian selection back in the driver's seat. > the evolution of memes will be more important than the evolution of genes because minds are involved thus it's vastly faster. And the faster minds become the faster memes will change. I think most of extropy-chat readers have seen the article I wrote where humans could experience 50 million years of subjective existence before the end of this century. https://web.archive.org/web/20121130232045/http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/12/transhumanism-and-the-human-expansion-into-space-a-conflict-with-physics/ The original seems to be off the net. > Rather than worrying about outmoded behavioral programming inherited from our stone-age past I'm much more concerned with what will happen when we have full conscious control of our emotional control panel. Marvin Minsky wrote extensively about the dangers of mind modification. We are (perhaps, fortunately) a long way from having such controls. In the meantime, the stone-age psychological traits of going to war due to resource shortages may keep us from making progress in emotional controls. > Suppose there was some task that you knew you should do but don't want to because you're naturally lazy and the task is dull, so you just turn one knob on your emotional control panel and now you're no longer lazy, now you love nothing better than hard work, and you then turn another knob and now you find your job of putting thousands of caps on thousands of toothpaste tubes to be utterly fascinating, fulfilling, and endlessly enjoyable. It seems to me that having too much self-control would lead to a positive feedback loop, and those things tend to head for extremes and rarely produce anything productive, they usually end up producing either no output or an explosive output. Sometimes literally explosive. Mind modification of this sort is something to approach with a great deal of caution. * > if you, yourself, are duplicated by the thousands, millions, or > billions and there is some limit on the number of poker chips that can be > made, then a large numbers of copies of you are going to make you poor in > terms of chips.* > If there is a consensus among the many copies of me that there are just too many of us then we could decide to merge back together. The resulting being would then remember doing different things in different places at exactly the same time, but that would be OK with me. I suspect this may have problems besides parallel memories. But this is rank speculation. I don't know how much (if any) of humanity will survive the changes we see coming. Keith From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 1 22:29:46 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 15:29:46 -0700 Subject: [ExI] riots, was: RE: Is a copy of you really you? Message-ID: <024601d63864$27faa0f0$77efe2d0$@rainier66.com> Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > ... I find it terrifying that human behavior can switch into modes that give rise to the many violent episodes in historical times and ongoing ones like the current rash of destructive riots...Keith _______________________________________________ Ja. I have friends posting me in despair, certain that civilization is coming to an end. But consider this first. Imagine a streaming video camera hard mounted on every street intersection, looking both ways. I don't even know how to estimate how many intersections exist in the world, but since the USA is having riot season, let's just look at that beleaguered nation. I would estimate there are about 300 intersections in my town, and it has about 1/4000th of the US population, so we could estimate there are about a million intersections. We want to gaze all four directions, so 4 million cameras peering out and reporting back. Of those, I would be surprised if anything exciting or scary is happening in more than about 1000 of those fields of view, so these terrible riots are in about one in perhaps 4000 cameras. Sure. But hey, everything doesn't need to happen near an intersection. Let's have cameras every 100 meters, regardless of where they are. Now I would be surprised if anything exciting is happening in more than 1 in about 100,000 cameras. My point: we have troubles. But it is very localized, and the participants are in the trouble zone by choice (even the cops.) The cop who murdered that man on camera sparked it, but something like this was going to happen: you can't just shut down civilization because of a bad flu virus. It stresses society to the breaking point. However... this lockdown was very educational. We learned how effective our online meeting tools can be, and many of us learned to use them effectively. We learned that much retail is an obsolete holdover from the olden days: we can replace it with something else which is more efficient. Civilization is not coming to an end. Civilization is coming to start. spike From sen.otaku at gmail.com Mon Jun 1 22:58:14 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 17:58:14 -0500 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: I can agree John. And as the saying goes, ?A rotten apple spoils the whole bunch.? SR Ballard > On Jun 1, 2020, at 11:01 AM, John Clark via extropy-chat wrote: > >> On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 9:43 AM spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > >> > Clearly they had a bad apple on staff. >> > > It's not that simple, there were 4 "bad apples", one was a murderer and 3 were accomplices who just watched somebody being strangled to death right in front of them for 8 minutes and 46 seconds and they did absolutely nothing to stop it even though they were armed and their job was to uphold the law against murder. The fact that all 4 were at the same place at the same time makes me suspect for statistical reasons that such "bad apples" could not be all that rare on the police force. > > John K Clark > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 1 23:26:54 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 16:26:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] ring of truth I can agree John. And as the saying goes, ?A rotten apple spoils the whole bunch.? SR Ballard Hi SR, ja, so tragic. The whole bunch refers to bad bananas (with a greasy black peel.) The rotten apple spoils the barrel. I saw something interesting today: the peaceful (and justified) police brutality protestors grabbed an anarchist and handed him over to the police: https://twitter.com/i/status/1267240521052946432 That one act did more to promote their cause than anything else they could have done. These protestors have a good point. The anarchists and looters do not. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Mon Jun 1 23:37:47 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 16:37:47 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> References: <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Jun 1, 2020, at 4:29 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] ring of truth > > I can agree John. And as the saying goes, ?A rotten apple spoils the whole bunch.? > > SR Ballard > > > Hi SR, ja, so tragic. The whole bunch refers to bad bananas (with a greasy black peel.) The rotten apple spoils the barrel. > > I saw something interesting today: the peaceful (and justified) police brutality protestors grabbed an anarchist and handed him over to the police: > > https://twitter.com/i/status/1267240521052946432 > > That one act did more to promote their cause than anything else they could have done. These protestors have a good point. The anarchists and looters do not. > > spike How to you just person is an anarchist? Do you believe anarchists as anarchists (rather than as anything else) don?t have a right to protest or promote their views? It seems to me you?re defining anarchist in a way that goes against the original meaning of the term and also against how many actual anarchists (myself included) use the term. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Mon Jun 1 23:45:49 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 16:45:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] riots, was: RE: Is a copy of you really you? In-Reply-To: <024601d63864$27faa0f0$77efe2d0$@rainier66.com> References: <024601d63864$27faa0f0$77efe2d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <62984A9E-5AB1-4BE0-95A5-AD6327BEE789@gmail.com> On Jun 1, 2020, at 3:31 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >> ... I find it terrifying that human behavior can switch into modes that > give rise to the many violent episodes in historical times and ongoing ones > like the current rash of destructive riots...Keith > _______________________________________________ > > > Ja. I have friends posting me in despair, certain that civilization is > coming to an end. But consider this first. > > Imagine a streaming video camera hard mounted on every street intersection, > looking both ways. I don't even know how to estimate how many intersections > exist in the world, but since the USA is having riot season, let's just look > at that beleaguered nation. I would estimate there are about 300 > intersections in my town, and it has about 1/4000th of the US population, so > we could estimate there are about a million intersections. > > We want to gaze all four directions, so 4 million cameras peering out and > reporting back. > > Of those, I would be surprised if anything exciting or scary is happening in > more than about 1000 of those fields of view, so these terrible riots are in > about one in perhaps 4000 cameras. > > Sure. But hey, everything doesn't need to happen near an intersection. > Let's have cameras every 100 meters, regardless of where they are. Now I > would be surprised if anything exciting is happening in more than 1 in about > 100,000 cameras. > > My point: we have troubles. But it is very localized, and the participants > are in the trouble zone by choice (even the cops.) > > The cop who murdered that man on camera sparked it, but something like this > was going to happen: you can't just shut down civilization because of a bad > flu virus. It stresses society to the breaking point. > > However... this lockdown was very educational. We learned how effective our > online meeting tools can be, and many of us learned to use them effectively. > We learned that much retail is an obsolete holdover from the olden days: we > can replace it with something else which is more efficient. > > Civilization is not coming to an end. Civilization is coming to start. While I agree this is nowhere near a civilization-ending thing, I don?t think it?s the start of one either. Civilization will muddle along. A better point is that those who think this is even close to collapsing civilization are almost certainly drama queens with little perspective. If these demonstrations could end civilization, one would?ve expected the many other demonstrations in recent decades to have done so many times over. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 00:01:56 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 17:01:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <003d01d63871$089a7b10$19cf7130$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] ring of truth On Jun 1, 2020, at 4:29 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: >?How to you just person is an anarchist? Do you believe anarchists as anarchists (rather than as anything else) don?t have a right to protest or promote their views?... Hi Dan, I saw in the video a bunch of guys with a perfectly legitimate and justifiable cause (protesting police brutality) having their protest hijacked by anarchists and looters. The hammer guy was beating on the curb to break off chunks of concrete with which he would enable others to hurl at windows and police. Naturally the protestors are annoyed by anarchists and looters, both of which discredit their message. So, the nabbed the sleazeball and handed him over. Good for them. Of course anarchists have a right to protest. They don?t have a right to destroy property or cause injury. >?It seems to me you?re defining anarchist in a way that goes against the original meaning of the term and also against how many actual anarchists (myself included) use the term. Regards, Dan OK no worries: the guy who was chipping off weapons to use against the police (and perhaps National Guard who are perfectly innocent here, just doing a job) has no right to that. I suspect the other protestors he will share a cell with tonight will also take a dim view of his actions. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 00:14:33 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 17:14:33 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <003d01d63871$089a7b10$19cf7130$@rainier66.com> References: <003d01d63871$089a7b10$19cf7130$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Jun 1, 2020, at 5:03 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] ring of truth > > On Jun 1, 2020, at 4:29 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > >?How to you just person is an anarchist? Do you believe anarchists as anarchists (rather than as anything else) don?t have a right to protest or promote their views?... > > Hi Dan, I saw in the video a bunch of guys with a perfectly legitimate and justifiable cause (protesting police brutality) having their protest hijacked by anarchists and looters. The hammer guy was beating on the curb to break off chunks of concrete with which he would enable others to hurl at windows and police. Naturally the protestors are annoyed by anarchists and looters, both of which discredit their message. So, the nabbed the sleazeball and handed him over. Good for them. > > Of course anarchists have a right to protest. They don?t have a right to destroy property or cause injury. > > >?It seems to me you?re defining anarchist in a way that goes against the original meaning of the term and also against how many actual anarchists (myself included) use the term. > > Regards, > > Dan > > OK no worries: the guy who was chipping off weapons to use against the police (and perhaps National Guard who are perfectly innocent here, just doing a job) has no right to that. I suspect the other protestors he will share a cell with tonight will also take a dim view of his actions. Again, why do you believe the person in the video is an anarchist? It seems you are conflating the term anarchist with someone who dies destructive things. Is that your virw? Let me show you a video of an anarchist: https://youtu.be/ejMh0HdS9yE Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 00:22:21 2020 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 10:22:21 +1000 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 2 Jun 2020 at 09:28, spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *SR Ballard via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] ring of truth > > > > I can agree John. And as the saying goes, ?A rotten apple spoils the whole > bunch.? > > SR Ballard > > > > > > Hi SR, ja, so tragic. The whole bunch refers to bad bananas (with a > greasy black peel.) The rotten apple spoils the barrel. > > > > I saw something interesting today: the peaceful (and justified) police > brutality protestors grabbed an anarchist and handed him over to the police: > > > > https://twitter.com/i/status/1267240521052946432 > > > > That one act did more to promote their cause than anything else they could > have done. These protestors have a good point. The anarchists and looters > do not. > The protestors, anarchists and looters don?t seem to have a lot of guns. >From what you said before, the main purpose of citizens having guns is just such an occasion as this: so that they can resist when the authorities come to bend them to their will. What would the police and the army do if the protesters all had guns: leave them alone, or respond mire aggressively? It?s not a theoretical question, because the guns do exist somewhere, and it could be coming next. > -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 00:42:58 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 20:42:58 -0400 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: OTOH, you may have noticed the only shops not being destroyed were protected by owners asserting their 2nd amendment rights. On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 8:23 PM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > On Tue, 2 Jun 2020 at 09:28, spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >> >> >> >> > *On Behalf Of *SR Ballard via extropy-chat >> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] ring of truth >> >> >> >> I can agree John. And as the saying goes, ?A rotten apple spoils the >> whole bunch.? >> >> SR Ballard >> >> >> >> >> >> Hi SR, ja, so tragic. The whole bunch refers to bad bananas (with a >> greasy black peel.) The rotten apple spoils the barrel. >> >> >> >> I saw something interesting today: the peaceful (and justified) police >> brutality protestors grabbed an anarchist and handed him over to the police: >> >> >> >> https://twitter.com/i/status/1267240521052946432 >> >> >> >> That one act did more to promote their cause than anything else they >> could have done. These protestors have a good point. The anarchists and >> looters do not. >> > The protestors, anarchists and looters don?t seem to have a lot of guns. > From what you said before, the main purpose of citizens having guns is just > such an occasion as this: so that they can resist when the authorities come > to bend them to their will. What would the police and the army do if the > protesters all had guns: leave them alone, or respond mire aggressively? > It?s not a theoretical question, because the guns do exist somewhere, and > it could be coming next. > >> -- > Stathis Papaioannou > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 01:00:38 2020 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 11:00:38 +1000 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 2 Jun 2020 at 10:45, Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > OTOH, you may have noticed the only shops not being destroyed were > protected by owners asserting their 2nd amendment rights. > I didn?t notice that, but what I was asking was if the mobs decided to assert their ?second amendment rights? on the grounds that they were forming a militia to protect themselves from the authoritarian state. What would be the response of the police and the armed forces? On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 8:23 PM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >> >> On Tue, 2 Jun 2020 at 09:28, spike jones via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> > *On Behalf Of *SR Ballard via extropy-chat >>> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] ring of truth >>> >>> >>> >>> I can agree John. And as the saying goes, ?A rotten apple spoils the >>> whole bunch.? >>> >>> SR Ballard >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> Hi SR, ja, so tragic. The whole bunch refers to bad bananas (with a >>> greasy black peel.) The rotten apple spoils the barrel. >>> >>> >>> >>> I saw something interesting today: the peaceful (and justified) police >>> brutality protestors grabbed an anarchist and handed him over to the police: >>> >>> >>> >>> https://twitter.com/i/status/1267240521052946432 >>> >>> >>> >>> That one act did more to promote their cause than anything else they >>> could have done. These protestors have a good point. The anarchists and >>> looters do not. >>> >> The protestors, anarchists and looters don?t seem to have a lot of guns. >> From what you said before, the main purpose of citizens having guns is just >> such an occasion as this: so that they can resist when the authorities come >> to bend them to their will. What would the police and the army do if the >> protesters all had guns: leave them alone, or respond mire aggressively? >> It?s not a theoretical question, because the guns do exist somewhere, and >> it could be coming next. >> >>> -- >> Stathis Papaioannou >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 01:08:37 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 18:08:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d63871$089a7b10$19cf7130$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <008d01d6387a$58cfb060$0a6f1120$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat Again, why do you believe the person in the video is an anarchist? It seems you are conflating the term anarchist with someone who dies destructive things. Is that your virw? Let me show you a video of an anarchist: https://youtu.be/ejMh0HdS9yE Regards, Dan Granted it is an interpretation Dan. Most of the protestors seemed to want a peaceful legitimate protest. This one reprehensible bastard was banging loose chunks of concrete. My imagination filled in a motive (attacking police, destroying property.) I imagined (and still do) that he had in mind using the chunks as projectiles. The protestors handed him over, and continued with their peaceful protest, honoring Martin Luther King and the memory of George Floyd. Good for them. Bad for hammer boy. I hope this sends a message: police brutality protestors, over here. People wishing to destroy property and harm police, over there. Looters: nowhere. Three different things. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 01:12:39 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 18:12:39 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <009401d6387a$e9098890$bb1c99b0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat Sent: Monday, June 1, 2020 5:22 PM To: ExI chat list Cc: Stathis Papaioannou Subject: Re: [ExI] ring of truth On Tue, 2 Jun 2020 at 09:28, spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: > On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] ring of truth I can agree John. And as the saying goes, ?A rotten apple spoils the whole bunch.? SR Ballard Hi SR, ja, so tragic. The whole bunch refers to bad bananas (with a greasy black peel.) The rotten apple spoils the barrel. I saw something interesting today: the peaceful (and justified) police brutality protestors grabbed an anarchist and handed him over to the police: https://twitter.com/i/status/1267240521052946432 That one act did more to promote their cause than anything else they could have done. These protestors have a good point. The anarchists and looters do not. >?The protestors, anarchists and looters don?t seem to have a lot of guns? Stathis, why is that? Think about it. >? From what you said before, the main purpose of citizens having guns is just such an occasion as this? If the looters and rioters began shooting, be sure we have the advantage. That?s why we have guns. >? What would the police and the army do if the protesters all had guns? Probably shoot them. Peaceful protestors don?t need guns and damn well better not carry them to that occasion. >? It?s not a theoretical question, because the guns do exist somewhere, and it could be coming next. -- Stathis Papaioannou I doubt it. The rioters would have to recognize how outgunned they are. They are facing the army, the national guard, the police and an armed citizenry. I suggest they drop the property destruction and demonstrate peacefully. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 01:15:51 2020 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 11:15:51 +1000 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <008d01d6387a$58cfb060$0a6f1120$@rainier66.com> References: <003d01d63871$089a7b10$19cf7130$@rainier66.com> <008d01d6387a$58cfb060$0a6f1120$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 2 Jun 2020 at 11:10, spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > > > > Again, why do you believe the person in the video is an anarchist? It > seems you are conflating the term anarchist with someone who dies > destructive things. Is that your virw? Let me show you a video of an > anarchist: > > > > https://youtu.be/ejMh0HdS9yE > > Regards, > > > > Dan > > > > > > Granted it is an interpretation Dan. Most of the protestors seemed to > want a peaceful legitimate protest. This one reprehensible bastard was > banging loose chunks of concrete. My imagination filled in a motive > (attacking police, destroying property.) > > > > I imagined (and still do) that he had in mind using the chunks as > projectiles. The protestors handed him over, and continued with their > peaceful protest, honoring Martin Luther King and the memory of George > Floyd. Good for them. Bad for hammer boy. I hope this sends a message: > police brutality protestors, over here. People wishing to destroy property > and harm police, over there. Looters: nowhere. Three different things. > The term ?anarchist? does not mean ?someone who randomly loots and destroys?. > -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 01:25:43 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 18:25:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <008d01d6387a$58cfb060$0a6f1120$@rainier66.com> References: <008d01d6387a$58cfb060$0a6f1120$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Jun 1, 2020, at 6:10 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > > > Again, why do you believe the person in the video is an anarchist? It seems you are conflating the term anarchist with someone who dies destructive things. Is that your virw? Let me show you a video of an anarchist: > > https://youtu.be/ejMh0HdS9yE > > Regards, > > Dan > > > Granted it is an interpretation Dan. Most of the protestors seemed to want a peaceful legitimate protest. This one reprehensible bastard was banging loose chunks of concrete. My imagination filled in a motive (attacking police, destroying property.) > > I imagined (and still do) that he had in mind using the chunks as projectiles. The protestors handed him over, and continued with their peaceful protest, honoring Martin Luther King and the memory of George Floyd. Good for them. Bad for hammer boy. I hope this sends a message: police brutality protestors, over here. People wishing to destroy property and harm police, over there. Looters: nowhere. Three different things. Again, why do _you_ believe that person is an anarchist? Do you believe what that person is doing is something necessarily anarchists must do? I showed you a video of an anarchist. (In particular, it was anarchist philosopher Roderick T. Long.) Did you watch the video at all? If you did, were you waiting for him to smash something or maybe attack an audience member because, well, he?s an anarchist? Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 01:33:16 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 18:33:16 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00be01d6387d$ca824210$5f86c630$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] ring of truth On Tue, 2 Jun 2020 at 10:45, Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat > wrote: OTOH, you may have noticed the only shops not being destroyed were protected by owners asserting their 2nd amendment rights. >?I didn?t notice that, but what I was asking was if the mobs decided to assert their ?second amendment rights? on the grounds that they were forming a militia to protect themselves from the authoritarian state. What would be the response of the police and the armed forces? The authoritarian state isn?t out there rioting, looting and burning. The militia is there to maintain law and order in the event that the police force and army are overwhelmed. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 01:41:17 2020 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 11:41:17 +1000 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <009401d6387a$e9098890$bb1c99b0$@rainier66.com> References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> <009401d6387a$e9098890$bb1c99b0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 2 Jun 2020 at 11:17, spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat > *Sent:* Monday, June 1, 2020 5:22 PM > *To:* ExI chat list > *Cc:* Stathis Papaioannou > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] ring of truth > > > > > > > > On Tue, 2 Jun 2020 at 09:28, spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *SR Ballard via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] ring of truth > > > > I can agree John. And as the saying goes, ?A rotten apple spoils the whole > bunch.? > > SR Ballard > > > > > > Hi SR, ja, so tragic. The whole bunch refers to bad bananas (with a > greasy black peel.) The rotten apple spoils the barrel. > > > > I saw something interesting today: the peaceful (and justified) police > brutality protestors grabbed an anarchist and handed him over to the police: > > > > https://twitter.com/i/status/1267240521052946432 > > > > That one act did more to promote their cause than anything else they could > have done. These protestors have a good point. The anarchists and looters > do not. > > >?The protestors, anarchists and looters don?t seem to have a lot of guns? > > > > Stathis, why is that? Think about it. > > > > >? From what you said before, the main purpose of citizens having guns is > just such an occasion as this? > > > > If the looters and rioters began shooting, be sure we have the advantage. > That?s why we have guns. > > > > >? What would the police and the army do if the protesters all had guns? > > > > Probably shoot them. Peaceful protestors don?t need guns and damn well > better not carry them to that occasion. > > > > >? It?s not a theoretical question, because the guns do exist somewhere, > and it could be coming next. > > -- > > Stathis Papaioannou > > > > I doubt it. The rioters would have to recognize how outgunned they are. > They are facing the army, the national guard, the police and an armed > citizenry. > The army, national guard and police would outgun armed citizens aggrieved with the government, which is what we are seeing, and which is what you said was the check on the state or their agents acting tyrannically. It seems to me that the only real check is that the army, national guard, police and those ordering them to act would not want to cause a massacre, not that they fear they would lose in a fight against citizens with guns. > -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 01:43:54 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 18:43:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d63871$089a7b10$19cf7130$@rainier66.com> <008d01d6387a$58cfb060$0a6f1120$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00d101d6387f$46aa5b60$d3ff1220$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat The term ?anarchist? does not mean ?someone who randomly loots and destroys?. -- Stathis Papaioannou OK cool thanks for that. But someone who randomly loots and destroys is an anarchist, or one particular type of anarchist. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 01:44:23 2020 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 11:44:23 +1000 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <00be01d6387d$ca824210$5f86c630$@rainier66.com> References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> <00be01d6387d$ca824210$5f86c630$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 2 Jun 2020 at 11:37, spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] ring of truth > > > > > > > > On Tue, 2 Jun 2020 at 10:45, Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > OTOH, you may have noticed the only shops not being destroyed were > protected by owners asserting their 2nd amendment rights. > > > > >?I didn?t notice that, but what I was asking was if the mobs decided to > assert their ?second amendment rights? on the grounds that they were > forming a militia to protect themselves from the authoritarian state. What > would be the response of the police and the armed forces? > > > > > > > > > > > > The authoritarian state isn?t out there rioting, looting and burning. The > militia is there to maintain law and order in the event that the police > force and army are overwhelmed. > I thought you said previously that the militia was there to protect the people from government going bad. (I admit, I had previously assumed the guns were for hunting and to scare off burglars.) > -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 02:16:43 2020 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 12:16:43 +1000 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <00d101d6387f$46aa5b60$d3ff1220$@rainier66.com> References: <003d01d63871$089a7b10$19cf7130$@rainier66.com> <008d01d6387a$58cfb060$0a6f1120$@rainier66.com> <00d101d6387f$46aa5b60$d3ff1220$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 2 Jun 2020 at 11:49, spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat > > The term ?anarchist? does not mean ?someone who randomly loots and > destroys?. > > -- > > Stathis Papaioannou > > > > > > OK cool thanks for that. But someone who randomly loots and destroys is > an anarchist, or one particular type of anarchist. > There are various types of anarchists but none of them advocate random looting and destroying. Particular anarchists might in particular situations, but so might particular monarchists, capitalists or socialists. > -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 03:27:05 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 20:27:05 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> <009401d6387a$e9098890$bb1c99b0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <011601d6388d$b1456e70$13d04b50$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat I doubt it. The rioters would have to recognize how outgunned they are. They are facing the army, the national guard, the police and an armed citizenry. The army, national guard and police would outgun armed citizens aggrieved with the government, which is what we are seeing, and which is what you said was the check on the state or their agents acting tyrannically. It seems to me that the only real check is that the army, national guard, police and those ordering them to act would not want to cause a massacre, not that they fear they would lose in a fight against citizens with guns. -- Stathis Papaioannou Stathis, the aggrieved citizens protest, they capture and hand over anarchists to the National Guard, as you saw on the video. The armed citizenry sympathizes with the protestors, who are all in agreement: there are bad cops, but not all cops are bad. The good cops, the National Guard, the army, the militia, the armed citizens not part of the militia, are all on the same side. That?s why we have a militia and an armed citizenry. A well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. We want a secure free state. That?s why we have a well-regulated militia and a well-armed citizenry. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 03:32:56 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 20:32:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> <00be01d6387d$ca824210$5f86c630$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <011d01d6388e$826fe110$874fa330$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On The authoritarian state isn?t out there rioting, looting and burning. The militia is there to maintain law and order in the event that the police force and army are overwhelmed. >?I thought you said previously that the militia was there to protect the people from government going bad? If that happens, ja. But it hasn?t. >? (I admit, I had previously assumed the guns were for hunting and to scare off burglars.) -- Stathis Papaioannou No, but that is what we are told. But that isn?t what they are for, even though they can be used for both. The US Constitution doesn?t guarantee the right to hunt. I wouldn?t necessarily scare off a burglar: I would just shoot a burglar, then scare her if she survives that. Reasoning: anyone who would break in to an occupied home where the citizens have the right to bear arms has a death wish or wish to cause death. I choose to grant them their death wish. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 03:37:44 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 20:37:44 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d63871$089a7b10$19cf7130$@rainier66.com> <008d01d6387a$58cfb060$0a6f1120$@rainier66.com> <00d101d6387f$46aa5b60$d3ff1220$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <012401d6388f$2ddd3980$8997ac80$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On OK cool thanks for that. But someone who randomly loots and destroys is an anarchist, or one particular type of anarchist. >?There are various types of anarchists but none of them advocate random looting and destroying. Particular anarchists might in particular situations, but so might particular monarchists, capitalists or socialists. -- Stathis Papaioannou I see. So you are arguing those who are setting fires, destroying property and looting stores are not anarchists? They meet my definition. I can definitely see why the protestors handed over hammer boy to the National Guard. The legitimate protestors recognize that the looters and rioters are not the protestors? friends. They are crass opportunists. Those groups are the common enemy of everyone. Note that the one video of the protestors handing over hammer guy did more to advance their cause than anything: they demonstrate they don?t generalize the crime of the bad cops in Minneapolis to all police or all National Guard. Good for them. I stand with them in solidarity. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 03:47:20 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 20:47:20 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <00d101d6387f$46aa5b60$d3ff1220$@rainier66.com> References: <00d101d6387f$46aa5b60$d3ff1220$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Jun 1, 2020, at 6:49 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > On Behalf Of Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat > > The term ?anarchist? does not mean ?someone who randomly loots and destroys?. > -- > Stathis Papaioannou > > > OK cool thanks for that. But someone who randomly loots and destroys is an anarchist, or one particular type of anarchist. No, a person who randomly loots and destroys is usually termed a vandal or a looter. (Maybe you meant loots an dc randomly destroys as looting seems to not be random. Also, the person filmed didn?t seem to be looting.) Not the last word on the subject, but you might start here rather than simply using the term as a synonym for something you don?t like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 03:51:59 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 20:51:59 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <012401d6388f$2ddd3980$8997ac80$@rainier66.com> References: <003d01d63871$089a7b10$19cf7130$@rainier66.com> <008d01d6387a$58cfb060$0a6f1120$@rainier66.com> <00d101d6387f$46aa5b60$d3ff1220$@rainier66.com> <012401d6388f$2ddd3980$8997ac80$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <013f01d63891$2b8a0fd0$829e2f70$@rainier66.com> From: spike at rainier66.com >?Note that the one video of the protestors handing over hammer guy did more to advance their cause than anything: they demonstrate they don?t generalize the crime of the bad cops in Minneapolis to all police or all National Guard. Good for them. I stand with them in solidarity. ?spike This happened up the street a few miles. Ja, I can see why the protestors resent the hell outta being conflated with these kinds of people: https://twitter.com/i/status/1267269872045764608 If this isn?t anarchy, it bears a striking resemblance to it. It is easy to imagine plenty of these bricks and mortar stores will call it a day with this double catastrophe: the shutdown followed by looters pretending to be protestors. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 04:17:22 2020 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 14:17:22 +1000 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <011601d6388d$b1456e70$13d04b50$@rainier66.com> References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> <009401d6387a$e9098890$bb1c99b0$@rainier66.com> <011601d6388d$b1456e70$13d04b50$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 2 Jun 2020 at 13:29, spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat > > I doubt it. The rioters would have to recognize how outgunned they are. > They are facing the army, the national guard, the police and an armed > citizenry. > > The army, national guard and police would outgun armed citizens aggrieved > with the government, which is what we are seeing, and which is what you > said was the check on the state or their agents acting tyrannically. It > seems to me that the only real check is that the army, national guard, > police and those ordering them to act would not want to cause a massacre, > not that they fear they would lose in a fight against citizens with guns. > > -- > > Stathis Papaioannou > > > > > > Stathis, the aggrieved citizens protest, they capture and hand over > anarchists to the National Guard, as you saw on the video. The armed > citizenry sympathizes with the protestors, who are all in agreement: there > are bad cops, but not all cops are bad. The good cops, the National Guard, > the army, the militia, the armed citizens not part of the militia, are all > on the same side. That?s why we have a militia and an armed citizenry. > > > > A well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. We > want a secure free state. That?s why we have a well-regulated militia and > a well-armed citizenry. > The well-armed citizenry might decide that the police chief, governor and president all need to go. The police chief, governor and president might disagree, and call the well-armed citizenry terrorists and thugs (and even, using the term incorrectly, anarchists). What happens then? > -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 04:35:08 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 21:35:08 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> <009401d6387a$e9098890$bb1c99b0$@rainier66.com> <011601d6388d$b1456e70$13d04b50$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <017c01d63897$32bf8e00$983eaa00$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat A well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. We want a secure free state. That?s why we have a well-regulated militia and a well-armed citizenry. >?The well-armed citizenry might decide that the police chief, governor and president all need to go. The police chief, governor and president might disagree, and call the well-armed citizenry terrorists and thugs (and even, using the term incorrectly, anarchists). What happens then? -- Stathis Papaioannou The police chief is removed by putting political pressure on the mayor. The governor and the president have an election every four years and are term limited. They are removed by donating to their competitor. The holders of these offices are free to call the American people names if they wish (a recent unsuccessful POTUS candidate called Americans deplorables (this ended her political career)) but it would likely lead to their failure to win their next term. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 04:37:15 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 00:37:15 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Who is Enoch Root? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 3:06 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Who is Enoch Root? > > Neal Stephenson?s ?Fall; or, Dodge in Hell? (2019) is a festival of > ideas centered on mind uploading and simulated realities... > > https://turingchurch.net/who-is-enoch-root-11b9c157613c > > ___ ### I reviewed "Fall" here last year, if I remember correctly. I really didn't like it. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 04:44:49 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 00:44:49 -0400 Subject: [ExI] olive oil In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 10:58 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I am sure that, like Kale or Natto, many gross things are very good for > me. > ### I like the smell of olive oil, which I perceive as grassy and slightly minty. I started using a lot of olive oil mixed 1:1 with balsamic vinegar in my daily salad in the past couple of years. Strangely, my DNAmPhenoAge_gen biological age estimator improved by a few years concomitantly, so there you are, a new medical anecdote to ponder. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 04:51:21 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 21:51:21 -0700 Subject: [ExI] riots, was: RE: Is a copy of you really you? Message-ID: wrote: Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> ... I find it terrifying that human behavior can switch into modes that give rise to the many violent episodes in historical times and ongoing ones like the current rash of destructive riots...Keith _______________________________________________ > Ja. I have friends posting me in despair, certain that civilization is coming to an end. But consider this first. > Imagine a streaming video camera hard mounted on every street intersection, looking both ways. I live in Van Nuys (northern Los Angeles) now. Being a high tech person I look at things on poles. There are already cameras on every intersection for many miles around here. This has not inhibited protests or looting, which is going on within a mile of where I am writing this. Of course, the activated psychological mode in the stone age had warriors going off to a 50% chance of being killed. I doubt cameras are going to make much of a change in behavior. snip > The cop who murdered that man on camera sparked it, but something like this was going to happen: you can't just shut down civilization because of a bad flu virus. Depending on age and other factors, getting COVID-19 has a high probability of a particularly nasty death on a ventilator. There is no vaccine (yet) so the only available solution for people of my age is to stay away from other people. But you are right, " It stresses society to the breaking point." I don't have the analytical tools to determine how much of the current social unrest is due to the shutdown, but when the tools are developed, my guess is it will be determined to be considerable. We are a long way from seeing the end of this. There have been well over 100,000 deaths in the US so far. Around 4% of the LA and Santa Clara populations has antibodies. Assuming 70% for herd immunity, we are around 1/17th of the way through this pandemic. If that's accurate and nothing like a vaccine comes along, the US death toll will not be much short of 2 million. The lockdown has been protective of overloading the hospitals, but the cost to the economy has been extreme. And we are a *long* way from seeing the ripple through effects on food prices. Meat may become unaffordable for a substantial part of the population. > However... this lockdown was very educational. We learned how effective our online meeting tools can be, and many of us learned to use them effectively. I have been using Skype and hangouts for a long time. I really don't know how many learned to use the tools, but it's obvious that whole segments of the population have no access to the tools. A substantial fraction of the school-age population has no wifi even if the schools can loan them a laptop. > We learned that much retail is an obsolete holdover from the olden days: we can replace it with something else which is more efficient. I have been living on delivered food since March 13. If things ever go back to where I can go to a store, I will not bitch about the time and effort of shopping because ordering/delivery is more of a pain in the ass and considerably more expensive. I used to shop over a few weeks at half a dozen places. The delivery cost has reduced that to one. (I tip enough for the delivery people to at least make minimum wage.) > Civilization is not coming to an end. The center of civilization is moving through. The US has done a miserable job compared to the Chinese. > Civilization is coming to start. How much do you think the pandemic has delayed AI and nanotech work? Perhaps we should be thankful because either could destroy humanity entirely (while not necessarily ending something like civilization). Consider the ending of "the clinic seed" where humans are biologically extinct or Stross's two novels where lonely sex robots are all that's maintaining civilization. My, I am in a bad mood tonight. Too much drifting smoke from the looting to the west. Keith From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 04:53:50 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 21:53:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Who is Enoch Root? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <019c01d63899$cf909880$6eb1c980$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat ### I reviewed "Fall" here last year, if I remember correctly. I really didn't like it. Rafal I didn?t like it either Rafal: way too rambly. As a contrast, note Cryptonomicon, which really had momentum! Of course, you never knew which direction, but it had momentum. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 05:19:59 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 01:19:59 -0400 Subject: [ExI] elon opens In-Reply-To: References: <01ef01d627f0$0a168290$1e4387b0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 11:10 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > On the other hand, I worry about the precedent for ignoring public health > officials. What if we really do ?get the big one?? > > ### We should ignore public health officials. Even genuine peer-reviewed top-level scientists and physicians know little, often are pompous fools and when interacting with politicians suffer from further degradation of their analytic capacity (see Ferguson, Fauci or that woman Kizzmekia). Public health officials are a couple of notches below scientists. Hardly any of them have any genuine medical or science background. The Alameda health lady has a degree in sociology, or something of that kind. Predicting the future is difficult, and even very smart scientists have difficulties with this task, to say nothing of the diverse officials who are eager to guide us. We should distrust everybody and especially when they try to sell us very expensive goods, like a war or a mass house arrest. When the big epidemic hits, we'll know it soon enough, and we could respond appropriately not out of faith in officials but based on a reasonable assessment of the situation. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 05:35:51 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 01:35:51 -0400 Subject: [ExI] drugs and diagnosis In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 1:44 PM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Well, as with most things, there's a history here. > > Medicine in america /was/ pretty unregulated. > > Then in 1932 a major national sports celebrity, Eben Byers, died from > spending 5 years of chugging so much radium water his skeleton started > dissolving. He died of, basically, cancer-of-the-everything. > > The federal government, which was already in a > flexing-it's-muscles expansive kind of mood, used the incident to build the > foundations of our modern medical regulatory state. > > ### Government is a low-feedback, slow-acting, self-interested hierarchical machine, almost always guaranteed to deliver goods and services of lower quality than the strong-feedback, fast-acting, polycentric and consumer-oriented truth-finding machine of the market. Medical regulation is no exception here - if delivered by the FDA it is crude, behind-the-times and a net harm compared to regulation created directly by providers and consumers of health care. Delusional losers will harm themselves no matter what, unless locked up in an asylum but they are no excuse to put us all in there. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 05:38:07 2020 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 15:38:07 +1000 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <017c01d63897$32bf8e00$983eaa00$@rainier66.com> References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> <009401d6387a$e9098890$bb1c99b0$@rainier66.com> <011601d6388d$b1456e70$13d04b50$@rainier66.com> <017c01d63897$32bf8e00$983eaa00$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 2 Jun 2020 at 14:36, spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat > > > A well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. We > want a secure free state. That?s why we have a well-regulated militia and > a well-armed citizenry. > > >?The well-armed citizenry might decide that the police chief, governor > and president all need to go. The police chief, governor and president > might disagree, and call the well-armed citizenry terrorists and thugs (and > even, using the term incorrectly, anarchists). What happens then? > > -- > > Stathis Papaioannou > > > > > > > > > > The police chief is removed by putting political pressure on the mayor. > The governor and the president have an election every four years and are > term limited. They are removed by donating to their competitor. The > holders of these offices are free to call the American people names if they > wish (a recent unsuccessful POTUS candidate called Americans deplorables > (this ended her political career)) but it would likely lead to their > failure to win their next term. > This is the way things are normally done, but the arms the citizens have are not needed if everything works as it?s meant to, only if they believe that the normal processes are unfair or corrupted. That is what the protestors seem to think at the moment. They haven?t gone as far as attempting an overthrow, but they might. In that case, there would be an armed clash between the government forces and the citizens? militia, each claiming to be the true patriots. -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 06:04:05 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 02:04:05 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The plural of "me" is not "us" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, May 15, 2020 at 7:12 AM Re Rose via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > But the real concern here is YOU being YOU! Just consider that you violate > no physical law of anything by existing contemporaneously with this new > being with your uploaded copy of your brain. So, la la la, you are hanging > out with your copy one day. Having coffee, maybe. And a scone. It's > pleasant and the coffee is good. You want to die now? Do you think you will > magically inhabit this nice new being made from your upload, seeing from > its eyes and gathering information from its sensors, because you now die? > Nope. That won't happen, sadly. All that will happen is that you will die. > ### I would not see it as anything really sad, if I knew with sufficient degree of confidence that the person I share scones with contains enough of my memories and proclivities. It's a bit like living through your children - most of us like the idea of our children living on, in part because of the shared genes, in part because of the shared memories. Of course, your child is also quite different from you, so the consolation you gain from the child's survival is weak. But a fresh copy of me shares almost all that makes me into me, so I would not be much upset about the death of me, if I knew there is another me left alive. You notice how I am using language in a strange way - we and our language have not evolved ways of analyzing uploaded copies, since copies do not happen in nature. Our inbuilt, dedicated self-analysis circuitry which is located in the parietal cortex is not equipped to look at copies and correctly categorize them. It throws a divide by zero error and quits, leaving you with a feeling of something being wrong. It's hard to think about a plural of "me" as a single identity - we automatically default to using "us", a collection of distinct entities, more-or-less diverse people rather than exact copies of one person. In the world with uploading the plural of "me" is not "us". Once uploading become possible we'll need to invent a new collective/singular pronoun to refer to multiples of one person. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 06:52:21 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 02:52:21 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Uploaded property rights In-Reply-To: References: <82b33da3-950b-09ce-d3e8-b688a3dd9683@zaiboc.net> Message-ID: > > *> If your theory of identity can't be used to derive a workable set of >> property rights laws, it's not much good for anything. * > > > Both have a equally valid claim to be called Darin Sunley so regardless of > who eventually gets to live in that house Darin Sunley will feel that > justice has been achieved and Darin Sunley will feel that a profound > injustice has been committed and Darin Sunley will be absolutely correct. > If that seems weird well that's why it's called a Singularity. > ### It's actually an interesting question, over and above philosophising about the whichness of me-ness. Let's say your enemies get a hold of your personal information and use it to create a copy of you. The copy comes over into your house and says it's his, too. What should the law say? But let's say you made a copy of yourself voluntarily but then had a change of heart, being creeped out like when you are watching yourself on video. The copy says it's his house, you say it's your house. What should the law say? Or the wife says two of you is just too much for her and serves you both papers. What should the law say? Who pays the alimony? I would think that the law should pay attention to the parent-process responsible for creating the copy-process. If a copy of you is made by your enemies, they are to be held responsible for making that copy whole in legal terms - such as giving him wealth equal to the wealth owned by the original. If you create a copy of you voluntarily, the law could say you also create property rights for that copy. For example, depending on your beliefs (which are by definition identical to the beliefs held by the copy), the property might be split, or a coin could be thrown to decide which of yous gets your money. Or maybe it would be OK for the copy to own nothing and let the copy be used as a slave by its original - after all, it would be you abusing yourself, so it's nobody else's business. But let's say a criminal on death row makes a copy of himself and says to take a randomly selected one of him to the gas chamber. Should the law be satisfied with gassing one or insist on gassing both? Iain Banks, the religion-hater that he was, wrote about religious people making copies of sinners and sending them to extreme torture in a simulation of hell - is it OK to take vengeance on copies for the sins of the originals? What should the law say? Verily, uploading creates lots of fascinating questions for the legally-inclined mind. Any law worth of respect has to meet many constraints and must respond to a very complicated social reality, so of course the philosophy of personal identity is not a sufficient foundation to create the law of uploads. Doubtless it will take multitudes of well-paid lawyers to create this law as we bumble our way through the singularity. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 07:25:46 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 03:25:46 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Essential Upload Data In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, May 20, 2020 at 6:58 AM Re Rose via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: Of course a copy of you can be someone other than you. It is. It is a new > person. It is not you, even if it thinks it is you. > ### I hope you are not telling me what attitude I should have towards me or me's? I do not tell you how you should feel about a person who has body and thoughts that happen to be 99.999% identical to your current body and thoughts but is sitting next to you. How do you feel about that person it your personal matter, not mine. There are people who feel like me, or Ben or John and there are people who feel like you. Our opinions differ but then being me is a matter of opinion, not fact, more like liking the taste of olive oil than adding two and two. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 07:34:02 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 03:34:02 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Virus testing In-Reply-To: References: <185086D3-7454-4602-9BE2-171F059FEB6B@gmail.com> <005401d62f7a$b7a44500$26eccf00$@rainier66.com> <00b801d62f85$400eb5b0$c02c2110$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 12:09 PM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > We have just witnessed nothing less than the most public failure possible > of the basic concept of the technocratic state public health apparatus. And > them throwing nonsensical meaningless number after nonsensical meaningless > number at us is just a desperate attempt to get us to not notice this. > ### Yes!!! I couldn't say it better. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 07:39:18 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 03:39:18 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Summer weather and COVID-19 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, May 23, 2020 at 12:07 AM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > The consequences for older > folks (me for example) are dire (about 30% death rate for my age > bracket). ### Do you mean IFR of 30%? Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 08:00:54 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 04:00:54 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Evolution In-Reply-To: <413981387.2016131.1590091701600@mail.yahoo.com> References: <5303e4d1-3b53-a30b-74b8-d0fe4405ae8d@zaiboc.net> <413981387.2016131.1590091701600@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 4:10 PM The Avantguardian via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > But the error rate that you and John complain about is an essential part > of evolution. If DNA replication was 100% accurate then none of us would be > here. Life would never have progressed beyond the RNA world or whatever the > prototypical life scenario was. The ability to modulate the error rate and > fine tune it over time and space is a feature of DNA-based wetware, and not > a bug. Perfect fidelity is unnatural and changing environmental conditions > will inevitably render any "perfect" organism extinct. ### You are right but there is more to the story - while some non-zero error rate is needed as the grist for evolution, the error rate also puts limits on the amount of information that can be stored per generation in an organism. The higher the error rate, the faster an organism loses genetic information and with high error rate only small amounts of information can be stored. It takes only a couple hundred genes to just survive as the simplest possible organism in some environments but it takes thousands of genes to make an organism capable of writing these words, so humans need better DNA repair than mycoplasma. If our genome was more stable, we might be able to achieve much higher performance, at least as long as our population was large enough to generate sufficient variation for evolution to act on. I don't know if human evolution is constrained by insufficient diversity generation (which is proportional to mutation rate) or by information loss (which also increases with mutation rate but is not described by the same formula). My guess is that the latter is a bigger obstacle to human greatness but I am too lazy at this time of the night to do a proper literature search. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 08:39:12 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 04:39:12 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Does anybody still think a US dictatorship is impossible? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 5:18 PM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Freedom of the press was nice while it lasted. > > Trump's executive order target's social media companies > > > ### Seen from outside of the bubble you live in, the real story is the 180-degree opposite - our freedom of speech is increasingly eliminated by oligarchic and monopolistic owners of internet platforms and Trump is here to feebly protest this enemy takeover. The problem with networks is that their value is created by their ubiquity and in network-dependent industries meaningful competition is eliminated if the network is large enough and controlled by a single entity. Youtube, Google, Twitter, Amazon are all network companies, they are all controlled by a very small group of decision-makers, and they have an enormous ability to control information, the lifeblood of our society, for their own goals and often against our, normal citizens', interests. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 08:40:50 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 04:40:50 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Is a copy of you really you? In-Reply-To: <002501d6360b$7ce6d0d0$76b47270$@rainier66.com> References: <002501d6360b$7ce6d0d0$76b47270$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Fri, May 29, 2020 at 6:52 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > Robin! Is it the REAL you, or just a copy? > > > > spike > > > ### +1 ! Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 08:47:38 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 04:47:38 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 9:57 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: Nobody thinks this is OK except perhaps for the white supremacists. > ### Have you been watching a lot of CNN recently? Also, "white supremacist" is a racial slur. You should not use it lightly. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 09:01:21 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 05:01:21 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 1:14 PM Dave Sill via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 9:57 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >> If I thought that protests would do the slightest bit of good I would not >> say what I said above. But I don't. Men are going on trial for murder, >> so the government did the right thing. What else can they do? >> > > The cop in question had a series of complaints and zero reprimands. > Policitians and law enforcement leadership could do a lot more to prevent > police brutality. Police unions are too powerful, Qualified immunity gives > cops carte blanche. Militarization of police forces has to stop. The drug > war has to end. > > Citizens of all races have put up with poor treatment by the police they > hire to "protect and serve" them. They tried peaceful protests--remember > the NFL taking a knee?--and that wasn't acceptable. This has been a problem > too long to expect the victims to be patient and polite. > > ### All you say is correct. The Democrats such as Klobuchar did a lot to encourage police brutality - but does it justify antifa thugs and random other black and white thugs robbing stores and torching businesses? Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 09:09:25 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 05:09:25 -0400 Subject: [ExI] riots, was: RE: Is a copy of you really you? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 12:59 AM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > We are a long way from seeing the end of this. There have been well > over 100,000 deaths in the US so far. Around 4% of the LA and Santa > Clara populations has antibodies. Assuming 70% for herd immunity, we > are around 1/17th of the way through this pandemic. If that's > accurate and nothing like a vaccine comes along, the US death toll > will not be much short of 2 million. ### You are off by more than an order of magnitude. We are getting close to herd immunity in many locations, eyeballing the curve we are about 2/3rd of the way through the pandemic, so the total will be around 150k, maybe up to 200k at the most. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 12:16:59 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 08:16:59 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Does anybody still think a US dictatorship is impossible? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 4:42 AM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> Freedom of the press was nice while it lasted. > > Trump's executive order target's social media companies >> >> > > > *### Seen from outside of the bubble you live in,* > You mean in the world of MAGA Hatters, Alex Jones, and Neo-Nazis? > * > the real story is the 180-degree opposite - our freedom of speech is > increasingly eliminated by oligarchic and monopolistic owners of internet > platforms and Trump is here to feebly protest this enemy takeover. * > Enemy takeover?! I'm a libertarian (small l), perhaps you've heard of it, so I believe in the Free Market, especially for ideas, thus I have no animosity against people who got rich off if it although I think they sometimes act unwisely and against their own best interests. I also don't think monopolistic online platforms are inherently evil but are a result of the nature of the Internet and of networks in general; but if you disagree and don't like them then why do you want the ultimate monopoly, why do you want just one giant one in charge of everything and controlled by BIg Brother? And if internet providers were held to the same idiotic liability laws as newspapers and had to have their lawyers give their OK for every Email or text message or personal web page as Trump wants then how on earth could we still have them? We couldn't, banning those things is the entire point and is the clearest sign yet of impending dictatorship. The next step would be for Trump to order American army troops into the streets of American cities despite the wishes of those involved, like the Governors and Mayors and even the local civilian police. > *> The problem with networks is that their value is created by their > ubiquity and in network-dependent industries meaningful competition is > eliminated if the network is large enough and controlled by a single > entity. Youtube, Google, Twitter, Amazon are all network companies, they > are all controlled by a very small group of decision-makers,* > And you believe the solution to that is for networks to be controlled by an even smaller group, the US government, and you think the perfect man to control the government is Donald J Trump who is currently averaging 23.8 public lies a day, that's one public lie every 40 waking minutes. You think that's the best way for the American people to get the real truth. I disagree, I don't think government should get into the truth determining business, especially not a government led by a congenital liar. > *> and they have an enormous ability to control information, the lifeblood > of our society, for their own goals and often against our, normal > citizens', interests.* > And all this started not because Twitter deleted a Trump tweet but because the Twitter company dared to add a link to it where somebody could fact check it after Trump told a lie that was particularly egregious even by his own very very low standards for honesty. Rafal, are we on the same page here, are we even talking the same language? Do you consider 1984 to be a dystopian or a utopian novel? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 12:26:57 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 08:26:57 -0400 Subject: [ExI] riots, was: RE: Is a copy of you really you? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 5:12 AM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > *t**he total will be around 150k, maybe up to 200k at the most.* > 10 to 20 million... tops John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 12:27:49 2020 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 08:27:49 -0400 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <00d101d6387f$46aa5b60$d3ff1220$@rainier66.com> References: <003d01d63871$089a7b10$19cf7130$@rainier66.com> <008d01d6387a$58cfb060$0a6f1120$@rainier66.com> <00d101d6387f$46aa5b60$d3ff1220$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 9:50 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > OK cool thanks for that. But someone who randomly loots and destroys is > an anarchist, or one particular type of anarchist. > No. WTF are you thinking? -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 12:39:51 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 05:39:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d63871$089a7b10$19cf7130$@rainier66.com> <008d01d6387a$58cfb060$0a6f1120$@rainier66.com> <00d101d6387f$46aa5b60$d3ff1220$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00b601d638da$e9f8f000$bdead000$@rainier66.com> From: Dave Sill Subject: Re: [ExI] ring of truth On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 9:50 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: OK cool thanks for that. But someone who randomly loots and destroys is an anarchist, or one particular type of anarchist. >?No. WTF are you thinking? -Dave Legitimate peaceful anarchists don?t like being identified with looters and rioters any more than the protestors do. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 12:56:23 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 08:56:23 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 4:57 AM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > "white supremacist" is a racial slur. You should not use it lightly. > I don't think calling somebody who is chanting "Jews will not replace us" is carrying a torch and is giving the Nazi salute a "white supremacist" is a racial slur; I think it's a statement of fact and remains true even if the person is also a good old boy MAGA Hatter. John K Clark > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 13:25:02 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 09:25:02 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 9:58 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I don't think that there is anything at all positive about the protests. > Not even peaceful protests? Last night before the curfew there was a perfectly peaceful and legal protest in Lafayette Square, suddenly without any warning police thugs turned up and charged the protesters with flash bangs and tear gas. Why? Because Trump wanted them to clear a path so he could have a 17 minute photo op and have his picture taken holding a bible upside down and standing in front of a church looking like a complete dipshit. All it needs is "I am a hypocrite" tattooed on his forehead John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 14:36:04 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 07:36:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> <009401d6387a$e9098890$bb1c99b0$@rainier66.com> <011601d6388d$b1456e70$13d04b50$@rainier66.com> <017c01d63897$32bf8e00$983eaa00$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00fa01d638eb$25fb8940$71f29bc0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat >?This is the way things are normally done, but the arms the citizens have are not needed if everything works as it?s meant to, only if they believe that the normal processes are unfair or corrupted. That is what the protestors seem to think at the moment. They haven?t gone as far as attempting an overthrow, but they might. In that case, there would be an armed clash between the government forces and the citizens? militia, each claiming to be the true patriots. -- Stathis Papaioannou Hi Stathis, it isn?t the militia out there doing the rioting and looting. Rioters and looters are anarchists, and they besmirch legitimate anarchists. Legitimate anarchists don?t even like to share the name anarchists with the looters and rioters. The government and the militia are on the same side. >?normal processes are unfair or corrupted? It seems to be looking up. In the USA, we have caught a lot of corruption way up at the top recently. We uncovered a huge conspiracy right up at the top of the FBI and Department of Justice. A judge accused the DoJ of questionable motives in dropping their case against the former National Security Advisor. The DoJ answered back that the FBI falsified or fabricated the only evidence they had against him. Now, we caught em. Sunlight disinfects. >? but the arms the citizens have are not needed? The arms of the citizens are always needed, even if they are not used. The fact that we have them is very important. We are well armed with plenty of ammo and plenty of training. We are not dependent on government funding to exist, which is good, for if government doesn?t pay the military, they cease to exist. But we don?t. We are here to protect. A well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 14:53:31 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 07:53:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Virus testing In-Reply-To: References: <185086D3-7454-4602-9BE2-171F059FEB6B@gmail.com> <005401d62f7a$b7a44500$26eccf00$@rainier66.com> <00b801d62f85$400eb5b0$c02c2110$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <011101d638ed$9592f890$c0b8e9b0$@rainier66.com> On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 12:09 PM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat > wrote: We have just witnessed nothing less than the most public failure possible of the basic concept of the technocratic state public health apparatus. And them throwing nonsensical meaningless number after nonsensical meaningless number at us is just a desperate attempt to get us to not notice this? Darin Truer words are seldom posted, Darin, thanks for that. We already know we are to compare numbers that are not directly comparable. Covid deaths were intentionally over-reported in the USA and not reported at all in China. Northern Europe was hit the hardest from what I can tell, with Chile and Brazil about to pass even the hardest-hit nation which was Belgium. It is very possible that China might end up being the hardest-hit nation once we get the overall death rates from everywhere and subtract out background rates. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 15:14:41 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 10:14:41 -0500 Subject: [ExI] home defense Message-ID: It used to be the case (and I cannot remember whether it was federal or state law) that a homeowner had to back up to the farthest part of his house before he could shoot an intruder. That got changed awhile back. Who knows what the federal standard is? Or is that a state thing, or what? bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 15:40:20 2020 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 11:40:20 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 5:04 AM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > ### All you say is correct. The Democrats such as Klobuchar did a lot to > encourage police brutality - but does it justify antifa thugs and random > other black and white thugs robbing stores and torching businesses? > I'm only trying to understand and explain, not justify. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 15:43:18 2020 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 11:43:18 -0400 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <00fa01d638eb$25fb8940$71f29bc0$@rainier66.com> References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> <009401d6387a$e9098890$bb1c99b0$@rainier66.com> <011601d6388d$b1456e70$13d04b50$@rainier66.com> <017c01d63897$32bf8e00$983eaa00$@rainier66.com> <00fa01d638eb$25fb8940$71f29bc0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 10:38 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > Rioters and looters are anarchists, and they besmirch legitimate > anarchists. > I don't know if you're trying to be clever or funny, but this is offensive and wrong. Please stop. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 15:44:37 2020 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 11:44:37 -0400 Subject: [ExI] home defense In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 11:17 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > It used to be the case (and I cannot remember whether it was federal or > state law) that a homeowner had to back up to the farthest part of his > house before he could shoot an intruder. That got changed awhile back. > > Who knows what the federal standard is? Or is that a state thing, or what? > It's a state thing. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 15:52:21 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 08:52:21 -0700 Subject: [ExI] home defense In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <003101d638f5$cddd1750$699745f0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: [ExI] home defense >?It used to be the case (and I cannot remember whether it was federal or state law) that a homeowner had to back up to the farthest part of his house before he could shoot an intruder. That got changed awhile back? That one is easy: I couldn?t hit the bastard from the farthest back part of my house. There are walls in the way. >?Who knows what the federal standard is? Depends on the round. For 5.56 ammo, the standard is .223 +/- .0001 diameter, 53 grain mass for the #1410 hollow point. >. ?Or is that a state thing, or what? bill w Bill you live in Mississippi. The law is on your side. Always think safety first: drill a hole in the sleazy bastard, then if necessary, drag her corpse to the back of your house, then call 911 and beg them to rescue you from a dangerous intruder. When they show up about an hour later, good chance they won?t mention that her earthly remains have already cooled to nearly room temperature. Safety first BillW: in any nation where the citizens have the right to bear arms, anyone who breaks in to an occupied home intends to slay. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 15:55:12 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 11:55:12 -0400 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> <009401d6387a$e9098890$bb1c99b0$@rainier66.com> <011601d6388d$b1456e70$13d04b50$@rainier66.com> <017c01d63897$32bf8e00$983eaa00$@rainier66.com> <00fa01d638eb$25fb8940$71f29bc0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: I understand that if you follow anarchy as a political philosophy why you might find Spike's use of the term offensive, but his use of it is well understood as a legitimate meaning of the word in the English language: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anarchist In fact, among the general populace, I would suspect Spike's definition is the only one most people are familiar with. On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 11:49 AM Dave Sill via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 10:38 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >> >> Rioters and looters are anarchists, and they besmirch legitimate >> anarchists. >> > > I don't know if you're trying to be clever or funny, but this is offensive > and wrong. Please stop. > > -Dave > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 15:56:32 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 08:56:32 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> <009401d6387a$e9098890$bb1c99b0$@rainier66.com> <011601d6388d$b1456e70$13d04b50$@rainier66.com> <017c01d63897$32bf8e00$983eaa00$@rainier66.com> <00fa01d638eb$25fb8940$71f29bc0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <003d01d638f6$638b9290$2aa2b7b0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Dave Sill via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] ring of truth On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 10:38 AM spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: Rioters and looters are anarchists, and they besmirch legitimate anarchists. >?I don't know if you're trying to be clever or funny, but this is offensive and wrong. Please stop. -Dave Neither of these Dave. There are perfectly legitimate anarchists, those who believe society can exist without a top-down government. Native Americans existed on this continent for millennia without central government. There is no offense or entertainment intended. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 16:05:58 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 12:05:58 -0400 Subject: [ExI] home defense In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Typically found under Stand your ground or Castle doctrine. Stand your ground applies to outside of the home, and in many blue states, you have a duty to retreat before application of lethal force if possible. In other states, there is no obligation. Most states do recognize the Castle doctrine that allows you to apply lethal force within your home to defend yourself. On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 11:55 AM Dave Sill via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 11:17 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> It used to be the case (and I cannot remember whether it was federal or >> state law) that a homeowner had to back up to the farthest part of his >> house before he could shoot an intruder. That got changed awhile back. >> >> Who knows what the federal standard is? Or is that a state thing, or >> what? >> > > It's a state thing. > > -Dave > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 16:11:10 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 09:11:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <00fa01d638eb$25fb8940$71f29bc0$@rainier66.com> References: <00fa01d638eb$25fb8940$71f29bc0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Jun 2, 2020, at 7:44 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat > > >?This is the way things are normally done, but the arms the citizens have are not needed if everything works as it?s meant to, only if they believe that the normal processes are unfair or corrupted. That is what the protestors seem to think at the moment. They haven?t gone as far as attempting an overthrow, but they might. In that case, there would be an armed clash between the government forces and the citizens? militia, each claiming to be the true patriots. > -- > Stathis Papaioannou > > > Hi Stathis, it isn?t the militia out there doing the rioting and looting. Rioters and looters are anarchists, and they besmirch legitimate anarchists. Legitimate anarchists don?t even like to share the name anarchists with the looters and rioters. The government and the militia are on the same side. You introduced the term anarchist to describe the person in that video. I?ve asked time and again to tell how you know the person is an anarchist and what you mean by this. Rioters and looters are not anarchists; they?re, respectively rioters and looters. It?s you who besmirch all anarchists by using the term ?anarchist? as a synonym for rioter, looter, or vandal. > >?normal processes are unfair or corrupted? > > It seems to be looking up. As measured by corruption indices, the US has become slightly more corrupt over the last few years: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/corruption-index and: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2018/results/usa So, if these indices are reliable, things are not looking up. It?s not like they?ve falling off a cliff either, but a slight uptick in corruption is no cause for celebration, IMO. > In the USA, we have caught a lot of corruption way up at the top recently. We uncovered a huge conspiracy right up at the top of the FBI and Department of Justice. A judge accused the DoJ of questionable motives in dropping their case against the former National Security Advisor. The DoJ answered back that the FBI falsified or fabricated the only evidence they had against him. Now, we caught em. Sunlight disinfects. This seems way more complicated than you make it to be. And, in fact, it seems more to lean in the direction of the DoJ being corrupted for political reasons. See: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/01/judge-questions-unusual-justice-department-filing-in-flynn-case-294330 Note the unusual nature of the dismissal of the charges at DoJ. Add to this, the earlier guilty plea. (Granted, plea bargaining was involved here.) And Barr appointing another Trump appointee to review the case. This doesn?t exacting look like sunlight disinfecting the process. Instead, it might be a case of the process being ever more subverted to politics. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 16:13:41 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 09:13:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4D5D1131-9EE1-4BE4-A4F6-79B4B3AA0D50@gmail.com> On Jun 2, 2020, at 8:50 AM, Dave Sill via extropy-chat wrote:? > >> On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 10:38 AM spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > >> Rioters and looters are anarchists, and they besmirch legitimate anarchists. >> > > I don't know if you're trying to be clever or funny, but this is offensive and wrong. Please stop. I find it highly offensive too. And I find it wrong as I?ve tried to explain here. But so far, Spike seems to be ignoring the gist of my comments. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 16:19:40 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 10:19:40 -0600 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> <009401d6387a$e9098890$bb1c99b0$@rainier66.com> <011601d6388d$b1456e70$13d04b50$@rainier66.com> <017c01d63897$32bf8e00$983eaa00$@rainier66.com> <00fa01d638eb$25fb8940$71f29bc0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: "I see you accept /society's/ definition of "anarchist!" Obligatory SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-09-16 On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 10:10 AM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I understand that if you follow anarchy as a political philosophy why you > might find Spike's use of the term offensive, but his use of it is well > understood as a legitimate meaning of the word in the English language: > > https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anarchist > > In fact, among the general populace, I would suspect Spike's definition is > the only one most people are familiar with. > > On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 11:49 AM Dave Sill via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 10:38 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> >>> >>> Rioters and looters are anarchists, and they besmirch legitimate >>> anarchists. >>> >> >> I don't know if you're trying to be clever or funny, but this is >> offensive and wrong. Please stop. >> >> -Dave >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 16:23:49 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 09:23:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <61F4FFDE-60CA-4127-AF2B-D7DB782877CB@gmail.com> On Jun 2, 2020, at 8:43 AM, Dave Sill via extropy-chat wrote: >> On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 5:04 AM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat wrote: > >> >> ### All you say is correct. The Democrats such as Klobuchar did a lot to encourage police brutality - but does it justify antifa thugs and random other black and white thugs robbing stores and torching businesses? > > I'm only trying to understand and explain, not justify. See, for a different take: https://c4ss.org/content/52928 No doubt, some will be triggered by the author?s use of chud and fash. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brent.allsop at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 16:23:54 2020 From: brent.allsop at gmail.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 10:23:54 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Is a copy of you really you? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hi Robin, Thanks for this info. I am not much of a reader of novels, so haven?t read this book. But do you talk about ?eefing of the ineffable? or merging consciousness at all? For example, if you had a neural ponytail that functions like the corpus callosum (only instead of just computationally binding 2 hemispheres, It would merge 4), you could then experience all of the experiences, not just half. This would let you know things like if your redness was like your partner?s greenness and such. I agree there will be lots of copies, but they will also be ?computationally bound?, and such, so more like one larger individual consciousness (the way our brain has two computationally bound hemispheres for one individual), than multiple individuals. On Fri, May 29, 2020 at 3:02 PM Robin D Hanson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I disagree; I wrote a whole book describing a reasonable world where many > copies are made: > http://ageofem.com > > > On May 29, 2020, at 10:40 AM, Keith Henson via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > This is still my conclusion, and yes this thing was beaten to death > > long ago. Not solved - > > It was understood, not solved because there was nothing to solve. > > It was also understood that except for corner cases, like crews for > starships, that making copies of people was a bad idea. > > > > Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu > Future of Humanity Inst., Oxford University > Assoc. Prof. Economics, George Mason University > See my books: http://ageofem.com http://elephantinthebrain.com > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 16:28:01 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 09:28:01 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <003d01d638f6$638b9290$2aa2b7b0$@rainier66.com> References: <003d01d638f6$638b9290$2aa2b7b0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Jun 2, 2020, at 9:16 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > On Behalf Of Dave Sill via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] ring of truth > > On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 10:38 AM spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > Rioters and looters are anarchists, and they besmirch legitimate anarchists. > > >?I don't know if you're trying to be clever or funny, but this is offensive and wrong. Please stop. > > -Dave > > > Neither of these Dave. There are perfectly legitimate anarchists, those who believe society can exist without a top-down government. Native Americans existed on this continent for millennia without central government. > > There is no offense or entertainment intended. > > spike If no offense is intended, would you please stop using the term ?anarchist? as a synonym for rioter and looters? You didn?t do that in the quoted text. In fact, you start off with ?Rioters and looters are anarchists...? Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 16:28:05 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 09:28:05 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> <009401d6387a$e9098890$bb1c99b0$@rainier66.com> <011601d6388d$b1456e70$13d04b50$@rainier66.com> <017c01d63897$32bf8e00$983eaa00$@rainier66.com> <00fa01d638eb$25fb8940$71f29bc0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <006a01d638fa$cc2dc760$64895620$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] ring of truth >?I understand that if you follow anarchy as a political philosophy why you might find Spike's use of the term offensive, but his use of it is well understood as a legitimate meaning of the word in the English language: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anarchist In fact, among the general populace, I would suspect Spike's definition is the only one most people are familiar with? Ja, thanks for the reminder Dylan and Dave. There are different brands of anarchist, just as there are very different brands of libertarian or any other label, often very incompatible with each other, sharing the name. Often the most bitter animosity is between different brands of similarly-named parties (we see that in the Libertarian party.) I don?t understand the details of anarchism, because I am not an anarchist: I believe a top-level government is beneficial, if it is carefully limited and defined by a constitution. When I see rioters burning buildings and cars, destroying property, attacking store owners, to me they are committing acts of anarchy, which makes them anarchists (one particular brand.) I recognize (and know personally) another brand of anarchist who doesn?t do these things. He believes people will be OK with no top-level government. He isn?t crazy or deluded, he is not a bad guy at all. We just disagree on that, perfectly peacefully. I would consider us friends: he?s a pleasant chap, tolerant of others, as am I. We just disagree on that topic full stop. In the USA, there is a thing called a minarchist, with a subset being a minarcho-capitalist. This is a guy who agrees a central government must exist, to do things like provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, establish justice, secure to ourselves and our posterity the blessings of liberty, you know, the thing. But a minarcho-capitalist would argue that the heavy lifting in government is done at the state level, because states have more options in how to raise funds than does the Federal government, which really has only the income tax. spike On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 11:49 AM Dave Sill via extropy-chat > wrote: On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 10:38 AM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: Rioters and looters are anarchists, and they besmirch legitimate anarchists. I don't know if you're trying to be clever or funny, but this is offensive and wrong. Please stop. -Dave _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 16:59:46 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 12:59:46 -0400 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <00fa01d638eb$25fb8940$71f29bc0$@rainier66.com> References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> <009401d6387a$e9098890$bb1c99b0$@rainier66.com> <011601d6388d$b1456e70$13d04b50$@rainier66.com> <017c01d63897$32bf8e00$983eaa00$@rainier66.com> <00fa01d638eb$25fb8940$71f29bc0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 10:39 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > *The government and the militia are on the same side.* > If so then the MAGA Hatter militia can help Trump become a dictator as he already controls 2 and a half out of the 3 branches of government. > A judge accused the DoJ of questionable motives in dropping their case > against the former National Security Advisor. The DoJ answered back that > the FBI falsified or fabricated the only evidence they had against him. > Now, we caught em. Sunlight disinfects. > Yep no question about it, Trump's Doj and his lackey William Barr were shown to be contemptible lying frauds. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 17:05:44 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 10:05:44 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <4D5D1131-9EE1-4BE4-A4F6-79B4B3AA0D50@gmail.com> References: <4D5D1131-9EE1-4BE4-A4F6-79B4B3AA0D50@gmail.com> Message-ID: <003301d63900$0dfd5de0$29f819a0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat Sent: Tuesday, June 2, 2020 9:14 AM To: ExI chat list Cc: Dan TheBookMan Subject: Re: [ExI] ring of truth On Jun 2, 2020, at 8:50 AM, Dave Sill via extropy-chat > wrote:? On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 10:38 AM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: Rioters and looters are anarchists, and they besmirch legitimate anarchists. I don't know if you're trying to be clever or funny, but this is offensive and wrong. Please stop. I find it highly offensive too. And I find it wrong as I?ve tried to explain here. But so far, Spike seems to be ignoring the gist of my comments. Regards, Dan OK no problem, I see where you are going. No offense intended Dan or anyone else. There are Libertarians and small l libertarians, which are two different things. One is a committed party follower (cap L) and the other is a loose-fitting catch-many term which includes those who believe in smaller limited federal government, the minarchists of all brands, those who believe in government primarily at the state level, and so forth. Rather than distinguish between cap A Anarchists and the rioters who are committing acts of anarchy but are not Anarchists, I will refrain from using the term to refer to opportunists (looters) and anger-driven destructobots, which also two different groups with generally differing motives. The protestors are generally not anarchists: they want law and order, applied fairly and equally. So do we. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 17:07:41 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 12:07:41 -0500 Subject: [ExI] home defense In-Reply-To: <003101d638f5$cddd1750$699745f0$@rainier66.com> References: <003101d638f5$cddd1750$699745f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Spike, I do not agree with you about the intention of an intruder to kill someone. If I had to, I would shoot to disable and if that didn't work I'd empty the gun, no question. But the ones who are caught here are always trying to rob the place, and they get shot or killed more often than the homeowner does. We had an old black guy trying to come in the front door in broad daylight, and my wife was pushing him away. Should I have shot him? He went back on the street and we saw a cop car out there. Someone else had called 911. Mentally handicapped. Harmless. I would have felt extremely guilty if had shot him, much less killed him. I have known many harmless, confused mental patients. I would not have wanted to be one of the people who had killed such a person simply out of my fear. There are too many of those killed by cops. He comes in with a gun? Fine. We go to war. bill w On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 11:02 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat > *Subject:* [ExI] home defense > > > > > > > > >?It used to be the case (and I cannot remember whether it was federal or > state law) that a homeowner had to back up to the farthest part of his > house before he could shoot an intruder. That got changed awhile back? > > > > That one is easy: I couldn?t hit the bastard from the farthest back part > of my house. There are walls in the way. > > > > > > >?Who knows what the federal standard is? > > > > Depends on the round. For 5.56 ammo, the standard is .223 +/- .0001 > diameter, 53 grain mass for the #1410 hollow point. > > > > > > >. ?Or is that a state thing, or what? bill w > > > > Bill you live in Mississippi. The law is on your side. > > > > Always think safety first: drill a hole in the sleazy bastard, then if > necessary, drag her corpse to the back of your house, then call 911 and > beg them to rescue you from a dangerous intruder. When they show up about > an hour later, good chance they won?t mention that her earthly remains have > already cooled to nearly room temperature. > > > > Safety first BillW: in any nation where the citizens have the right to > bear arms, anyone who breaks in to an occupied home intends to slay. > > > > spike > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 17:44:18 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 10:44:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] riots, was: RE: Is a copy of you really you? Message-ID: Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 12:59 AM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > We are a long way from seeing the end of this. There have been well > over 100,000 deaths in the US so far. Around 4% of the LA and Santa > Clara populations has antibodies. Assuming 70% for herd immunity, we > are around 1/17th of the way through this pandemic. If that's > accurate and nothing like a vaccine comes along, the US death toll > will not be much short of 2 million. ### You are off by more than an order of magnitude. I hope what I posted above is wrong and you are right. What do you think is wrong with my analysis? The range I have seen on herd immunity is 60 to 80% so I used 70% for analysis. If you have a better number for me to use, what is it? The antibody testing results for the two California locations are centered around 4%. I am aware there is some uncertainty in this number, but if herd immunity takes 70%, then 70/4 is around a factor of ~17. That indicates to me that the pandemic has quite a way to go at least in California. ### We are getting close to herd immunity in many locations, I am not aware of such locations, not even Sweeden. Can you point me to some of them? ### eyeballing the curve we are about 2/3rd of the way through the pandemic, so the total will be around 150k, maybe up to 200k at the most. You might look up the curve for Iran which is undergoing a secondary peak of about the same size as the first one. As I said, I hope you are right and my rough analysis is wrong. Of course, a vaccine would change the picture entirely. Keith From sparge at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 17:45:51 2020 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 13:45:51 -0400 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: <006a01d638fa$cc2dc760$64895620$@rainier66.com> References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> <009401d6387a$e9098890$bb1c99b0$@rainier66.com> <011601d6388d$b1456e70$13d04b50$@rainier66.com> <017c01d63897$32bf8e00$983eaa00$@rainier66.com> <00fa01d638eb$25fb8940$71f29bc0$@rainier66.com> <006a01d638fa$cc2dc760$64895620$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 1:18 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > When I see rioters burning buildings and cars, destroying property, > attacking store owners, to me they are committing acts of anarchy, which > makes them anarchists (one particular brand.) > You're attributing a cause to their actions without evidence that that's why they're doing what they're doing. They *could* be anarchists, but they could also just be destroying things for fun, looting because they want free stuff, reacting out of fear/anger, etc. Now that you know labeling them as anarchists is offensive, kindly stop doing that. Stick with observable labels like rioters or looters. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 17:48:21 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 12:48:21 -0500 Subject: [ExI] better than Google Message-ID: You guys and gals. What I want to know is whatever happened to the neutron bomb? Wasn't it supposed to kill people but leave buildings intact? Maybe it was really dirty, radiation-wise. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 17:52:19 2020 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 13:52:19 -0400 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: <00de01d636fb$b542bf70$1fc83e50$@rainier66.com> <005701d63814$64b6a0c0$2e23e240$@rainier66.com> <009a01d6381a$632bd350$298379f0$@rainier66.com> <002301d6386c$239af6b0$6ad0e410$@rainier66.com> <009401d6387a$e9098890$bb1c99b0$@rainier66.com> <011601d6388d$b1456e70$13d04b50$@rainier66.com> <017c01d63897$32bf8e00$983eaa00$@rainier66.com> <00fa01d638eb$25fb8940$71f29bc0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 12:10 PM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I understand that if you follow anarchy as a political philosophy why you > might find Spike's use of the term offensive, but his use of it is well > understood as a legitimate meaning of the word in the English language: > > https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anarchist > > In fact, among the general populace, I would suspect Spike's definition is > the only one most people are familiar with. > I'd like to think we're at a level above the general populace. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 18:05:34 2020 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 14:05:34 -0400 Subject: [ExI] better than Google In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 2:00 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > You guys and gals. What I want to know is whatever happened to the > neutron bomb? Wasn't it supposed to kill people but leave buildings > intact? Maybe it was really dirty, radiation-wise. > It was considered uncouth to kill people without also destroying buildings. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 18:08:00 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 11:08:00 -0700 Subject: [ExI] better than Google In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: They're about as strategically useful as other nuclear WMDs - which is to say, the amount of indiscriminate death they inflict would trigger a nuclear war if they were used against an enemy. That said, the ones that have been produced can't penetrate modern tank armor, which caused them to fall out of favor: if you can't use them against enemy military, having them around is a clear sign that you want to use them against enemy civilians, which is a no-no. (You can have stuff that in practice might mostly hurt civilians, but you can't be seen to be preparing to specifically target civilians and not military.) On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 10:59 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > You guys and gals. What I want to know is whatever happened to the > neutron bomb? Wasn't it supposed to kill people but leave buildings > intact? Maybe it was really dirty, radiation-wise. bill w > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 18:30:30 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 11:30:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] better than Google In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <004a01d6390b$e5e434d0$b1ac9e70$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: [ExI] better than Google You guys and gals. What I want to know is whatever happened to the neutron bomb? Wasn't it supposed to kill people but leave buildings intact? Maybe it was really dirty, radiation-wise. bill w BillW, it was nearly useless as a weapon. The ideal weapon would do the opposite: wreck the equipment and leave the people intact. That?s why we hear so much more about the EMP, which wrecks the communications, the computers, the electrical infrastructure, the engines and such, but the people don?t even notice until their solitaire game won?t turn on. Then FaceBook is gone, and oh dear, they realize they just lost World War 4. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 18:59:55 2020 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 14:59:55 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <61F4FFDE-60CA-4127-AF2B-D7DB782877CB@gmail.com> References: <61F4FFDE-60CA-4127-AF2B-D7DB782877CB@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 12:59 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > On Jun 2, 2020, at 8:43 AM, Dave Sill via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 5:04 AM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >> ### All you say is correct. The Democrats such as Klobuchar did a lot to >> encourage police brutality - but does it justify antifa thugs and random >> other black and white thugs robbing stores and torching businesses? >> > > I'm only trying to understand and explain, not justify. > > > See, for a different take: https://c4ss.org/content/52928 > > No doubt, some will be triggered by the author?s use of chud and fash. > That was...different, as promised. :-) Hard to read even with my Urban Dictionary open. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 19:10:48 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 12:10:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: <61F4FFDE-60CA-4127-AF2B-D7DB782877CB@gmail.com> Message-ID: <007101d63911$875721b0$96056510$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dave Sill via On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 12:59 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote: See, for a different take: https://c4ss.org/content/52928 No doubt, some will be triggered by the author?s use of chud and fash. That was...different, as promised. :-) Hard to read even with my Urban Dictionary open. -Dave Ja, even the Urban Dictionary didn?t help that much. Words which have not been around very long have no consensus definition. I can?t be triggered by words I don?t understand. I removed those mystery words and tried to comprehend the meaning of the article from context. No luck. Perhaps if the author were to rewrite using only the words in the current edition of Miriam Webster using the definitions found there, the meaning would be clear. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mbb386 at main.nc.us Tue Jun 2 19:14:22 2020 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 15:14:22 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <007101d63911$875721b0$96056510$@rainier66.com> References: <61F4FFDE-60CA-4127-AF2B-D7DB782877CB@gmail.com> <007101d63911$875721b0$96056510$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <7b3f41d53d6fec7e5ca6089b8fbf9cc2.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> On Tue, June 2, 2020 15:10, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > Perhaps if the author were to rewrite using only the words in the current > edition of Miriam Webster using the definitions found there, the meaning > would be clear. > > Ah, but the author isn't writing for *us*... we're outsiders (because we don't already know and use those words). He's writing for the elect, those who already know what he's saying. :( Regards, MB From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 19:34:55 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 12:34:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ring of truth In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <56F16947-D35A-460F-9314-12F05B9A6237@gmail.com> On Jun 2, 2020, at 11:14 AM, Dave Sill via extropy-chat wrote: > >> On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 12:10 PM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat wrote: > >> I understand that if you follow anarchy as a political philosophy why you might find Spike's use of the term offensive, but his use of it is well understood as a legitimate meaning of the word in the English language: >> >> https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anarchist >> >> In fact, among the general populace, I would suspect Spike's definition is the only one most people are familiar with. > > I'd like to think we're at a level above the general populace. > > -Dave I was going to post the same point. Colloquially, most people also think atheists are amoral if not immoral. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 20:06:30 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 15:06:30 -0500 Subject: [ExI] better than Google In-Reply-To: <004a01d6390b$e5e434d0$b1ac9e70$@rainier66.com> References: <004a01d6390b$e5e434d0$b1ac9e70$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Well is there anything between nuclear and the conventional bombs? It would be nice, in a gruesome kind of way, to have bombs capable of killing the same number of whatever as nuclear ones but no radiation. Has a total, all out war, sparing nothing, been fought in modern times? All those little piddly wars between FRance and Britain were largely fought with mercenaries. Why didn't they put every man who could carry a weapon into the wars? That would be a very very short war. But no, they fought limited wars, and mostly nobody won. bill w On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 1:36 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat > *Subject:* [ExI] better than Google > > > > You guys and gals. What I want to know is whatever happened to the > neutron bomb? Wasn't it supposed to kill people but leave buildings > intact? Maybe it was really dirty, radiation-wise. bill w > > > > > > BillW, it was nearly useless as a weapon. The ideal weapon would do the > opposite: wreck the equipment and leave the people intact. That?s why we > hear so much more about the EMP, which wrecks the communications, the > computers, the electrical infrastructure, the engines and such, but the > people don?t even notice until their solitaire game won?t turn on. Then > FaceBook is gone, and oh dear, they realize they just lost World War 4. > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 21:20:31 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 14:20:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] better than Google In-Reply-To: References: <004a01d6390b$e5e434d0$b1ac9e70$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <002901d63923$a60878e0$f2196aa0$@rainier66.com> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] better than Google Well is there anything between nuclear and the conventional bombs?... Let?s hope not. Fusion devices are weapons of peace: they are too big to use. That in-between business is what made neutron bombs so controversial and unpopular: they might be used. They called them tactical nukes. That?s a good way to trigger a nuclear holocaust. >? piddly wars between FRance and Britain were largely fought with mercenaries. Why didn't they put every man who could carry a weapon into the wars? bill w How would the kings feed them? Who would be left back to produce the war material? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 2 21:15:49 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 14:15:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <7b3f41d53d6fec7e5ca6089b8fbf9cc2.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> References: <61F4FFDE-60CA-4127-AF2B-D7DB782877CB@gmail.com> <007101d63911$875721b0$96056510$@rainier66.com> <7b3f41d53d6fec7e5ca6089b8fbf9cc2.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> Message-ID: <002801d63922$fda998f0$f8fccad0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of MB via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Protest On Tue, June 2, 2020 15:10, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > Perhaps if the author were to rewrite using only the words in the > current edition of Miriam Webster using the definitions found there, > the meaning would be clear. > > >...Ah, but the author isn't writing for *us*... we're outsiders (because we don't already know and use those words). He's writing for the elect, those who already know what he's saying. :( Regards, MB _______________________________________________ Sure, OK I think you are right MB. We can read Le Miserables and Don Quixote in a sense via the translations. These writers can translate it for the rest of us. If these political operatives wish to use intentionally obscure language filled with privately-defined terms, they are merely breathing their own fumes. spike From sen.otaku at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 20:37:33 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 15:37:33 -0500 Subject: [ExI] home defense In-Reply-To: References: <003101d638f5$cddd1750$699745f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: In my town, and also where I lived in Florida, Castle Doctrine was only for shoot-to-kill. If you were not trying to kill them it?s 10 years for discharge or 20 years for injury. Life for murder but 0 for self defense under castle doctrine. So it?s actually better for you if you kill them. At least here. Might be different in Bluer or Redder places. SR Ballard > On Jun 2, 2020, at 12:07 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > Spike, I do not agree with you about the intention of an intruder to kill someone. If I had to, I would shoot to disable and if that didn't work I'd empty the gun, no question. But the ones who are caught here are always trying to rob the place, and they get shot or killed more often than the homeowner does. > > We had an old black guy trying to come in the front door in broad daylight, and my wife was pushing him away. Should I have shot him? He went back on the street and we saw a cop car out there. Someone else had called 911. Mentally handicapped. Harmless. I would have felt extremely guilty if had shot him, much less killed him. I have known many harmless, confused mental patients. I would not have wanted to be one of the people who had killed such a person simply out of my fear. There are too many of those killed by cops. > > He comes in with a gun? Fine. We go to war. > > bill w > >> On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 11:02 AM spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> >> >> >> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat >> Subject: [ExI] home defense >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >?It used to be the case (and I cannot remember whether it was federal or state law) that a homeowner had to back up to the farthest part of his house before he could shoot an intruder. That got changed awhile back? >> >> >> >> That one is easy: I couldn?t hit the bastard from the farthest back part of my house. There are walls in the way. >> >> >> >> >> >> >?Who knows what the federal standard is? >> >> >> >> Depends on the round. For 5.56 ammo, the standard is .223 +/- .0001 diameter, 53 grain mass for the #1410 hollow point. >> >> >> >> >> >> >. ?Or is that a state thing, or what? bill w >> >> >> >> Bill you live in Mississippi. The law is on your side. >> >> >> >> Always think safety first: drill a hole in the sleazy bastard, then if necessary, drag her corpse to the back of your house, then call 911 and beg them to rescue you from a dangerous intruder. When they show up about an hour later, good chance they won?t mention that her earthly remains have already cooled to nearly room temperature. >> >> >> >> Safety first BillW: in any nation where the citizens have the right to bear arms, anyone who breaks in to an occupied home intends to slay. >> >> >> >> spike >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 21:41:49 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 14:41:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] better than Google In-Reply-To: References: <004a01d6390b$e5e434d0$b1ac9e70$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 1:08 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Well is there anything between nuclear and the conventional bombs? It > would be nice, in a gruesome kind of way, to have bombs capable of killing > the same number of whatever as nuclear ones but no radiation. Has a total, > all out war, sparing nothing, been fought in modern times? > Not even WWII was as total as all out nuclear war would be. And that gets to the problem: while some may see it as a nice fantasy, in practice there has never been nor will there likely ever be a situation wherein complete nuclear annihilation of the enemy will be the best approach, at least not for any country able to manufacture and launch long-range nuclear weapons. Iran and North Korea might be close - and certainly, their ideologies blind them to the reality that their regimes (and quite possibly most of their countries) would be annihilated if they conducted a nuclear first attack - but that same fundamentalism has diminished their technical capability: see what has actually happened when they have tried so far. For countries that do have the technical capability, they are well aware that the only guaranteed result if they struck first would be nuclear reprisals from enough of the world that, no matter what happens to their foes, they would lose. MOAB and similar are the largest bombs for which an actual use in modern war has been identified - and even then, it's been rare. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 20:39:45 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 16:39:45 -0400 Subject: [ExI] better than Google In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 2:00 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > You guys and gals. What I want to know is whatever happened to the > neutron bomb? Wasn't it supposed to kill people but leave buildings > intact? Maybe it was really dirty, radiation-wise. bill w > Actually a neutron bomb is very clean, it produces far less radioactive fallout than a regular garden variety nuclear bomb because most of its energy is not in the form of a sudden release of heat (aka explosive power) but in a burst of extremely high energy neutrons, a burst that lasts for just a small fraction of a second but would be enough to be lethal even if you were inside a Soviet tank in the 1980s that was invading Europe. A Neutron Bomb is just a special type of thermonuclear H-bomb in which the fission trigger is made as small as possible and the fusion secondary is made as large as possible. The main reason Neutron Bombs never became popular is not ethical its economic, it's a very expensive way to kill people, there are much cheaper ways to achieve megadeath. For a any type of H-bomb to work it needs lots of Tritium and Neutron Bombs are no exception, regular H-bombs make their own Tritium instantly on the spot when the Fission trigger goes off, but for that to happen a lot of fallout is produced, so for the Neutron Bomb a bombmaker must supply lots of Tritium beforehand on his own. The trouble is pound for pound Tritium is MUCH more expensive to make that either U-235 or Plutonium, and even worse its half life is only 12.5 years, so your nuclear stockpile would need lots of constant and very expensive maintenance to remain workable. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Tue Jun 2 22:18:05 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 16:18:05 -0600 Subject: [ExI] better than Google In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The biggest fuel-air explosive bombs get, iirc, just barely into the range of the smallest tactical nukes. On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 3:51 PM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 2:00 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > You guys and gals. What I want to know is whatever happened to the >> neutron bomb? Wasn't it supposed to kill people but leave buildings >> intact? Maybe it was really dirty, radiation-wise. bill w >> > > Actually a neutron bomb is very clean, it produces far less radioactive > fallout than a regular garden variety nuclear bomb because most of its > energy is not in the form of a sudden release of heat (aka explosive power) > but in a burst of extremely high energy neutrons, a burst that lasts for > just a small fraction of a second but would be enough to be lethal even if > you were inside a Soviet tank in the 1980s that was invading Europe. A > Neutron Bomb is just a special type of thermonuclear H-bomb in which the > fission trigger is made as small as possible and the fusion secondary is > made as large as possible. The main reason Neutron Bombs never became > popular is not ethical its economic, it's a very expensive way to kill > people, there are much cheaper ways to achieve megadeath. > > For a any type of H-bomb to work it needs lots of Tritium and Neutron > Bombs are no exception, regular H-bombs make their own Tritium instantly on > the spot when the Fission trigger goes off, but for that to happen a lot of > fallout is produced, so for the Neutron Bomb a bombmaker must supply lots > of Tritium beforehand on his own. The trouble is pound for pound Tritium is > MUCH more expensive to make that either U-235 or Plutonium, and even > worse its half life is only 12.5 years, so your nuclear stockpile would > need lots of constant and very expensive maintenance to remain workable. > > John K Clark > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Wed Jun 3 01:38:19 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 18:38:19 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <007101d63911$875721b0$96056510$@rainier66.com> References: <007101d63911$875721b0$96056510$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Jun 2, 2020, at 12:12 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dave Sill via > > On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 12:59 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote: > > > See, for a different take: https://c4ss.org/content/52928 > > No doubt, some will be triggered by the author?s use of chud and fash. > > That was...different, as promised. :-) Hard to read even with my Urban Dictionary open. > > -Dave > > > Ja, even the Urban Dictionary didn?t help that much. Words which have not been around very long have no consensus definition. I can?t be triggered by words I don?t understand. I removed those mystery words and tried to comprehend the meaning of the article from context. No luck. > > Perhaps if the author were to rewrite using only the words in the current edition of Miriam Webster using the definitions found there, the meaning would be clear. Let me try to guess the words that might have given some difficulty with the piece, roughly in order of appearance chud -- term of opprobrium used against the alt-right; think of it as calling someone an asshole POC -- person of colour fashy/fash -- fascist (adjective/noun) apparatchik -- official or bureaucrat, usually meant as a snear woke -- enlightened or aware, as in consciousness raising protest managerial class -- group of people, usually politicians, who attempt to control protests for their class or personal interests By the way, I don't know enough about Hardesty. Her advocating a curfew and all that might be her caving to pressure or from fear what the police might do, but it could be just that she's following the long line of radicals who, once elected and having become part of the ruling class, suddenly discover they don't want radical change. Regards, Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Wed Jun 3 01:39:41 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 18:39:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <7b3f41d53d6fec7e5ca6089b8fbf9cc2.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> References: <7b3f41d53d6fec7e5ca6089b8fbf9cc2.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> Message-ID: <5EC43454-CA3A-480C-B6A1-5543D8CE6B28@gmail.com> On Jun 2, 2020, at 12:26 PM, MB via extropy-chat wrote: > >> On Tue, June 2, 2020 15:10, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> Perhaps if the author were to rewrite using only the words in the current >> edition of Miriam Webster using the definitions found there, the meaning >> would be clear. >> >> > > Ah, but the author isn't writing for *us*... we're outsiders (because we > don't already know and use those words). He's writing for the elect, > those who already know what he's saying. :( In another post, I tried to translate some of the terms that I felt might be confusing. I'm not sure how familiar you are with the various online political movements and their interaction, but I think many of the terms he uses -- well, not POC and apparatchik, terms that have a longer history than chud -- are in currency online. I'm guessing the college aged "woke" person on Twitter, FB, etc. would know what they mean. This isn't jargon used by little academic circle at Ann Arbor or Berkeley. :) If you want the gist of the piece, Gillis believes the Establishment wants to split off liberal people of colour from the wider Left and especially from folks who want a more radical change in policing -- whether that's strict accountability (in other words, treating the police as having no more legal rights than the people) or abolition. In other words, divide et impera -- or divide and conquer. This is typical of how any establishment has dealt with widespread dissent and protest: attempt to pull away some of the more moderate elements to weaken the overall movement. Sometimes this strategy -- or range of strategies -- works, sometimes it backfires. Regards, Dan From danust2012 at gmail.com Wed Jun 3 01:41:30 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 18:41:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <002801d63922$fda998f0$f8fccad0$@rainier66.com> References: <002801d63922$fda998f0$f8fccad0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <246E843B-2F52-4E88-A70B-0CB62D646DC3@gmail.com> On Jun 2, 2020, at 2:30 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > >> On Behalf Of MB via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] Protest > >> ...Ah, but the author isn't writing for *us*... we're outsiders (because we > don't already know and use those words). He's writing for the elect, those > who already know what he's saying. :( > > Regards, > MB > > _______________________________________________ > > > Sure, OK I think you are right MB. We can read Le Miserables and Don > Quixote in a sense via the translations. These writers can translate it for > the rest of us. If these political operatives wish to use intentionally > obscure language filled with privately-defined terms, they are merely > breathing their own fumes. See my other posts where I discuss some of what I think are the problem terms and also what (I think) William Gillis meant (the TL;DR, in other words) in this piece. You might disagree with that, but there it is. Calling Gillis a political operative is a bit much. Usually, when people use the term political operative, they mean someone working on a campaign staff for a politician or in the politician's office after they're elected. For a fictional account, see a TV series like the UK's The Thick of It or the US's Veep. (Both fun to watch because they're comedies, but also face-paced.) Real life examples are campaign managers like Ron Robinson. Gillis is unlike these. He's an anarchist and an activist who writes opinion pieces like this one. As far as I know, he's not involved in any election races, either managing them or doing grunt work. I doubt anyone else would call him a political operative. Or tell me what you mean by the term. Put another way, he's as much a political operative as you or me are political operatives. Regards, Dan From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 3 04:47:19 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 21:47:19 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: <007101d63911$875721b0$96056510$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00ee01d63962$112c6a30$33853e90$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat Perhaps if the author were to rewrite using only the words in the current edition of Miriam Webster using the definitions found there, the meaning would be clear. Let me try to guess the words that might have given some difficulty with the piece, roughly in order of appearance chud -- term of opprobrium used against the alt-right; think of it as calling someone an asshole POC -- person of colour fashy/fash -- fascist (adjective/noun) apparatchik -- official or bureaucrat, usually meant as a snear woke -- enlightened or aware, as in consciousness raising protest managerial class -- group of people, usually politicians, who attempt to control protests for their class or personal interests? Regards, Dan Hi Dan, since these novel terms have no consensus definitions, I am free to assign my own meaning until the author translates the document into a standardized form. chud: a variation or misspelling of chad, which is a bit of paper. POC: point of contact. Fashy/fash: one who follows the latest fashion trends. Apparatchik: a Russian government worker Woke: what I did this morning at the end of my slumber Protest managerial class: a instructional gathering designed for those who would lead a company, specifically focused on how to handle disagreements. We standardize language for a reason. Insider dialects are fine, so long as they are not intended to convey meaning to those outside the community. Perhaps that was never the intention. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 3 04:51:54 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 21:51:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <5EC43454-CA3A-480C-B6A1-5543D8CE6B28@gmail.com> References: <7b3f41d53d6fec7e5ca6089b8fbf9cc2.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <5EC43454-CA3A-480C-B6A1-5543D8CE6B28@gmail.com> Message-ID: <00f501d63962$b502b4c0$1f081e40$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dan >...-- or divide and conquer. This is typical of how any establishment has dealt with widespread dissent and protest: attempt to pull away some of the more moderate elements to weaken the overall movement. ...Regards, Dan _______________________________________________ That would explain the legitimate protestors handing over the vandal to the cops. We read Saul Alinsky Rules of Radicals too. spike From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Jun 3 08:27:42 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2020 04:27:42 -0400 Subject: [ExI] riots, was: RE: Is a copy of you really you? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 1:46 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > I hope what I posted above is wrong and you are right. What do you > think is wrong with my analysis? The range I have seen on herd > immunity is 60 to 80% so I used 70% for analysis. If you have a > better number for me to use, what is it? > > The antibody testing results for the two California locations are > centered around 4%. I am aware there is some uncertainty in this > number, but if herd immunity takes 70%, then 70/4 is around a factor > of ~17. That indicates to me that the pandemic has quite a way to go > at least in California. > ### The infectivity of Covid-19 is relatively low, much less than initially suspected. Observations of household transmission show that as few as 15% but perhaps as many as 50% of household members become infected from the index case. Household transmission means 7 days in close proximity to the index case, indoors, for many hours a day, at close quarters, so this level of transmission implies low infectivity in general. There is a relationship between R0 and the herd immunity level - the higher R0 the higher the percentage needed for herd immunity. Downward revision of R0 based on household transmission implies that herd immunity should be achieved at lower levels. The exact percentage will of course vary in different locations - it will be much higher in NY city than in suburban CA - but it will be much lower than the initial estimate of 80%. We know that the seasonal influenza infects usually less than 15 - 25% of the population per year, and there are good reasons to expect C-19 will be similar or less. We know that there is a substantial prevalence of immunity to C-19 in the population at baseline, due to cross-reactivity and cross-immunity between C-19 and the coronaviruses responsible for the common cold. This is similar to influenza, where some cross-immunity exists between strains active in different years. This means we are not 1/17th of the way to herd immunity. Most likely we are at least 1/3 there as a country, maybe even 2/3, and NY is almost at herd immunity level now (see their curve of new cases). Of course, the Iran second wave is worrisome. On the other hand, Spain, Germany, Sweden and most other countries seem to be doing well, lockdown or not. It's also useful to remember that between 40 and 80% of C-19 deaths occur in nursing homes. If you are not in a nursing home, your risk is much lower, even if elderly. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Wed Jun 3 08:31:33 2020 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2020 10:31:33 +0200 Subject: [ExI] No Prof. Deudney, the skies are brighter than your lockdown Message-ID: A review of a recently published book by a political scientist who forcefully argues against space expansion. Of course, my review is very critical and negative. No Prof. Deudney, the skies are brighter than your lockdown Recent events have shown what happens to people locked down in a retirement home. https://turingchurch.net/no-prof-deudney-the-skies-are-brighter-than-your-lockdown-4387e523604e From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Jun 3 11:43:09 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2020 07:43:09 -0400 Subject: [ExI] riots, was: RE: Is a copy of you really you? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 4:31 AM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> There is a relationship between R0 and the herd immunity level - the > higher R0 the higher the percentage needed for herd immunity. Downward > revision of R0 based on household transmission implies that herd immunity > should be achieved at lower levels. The exact percentage will of course > vary in different locations - it will be much higher in NY city than in > suburban CA * For herd immunity to COVID-19 to kick in most think at least 60% of the population must be resistant to it, and probably closer to 80%; and even after it's reached the pandemic doesn't suddenly stop it just slows down, it can continue for many months after that. The people of New York City have the highest levels of antibodies against COVID-19 not just in the country but in the entire world and it's only 19.9%. Sweden is betting heavily on herd immunity but in Stockholm only 7.3% have the antibody and it's far lower in less densely populated regions of the country; there was a report it was 27% but it turned out that was just for Swedish hospital emergency room workers. To add to the uncertainty we're not even sure that high antibody levels correspond to immunity to the disease, it might take more than just that. And even though they spend far less on medical care than the USA the Swedish population was much healthier than the American population to start with so would likely suffer a higher death toll than the Swedes. >*but it will be much lower than the initial estimate of 80%.* A R0 number is only meaningful in a given context because it depends crucially on human behavior, the R0 was much higher before people changed their behavior and the shutdown and social distancing went into effect, in fact that was the entire point of it. And initially there was no shutdown or social distancing, when that changes the R0 will change too. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Jun 3 16:12:04 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2020 09:12:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] No Prof. Deudney, the skies are brighter than your lockdown In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Of course, if Deudney ever reads your article, he will ignore it. It makes too much sense. On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 1:38 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > A review of a recently published book by a political scientist who > forcefully argues against space expansion. Of course, my review is > very critical and negative. > > No Prof. Deudney, the skies are brighter than your lockdown > > Recent events have shown what happens to people locked down in a > retirement home. > > > https://turingchurch.net/no-prof-deudney-the-skies-are-brighter-than-your-lockdown-4387e523604e > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Wed Jun 3 16:22:54 2020 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2020 18:22:54 +0200 Subject: [ExI] No Prof. Deudney, the skies are brighter than your lockdown In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Probably, but perhaps others will discuss it. Robin has tweeted it, and others are sharing it on FB etc. On 2020. Jun 3., Wed at 18:14, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Of course, if Deudney ever reads your article, he will ignore it. It > makes too much sense. > > On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 1:38 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> A review of a recently published book by a political scientist who >> forcefully argues against space expansion. Of course, my review is >> very critical and negative. >> >> No Prof. Deudney, the skies are brighter than your lockdown >> >> Recent events have shown what happens to people locked down in a >> retirement home. >> >> >> https://turingchurch.net/no-prof-deudney-the-skies-are-brighter-than-your-lockdown-4387e523604e >> > _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Jun 4 11:51:52 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 07:51:52 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Human Challenge Trials Message-ID: Through the website https://1daysooner.org/ more than 26,000 young healthy people have volunteered to be deliberately infected with COVID-19 so a vaccine can be tested and developed faster. Even most bioethicists, who are notoriously squeamish about this sort of thing, say this would be ethically acceptable because in that age group there is only one chance in 3000 of dying and because each and every day such trials DON'T happen several thousand more people will die. But even though nobody can find a good reason for not conducting Human Challenge Trials for some inexplicable reason nobody has taken any of those 26,000 people up on their offer and such trials are not taking place. That website is well named because if you can find a way to develop a vaccine just one day sooner then you have found a way to save several thousand people from dying. And the clock is still ticking and so are the deaths. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Jun 4 12:35:16 2020 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 08:35:16 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Human Challenge Trials In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 4, 2020, 7:55 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Through the website https://1daysooner.org/ more than 26,000 young > healthy people have volunteered to be deliberately infected with COVID-19 > so a vaccine can be tested and developed faster. > Why do we have to infect people who have not already been exposed? Aren't there already plenty of people who have been exposed and recovered from whatever level of symptoms? The way medicine is practiced in US, the population of survivors has an unusual prevalence of eating pb&j for lunch... so eating pb&j for lunch (but only lunch) becomes standard prophylaxis for covid. Maybe there is a drug that "helps" but given the overplayed hand of pharma, I'm going to remain skeptical of any single pill or miracle cure. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Jun 4 13:19:21 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 09:19:21 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Human Challenge Trials In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 8:38 AM Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> Why do we have to infect people who have not already been exposed? > Aren't there already plenty of people who have been exposed and recovered > from whatever level of symptoms? * I don't understand your questions. How on earth can somebody who has already recovered from COVID-19 on their own help us figure out if a new experimental vaccine works or not? *> The way medicine is practiced in US, the population of survivors has an > unusual prevalence of eating pb&j for lunch... so eating pb&j for lunch > (but only lunch) becomes standard prophylaxis for covid.* > Huh?! *> Maybe there is a drug that "helps" but given the overplayed hand of > pharma, I'm going to remain skeptical of any single pill or miracle cure. * > I don't understand your point. Why not a miracle cure against COVID-19? We've had a "miracle cure", aka a vaccine, against Smallpox for centuries and today we have additional "miracle cures" against Polio, Diphtheria, Measles, Mumps, Shingles, Tetanus, Chickenpox, Cholera and dozens of other deadly diseases, and those vaccines have saved the lives of BILLIONS of people over the years. So why not a vaccine against COVID-19 too? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Jun 4 14:38:26 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 09:38:26 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder Message-ID: Remember him? He is famous for saying that the big strong black men you see in the NFL came from slaveowners using their biggest, strongest slave to impregnate all the women so as to have the biggest strongest babies. We never heard from him again. Some blacks said that was not racism - that was just the truth, like it or not. So anyhow, we do have a lot of those men. So what? So police are afraid of them. Police have fears just like anyone else. The cop who stopped your car for speeding takes his life in his hands when he does so, and he knows that. So add black man to the description of the person you the cop are trying to arrest and you have a double fear situation. Is it racism to be more afraid of blacks? I don't think so - not for cops. Of course that excuses nothing, but it does help explain why more force is used on blacks than on others. Excellent article in my paper today about demilitarizing cops and their equipment, training cops, requiring body cameras, requiring liability insurance for cops, and ending qualified immunity (already discussed in Congress). Let's add 'protect and serve' and get away from 'shock and awe'. Requiring reporting of wrong behavior by fellow cops should happen, but that won't happen, I think. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Jun 4 14:43:29 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 10:43:29 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character Message-ID: The University of California system has permanently banned SAT and ACT test results from being a factor in deciding who will be admitted to their Universities. It's likely many other Universities in the US will follow this lead. They said they did it because standardized testing is racially biased due to the fact that rich white people can hire tutors to help their kids score high on the tests but poor black kids can't. So from now on admission will be based on subjective qualities like "well-roundedness" and "character". Apparently the ability to kick a ball on a field or play water polo in a pool or row a boat in a river shows great well-roundedness and character. I agree with Quantum Computer expert Scott Aaronson when he said: *"As a result, admissions to the top US universities?and hence, most chances for social advancement in the US?will henceforth be based entirely on shifting and nebulous criteria that rich, well-connected kids and their parents spend most of their lives figuring out, rather than merely mostly based on such criteria. The last side door for smart nonconformist kids is now being slammed shut."* Aaronson says if such a polacy had been in place when he was a kid he would have never been admitted to any university much less gone to graduate school and gotten a Phd. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Jun 4 14:50:29 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 10:50:29 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 10:41 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Is it racism to be more afraid of blacks? I don't think so - not for > cops. Is it racism for innocent people to be afraid of white cops? I don't think so - not for blacks. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Jun 4 15:59:20 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 10:59:20 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 9:58 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 10:41 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > Is it racism to be more afraid of blacks? I don't think so - not for >> cops. > > > Is it racism for innocent people to be afraid of white cops? I don't think > so - not for blacks. > > John K Clark > Or whites either. Look at them: military uniform, dark glasses, stern bearing, aggressive attitude, armed to the teeth - I have met exactly one officer, a highway patrol man, who did not do the intimidation thing and talked to me like I was a person. bill w > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Thu Jun 4 16:06:55 2020 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 18:06:55 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: OMG, what unbelievable (and backfiring) unthinking politically correct bullshit. Here?s Scott Aaronson?s post: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4816 On 2020. Jun 4., Thu at 16:48, John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > The University of California system has permanently banned SAT and ACT > test results from being a factor in deciding who will be admitted to their > Universities. It's likely many other Universities in the US will follow > this lead. They said they did it because standardized testing is racially > biased due to the fact that rich white people can hire tutors to help their > kids score high on the tests but poor black kids can't. So from now on > admission will be based on subjective qualities like "well-roundedness" and > "character". Apparently the ability to kick a ball on a field or play water > polo in a pool or row a boat in a river shows great well-roundedness and > character. > > I agree with Quantum Computer expert Scott Aaronson when he said: > > *"As a result, admissions to the top US universities?and hence, most > chances for social advancement in the US?will henceforth be based entirely > on shifting and nebulous criteria that rich, well-connected kids and their > parents spend most of their lives figuring out, rather than merely mostly > based on such criteria. The last side door for smart nonconformist kids is > now being slammed shut."* > > Aaronson says if such a polacy had been in place when he was a kid he > would have never been admitted to any university much less gone to graduate > school and gotten a Phd. > > John K Clark > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Jun 4 16:12:21 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 11:12:21 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: That's BS. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of colleges where just about anyone can get into. The only standard they have is 'the check did not bounce'. Actually you can get into lots of colleges without a high school diploma if you agree to take remedial work. Not that I agree with vague and nonacademic standards, you hear. bill w On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 9:49 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > The University of California system has permanently banned SAT and ACT > test results from being a factor in deciding who will be admitted to their > Universities. It's likely many other Universities in the US will follow > this lead. They said they did it because standardized testing is racially > biased due to the fact that rich white people can hire tutors to help their > kids score high on the tests but poor black kids can't. So from now on > admission will be based on subjective qualities like "well-roundedness" and > "character". Apparently the ability to kick a ball on a field or play water > polo in a pool or row a boat in a river shows great well-roundedness and > character. > > I agree with Quantum Computer expert Scott Aaronson when he said: > > *"As a result, admissions to the top US universities?and hence, most > chances for social advancement in the US?will henceforth be based entirely > on shifting and nebulous criteria that rich, well-connected kids and their > parents spend most of their lives figuring out, rather than merely mostly > based on such criteria. The last side door for smart nonconformist kids is > now being slammed shut."* > > Aaronson says if such a polacy had been in place when he was a kid he > would have never been admitted to any university much less gone to graduate > school and gotten a Phd. > > John K Clark > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From steinberg.will at gmail.com Thu Jun 4 16:18:10 2020 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 12:18:10 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hopefully they don't do this at University of Chicago where I went. It would suck to have less smart people there cuz that's kinda their thing. Though they are already trying to be the next Harvard and started admitting tons of normies On Thu, Jun 4, 2020, 12:15 William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > That's BS. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of colleges where > just about anyone can get into. The only standard they have is 'the check > did not bounce'. Actually you can get into lots of colleges without a high > school diploma if you agree to take remedial work. Not that I agree with > vague and nonacademic standards, you hear. bill w > > On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 9:49 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> The University of California system has permanently banned SAT and ACT >> test results from being a factor in deciding who will be admitted to their >> Universities. It's likely many other Universities in the US will follow >> this lead. They said they did it because standardized testing is racially >> biased due to the fact that rich white people can hire tutors to help their >> kids score high on the tests but poor black kids can't. So from now on >> admission will be based on subjective qualities like "well-roundedness" and >> "character". Apparently the ability to kick a ball on a field or play water >> polo in a pool or row a boat in a river shows great well-roundedness and >> character. >> >> I agree with Quantum Computer expert Scott Aaronson when he said: >> >> *"As a result, admissions to the top US universities?and hence, most >> chances for social advancement in the US?will henceforth be based entirely >> on shifting and nebulous criteria that rich, well-connected kids and their >> parents spend most of their lives figuring out, rather than merely mostly >> based on such criteria. The last side door for smart nonconformist kids is >> now being slammed shut."* >> >> Aaronson says if such a polacy had been in place when he was a kid he >> would have never been admitted to any university much less gone to graduate >> school and gotten a Phd. >> >> John K Clark >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Jun 4 16:37:09 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 09:37:09 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 9:01 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 9:58 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 10:41 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >> > Is it racism to be more afraid of blacks? I don't think so - not for >>> cops. >> >> >> Is it racism for innocent people to be afraid of white cops? I don't >> think so - not for blacks. >> >> John K Clark >> > > Or whites either. Look at them: military uniform, dark glasses, stern > bearing, aggressive attitude, armed to the teeth - I have met exactly one > officer, a highway patrol man, who did not do the intimidation thing and > talked to me like I was a person. > I guess that's why we're starting to see https://twitter.com/emilymvson/status/1268190940130394112 (with more context toward the end of https://twitter.com/s_Allahverdi/status/1267240521052946432 ). (If you don't want to click: protestor in riot armor & paintball mask. Tosses tear gas canisters back at the cops, but in another clip, thanks them when they arrest someone who was instigating property damage among the protestors.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Thu Jun 4 16:40:06 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 09:40:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <00a001d63a8e$ce560800$6b021800$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character >?The University of California system has permanently banned SAT and ACT test results from being a factor in deciding who will be admitted to their Universities. It's likely many other Universities in the US will follow this lead. They said they did it because standardized testing is racially biased due to the fact that rich white people can hire tutors to help their kids score high on the tests but poor black kids can't?John K Clark This comment doesn?t say if rich black families and poor white families can hire SAT tutors. Ideas? But no worries, we can work this. Instead of academics, we can have classes, clubs and tutors teaching roundedness. If we do however, it is unclear to me how we define ?top? universities. If we de-emphasize academics, how do we know which those are? Do we judge them on their football team? Basketball? Can we create a roundedness tournament? What would the events be? If sports are a measure of roundedness, we can create sports which can be ranked for the most roundedness per unit time invested. We can cluster sports in such a way that instead of having the traditional track and field team, we can have the javelin team, the shot put team, the 100 meter team, the pole vault team and so forth, so that the usual participation level on the track and field team would count as several separate sports teams. We can create clusters of clubs that meet at the same time in the same room, so that attendance counts for each. The student with the most clubs and sports wins! Meanwhile? our local immigrants from India and China are not fooled by any of this silly nonsense. They know what is important. Never letting a profit opportunity go to waste, there is a new local private company down the street which administers the SAT and ACT. It is unclear if the SAT team and the ACT team will count as sports, but we can hope. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Thu Jun 4 16:51:04 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 09:51:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: <00a001d63a8e$ce560800$6b021800$@rainier66.com> References: <00a001d63a8e$ce560800$6b021800$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00c901d63a90$569252e0$03b6f8a0$@rainier66.com> From: spike at rainier66.com Subject: RE: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character >>?The University of California system has permanently banned SAT and ACT test results from being a factor in deciding who will be admitted to their Universities? >?Meanwhile? our local immigrants from India and China are not fooled by any of this silly nonsense. They know what is important. ?spike Below I pasted in a page from the American Mathematics Competition distinguished honor roll. Look at that third column. Please, what do you see there? I am not kidding here, my friends. Do we see what is happening here? Do we care? spike 23.0 Q HU 8 George H. Moody Middle School Henrico, VA 23.0 K HU 7 Pacific Cascade Middle School Issaquah, WA 23.0 A HU 8 river trail middle school johns creek, GA 23.0 H HU 8 SHARON MIDDLE SCHOOL SHARON, MA 23.0 R HU 7 Thomas Hart Middle Pleasanton, CA 23.0 W HUANG 8 FORT SETTLEMENT MS SUGAR LAND, TX 23.0 L HUANG 8 Great Neck South Middle School Great Neck, NY 23.0 J HUANG 8 ST ANNE'S-BELFIELD SCHOOL CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA 23.0 C HUO 7 BERGEN CO ACADEMIES HACKENSACK, NJ 23.0 V INDRAKUMAR 8 Hyde Park Middle School Las Vegas, NV 23.0 S JIANG 8 Goldenlink Academy Markham, ON 23.0 L JIANG 6 HAMDEN HALL COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL HAMDEN, CT 23.0 K JIANG 8 Hopkins Junior High School Fremont, CA 23.0 N JIANG 8 Hopkins Junior High School Fremont, CA 23.0 D JIANG 8 MARIE CURIE MS 158Q BAYSIDE, NY 23.0 A JIANG 8 Schimelpfenig Middle School Plano, TX 23.0 A JIANG 7 Victoria International College North York, ON 23.0 I JO 8 Ephraim Curtis Middle School Sudbury, MA 23.0 I JONES 8 Thomas Russell Middle School Milpitas, CA 23.0 A JUN 8 Quail Valley Middle School Missouri City, TX 23.0 C JUNG 8 Edison Regional Gifted Center Chicago, IL 23.0 S KABBUR 8 AoPS Academy - Bellevue Bellevue, WA 23.0 P KANDI 8 Russian School of Mathematics Plano, TX 23.0 A KIM 8 Eastchester Middle School Eastchester, NY 23.0 E KIM 8 Tenafly Middle School Tenafly, NJ 23.0 M KIM 7 Union middle San Jose, CA 23.0 Y KIM 7 UT Dallas Richardson, TX 23.0 N KOLHE 8 Joaquin Miller middle school san jose, CA 23.0 J KOU 8 West Ridge Middle School Austin, TX 23.0 W KU 8 Overland Trail Middle School Overland Park, KS 23.0 R KUO 5 CHAPARRAL MIDDLE SCHOOL DIAMOND BAR, CA 23.0 S KURETI 0 Harmony School of EXcellence Houston, TX 23.0 D LAI 8 Orange County Math Circle Santa Ana, CA 23.0 R LAW 8 Frank S. Greene Jr. Middle School Palo Alto, CA 23.0 H LE 8 AoPS Academy Johns Creek Suwanee, GA 23.0 E LEE 8 Chaboya Middle School San Jose, CA 23.0 J LEE 6 Spring Branch Academic Institute Houston, TX 23.0 A LEIS 8 Jane Addams MS Seattle, WA 23.0 J LEWIN 7 Kealing Middle School Austin, TX 23.0 R LI 7 BASIS Independent Fremont Fremont, CA 23.0 M LI 7 Debang College Richmond, BC 23.0 E LI 7 Evergreen Middle School Redmond, WA 23.0 K LI 8 HUNTER COLLEGE HS NEW YORK, NY 23.0 M LI 8 Langara College Vancouver, BC 23.0 D LI 7 Saint Georges Junior School Vancouver, BC -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Thu Jun 4 16:53:23 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 09:53:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] riots, was: RE: Is a copy of you really you? Message-ID: Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: snip > This means we are not 1/17th of the way to herd immunity. Most likely we are at least 1/3 there as a country, maybe even 2/3, and NY is almost at herd immunity level now (see their curve of new cases). If the death rate to date stays the same, the US will see another ~200,000 deaths if your 1/3rd number is correct, another ~100,000 if 2/3rds is correct. I don't find either of those numbers comforting, but they are less terrifying than the worst case. snip > It's also useful to remember that between 40 and 80% of C-19 deaths occur in nursing homes. If you are not in a nursing home, your risk is much lower, even if elderly. There are two factors here. First is getting infected which has been high for nursing homes (similar to ships), and second if you do get it, dying. I have not seen this sorted out. Keith From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Jun 4 17:13:18 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 12:13:18 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: <00c901d63a90$569252e0$03b6f8a0$@rainier66.com> References: <00a001d63a8e$ce560800$6b021800$@rainier66.com> <00c901d63a90$569252e0$03b6f8a0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: The results as just exactly what you would expect if two countries each with a billion people send us many of their top people, some of whom become citizens. We are outnumbered by a factor of around 7. And what do these Asians get that we don't, starting in kindergarten? Better math education for sure. ACtually, I think we would expect these results even if their education is no better than ours, solely on the basis of numbers. bill w On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 11:53 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *From:* spike at rainier66.com > *Subject:* RE: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character > > > > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *John Clark via extropy-chat > *Subject:* [ExI] Well-roundedness and character > > > > >>?The University of California system has permanently banned SAT and ACT > test results from being a factor in deciding who will be admitted to their > Universities? > > > > >?Meanwhile? our local immigrants from India and China are not fooled by > any of this silly nonsense. They know what is important. ?spike > > > > > > Below I pasted in a page from the American Mathematics Competition > distinguished honor roll. Look at that third column. Please, what do you > see there? > > > > I am not kidding here, my friends. Do we see what is happening here? Do > we care? > > > > spike > > > > > > 23.0 > > Q > > HU > > 8 > > George H. Moody Middle School > > Henrico, VA > > 23.0 > > K > > HU > > 7 > > Pacific Cascade Middle School > > Issaquah, WA > > 23.0 > > A > > HU > > 8 > > river trail middle school > > johns creek, GA > > 23.0 > > H > > HU > > 8 > > SHARON MIDDLE SCHOOL > > SHARON, MA > > 23.0 > > R > > HU > > 7 > > Thomas Hart Middle > > Pleasanton, CA > > 23.0 > > W > > HUANG > > 8 > > FORT SETTLEMENT MS > > SUGAR LAND, TX > > 23.0 > > L > > HUANG > > 8 > > Great Neck South Middle School > > Great Neck, NY > > 23.0 > > J > > HUANG > > 8 > > ST ANNE'S-BELFIELD SCHOOL > > CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA > > 23.0 > > C > > HUO > > 7 > > BERGEN CO ACADEMIES > > HACKENSACK, NJ > > 23.0 > > V > > INDRAKUMAR > > 8 > > Hyde Park Middle School > > Las Vegas, NV > > 23.0 > > S > > JIANG > > 8 > > Goldenlink Academy > > Markham, ON > > 23.0 > > L > > JIANG > > 6 > > HAMDEN HALL COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL > > HAMDEN, CT > > 23.0 > > K > > JIANG > > 8 > > Hopkins Junior High School > > Fremont, CA > > 23.0 > > N > > JIANG > > 8 > > Hopkins Junior High School > > Fremont, CA > > 23.0 > > D > > JIANG > > 8 > > MARIE CURIE MS 158Q > > BAYSIDE, NY > > 23.0 > > A > > JIANG > > 8 > > Schimelpfenig Middle School > > Plano, TX > > 23.0 > > A > > JIANG > > 7 > > Victoria International College > > North York, ON > > 23.0 > > I > > JO > > 8 > > Ephraim Curtis Middle School > > Sudbury, MA > > 23.0 > > I > > JONES > > 8 > > Thomas Russell Middle School > > Milpitas, CA > > 23.0 > > A > > JUN > > 8 > > Quail Valley Middle School > > Missouri City, TX > > 23.0 > > C > > JUNG > > 8 > > Edison Regional Gifted Center > > Chicago, IL > > 23.0 > > S > > KABBUR > > 8 > > AoPS Academy - Bellevue > > Bellevue, WA > > 23.0 > > P > > KANDI > > 8 > > Russian School of Mathematics > > Plano, TX > > 23.0 > > A > > KIM > > 8 > > Eastchester Middle School > > Eastchester, NY > > 23.0 > > E > > KIM > > 8 > > Tenafly Middle School > > Tenafly, NJ > > 23.0 > > M > > KIM > > 7 > > Union middle > > San Jose, CA > > 23.0 > > Y > > KIM > > 7 > > UT Dallas > > Richardson, TX > > 23.0 > > N > > KOLHE > > 8 > > Joaquin Miller middle school > > san jose, CA > > 23.0 > > J > > KOU > > 8 > > West Ridge Middle School > > Austin, TX > > 23.0 > > W > > KU > > 8 > > Overland Trail Middle School > > Overland Park, KS > > 23.0 > > R > > KUO > > 5 > > CHAPARRAL MIDDLE SCHOOL > > DIAMOND BAR, CA > > 23.0 > > S > > KURETI > > 0 > > Harmony School of EXcellence > > Houston, TX > > 23.0 > > D > > LAI > > 8 > > Orange County Math Circle > > Santa Ana, CA > > 23.0 > > R > > LAW > > 8 > > Frank S. Greene Jr. Middle School > > Palo Alto, CA > > 23.0 > > H > > LE > > 8 > > AoPS Academy Johns Creek > > Suwanee, GA > > 23.0 > > E > > LEE > > 8 > > Chaboya Middle School > > San Jose, CA > > 23.0 > > J > > LEE > > 6 > > Spring Branch Academic Institute > > Houston, TX > > 23.0 > > A > > LEIS > > 8 > > Jane Addams MS > > Seattle, WA > > 23.0 > > J > > LEWIN > > 7 > > Kealing Middle School > > Austin, TX > > 23.0 > > R > > LI > > 7 > > BASIS Independent Fremont > > Fremont, CA > > 23.0 > > M > > LI > > 7 > > Debang College > > Richmond, BC > > 23.0 > > E > > LI > > 7 > > Evergreen Middle School > > Redmond, WA > > 23.0 > > K > > LI > > 8 > > HUNTER COLLEGE HS > > NEW YORK, NY > > 23.0 > > M > > LI > > 8 > > Langara College > > Vancouver, BC > > 23.0 > > D > > LI > > 7 > > Saint Georges Junior School > > Vancouver, BC > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mbb386 at main.nc.us Thu Jun 4 17:23:25 2020 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 13:23:25 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: References: <00a001d63a8e$ce560800$6b021800$@rainier66.com> <00c901d63a90$569252e0$03b6f8a0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <4df8701b8ce233a77288a5d6a563bccb.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> Congrats to Isaac, Spike. :) His hard work is showing. Asimov would be pleased. Regards, MB >> >> 23.0 >> >> I >> >> JONES >> >> 8 >> >> Thomas Russell Middle School >> >> Milpitas, CA >> >> From spike at rainier66.com Thu Jun 4 17:30:23 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 10:30:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: References: <00a001d63a8e$ce560800$6b021800$@rainier66.com> <00c901d63a90$569252e0$03b6f8a0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <000f01d63a95$d47e1860$7d7a4920$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character The results as just exactly what you would expect if two countries each with a billion people send us many of their top people, some of whom become citizens. We are outnumbered by a factor of around 7. And what do these Asians get that we don't, starting in kindergarten? Better math education for sure. ACtually, I think we would expect these results even if their education is no better than ours, solely on the basis of numbers. bill w Hi BillW, ja, there is that of course: we get top-level families from India and China coming to the states and there are a lot of them. But there is something else too: If I scroll down a page, I see this: 23.0 R LI 7 BASIS Independent Fremont Fremont, CA 23.0 M LI 7 Debang College Richmond, BC 23.0 E LI 7 Evergreen Middle School Redmond, WA 23.0 K LI 8 HUNTER COLLEGE HS NEW YORK, NY 23.0 M LI 8 Langara College Vancouver, BC 23.0 D LI 7 Saint Georges Junior School Vancouver, BC 23.0 D LI 8 STANFORD (JANE LATHROP) MIDDLE Palo Alto, CA 23.0 J LI 8 Toronto Harvard Intl Academy Toronto, ON 23.0 T LI 4 Toronto Harvard Intl Academy Toronto, ON 23.0 E LI 8 Treasure Valley Math & Science Center Boise, ID 23.0 J LICEN 8 TAKOMA PARK MS SILVER SPRING, MD 23.0 M LIEN 8 WARREN E HYDE MIDDLE SCHOOL CUPERTINO, CA 23.0 E LIN 8 IS 187 - Christa McAuliffe Brooklyn, NY 23.0 Y LIU 5 DANBURY MATH ACADEMY, WCSU Danbury, CT 23.0 K LIU 8 Daniel Wright Junior High Lincolnshire, IL 23.0 J LIU 5 Debang College Richmond, BC 23.0 J LIU 8 harvest park middle school pleasanton, CA 23.0 R LIU 8 Joaquin Miller middle school san jose, CA 23.0 Y LIU 6 Langara College Vancouver, BC 23.0 P LIU 6 Odle Middle School Bellevue, WA 23.0 Z LIU 8 Plum Grove Junior High Rolling Meadows, IL 23.0 K LIU 8 Princeton Academy Princeton, NJ 23.0 J LIU 8 RSM - Newton Newton, MA 23.0 L LIU 8 University of Chicago Lab School Chicago, IL 23.0 V LOH 8 Winchester Thurston School Pittsburgh, PA 23.0 J LU 8 Daniel Wright Junior High Lincolnshire, IL 23.0 M LU 8 Stonybrook University, Department of Mathematics Stony Brook, NY 23.0 A LU 6 TAKOMA PARK MS SILVER SPRING, MD 23.0 V LUU 7 Orange County Math Circle Santa Ana, CA 23.0 A MA 8 Arizona College Prep Junior High Chandler, AZ 23.0 S MA 8 Deerlake Middle Tallahassee, FL 23.0 J MA 7 Schimelpfenig Middle School Plano, TX 23.0 R MADHUKER 8 Carnage Middle School Raleigh, NC 23.0 O MAHESH 8 Ellen Fletcher MS palo alto, CA 23.0 C MAHESHWARI 8 Harmony School of EXcellence Houston, TX 23.0 A MALLANNA 7 William Diamond Middle School Lexington, MA 23.0 S MAO 5 Argonault Elementary School Saratoga, CA 23.0 S MAO 7 Redwood Middle saratoga, CA 23.0 R MARRI 8 Falcon Cove Middle Weston, FL 23.0 N MATHIHALLI 8 Redwood Middle saratoga, CA Not only is there fewer than one seventh traditional European-sounding names, on most pages there are none. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Thu Jun 4 18:20:36 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 11:20:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: <4df8701b8ce233a77288a5d6a563bccb.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> References: <00a001d63a8e$ce560800$6b021800$@rainier66.com> <00c901d63a90$569252e0$03b6f8a0$@rainier66.com> <4df8701b8ce233a77288a5d6a563bccb.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> Message-ID: <002901d63a9c$d8f8c6e0$8aea54a0$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- > On Behalf Of MB via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character >...Congrats to Isaac, Spike. :) His hard work is showing. Asimov would be pleased. Regards, MB Thanks MB, and thanks also for referencing Asimov. He is the writer I would say influenced me more than any other, but not from his SciFi (which I found suffered in comparison to others of his age (but rather from his many works of non-fiction (specifically the essay collections.))) I feel like I should be doing something, but I have no contacts in academia. I showed him my differential equations book from college, a subject over which I sweated bullets after three years of college math, including the calculus series. He is tearing through that like a hot chainsaw thru butter. So I scanned and archived the pages of his notebook, to show that yea verily, there are talented 8th graders who can get this stuff. MB, I will post a link offlist. Any suggestions welcome. What should I be doing? spike From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Jun 4 18:47:39 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 13:47:39 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: <002901d63a9c$d8f8c6e0$8aea54a0$@rainier66.com> References: <00a001d63a8e$ce560800$6b021800$@rainier66.com> <00c901d63a90$569252e0$03b6f8a0$@rainier66.com> <4df8701b8ce233a77288a5d6a563bccb.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <002901d63a9c$d8f8c6e0$8aea54a0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: What should I be doing? spike You should be recommending an essay collection of Asimov's. Conservative? Liberal? Mixed? Mostly political? Mostly not? Thanks! bill w On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 1:23 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > > > On Behalf Of MB via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character > > >...Congrats to Isaac, Spike. :) His hard work is showing. Asimov would > be > pleased. > > Regards, > MB > > > > Thanks MB, and thanks also for referencing Asimov. He is the writer I > would > say influenced me more than any other, but not from his SciFi (which I > found > suffered in comparison to others of his age (but rather from his many works > of non-fiction (specifically the essay collections.))) > > I feel like I should be doing something, but I have no contacts in > academia. > I showed him my differential equations book from college, a subject over > which I sweated bullets after three years of college math, including the > calculus series. He is tearing through that like a hot chainsaw thru > butter. So I scanned and archived the pages of his notebook, to show that > yea verily, there are talented 8th graders who can get this stuff. MB, I > will post a link offlist. > > Any suggestions welcome. What should I be doing? > > spike > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Thu Jun 4 18:54:24 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 11:54:24 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Asimov was a progressive overall and supported Democratic Party candidates. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst > On Jun 4, 2020, at 11:50 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > ? > What should I be doing? > > spike > You should be recommending an essay collection of Asimov's. Conservative? Liberal? Mixed? Mostly political? Mostly not? Thanks! bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Thu Jun 4 19:05:45 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 12:05:45 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: References: <00a001d63a8e$ce560800$6b021800$@rainier66.com> <00c901d63a90$569252e0$03b6f8a0$@rainier66.com> <4df8701b8ce233a77288a5d6a563bccb.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <002901d63a9c$d8f8c6e0$8aea54a0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <003b01d63aa3$27480580$75d81080$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character What should I be doing? spike You should be recommending an essay collection of Asimov's. Conservative? Liberal? Mixed? Mostly political? Mostly not? Thanks! bill w Hi BillW, ja those essays are excellent. I don?t recall any of them on the topic of politics, so I can?t answer your question. Here?s a list of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Essay_collections_by_Isaac_Asimov I read every one. Typically they would come out every two years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adding_a_Dimension spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hibbard at wisc.edu Thu Jun 4 19:51:28 2020 From: hibbard at wisc.edu (Bill Hibbard) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 14:51:28 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character Message-ID: Spike wrote: > I showed him my differential equations book from college, a subject over > which I sweated bullets after three years of college math, including the > calculus series. He is tearing through that like a hot chainsaw thru > butter. So I scanned and archived the pages of his notebook, to show > that yea verily, there are talented 8th graders who can get this stuff. Brings back memories. In 1962 I nearly flunked 8th grade spelling (got an "E", do they give E's anymore?) but my spelling notebook was filled with calculus, learned from my dad's Granville Smith and Longley. My 7th grade math teacher, whose principal subject was shop, routed me to low-track math for 8th grade. Fun times! Best wishes to you and Isaac! Regarding the U of C dropping SAT and ACT, the son of a friend skipped school every day in high school, skipped college altogether, and is now a very successful computer programmer. And I believe that Eliezer Yudkowsky skipped college but has been very effecive. From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Jun 4 21:16:27 2020 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 17:16:27 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Human Challenge Trials In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 4, 2020, 9:22 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 8:38 AM Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > *> Maybe there is a drug that "helps" but given the overplayed hand of >> pharma, I'm going to remain skeptical of any single pill or miracle cure. * >> > > I don't understand your point. Why not a miracle cure against COVID-19? > We've had a "miracle cure", aka a vaccine, against Smallpox for centuries > and today we have additional "miracle cures" against Polio, Diphtheria, > Measles, Mumps, Shingles, Tetanus, Chickenpox, Cholera and dozens of other > deadly diseases, and those vaccines have saved the lives of BILLIONS of > people over the years. So why not a vaccine against COVID-19 too? > Vaccine is not a miracle cure. I was refering to early blather that hydroxychloroquine would prevent covid despite no real testing... would be a miracle. Like snake oil is a miracle. I never understood why anyone ever needed to oil a snake, but maybe they dry - I'm no herpetologist I wouldn't call anything we understand a "miracle" I don't want to inject anything i don't understand. Even with understanding the how/why of vaccines in general, i don't trust the same government that is murdering people for having the wrong skin color to be injecting billions of lowest-bid supplies of version 1 cocktails. I'll admit to being a jittery paranoid monkey. I think that trait served my ancestors well enough that I exist, so I'll keep it as a feature instead of a defect. > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Thu Jun 4 23:43:47 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 16:43:47 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: <000f01d63a95$d47e1860$7d7a4920$@rainier66.com> References: <00a001d63a8e$ce560800$6b021800$@rainier66.com> <00c901d63a90$569252e0$03b6f8a0$@rainier66.com> <000f01d63a95$d47e1860$7d7a4920$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <004901d63ac9$fe34d0c0$fa9e7240$@rainier66.com> From: spike at rainier66.com >?Not only is there fewer than one seventh traditional European-sounding names, on most pages there are none?spike Math competitions are objective: there is only one right answer. There is no way to bullshit your way through a math test or a physics test. The machine which scores the test doesn?t know or care whose answer sheet it is. Universities are trending toward de-emphasizing objective metrics for admissions. Otherwise, their campus would be almost entirely Asian. Some schools find this unacceptable, so they look for ways around it. Conclusion: de-emphasizing objective metrics of academic prowess is a way to express racism. spike 23.0 R LI 7 BASIS Independent Fremont Fremont, CA 23.0 M LI 7 Debang College Richmond, BC 23.0 E LI 7 Evergreen Middle School Redmond, WA 23.0 K LI 8 HUNTER COLLEGE HS NEW YORK, NY 23.0 M LI 8 Langara College Vancouver, BC 23.0 D LI 7 Saint Georges Junior School Vancouver, BC 23.0 D LI 8 STANFORD (JANE LATHROP) MIDDLE Palo Alto, CA 23.0 J LI 8 Toronto Harvard Intl Academy Toronto, ON 23.0 T LI 4 Toronto Harvard Intl Academy Toronto, ON 23.0 E LI 8 Treasure Valley Math & Science Center Boise, ID 23.0 J LICEN 8 TAKOMA PARK MS SILVER SPRING, MD 23.0 M LIEN 8 WARREN E HYDE MIDDLE SCHOOL CUPERTINO, CA 23.0 E LIN 8 IS 187 - Christa McAuliffe Brooklyn, NY 23.0 Y LIU 5 DANBURY MATH ACADEMY, WCSU Danbury, CT 23.0 K LIU 8 Daniel Wright Junior High Lincolnshire, IL 23.0 J LIU 5 Debang College Richmond, BC 23.0 J LIU 8 harvest park middle school pleasanton, CA 23.0 R LIU 8 Joaquin Miller middle school san jose, CA 23.0 Y LIU 6 Langara College Vancouver, BC 23.0 P LIU 6 Odle Middle School Bellevue, WA 23.0 Z LIU 8 Plum Grove Junior High Rolling Meadows, IL 23.0 K LIU 8 Princeton Academy Princeton, NJ 23.0 J LIU 8 RSM - Newton Newton, MA 23.0 L LIU 8 University of Chicago Lab School Chicago, IL 23.0 V LOH 8 Winchester Thurston School Pittsburgh, PA 23.0 J LU 8 Daniel Wright Junior High Lincolnshire, IL 23.0 M LU 8 Stonybrook University, Dept of Math Stony Brook, NY 23.0 A LU 6 TAKOMA PARK MS SILVER SPRING, MD 23.0 V LUU 7 Orange County Math Circle Santa Ana, CA 23.0 A MA 8 Arizona College Prep Junior High Chandler, AZ 23.0 S MA 8 Deerlake Middle Tallahassee, FL 23.0 J MA 7 Schimelpfenig Middle School Plano, TX 23.0 R MADHUKER 8 Carnage Middle School Raleigh, NC 23.0 O MAHESH 8 Ellen Fletcher MS palo alto, CA 23.0 C MAHESHWARI 8 Harmony School of EXcellence Houston, TX 23.0 A MALLANNA 7 William Diamond Middle School Lexington, MA 23.0 S MAO 5 Argonault Elementary School Saratoga, CA 23.0 S MAO 7 Redwood Middle saratoga, CA 23.0 R MARRI 8 Falcon Cove Middle Weston, FL 23.0 N MATHIHALLI 8 Redwood Middle saratoga, CA -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 00:25:25 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 17:25:25 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> On Jun 4, 2020, at 7:47 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > Remember him? He is famous for saying that the big strong black men you see in the NFL came from slaveowners using their biggest, strongest slave to impregnate all the women so as to have the biggest strongest babies. We never heard from him again. > > Some blacks said that was not racism - that was just the truth, like it or not. So anyhow, we do have a lot of those men. So what? > > So police are afraid of them. Police have fears just like anyone else. The cop who stopped your car for speeding takes his life in his hands when he does so, and he knows that. > > So add black man to the description of the person you the cop are trying to arrest and you have a double fear situation. > > Is it racism to be more afraid of blacks? I don't think so - not for cops. > > Of course that excuses nothing, but it does help explain why more force is used on blacks than on others. > > Excellent article in my paper today about demilitarizing cops and their equipment, training cops, requiring body cameras, requiring liability insurance for cops, and ending qualified immunity (already discussed in Congress). Let's add 'protect and serve' and get away from 'shock and awe'. > > Requiring reporting of wrong behavior by fellow cops should happen, but that won't happen, I think. > > bill w A few years ago, there was a study that seemed to show this is the perception but not the reality. In other words, darker-skinned people were perceived by US-Americans as being bigger, stronger, and scarier. To me, that seems more a result of racism permeating the culture -- that most people in the US have ?breathed in? these views to the point that this becomes second nature. It doesn't mean it's the reality. In the same way, many US-Americans think if someone is an immigrant, they're more likely to be a criminal. Stats show exactly the opposite: lower levels of criminal behavior among immigrants, documented or undocumented, than among non-immigrants. But the perception is there and should be combated by reasonable people rather than embraced. This applies to cops too. Maybe they have the perception that their job is dangerous, but their job is far less dangerous than many others and people interacting with the police are far more likely to come to serious harm, even to be killed, than vice versa. Last year (02019), 89 cops died ?in the line of duty.? But cops killed approximately 1100 people during that same year! A ratio of more than an order of magnitude in the opposite direction of the perception. Again, I bring up abolishing the police. It should always be on the table, IMO. Regards, Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 00:27:21 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 17:27:21 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <98BF1FB0-482F-4795-9FC1-71B4486BBA74@gmail.com> On Jun 4, 2020, at 7:56 AM, John Clark via extropy-chat wrote:? > > The University of California system has permanently banned SAT and ACT test results from being a factor in deciding who will be admitted to their Universities. It's likely many other Universities in the US will follow this lead. They said they did it because standardized testing is racially biased due to the fact that rich white people can hire tutors to help their kids score high on the tests but poor black kids can't. So from now on admission will be based on subjective qualities like "well-roundedness" and "character". Apparently the ability to kick a ball on a field or play water polo in a pool or row a boat in a river shows great well-roundedness and character. > > I agree with Quantum Computer expert Scott Aaronson when he said: > > "As a result, admissions to the top US universities?and hence, most chances for social advancement in the US?will henceforth be based entirely on shifting and nebulous criteria that rich, well-connected kids and their parents spend most of their lives figuring out, rather than merely mostly based on such criteria. The last side door for smart nonconformist kids is now being slammed shut." > > Aaronson says if such a polacy had been in place when he was a kid he would have never been admitted to any university much less gone to graduate school and gotten a Phd. Regarding higher education, isn't there already a baked in unfairness in that the poorer members of the tax base pay for basically upper middle class kids to go to these schools? I mean it's sort of like a light rail system. Sure, poor people can pay the fare, but it's mainly built for upper middle class people and generally goes to and from where they want to go. Buses would be much cheaper than a light rail, but then that would serve the poorer members of society better -- and the poor, generally, don't organize and vote, aren't much of a threat to the elite. (Any elite to stay on top have to recognize the biggest threat are those who can and do organize and are likely to oust them. So the prizes are there to offset these threats. I'm not saying this is always a conscious policy. It's more Darwinian: elites that don't disrupt or co-opt internal threats will be replaced sooner or later.) Regards, Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 05:52:24 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 01:52:24 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: <004901d63ac9$fe34d0c0$fa9e7240$@rainier66.com> References: <00a001d63a8e$ce560800$6b021800$@rainier66.com> <00c901d63a90$569252e0$03b6f8a0$@rainier66.com> <000f01d63a95$d47e1860$7d7a4920$@rainier66.com> <004901d63ac9$fe34d0c0$fa9e7240$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 7:46 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > Universities are trending toward de-emphasizing objective metrics for > admissions. Otherwise, their campus would be almost entirely Asian. Some > schools find this unacceptable, so they look for ways around it. > ### This is a topic of some interest to me, sincy my daughter who was born last week is half-Polish and half-Han. I had to answer questions about the race of her parents on the birth certificate and I filled her father's race as "Other" (Polish). Her mother wrote "Asian". In retrospect this was not the best approach. We could have both filled "Other" (Unknown). I am thinking about identifying as African-American, or maybe Latino. After all, if your gender is nowadays not determined by your sex chromosomes or your genitals but by how you identify, then race, which on good authority does not objectively exist and is a social construct, should be also open to individual interpretation. We have Ms Dolezal, genetically Czech but very black with the help of some heavy-duty tan cream and hair-curlers, so why not? Getting a 200 to 400 point boost on admission to an Ivy is definitely worth it. I'll start filling out all forms asking for race with "Other", "Unknown" for now but then let the events guide further interpretations. You never know if Oceania would continue to be at war with Eastasia forever, so flexibility may be very useful. I am reasonably confident though that filling in "Other" (American) would be seen as very suspect, possibly seditious and altogether racist. Failing to mention race every five minutes is the loudest dog-whistle we have for racists, as we all know, so saying you are American would be the death-knell for one's chances of success in our society. I'll get some tanning cream and give it a try. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 06:06:46 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 02:06:46 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 8:27 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > Again, I bring up abolishing the police. It should always be on the table, > IMO. > > > ### This is a brilliant idea and I entirely support it. No, seriously! Then I would be able to hire Al's Protection Racket, who come recommended by Vernor Vinge, or the Red Hand, recommended by John Varley, and I would feel much safer. The Red Hand are no slouches - nobody messes with the Red Hand! (Extra points for identifying the books!) Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 06:29:14 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 02:29:14 -0400 Subject: [ExI] riots, was: RE: Is a copy of you really you? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 1:06 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > There are two factors here. First is getting infected which has been > high for nursing homes (similar to ships), and second if you do get > it, dying. I have not seen this sorted out. ### Being in a nursing home is indeed a double whammy. First, most residents are there because they are much sicker at baseline than age-matched controls and therefore are hit harder if infected. And second, nursing aides who change your diapers tend to smear all manner of infectious agents on the butts of multiple residents per day, so if you infect one, you infect all - this is only a minor exaggeration. Failure to strictly quarantine nursing homes probably increased Chicom-19 mortality by tens of thousands in the US (and closing schools failed to save a single life, but that's a different story). If I get less lazy, I'll put together my interim C-19 summary and literature review in a post soon. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 5 12:31:40 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 05:31:40 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> Message-ID: <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 8:27 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > wrote: Again, I bring up abolishing the police. It should always be on the table, IMO. There ya go, Dan. That notion should put to bed any remaining suggestion that Americans do not need to own a gun. Even the possibility that an entire police force could just get pissed and walk off the job (as they did in St. Louis this week) should be a clear unambiguous reminder that a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. If we abolish the police, we also abolish all gun control laws, all of them. Without a professional police force, we all need to have and to carry guns. We have the opportunity to educate our society on the meaning of the phrase ??shall not be infringed.? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 5 12:53:10 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 05:53:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: References: <00a001d63a8e$ce560800$6b021800$@rainier66.com> <00c901d63a90$569252e0$03b6f8a0$@rainier66.com> <000f01d63a95$d47e1860$7d7a4920$@rainier66.com> <004901d63ac9$fe34d0c0$fa9e7240$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <004f01d63b38$44e14670$cea3d350$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 7:46 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: Universities are trending toward de-emphasizing objective metrics for admissions. Otherwise, their campus would be almost entirely Asian. Some schools find this unacceptable, so they look for ways around it. ### This is a topic of some interest to me, sincy my daughter who was born last week is half-Polish and half-Han? Rafal! Best wishes to you and your bride with that baby. I am very happy for you sir. >? I am thinking about identifying as African-American ?I'll get some tanning cream and give it a try. Rafal >From what I can tell, we are free to choose our race but not to alter our appearance. Of all oddball things for a society to decide is the apex cardinal sin, it turns out to be darkening one?s skin. Some of us have the DNA to prove our recent African ancestry, but I have determined to never use that for any kind of advancement purpose, anything other than an amusing bit of scientific self-knowledge. When I received my results from Ancestry.com and 23&Me (both tests indicated the 3% African) one of my black 4th cousins did the hard work of tracing it back. Her cousins (not related to me) were intrigued by seeing a white guy in their cousin?s DNA matches list (but not their own.) Long story short, it had kind of a bitter outcome: we discovered that my 4th cousin and I are directly descended from a former slave, but that her black cousins are not (their ancestors immigrated from Africa after slavery was abolished.) To avoid such heartbreak, I recommend not doing those nifty 60 dollar DNA tests from Ancestry.com. Stop thinking about doing a DNA test. Stop that, I say! You are thinking of DNA tests right now, ja? Stop! Don?t think about DNA tests at all, I implore you, don?t think about it at all. But if you decide otherwise, feel free to post me offlist and I will show you some cool stuff you can do with interpreting the results, as well as how to do that while maintaining anonymity. That last bit is important because I discovered that one of the DNA majors left the HTML of their results page accessible to those you invite. Details available on request. Now stop thinking about doing that nifty 60 dollar DNA test! spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 13:11:09 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 08:11:09 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Some of you want no taxes, some no police, some no government at all (does that mean no laws at all?), but not one of you has offered a single answer to how things would work without them. bill w On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 7:34 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 8:27 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > Again, I bring up abolishing the police. It should always be on the table, > IMO. > > > > There ya go, Dan. That notion should put to bed any remaining suggestion > that Americans do not need to own a gun. Even the possibility that an > entire police force could just get pissed and walk off the job (as they did > in St. Louis this week) should be a clear unambiguous reminder that a > well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. > > > > If we abolish the police, we also abolish all gun control laws, all of > them. Without a professional police force, we all need to have and to > carry guns. > > > > We have the opportunity to educate our society on the meaning of the > phrase ??shall not be infringed.? > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 5 13:54:38 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 06:54:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <007b01d63b40$db76f3c0$9264db40$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder Some of you want no taxes, some no police, some no government at all (does that mean no laws at all?), but not one of you has offered a single answer to how things would work without them. bill w BillW, to clarify: I am not in favor of abolishing police. I believe in government, strictly controlled. I am an archist perhaps more archist than most. I oppose the notion of abolishing police, but we must face the possibility that some police forces may be abolished by consensus and some may be abolished by a collective failure of city governments, some may be abolished by the police union walking off the job because the rioters they arrested yesterday are all back out there with revenge on their minds. Result: Americans need to have guns, in any of these scenarios. How things would work without a police force: badly. spike On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 7:34 AM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 8:27 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > wrote: Again, I bring up abolishing the police. It should always be on the table, IMO. There ya go, Dan. That notion should put to bed any remaining suggestion that Americans do not need to own a gun. Even the possibility that an entire police force could just get pissed and walk off the job (as they did in St. Louis this week) should be a clear unambiguous reminder that a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. If we abolish the police, we also abolish all gun control laws, all of them. Without a professional police force, we all need to have and to carry guns. We have the opportunity to educate our society on the meaning of the phrase ??shall not be infringed.? spike _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 15:04:59 2020 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 11:04:59 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 9:14 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Some of you want no taxes, some no police, some no government at all (does > that mean no laws at all?), but not one of you has offered a single answer > to how things would work without them. > No taxes: other forms or revenue, cutting spending No police: private security No government: I don't know; I'm more of a minarchist There's plenty of literature covering these topics. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From steinberg.will at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 16:22:11 2020 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 12:22:11 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: No police is a horrible idea just because the alternative is protection rackets as Rafal mentioned. Good way for security forces to become WAY more militarized (competition) while also becoming basically the mafia. In fact I'm sure a lot of private protection squads would be LITERALLY run by organized crime. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 5 16:39:06 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 09:39:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00fb01d63b57$d5097a50$7f1c6ef0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Will Steinberg via extropy-chat Sent: Friday, June 5, 2020 9:22 AM To: ExI chat list Cc: Will Steinberg Subject: Re: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder >?No police is a horrible idea just because the alternative is protection rackets as Rafal mentioned. Good way for security forces to become WAY more militarized (competition) while also becoming basically the mafia. In fact I'm sure a lot of private protection squads would be LITERALLY run by organized crime? Agreed Will. Among legitimate protestors are those who are there for the loot and those who promote the idea of disbanding police forces in order to establish protection rackets. The protestors would benefit if they could identify those in their ranks who are the latter two categories and hand them over. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 5 17:17:55 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 10:17:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Will Steinberg via extropy-chat ubject: Re: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder >?No police is a horrible idea just because the alternative is protection rackets as Rafal mentioned. Good way for security forces to become WAY more militarized (competition) while also becoming basically the mafia. In fact I'm sure a lot of private protection squads would be LITERALLY run by organized crime? Will Since the start of the quarantine, I have been pondering the fact that we have built up cities with a population density high enough to make street traffic mostly impractical, social distancing nearly impossible and causing the proletariat to rely on mass transit, which we already know is inherently dangerous. For safety reasons, that level of population density must come down. We don?t know how exactly. The biggest rioting is coming from those areas where population density is the highest. The loudest calls to disband the police force is coming from those dense areas. Suppose the local constabulary decides nearly unanimously that law enforcement is too dangerous as a way to make a living. Or city governments decide to disband the force. In that scenario, the really dense cities will likely start to empty out. Living there or even working there has become too risky. I predict that peak population density has passed, and peak motive to live or work in a high density area has passed. Can anyone suggest a reason why either prediction is wrong? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 17:34:33 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 10:34:33 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 10:21 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Since the start of the quarantine, I have been pondering the fact that we > have built up cities with a population density high enough to make street > traffic mostly impractical, social distancing nearly impossible and causing > the proletariat to rely on mass transit, which we already know is > inherently dangerous. > > > > For safety reasons, that level of population density must come down. We > don?t know how exactly. > Contrasting that is the fact that certain services - including ones we have come to depend on, such as schools and hospitals - are only practical with certain minimum population densities, and become more efficient - better able to serve more people on the same budget - with higher population densities. Pandemics like this, and other such density-magnified traumas - are a tiny minority of our time. This might seem ludicrous right now, while we are in the middle of this pandemic, but take an honest look back at the past 100 or 200 years, considering how much of the time we are not thus afflicted, and you will see that it is true. Further, solutions to density-magnified traumas can be developed. We collectively dropped the ball on this one. Famously, Bill Gates saw it coming and tried to develop solutions - but even his resources were not enough on their own. But let's say that this coronavirus is largely beat by this time next year, and a repeat will come in 10 years. Do you think that we will be as unprepared then as we were when this one struck? Do you think that our response next time will be as severe, or any less effective for being less severe but better directed? Likewise, every single danger of mass transit can be mitigated - if resources are put toward mitigating them, which resources can be either freed up by or generated from the increased population density. (Although, ironically, one of the mitigations is to douse the BS that all jobs must be done on site, that most workers can not be trusted to work from home. There are some jobs that must be done in person, but there was already a wide recognition that many jobs done in the office could have been done from home if only bosses would allow it. Well, today many bosses are forced to allow it, and inertia may make that an industry standard, lowering the fraction of the workforce that needs mass or private transit to and from an office.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 17:40:38 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 12:40:38 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: If a boss does not know how long a job should take a person working from home, then they need to be retrained or fired. bill w On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 12:36 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 10:21 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> Since the start of the quarantine, I have been pondering the fact that we >> have built up cities with a population density high enough to make street >> traffic mostly impractical, social distancing nearly impossible and causing >> the proletariat to rely on mass transit, which we already know is >> inherently dangerous. >> >> >> >> For safety reasons, that level of population density must come down. We >> don?t know how exactly. >> > > Contrasting that is the fact that certain services - including ones we > have come to depend on, such as schools and hospitals - are only practical > with certain minimum population densities, and become more efficient - > better able to serve more people on the same budget - with higher > population densities. > > Pandemics like this, and other such density-magnified traumas - are a tiny > minority of our time. This might seem ludicrous right now, while we are in > the middle of this pandemic, but take an honest look back at the past 100 > or 200 years, considering how much of the time we are not thus afflicted, > and you will see that it is true. > > Further, solutions to density-magnified traumas can be developed. We > collectively dropped the ball on this one. Famously, Bill Gates saw it > coming and tried to develop solutions - but even his resources were not > enough on their own. But let's say that this coronavirus is largely beat > by this time next year, and a repeat will come in 10 years. Do you think > that we will be as unprepared then as we were when this one struck? Do you > think that our response next time will be as severe, or any less effective > for being less severe but better directed? > > Likewise, every single danger of mass transit can be mitigated - if > resources are put toward mitigating them, which resources can be either > freed up by or generated from the increased population density. (Although, > ironically, one of the mitigations is to douse the BS that all jobs must be > done on site, that most workers can not be trusted to work from home. > There are some jobs that must be done in person, but there was already a > wide recognition that many jobs done in the office could have been done > from home if only bosses would allow it. Well, today many bosses are > forced to allow it, and inertia may make that an industry standard, > lowering the fraction of the workforce that needs mass or private transit > to and from an office.) > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 5 17:56:58 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 10:56:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <001901d63b62$b63e2c50$22ba84f0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 10:21 AM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: >>?Since the start of the quarantine, I have been pondering the fact that we have built up cities with a population density high enough to make street traffic mostly impractical, social distancing nearly impossible and causing the proletariat to rely on mass transit, which we already know is inherently dangerous. For safety reasons, that level of population density must come down. We don?t know how exactly. >?Contrasting that is the fact that certain services - including ones we have come to depend on, such as schools and hospitals - are only practical with certain minimum population densities, and become more efficient - better able to serve more people on the same budget - with higher population densities?.Well, today many bosses are forced to allow it, and inertia may make that an industry standard, lowering the fraction of the workforce that needs mass or private transit to and from an office.) Well stated, Adrian. I agree with all. In the meantime, I am still thinking about a means of isolating people aboard mass transit, using something analogous to an electric wheelchair device with a plastic clamshell barrier around it. The passenger just gets in, the chair rolls onto the train, rolls back off, goes to the office, without further instruction from the sleeping prole within. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robot at ultimax.com Fri Jun 5 17:44:59 2020 From: robot at ultimax.com (robot at ultimax.com) Date: Fri, 05 Jun 2020 13:44:59 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <05a0a51941c2ccd2857a189866b1f1df@ultimax.com> 1. /Marooned in Realtime/, (1992). Changed my worldview. 2. Sounds like /The Ophiuchi Hotline/, but there are quite a few other stories from that common setting, too. Btw, the Sicilian mafia did start out as a self-protection organization, a hybrid of grass-roots militia and vigilantes, when Sicily was invaded by Crusaders. After that, they experienced what might be called "mission creep" or "loss of focus". Like all human organizations, they were not immune from the Iron Laws of Bureaucracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_iron_law_of_bureaucracy a special case derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy K3 On 2020-06-05 12:39, extropy-chat-request at lists.extropy.org wrote: > Message: 4 > Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 02:06:46 -0400 > From: Rafal Smigrodzki > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder > > On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 8:27 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >> Again, I bring up abolishing the police. It should always be on the >> table, >> IMO. > ### This is a brilliant idea and I entirely support it. No, seriously! > > Then I would be able to hire Al's Protection Racket, who come > recommended > by Vernor Vinge, or the Red Hand, recommended by John Varley, and I > would > feel much safer. The Red Hand are no slouches - nobody messes with the > Red > Hand! > > (Extra points for identifying the books!) . ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ From interzone at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 18:03:24 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 14:03:24 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <001901d63b62$b63e2c50$22ba84f0$@rainier66.com> References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> <001901d63b62$b63e2c50$22ba84f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: The problem with any of these solutions for social distancing on mass transit is they SEVERELY reduce the number of passengers per car which is unsustainable from both a revenue generating perspective and a practical one. I saw the Phillipines had kitted out a demo car to enforce proper spacing, and it reduced the passenger limit by an order of magnitude from 1600 to around 160. On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 1:58 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder > > > > On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 10:21 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > >>?Since the start of the quarantine, I have been pondering the fact that > we have built up cities with a population density high enough to make > street traffic mostly impractical, social distancing nearly impossible and > causing the proletariat to rely on mass transit, which we already know is > inherently dangerous. > > For safety reasons, that level of population density must come down. We > don?t know how exactly. > > > > >?Contrasting that is the fact that certain services - including ones we > have come to depend on, such as schools and hospitals - are only practical > with certain minimum population densities, and become more efficient - > better able to serve more people on the same budget - with higher > population densities?.Well, today many bosses are forced to allow it, and > inertia may make that an industry standard, lowering the fraction of the > workforce that needs mass or private transit to and from an office.) > > > > > > Well stated, Adrian. I agree with all. > > > > In the meantime, I am still thinking about a means of isolating people > aboard mass transit, using something analogous to an electric wheelchair > device with a plastic clamshell barrier around it. The passenger just gets > in, the chair rolls onto the train, rolls back off, goes to the office, > without further instruction from the sleeping prole within. > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 18:20:17 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 11:20:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 10:48 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > If a boss does not know how long a job should take a person working from > home, then they need to be retrained or fired. > Yes, but who's going to do that retraining or firing? Usually someone else with even less idea, thus they never commit to that retraining or firing in order to preserve their own illusion of competence. Thus it took an outside force, such as the coronavirus epidemic, to force this change in far too many institutions. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lubkin at unreasonable.com Fri Jun 5 18:20:16 2020 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Fri, 05 Jun 2020 14:20:16 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: <004f01d63b38$44e14670$cea3d350$@rainier66.com> References: <00a001d63a8e$ce560800$6b021800$@rainier66.com> <00c901d63a90$569252e0$03b6f8a0$@rainier66.com> <000f01d63a95$d47e1860$7d7a4920$@rainier66.com> <004901d63ac9$fe34d0c0$fa9e7240$@rainier66.com> <004f01d63b38$44e14670$cea3d350$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <202006051821.055IL7oD020890@athena.zia.io> Spike wrote: > From what I can tell, we are free to choose our race but not to > alter our appearance. Of all oddball things for a society to > decide is the apex cardinal sin, it turns out to be darkening one's > skin. Some of us have the DNA to prove our recent African > ancestry, but I have determined to never use that for any kind of > advancement purpose, anything other than an amusing bit of > scientific self-knowledge. My mother's Austro-Hungarian Jewish father was a portrait photographer in West Philly. He was not prejudiced and needed to earn a living. So he had black customers but was simultaneously attune to the sensibilities of the day. She remembers he had her brother deliver wedding photos to a black family in the Forties, to avoid his less-tolerant neighbors starting talking if they'd come by to pick them up. But the family thanked him for the sensitivity of having them delivered by "one of our kind." My uncle had curly black hair and dark skin; he was often mistaken for "mulatto." Most of us have his curly hair; I assume the darker shade came from Hungarian Jewish. Two of my cousins have his coloration. I doubt they ever relied on it to pass for a "person of color" but no one would doubt that claim if they made it. I'm curious if my uncle was ever stopped for DWB or was refused admission to somewhere designated whites-only. And, if so, what transpired. My guess is it's likelier someone mistook him for "eye-talian" instead, a lesser stigma than either being Jewish or black. -- David. From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 5 18:33:17 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 11:33:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> <001901d63b62$b63e2c50$22ba84f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <001601d63b67$c845dba0$58d192e0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder >?The problem with any of these solutions for social distancing on mass transit is they SEVERELY reduce the number of passengers per car which is unsustainable from both a revenue generating perspective and a practical one. I saw the Phillipines had kitted out a demo car to enforce proper spacing, and it reduced the passenger limit by an order of magnitude from 1600 to around 160? Dylan Ja. Dylan, my concern is that even with a tenth the capacity, a subway car is still dangerous. Homeless people will still use them as a rolling bedroom, around the clock, and it is still an enclosed space. Criminals can still use them to victimize people, a problem which might be even worse with lower passenger counts. Is there any way to compensate by increasing the number of cars? Do those rigs need human operators? If not, could we have a deal where there are 5 to 10 times as many trains, get as many roller-eggs in there as possible by taking out the seats and the grab-on poles (are those things structural elements? (Ashamed of me for not knowing that (I don?t ride them (I don?t like big cities (oy vey, mercy.)))) spike On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 1:58 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: > On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 10:21 AM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: >>?Since the start of the quarantine, I have been pondering the fact that we have built up cities with a population density high enough to make street traffic mostly impractical, social distancing nearly impossible and causing the proletariat to rely on mass transit, which we already know is inherently dangerous. For safety reasons, that level of population density must come down. We don?t know how exactly. >?Contrasting that is the fact that certain services - including ones we have come to depend on, such as schools and hospitals - are only practical with certain minimum population densities, and become more efficient - better able to serve more people on the same budget - with higher population densities?.Well, today many bosses are forced to allow it, and inertia may make that an industry standard, lowering the fraction of the workforce that needs mass or private transit to and from an office.) Well stated, Adrian. I agree with all. In the meantime, I am still thinking about a means of isolating people aboard mass transit, using something analogous to an electric wheelchair device with a plastic clamshell barrier around it. The passenger just gets in, the chair rolls onto the train, rolls back off, goes to the office, without further instruction from the sleeping prole within. spike _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 19:19:35 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 13:19:35 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <001601d63b67$c845dba0$58d192e0$@rainier66.com> References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> <001901d63b62$b63e2c50$22ba84f0$@rainier66.com> <001601d63b67$c845dba0$58d192e0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: I think a rapidly-growing sentiment is that what we have with our current police forces is already a protection racket - merely a supremely well-entrenched one that operates at too high a level of jurisdiction, and that it might be time to uproot the current one and rebuild from local community protection rackets. You know, the way our police forces started in the first place. On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 12:47 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder > > > > >?The problem with any of these solutions for social distancing on mass > transit is they SEVERELY reduce the number of passengers per car which is > unsustainable from both a revenue generating perspective and a practical > one. I saw the Phillipines had kitted out a demo car to enforce proper > spacing, and it reduced the passenger limit by an order of magnitude from > 1600 to around 160? Dylan > > > > > > > > > > Ja. Dylan, my concern is that even with a tenth the capacity, a subway > car is still dangerous. Homeless people will still use them as a rolling > bedroom, around the clock, and it is still an enclosed space. Criminals > can still use them to victimize people, a problem which might be even worse > with lower passenger counts. > > > > Is there any way to compensate by increasing the number of cars? Do those > rigs need human operators? If not, could we have a deal where there are 5 > to 10 times as many trains, get as many roller-eggs in there as possible by > taking out the seats and the grab-on poles (are those things structural > elements? (Ashamed of me for not knowing that (I don?t ride them (I don?t > like big cities (oy vey, mercy.)))) > > > > spike > > > > > > > > On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 1:58 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder > > > > On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 10:21 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > >>?Since the start of the quarantine, I have been pondering the fact that > we have built up cities with a population density high enough to make > street traffic mostly impractical, social distancing nearly impossible and > causing the proletariat to rely on mass transit, which we already know is > inherently dangerous. > > For safety reasons, that level of population density must come down. We > don?t know how exactly. > > > > >?Contrasting that is the fact that certain services - including ones we > have come to depend on, such as schools and hospitals - are only practical > with certain minimum population densities, and become more efficient - > better able to serve more people on the same budget - with higher > population densities?.Well, today many bosses are forced to allow it, and > inertia may make that an industry standard, lowering the fraction of the > workforce that needs mass or private transit to and from an office.) > > > > > > Well stated, Adrian. I agree with all. > > > > In the meantime, I am still thinking about a means of isolating people > aboard mass transit, using something analogous to an electric wheelchair > device with a plastic clamshell barrier around it. The passenger just gets > in, the chair rolls onto the train, rolls back off, goes to the office, > without further instruction from the sleeping prole within. > > > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From steinberg.will at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 19:27:04 2020 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 15:27:04 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: <202006051821.055IL7oD020890@athena.zia.io> References: <00a001d63a8e$ce560800$6b021800$@rainier66.com> <00c901d63a90$569252e0$03b6f8a0$@rainier66.com> <000f01d63a95$d47e1860$7d7a4920$@rainier66.com> <004901d63ac9$fe34d0c0$fa9e7240$@rainier66.com> <004f01d63b38$44e14670$cea3d350$@rainier66.com> <202006051821.055IL7oD020890@athena.zia.io> Message-ID: @spike: Math competitions are not objective. Wins are often doled out based on parsimony and beauty--at least for higher level competitions. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 19:46:20 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 14:46:20 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Adrian, if a company, big or small, cannot measure productivity it will be full of lazy people asap. Somebody at some level has to know. bill w On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 1:29 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 10:48 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> If a boss does not know how long a job should take a person working from >> home, then they need to be retrained or fired. >> > > Yes, but who's going to do that retraining or firing? Usually someone > else with even less idea, thus they never commit to that retraining or > firing in order to preserve their own illusion of competence. > > Thus it took an outside force, such as the coronavirus epidemic, to force > this change in far too many institutions. > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 20:38:55 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 15:38:55 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <9EB02C66-59C9-4113-A190-F5ECBFC53C01@gmail.com> When people say ?no police? they mean that the police force and prison system as they currently exist should be completely and totally dismantled and a new thing created in their place. Why? Police Shooting/Killing/Maiming the Disabled/Mentally ill and/or their caregivers: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Charles_Kinsey https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_James_Boyd https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jeremy_McDole https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3377699/amp/Teen-left-bloodied-bruised-cop-sicced-K-9-dog-mother-called-911-fears-son-suicidal.html Police shooting people for being near/in cars: https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/31/us/florida-police-shooting/index.html https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Philando_Castile Police suffocating/choking people to death: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jonny_Gammage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_George_Floyd Airsoft Deaths: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Andy_Lopez https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Tamir_Rice No-knock Warrants: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Breonna_Taylor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Duncan_Lemp (hey, he was in a militia!) Suspicious deaths in police custody: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sandra_Bland Shot/killed while protesting, or being near protests: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Sean_Monterrosa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_David_McAtee Mistaken Identify: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Alton_Sterling Officers joke about murdering people: https://www.newsweek.com/sean-reed-justice-indianapolis-police-shooting-facebook-1502502 Cops shooting dogs: https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/870601/police-killing-dogs-is-an-epidemic-according-to-the-justice-department/amp/ Police officers committing domestic violence: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/380329/ The fact that ?SWATTING? exists: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting https://web.archive.org/web/20150216193032/http://newsok.com/court-document-reveals-more-about-sentinel-ok-bomb-threat/article/5386857 https://web.archive.org/web/20180709154458/https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kansas-swatting/california-man-two-others-indicted-in-fatal-kansas-swatting-case-idUSKCN1IP065 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/fortnite-world-champion-swatted-while-streaming-on-twitch/ Cops are ?scared? at work but there are plenty of other more deadly occupations: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/1002500001 https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/cwc/work-related-homicides-the-facts.pdf Bullshit police calls: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2020/05/27/stop-calling-the-police-on-black-people/amp/ Cavity Searches: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.azcentral.com/amp/1873153001 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/us/tampon-san-antonio.amp.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/michigan-lawsuit-officer-daniel-mack-illegal-body-cavity-search.amp Civil Forfeiture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States Planting evidence: https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/4692-cops-planting-evidence Sexual misconduct: https://www.aclu.org/blog/womens-rights/women-and-criminal-justice/nypd-police-officers-union-wants-keep-sexual And all of that compounded by police ?unions? and the ?blue code of silence?. Anecdotally I have: - had police show up to my home when I (3) ?play dialed? 911 on a phone I thought wasn?t plugged in and my entire family had to go into the lawn, in front of our neighbors, in our underwear - had a police officer pull a hard u-turn in front of me, blocking the road, and accusing me (12) of being a runaway - had a police officer pull a hard u-turn across 4 lanes of traffic to accuse me (14) of being a prostitute when my bus was late - had a police officer threaten to commit me (17) for a letter I wrote to a friend; when he said I could leave I fled, crying, and was later detained by him and threatened with arrest for slamming a door - had a police officer blame me (18) for my own rape, and belittled for my father threatening to kill me; despite that, they felt the need to handcuff my parents and threaten to shoot them - was handcuffed when I (19) told my councilor I was suicidal - had the cops called on me (23) for knocking on doors to find my lost dog - had cops jump my fence, enter my home without knocking through my back door, and draw their guns on me because I (24) was taking a nap with the AC off and the back door open - had cops pull me (25) over on suspicion of drug use when I was learning how to drive And you know when I did NOT call the police? Oh wait, I have never called the police. (Unless you count that ?call? when I was like 4.) I have been raped (filed a report), threatened to be killed (filed a report) and had a gun brandished and pointed at me (Trump had just been elected and I was ?too white?, I did not file a report, I just moved). In maybe 99% of cases, calling police makes any situation worse. So maybe just... don?t. There?s no need to arrest or accost people for minor violations, or shoot people for having loud parties. Just fine them and be done with it. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 20:41:34 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 13:41:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <001601d63b67$c845dba0$58d192e0$@rainier66.com> References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> <001901d63b62$b63e2c50$22ba84f0$@rainier66.com> <001601d63b67$c845dba0$58d192e0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 11:47 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Is there any way to compensate by increasing the number of cars? Do those > rigs need human operators? If not, could we have a deal where there are 5 > to 10 times as many trains, get as many roller-eggs in there as possible by > taking out the seats and the grab-on poles (are those things structural > elements? (Ashamed of me for not knowing that (I don?t ride them (I don?t > like big cities (oy vey, mercy.)))) > There have been proposals for higher numbers of much smaller cars - maybe just enough for 3-5 (there being a number of cases where one person is escorting another, such as a parent with multiple children). Manufacturing and then repeatedly transporting the mass of the extra walls and doors makes these proposals less efficient, but there are counterarguments, such as having to clean less (or, worst case, take less of a train out of service) when someone uses it as a toilet. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 20:42:05 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 13:42:05 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: They know. But they believe they are incentivized not to do anything. On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 12:49 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Adrian, if a company, big or small, cannot measure productivity it will be > full of lazy people asap. Somebody at some level has to know. bill w > > On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 1:29 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >> >> On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 10:48 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> If a boss does not know how long a job should take a person working from >>> home, then they need to be retrained or fired. >>> >> >> Yes, but who's going to do that retraining or firing? Usually someone >> else with even less idea, thus they never commit to that retraining or >> firing in order to preserve their own illusion of competence. >> >> Thus it took an outside force, such as the coronavirus epidemic, to force >> this change in far too many institutions. >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 20:52:26 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 13:52:26 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <9EB02C66-59C9-4113-A190-F5ECBFC53C01@gmail.com> References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> <9EB02C66-59C9-4113-A190-F5ECBFC53C01@gmail.com> Message-ID: Huh. You've certainly got me beat. I just have this one time when the cops raided my house pretending to have a warrant (they had a manila envelope w/blank paper), dragged my brother out to the front lawn and cuffed him on the ground, then kicked open my (16, I think) bedroom door w/gun drawn on me, all because they were pursuing an ex-Apple employee who used to live at my address who had committed petty theft on his way out of his job. (At my place, they found one cable - equivalent of a USB cable today - he had left behind.) On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 1:40 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > When people say ?no police? they mean that the police force and prison > system as they currently exist should be completely and totally dismantled > and a new thing created in their place. > > Why? > > Police Shooting/Killing/Maiming the Disabled/Mentally ill and/or their > caregivers: > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Charles_Kinsey > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_James_Boyd > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jeremy_McDole > > https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3377699/amp/Teen-left-bloodied-bruised-cop-sicced-K-9-dog-mother-called-911-fears-son-suicidal.html > > Police shooting people for being near/in cars: > https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/31/us/florida-police-shooting/index.html > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Philando_Castile > > Police suffocating/choking people to death: > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jonny_Gammage > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_George_Floyd > > Airsoft Deaths: > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Andy_Lopez > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Tamir_Rice > > No-knock Warrants: > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Breonna_Taylor > > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Duncan_Lemp (hey, he was in a > militia!) > > Suspicious deaths in police custody: > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sandra_Bland > > Shot/killed while protesting, or being near protests: > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Sean_Monterrosa > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_David_McAtee > > Mistaken Identify: > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Alton_Sterling > > Officers joke about murdering people: > > https://www.newsweek.com/sean-reed-justice-indianapolis-police-shooting-facebook-1502502 > > Cops shooting dogs: > > https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/870601/police-killing-dogs-is-an-epidemic-according-to-the-justice-department/amp/ > > Police officers committing domestic violence: > https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/380329/ > > The fact that ?SWATTING? exists: > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting > > https://web.archive.org/web/20150216193032/http://newsok.com/court-document-reveals-more-about-sentinel-ok-bomb-threat/article/5386857 > > https://web.archive.org/web/20180709154458/https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kansas-swatting/california-man-two-others-indicted-in-fatal-kansas-swatting-case-idUSKCN1IP065 > > https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/fortnite-world-champion-swatted-while-streaming-on-twitch/ > > Cops are ?scared? at work but there are plenty of other more deadly > occupations: > https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/1002500001 > https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/cwc/work-related-homicides-the-facts.pdf > > Bullshit police calls: > > https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2020/05/27/stop-calling-the-police-on-black-people/amp/ > > Cavity Searches: > https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.azcentral.com/amp/1873153001 > https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/us/tampon-san-antonio.amp.html > > https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/michigan-lawsuit-officer-daniel-mack-illegal-body-cavity-search.amp > > Civil Forfeiture: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States > > Planting evidence: > https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/4692-cops-planting-evidence > > Sexual misconduct: > > https://www.aclu.org/blog/womens-rights/women-and-criminal-justice/nypd-police-officers-union-wants-keep-sexual > > And all of that compounded by police ?unions? and the ?blue code of > silence?. > > Anecdotally I have: > - had police show up to my home when I (3) ?play dialed? 911 on a phone I > thought wasn?t plugged in and my entire family had to go into the lawn, in > front of our neighbors, in our underwear > - had a police officer pull a hard u-turn in front of me, blocking the > road, and accusing me (12) of being a runaway > - had a police officer pull a hard u-turn across 4 lanes of traffic to > accuse me (14) of being a prostitute when my bus was late > - had a police officer threaten to commit me (17) for a letter I wrote to > a friend; when he said I could leave I fled, crying, and was later detained > by him and threatened with arrest for slamming a door > - had a police officer blame me (18) for my own rape, and belittled for my > father threatening to kill me; despite that, they felt the need to handcuff > my parents and threaten to shoot them > - was handcuffed when I (19) told my councilor I was suicidal > - had the cops called on me (23) for knocking on doors to find my lost dog > - had cops jump my fence, enter my home without knocking through my back > door, and draw their guns on me because I (24) was taking a nap with the AC > off and the back door open > - had cops pull me (25) over on suspicion of drug use when I was learning > how to drive > > And you know when I did NOT call the police? Oh wait, I have never called > the police. (Unless you count that ?call? when I was like 4.) > > I have been raped (filed a report), threatened to be killed (filed a > report) and had a gun brandished and pointed at me (Trump had just been > elected and I was ?too white?, I did not file a report, I just moved). > > In maybe 99% of cases, calling police makes any situation worse. So maybe > just... don?t. There?s no need to arrest or accost people for minor > violations, or shoot people for having loud parties. Just fine them and be > done with it. > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 21:49:05 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 16:49:05 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> <9EB02C66-59C9-4113-A190-F5ECBFC53C01@gmail.com> Message-ID: <3912C301-F651-424D-B955-F249CF8A05E5@gmail.com> That still sounds pretty bad. SR Ballard > On Jun 5, 2020, at 3:52 PM, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat wrote: > > Huh. You've certainly got me beat. I just have this one time when the cops raided my house pretending to have a warrant (they had a manila envelope w/blank paper), dragged my brother out to the front lawn and cuffed him on the ground, then kicked open my (16, I think) bedroom door w/gun drawn on me, all because they were pursuing an ex-Apple employee who used to live at my address who had committed petty theft on his way out of his job. (At my place, they found one cable - equivalent of a USB cable today - he had left behind.) > >> On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 1:40 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat wrote: >> When people say ?no police? they mean that the police force and prison system as they currently exist should be completely and totally dismantled and a new thing created in their place. >> >> Why? >> >> Police Shooting/Killing/Maiming the Disabled/Mentally ill and/or their caregivers: >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Charles_Kinsey >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_James_Boyd >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jeremy_McDole >> https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3377699/amp/Teen-left-bloodied-bruised-cop-sicced-K-9-dog-mother-called-911-fears-son-suicidal.html >> >> Police shooting people for being near/in cars: >> https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/31/us/florida-police-shooting/index.html >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Philando_Castile >> >> Police suffocating/choking people to death: >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jonny_Gammage >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_George_Floyd >> >> Airsoft Deaths: >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Andy_Lopez >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Tamir_Rice >> >> No-knock Warrants: >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Breonna_Taylor >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Duncan_Lemp (hey, he was in a militia!) >> >> Suspicious deaths in police custody: >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sandra_Bland >> >> Shot/killed while protesting, or being near protests: >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Sean_Monterrosa >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_David_McAtee >> >> Mistaken Identify: >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Alton_Sterling >> >> Officers joke about murdering people: >> https://www.newsweek.com/sean-reed-justice-indianapolis-police-shooting-facebook-1502502 >> >> Cops shooting dogs: >> https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/870601/police-killing-dogs-is-an-epidemic-according-to-the-justice-department/amp/ >> >> Police officers committing domestic violence: >> https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/380329/ >> >> The fact that ?SWATTING? exists: >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting >> https://web.archive.org/web/20150216193032/http://newsok.com/court-document-reveals-more-about-sentinel-ok-bomb-threat/article/5386857 >> https://web.archive.org/web/20180709154458/https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kansas-swatting/california-man-two-others-indicted-in-fatal-kansas-swatting-case-idUSKCN1IP065 >> https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/fortnite-world-champion-swatted-while-streaming-on-twitch/ >> >> Cops are ?scared? at work but there are plenty of other more deadly occupations: >> https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/1002500001 >> https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/cwc/work-related-homicides-the-facts.pdf >> >> Bullshit police calls: >> https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2020/05/27/stop-calling-the-police-on-black-people/amp/ >> >> Cavity Searches: >> https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.azcentral.com/amp/1873153001 >> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/us/tampon-san-antonio.amp.html >> https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/michigan-lawsuit-officer-daniel-mack-illegal-body-cavity-search.amp >> >> Civil Forfeiture: >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States >> >> Planting evidence: >> https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/4692-cops-planting-evidence >> >> Sexual misconduct: >> https://www.aclu.org/blog/womens-rights/women-and-criminal-justice/nypd-police-officers-union-wants-keep-sexual >> >> And all of that compounded by police ?unions? and the ?blue code of silence?. >> >> Anecdotally I have: >> - had police show up to my home when I (3) ?play dialed? 911 on a phone I thought wasn?t plugged in and my entire family had to go into the lawn, in front of our neighbors, in our underwear >> - had a police officer pull a hard u-turn in front of me, blocking the road, and accusing me (12) of being a runaway >> - had a police officer pull a hard u-turn across 4 lanes of traffic to accuse me (14) of being a prostitute when my bus was late >> - had a police officer threaten to commit me (17) for a letter I wrote to a friend; when he said I could leave I fled, crying, and was later detained by him and threatened with arrest for slamming a door >> - had a police officer blame me (18) for my own rape, and belittled for my father threatening to kill me; despite that, they felt the need to handcuff my parents and threaten to shoot them >> - was handcuffed when I (19) told my councilor I was suicidal >> - had the cops called on me (23) for knocking on doors to find my lost dog >> - had cops jump my fence, enter my home without knocking through my back door, and draw their guns on me because I (24) was taking a nap with the AC off and the back door open >> - had cops pull me (25) over on suspicion of drug use when I was learning how to drive >> >> And you know when I did NOT call the police? Oh wait, I have never called the police. (Unless you count that ?call? when I was like 4.) >> >> I have been raped (filed a report), threatened to be killed (filed a report) and had a gun brandished and pointed at me (Trump had just been elected and I was ?too white?, I did not file a report, I just moved). >> >> In maybe 99% of cases, calling police makes any situation worse. So maybe just... don?t. There?s no need to arrest or accost people for minor violations, or shoot people for having loud parties. Just fine them and be done with it. >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 22:08:12 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 15:08:12 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <3912C301-F651-424D-B955-F249CF8A05E5@gmail.com> References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> <9EB02C66-59C9-4113-A190-F5ECBFC53C01@gmail.com> <3912C301-F651-424D-B955-F249CF8A05E5@gmail.com> Message-ID: It was bad enough. I have wondered, if Bernie had won (I have no illusions that Hillary would have done this) and been in the President's seat today, if he might have issued a statement like the following: "I advise most police to march with, not against, the protestors. There are three main reasons: "1) So you can escort the protestors, and keep them separate from those who would do them harm. If you've got good community relations, perhaps you can even guide the protests; for most departments, at least you'll know where they're going so you can get out in front and direct traffic away. If you can keep a block's distance between the protestors and traffic, that's a block's warning should any car break through and try to ram the protest. "2) Most of you should be mad about the killing, just like the protestors are. This was murder. it is being charged as murder. Police are not supposed to murder. Those responsible for this act may have worn the uniform and badge, but they were not police officers in any but the official sense. There are many Americans who could use reassurance that you are there to serve and protect them, not just to execute them. You have every moral right to be protesting the murder alongside your fellow citizens. "3) Being among the protestors will help you more quickly spot and intercept those few individuals who wish to spark violence, and to remove them before their actions agitate others into violence. The choice between arresting one individual who starts breaking windows, and standing back until multiple buildings are set on fire, should be an easy one. (Any police officer who thinks the latter is the right thing to do, see point 2.)" On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 2:51 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > That still sounds pretty bad. > > SR Ballard > > On Jun 5, 2020, at 3:52 PM, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > Huh. You've certainly got me beat. I just have this one time when the > cops raided my house pretending to have a warrant (they had a manila > envelope w/blank paper), dragged my brother out to the front lawn and > cuffed him on the ground, then kicked open my (16, I think) bedroom door > w/gun drawn on me, all because they were pursuing an ex-Apple employee who > used to live at my address who had committed petty theft on his way out of > his job. (At my place, they found one cable - equivalent of a USB cable > today - he had left behind.) > > On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 1:40 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> When people say ?no police? they mean that the police force and prison >> system as they currently exist should be completely and totally dismantled >> and a new thing created in their place. >> >> Why? >> >> Police Shooting/Killing/Maiming the Disabled/Mentally ill and/or their >> caregivers: >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Charles_Kinsey >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_James_Boyd >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jeremy_McDole >> >> https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3377699/amp/Teen-left-bloodied-bruised-cop-sicced-K-9-dog-mother-called-911-fears-son-suicidal.html >> >> Police shooting people for being near/in cars: >> https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/31/us/florida-police-shooting/index.html >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Philando_Castile >> >> Police suffocating/choking people to death: >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jonny_Gammage >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_George_Floyd >> >> Airsoft Deaths: >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Andy_Lopez >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Tamir_Rice >> >> No-knock Warrants: >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Breonna_Taylor >> >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Duncan_Lemp (hey, he was in >> a militia!) >> >> Suspicious deaths in police custody: >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sandra_Bland >> >> Shot/killed while protesting, or being near protests: >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Sean_Monterrosa >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_David_McAtee >> >> Mistaken Identify: >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Alton_Sterling >> >> Officers joke about murdering people: >> >> https://www.newsweek.com/sean-reed-justice-indianapolis-police-shooting-facebook-1502502 >> >> Cops shooting dogs: >> >> https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/870601/police-killing-dogs-is-an-epidemic-according-to-the-justice-department/amp/ >> >> Police officers committing domestic violence: >> https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/380329/ >> >> The fact that ?SWATTING? exists: >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting >> >> https://web.archive.org/web/20150216193032/http://newsok.com/court-document-reveals-more-about-sentinel-ok-bomb-threat/article/5386857 >> >> https://web.archive.org/web/20180709154458/https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kansas-swatting/california-man-two-others-indicted-in-fatal-kansas-swatting-case-idUSKCN1IP065 >> >> https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/fortnite-world-champion-swatted-while-streaming-on-twitch/ >> >> Cops are ?scared? at work but there are plenty of other more deadly >> occupations: >> https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/1002500001 >> https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/cwc/work-related-homicides-the-facts.pdf >> >> Bullshit police calls: >> >> https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2020/05/27/stop-calling-the-police-on-black-people/amp/ >> >> Cavity Searches: >> https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.azcentral.com/amp/1873153001 >> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/us/tampon-san-antonio.amp.html >> >> https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/michigan-lawsuit-officer-daniel-mack-illegal-body-cavity-search.amp >> >> Civil Forfeiture: >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States >> >> Planting evidence: >> https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/4692-cops-planting-evidence >> >> Sexual misconduct: >> >> https://www.aclu.org/blog/womens-rights/women-and-criminal-justice/nypd-police-officers-union-wants-keep-sexual >> >> And all of that compounded by police ?unions? and the ?blue code of >> silence?. >> >> Anecdotally I have: >> - had police show up to my home when I (3) ?play dialed? 911 on a phone I >> thought wasn?t plugged in and my entire family had to go into the lawn, in >> front of our neighbors, in our underwear >> - had a police officer pull a hard u-turn in front of me, blocking the >> road, and accusing me (12) of being a runaway >> - had a police officer pull a hard u-turn across 4 lanes of traffic to >> accuse me (14) of being a prostitute when my bus was late >> - had a police officer threaten to commit me (17) for a letter I wrote to >> a friend; when he said I could leave I fled, crying, and was later detained >> by him and threatened with arrest for slamming a door >> - had a police officer blame me (18) for my own rape, and belittled for >> my father threatening to kill me; despite that, they felt the need to >> handcuff my parents and threaten to shoot them >> - was handcuffed when I (19) told my councilor I was suicidal >> - had the cops called on me (23) for knocking on doors to find my lost dog >> - had cops jump my fence, enter my home without knocking through my back >> door, and draw their guns on me because I (24) was taking a nap with the AC >> off and the back door open >> - had cops pull me (25) over on suspicion of drug use when I was learning >> how to drive >> >> And you know when I did NOT call the police? Oh wait, I have never called >> the police. (Unless you count that ?call? when I was like 4.) >> >> I have been raped (filed a report), threatened to be killed (filed a >> report) and had a gun brandished and pointed at me (Trump had just been >> elected and I was ?too white?, I did not file a report, I just moved). >> >> In maybe 99% of cases, calling police makes any situation worse. So maybe >> just... don?t. There?s no need to arrest or accost people for minor >> violations, or shoot people for having loud parties. Just fine them and be >> done with it. >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 22:19:18 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 17:19:18 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> <9EB02C66-59C9-4113-A190-F5ECBFC53C01@gmail.com> <3912C301-F651-424D-B955-F249CF8A05E5@gmail.com> Message-ID: I think those are absolutely terrific ideas, and it would take an extremely creative and independent police chief to try those. I won't hold my breath. bill w On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 5:10 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > It was bad enough. > > I have wondered, if Bernie had won (I have no illusions that Hillary would > have done this) and been in the President's seat today, if he might have > issued a statement like the following: > > "I advise most police to march with, not against, the protestors. There > are three main reasons: > > "1) So you can escort the protestors, and keep them separate from those > who would do them harm. If you've got good community relations, perhaps > you can even guide the protests; for most departments, at least you'll know > where they're going so you can get out in front and direct traffic away. > If you can keep a block's distance between the protestors and traffic, > that's a block's warning should any car break through and try to ram the > protest. > > "2) Most of you should be mad about the killing, just like the protestors > are. This was murder. it is being charged as murder. Police are not > supposed to murder. Those responsible for this act may have worn the > uniform and badge, but they were not police officers in any but the > official sense. There are many Americans who could use reassurance that > you are there to serve and protect them, not just to execute them. You > have every moral right to be protesting the murder alongside your fellow > citizens. > > "3) Being among the protestors will help you more quickly spot and > intercept those few individuals who wish to spark violence, and to remove > them before their actions agitate others into violence. The choice between > arresting one individual who starts breaking windows, and standing back > until multiple buildings are set on fire, should be an easy one. (Any > police officer who thinks the latter is the right thing to do, see point > 2.)" > > On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 2:51 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> That still sounds pretty bad. >> >> SR Ballard >> >> On Jun 5, 2020, at 3:52 PM, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >> Huh. You've certainly got me beat. I just have this one time when the >> cops raided my house pretending to have a warrant (they had a manila >> envelope w/blank paper), dragged my brother out to the front lawn and >> cuffed him on the ground, then kicked open my (16, I think) bedroom door >> w/gun drawn on me, all because they were pursuing an ex-Apple employee who >> used to live at my address who had committed petty theft on his way out of >> his job. (At my place, they found one cable - equivalent of a USB cable >> today - he had left behind.) >> >> On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 1:40 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> When people say ?no police? they mean that the police force and prison >>> system as they currently exist should be completely and totally dismantled >>> and a new thing created in their place. >>> >>> Why? >>> >>> Police Shooting/Killing/Maiming the Disabled/Mentally ill and/or their >>> caregivers: >>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Charles_Kinsey >>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_James_Boyd >>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jeremy_McDole >>> >>> https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3377699/amp/Teen-left-bloodied-bruised-cop-sicced-K-9-dog-mother-called-911-fears-son-suicidal.html >>> >>> Police shooting people for being near/in cars: >>> https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/31/us/florida-police-shooting/index.html >>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Philando_Castile >>> >>> Police suffocating/choking people to death: >>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner >>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jonny_Gammage >>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_George_Floyd >>> >>> Airsoft Deaths: >>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Andy_Lopez >>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Tamir_Rice >>> >>> No-knock Warrants: >>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Breonna_Taylor >>> >>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Duncan_Lemp (hey, he was in >>> a militia!) >>> >>> Suspicious deaths in police custody: >>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sandra_Bland >>> >>> Shot/killed while protesting, or being near protests: >>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Sean_Monterrosa >>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_David_McAtee >>> >>> Mistaken Identify: >>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Alton_Sterling >>> >>> Officers joke about murdering people: >>> >>> https://www.newsweek.com/sean-reed-justice-indianapolis-police-shooting-facebook-1502502 >>> >>> Cops shooting dogs: >>> >>> https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/870601/police-killing-dogs-is-an-epidemic-according-to-the-justice-department/amp/ >>> >>> Police officers committing domestic violence: >>> https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/380329/ >>> >>> The fact that ?SWATTING? exists: >>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting >>> >>> https://web.archive.org/web/20150216193032/http://newsok.com/court-document-reveals-more-about-sentinel-ok-bomb-threat/article/5386857 >>> >>> https://web.archive.org/web/20180709154458/https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kansas-swatting/california-man-two-others-indicted-in-fatal-kansas-swatting-case-idUSKCN1IP065 >>> >>> https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/fortnite-world-champion-swatted-while-streaming-on-twitch/ >>> >>> Cops are ?scared? at work but there are plenty of other more deadly >>> occupations: >>> https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/1002500001 >>> https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/cwc/work-related-homicides-the-facts.pdf >>> >>> Bullshit police calls: >>> >>> https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2020/05/27/stop-calling-the-police-on-black-people/amp/ >>> >>> Cavity Searches: >>> https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.azcentral.com/amp/1873153001 >>> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/us/tampon-san-antonio.amp.html >>> >>> https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/michigan-lawsuit-officer-daniel-mack-illegal-body-cavity-search.amp >>> >>> Civil Forfeiture: >>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States >>> >>> Planting evidence: >>> https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/4692-cops-planting-evidence >>> >>> Sexual misconduct: >>> >>> https://www.aclu.org/blog/womens-rights/women-and-criminal-justice/nypd-police-officers-union-wants-keep-sexual >>> >>> And all of that compounded by police ?unions? and the ?blue code of >>> silence?. >>> >>> Anecdotally I have: >>> - had police show up to my home when I (3) ?play dialed? 911 on a phone >>> I thought wasn?t plugged in and my entire family had to go into the lawn, >>> in front of our neighbors, in our underwear >>> - had a police officer pull a hard u-turn in front of me, blocking the >>> road, and accusing me (12) of being a runaway >>> - had a police officer pull a hard u-turn across 4 lanes of traffic to >>> accuse me (14) of being a prostitute when my bus was late >>> - had a police officer threaten to commit me (17) for a letter I wrote >>> to a friend; when he said I could leave I fled, crying, and was later >>> detained by him and threatened with arrest for slamming a door >>> - had a police officer blame me (18) for my own rape, and belittled for >>> my father threatening to kill me; despite that, they felt the need to >>> handcuff my parents and threaten to shoot them >>> - was handcuffed when I (19) told my councilor I was suicidal >>> - had the cops called on me (23) for knocking on doors to find my lost >>> dog >>> - had cops jump my fence, enter my home without knocking through my back >>> door, and draw their guns on me because I (24) was taking a nap with the AC >>> off and the back door open >>> - had cops pull me (25) over on suspicion of drug use when I was >>> learning how to drive >>> >>> And you know when I did NOT call the police? Oh wait, I have never >>> called the police. (Unless you count that ?call? when I was like 4.) >>> >>> I have been raped (filed a report), threatened to be killed (filed a >>> report) and had a gun brandished and pointed at me (Trump had just been >>> elected and I was ?too white?, I did not file a report, I just moved). >>> >>> In maybe 99% of cases, calling police makes any situation worse. So >>> maybe just... don?t. There?s no need to arrest or accost people for minor >>> violations, or shoot people for having loud parties. Just fine them and be >>> done with it. >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From avant at sollegro.com Sat Jun 6 06:35:14 2020 From: avant at sollegro.com (Stuart LaForge) Date: Fri, 05 Jun 2020 23:35:14 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20200605233514.Horde.IvWMXpUbX7VSTjrMWayWFvH@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Quoting SR Ballard : > When people say ?no police? they mean that the police force and > prison system as they currently exist should be completely and > totally dismantled and a new thing created in their place. > Why? [snipped a lot of good reasons] How about this not getting rid of cops. Make patrol and beat cops mostly women. Make SWAT and other paramilitary cops mostly men. When a woman beat cop radios for backup for a situation she can't handle, only then do the testoterone laden assholes with assault rifles show up. Kind of like primary care versus a specialist. We could probably do this relatively easily by offering signing bonuses for women veterans, martial artists, combat sports athletes etc. Just a thought. Stuart LaForge From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 10:52:23 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 06:52:23 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> <9EB02C66-59C9-4113-A190-F5ECBFC53C01@gmail.com> <3912C301-F651-424D-B955-F249CF8A05E5@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 6:10 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> I have wondered, if Bernie had won (I have no illusions that Hillary > would have done this) and been in the President's seat today, if he might > have issued a statement like the following: "I advise most police to march > with, not against, the protestors. * > You're probably right about that, but at least Hillary would NOT have advised governors to "*dominate the battlespace*" with "*vicious dogs*" and with "*the most ominous weapons I have ever seen*". And she would have at least pretended to have some sympathy for the people marching in the streets, even Nixon gave Vietnam War protesters that much respect. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 11:26:23 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 07:26:23 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 8:28 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> Again, I bring up abolishing the police. It should always be on the > table, IMO.* Even that very radical move wouldn't necessarily solve the current problem. The Commander In Chief asked about using tanks to quell dissent, and Senator Tom Cotton (a Republacan of course) recommended putting the 101st Airborne division of the US Army into the streets of American cities to keep people in line. And it's still 5 months till November. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 6 12:31:08 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 05:31:08 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <20200605233514.Horde.IvWMXpUbX7VSTjrMWayWFvH@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> References: <20200605233514.Horde.IvWMXpUbX7VSTjrMWayWFvH@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Message-ID: <002801d63bfe$5bb1cfc0$13156f40$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder Quoting SR Ballard : > When people say ?no police? they mean that the police force and prison > system as they currently exist should be completely and totally > dismantled and a new thing created in their place. > Why? [snipped a lot of good reasons] How about this not getting rid of cops. Make patrol and beat cops mostly women. Make SWAT and other paramilitary cops mostly men. When a woman beat cop radios for backup for a situation she can't handle, only then do the testoterone laden assholes with assault rifles show up. Kind of like primary care versus a specialist. We could probably do this relatively easily by offering signing bonuses for women veterans, martial artists, combat sports athletes etc. Just a thought. Stuart LaForge _______________________________________________ Stuart all of that assumes there is some objective way to tell the difference between "men" and "women." There was once thought to be such a criterion, but that has been debunked. Our gender is now fluid, it is whatever we say it is, and can change without surgery. I would still claim whatever gender is necessary at the time to collect the sign-on bonus of course. It's nothing personal, just business. People who advocate for disbanding police forces and emptying prisons have never visited a prison (oy vey, mercy.) If the constables decide to make a living some other way, we will miss them. Those who do not have guns will miss them even more. spike From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 14:18:08 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 09:18:08 -0500 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes Message-ID: Musicthatmakesyoudumb -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From steinberg.will at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 14:25:35 2020 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 10:25:35 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> <9EB02C66-59C9-4113-A190-F5ECBFC53C01@gmail.com> <3912C301-F651-424D-B955-F249CF8A05E5@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 6:55 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > "*the most ominous weapons I have ever seen*" > I thought this was such a strange thing to say. What, does he have necromancers he's gonna unleash or something? Who the fuck calls their weapons ominous -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 14:50:13 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 08:50:13 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> <9EB02C66-59C9-4113-A190-F5ECBFC53C01@gmail.com> <3912C301-F651-424D-B955-F249CF8A05E5@gmail.com> Message-ID: Tanks on the streets don't worry me anywhere /near/ as much as Air Force strike aircraft flyovers of major sporting events. "Hi. Here's your friendly neighborhood first world military with a friendly reminder that we could kill ten thousand of you with a single pull of this trigger, and another 2-3k if we linger around looking for stragglers! Have a GREAT weekend! ;) " Coming from a country where the air force acrobatics team uses cute little 60's-vintage jet trainers: yikes. On Sat, Jun 6, 2020, 8:32 AM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 6:55 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> "*the most ominous weapons I have ever seen*" >> > > I thought this was such a strange thing to say. What, does he have > necromancers he's gonna unleash or something? Who the fuck calls their > weapons ominous > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 16:08:03 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 11:08:03 -0500 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Link doesn?t work. > On Jun 6, 2020, at 9:18 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > Musicthatmakesyoudumb > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 16:10:44 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 11:10:44 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <20200605233514.Horde.IvWMXpUbX7VSTjrMWayWFvH@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> References: <20200605233514.Horde.IvWMXpUbX7VSTjrMWayWFvH@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Message-ID: <05C456BC-2138-4AB7-BAF2-8CAC9BCFF3EC@gmail.com> I actually think female police might be more likely to use deadly force due to lower average muscle mass in women. And I think nearly anyone would see the plan as intolerably sexist. SR Ballard > On Jun 6, 2020, at 1:35 AM, Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat wrote: > > > Quoting SR Ballard : > >> When people say ?no police? they mean that the police force and prison system as they currently exist should be completely and totally dismantled and a new thing created in their place. >> Why? > [snipped a lot of good reasons] > > How about this not getting rid of cops. Make patrol and beat cops mostly women. Make SWAT and other paramilitary cops mostly men. When a woman beat cop radios for backup for a situation she can't handle, only then do the testoterone laden assholes with assault rifles show up. Kind of like primary care versus a specialist. > > We could probably do this relatively easily by offering signing bonuses for women veterans, martial artists, combat sports athletes etc. > > Just a thought. > > Stuart LaForge > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 16:10:49 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 12:10:49 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> <9EB02C66-59C9-4113-A190-F5ECBFC53C01@gmail.com> <3912C301-F651-424D-B955-F249CF8A05E5@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 10:52 AM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> Tanks on the streets don't worry me anywhere /near/ as much as Air Force > strike aircraft flyovers of major sporting events.* > They've already ordered military helicopters to hover low over protestors to intimidate them with the deafening noise and very powerful downward rotor wash. DC Guard To Investigate Helicopter Maneuvers To Show Force John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 16:11:37 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 11:11:37 -0500 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I just copied the image into the email. You can't see it? bill w On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 11:10 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Link doesn?t work. > > On Jun 6, 2020, at 9:18 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > Musicthatmakesyoudumb > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 17:23:03 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 13:23:03 -0400 Subject: [ExI] NASA Scientists Plan To Approach Girl Message-ID: NASA Scientists Plan To Approach Girl John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 18:02:21 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 12:02:21 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> <9EB02C66-59C9-4113-A190-F5ECBFC53C01@gmail.com> <3912C301-F651-424D-B955-F249CF8A05E5@gmail.com> Message-ID: Substantially less odds of killing or permanently injuring people than billy clubs, rubber bullets and tear gas - I think I'm ok with that one. Fairly decent thinking outside the box for the authorities. There is, in contrast, /no/ way to employ a strike aircraft as a non-lethal weapon. [And darned few ways to use a tank non-lethally, for that matter.] On Sat, Jun 6, 2020, 10:28 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 10:52 AM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > *> Tanks on the streets don't worry me anywhere /near/ as much as Air >> Force strike aircraft flyovers of major sporting events.* >> > > They've already ordered military helicopters to hover low over protestors > to intimidate them with the deafening noise and very powerful downward > rotor wash. > > DC Guard To Investigate Helicopter Maneuvers To Show Force > > > John K Clark > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 18:26:06 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 13:26:06 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <05C456BC-2138-4AB7-BAF2-8CAC9BCFF3EC@gmail.com> References: <20200605233514.Horde.IvWMXpUbX7VSTjrMWayWFvH@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> <05C456BC-2138-4AB7-BAF2-8CAC9BCFF3EC@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 11:18 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I actually think female police might be more likely to use deadly force > due to lower average muscle mass in women. > > And I think nearly anyone would see the plan as intolerably sexist. > > SR Ballard > Margaret Mead said that the reason wars weren't fought by women was that > if they were the human race would now be extinct. Women are fierce, take > no prisoners - total destruction, once they get their dander up. bill w > > On Jun 6, 2020, at 1:35 AM, Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > Quoting SR Ballard : > > > >> When people say ?no police? they mean that the police force and prison > system as they currently exist should be completely and totally dismantled > and a new thing created in their place. > >> Why? > > [snipped a lot of good reasons] > > > > How about this not getting rid of cops. Make patrol and beat cops mostly > women. Make SWAT and other paramilitary cops mostly men. When a woman beat > cop radios for backup for a situation she can't handle, only then do the > testoterone laden assholes with assault rifles show up. Kind of like > primary care versus a specialist. > > > > We could probably do this relatively easily by offering signing bonuses > for women veterans, martial artists, combat sports athletes etc. > > > > Just a thought. > > > > Stuart LaForge > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 18:29:12 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 13:29:12 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <33FD9673-6CF6-4F68-A993-41BCCF3135A7@gmail.com> <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63b5d$411e4b30$c35ae190$@rainier66.com> <9EB02C66-59C9-4113-A190-F5ECBFC53C01@gmail.com> <3912C301-F651-424D-B955-F249CF8A05E5@gmail.com> Message-ID: I can understand using force for the looting and the destruction of property. But we do have a Constitution, as Spike keeps reminding us, and it lets us peacefully assemble. Unless the peace part fails, there should be no efforts whatsoever to stop a protest. bill w On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 1:04 PM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Substantially less odds of killing or permanently injuring people than > billy clubs, rubber bullets and tear gas - I think I'm ok with that one. > Fairly decent thinking outside the box for the authorities. > > There is, in contrast, /no/ way to employ a strike aircraft as a > non-lethal weapon. [And darned few ways to use a tank non-lethally, for > that matter.] > > On Sat, Jun 6, 2020, 10:28 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 10:52 AM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >> *> Tanks on the streets don't worry me anywhere /near/ as much as Air >>> Force strike aircraft flyovers of major sporting events.* >>> >> >> They've already ordered military helicopters to hover low over protestors >> to intimidate them with the deafening noise and very powerful downward >> rotor wash. >> >> DC Guard To Investigate Helicopter Maneuvers To Show Force >> >> >> John K Clark >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 19:08:45 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 14:08:45 -0500 Subject: [ExI] scan Message-ID: For those of us who need --well, you know. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 19:18:59 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 14:18:59 -0500 Subject: [ExI] let's try again Message-ID: For those of us who need --well, you know. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-wearable-brain-scanner-technology-imaging.html bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 20:20:30 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 16:20:30 -0400 Subject: [ExI] scan In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: ??? On Sat, Jun 6, 2020, 3:09 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > For those of us who need --well, you know. > > bill w > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 20:38:10 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 15:38:10 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <002801d63bfe$5bb1cfc0$13156f40$@rainier66.com> References: <20200605233514.Horde.IvWMXpUbX7VSTjrMWayWFvH@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> <002801d63bfe$5bb1cfc0$13156f40$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <2E23C85C-7506-4C34-A376-81CD32407D78@gmail.com> Spike, when you go on that there is no ?objective way? to determine now, you act as if people will easily and willingly claim a gender their delivery doctor wouldn?t expect. There are very real social and personal costs for being publicly trans. It is not likely someone would put on such an emotionally difficult charade for a sign on bonus. In a highly competitive, cut throat situation like high-level athleticism I think it is very plausible, but gendered bonuses are illegal in most Anglophone countries, rendering those pressure null. I have never visited a jail prison but have lived and worked closely with former prisoners. My father was incarcerated for a year on non-payment of child support. That seems a bit inhumane to me. I don?t think that requires jail. I did applications for restoration of felon?s voting rights when I worked in politics. A shockingly large number were fairly normal barring the fact that they usually couldn?t read and never finished high school. A friend of mine in high school did time for selling weed. He?s just a normal dude. Furthering that, a large percent of prisoners in the US are mentally ill. They would be better served in a psychiatric institution that was dismantled a while back. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentally_ill_people_in_United_States_jails_and_prisons#Prevalence Psychiatric institutions, curiously, have usually suffered violence from nurses rather than other patients. Patients are medicated out of their violence (that is it?s own set of issues). I have spent time at various psych hospitals and most of the people there have been to jail or prison, perfectly fine to me and there was no gang violence or stabbings. Women?s shelter was the same. Most of the women had been to jail or prison but were perfectly pleasant. In jail and prison, you do what you must to survive. Did you know in other countries that they have prisons without the issues our prisons have? SR Ballard > Stuart all of that assumes there is some objective way to tell the > difference between "men" and "women." There was once thought to be such a > criterion, but that has been debunked. Our gender is now fluid, it is > whatever we say it is, and can change without surgery. I would still claim > whatever gender is necessary at the time to collect the sign-on bonus of > course. It's nothing personal, just business. > > People who advocate for disbanding police forces and emptying prisons have > never visited a prison (oy vey, mercy.) If the constables decide to make a > living some other way, we will miss them. Those who do not have guns will > miss them even more. > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 20:40:28 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 15:40:28 -0500 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <0E61F0A1-3B1D-4839-80CD-2566A81C0578@gmail.com> There was a link at the bottom SR Ballard > On Jun 6, 2020, at 11:11 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > I just copied the image into the email. You can't see it? bill w > >> On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 11:10 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat wrote: >> Link doesn?t work. >> >>> On Jun 6, 2020, at 9:18 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>> Musicthatmakesyoudumb >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 6 20:53:35 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 13:53:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <2E23C85C-7506-4C34-A376-81CD32407D78@gmail.com> References: <20200605233514.Horde.IvWMXpUbX7VSTjrMWayWFvH@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> <002801d63bfe$5bb1cfc0$13156f40$@rainier66.com> <2E23C85C-7506-4C34-A376-81CD32407D78@gmail.com> Message-ID: <001d01d63c44$8c62b490$a5281db0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder >?Spike, when you go on that there is no ?objective way? to determine now, you act as if people will easily and willingly claim a gender their delivery doctor wouldn?t expect? Delivery doctor? I am pretty sure mine has died a long time ago. In any case, modern doctors will have no expectations. >?There are very real social and personal costs for being publicly trans. It is not likely someone would put on such an emotionally difficult charade for a sign on bonus? SR, in the world I am being thrust into, we are all trans. We are told that gender is a state of mind. Well, OK, who am I to question that? I don?t know what goes on in other peoples? minds. >?In a highly competitive, cut throat situation like high-level athleticism I think it is very plausible, but gendered bonuses are illegal in most Anglophone countries, rendering those pressure null? Ja. I have no intentions of claiming to be female SR. >?Furthering that, a large percent of prisoners in the US are mentally ill. They would be better served in a psychiatric institution that was dismantled a while back? Ja. If we didn?t have prisons, we would be in one hell of a jam. Regarding psychiatric institutions being dismantled, most people do not know why that was done. But we do: lack of customers. >?Did you know in other countries that they have prisons without the issues our prisons have? SR Ballard SR, how can we know? It could be that in other countries they can legally incarcerate psychiatric patients and they do this out of sight. We wouldn?t know if they were doing that. In the US, we cannot hold psychiatric patients against their will unless they have committed a crime and have been convicted. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 21:08:10 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 16:08:10 -0500 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes In-Reply-To: <0E61F0A1-3B1D-4839-80CD-2566A81C0578@gmail.com> References: <0E61F0A1-3B1D-4839-80CD-2566A81C0578@gmail.com> Message-ID: But did you get the image? The chart? bill w On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 3:48 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > There was a link at the bottom > > SR Ballard > > On Jun 6, 2020, at 11:11 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > I just copied the image into the email. You can't see it? bill w > > On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 11:10 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> Link doesn?t work. >> >> On Jun 6, 2020, at 9:18 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >> >> Musicthatmakesyoudumb >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 6 21:25:58 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 14:25:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes In-Reply-To: <0E61F0A1-3B1D-4839-80CD-2566A81C0578@gmail.com> References: <0E61F0A1-3B1D-4839-80CD-2566A81C0578@gmail.com> Message-ID: <002d01d63c49$126b9d50$3742d7f0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes There was a link at the bottom SR Ballard Here it is: https://www.labnol.org/internet/music-taste-linked-to-intelligence/7489/ The title of the article claims one?s taste in music can reveal how smart or dumb you are, but that isn?t right. The SAT score can reveal how smart or dumb you are, and how smart or dumb you are might reveal (to some extent) what your taste in music might be. The article has it backwards. In any case? it worked. I looked up my SAT score (OK, well off the right side of the scale (sheesh no wonder I was clobbered at the Humility Olympics)) and found Sufjan Stevens. Never heard of him or her, so? Google, found him, I like it. Down there on the wrong end is Hip Hop, Lil Wayne (never heard of him) Beyonce (isn?t she model or something?) T.I. (never heard of him or her) sheesh most of this stuff I never heard of on both ends of the scale. I fear that I am terminally not hip. I see two of my favorites in there, Eagles, Beatles, Johnny Cash, Josh Groban. Some of these I really don?t get: Bob Dylan? Most of the time he wasn?t even trying to sing as far as I could tell. Where is Roy Orbison on this chart? Glenn Campbell? John Denver? Can anyone suggest a reason why it is that our musical taste seems to be somehow determined in our childhood, then doesn?t change much after that for most of us? BillW or anyone, why? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 21:42:14 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 15:42:14 -0600 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes In-Reply-To: <002d01d63c49$126b9d50$3742d7f0$@rainier66.com> References: <0E61F0A1-3B1D-4839-80CD-2566A81C0578@gmail.com> <002d01d63c49$126b9d50$3742d7f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: The plot may not be... /entirely/ rigorous, seeing as how "Beethoven" and "Classical" are on opposite ends of the spread. :) On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 3:29 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *SR Ballard via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes > > > > There was a link at the bottom > > SR Ballard > > > > > > > > > > Here it is: > > > > https://www.labnol.org/internet/music-taste-linked-to-intelligence/7489/ > > > > The title of the article claims one?s taste in music can reveal how smart > or dumb you are, but that isn?t right. The SAT score can reveal how smart > or dumb you are, and how smart or dumb you are might reveal (to some > extent) what your taste in music might be. > > > > The article has it backwards. > > > > In any case? it worked. I looked up my SAT score (OK, well off the right > side of the scale (sheesh no wonder I was clobbered at the Humility > Olympics)) and found Sufjan Stevens. Never heard of him or her, so? > Google, found him, I like it. > > > > Down there on the wrong end is Hip Hop, Lil Wayne (never heard of him) > Beyonce (isn?t she model or something?) T.I. (never heard of him or her) > sheesh most of this stuff I never heard of on both ends of the scale. I > fear that I am terminally not hip. > > > > I see two of my favorites in there, Eagles, Beatles, Johnny Cash, Josh > Groban. > > > > Some of these I really don?t get: Bob Dylan? Most of the time he wasn?t > even trying to sing as far as I could tell. Where is Roy Orbison on this > chart? Glenn Campbell? John Denver? > > > > Can anyone suggest a reason why it is that our musical taste seems to be > somehow determined in our childhood, then doesn?t change much after that > for most of us? BillW or anyone, why? > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From steinberg.will at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 21:44:35 2020 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 17:44:35 -0400 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes In-Reply-To: <002d01d63c49$126b9d50$3742d7f0$@rainier66.com> References: <0E61F0A1-3B1D-4839-80CD-2566A81C0578@gmail.com> <002d01d63c49$126b9d50$3742d7f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Lol @ Spike discovering Sufjan Stevens XD Decade or two too late my friend :P SAT scores only show how prepared you are to take the SAT. Can be for a variety of reasons. Some very very smart people who I know also did not great on the SAT. I missed one question off a perfect SAT score but I love Little Wayne (his wordplay is excellent.) On Sat, Jun 6, 2020, 17:28 spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *SR Ballard via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes > > > > There was a link at the bottom > > SR Ballard > > > > > > > > > > Here it is: > > > > https://www.labnol.org/internet/music-taste-linked-to-intelligence/7489/ > > > > The title of the article claims one?s taste in music can reveal how smart > or dumb you are, but that isn?t right. The SAT score can reveal how smart > or dumb you are, and how smart or dumb you are might reveal (to some > extent) what your taste in music might be. > > > > The article has it backwards. > > > > In any case? it worked. I looked up my SAT score (OK, well off the right > side of the scale (sheesh no wonder I was clobbered at the Humility > Olympics)) and found Sufjan Stevens. Never heard of him or her, so? > Google, found him, I like it. > > > > Down there on the wrong end is Hip Hop, Lil Wayne (never heard of him) > Beyonce (isn?t she model or something?) T.I. (never heard of him or her) > sheesh most of this stuff I never heard of on both ends of the scale. I > fear that I am terminally not hip. > > > > I see two of my favorites in there, Eagles, Beatles, Johnny Cash, Josh > Groban. > > > > Some of these I really don?t get: Bob Dylan? Most of the time he wasn?t > even trying to sing as far as I could tell. Where is Roy Orbison on this > chart? Glenn Campbell? John Denver? > > > > Can anyone suggest a reason why it is that our musical taste seems to be > somehow determined in our childhood, then doesn?t change much after that > for most of us? BillW or anyone, why? > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 21:57:03 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 16:57:03 -0500 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes In-Reply-To: <002d01d63c49$126b9d50$3742d7f0$@rainier66.com> References: <0E61F0A1-3B1D-4839-80CD-2566A81C0578@gmail.com> <002d01d63c49$126b9d50$3742d7f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: No idea Spike. Taste gels around age 35 is the only data with which I am familiar. However, I must be an unusual case since I have accepted some really atonal composers when I was long past 35. But - my tastes in pop music gelled in the 70s (I say that, but truthfully I have not listened to pop since then - only occasionally scanning the radio dial in the car and finding nothing to like). There's a lot of female vocalists around now and I don't care for their timbre, and their 'can't seem to find the note' styles - gimme tenors, but strong ones, not teen falsetto ones screaming. Cash one of the very few basses in pop/country. What did the chart get backward? And here's a case of no proofreading (naughty, naughty) I see two of my favorites in there, Eagles, Beatles, Johnny Cash, Josh Groban. The first time I saw Roy Orbison play and sing I thought he was doing a parody. Never did like most of the Beatles - Eagles are great. Cash and GRoban I don't know (heard of Cash). This is interesting to me because I see some indication that when some dementia starts the person's tastes get lower, such as when my former chairman who had a stroke got addicted to soap operas. bill w On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 4:29 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *SR Ballard via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes > > > > There was a link at the bottom > > SR Ballard > > > > > > > > > > Here it is: > > > > https://www.labnol.org/internet/music-taste-linked-to-intelligence/7489/ > > > > The title of the article claims one?s taste in music can reveal how smart > or dumb you are, but that isn?t right. The SAT score can reveal how smart > or dumb you are, and how smart or dumb you are might reveal (to some > extent) what your taste in music might be. > > > > The article has it backwards. > > > > In any case? it worked. I looked up my SAT score (OK, well off the right > side of the scale (sheesh no wonder I was clobbered at the Humility > Olympics)) and found Sufjan Stevens. Never heard of him or her, so? > Google, found him, I like it. > > > > Down there on the wrong end is Hip Hop, Lil Wayne (never heard of him) > Beyonce (isn?t she model or something?) T.I. (never heard of him or her) > sheesh most of this stuff I never heard of on both ends of the scale. I > fear that I am terminally not hip. > > > > I see two of my favorites in there, Eagles, Beatles, Johnny Cash, Josh > Groban. > > > > Some of these I really don?t get: Bob Dylan? Most of the time he wasn?t > even trying to sing as far as I could tell. Where is Roy Orbison on this > chart? Glenn Campbell? John Denver? > > > > Can anyone suggest a reason why it is that our musical taste seems to be > somehow determined in our childhood, then doesn?t change much after that > for most of us? BillW or anyone, why? > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 21:57:40 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 16:57:40 -0500 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes In-Reply-To: References: <0E61F0A1-3B1D-4839-80CD-2566A81C0578@gmail.com> <002d01d63c49$126b9d50$3742d7f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Yeah, Darin, I saw that too. ??? bill w On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 4:45 PM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > The plot may not be... /entirely/ rigorous, seeing as how "Beethoven" and > "Classical" are on opposite ends of the spread. :) > > On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 3:29 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >> >> >> >> > *On Behalf Of *SR Ballard via extropy-chat >> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes >> >> >> >> There was a link at the bottom >> >> SR Ballard >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> Here it is: >> >> >> >> https://www.labnol.org/internet/music-taste-linked-to-intelligence/7489/ >> >> >> >> The title of the article claims one?s taste in music can reveal how smart >> or dumb you are, but that isn?t right. The SAT score can reveal how smart >> or dumb you are, and how smart or dumb you are might reveal (to some >> extent) what your taste in music might be. >> >> >> >> The article has it backwards. >> >> >> >> In any case? it worked. I looked up my SAT score (OK, well off the right >> side of the scale (sheesh no wonder I was clobbered at the Humility >> Olympics)) and found Sufjan Stevens. Never heard of him or her, so? >> Google, found him, I like it. >> >> >> >> Down there on the wrong end is Hip Hop, Lil Wayne (never heard of him) >> Beyonce (isn?t she model or something?) T.I. (never heard of him or her) >> sheesh most of this stuff I never heard of on both ends of the scale. I >> fear that I am terminally not hip. >> >> >> >> I see two of my favorites in there, Eagles, Beatles, Johnny Cash, Josh >> Groban. >> >> >> >> Some of these I really don?t get: Bob Dylan? Most of the time he wasn?t >> even trying to sing as far as I could tell. Where is Roy Orbison on this >> chart? Glenn Campbell? John Denver? >> >> >> >> Can anyone suggest a reason why it is that our musical taste seems to be >> somehow determined in our childhood, then doesn?t change much after that >> for most of us? BillW or anyone, why? >> >> >> >> spike >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 22:24:03 2020 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 08:24:03 +1000 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <001d01d63c44$8c62b490$a5281db0$@rainier66.com> References: <20200605233514.Horde.IvWMXpUbX7VSTjrMWayWFvH@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> <002801d63bfe$5bb1cfc0$13156f40$@rainier66.com> <2E23C85C-7506-4C34-A376-81CD32407D78@gmail.com> <001d01d63c44$8c62b490$a5281db0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 7 Jun 2020 at 06:58, spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *SR Ballard via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder > > > > > > > > > > > > >?Spike, when you go on that there is no ?objective way? to determine now, > you act as if people will easily and willingly claim a gender their > delivery doctor wouldn?t expect? > > > > Delivery doctor? I am pretty sure mine has died a long time ago. In any > case, modern doctors will have no expectations. > > > > >?There are very real social and personal costs for being publicly trans. > It is not likely someone would put on such an emotionally difficult charade > for a sign on bonus? > > > > SR, in the world I am being thrust into, we are all trans. We are told > that gender is a state of mind. Well, OK, who am I to question that? I > don?t know what goes on in other peoples? minds. > > > > >?In a highly competitive, cut throat situation like high-level > athleticism I think it is very plausible, but gendered bonuses are illegal > in most Anglophone countries, rendering those pressure null? > > > > Ja. I have no intentions of claiming to be female SR. > > > > >?Furthering that, a large percent of prisoners in the US are mentally > ill. They would be better served in a psychiatric institution that was > dismantled a while back? > > > > Ja. If we didn?t have prisons, we would be in one hell of a jam. > Regarding psychiatric institutions being dismantled, most people do not > know why that was done. But we do: lack of customers. > > > > >?Did you know in other countries that they have prisons without the > issues our prisons have? SR Ballard > > SR, how can we know? It could be that in other countries they can legally > incarcerate psychiatric patients and they do this out of sight. We > wouldn?t know if they were doing that. In the US, we cannot hold > psychiatric patients against their will unless they have committed a crime > and have been convicted. > That?s not true. Laws differ from state to state, but there are legal mechanisms to detain and treat people who present a serious risk to themselves or others due to mental illness. I don?t think there is anywhere in the world where someone with dementia or psychosis, for example, would be allowed to wander into traffic on the grounds that they have not been convicted of a crime. > -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 6 22:25:51 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 15:25:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes In-Reply-To: References: <0E61F0A1-3B1D-4839-80CD-2566A81C0578@gmail.com> <002d01d63c49$126b9d50$3742d7f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <004c01d63c51$702cf3a0$5086dae0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Will Steinberg via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes >?Lol @ Spike discovering Sufjan Stevens XD >?Decade or two too late my friend ?? Hi Will hey, I have been busy the last decade or two: finishing up a career, then being a fulltime parent. {8^D I am not alone: I can imagine plenty of music non-hipsters in our world today, who would like Sufjan Stevens if they ever heard of him. A lot of us play our own CDs in the car and we are too busy with other matters at home, so we don?t know the latest hip sounds on Americaaaaan Top Fortyyyyyyyy (is Casey Kasem still doing those? (no I suppose not (he would hafta be about 90 yrs old by now (but we loved that radio show.)))) If you want a good laugh: my car still has a cassette tape player and it still works really well. My cassettes are worn out so I don?t use them much now. >?SAT scores only show how prepared you are to take the SAT. Can be for a variety of reasons. Some very very smart people who I know also did not great on the SAT? Ja the argument claims that the prepared do better on the SAT, so it isn?t a fair test. Sheesh. OK cool, let?s look at it another way. Suppose we could (somehow) prevent anyone from preparing, so everyone went into the SAT cold. Then what would happen? Would the spread be smaller? Or just different? And why do we assume that there is some kind of class thing going on? My notion is that middle or lower middle class people are hungry but not too discouraged to try harder. So they are the ones who really put their shoulder into the test prep and do well. This would work against stratification of society with the same people generation after generation at the top, ja? I have vague doubts there was any serious research that went into the chart. It would make for a fun sociology experiment to try to make a real chart like this. I can see a problem with trying to correlate these: most people don?t remember their SAT scores unless they were extraordinary and on the right end of the spectrum. spike Here it is: https://www.labnol.org/internet/music-taste-linked-to-intelligence/7489/ spike _______________________________________________ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 6 22:59:36 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 15:59:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <20200605233514.Horde.IvWMXpUbX7VSTjrMWayWFvH@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> <002801d63bfe$5bb1cfc0$13156f40$@rainier66.com> <2E23C85C-7506-4C34-A376-81CD32407D78@gmail.com> <001d01d63c44$8c62b490$a5281db0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <007801d63c56$26d02ec0$74708c40$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat SR, how can we know? It could be that in other countries they can legally incarcerate psychiatric patients and they do this out of sight. We wouldn?t know if they were doing that. In the US, we cannot hold psychiatric patients against their will unless they have committed a crime and have been convicted. That?s not true. Laws differ from state to state, but there are legal mechanisms to detain and treat people who present a serious risk to themselves or others due to mental illness. I don?t think there is anywhere in the world where someone with dementia or psychosis, for example, would be allowed to wander into traffic on the grounds that they have not been convicted of a crime. -- Stathis Papaioannou Hi Stathis, this touches on a controversial subject. There are emergency interventions, but in general being crazy alone cannot result in long-term commitment against a person?s will. Wandering in traffic is a legal infraction, so they could be arrested for that, then held. Dementia: oh dear what a morass is that question. In our society, we regularly put AD patients in lockdown when the patient is clearly suffering but haven?t committed a crime. An example case is where an AD sufferer starts tearing out a back patio with a crowbar and clearly hasn?t the capacity to build what she wants in its place. Well, it isn?t a crime to wreck your own house. It isn?t a crime to go wandering outdoors in one?s pajamas. Another example, grandma doesn?t recognize the man she has been married to for 55 years and sometimes goes into a panic when he comes home. Well? it?s his house too. But shrieking for help isn?t a crime. AD is a terrifying disease: the patient is often OK or mostly so in the morning, but they fade as the day progresses. We often do the equivalent of incarceration for those patients. They don?t want to be there, but have never committed a crime. A burden I have long carried is the notion that AD patients would likely be better if they had mental stimulation, which we damn well do have the technology to provide. I would invent that, but I suck. I am hoping people who do not will invent that, and get on it quickly. Make us some really good mental stimulation software, so we can fight back against Alzheimers. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 23:15:01 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 18:15:01 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <20200605233514.Horde.IvWMXpUbX7VSTjrMWayWFvH@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> <002801d63bfe$5bb1cfc0$13156f40$@rainier66.com> <2E23C85C-7506-4C34-A376-81CD32407D78@gmail.com> <001d01d63c44$8c62b490$a5281db0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Ja. If we didn?t have prisons, we would be in one hell of a jam. Regarding psychiatric institutions being dismantled, most people do not know why that was done. But we do: lack of customers spike Now Spike let's not run off without data. In 1973 the feds sued Alabama (and George Wallace): insufficient everything at the state psychiatric and the state mentally retarded institutions. (Some patients had been in there for decades and had nothing on their charts - no treatment of any kind. Lureen Wallace was governor because George could not run again. She came to Tuscaloosa, visited the institutions and gave a TV interview while crying and vowed to go back to Montgomery and get more money. Since George was really running the state you can guess how far she got.) Result, a lot of money was needed and the state didn't have it or wouldn't give it. Also at that time there were theories coming out that said that immersing a person in their own community was the answer, not putting them in large, inadequate institutions. So community mental health was started. One benefit was that many of the patients could stay at home and get drugs and therapy on an outpatient basis. I would say overall that it has not worked as intended but it did get a lot of economic pressure off fed and state govs. Yes, (as someone said) there are many psychiatric patients in local jails and in prisons. There is no other place to put them. They get little if any care. Some have died from lack of drugs, and some prisoners too who did not get their diabetes medicine or the like). The theory must be: just keep them off the streets (at about $30K a year in the prisons, so cost effectiveness is very poor here). AGain, to emphasize what I said in an earlier email, they have to be picked up and often no one will do that, or come up with bail in the case of misdeaneanors and felonies by the mental patients. Side effect: many criminals have to be let out on minimal bail because there is not room for them, even after putting many of them together - like 4 men to a 2 person cell. In 1973 Partlow, the MR place, had 4K people and was built for 2K. I do not know of a class of people in this country that are treated worse - as in 3rd world worse. Henry - jump in any time and update me and the group. I have not kept up with this issue. bill w On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 5:27 PM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > On Sun, 7 Jun 2020 at 06:58, spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >> >> >> >> *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf >> Of *SR Ballard via extropy-chat >> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >?Spike, when you go on that there is no ?objective way? to determine >> now, you act as if people will easily and willingly claim a gender their >> delivery doctor wouldn?t expect? >> >> >> >> Delivery doctor? I am pretty sure mine has died a long time ago. In any >> case, modern doctors will have no expectations. >> >> >> >> >?There are very real social and personal costs for being publicly trans. >> It is not likely someone would put on such an emotionally difficult charade >> for a sign on bonus? >> >> >> >> SR, in the world I am being thrust into, we are all trans. We are told >> that gender is a state of mind. Well, OK, who am I to question that? I >> don?t know what goes on in other peoples? minds. >> >> >> >> >?In a highly competitive, cut throat situation like high-level >> athleticism I think it is very plausible, but gendered bonuses are illegal >> in most Anglophone countries, rendering those pressure null? >> >> >> >> Ja. I have no intentions of claiming to be female SR. >> >> >> >> >?Furthering that, a large percent of prisoners in the US are mentally >> ill. They would be better served in a psychiatric institution that was >> dismantled a while back? >> >> >> >> Ja. If we didn?t have prisons, we would be in one hell of a jam. >> Regarding psychiatric institutions being dismantled, most people do not >> know why that was done. But we do: lack of customers. >> >> >> >> >?Did you know in other countries that they have prisons without the >> issues our prisons have? SR Ballard >> >> SR, how can we know? It could be that in other countries they can >> legally incarcerate psychiatric patients and they do this out of sight. We >> wouldn?t know if they were doing that. In the US, we cannot hold >> psychiatric patients against their will unless they have committed a crime >> and have been convicted. >> > That?s not true. Laws differ from state to state, but there are legal > mechanisms to detain and treat people who present a serious risk to > themselves or others due to mental illness. I don?t think there is anywhere > in the world where someone with dementia or psychosis, for example, would > be allowed to wander into traffic on the grounds that they have not been > convicted of a crime. > >> -- > Stathis Papaioannou > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 23:26:01 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 18:26:01 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <007801d63c56$26d02ec0$74708c40$@rainier66.com> References: <20200605233514.Horde.IvWMXpUbX7VSTjrMWayWFvH@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> <002801d63bfe$5bb1cfc0$13156f40$@rainier66.com> <2E23C85C-7506-4C34-A376-81CD32407D78@gmail.com> <001d01d63c44$8c62b490$a5281db0$@rainier66.com> <007801d63c56$26d02ec0$74708c40$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: being crazy alone cannot result in long-term commitment against a person?s will. spike In most states a judge and a psychiatrist, or psychologist, or sometimes just an MD can get a person involuntarily incarcerated - but not for a long time; that has to be determined after admission. I saw a case where a man was put in a mental hospital because he refused to have an appendectomy. Not at all mentally ill. So they operated and he died. There are judges who, given certain promises, can do anything they like. bill w On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 6:01 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat > > SR, how can we know? It could be that in other countries they can legally > incarcerate psychiatric patients and they do this out of sight. We > wouldn?t know if they were doing that. In the US, we cannot hold > psychiatric patients against their will unless they have committed a crime > and have been convicted. > > That?s not true. Laws differ from state to state, but there are legal > mechanisms to detain and treat people who present a serious risk to > themselves or others due to mental illness. I don?t think there is anywhere > in the world where someone with dementia or psychosis, for example, would > be allowed to wander into traffic on the grounds that they have not been > convicted of a crime. > > -- > > Stathis Papaioannou > > > > > > > > Hi Stathis, this touches on a controversial subject. There are emergency > interventions, but in general being crazy alone cannot result in long-term > commitment against a person?s will. Wandering in traffic is a legal > infraction, so they could be arrested for that, then held. > > > > Dementia: oh dear what a morass is that question. In our society, we > regularly put AD patients in lockdown when the patient is clearly suffering > but haven?t committed a crime. An example case is where an AD sufferer > starts tearing out a back patio with a crowbar and clearly hasn?t the > capacity to build what she wants in its place. Well, it isn?t a crime to > wreck your own house. It isn?t a crime to go wandering outdoors in one?s > pajamas. Another example, grandma doesn?t recognize the man she has been > married to for 55 years and sometimes goes into a panic when he comes > home. Well? it?s his house too. But shrieking for help isn?t a crime. > > > > AD is a terrifying disease: the patient is often OK or mostly so in the > morning, but they fade as the day progresses. > > > > We often do the equivalent of incarceration for those patients. They > don?t want to be there, but have never committed a crime. > > > > A burden I have long carried is the notion that AD patients would likely > be better if they had mental stimulation, which we damn well do have the > technology to provide. I would invent that, but I suck. I am hoping > people who do not will invent that, and get on it quickly. Make us some > really good mental stimulation software, so we can fight back against > Alzheimers. > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 23:26:35 2020 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 09:26:35 +1000 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <007801d63c56$26d02ec0$74708c40$@rainier66.com> References: <20200605233514.Horde.IvWMXpUbX7VSTjrMWayWFvH@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> <002801d63bfe$5bb1cfc0$13156f40$@rainier66.com> <2E23C85C-7506-4C34-A376-81CD32407D78@gmail.com> <001d01d63c44$8c62b490$a5281db0$@rainier66.com> <007801d63c56$26d02ec0$74708c40$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 7 Jun 2020 at 09:01, spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat > > SR, how can we know? It could be that in other countries they can legally > incarcerate psychiatric patients and they do this out of sight. We > wouldn?t know if they were doing that. In the US, we cannot hold > psychiatric patients against their will unless they have committed a crime > and have been convicted. > > That?s not true. Laws differ from state to state, but there are legal > mechanisms to detain and treat people who present a serious risk to > themselves or others due to mental illness. I don?t think there is anywhere > in the world where someone with dementia or psychosis, for example, would > be allowed to wander into traffic on the grounds that they have not been > convicted of a crime. > > -- > > Stathis Papaioannou > > > > > > > > Hi Stathis, this touches on a controversial subject. There are emergency > interventions, but in general being crazy alone cannot result in long-term > commitment against a person?s will. Wandering in traffic is a legal > infraction, so they could be arrested for that, then held. > > > > Dementia: oh dear what a morass is that question. In our society, we > regularly put AD patients in lockdown when the patient is clearly suffering > but haven?t committed a crime. An example case is where an AD sufferer > starts tearing out a back patio with a crowbar and clearly hasn?t the > capacity to build what she wants in its place. Well, it isn?t a crime to > wreck your own house. It isn?t a crime to go wandering outdoors in one?s > pajamas. Another example, grandma doesn?t recognize the man she has been > married to for 55 years and sometimes goes into a panic when he comes > home. Well? it?s his house too. But shrieking for help isn?t a crime. > > > > AD is a terrifying disease: the patient is often OK or mostly so in the > morning, but they fade as the day progresses. > > > > We often do the equivalent of incarceration for those patients. They > don?t want to be there, but have never committed a crime. > > > > A burden I have long carried is the notion that AD patients would likely > be better if they had mental stimulation, which we damn well do have the > technology to provide. I would invent that, but I suck. I am hoping > people who do not will invent that, and get on it quickly. Make us some > really good mental stimulation software, so we can fight back against > Alzheimers. > The criterion bot involuntary treatment in most jurisdictions is that the person has a mental illness and, as a result of this, presents a serious risk to themselves or others. Some jurisdictions define ?serious risk? more loosely than others. For example, if your child refuses to come out of their room and stops eating because they hear voices telling them you have poisoned their food, and they refuse treatment or even assessment because they don?t believe they are unwell, should they be treated against their will? This is not an uncommon presentation of a young person with schizophrenia. Some jurisdictions would allow early intervention, others would wait until they were actually showing signs of starvation. But to actually let them die because of a treatable condition that takes away their ability to reason would be a tragedy. -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 23:35:10 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 18:35:10 -0500 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes In-Reply-To: <004c01d63c51$702cf3a0$5086dae0$@rainier66.com> References: <0E61F0A1-3B1D-4839-80CD-2566A81C0578@gmail.com> <002d01d63c49$126b9d50$3742d7f0$@rainier66.com> <004c01d63c51$702cf3a0$5086dae0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Ja the argument claims that the prepared do better on the SAT, so it isn?t a fair test. Sheesh. You would have to live pretty far out in the boonies not to know that SAT prep was free all over the web. Me, I took the ACT. Context: you had to be in ROTC in 1960 - land grant college. So we marched here, filled out stuff, marched there, filled out stuff, etc. One of the things was the ACT. I marked answers at random and put my head down and took a long nap. Later college officials would look at my score, look at me, and ask how I got into Honors English. I think I made a 4 or something absurd (etymology of 'absurd' = away from the normal - I sure was). As far as 'fair' is concerned, there aren't any fair tests. You can always come up with some cultural variable background and claim unfairness. But fair for most? Yes And only those who make low scores complain. High ones never do, though some did get high scores by chance. Very few, though. bill w On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 5:35 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *Will Steinberg via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes > > > > >?Lol @ Spike discovering Sufjan Stevens XD > > > > >?Decade or two too late my friend ?? > > > > Hi Will hey, I have been busy the last decade or two: finishing up a > career, then being a fulltime parent. {8^D > > > > I am not alone: I can imagine plenty of music non-hipsters in our world > today, who would like Sufjan Stevens if they ever heard of him. A lot of > us play our own CDs in the car and we are too busy with other matters at > home, so we don?t know the latest hip sounds on Americaaaaan Top > Fortyyyyyyyy (is Casey Kasem still doing those? (no I suppose not (he would > hafta be about 90 yrs old by now (but we loved that radio show.)))) > > > > If you want a good laugh: my car still has a cassette tape player and it > still works really well. My cassettes are worn out so I don?t use them > much now. > > > > >?SAT scores only show how prepared you are to take the SAT. Can be for a > variety of reasons. Some very very smart people who I know also did not > great on the SAT? > > > > Ja the argument claims that the prepared do better on the SAT, so it isn?t > a fair test. Sheesh. > > > > OK cool, let?s look at it another way. Suppose we could (somehow) prevent > anyone from preparing, so everyone went into the SAT cold. Then what would > happen? Would the spread be smaller? Or just different? And why do we > assume that there is some kind of class thing going on? My notion is that > middle or lower middle class people are hungry but not too discouraged to > try harder. So they are the ones who really put their shoulder into the > test prep and do well. This would work against stratification of society > with the same people generation after generation at the top, ja? > > > > I have vague doubts there was any serious research that went into the > chart. > > > > It would make for a fun sociology experiment to try to make a real chart > like this. > > > > I can see a problem with trying to correlate these: most people don?t > remember their SAT scores unless they were extraordinary and on the right > end of the spectrum. > > > > spike > > > > > > > > Here it is: > > > > https://www.labnol.org/internet/music-taste-linked-to-intelligence/7489/ > > > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sun Jun 7 00:03:51 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 17:03:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder Message-ID: SR Ballard wrote: > I actually think female police might be more likely to use deadly force due to lower average muscle mass in women. That's something where there are probable numbers. But the police force is some significant fraction female. I can't think of a case where a female officer was involved in a non-justified killing, but there may be some. There are around 1000 killings by police every year. If female cops are 10%, then (if they kill at the same rate) they should be killing about a hundred a year. BTW, the rate of killing by the cops is going down in some places that emphasize de-escalation in training police. > And I think nearly anyone would see the plan as intolerably sexist. That might be the case, but it isn't a new idea. About 15 years ago, in "UpLift", a chapter that goes with "the clinic seed" I wrote: **** "Kanati mentioned your brother Ricky got in some kind of trouble," Floyd said. "Oh my God, did he." Marc shook his head. "My fool brother put the sound of racking a 12 gage pump shotgun on his cell phone as the ring tone. He was in a Pizza Hut line when the damned phone went off. Guy in front of him was undercover RCMP who some biker had threatened with a shotgun earlier that day." "What happened"? Floyd asked. "The Mountie tried to pull his gun and turn around. The gun went off, slug hit the floor and bits of lead and floor chopped up a little kid's legs. Fortunately, it wasn't too bad. The cops arrested Ricky. They were asking for bail. Before I could wire the money, the tribal lawyer got him released. The lawyer talked to the Crown attorney. The Crown told the RCMP a charge of threatening an officer with a cell phone ring tone wouldn't fly." Marc sighed. "At least he wasn't murdered by the cops like Leroy Shenandoah. My great uncle served in the Green Berets with him and grandfather was working with him in Philadelphia when that went down. Wish I could get Ricky to try for a job here, but his girlfriend won't consider it." Floyd commiserated on the time he had to bail out his brother and went on, "At least he wouldn't have to worry about nervous macho cops here." One of the directors of UpLift held strong opinions about police, so the entire force was female. ***** Keith From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sun Jun 7 04:58:02 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2020 21:58:02 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder Message-ID: SR Ballard snip > Anecdotally I have: > - had police show up snip That's an impressive list. Until I got involved with the scientologists, my actual contact with the police was minimal, especially when you consider all the really dicey things we did with recreational explosives, cannons, rockets, cases of dynamite, and such. After I got involved with that fight, the clam cult corrupted cops, district attornies, court records, and judges. They have intimidated the FBI, the FDA, and other agencies. Perhaps the worse was when a SWAT team took down me and a friend in a shopping mall. We were in a car when we were jumped. The friend had been trained in escape driving as am embassy guard. It came to sub-seconds when he almost backed over two cops. I am sure the rest would have fired machine guns through us and right into the food court at a mall if that had happened. The friend had PTSD for the next year or two. All this is deeply documented if anyone ever has the nerve to go after the cult. Keith From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sun Jun 7 10:02:52 2020 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 06:02:52 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Signing your death warrant Message-ID: Recently the hospital administration, in their wisdom, decreed that I have to ask each and every patient I admit about his preferences regarding resuscitation. Previously I did not do it, the default being full resuscitation, that is doctors making all efforts to restart the patient's heart and breathing should they stop but be potentially recoverable. Now I have been asking the same questions multiple times a day and I am shocked about the answers I hear. Let's not discuss much those who say they do want to be resuscitated - aside from mentioning that sometimes people are distressed by having the question posed to them. Do they wonder if I am, well, hesitant to do everything to help them? That I am eager to let them drop dead, if they would give me an excuse? From the way many react I gather they get suspicious and I immediately reassure them that I only ask the question because "they make me do it". But very often, when I ask "If your heart stopped, would you like the doctors to help you or not?" they say "No, do not resuscitate, I have the papers, living will, advanced life directives and whatnot", as if they knew what we are talking about. If I stopped questioning right there, the order DNR would be entered on chart. But I always follow up with "So let me make sure we understand each other - if your heart stopped, and we could get it restarted, with an electric shock and medications, and get you back to your normal life, you want the doctors to stand around while you are dying and do nothing? Are you sure?". Nine times out of ten the patient, even the ones with all the papers filled out and signed and validated by lawyers, will say "Well, if you can get me back to normal, help me, I don't want to die, I just don't want to be hooked to a machine and never get off it". There is a common misunderstanding among patients that when they sign their DNR papers they just make sure that their lives would not end in a futile and painful ICU stay, on life support, to be eventually terminated without ever going back to a life worth living. But in fact, DNR means much more - it means no efforts will be made to help them even if their chance of recovery is high. I once had a patient who coded almost ten times, and was resuscitated successfully, usually within less than a minute by one or two defibrillator shots, and walked home none the worse for wear, with a new pacemaker. This situation, a sudden cardiac arrest in the hospital on telemetry (heart monitoring) is completely different from an unmonitored cardiac arrest, or arrest in the course of progressive and irreversible disease. The former has a very good prognosis, as in my patient with ten lives. The latter is what DNR should be about - situations when efforts are often futile and result in wrongful life - short, painful, meaningless survival of the body while the mind is already too far gone, even if not strictly speaking brain dead. Unfortunately the DNR papers don't really make a distinction between them, or the distinction is lost on many patients when they talk to their lawyers. How many hundreds of thousands of Americans are admitted to the hospital every day? How many tens of thousands have DNR orders they never really meant to authorize? What if your doctor just takes your "No, no, just let me go" at face value, and marks you for death you don't really want? My guess is it happens all the time but nobody pays attention because those who are harmed are all dead and speechless, and the paperwork is ok. If a doctor, a lawyer or another huckster asks you if you want to have DNR orders be sure you really know what the story is about. You don't want to sign your own death warrant accidentally, do you? Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From steinberg.will at gmail.com Sun Jun 7 14:50:53 2020 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 10:50:53 -0400 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes In-Reply-To: References: <0E61F0A1-3B1D-4839-80CD-2566A81C0578@gmail.com> <002d01d63c49$126b9d50$3742d7f0$@rainier66.com> <004c01d63c51$702cf3a0$5086dae0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Here is something I always wondered--and maybe should be ashamed of thinking because I studied statistics in grad school: So guessing on the SAT is weighted so the expected value of a question is the same no matter whether you guess or leave it blank--negative 1/4 points for a guess. However, if you don't answer a question, you lower your maximum score, no questions asked. Now if wrong answers lost you more points to make the expected value of guessing lower than not answering, I would find it hard to recommend guessing. But all things being equal, does guessing not have a hidden value--that you MAY still get those points? This is what I always thought. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Jun 7 15:07:14 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 11:07:14 -0400 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes In-Reply-To: References: <0E61F0A1-3B1D-4839-80CD-2566A81C0578@gmail.com> <002d01d63c49$126b9d50$3742d7f0$@rainier66.com> <004c01d63c51$702cf3a0$5086dae0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Where is Weird Al Yankovic on this chart? He should be somewhere to the right of Beethoven but I don't see him. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 7 15:29:44 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 08:29:44 -0700 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes In-Reply-To: References: <0E61F0A1-3B1D-4839-80CD-2566A81C0578@gmail.com> <002d01d63c49$126b9d50$3742d7f0$@rainier66.com> <004c01d63c51$702cf3a0$5086dae0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <008301d63ce0$78a294b0$69e7be10$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Sent: Sunday, June 7, 2020 8:07 AM Subject: Re: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes Where is Weird Al Yankovic on this chart? He should be somewhere to the right of Beethoven but I don't see him. John K Clark Weird Al was himself a brilliant student, according to those who knew him personally. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Jun 7 15:43:32 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 11:43:32 -0400 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes In-Reply-To: <008301d63ce0$78a294b0$69e7be10$@rainier66.com> References: <0E61F0A1-3B1D-4839-80CD-2566A81C0578@gmail.com> <002d01d63c49$126b9d50$3742d7f0$@rainier66.com> <004c01d63c51$702cf3a0$5086dae0$@rainier66.com> <008301d63ce0$78a294b0$69e7be10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Jun 7, 2020 at 11:33 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> Weird Al was himself a brilliant student, according to those who knew > him personally. * > I can believe that. BOB John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 7 15:51:36 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 08:51:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes In-Reply-To: <008301d63ce0$78a294b0$69e7be10$@rainier66.com> References: <0E61F0A1-3B1D-4839-80CD-2566A81C0578@gmail.com> <002d01d63c49$126b9d50$3742d7f0$@rainier66.com> <004c01d63c51$702cf3a0$5086dae0$@rainier66.com> <008301d63ce0$78a294b0$69e7be10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00b101d63ce3$86b8a960$9429fc20$@rainier66.com> From: spike at rainier66.com > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Sent: Sunday, June 7, 2020 8:07 AM Subject: Re: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes >?Where is Weird Al Yankovic on this chart? He should be somewhere to the right of Beethoven but I don't see him. John K Clark I am thinking of that chart again, and how to use it. We don?t need to be told how smart we are, since we already have our SAT scores (or ACT or equivalent.) We want to use the chart to figure out who would be a genre of music we might like, as I did with Sufjan over on the right side of the chart. We could expand that concept and use it to sell music to people who usually aren?t in the market. Rather than correlate music genres with SAT scores, we could correlate it with taste in cars, political attitudes (that one might be really interesting) favorite sports, personal wealth, favorite foods, and so forth, but really what we need is some way to reduce each of these things to a number. SAT scores do that for us, but how would we reduce any of this other stuff to a single number so we can graph that metric on the horizontal axis? Even SAT score is multidimensional (more than just the two main ones, math and English skill) so it could be we are mostly fooling ourselves if we pretend that can be effectively reduced to one number. How can we express favorite sports in one number? Of those categories I named, personal wealth might be the one which most readily reduces to one number. This looks like a terrific sociology experiment: get a bunch of undergrads to choose a factor, try to correlate music groups with it. Then we create a multi-dimensional matrix with their data, use our mathematical tricks we enginerds worked so hard to master, let proles find themselves in that multi-space by entering in the computer their favorite sports, their favorite cars, personal wealth, political preferences and so on, then calculate music groups they might like. In the meantime? we now have in our extremely valuable database? some extremely valuable data. We know their favorite cars and how much money they have. We have their email @. We send the richest proles focused advertising for their favorite cars, we make a cubic buttload. Or rather I do, but I will say nice things about you for giving me the idea to start with. Thanks BillW! spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 7 16:18:41 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 09:18:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes In-Reply-To: References: <0E61F0A1-3B1D-4839-80CD-2566A81C0578@gmail.com> <002d01d63c49$126b9d50$3742d7f0$@rainier66.com> <004c01d63c51$702cf3a0$5086dae0$@rainier66.com> <008301d63ce0$78a294b0$69e7be10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00da01d63ce7$4f563510$ee029f30$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes On Sun, Jun 7, 2020 at 11:33 AM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: > Weird Al was himself a brilliant student, according to those who knew him personally. I can believe that. BOB John K Clark For fellow hardcore Weird Al fans willing to invest 7 delightful minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvSvz2_d9R8 Fun aside: there was an equation on the board in the background in a one-second shot from White and Nerdy. The equation is anatomically correct. That?s attention to detail. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sun Jun 7 16:31:27 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 11:31:27 -0500 Subject: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes In-Reply-To: <00b101d63ce3$86b8a960$9429fc20$@rainier66.com> References: <0E61F0A1-3B1D-4839-80CD-2566A81C0578@gmail.com> <002d01d63c49$126b9d50$3742d7f0$@rainier66.com> <004c01d63c51$702cf3a0$5086dae0$@rainier66.com> <008301d63ce0$78a294b0$69e7be10$@rainier66.com> <00b101d63ce3$86b8a960$9429fc20$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: When I buy a book on Amazon I get a selection of books other people bought who bought my book. It's always books, but it could just as easily be music or clothes or anything. Or if I buy music it could recommend books. All you need is the data, and Amazon has it from hundreds of millions of people. I don't know how Spike can make any money from it but Amazon can. What seems to be needed is a different massaging of the data Amazon already has, looking for correlations between books bought and music bought (and any other combination one can think of). I have no way to do this. If you present the idea to Amazon they will just steal it and say they were already doing that.. bill w On Sun, Jun 7, 2020 at 10:56 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *From:* spike at rainier66.com > > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *John Clark via extropy-chat > *Sent:* Sunday, June 7, 2020 8:07 AM > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes > > > > >?Where is Weird Al Yankovic on this chart? He should be somewhere to the > right of Beethoven but I don't see him. > > John K Clark > > > > > > I am thinking of that chart again, and how to use it. We don?t need to be > told how smart we are, since we already have our SAT scores (or ACT or > equivalent.) We want to use the chart to figure out who would be a genre > of music we might like, as I did with Sufjan over on the right side of the > chart. > > > > We could expand that concept and use it to sell music to people who > usually aren?t in the market. > > > > Rather than correlate music genres with SAT scores, we could correlate it > with taste in cars, political attitudes (that one might be really > interesting) favorite sports, personal wealth, favorite foods, and so > forth, but really what we need is some way to reduce each of these things > to a number. SAT scores do that for us, but how would we reduce any of > this other stuff to a single number so we can graph that metric on the > horizontal axis? > > > > Even SAT score is multidimensional (more than just the two main ones, math > and English skill) so it could be we are mostly fooling ourselves if we > pretend that can be effectively reduced to one number. How can we express > favorite sports in one number? Of those categories I named, personal > wealth might be the one which most readily reduces to one number. > > > > This looks like a terrific sociology experiment: get a bunch of undergrads > to choose a factor, try to correlate music groups with it. Then we create > a multi-dimensional matrix with their data, use our mathematical tricks we > enginerds worked so hard to master, let proles find themselves in that > multi-space by entering in the computer their favorite sports, their > favorite cars, personal wealth, political preferences and so on, then > calculate music groups they might like. > > > > In the meantime? we now have in our extremely valuable database? some > extremely valuable data. We know their favorite cars and how much money > they have. We have their email @. We send the richest proles focused > advertising for their favorite cars, we make a cubic buttload. Or rather I > do, but I will say nice things about you for giving me the idea to start > with. Thanks BillW! > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sun Jun 7 17:04:40 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 12:04:40 -0500 Subject: [ExI] help me and Spike Message-ID: We are looking for the word that describes the software that recommends music or books to you based on what you bought. Thanks! bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Sun Jun 7 17:11:04 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 13:11:04 -0400 Subject: [ExI] help me and Spike In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: They're called recommender systems: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recommender_system On Sun, Jun 7, 2020, 1:08 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > We are looking for the word that describes the software that recommends > music or books to you based on what you bought. > > Thanks! bill w > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sun Jun 7 17:36:36 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 12:36:36 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9CDEBA20-8CB6-49F5-956A-66973F2B63E2@gmail.com> Very shocking that it happened to you personally. I?m very aware of the situation, unfortunately. SR Ballard > On Jun 6, 2020, at 11:58 PM, Keith Henson via extropy-chat wrote: > > SR Ballard > > snip > >> Anecdotally I have: >> - had police show up > > snip > > That's an impressive list. > > Until I got involved with the scientologists, my actual contact with > the police was minimal, especially when you consider all the really > dicey things we did with recreational explosives, cannons, rockets, > cases of dynamite, and such. > > After I got involved with that fight, the clam cult corrupted cops, > district attornies, court records, and judges. They have intimidated > the FBI, the FDA, and other agencies. > > Perhaps the worse was when a SWAT team took down me and a friend in a > shopping mall. We were in a car when we were jumped. The friend had > been trained in escape driving as am embassy guard. It came to > sub-seconds when he almost backed over two cops. I am sure the rest > would have fired machine guns through us and right into the food court > at a mall if that had happened. The friend had PTSD for the next year > or two. > > All this is deeply documented if anyone ever has the nerve to go after the cult. > > Keith > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sun Jun 7 17:59:34 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 12:59:34 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Signing your death warrant In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Why can?t we have a separate classification of like... ?Limited Resuscitation? Orders? If they are a thing, I?ve never heard of them. And I have to admit, people are really not that knowledgeable about their own healthcare options and it?s very sad. On the other hand, I have family experience with doctors just straight up ignoring DNRs that they are painfully aware of, for both my aunt and grandmother. (Neither of them appreciated that, by the way. My aunt has a pain disorder and they did chest compressions on her. She lives in... basically agony everyday because of it.) Oh well... SR Ballard > On Jun 7, 2020, at 5:02 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat wrote: > > Recently the hospital administration, in their wisdom, decreed that I have to ask each and every patient I admit about his preferences regarding resuscitation. Previously I did not do it, the default being full resuscitation, that is doctors making all efforts to restart the patient's heart and breathing should they stop but be potentially recoverable. Now I have been asking the same questions multiple times a day and I am shocked about the answers I hear. > > Let's not discuss much those who say they do want to be resuscitated - aside from mentioning that sometimes people are distressed by having the question posed to them. Do they wonder if I am, well, hesitant to do everything to help them? That I am eager to let them drop dead, if they would give me an excuse? From the way many react I gather they get suspicious and I immediately reassure them that I only ask the question because "they make me do it". > > But very often, when I ask "If your heart stopped, would you like the doctors to help you or not?" they say "No, do not resuscitate, I have the papers, living will, advanced life directives and whatnot", as if they knew what we are talking about. If I stopped questioning right there, the order DNR would be entered on chart. But I always follow up with "So let me make sure we understand each other - if your heart stopped, and we could get it restarted, with an electric shock and medications, and get you back to your normal life, you want the doctors to stand around while you are dying and do nothing? Are you sure?". Nine times out of ten the patient, even the ones with all the papers filled out and signed and validated by lawyers, will say "Well, if you can get me back to normal, help me, I don't want to die, I just don't want to be hooked to a machine and never get off it". > > There is a common misunderstanding among patients that when they sign their DNR papers they just make sure that their lives would not end in a futile and painful ICU stay, on life support, to be eventually terminated without ever going back to a life worth living. But in fact, DNR means much more - it means no efforts will be made to help them even if their chance of recovery is high. I once had a patient who coded almost ten times, and was resuscitated successfully, usually within less than a minute by one or two defibrillator shots, and walked home none the worse for wear, with a new pacemaker. This situation, a sudden cardiac arrest in the hospital on telemetry (heart monitoring) is completely different from an unmonitored cardiac arrest, or arrest in the course of progressive and irreversible disease. The former has a very good prognosis, as in my patient with ten lives. The latter is what DNR should be about - situations when efforts are often futile and result in wrongful life - short, painful, meaningless survival of the body while the mind is already too far gone, even if not strictly speaking brain dead. > > Unfortunately the DNR papers don't really make a distinction between them, or the distinction is lost on many patients when they talk to their lawyers. How many hundreds of thousands of Americans are admitted to the hospital every day? How many tens of thousands have DNR orders they never really meant to authorize? What if your doctor just takes your "No, no, just let me go" at face value, and marks you for death you don't really want? > > My guess is it happens all the time but nobody pays attention because those who are harmed are all dead and speechless, and the paperwork is ok. > > If a doctor, a lawyer or another huckster asks you if you want to have DNR orders be sure you really know what the story is about. You don't want to sign your own death warrant accidentally, do you? > > Rafal > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 7 18:17:20 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 11:17:20 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Signing your death warrant In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <008301d63cf7$e2e649e0$a8b2dda0$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Signing your death warrant >...Why can?t we have a separate classification of like... ?Limited Resuscitation? Orders? If they are a thing, I?ve never heard of them. ... >...Oh well... SR Ballard Rafal and SR, we must deal with the way ICU patients are cared for and paid for. If a person has no insurance, then a few weeks in the ICU would impoverish their family, then I can completely see why a person would want nothing to do with that. I wouldn't want that either. Ideally we should have some means of doing a limited-liability insurance policy whereby a person or family can buy some fixed amount, say 200k, to cover ICU expenses. Then by agreement, when that money is gone, I'm gone. spike > On Jun 7, 2020, at 5:02 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat wrote: > > Recently the hospital administration, in their wisdom, decreed that I have to ask each and every patient I admit about his preferences regarding resuscitation. Previously I did not do it... > > Rafal > _______________________________________________ From brent.allsop at gmail.com Sun Jun 7 19:07:04 2020 From: brent.allsop at gmail.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 13:07:04 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Signing your death warrant In-Reply-To: <008301d63cf7$e2e649e0$a8b2dda0$@rainier66.com> References: <008301d63cf7$e2e649e0$a8b2dda0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Thanks for bringing this up Rafal, I'm completely frustrated with not knowing what to do with this, or what kind of "advanced life directive" I need. I'm signed up with Alcor, and expected they would provide me with one. I asked them, probably only once, in passing, quite a while ago, so it is probably my fault, but I am completely frustrated that they aren't at least providing a sample one, and telling me what is and isn't important, for Alcor to be most likely able to do what they need to do. Where does one go, to find a sample "advanced life directive" that is compatible with being signed up with Alcor? Do any of you Alcor people out there have one? Could I see a copy? Brent On Sun, Jun 7, 2020 at 12:21 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of > SR Ballard via extropy-chat > > Subject: Re: [ExI] Signing your death warrant > > >...Why can?t we have a separate classification of like... ?Limited > Resuscitation? Orders? If they are a thing, I?ve never heard of them. > ... > >...Oh well... > > SR Ballard > > > > > > > Rafal and SR, we must deal with the way ICU patients are cared for and > paid for. If a person has no insurance, then a few weeks in the ICU would > impoverish their family, then I can completely see why a person would want > nothing to do with that. I wouldn't want that either. > > Ideally we should have some means of doing a limited-liability insurance > policy whereby a person or family can buy some fixed amount, say 200k, to > cover ICU expenses. Then by agreement, when that money is gone, I'm gone. > > spike > > > > > > > On Jun 7, 2020, at 5:02 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > Recently the hospital administration, in their wisdom, decreed that I > have to ask each and every patient I admit about his preferences regarding > resuscitation. Previously I did not do it... > > > > Rafal > > _______________________________________________ > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sun Jun 7 19:33:13 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 14:33:13 -0500 Subject: [ExI] resusitation Message-ID: Can't there be a form whereby we can legally defer our decision to a family member or friend, or just anyone we put on the list? bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 7 19:49:46 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 12:49:46 -0700 Subject: [ExI] resusitation In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <002c01d63d04$ccad47c0$6607d740$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: [ExI] resusitation >?Can't there be a form whereby we can legally defer our decision to a family member or friend, or just anyone we put on the list? bill w Hmmm, perhaps, but the family?s judgment might disagree with my own. When I am in need of resuscitation, my money is their money. I would opt to call in Alcor, they might opt to try to spend money they are going to need to keep my heart beating a little longer. I lived, I had fun. Now it is their turn. I was in the hospital in December. If being alive means being in that place, I want to save the money and let my family have that. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sun Jun 7 20:02:31 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 15:02:31 -0500 Subject: [ExI] resusitation In-Reply-To: <002c01d63d04$ccad47c0$6607d740$@rainier66.com> References: <002c01d63d04$ccad47c0$6607d740$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: The key is: what are the odds that resuscitation brings me back to a life worth living. Heart attacks really don't count here. Zap me back into life and give me pills or a pacemaker and I am back to nearly normal. Severe strokes count heavily: if they affect my frontal lobes I won't be the same person - maybe like having end stage Alzheimer's. Who wants that for a life? Partly paralyzed I can handle. All of which would be discussed with the people on my list. I assume calling 911 is equal to saying that I want to be resuscitated asap. Any decisions would be made later at the hospital after seeing what good the emts did. Legal question: can a person with power of attorney make the hospital let me go home even if I am in ICU? I am guessing no physician would sign a release form in that case. bill w On Sun, Jun 7, 2020 at 2:51 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat > *Subject:* [ExI] resusitation > > > > >?Can't there be a form whereby we can legally defer our decision to a > family member or friend, or just anyone we put on the list? bill w > > > > > > > > Hmmm, perhaps, but the family?s judgment might disagree with my own. When > I am in need of resuscitation, my money is their money. I would opt to > call in Alcor, they might opt to try to spend money they are going to need > to keep my heart beating a little longer. I lived, I had fun. Now it is > their turn. > > > > I was in the hospital in December. If being alive means being in that > place, I want to save the money and let my family have that. > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rhanson at gmu.edu Sun Jun 7 13:22:25 2020 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin D Hanson) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 13:22:25 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Signing your death warrant In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <04C8C973-E75D-43EE-8DD9-E879633FD994@gmu.edu> This seems important enough to be worth writing up into something for a wider audience. On Jun 7, 2020, at 6:02 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat > wrote: Recently the hospital administration, in their wisdom, decreed that I have to ask each and every patient I admit about his preferences regarding resuscitation. Previously I did not do it, the default being full resuscitation, that is doctors making all efforts to restart the patient's heart and breathing should they stop but be potentially recoverable. Now I have been asking the same questions multiple times a day and I am shocked about the answers I hear. Let's not discuss much those who say they do want to be resuscitated - aside from mentioning that sometimes people are distressed by having the question posed to them. Do they wonder if I am, well, hesitant to do everything to help them? That I am eager to let them drop dead, if they would give me an excuse? From the way many react I gather they get suspicious and I immediately reassure them that I only ask the question because "they make me do it". But very often, when I ask "If your heart stopped, would you like the doctors to help you or not?" they say "No, do not resuscitate, I have the papers, living will, advanced life directives and whatnot", as if they knew what we are talking about. If I stopped questioning right there, the order DNR would be entered on chart. But I always follow up with "So let me make sure we understand each other - if your heart stopped, and we could get it restarted, with an electric shock and medications, and get you back to your normal life, you want the doctors to stand around while you are dying and do nothing? Are you sure?". Nine times out of ten the patient, even the ones with all the papers filled out and signed and validated by lawyers, will say "Well, if you can get me back to normal, help me, I don't want to die, I just don't want to be hooked to a machine and never get off it". There is a common misunderstanding among patients that when they sign their DNR papers they just make sure that their lives would not end in a futile and painful ICU stay, on life support, to be eventually terminated without ever going back to a life worth living. But in fact, DNR means much more - it means no efforts will be made to help them even if their chance of recovery is high. I once had a patient who coded almost ten times, and was resuscitated successfully, usually within less than a minute by one or two defibrillator shots, and walked home none the worse for wear, with a new pacemaker. This situation, a sudden cardiac arrest in the hospital on telemetry (heart monitoring) is completely different from an unmonitored cardiac arrest, or arrest in the course of progressive and irreversible disease. The former has a very good prognosis, as in my patient with ten lives. The latter is what DNR should be about - situations when efforts are often futile and result in wrongful life - short, painful, meaningless survival of the body while the mind is already too far gone, even if not strictly speaking brain dead. Unfortunately the DNR papers don't really make a distinction between them, or the distinction is lost on many patients when they talk to their lawyers. How many hundreds of thousands of Americans are admitted to the hospital every day? How many tens of thousands have DNR orders they never really meant to authorize? What if your doctor just takes your "No, no, just let me go" at face value, and marks you for death you don't really want? My guess is it happens all the time but nobody pays attention because those who are harmed are all dead and speechless, and the paperwork is ok. If a doctor, a lawyer or another huckster asks you if you want to have DNR orders be sure you really know what the story is about. You don't want to sign your own death warrant accidentally, do you? Rafal _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://secure-web.cisco.com/10a5ofT94oMFk_WQFsmFPo6ykVuPq1zrgvTZIxiUP1NOML1bnQOIkE3GL_UpAmgMd9jhH-X7Zp4Yj4-D2z0-Vp24AHnIHwuT_LRJ-7k-3esqxbHGFcvBYtRnKy38SsOSvEIz1taovyje806LXmkKm3sQ2EMHd2jOfTOgARJv18NnX_ZCGz0--HGJj4DJc9DwAC6_7JNlU3mMATSMa13DvygOBZ0MGRV-scEP4yrF1OW1hM8sIv-nPRi5nSOB4pQPuQpEWvTCMLP4B-l4O1fAhZYmouajHccShF6eDBQlFOiDr-0FeudzbYSk-Aa7vHrf_Y5vdyBqTVT5TnSa_ZAyMC8iyNA09Ylol3Q7G1xv7nsWdfEqRAl3oi10n3HRmlNGhOm7C3Ks_hQeHvQDwIKmOoTkq5cCxwQh_CGM_NCf4ocfVL9XGxD-Z8kRp7e1b2vfx/http%3A%2F%2Flists.extropy.org%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo.cgi%2Fextropy-chat Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu Future of Humanity Inst., Oxford University Assoc. Prof. Economics, George Mason University See my books: http://ageofem.com http://elephantinthebrain.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 7 21:53:00 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 14:53:00 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Signing your death warrant In-Reply-To: <04C8C973-E75D-43EE-8DD9-E879633FD994@gmu.edu> References: <04C8C973-E75D-43EE-8DD9-E879633FD994@gmu.edu> Message-ID: <003401d63d16$03b42200$0b1c6600$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Robin D Hanson via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Signing your death warrant >.This seems important enough to be worth writing up into something for a wider audience. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu I agree with Robin. A doctor is also a teacher: part of the job is to teach your patient how to not do whatever it is that landed her in your office. I learned a lot from Rafal's post. Please may I forward it to the local Alcor community? spike On Jun 7, 2020, at 6:02 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat > wrote: Recently the hospital administration, in their wisdom, decreed that I have to ask each and every patient I admit about his preferences regarding resuscitation. . If a doctor, a lawyer or another huckster asks you if you want to have DNR orders be sure you really know what the story is about. You don't want to sign your own death warrant accidentally, do you? Rafal _______________________________________________ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Sun Jun 7 22:23:50 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 15:23:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <078C8A72-5A49-4AC8-90BD-148DEE4FB893@gmail.com> On Jun 4, 2020, at 10:55 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat wrote: > >> On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 7:46 PM spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> Universities are trending toward de-emphasizing objective metrics for admissions. Otherwise, their campus would be almost entirely Asian. Some schools find this unacceptable, so they look for ways around it. >> > > ### This is a topic of some interest to me, sincy my daughter who was born last week is half-Polish and half-Han. I had to answer questions about the race of her parents on the birth certificate and I filled her father's race as "Other" (Polish). Her mother wrote "Asian". In retrospect this was not the best approach. We could have both filled "Other" (Unknown). > > I am thinking about identifying as African-American, or maybe Latino. After all, if your gender is nowadays not determined by your sex chromosomes or your genitals but by how you identify, then race, which on good authority does not objectively exist and is a social construct, should be also open to individual interpretation. We have Ms Dolezal, genetically Czech but very black with the help of some heavy-duty tan cream and hair-curlers, so why not? Getting a 200 to 400 point boost on admission to an Ivy is definitely worth it. > > I'll start filling out all forms asking for race with "Other", "Unknown" for now but then let the events guide further interpretations. You never know if Oceania would continue to be at war with Eastasia forever, so flexibility may be very useful. > > I am reasonably confident though that filling in "Other" (American) would be seen as very suspect, possibly seditious and altogether racist. Failing to mention race every five minutes is the loudest dog-whistle we have for racists, as we all know, so saying you are American would be the death-knell for one's chances of success in our society. > > I'll get some tanning cream and give it a try. The view that either or both gender and race are social constructs doesn't exactly mean they're not objective -- at least not in the sense that they're totally whimsical. Think of money or language. Both are social constructs, but it's not true that anything goes with either. For instance, money relies on other people accepting what someone views as money. And gender and race are somewhat like this -- as one can see by variations on both across societies. For instance, with race, judging who's Black depends both on overall social rules and how people present themselves. On the latter, someone who can pass as White often does (and did more so in the past) and they were often accepted as White. (And what's White in the US varies over time and across communities.) And who's White or not doesn't map onto ancestry per se. Rachel Anne Dolezal certainly couldn't have passed the other way if this were not so. I'm wonder if you met her before she was "exposed," if you'd have thought she was passing or not -- as opposed to being a "light-skinned" African-American. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 7 23:55:41 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 16:55:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: <078C8A72-5A49-4AC8-90BD-148DEE4FB893@gmail.com> References: <078C8A72-5A49-4AC8-90BD-148DEE4FB893@gmail.com> Message-ID: <005801d63d27$2745c0f0$75d142d0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat >?judging who's Black depends both on overall social rules and how people present themselves?Dan Hi Dan, since we have DNA tests now, why not just have a number? Numbers are such marvelous things. We can find a SubSaharan African group where we can be confident there is little outside genetic material, get some DNA tests, get some from here, from there, then when one does the test, we just see how much DNA they share with an identifiable group. This would be completely objective and independent on how one presents herself. This latest part is particularly of interest, because of the recent comment and apology by a politician (whose name I cannot recall) who suggested one?s political choices determines one?s race. Dan, regarding the comment ??depends?how people present themselves?? I ask: does that determine in any way one?s race? These DNA tests are really only reliable back about 6 generations or so, but my own African ancestor is only 5 generations back. The 60 dollar DNA tests picked it up in all of us who are on that branch of the family tree. So I have an actual number (verified by multiple DNA tests (two different services for several relatives (rather than a breezy claim (or a dark complexion (which can be faked.))))) Numbers are my friends. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 8 02:51:27 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 19:51:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] that's why Message-ID: <000001d63d3f$b4d9b990$1e8d2cb0$@rainier66.com> Many have questioned the justification for the 2nd amendment in modern America. Today we hear Minneapolis city council wants to defund their police force. What if? the citizens of Minneapolis had no right to bear arms. What would they do without a police force and without guns? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 03:16:32 2020 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2020 23:16:32 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: <005801d63d27$2745c0f0$75d142d0$@rainier66.com> References: <078C8A72-5A49-4AC8-90BD-148DEE4FB893@gmail.com> <005801d63d27$2745c0f0$75d142d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Jun 7, 2020, 7:58 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > These DNA tests are really only reliable back about 6 generations or so, > but my own African ancestor is only 5 generations back. The 60 dollar DNA > tests picked it up in all of us who are on that branch of the family tree. > So I have an actual number (verified by multiple DNA tests (two different > services for several relatives (rather than a breezy claim (or a dark > complexion (which can be faked.))))) > So genetic racism? Please spin me a tale about how DNA testing is going to make bigotry obsolete instead of double-down on hating those who are fundamentally "different" (even if those most prejudiced have no idea what the numbers actually mean) I think we're very clever to be reading sourcecode for a person's hardware, but i don't think we're mature enough to be using the information responsibly. Yeah, it's all great fun & games... for now. Other than gross incompetence being the saviour from dystopian futures, how are we building the ethical framework and legal protection to ensure we're not hog-tied and horse-whipped "by the numbers" that DNA exposes in every living thing on earth? > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 04:16:45 2020 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 14:16:45 +1000 Subject: [ExI] that's why In-Reply-To: <000001d63d3f$b4d9b990$1e8d2cb0$@rainier66.com> References: <000001d63d3f$b4d9b990$1e8d2cb0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 8 Jun 2020 at 12:54, spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > > Many have questioned the justification for the 2nd amendment in modern > America. Today we hear Minneapolis city council wants to defund their > police force. > > > > What if? the citizens of Minneapolis had no right to bear arms. What > would they do without a police force and without guns? > They are proposing replacing the existing police force with a better one: ?In Minneapolis and in cities across the US, it is clear that our system of policing is not keeping our communities safe,? said Lisa Bender, the Minneapolis city council president, at the event. ?Our efforts at incremental reform have failed, period. Our commitment is to do what?s necessary to keep every single member of our community safe and to tell the truth: that the Minneapolis police are not doing that. Our commitment is to end policing as we know it and to recreate systems of public safety that actually keep us safe.? https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/07/minneapolis-city-council-defund-police-george-floyd Even the poorest, most deprived states in the world generally find the resources to maintain a police force. -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rocket at earthlight.com Mon Jun 8 11:11:34 2020 From: rocket at earthlight.com (Re Rose) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 07:11:34 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Signing your death warrant Message-ID: Rafal, I think this is a hugely important point! My late husband had a DNR, and then was in a catastrophic bicycle accident back in 2000. >From many prior discussions we had had about his DNR thoughts and wishes, I knew clearly his decison to have a DNR on file was only because he did not want to live with his life supported by machines, in chronic pain, or in full paralysis. The doctors did not know this, and I was asked repeatedly to allow them to take him off life support. As long as I thought he might, maybe, be brought back to health, I refused, against his team of the doctor's daily advice (as well as some family). I felt no hesitation at all, because if there was any chance for his recovery, I was not going to make an irrevocable decision with his precious life, against what I understood of his wishes. Only after it was clear that he could not possibly recover did I move forward and honor his specific wishes as expressed in his DNR, because now they were applicable. Survival for him would mean on a breathing apparatus and fully paralyzed. He did not want that, and I was clear on it. This understanding and distinction is so important! I'm so glad you brought this DNR issue up. The position of interpreting the wishes of the person who signed the DNR could fall on a family member as well as or in addition to on the patient's medical team. As a family member you can have this conversation with your loved ones before anything happens, so you can be sure you are carrying out their wishes, and with a clear concience. -Regina I also agree with whoever pointed out that Alcor has not given enough guidance on this -- maybe their paperwork on this could be clarified and/or updated. I ------------------------------------------------------ > On Jun 7, 2020, at 5:02 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > Recently the hospital administration, in their wisdom, decreed that I have to ask each and every patient I admit about his preferences regarding resuscitation. Previously I did not do it, the default being full resuscitation, that is doctors making all efforts to restart the patient's heart and breathing should they stop but be potentially recoverable. Now I have been asking the same questions multiple times a day and I am shocked about the answers I hear. > > Let's not discuss much those who say they do want to be resuscitated - aside from mentioning that sometimes people are distressed by having the question posed to them. Do they wonder if I am, well, hesitant to do everything to help them? That I am eager to let them drop dead, if they would give me an excuse? From the way many react I gather they get suspicious and I immediately reassure them that I only ask the question because "they make me do it". > > But very often, when I ask "If your heart stopped, would you like the doctors to help you or not?" they say "No, do not resuscitate, I have the papers, living will, advanced life directives and whatnot", as if they knew what we are talking about. If I stopped questioning right there, the order DNR would be entered on chart. But I always follow up with "So let me make sure we understand each other - if your heart stopped, and we could get it restarted, with an electric shock and medications, and get you back to your normal life, you want the doctors to stand around while you are dying and do nothing? Are you sure?". Nine times out of ten the patient, even the ones with all the papers filled out and signed and validated by lawyers, will say "Well, if you can get me back to normal, help me, I don't want to die, I just don't want to be hooked to a machine and never get off it". > > There is a common misunderstanding among patients that when they sign their DNR papers they just make sure that their lives would not end in a futile and painful ICU stay, on life support, to be eventually terminated without ever going back to a life worth living. But in fact, DNR means much more - it means no efforts will be made to help them even if their chance of recovery is high. I once had a patient who coded almost ten times, and was resuscitated successfully, usually within less than a minute by one or two defibrillator shots, and walked home none the worse for wear, with a new pacemaker. This situation, a sudden cardiac arrest in the hospital on telemetry (heart monitoring) is completely different from an unmonitored cardiac arrest, or arrest in the course of progressive and irreversible disease. The former has a very good prognosis, as in my patient with ten lives. The latter is what DNR should be about - situations when efforts are often futile and result in wro! ngful life - short, painful, meaningless survival of the body while the mind is already too far gone, even if not strictly speaking brain dead. > > Unfortunately the DNR papers don't really make a distinction between them, or the distinction is lost on many patients when they talk to their lawyers. How many hundreds of thousands of Americans are admitted to the hospital every day? How many tens of thousands have DNR orders they never really meant to authorize? What if your doctor just takes your "No, no, just let me go" at face value, and marks you for death you don't really want? > > My guess is it happens all the time but nobody pays attention because those who are harmed are all dead and speechless, and the paperwork is ok. > > If a doctor, a lawyer or another huckster asks you if you want to have DNR orders be sure you really know what the story is about. You don't want to sign your own death warrant accidentally, do you? > > Rafal > ______________________________ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 12:07:55 2020 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 08:07:55 -0400 Subject: [ExI] that's why In-Reply-To: References: <000001d63d3f$b4d9b990$1e8d2cb0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 12:19 AM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > They are proposing replacing the existing police force with a better one: > > ?In Minneapolis and in cities across the US, it is clear that our system > of policing is not keeping our communities safe,? said Lisa Bender, the > Minneapolis city council president, at the event. ?Our efforts at > incremental reform have failed, period. Our commitment is to do what?s > necessary to keep every single member of our community safe and to tell the > truth: that the Minneapolis police are not doing that. Our commitment is to > end policing as we know it and to recreate systems of public safety that > actually keep us safe.? > > > https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/07/minneapolis-city-council-defund-police-george-floyd > > Even the poorest, most deprived states in the world generally find the > resources to maintain a police force. > The problems with policing in the US are pretty well-known: - too-strong police unions - bad actors rarely punished by the police force - qualified immunity - bad actors rarely punished in civil court - militarization - military weapons and equipment without real need or proper training - excessive use of force - see https://8cantwait.org/ - culture of disrespect for citizens - us vs. them mentality instead of "protect & serve" - too many victimless crime laws - the Drug War does more harm than good - attracts bad actors - if you're racist and/or you want to be a badass, it's the place to work etc. Starting with a clean slate might fix some of them but it won't fix all of them. Politicians have to stand up to the unions. Congress has to end qualified immunity (there's a bill in the House now). Transfer of military equipment to police needs to stop. I think every use of force or allegation of wrongdoing by an officer should be reviewed by a citizen's review board empowered to recommend disciplinary actions, criminal charges, or firing, and these results should be a permanent part of every officer's record. State and federal governments will have to decriminalize drugs. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 15:05:12 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 10:05:12 -0500 Subject: [ExI] that's why In-Reply-To: References: <000001d63d3f$b4d9b990$1e8d2cb0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Completely agree. SR Ballard > On Jun 8, 2020, at 7:07 AM, Dave Sill via extropy-chat wrote: > >> On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 12:19 AM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat wrote: > >> >> They are proposing replacing the existing police force with a better one: >> >> ?In Minneapolis and in cities across the US, it is clear that our system of policing is not keeping our communities safe,? said Lisa Bender, the Minneapolis city council president, at the event. ?Our efforts at incremental reform have failed, period. Our commitment is to do what?s necessary to keep every single member of our community safe and to tell the truth: that the Minneapolis police are not doing that. Our commitment is to end policing as we know it and to recreate systems of public safety that actually keep us safe.? >> >> https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/07/minneapolis-city-council-defund-police-george-floyd >> >> Even the poorest, most deprived states in the world generally find the resources to maintain a police force. > > The problems with policing in the US are pretty well-known: > > - too-strong police unions - bad actors rarely punished by the police force > - qualified immunity - bad actors rarely punished in civil court > - militarization - military weapons and equipment without real need or proper training > - excessive use of force - see https://8cantwait.org/ > - culture of disrespect for citizens - us vs. them mentality instead of "protect & serve" > - too many victimless crime laws - the Drug War does more harm than good > - attracts bad actors - if you're racist and/or you want to be a badass, it's the place to work > etc. > > Starting with a clean slate might fix some of them but it won't fix all of them. > > Politicians have to stand up to the unions. Congress has to end qualified immunity (there's a bill in the House now). Transfer of military equipment to police needs to stop. I think every use of force or allegation of wrongdoing by an officer should be reviewed by a citizen's review board empowered to recommend disciplinary actions, criminal charges, or firing, and these results should be a permanent part of every officer's record. State and federal governments will have to decriminalize drugs. > > -Dave > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 8 15:24:55 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 08:24:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling Message-ID: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> I have been pondering the end game if retail stores in general give way to online stores. Some areas of retail are better suited for online sales than others. Plenty of us here have long-since moved to buying electronic equipment online: there is not much point in going to a bricks and mortar store for that, ja? OK so if electronics stuff is perhaps the best-suited for online sales, what is the worst suited? It is tempting to answer clothing, because that generally needs to be tried on, but that is a mixed bag: plenty of clothing can be bought without trying on. We have had catalog sales for clothing since back in the days when the catalogs had a useful alternative application. High-end clothing and tailored clothing needs a shop generally, but plenty of us don?t wear that kind of stuff. What else? Cars? I have bought three cars online sight unseen (all three new (the first one in 1998.)) Alternative? Who gets hit the hardest if bricks and mortar shuts down? Perhaps a good answer is jewelry stores. I claim no expertise on this, for I have never bought jewelry of any kind (my bride doesn?t wear it (any of it (her parents oppose it (on religious grounds)))) but that is an industry perhaps most dependent on bricks and mortar retail outlets. Yesterday we saw an antifa guy threatening to torch the diamond district in New York. If a bunch of them coordinate an attack, they could show up at midnight with a battering ram, smash through, toss in a few cans of fuel, torch enormous quantities of wealth. That would be some of the most productive wealth-destruction they could do. This morning I see this: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/great-diamond-glut-miners-stuck-040022775.html spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 15:28:02 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 09:28:02 -0600 Subject: [ExI] that's why In-Reply-To: References: <000001d63d3f$b4d9b990$1e8d2cb0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: There's a basic structural problem with policing, as an institution. It is fundamentally the wrong solution for many of the tasks we've handed over to it. "Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use violence in situations where the average citizen would be arrested. So when we turn a problem [i.e. homelessness, mental health, narcotics abuse, disruptive behavior in schools, etc] over to the police to manage, there will be violence, because those are ultimately the tools that they are most equipped to utilize: handcuffs, threats, guns, arrests. That's what really is at the root of policing. So if we don't want violence, we should try to figure out how to not get the police involved." https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/06/03/457251670/how-much-do-we-need-the-police https://www.amazon.com/End-Policing-Alex-S-Vitale-ebook/dp/B01I85OOZA/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 9:09 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Completely agree. > > SR Ballard > > On Jun 8, 2020, at 7:07 AM, Dave Sill via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 12:19 AM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >> They are proposing replacing the existing police force with a better one: >> >> ?In Minneapolis and in cities across the US, it is clear that our system >> of policing is not keeping our communities safe,? said Lisa Bender, the >> Minneapolis city council president, at the event. ?Our efforts at >> incremental reform have failed, period. Our commitment is to do what?s >> necessary to keep every single member of our community safe and to tell the >> truth: that the Minneapolis police are not doing that. Our commitment is to >> end policing as we know it and to recreate systems of public safety that >> actually keep us safe.? >> >> >> https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/07/minneapolis-city-council-defund-police-george-floyd >> >> Even the poorest, most deprived states in the world generally find the >> resources to maintain a police force. >> > > The problems with policing in the US are pretty well-known: > > - too-strong police unions - bad actors rarely punished by the police force > - qualified immunity - bad actors rarely punished in civil court > - militarization - military weapons and equipment without real need or > proper training > - excessive use of force - see https://8cantwait.org/ > - culture of disrespect for citizens - us vs. them mentality instead of > "protect & serve" > - too many victimless crime laws - the Drug War does more harm than good > - attracts bad actors - if you're racist and/or you want to be a badass, > it's the place to work > etc. > > Starting with a clean slate might fix some of them but it won't fix all of > them. > > Politicians have to stand up to the unions. Congress has to end qualified > immunity (there's a bill in the House now). Transfer of military equipment > to police needs to stop. I think every use of force or allegation of > wrongdoing by an officer should be reviewed by a citizen's review board > empowered to recommend disciplinary actions, criminal charges, or firing, > and these results should be a permanent part of every officer's record. > State and federal governments will have to decriminalize drugs. > > -Dave > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 15:59:30 2020 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 11:59:30 -0400 Subject: [ExI] that's why In-Reply-To: References: <000001d63d3f$b4d9b990$1e8d2cb0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 11:37 AM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > There's a basic structural problem with policing, as an institution. It is > fundamentally the wrong solution for many of the tasks we've handed over to > it. > There's certainly a mismatch between what we want police to do and what they actually do. > "Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep > imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make > them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence > workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government > functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use violence in situations > where the average citizen would be arrested. > Police need to be more than one-trick ponies: hired thugs that violently counter every threat, damn the collateral damage. It's not asking too much that they be able to use violence as a last resort. The presumption of innocence should apply to dealing with the public. So when we turn a problem [i.e. homelessness, mental health, narcotics > abuse, disruptive behavior in schools, etc] over to the police to manage, > there will be violence, because those are ultimately the tools that they > are most equipped to utilize: handcuffs, threats, guns, arrests. That's > what really is at the root of policing. So if we don't want violence, we > should try to figure out how to not get the police involved." > Yeah, in major metropolitan areas we could have separate departments for all of those things. In the other 98% of the country, the police need to wear multiple hats--at least as first-responders. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 16:00:43 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 11:00:43 -0500 Subject: [ExI] that's why In-Reply-To: References: <000001d63d3f$b4d9b990$1e8d2cb0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: We are always going to need people to meet fire with fire. Violent people won't stop just because you ask them too. They have to be arrested and contained. I agree that cops often incite violence where there was no threat of it before. I see no reason for cops to go to a school unless weapons are seen or are being used. Send in the social workers! I see no reason why cops should show up at protests in riot gear. If the situation turns nasty, with shooting and looting, then you will have kept the riot gear cops nearby in reserve for just that reason. Routine protests should not find rifles in the hands of anyone. Why should a protestor show up with guns? Who are they going to shoot? Cops? We don't need protestors who want 'death by cop'. I like the idea of the protestors policing the looters, but think most won't do it, and looters will have weapons, so this is a job for cops, I am afraid. As for the mentally ill, perhaps police departments could have psychiatric workers on call or on the payroll to go to incidents involving the mentally ill. When cops show up for that they only have one thing to use: a gun. I read where tasers just don't often work. Take along someone who knows what to do with mental patients. If you get combative with them, they'll get combative with you. I worked as an aide for three months in a big mental hospital, so I do know something about this. But you do have to watchout for the paranoids, who will often have a weapon - then it's the cops who have to deal with it. bill w Complete retraining for all cops starting now. But who would retrain them? Same old same old? Maybe professors in criminal justice have some ideas (don't they always?), and some might even be good. Professors aren't always lost in the ivory tower. On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 10:37 AM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > There's a basic structural problem with policing, as an institution. It is > fundamentally the wrong solution for many of the tasks we've handed over to > it. > > > "Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep > imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make > them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence > workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government > functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use violence in situations > where the average citizen would be arrested. > > So when we turn a problem [i.e. homelessness, mental health, narcotics > abuse, disruptive behavior in schools, etc] over to the police to manage, > there will be violence, because those are ultimately the tools that they > are most equipped to utilize: handcuffs, threats, guns, arrests. That's > what really is at the root of policing. So if we don't want violence, we > should try to figure out how to not get the police involved." > > > > https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/06/03/457251670/how-much-do-we-need-the-police > > > > > https://www.amazon.com/End-Policing-Alex-S-Vitale-ebook/dp/B01I85OOZA/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= > > > On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 9:09 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> Completely agree. >> >> SR Ballard >> >> On Jun 8, 2020, at 7:07 AM, Dave Sill via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >> On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 12:19 AM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> >>> They are proposing replacing the existing police force with a better one: >>> >>> ?In Minneapolis and in cities across the US, it is clear that our system >>> of policing is not keeping our communities safe,? said Lisa Bender, the >>> Minneapolis city council president, at the event. ?Our efforts at >>> incremental reform have failed, period. Our commitment is to do what?s >>> necessary to keep every single member of our community safe and to tell the >>> truth: that the Minneapolis police are not doing that. Our commitment is to >>> end policing as we know it and to recreate systems of public safety that >>> actually keep us safe.? >>> >>> >>> https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/07/minneapolis-city-council-defund-police-george-floyd >>> >>> Even the poorest, most deprived states in the world generally find the >>> resources to maintain a police force. >>> >> >> The problems with policing in the US are pretty well-known: >> >> - too-strong police unions - bad actors rarely punished by the police >> force >> - qualified immunity - bad actors rarely punished in civil court >> - militarization - military weapons and equipment without real need or >> proper training >> - excessive use of force - see https://8cantwait.org/ >> - culture of disrespect for citizens - us vs. them mentality instead of >> "protect & serve" >> - too many victimless crime laws - the Drug War does more harm than good >> - attracts bad actors - if you're racist and/or you want to be a badass, >> it's the place to work >> etc. >> >> Starting with a clean slate might fix some of them but it won't fix all >> of them. >> >> Politicians have to stand up to the unions. Congress has to end qualified >> immunity (there's a bill in the House now). Transfer of military equipment >> to police needs to stop. I think every use of force or allegation of >> wrongdoing by an officer should be reviewed by a citizen's review board >> empowered to recommend disciplinary actions, criminal charges, or firing, >> and these results should be a permanent part of every officer's record. >> State and federal governments will have to decriminalize drugs. >> >> -Dave >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 16:14:39 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 09:14:39 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Signing your death warrant Message-ID: Brent Allsop wrote: snip > I'm completely frustrated with not knowing what to do with this, or what kind of "advanced life directive" I need. I'm signed up with Alcor, and expected they would provide me with one. I asked them, probably only once, in passing, quite a while ago, so it is probably my fault, but I am completely frustrated that they aren't at least providing a sample one, and telling me what is and isn't important, for Alcor to be most likely able to do what they need to do. That surprises me since when I signed up in 1985 an "advanced life directive" or whatever they called it was part of the signup paperwork. As was a power of attorney for health care. > Where does one go, to find a sample "advanced life directive" that is compatible with being signed up with Alcor? Do any of you Alcor people out there have one? Could I see a copy? I have one but don't know if it is the current version. As I recall, my directive says resuscitate until/unless Alcor is on-site and then do whatever they ask. I cc'ed Diane Cremeens, Director of Membership at diane at alcor.org. She should be able to email you the current form. Keith From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 16:17:17 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 12:17:17 -0400 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling In-Reply-To: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> References: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 11:28 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> OK so if electronics stuff is perhaps the best-suited for online sales, > what is the worst suited? * Bordellos. And I wonder about movie theaters, will they come back after a vaccine is found or will people have gotten so used to watching movies at home on very high quality TVs they will have gotten out of the habit of going out to see a movie? > *Yesterday we saw an antifa guy threatening to torch the diamond district > in New York.* It's possable but I doubt it, most looters or rioters or peaceful protestors or human beings in general have never even heard of "antifa" and couldn't spell it much less be a member of it; presumably it's an acronym but I have no idea what it stands for, but I'll bet a Qanon member would know. *> they could show up at midnight with a battering ram, smash through, toss > in a few cans of fuel, torch enormous quantities of wealth.* Probably not, most wood ignites at 572F but in air diamonds needs 1652F to burn, and they're probably in a fireproof safe. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 8 16:27:02 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 09:27:02 -0700 Subject: [ExI] that's why In-Reply-To: References: <000001d63d3f$b4d9b990$1e8d2cb0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00e901d63db1$a46a8b80$ed3fa280$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat >.... >?Complete retraining for all cops starting now. But who would retrain them? Same old same old? Maybe professors in criminal justice have some ideas (don't they always?)? bill w The officer who killed George Floyd was a trainer. Two of the other three who were charged were trainees at the time. This is what happened last week locally: https://twitter.com/i/status/1267925521377222660 spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 17:13:54 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 12:13:54 -0500 Subject: [ExI] that's why In-Reply-To: <00e901d63db1$a46a8b80$ed3fa280$@rainier66.com> References: <000001d63d3f$b4d9b990$1e8d2cb0$@rainier66.com> <00e901d63db1$a46a8b80$ed3fa280$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Has anyone run the statistics to see just how widespread police brutality is? Just guessing: probably way less than 1% in police-public interactions. Defunding police: exactly the wrong thing to do. I don't know what their thinking is on this, but we need more, not less: 1 - better pay equals better people applying for jobs, 2 - they need to hire or somehow fund the mental health workers I mentioned in my previous email 3 - they need more time for training 4 - they need to hire consultants to restructure police departments and training. Probably more good reasons. Defunding could lower cop pay. It punishes the 99% plus majority of cops who are never brutal. (again, I do not know the statistics) bill w On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 11:39 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat > > *>...*. > > > > >?Complete retraining for all cops starting now. But who would retrain > them? Same old same old? Maybe professors in criminal justice have some > ideas (don't they always?)? bill w > > > > > > The officer who killed George Floyd was a trainer. Two of the other three > who were charged were trainees at the time. > > > > This is what happened last week locally: > > > > https://twitter.com/i/status/1267925521377222660 > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robot at ultimax.com Mon Jun 8 17:16:00 2020 From: robot at ultimax.com (robot at ultimax.com) Date: Mon, 08 Jun 2020 13:16:00 -0400 Subject: [ExI] that's why In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6062e59a51463cb74f00ce5de887764d@ultimax.com> +1 K3 On 2020-06-08 11:28, extropy-chat-request at lists.extropy.org wrote: > Message: 6 > Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 08:07:55 -0400 > From: Dave Sill > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [ExI] that's why > > On Mon, 8 Jun 2020 at 12:54, spike jones via extropy-chat < >> They are proposing replacing the existing police force with a better >> one: >> Message: 6 > > - too-strong police unions - bad actors rarely punished by the police > force > - qualified immunity - bad actors rarely punished in civil court > - militarization - military weapons and equipment without real need or > proper training > - excessive use of force - see https://8cantwait.org/ > - culture of disrespect for citizens - us vs. them mentality instead of > "protect & serve" > - too many victimless crime laws - the Drug War does more harm than > good > - attracts bad actors - if you're racist and/or you want to be a > badass, > it's the place to work > etc. > > Starting with a clean slate might fix some of them but it won't fix all > of > them. > > Politicians have to stand up to the unions. Congress has to end > qualified > immunity (there's a bill in the House now). Transfer of military > equipment > to police needs to stop. I think every use of force or allegation of > wrongdoing by an officer should be reviewed by a citizen's review board > empowered to recommend disciplinary actions, criminal charges, or > firing, > and these results should be a permanent part of every officer's record. > State and federal governments will have to decriminalize drugs. > > -Dave [snip] > > Message: 7 > Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 10:05:12 -0500 > From: SR Ballard > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [ExI] that's why > > Completely agree. > > SR Ballard From atymes at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 17:58:40 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 10:58:40 -0700 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling In-Reply-To: References: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 9:28 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > most looters or rioters or peaceful protestors or human beings in general > have never even heard of "antifa" and couldn't spell it much less be a > member of it; presumably it's an acronym but I have no idea what it stands > for > > AntiFa, for anti-fascist. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States) for details; especially note that there are a bunch of groups calling themselves "antifa" with no coordination, so what "antifa" is to one person may vary wildly from what "antifa" is to someone else right next to them. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 18:24:53 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 14:24:53 -0400 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling In-Reply-To: References: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 12:27 PM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > *Yesterday we saw an antifa guy threatening to torch the diamond >> district in New York.* > > > It's possable but I doubt it, most looters or rioters or peaceful > protestors or human beings in general have never even heard of "antifa" and > couldn't spell it much less be a member of it; presumably it's an acronym > but I have no idea what it stands for, but I'll bet a Qanon member would > know. > > John, not sure if you truly have no idea who they are since they were all over even the mainstream news when they were destroying things and hurting people in Portland, Berkeley, and other areas, but if so, you can ask the Attorney General of Minnesota for more info. He's a big fan of theirs from way back: https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-keith-ellison-antifa-handbook-tweet-20180104-story.html You can also read the handbook he's holding in the picture related to the above story for more information like this snippet: In truth, violence represents a small though vital sliver of anti-fascist activity. There are three main arguments that anti-fascists use to justify their occasional violence. First, as explained in Chapter 4, anti-fascists make a historical argument based on the accurate observation that ?rational debate? and the institutions of government have failed to consistently halt the rise of fascism. Given that fact, they argue that the only hope to prevent a sequel is to physically prevent any potential fascist advance. Second, they point to the many successful examples of militant anti-fascism shutting down or severely hampering far-right organizing since the end of World War II. Third, fascist violence often necessitates self-defense?although anti-fascists challenge conventional interpretations of self-defense grounded in individualistic personal ethics by legitimating offensive tactics in order to forestall the potential need for literal self-defense down the line. In other words, anti-fascists don?t wait for a fascist threat to become violent before acting to shut it down, physically if necessary. As Murray from Baltimore ARA explained it, You fight them by writing letters and making phone calls so you don?t have to fight them with fists. You fight them with fists so you don?t have to fight them with knives. You fight them with knives so you don?t have to fight them with guns. You fight them with guns so you don?t have to fight them with tanks.398 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 19:02:53 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 15:02:53 -0400 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling In-Reply-To: References: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 2:29 PM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > *John, not sure if you truly have no idea who they* [antifa] *are* > I knew "antifa" were the MAGA Hatter and Qanon bogeyman, and if both those groups didn't like them I figured they can't be all bad, and that's all I knew. Now you tell me it means "anti-fascists", thank you I've learned something. So I guess that means I'm "antifa" too because the truth is I don't like fascists very much. You also say "antifa" doesn't want fascists to become violent before they can shut them down, physically if necessary. Maybe I'm missing something but that sounds like an entirely rational way to deal with fascists to me. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 19:09:37 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 15:09:37 -0400 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling In-Reply-To: References: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: It's interesting you don't feel the same way about the folks who followed their beliefs in shutting down the telescope. On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 3:04 PM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 2:29 PM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > You also say "antifa" doesn't want fascists to become violent before they >> can shut them down, physically if necessary. Maybe I'm missing something >> but that sounds like an entirely rational way to deal with fascists to me. >> > > John K Clark > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 19:41:57 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 12:41:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] that's why In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <7F829503-2718-4AFD-AF4D-4A0A99E89694@gmail.com> On Jun 8, 2020, at 10:16 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > Has anyone run the statistics to see just how widespread police brutality is? Just guessing: probably way less than 1% in police-public interactions. > > Defunding police: exactly the wrong thing to do. I don't know what their thinking is on this, but we need more, not less: 1 - better pay equals better people applying for jobs, 2 - they need to hire or somehow fund the mental health workers I mentioned in my previous email 3 - they need more time for training 4 - they need to hire consultants to restructure police departments and training. Probably more good reasons. Defunding could lower cop pay. It punishes the 99% plus majority of cops who are never brutal. (again, I do not know the statistics) It's hard to track brutality because much of this stuff is quashed at the local level. I mean the stories and reports are quashed at that level. And until recently, there weren't the kinds of databases one comes to expect from other government operations. I can't imagine why anyone would think there's a need for more police. Overall, violent and property crime has declined since the early 1990s. So, if the argument is there's ever more need for policing (to combat crimes of violence and property), this flies in the face of the crime data. (And this trend is both national and global. Yes, there are exceptions, but the US and the West are not exceptional with this trend.) As for how to penalize police misconduct, the problem goes further than, say, a bad apple in the bunch. The recent George Floyd case illustrates the typical police brutality narrative: one cop does wrong and the other cops on the scene do nothing to prevent or stop the wrong. They simply allow it to play out. In this case, yes, the other cops were charged, but that's what's atypical about the case. The usual case seems to be: one or more cops brutalize someone, the others look on, and they all face no penalties for misconduct. Training and such also has little value if the incentives for misconduct remain in place. And all this depends on buy-in from the police, their unions, pro-cop groups, and pro-cop politicians. My guess is most of these reforms will be minuscule and more along the lines of making the protests die down before things return to business as usual. This is why abolition is the best approach: excise the problem rather than try to manage it. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 19:57:16 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 14:57:16 -0500 Subject: [ExI] that's why In-Reply-To: <7F829503-2718-4AFD-AF4D-4A0A99E89694@gmail.com> References: <7F829503-2718-4AFD-AF4D-4A0A99E89694@gmail.com> Message-ID: As usual, Dan, you offer to get rid of something but do not supply anything to replace it to deal with crime. Spike, I think, pointed out that the cops who were with the accused one were trainees - a reasonable, though not valid, reason why they didn't try to stop it, remark on it, or anything. bill w On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 2:45 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Jun 8, 2020, at 10:16 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > Has anyone run the statistics to see just how widespread police brutality > is? Just guessing: probably way less than 1% in police-public > interactions. > > Defunding police: exactly the wrong thing to do. I don't know what their > thinking is on this, but we need more, not less: 1 - better pay equals > better people applying for jobs, 2 - they need to hire or somehow fund the > mental health workers I mentioned in my previous email 3 - they need more > time for training 4 - they need to hire consultants to restructure police > departments and training. Probably more good reasons. Defunding could > lower cop pay. It punishes the 99% plus majority of cops who are never > brutal. (again, I do not know the statistics) > > > It's hard to track brutality because much of this stuff is quashed at the > local level. I mean the stories and reports are quashed at that level. And > until recently, there weren't the kinds of databases one comes to expect > from other government operations. > > I can't imagine why anyone would think there's a need for more police. > Overall, violent and property crime has declined since the early 1990s. So, > if the argument is there's ever more need for policing (to combat crimes of > violence and property), this flies in the face of the crime data. (And this > trend is both national and global. Yes, there are exceptions, but the US > and the West are not exceptional with this trend.) > > As for how to penalize police misconduct, the problem goes further than, > say, a bad apple in the bunch. The recent George Floyd case illustrates the > typical police brutality narrative: one cop does wrong and the other cops > on the scene do nothing to prevent or stop the wrong. They simply allow it > to play out. In this case, yes, the other cops were charged, but that's > what's atypical about the case. The usual case seems to be: one or more > cops brutalize someone, the others look on, and they all face no penalties > for misconduct. > > Training and such also has little value if the incentives for misconduct > remain in place. And all this depends on buy-in from the police, their > unions, pro-cop groups, and pro-cop politicians. My guess is most of these > reforms will be minuscule and more along the lines of making the protests > die down before things return to business as usual. This is why abolition > is the best approach: excise the problem rather than try to manage it. > > Regards, > > Dan > Sample my Kindle books at: > > http://author.to/DanUst > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 20:03:23 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 16:03:23 -0400 Subject: [ExI] that's why In-Reply-To: References: <7F829503-2718-4AFD-AF4D-4A0A99E89694@gmail.com> Message-ID: I agree, Bill. I'd love to see what this replacement would look like. I am no fan of the police by any stretch of the imagination but I also acknowledge their utility. I'm curious to see what Minneapolis will look like if the council gets its way in completely disbanding the police force (and not replacing it with a reformed one). On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 3:59 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > As usual, Dan, you offer to get rid of something but do not supply > anything to replace it to deal with crime. > > Spike, I think, pointed out that the cops who were with the accused one > were trainees - a reasonable, though not valid, reason why they didn't try > to stop it, remark on it, or anything. > > bill w > > On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 2:45 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> On Jun 8, 2020, at 10:16 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >> Has anyone run the statistics to see just how widespread police brutality >> is? Just guessing: probably way less than 1% in police-public >> interactions. >> >> Defunding police: exactly the wrong thing to do. I don't know what >> their thinking is on this, but we need more, not less: 1 - better pay >> equals better people applying for jobs, 2 - they need to hire or somehow >> fund the mental health workers I mentioned in my previous email 3 - they >> need more time for training 4 - they need to hire consultants to >> restructure police departments and training. Probably more good reasons. >> Defunding could lower cop pay. It punishes the 99% plus majority of cops >> who are never brutal. (again, I do not know the statistics) >> >> >> It's hard to track brutality because much of this stuff is quashed at the >> local level. I mean the stories and reports are quashed at that level. And >> until recently, there weren't the kinds of databases one comes to expect >> from other government operations. >> >> I can't imagine why anyone would think there's a need for more police. >> Overall, violent and property crime has declined since the early 1990s. So, >> if the argument is there's ever more need for policing (to combat crimes of >> violence and property), this flies in the face of the crime data. (And this >> trend is both national and global. Yes, there are exceptions, but the US >> and the West are not exceptional with this trend.) >> >> As for how to penalize police misconduct, the problem goes further than, >> say, a bad apple in the bunch. The recent George Floyd case illustrates the >> typical police brutality narrative: one cop does wrong and the other cops >> on the scene do nothing to prevent or stop the wrong. They simply allow it >> to play out. In this case, yes, the other cops were charged, but that's >> what's atypical about the case. The usual case seems to be: one or more >> cops brutalize someone, the others look on, and they all face no penalties >> for misconduct. >> >> Training and such also has little value if the incentives for misconduct >> remain in place. And all this depends on buy-in from the police, their >> unions, pro-cop groups, and pro-cop politicians. My guess is most of these >> reforms will be minuscule and more along the lines of making the protests >> die down before things return to business as usual. This is why abolition >> is the best approach: excise the problem rather than try to manage it. >> >> Regards, >> >> Dan >> Sample my Kindle books at: >> >> http://author.to/DanUst >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 20:32:23 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 13:32:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] that's why In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Minneapolis will, if it actually disbanded its police force, not be the first place to ever do so. In some cases, this has meant merely getting rid of them to rebuild them along new lines, as in Camden, New Jersey, US. In others, like Blandford, Massachusetts, policing was outsourced to another police department. It?s a bit dated, but Bruce Benson examined cases where full privatization took place in his _The Enterprise of Law: Justice without the State_. I don?t have a copy handy and I haven?t read his newer work in this area. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst > On Jun 8, 2020, at 1:08 PM, Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat wrote: > > ? > I agree, Bill. I'd love to see what this replacement would look like. I am no fan of the police by any stretch of the imagination but I also acknowledge their utility. I'm curious to see what Minneapolis will look like if the council gets its way in completely disbanding the police force (and not replacing it with a reformed one). > >> On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 3:59 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: >> As usual, Dan, you offer to get rid of something but do not supply anything to replace it to deal with crime. >> >> Spike, I think, pointed out that the cops who were with the accused one were trainees - a reasonable, though not valid, reason why they didn't try to stop it, remark on it, or anything. >> >> bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 20:40:36 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 13:40:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] that's why In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: No, you generally ignore when I do respond to you on stuff like this. I?d say read _The Enterprise of Law: Justice without the State_ for ideas on what to do about actual crime. But many of these things are overstated. Crime is getting lower and policing doesn?t seem to be the main reason for it going down. So it?s almost like you?re asking for a solution that generally doesn?t work to be kept and even expanded. One can imagine the ardent drug warrior arguing we need a bigger, badder, better trained DEA rather than an end to drug prohibition. You?re also sticking to close to one case. Yeah, sure, that might be true of the Floyd killing, but generally we see cops do bad things and fellow officers usually overlook this. Robert Higgs, of _Crisis and Leviathan_ fame (and not the Higgs Boson;), went much further than this: https://medium.com/@petrostsimigatos98981989/all-cops-are-bad-people-by-dr-robert-higgs-a0a42ca8deee Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst > On Jun 8, 2020, at 1:00 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > ? > As usual, Dan, you offer to get rid of something but do not supply anything to replace it to deal with crime. > > Spike, I think, pointed out that the cops who were with the accused one were trainees - a reasonable, though not valid, reason why they didn't try to stop it, remark on it, or anything. > > bill w > >> On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 2:45 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote: >>> On Jun 8, 2020, at 10:16 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: >>> Has anyone run the statistics to see just how widespread police brutality is? Just guessing: probably way less than 1% in police-public interactions. >>> >>> Defunding police: exactly the wrong thing to do. I don't know what their thinking is on this, but we need more, not less: 1 - better pay equals better people applying for jobs, 2 - they need to hire or somehow fund the mental health workers I mentioned in my previous email 3 - they need more time for training 4 - they need to hire consultants to restructure police departments and training. Probably more good reasons. Defunding could lower cop pay. It punishes the 99% plus majority of cops who are never brutal. (again, I do not know the statistics) >> >> It's hard to track brutality because much of this stuff is quashed at the local level. I mean the stories and reports are quashed at that level. And until recently, there weren't the kinds of databases one comes to expect from other government operations. >> >> I can't imagine why anyone would think there's a need for more police. Overall, violent and property crime has declined since the early 1990s. So, if the argument is there's ever more need for policing (to combat crimes of violence and property), this flies in the face of the crime data. (And this trend is both national and global. Yes, there are exceptions, but the US and the West are not exceptional with this trend.) >> >> As for how to penalize police misconduct, the problem goes further than, say, a bad apple in the bunch. The recent George Floyd case illustrates the typical police brutality narrative: one cop does wrong and the other cops on the scene do nothing to prevent or stop the wrong. They simply allow it to play out. In this case, yes, the other cops were charged, but that's what's atypical about the case. The usual case seems to be: one or more cops brutalize someone, the others look on, and they all face no penalties for misconduct. >> >> Training and such also has little value if the incentives for misconduct remain in place. And all this depends on buy-in from the police, their unions, pro-cop groups, and pro-cop politicians. My guess is most of these reforms will be minuscule and more along the lines of making the protests die down before things return to business as usual. This is why abolition is the best approach: excise the problem rather than try to manage it. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 20:47:46 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 13:47:46 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> References: <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <7284FB27-798A-4E82-906B-3E025A693546@gmail.com> On Jun 5, 2020, at 5:44 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 8:27 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote: > > Again, I bring up abolishing the police. It should always be on the table, IMO. > > > > There ya go, Dan. That notion should put to bed any remaining suggestion that Americans do not need to own a gun. Even the possibility that an entire police force could just get pissed and walk off the job (as they did in St. Louis this week) should be a clear unambiguous reminder that a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. > > If we abolish the police, we also abolish all gun control laws, all of them. Without a professional police force, we all need to have and to carry guns. > > We have the opportunity to educate our society on the meaning of the phrase ??shall not be infringed.? > > spike It seems you believe I'm against people defending themselves and others. Is this so? In fact, I've argued for arming the masses -- not just the US-American masses, but worldwide. This is the correct Left position on this issue. (In fact, traditionally, the Right wants the masses disarmed to prevent them getting uppity. The strange thing is that many modern Leftists seem to want the opposite: disarmed masses and armed elites. To me, this is typically how those in the Left eventually turn to the Right on issues once they have power.) In fact, I'd argue that immigrants and other marginal people need to be armed and defended more so than your average person. For instance, immigrants in the US tend to commit less crime but suffer more crime than non-immigrants. This is so even though, as studies have shown, immigrants tend to under-report crimes committed against them. Ditto for trans people and for 'mentally ill' people.* That said, overall violence is down. I don't agree with the view that somehow having no police around all the thugs will go on a crime spree. That's like a Hollywood movie scenario. Real life, however, almost never looks like that. A case in point is almost any natural disaster. We generally don't see Mad Max: Fury Road playing out, but people usually helping each other. (Yet just about any movie about a natural disaster shows people turning vicious and against each other. Again, look at the real world events and data -- rather than movie or TV narrative.) As for your citing the COTUS, you should note well that the right has been infringed, and that should call into question your seeing the COTUS as some sort of shield against injustice. Either the COTUS authorized those infringements or did nothing to stop them. Or as Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) put it: 'But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain ? that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.' Regards, Dan * I'm not the only one calling for this. See Jane Louise's piece from five years ago: https://c4ss.org/content/3966 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 8 20:48:37 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 13:48:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] that's why In-Reply-To: References: <000001d63d3f$b4d9b990$1e8d2cb0$@rainier66.com> <00e901d63db1$a46a8b80$ed3fa280$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00ac01d63dd6$2f7598e0$8e60caa0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] that's why >?Defunding police: exactly the wrong thing to do. I don't know what their thinking is on this, but we need more, not less: 1 - better pay equals better people applying for jobs, 2 - they need to hire or somehow fund the mental health workers I mentioned in my previous email 3 - they need more time for training 4 - they need to hire consultants to restructure police departments and training. Probably more good reasons. Defunding could lower cop pay. It punishes the 99% plus majority of cops who are never brutal. (again, I do not know the statistics) bill w OK but somebody somewhere has to try this experiment. Theory has it that if they defund the police and use ?the? money to fund re-education plans to help those who would otherwise turn to lives of crime find jobs, then all will be well. I disagree for several reasons, but Minneapolis is going to try it, so I am glad we will get to see the theory being tested. I might be wrong, and all will be well there. I would be very pleased to be wrong. Somebody somewhere has to test it, and I am glad that somewhere is far away from me. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 20:49:09 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 16:49:09 -0400 Subject: [ExI] that's why In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I'm familiar with the Camden scenario. For those interested, Tyler Cowen (an economist I'd recommend for those unfamiliar regardless of your political/economic leanings) just had a piece on it: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/06/revisiting-camden.html I don't get the feeling that the city council is proposing either of these approaches though based on their public comments. Hopefully I'm wrong. On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 4:34 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Minneapolis will, if it actually disbanded its police force, not be the > first place to ever do so. In some cases, this has meant merely getting rid > of them to rebuild them along new lines, as in Camden, New Jersey, US. In > others, like Blandford, Massachusetts, policing was outsourced to another > police department. > > It?s a bit dated, but Bruce Benson examined cases where full privatization > took place in his _The Enterprise of Law: Justice without the State_. I > don?t have a copy handy and I haven?t read his newer work in this area. > > Regards, > > Dan > Sample my Kindle books at: > > http://author.to/DanUst > > On Jun 8, 2020, at 1:08 PM, Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > ? > I agree, Bill. I'd love to see what this replacement would look like. I > am no fan of the police by any stretch of the imagination but I also > acknowledge their utility. I'm curious to see what Minneapolis will look > like if the council gets its way in completely disbanding the police force > (and not replacing it with a reformed one). > > On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 3:59 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> As usual, Dan, you offer to get rid of something but do not supply >> anything to replace it to deal with crime. >> >> Spike, I think, pointed out that the cops who were with the accused one >> were trainees - a reasonable, though not valid, reason why they didn't try >> to stop it, remark on it, or anything. >> >> bill w >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 20:57:55 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 13:57:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <00ee01d63962$112c6a30$33853e90$@rainier66.com> References: <00ee01d63962$112c6a30$33853e90$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Jun 2, 2020, at 9:57 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > > Perhaps if the author were to rewrite using only the words in the current edition of Miriam Webster using the definitions found there, the meaning would be clear. > > Let me try to guess the words that might have given some difficulty with the piece, roughly in order of appearance > > chud -- term of opprobrium used against the alt-right; think of it as calling someone an asshole > POC -- person of colour > fashy/fash -- fascist (adjective/noun) > apparatchik -- official or bureaucrat, usually meant as a snear > woke -- enlightened or aware, as in consciousness raising > protest managerial class -- group of people, usually politicians, who attempt to control protests for their class or personal interests? > > > Regards, > > Dan > > > Hi Dan, since these novel terms have no consensus definitions, I am free to assign my own meaning until the author translates the document into a standardized form. > > chud: a variation or misspelling of chad, which is a bit of paper. > POC: point of contact. > Fashy/fash: one who follows the latest fashion trends. > Apparatchik: a Russian government worker > Woke: what I did this morning at the end of my slumber > Protest managerial class: a instructional gathering designed for those who would lead a company, specifically focused on how to handle disagreements. > > We standardize language for a reason. Insider dialects are fine, so long as they are not intended to convey meaning to those outside the community. Perhaps that was never the intention. > > spike New terms and new uses for old terms arise all the time. Standardization happens when a term or new use of a term gains ground. That's just part of normal language change. (Don't believe me. Look up how the terms 'girl' and 'silly' changed over time.) Does this mean _you_ will eschew using any new terms or using any old terms in new ways? I doubt it. In this particular instance, there's very little problem understanding the piece if you simply put in a tiny amount of effort. Yeah, one can play around pretending you don't understand that in a political analysis piece that 'fash' almost certainly means 'fascist' rather than 'fashionable' or that saying 'Jane is a POC' means 'Jane is a point of contact,' but that's just being obstinate. Maybe the obstinacy is for humorous effect, but I feel it was more dog piling to avoid respond to the analysis. Further, yeah, Gillis has a target audience that probably doesn?t include everyone. In fact, I?d say almost all topical pieces are speaking to an audience that?s a tiny fraction of the whole language community. This is nothing new. If you read ancient literature, many times it requires scholarship because you need to grasp who was speaking to whom rather than pretend everything is crystal clear to everyone at all times. (And this isn?t because any of these folks are being intentionally obscure. It?s just simply that it?s hard to guess how one will be misunderstood and often topical works have an immediate pragmatic aim, such as persuading someone right at the time of something ? and not worrying that someone ten years or in another audience will find it hard to understand.) Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 21:00:08 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 14:00:08 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <00f501d63962$b502b4c0$1f081e40$@rainier66.com> References: <00f501d63962$b502b4c0$1f081e40$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <023F1C32-1A2E-4643-801E-DE396CDFE9EF@gmail.com> On Jun 2, 2020, at 10:04 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dan > >> ...-- or divide and conquer. This is typical of how any establishment has > dealt with widespread dissent and protest: attempt to pull away some of the > more moderate elements to weaken the overall movement. ...Regards, Dan > > _______________________________________________ > > That would explain the legitimate protestors handing over the vandal to the > cops. > > We read Saul Alinsky Rules of Radicals too. > > spike You keep mentioning Saul Alinsky as if he invented the protest. Bringing him up is no answer to the issues raised. By the way, it's actually questionable when protesting police misconduct _if_ turning over a vandal or a looter to the police is the right thing to do. There are other ways to deal with such people rather than turning them over to a group of people who are known to brutalize other people. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 8 21:13:06 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 14:13:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] that's why In-Reply-To: References: <7F829503-2718-4AFD-AF4D-4A0A99E89694@gmail.com> Message-ID: <00cf01d63dd9$9b74f7e0$d25ee7a0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] that's why >?As usual, Dan, you offer to get rid of something but do not supply anything to replace it to deal with crime?bill w How about sharia law? That doesn?t actually cost anything, and the sharia people really know how to deal with crime. So? go ahead, defund the Minneapolis police. The fidels can go about enforcing strict sharia law on the hapless unbelievers, and may evolution have mercy on those who decide to stay there. I have no heartburn with their trying that experiment in Minneapolis. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 8 21:27:57 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 14:27:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <7284FB27-798A-4E82-906B-3E025A693546@gmail.com> References: <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <7284FB27-798A-4E82-906B-3E025A693546@gmail.com> Message-ID: <00e801d63ddb$af475c70$0dd61550$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat >?For instance, immigrants in the US tend to commit less crime but suffer more crime than non-immigrants. This is so even though, as studies have shown, immigrants tend to under-report crimes committed against them. ? Ja, this is well known in my own community, which became a destination for Vietnamese people in the 90s. A big problem was home invasion. The explanation given to me by a Vietnamese friend is that these homes were far more likely to have cash (because they don?t trust the banks (imagine that)) and they are far less likely to report (because they don?t trust law-enforcement (imagine that.)) >? We generally don't see Mad Max: Fury Road playing out, but people usually helping each other? Dan Ja again. One of the big problems easily foreseeable is that plenty of cities will deal with their criminals by sentencing them to a one-way bus ticket to Minneapolis. I might be wrong on this (I hope so) and all will be well. But if not, then Minneapolis may find it is waaaay the hell more expensive to try rebuilding what they took down than it was to just keep it. The new cops coming in can see this is a dangerous area and will want hazard pay. Perhaps they will be rock-hard veterans of other dangerous areas going in to try to clean up a mess. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 8 21:37:01 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 14:37:01 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: <00ee01d63962$112c6a30$33853e90$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00ef01d63ddc$f2176fd0$d6464f70$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat >?New terms and new uses for old terms arise all the time. Standardization happens when a term or new use of a term gains ground. That's just part of normal language change. (Don't believe me. Look up how the terms 'girl' and 'silly' changed over time.) Does this mean _you_ will eschew using any new terms or using any old terms in new ways? I doubt it?.Dan Dan it isn?t terms. There are underlying assumptions also written into these kinds of essays which are very foreign to plenty of us. But since you bring up fash, we have a term antifa, which we are told means anti-fascist. Sure, OK. But the way the term fascist (and perhaps fash) is being used today is for any political view with which the speaker disagrees. To me historic Fascism is defined by the 1930s Italian revolutionaries, where the majority overruled everything. In that sense, the call in the USA to eliminate the electoral college is fascist, for it would mean the majority of the voters would always get their way. The minority states would have little say. It would fail to protect minorities. In my view, the heavy lifting in governance should be done at the state level, for states have a lot more options for raising money than does the federal government. The rights of state government is preserved by the electoral college, which historic fascism does not need or want. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 21:39:28 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 16:39:28 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <7284FB27-798A-4E82-906B-3E025A693546@gmail.com> References: <003401d63b35$44a974f0$cdfc5ed0$@rainier66.com> <7284FB27-798A-4E82-906B-3E025A693546@gmail.com> Message-ID: dan wrote - I don't agree with the view that somehow having no police around all the thugs will go on a crime spree Fine. But even if crime is less there have to be people to deal with it. What do you suggest? bill w On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 3:53 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Jun 5, 2020, at 5:44 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 8:27 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > Again, I bring up abolishing the police. It should always be on the table, > IMO. > > > > There ya go, Dan. That notion should put to bed any remaining suggestion > that Americans do not need to own a gun. Even the possibility that an > entire police force could just get pissed and walk off the job (as they did > in St. Louis this week) should be a clear unambiguous reminder that a > well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. > > > > If we abolish the police, we also abolish all gun control laws, all of > them. Without a professional police force, we all need to have and to > carry guns. > > > > We have the opportunity to educate our society on the meaning of the > phrase ??shall not be infringed.? > > > > spike > > > It seems you believe I'm against people defending themselves and others. > Is this so? In fact, I've argued for arming the masses -- not just the > US-American masses, but worldwide. This is the correct Left position on > this issue. (In fact, traditionally, the Right wants the masses disarmed to > prevent them getting uppity. The strange thing is that many modern Leftists > seem to want the opposite: disarmed masses and armed elites. To me, this is > typically how those in the Left eventually turn to the Right on issues once > they have power.) > > In fact, I'd argue that immigrants and other marginal people need to be > armed and defended more so than your average person. For instance, > immigrants in the US tend to commit less crime but suffer more crime than > non-immigrants. This is so even though, as studies have shown, immigrants > tend to under-report crimes committed against them. Ditto for trans people > and for 'mentally ill' people.* > > That said, overall violence is down. I don't agree with the view that > somehow having no police around all the thugs will go on a crime spree. > That's like a Hollywood movie scenario. Real life, however, almost never > looks like that. A case in point is almost any natural disaster. We > generally don't see Mad Max: Fury Road playing out, but people usually > helping each other. (Yet just about any movie about a natural disaster > shows people turning vicious and against each other. Again, look at the > real world events and data -- rather than movie or TV narrative.) > > As for your citing the COTUS, you should note well that the right has been > infringed, and that should call into question your seeing the COTUS as some > sort of shield against injustice. Either the COTUS authorized those > infringements or did nothing to stop them. Or as Lysander Spooner > (1808-1887) put it: > > 'But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much > is certain ? that it has either authorized such a government as we have > had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to > exist.' > > Regards, > > Dan > > * I'm not the only one calling for this. See Jane Louise's piece from five > years ago: > > https://c4ss.org/content/3966 > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 21:42:24 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 16:42:24 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <023F1C32-1A2E-4643-801E-DE396CDFE9EF@gmail.com> References: <00f501d63962$b502b4c0$1f081e40$@rainier66.com> <023F1C32-1A2E-4643-801E-DE396CDFE9EF@gmail.com> Message-ID: There are other ways to deal with such people rather than turning them over to a group of people who are known to brutalize other people. Regards, Dan You want to give them a good talking to? Eh? Urge them to try therapy or positive psychology? bill w On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 4:37 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Jun 2, 2020, at 10:04 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of > Dan > > ...-- or divide and conquer. This is typical of how any establishment has > > dealt with widespread dissent and protest: attempt to pull away some of the > more moderate elements to weaken the overall movement. ...Regards, Dan > > _______________________________________________ > > That would explain the legitimate protestors handing over the vandal to the > cops. > > We read Saul Alinsky Rules of Radicals too. > > spike > > > You keep mentioning Saul Alinsky as if he invented the protest. Bringing > him up is no answer to the issues raised. > > By the way, it's actually questionable when protesting police misconduct > _if_ turning over a vandal or a looter to the police is the right thing to > do. There are other ways to deal with such people rather than turning them > over to a group of people who are known to brutalize other people. > > Regards, > > Dan > Sample my Kindle books at: > > http://author.to/DanUst > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 21:56:30 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 17:56:30 -0400 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling In-Reply-To: References: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 3:18 PM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> It's interesting you don't feel the same way about the folks who > followed their beliefs in shutting down the telescope.* > That's because shutting down a telescope is not an anti-fascist activity but protesting murder by police is. I don't advocate that fools follow their beliefs, and shutting down a telescope is an anti-enlightenment activity. It still appalls me that so many members of this list thought it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. I had thought Extropians were better than that. John K Clark > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 8 22:03:38 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 15:03:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <023F1C32-1A2E-4643-801E-DE396CDFE9EF@gmail.com> References: <00f501d63962$b502b4c0$1f081e40$@rainier66.com> <023F1C32-1A2E-4643-801E-DE396CDFE9EF@gmail.com> Message-ID: <012801d63de0$aa2e7bb0$fe8b7310$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat _______________________________________________ That would explain the legitimate protestors handing over the vandal to the cops. We read Saul Alinsky Rules of Radicals too. spike >?You keep mentioning Saul Alinsky as if he invented the protest. Bringing him up is no answer to the issues raised. >?By the way, it's actually questionable when protesting police misconduct _if_ turning over a vandal or a looter to the police is the right thing to do. There are other ways to deal with such people rather than turning them over to a group of people who are known to brutalize other people. Regards, Dan Hi Dan, I went to a local BLM protest march yesterday. It was peaceful, the chief of police was there, city leaders were there, school teachers, ordinary citizens of all races, people came to speak their mind and do their thing. There were plenty of whites and browns there. I didn?t feel threatened at any time. I took only one photo, this to remind me of the incident long in the future. The big problem that BLM people are having is that they keep being conflated with two other groups (at least two) who are pushing their own agendas and riding the perfectly legitimate cause of BLM. This was pointed out by one of the speakers. Antifa (from what I can tell) wants to rebuild society in their image. There are angry vandals among them. Vandalism does not advance the cause of BLM, it detracts from it. People are revolted by property destruction, for perfectly good reasons: it is too easy to envision bands of vandals roaming neighborhoods smashing car windows and slashing tires. There are looters who are there for profit (well hell at least I understand their motive, even if I disagree with their means.) They are opportunists. They too are being conflated with BLM, to the detriment of the latter. What I sense is that those with political power would like to join with and lift up BLM, for we agree: everyone should have equal opportunities and rights. We would also like to crush vandals, regardless of what motivates them. We would like to crush looters, for we know what motivates them and we disagree with it. I agree with what the crowd at the BLM rally did in handing the vandal over to the guard. Their action was what motivated me to go to that local BLM rally yesterday. They did the right thing. The BLM people are not vandals, they do not wish to harm the police, destroy property, tear down government, any of that. They want to be treated with respect. They are just like the rest of us. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 12926 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 22:05:16 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 15:05:16 -0700 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling Message-ID: Dylan Distasio wrote: snip > There are three main arguments that anti-fascists use to justify their occasional violence. First, as explained in Chapter 4, anti-fascists make a historical argument based on the accurate observation that ?rational debate? and the institutions of government have failed to consistently halt the rise of fascism. That's an argument consistent with the evolutionary psychology models I have promoted for a couple of decades. Essentially, when the economic conditions are right for a hitler, one will arise. Unfortunately, the model for how the traits for war or related social disruption evolved seems to be too difficult for all but a very few to grok. Keith From interzone at gmail.com Mon Jun 8 23:08:04 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 19:08:04 -0400 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling In-Reply-To: References: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: John- My point was that Antifa gets to decide who the fascists are and then proactively use violence on them. If you're actually in favor of free speech, I'm not sure how you can reconcile that belief with it being ok for one group to do everything possible through both non-violent and violent means to shut down the free speech of anyone they don't agree with. It's how Antifa operates, and that standard operating procedure has been inculcated on campuses throughout the country. The chickens are coming home to roost, both in the actions and toleration of Antifa, and those protesters you had such a hard time with in Hawaii. I'm against what both of them are up to. On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 6:32 PM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 3:18 PM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > *> It's interesting you don't feel the same way about the folks who >> followed their beliefs in shutting down the telescope.* >> > > That's because shutting down a telescope is not an anti-fascist activity > but protesting murder by police is. I don't advocate that fools follow > their beliefs, and shutting down a telescope is an anti-enlightenment > activity. It still appalls me that so many members of this list thought it > was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. I had thought Extropians were > better than that. > > John K Clark > > >> >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 00:54:23 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 17:54:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <00ef01d63ddc$f2176fd0$d6464f70$@rainier66.com> References: <00ef01d63ddc$f2176fd0$d6464f70$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <59CCC0F9-9105-4864-BF84-2A60B9095A80@gmail.com> Italian fascism wasn?t majoritarian in any meaningful sense. In fact, early on, the parliament passed a law guaranteeing the party with the plurality equal to or greater than 25% got two thirds of the seats in parliament. This meant getting 25% of the deputies actually garnered 67%. This law was tailored to allow the fascists to play at elections yet safely never face an actual challenge to their power. The fascists merely had to prevent any other single party from getting enough votes. (This sort of thing only works in a multiparty system ? which is what Italy had back then. Were it a two party system, no doubt, the Italian fascists would?ve sang a different song as their goal was to obtain and keep power ? not to beholden to any particular law regarding elections.) That?s very different from majority rule ? where in order to get a majority of seats in a parliament, you?d have to win a majority of seats and not apportion them more to some plurality. Thus the call to have direct elections for president in the US is not at all like the fascist election law. Also, Italian fascism was ?defined? in the 1920s. That?s when the party took power and also when the election law was passed. (The law was passed in 1924. That was the last competitive election in Italy until after the war. No doubt, had Italians had competitive elections during the 1920s and 1930s, fascists would?ve lost power. That was a risk they weren?t going to take.) Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst > On Jun 8, 2020, at 3:07 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > ? > > > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > > > >?New terms and new uses for old terms arise all the time. Standardization happens when a term or new use of a term gains ground. That's just part of normal language change. (Don't believe me. Look up how the terms 'girl' and 'silly' changed over time.) Does this mean _you_ will eschew using any new terms or using any old terms in new ways? I doubt it?.Dan > > > Dan it isn?t terms. There are underlying assumptions also written into these kinds of essays which are very foreign to plenty of us. > > But since you bring up fash, we have a term antifa, which we are told means anti-fascist. Sure, OK. But the way the term fascist (and perhaps fash) is being used today is for any political view with which the speaker disagrees. > > To me historic Fascism is defined by the 1930s Italian revolutionaries, where the majority overruled everything. In that sense, the call in the USA to eliminate the electoral college is fascist, for it would mean the majority of the voters would always get their way. The minority states would have little say. It would fail to protect minorities. > > In my view, the heavy lifting in governance should be done at the state level, for states have a lot more options for raising money than does the federal government. The rights of state government is preserved by the electoral college, which historic fascism does not need or want. > > spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 03:22:56 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 20:22:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest Message-ID: wrote: snip > To me historic Fascism . . . Spike, perhaps 30 years ago I noted that economic downturns in the US were associated _every time_ with an upsurge in neo-Nazis. It was a mystery at the time. Now I understand why. It is as mechanistic as a ball falling to the floor. Keith PS. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-navy-exclusive/exclusive-u-s-navy-test-shows-60-percent-of-carrier-crew-have-coronavirus-antibodies-idUSKBN23F29Z Which gives an idea of how many have to get COVID for the infection to burn out. From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 10:39:02 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 06:39:02 -0400 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling In-Reply-To: References: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 7:12 PM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> John- My point was that Antifa gets to decide who the fascists are and > then proactively use violence on them. * > Well yes, but In the final analysis that's not just true for Antifa, everybody must decide for themselves who is a fascist and who is not and what cause is worth fighting for and what cause is not. I think trying to stop the police from murdering people is worth fighting for, and so is trying to slow down the country's current march towards fascism, but stopping the construction of an instrument that would help the human race learn more about the universe is not worth fighting for. At least that's what I've decided, what about you? > *If you're actually in favor of free speech,* > I think a person has the right to say anything they want no matter how stupid, and I have a right to say they are unwise for doing so. * > I'm not sure how you can reconcile that belief with it being ok for one > group to do everything possible through both non-violent and violent means > to shut down the free speech of anyone they don't agree with. * > Considering the huge scale of these protests there has been very little violence from the protesters, I wish I could say the same thing about the police. A police riot is the worst kind of riot. > *> It's how Antifa operates, and that standard operating procedure has > been inculcated on campuses throughout the country.* > I've looked into this a little, in the real world outside of the fever dreams of MAGA Hatters and QAnon nutcases it seems to me Antifa rarely operates at all, and when they do it's usually to organize students protesting college administrators using student tuition money to pay a MAGA Hatter to give a Fascist speech on campus. I have no problem with that, you have the right to say whatever you want but you don't have the right to make me pay you to say it. Of course sometimes they protest speakers who are not Fascist like Richard Dawkins, and I do have a problem with that, but even then it's not a First Amendment issue it's just bad judgement. And of course Antifa is notoriously anti-capitalistic which is pretty silly. John K Clark > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 11:50:49 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 07:50:49 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap Message-ID: Forty million Americans have filed for unemployment during the economic lockdown and 113,106 have died from COVID-19, but between mid March and mid May the net worth of American billionaires increased by $434 billion. I find it amazing that so many people think this acceleration of the wealth gap can continue indefinitely without blood flowing in the streets. American billionaires got $434 billion richer during the pandemic John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 9 12:36:54 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 05:36:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling In-Reply-To: References: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <007701d63e5a$a866b390$f9341ab0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat >?everybody must decide for themselves who is a fascist and who is not and what cause is worth fighting for and what cause is not? >? of course Antifa is notoriously anti-capitalistic which is pretty silly. John K Clark No, this is a good thing. People who are anti-capitalistic tend to have less money, resulting in their being less well-armed. Any rioting mob committing acts of violence and vandalism is fascist. We (the well-organized militia and allies) have the right to fight them. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 15:19:14 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 09:19:14 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I guarantee that that's part of the dynamic driving the riots and looting, though you can always count on the MSM to fail to mention anything that might imply inform a narrative of economic-based class warfare [as opposed to race warefare, which they are all about]. On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 5:53 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Forty million Americans have filed for unemployment during the economic > lockdown and 113,106 have died from COVID-19, but between mid March and mid > May the net worth of American billionaires increased by $434 billion. I > find it amazing that so many people think this acceleration of the wealth > gap can continue indefinitely without blood flowing in the streets. > > American billionaires got $434 billion richer during the pandemic > > > John K Clark > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 9 16:06:12 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 09:06:12 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <00f401d63e77$e5f5f460$b1e1dd20$@rainier66.com> >? On Behalf Of Darin Sunley via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap >?I guarantee that that's part of the dynamic driving the riots and looting, though you can always count on the MSM to fail to mention anything that might imply inform a narrative of economic-based class warfare [as opposed to race warefare, which they are all about]. Which side of the gap are these guys on? https://nypost.com/2020/06/03/looters-flee-in-luxury-suvs-after-ransacking-nyc-stores-video/ spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 16:13:10 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 12:13:10 -0400 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling In-Reply-To: <007701d63e5a$a866b390$f9341ab0$@rainier66.com> References: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> <007701d63e5a$a866b390$f9341ab0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 8:39 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > *Any rioting mob committing acts of violence and vandalism is fascist. * What if, as in this case, the violent mob consists primarily of police? And a lot of the violence wasn't done by the regular police, it was done by the *SECRET POLICE*, many of the rioting cops had their names and badge numbers and any other way of identifying them carefully hidden. *> We (the well-organized militia and allies) have the right to fight them.* Is a gaggle of self described "militia members" running around in MAGA hats wielding torches and shotguns chanting "Jews will not replace us" a mob? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 16:48:26 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 12:48:26 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 11:23 AM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> I guarantee that that's part of the dynamic driving the riots and > looting,* > I agree, and the more the wealth gap, not just grows but accelerates, the more the rioting and looting will accelerate. People need to put their political ideology on hold for a moment, and I don't care if it's right or left or libertarian or fascist, and concentrate on what will work, that is to say embrace the Scientific Method; because we're all in this together and the acceleration needs to be stopped for our civilization to continue. To blissfully expect that this wealth gap acceleration can go on for eternity without producing any morbidly dangerous social consequences would just be dumb. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 16:49:38 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 09:49:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <012801d63de0$aa2e7bb0$fe8b7310$@rainier66.com> References: <012801d63de0$aa2e7bb0$fe8b7310$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Jun 8, 2020, at 3:49 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > > > _______________________________________________ > > That would explain the legitimate protestors handing over the vandal to the > cops. > > We read Saul Alinsky Rules of Radicals too. > > spike > > >?You keep mentioning Saul Alinsky as if he invented the protest. Bringing him up is no answer to the issues raised. > > >?By the way, it's actually questionable when protesting police misconduct _if_ turning over a vandal or a looter to the police is the right thing to do. There are other ways to deal with such people rather than turning them over to a group of people who are known to brutalize other people. > > Regards, > > Dan > > > Hi Dan, > > I went to a local BLM protest march yesterday. It was peaceful, the chief of police was there, city leaders were there, school teachers, ordinary citizens of all races, people came to speak their mind and do their thing. There were plenty of whites and browns there. I didn?t feel threatened at any time. > > I took only one photo, this to remind me of the incident long in the future. > > > > The big problem that BLM people are having is that they keep being conflated with two other groups (at least two) who are pushing their own agendas and riding the perfectly legitimate cause of BLM. This was pointed out by one of the speakers. Antifa (from what I can tell) wants to rebuild society in their image. There are angry vandals among them. Vandalism does not advance the cause of BLM, it detracts from it. People are revolted by property destruction, for perfectly good reasons: it is too easy to envision bands of vandals roaming neighborhoods smashing car windows and slashing tires. > > There are looters who are there for profit (well hell at least I understand their motive, even if I disagree with their means.) They are opportunists. They too are being conflated with BLM, to the detriment of the latter. > > What I sense is that those with political power would like to join with and lift up BLM, for we agree: everyone should have equal opportunities and rights. We would also like to crush vandals, regardless of what motivates them. We would like to crush looters, for we know what motivates them and we disagree with it. > > I agree with what the crowd at the BLM rally did in handing the vandal over to the guard. Their action was what motivated me to go to that local BLM rally yesterday. They did the right thing. The BLM people are not vandals, they do not wish to harm the police, destroy property, tear down government, any of that. They want to be treated with respect. They are just like the rest of us. > > spike Would you be willing to ?crush? the vandals revealed in this video: https://www.motherjones.com/anti-racism-police-protest/2020/06/videos-show-cops-slashing-car-tires-at-protests-in-minneapolis/ Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 16:50:59 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 10:50:59 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: <00f401d63e77$e5f5f460$b1e1dd20$@rainier66.com> References: <00f401d63e77$e5f5f460$b1e1dd20$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Twitter consensus seems to peg them as nouveau riche entrepreneurs of unlicensed pharmaceuticals, so the poor side, psychologically. On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 10:09 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *>?* *On Behalf Of *Darin Sunley via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap > > > > >?I guarantee that that's part of the dynamic driving the riots and > looting, though you can always count on the MSM to fail to mention anything > that might imply inform a narrative of economic-based class warfare [as > opposed to race warefare, which they are all about]. > > > > > > > > Which side of the gap are these guys on? > > > > > https://nypost.com/2020/06/03/looters-flee-in-luxury-suvs-after-ransacking-nyc-stores-video/ > > > > spike > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 17:03:00 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 11:03:00 -0600 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling In-Reply-To: References: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> <007701d63e5a$a866b390$f9341ab0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: "Mob" isn't just a word for "scary people I don't like." Whether or not a group of armed people intending violence and destruction is a "mob" depends largely on leadership and coordination, n'est-ce pas? That gaggle of NRA members sounds like it has a plan that they are taking coordinated action to pursue. So no, not a mob. On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 10:20 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 8:39 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > *Any rioting mob committing acts of violence and vandalism is >> fascist. * > > > What if, as in this case, the violent mob consists primarily of police? > And a lot of the violence wasn't done by the regular police, it was done > by the *SECRET POLICE*, many of the rioting cops had their names and > badge numbers and any other way of identifying them carefully hidden. > > *> We (the well-organized militia and allies) have the right to fight >> them.* > > > Is a gaggle of self described "militia members" running around in MAGA > hats wielding torches and shotguns chanting "Jews will not replace us" a > mob? > > John K Clark > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 9 17:07:12 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 10:07:12 -0700 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling In-Reply-To: References: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> <007701d63e5a$a866b390$f9341ab0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <012701d63e80$6b80fdc0$4282f940$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] diamonds falling On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 8:39 AM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: > Any rioting mob committing acts of violence and vandalism is fascist. >?What if, as in this case, the violent mob consists primarily of police? It should be easy enough to figure out using face recognition technology. > We (the well-organized militia and allies) have the right to fight them. >?Is a gaggle of self described "militia members" Self described? The militia is unambiguously defined: all American male citizens between the ages of 17 and 45. >?running around in MAGA hats? MAGA hats? Indeed? How many of those have you seen John? >?wielding torches? Torches? Indeed? Are you referring to the arsonists? Do they use torches for that? >?and shotguns? Why would they have shotguns of all things? >?chanting "Jews will not replace us" a mob? John K Clark Replace us? A good portion of the militia are Jews. John I do not know of the fantasy world where you imagined any of this, but it doesn?t sound like pleasant place. I have never seen or heard of any of this stuff. If this is the dark vision that is haunting you, do let me reassure you please: none of this will ever happen. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 17:29:14 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 13:29:14 -0400 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling In-Reply-To: References: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> <007701d63e5a$a866b390$f9341ab0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 1:24 PM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > *Whether or not a group of armed people intending violence and > destruction is a "mob" depends largely on leadership and coordination, > n'est-ce pas? That gaggle of NRA members sounds like it has a plan that > they are taking coordinated action to pursue. So no, not a mob.* > A lynch mob has a coordinated action they want to pursue, so why is that called a "mob"? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 9 17:37:13 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 10:37:13 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: <012801d63de0$aa2e7bb0$fe8b7310$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <017801d63e84$9ca284b0$d5e78e10$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Protest On Jun 8, 2020, at 3:49 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: > On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat Hi Dan, >? We would like to crush looters, for we know what motivates them and we disagree with it?I agree with what the crowd at the BLM rally did in handing the vandal over to the guard. Their action was what motivated me to go to that local BLM rally yesterday. They did the right thing. ? spike >?Would you be willing to ?crush? the vandals revealed in this video: https://www.motherjones.com/anti-racism-police-protest/2020/06/videos-show-cops-slashing-car-tires-at-protests-in-minneapolis/ Regards, Dan If this guy in the uniform is an actual vandal, of course I want to crush him. They dress like police and cause all manner of chaos. But they might be actual police, using an enforcement technique that makes perfect sense. Imagine this scenario. It isn?t hard to do: https://www.rt.com/usa/490582-looting-califorina-protest-video/ After hours, store closed, somebody gets a forklift or other piece of heavy equipment to break into an electronics store, there is a mob present for some mysterious reason, perhaps for having been on an email circle, they rush in, grab something of value, run out, drive off. This last part is important because that mall in Fairfield as well as plenty of others, would need a vehicle. They can?t really carry off enough loot in their hands to justify the risk, and many (if not most) of these looters may not be from anywhere around Fairfield (I am guessing they aren?t.) OK. Looters need to park near the entrance so they can carry enough packages out the door in a short enough time. So? police come in, don?t go into the store, just disable every car near the entrance. Looter comes out, perhaps don?t notice at first, get out on the freeway with a trunk full of stolen loot, police car calmly falls in behind, the tire comes off the rim a few minutes later, we get an entertaining video of the felon deciding if she wants to flee, resulting in those dramatic showering sparks of bare rim on pavement. Or she just gives up (more likely scenario.) Then the prosecutors make a deal: hand over the identities of the others, they go easy. Then they trace down the others, go to their houses, collect the stolen loot, the merchandise you and I paid for (through markups from insurance costs to retailers) is partially recovered. Fewer injuries that way than getting into a battle with the mob at the mall. If that is a real cop slashing tires, he would have had a law-enforcement reason to do that. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 9 17:39:33 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 10:39:33 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: References: <00f401d63e77$e5f5f460$b1e1dd20$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <017f01d63e84$f053b070$d0fb1150$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Darin Sunley via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap >>?Which side of the gap are these guys on? https://nypost.com/2020/06/03/looters-flee-in-luxury-suvs-after-ransacking-nyc-stores-video/ spike >?Twitter consensus seems to peg them as nouveau riche entrepreneurs of unlicensed pharmaceuticals, so the poor side, psychologically? I see, so if they are poor psychologically but rich monetarily, which side of the wealth gap are they on? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 17:58:50 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 13:58:50 -0400 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling In-Reply-To: <012701d63e80$6b80fdc0$4282f940$@rainier66.com> References: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> <007701d63e5a$a866b390$f9341ab0$@rainier66.com> <012701d63e80$6b80fdc0$4282f940$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 1:39 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >>?chanting "Jews will not replace us" a mob? > > *>Replace us? A good portion of the militia are Jews. I have never seen > or heard of any of this stuff. * > Charlottesville Nazis Chant 'Jews Will Not Replace Us' Through Streets *> Torches? Indeed?* Yes indeed, and Trump called them "good people": Torch-wielding white supremacists march through University of Virginia John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 9 18:03:10 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 11:03:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling In-Reply-To: References: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> <007701d63e5a$a866b390$f9341ab0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <01b001d63e88$3d71c970$b8555c50$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Darin Sunley via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] diamonds falling >?"Mob" isn't just a word for "scary people I don't like." ? >?That gaggle of NRA members sounds like it has a plan that they are taking coordinated action to pursue. So no, not a mob? Hi Darin, I agree. Anyone who is afraid at an NRA rally or a gun show has never been to one. Do attend to one. You will never be safer anywhere, for there are plenty of people there with concealed firearms, responsible, legal, skilled in the sport. You are perfectly safe there. Looters and rioters will not be seen. Of course there is a risk. One might observe that the crowd there is polite, respectful, good people. No one has a torch. I suppose there is the occasional shotgun, but that would be a very small fraction of the firearms present. They are not stupid. They are not violent. They are not rioters. Attendance there might cause one to begin doubting the narrative of a dangerous pitchfork and torch-wielding redneck mob. One might discover this crowd really isn?t violent, they aren?t stupid, they are against violence and stupidity. They stand between you and violence. One might come to recognize deplorable arrogance in oneself based on a Hollywood caricature of the NRA mob. It could lead to an episode of soul-cleansing humility. Horrors! Go there. See. Listen. Learn. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 34475 bytes Desc: not available URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 18:36:06 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 12:36:06 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: <017f01d63e84$f053b070$d0fb1150$@rainier66.com> References: <00f401d63e77$e5f5f460$b1e1dd20$@rainier66.com> <017f01d63e84$f053b070$d0fb1150$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: As with so many things, it depends on what you're wanting to use the answer to that question for. If you're looking to assign blameworthiness in a deontological moral framework, then objectively, they're rich. But if you want to model and predict their behavior, you'll get much better results modeling them as poor. On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 12:08 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *Darin Sunley via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap > > > > > > >>?Which side of the gap are these guys on? > > > https://nypost.com/2020/06/03/looters-flee-in-luxury-suvs-after-ransacking-nyc-stores-video/ > > spike > > > > > > >?Twitter consensus seems to peg them as nouveau riche entrepreneurs of > unlicensed pharmaceuticals, so the poor side, psychologically? > > > > > > I see, so if they are poor psychologically but rich monetarily, which side > of the wealth gap are they on? > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 18:43:03 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 12:43:03 -0600 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling In-Reply-To: References: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> <007701d63e5a$a866b390$f9341ab0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: To the extent that the "mob" in "lynch mob" isn't simply an ad hominem for "scary people I don't like", it probably has to do with their dependence [or lack thereof], on centralized, top down leadership for tactical decisions on a intermediate (10-15 minutes) time scale. A mob can share a strategy and a goal, but it's mobbish-ness derives from that fact that there's no one they look to for tactical direction. Which is probably not the case with the MAGA-aligned protesters you mentioned earlier. On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 11:49 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 1:24 PM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > *Whether or not a group of armed people intending violence and >> destruction is a "mob" depends largely on leadership and coordination, >> n'est-ce pas? That gaggle of NRA members sounds like it has a plan that >> they are taking coordinated action to pursue. So no, not a mob.* >> > > A lynch mob has a coordinated action they want to pursue, so why is that > called a "mob"? > > John K Clark > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 9 18:49:24 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 11:49:24 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: References: <00f401d63e77$e5f5f460$b1e1dd20$@rainier66.com> <017f01d63e84$f053b070$d0fb1150$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <01e601d63e8e$b26d6440$17482cc0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Darin Sunley via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap >?As with so many things, it depends on what you're wanting to use the answer to that question for. >?If you're looking to assign blameworthiness in a deontological moral framework, then objectively, they're rich? Ja, OK. If a mob is looting, it is already clear to me they are to blame. That?s the easy part. >?But if you want to model and predict their behavior, you'll get much better results modeling them as poor? I would model them as crazy. Somebody has a $300k Rolls, and they are risking that to grab a few hundred or perhaps a few thousand bucks worth of loot? Does that make sense to you? Doesn?t to me either. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 9 18:59:49 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 11:59:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] diamonds falling In-Reply-To: References: <008101d63da8$f76304b0$e6290e10$@rainier66.com> <007701d63e5a$a866b390$f9341ab0$@rainier66.com> <012701d63e80$6b80fdc0$4282f940$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <020201d63e90$26e28340$74a789c0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] diamonds falling On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 1:39 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: >>?chanting "Jews will not replace us" a mob? >Replace us? A good portion of the militia are Jews. I have never seen or heard of any of this stuff. Charlottesville Nazis Chant 'Jews Will Not Replace Us' Through Streets > Torches? Indeed? >?Yes indeed, and Trump? Campaigning? Here? >?Torch-wielding white supremacists march through University of Virginia John K Clark A Nazi rally? John is this your world? Do you shape your worldview based on a Nazi rally? I heard of exactly one Nazi rally, but we are seeing looters everywhere regularly, we are seeing vandalism, everywhere, not just in one place. This is why we have a militia, because of Nazi rallies and looting mobs. The militia has Jews, gentiles, black, white, everything. The militia is there to assist the army if things get beyond their ability to control the mobs. Regarding torches at the Nazi rally, I notice they didn?t use those to commit arson, and I didn?t see any shotguns. Shotguns, how bizarre is that? On the other hand? This is what happened up the street from here in 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwFzOW2tZf0 I am part Jewish (genetically, not culturally.) I don?t worry about Nazis, there aren?t enough of them. Fascists, such as the ones calling themselves antifa, are much more a concern to me: there are way more of them, and they are openly promoting violence. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 19:04:41 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 13:04:41 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: <01e601d63e8e$b26d6440$17482cc0$@rainier66.com> References: <00f401d63e77$e5f5f460$b1e1dd20$@rainier66.com> <017f01d63e84$f053b070$d0fb1150$@rainier66.com> <01e601d63e8e$b26d6440$17482cc0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: People who, due to their circumstances, literally do not believe in the future, any future, frequently do things that can very reasonably be called "crazy". When you hyperbolicly discount any projected future utility more than a month or so out down to zero due to genuinely real uncertainty about still being alive and healthy then, a lot of very extreme actions start to seem rational. When a critical mass of the population of an area becomes this nihilistic, the nihilism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 12:56 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *Darin Sunley via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap > > > > > > > > > > > > >?As with so many things, it depends on what you're wanting to use the > answer to that question for. > > > > >?If you're looking to assign blameworthiness in a deontological moral > framework, then objectively, they're rich? > > > > Ja, OK. If a mob is looting, it is already clear to me they are to > blame. That?s the easy part. > > > > > > >?But if you want to model and predict their behavior, you'll get much > better results modeling them as poor? > > > > I would model them as crazy. Somebody has a $300k Rolls, and they are > risking that to grab a few hundred or perhaps a few thousand bucks worth of > loot? Does that make sense to you? Doesn?t to me either. > > > > spike > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 19:10:58 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 13:10:58 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: <01e601d63e8e$b26d6440$17482cc0$@rainier66.com> References: <00f401d63e77$e5f5f460$b1e1dd20$@rainier66.com> <017f01d63e84$f053b070$d0fb1150$@rainier66.com> <01e601d63e8e$b26d6440$17482cc0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Also, "crazy" isn't a behavioral model, it's merely an implicit confession that their behavior confuses you and you don't know how to model their behavior. On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 12:56 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *Darin Sunley via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap > > > > > > > > > > > > >?As with so many things, it depends on what you're wanting to use the > answer to that question for. > > > > >?If you're looking to assign blameworthiness in a deontological moral > framework, then objectively, they're rich? > > > > Ja, OK. If a mob is looting, it is already clear to me they are to > blame. That?s the easy part. > > > > > > >?But if you want to model and predict their behavior, you'll get much > better results modeling them as poor? > > > > I would model them as crazy. Somebody has a $300k Rolls, and they are > risking that to grab a few hundred or perhaps a few thousand bucks worth of > loot? Does that make sense to you? Doesn?t to me either. > > > > spike > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 19:30:36 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 12:30:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Lockdowns Message-ID: " Lockdowns and other distancing measures have had resounding success at thwarting the new coronavirus, according to two independently conducted studies. One found that stay-at-home orders and policies that restrict face-to-face contact were especially effective in 11 European countries, reducing transmission by 81%. The combination of policies aimed at slowing the virus?s spread prevented more than 3 million deaths from the epidemic?s start to early May. Another study that looked at China, the United States and 4 more countries showed that across all 6 countries, anti-transmission measures averted roughly 500 million infections." >From Nature I would modify the article. "Prevented" should be "delayed" and "averted" should be "temporarily averted" assuming we get neither a vaccine nor effective treatments. Keith From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 19:33:13 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 14:33:13 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: <01e601d63e8e$b26d6440$17482cc0$@rainier66.com> References: <00f401d63e77$e5f5f460$b1e1dd20$@rainier66.com> <017f01d63e84$f053b070$d0fb1150$@rainier66.com> <01e601d63e8e$b26d6440$17482cc0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: would model them as crazy. Somebody has a $300k Rolls, and they are risking that to grab a few hundred or perhaps a few thousand bucks worth of loot? Does that make sense to you? Doesn?t to me either. spike It's the thrill. LIke the billionaire's wife who gets arrested for shoplifting an $80 scarf at Macy''s bill w On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 1:56 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *Darin Sunley via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap > > > > > > > > > > > > >?As with so many things, it depends on what you're wanting to use the > answer to that question for. > > > > >?If you're looking to assign blameworthiness in a deontological moral > framework, then objectively, they're rich? > > > > Ja, OK. If a mob is looting, it is already clear to me they are to > blame. That?s the easy part. > > > > > > >?But if you want to model and predict their behavior, you'll get much > better results modeling them as poor? > > > > I would model them as crazy. Somebody has a $300k Rolls, and they are > risking that to grab a few hundred or perhaps a few thousand bucks worth of > loot? Does that make sense to you? Doesn?t to me either. > > > > spike > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 9 19:34:48 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 12:34:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: References: <00f401d63e77$e5f5f460$b1e1dd20$@rainier66.com> <017f01d63e84$f053b070$d0fb1150$@rainier66.com> <01e601d63e8e$b26d6440$17482cc0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <001501d63e95$0a2d2bb0$1e878310$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Darin Sunley via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap >?People who, due to their circumstances, literally do not believe in the future, any future, frequently do things that can very reasonably be called "crazy"? Darin Hi Darin, well sure. I don?t see how that no-future scenario would apply to the owner of that Rolls who was participating in the looting, who clearly has a lot of money. She could flee that benighted suburb, move out into the country, live a nice peaceful life out there with no concerns with finances. The future sure looks bright to me for that owner. Since the no-future argument doesn?t really apply there, perhaps someone can offer an explanation for why one would drive one?s Rolls to such an event. Why not just rent a car for that purpose? One could hire looters I suppose, to reduce the risk to oneself. Anyone who owns something of value has something of value to lose. Ownership instills a sense of responsibility. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 20:01:57 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 14:01:57 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: <001501d63e95$0a2d2bb0$1e878310$@rainier66.com> References: <00f401d63e77$e5f5f460$b1e1dd20$@rainier66.com> <017f01d63e84$f053b070$d0fb1150$@rainier66.com> <01e601d63e8e$b26d6440$17482cc0$@rainier66.com> <001501d63e95$0a2d2bb0$1e878310$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: To an inner city drug dealer, it absolutely applies. That Rolls is the result of maybe a few really good deals, and could be gone tomorrow. Ownership does not necessarily instill a responsibility on a Hobbesian state of nature. Here today, gone tomorrow. On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 1:51 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *Darin Sunley via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap > > > > >?People who, due to their circumstances, literally do not believe in the > future, any future, frequently do things that can very reasonably be called > "crazy"? Darin > > > > Hi Darin, well sure. I don?t see how that no-future scenario would apply > to the owner of that Rolls who was participating in the looting, who > clearly has a lot of money. She could flee that benighted suburb, move out > into the country, live a nice peaceful life out there with no concerns with > finances. The future sure looks bright to me for that owner. > > > > Since the no-future argument doesn?t really apply there, perhaps someone > can offer an explanation for why one would drive one?s Rolls to such an > event. Why not just rent a car for that purpose? One could hire looters I > suppose, to reduce the risk to oneself. Anyone who owns something of value > has something of value to lose. Ownership instills a sense of > responsibility. > > > > spike > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 9 20:12:09 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 13:12:09 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: References: <00f401d63e77$e5f5f460$b1e1dd20$@rainier66.com> <017f01d63e84$f053b070$d0fb1150$@rainier66.com> <01e601d63e8e$b26d6440$17482cc0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <005201d63e9a$4199ea20$c4cdbe60$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Darin Sunley via extropy-chat Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 12:11 PM To: ExI chat list Cc: Darin Sunley Subject: Re: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap >?Also, "crazy" isn't a behavioral model, it's merely an implicit confession that their behavior confuses you and you don't know how to model their behavior? OK Darin, I will certainly admit I don?t understand how to model the behavior of driving a $300k Rolls to loot a department store. Can you make sense of that? Looters may imagine they are stealing from the rich, but in fact they are stealing from the poor. The insurance premiums will go up on all businesses anywhere near where rioting took place. This increases the prices of everything, which hits the poor the hardest. Since their local stores are burned out and my not be rebuilt, the poor now need to travel a greater distance to do their trading. Looters are the opposite of Robin Hood: they steal from the poor and give to themselves. Note the comments made by the mayor of Chicago: "I've been on calls and text messages with people all day who fought hard to bring economic development to areas of the city, only to see the Walgreens, the CVS, the grocery store, everything vanish in an eye blink. It's going to take a Herculean effort on the part of all of us to convince businesses not to disappear, to come back. We're prepared to fight that fight." "I haven't seen shit like this before. The number of places all over the South and West sides in particular that have been hit today has just been off the charts. Literally hundreds, if not thousands, of locations. Big stores, small stores, strip malls, many corner places, it is all over the city." The mayor did have an uplifting comment on the local residents form a volunteer guard, hoping to protect what is left. This is important considering the obvious new challenge: the remaining businesses are all they have left. ?The new guards are unarmed and solely in place to monitor activity on commercial corridors and notify the Chicago Police Department if any illegal activity occurs. None of the security guards have policing powers, but are another set of eyes and ears to support efforts to deter looters. All security officers will wear visible identification.? Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, 31 May 2020 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 20:16:11 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 13:16:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I don't have all the answers here, but personal self-defense and voluntary defense associations for those extremely rare occasions when violent confrontations happen. Private security already plays a role in current US-American society, such as security guards inside shopping malls and the like. So I don't see any reason why people can't specialize in security and things like detection and apprehension of suspects. What wouldn't exist under such a system is a group of people who have special privileges because of this specialization. (And self-help wouldn't be outlawed.) Elsewhere I mentioned Bruce L. Benson's 1990 book _The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State_. He goes over much of this in far more depth than me. Also, market anarchists have been discussing how to deal with crime without the state for decades now. This is all part of the literature of libertarian thought, no? (What shocks me is meeting people who call themselves libertarians who seem unaware of this work. Have you heard of Benson's work? That's not his only book. How about George H. Smith? Have you read his essay "Justice Entrepreneurship In a Free Market"? He wrote on this subject back in 1979!) Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst > On Jun 8, 2020, at 3:21 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > ? > dan wrote - I don't agree with the view that somehow having no police around all the thugs will go on a crime spree > > Fine. But even if crime is less there have to be people to deal with it. What do you suggest? > > bill w >> >> It seems you believe I'm against people defending themselves and others. Is this so? In fact, I've argued for arming the masses -- not just the US-American masses, but worldwide. This is the correct Left position on this issue. (In fact, traditionally, the Right wants the masses disarmed to prevent them getting uppity. The strange thing is that many modern Leftists seem to want the opposite: disarmed masses and armed elites. To me, this is typically how those in the Left eventually turn to the Right on issues once they have power.) >> >> In fact, I'd argue that immigrants and other marginal people need to be armed and defended more so than your average person. For instance, immigrants in the US tend to commit less crime but suffer more crime than non-immigrants. This is so even though, as studies have shown, immigrants tend to under-report crimes committed against them. Ditto for trans people and for 'mentally ill' people.* >> >> That said, overall violence is down. I don't agree with the view that somehow having no police around all the thugs will go on a crime spree. That's like a Hollywood movie scenario. Real life, however, almost never looks like that. A case in point is almost any natural disaster. We generally don't see Mad Max: Fury Road playing out, but people usually helping each other. (Yet just about any movie about a natural disaster shows people turning vicious and against each other. Again, look at the real world events and data -- rather than movie or TV narrative.) >> >> As for your citing the COTUS, you should note well that the right has been infringed, and that should call into question your seeing the COTUS as some sort of shield against injustice. Either the COTUS authorized those infringements or did nothing to stop them. Or as Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) put it: >> >> 'But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain ? that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.' >> >> Regards, >> >> Dan >> >> * I'm not the only one calling for this. See Jane Louise's piece from five years ago: >> >> https://c4ss.org/content/3966 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 20:17:23 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 13:17:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Jun 9, 2020, at 12:16 PM, Darin Sunley via extropy-chat wrote:? > > People who, due to their circumstances, literally do not believe in the future, any future, frequently do things that can very reasonably be called "crazy". > > When you hyperbolicly discount any projected future utility more than a month or so out down to zero due to genuinely real uncertainty about still being alive and healthy then, a lot of very extreme actions start to seem rational. > > When a critical mass of the population of an area becomes this nihilistic, the nihilism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ever hear of Crinton Bane's _The Anatomy of Revolution_? I seem to recall him positing that revolutions happen when there are rising expectations -- rising hopes -- but the near-term prospects are being thwarted or seem grim. Sort of fits with your view, though it's not about seeing no future or no hope, but about seeing a better future being taken away unless they act. Or that's what I got from the book when I read it in high school. (If it's not what Bane meant, and I'm seeing the book is much older than I thought; I probably read a revised edition in paperback, but even the last revised edition is older than me. And add to this, I'm sure Bane is not the last word on the subject.) Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 20:21:10 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 13:21:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6865B53E-A3C8-44AC-B24D-60313B3D92DB@gmail.com> On Jun 8, 2020, at 3:31 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote:? > > There are other ways to deal with such people rather than turning them over to a group of people who are known to brutalize other people. > > Regards, > > Dan > > You want to give them a good talking to? Eh? Urge them to try therapy or positive psychology? > bill w Well, first you can stop them from doing the vandalizing. That seems to have happened, no? Some people there stopped him forcibly from whatever it was he was doing. That's part of what I meant. And, yes, talking works too. Or do you think talking never works? How do people, including police in other Western nations, quite frequently de-escalate situations like fights? Usually through talk, no? (How do UK police get along with most of them not carrying guns?) But it doesn't strike you at all as ironic that when protesting police misconduct, especially if as a protester you believe this is rampant and systemic, that you'd turn anyone over to the police? (My guess is most people, including many if not most protesters, lack imagination and insight here. This is a terrible sin. The average person gets upset at police misconduct -- though only after decades of such and only after it's finally widely publicized to the point it's impossible to ignore. I don't expect the average person to think of all the ramifications here and that the problem almost certainly won't be solved by a few reforms.) Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst >> On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 4:37 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> You keep mentioning Saul Alinsky as if he invented the protest. Bringing him up is no answer to the issues raised. >> >> By the way, it's actually questionable when protesting police misconduct _if_ turning over a vandal or a looter to the police is the right thing to do. There are other ways to deal with such people rather than turning them over to a group of people who are known to brutalize other people. >> >> Regards, >> >> Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 20:40:09 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 13:40:09 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <017801d63e84$9ca284b0$d5e78e10$@rainier66.com> References: <017801d63e84$9ca284b0$d5e78e10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <03535B26-81B5-4739-952C-2DF786CFCE4D@gmail.com> On Jun 9, 2020, at 10:58 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] Protest > > On Jun 8, 2020, at 3:49 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > > > > > Hi Dan, > > >? We would like to crush looters, for we know what motivates them and we disagree with it?I agree with what the crowd at the BLM rally did in handing the vandal over to the guard. Their action was what motivated me to go to that local BLM rally yesterday. They did the right thing. ? > > spike > > >?Would you be willing to ?crush? the vandals revealed in this video: > > https://www.motherjones.com/anti-racism-police-protest/2020/06/videos-show-cops-slashing-car-tires-at-protests-in-minneapolis/ > > Regards, > > Dan > > > If this guy in the uniform is an actual vandal, of course I want to crush him. They dress like police and cause all manner of chaos. > > But they might be actual police, using an enforcement technique that makes perfect sense. > > Imagine this scenario. It isn?t hard to do: > > https://www.rt.com/usa/490582-looting-califorina-protest-video/ > > After hours, store closed, somebody gets a forklift or other piece of heavy equipment to break into an electronics store, there is a mob present for some mysterious reason, perhaps for having been on an email circle, they rush in, grab something of value, run out, drive off. This last part is important because that mall in Fairfield as well as plenty of others, would need a vehicle. They can?t really carry off enough loot in their hands to justify the risk, and many (if not most) of these looters may not be from anywhere around Fairfield (I am guessing they aren?t.) > > OK. Looters need to park near the entrance so they can carry enough packages out the door in a short enough time. So? police come in, don?t go into the store, just disable every car near the entrance. Looter comes out, perhaps don?t notice at first, get out on the freeway with a trunk full of stolen loot, police car calmly falls in behind, the tire comes off the rim a few minutes later, we get an entertaining video of the felon deciding if she wants to flee, resulting in those dramatic showering sparks of bare rim on pavement. Or she just gives up (more likely scenario.) > > Then the prosecutors make a deal: hand over the identities of the others, they go easy. Then they trace down the others, go to their houses, collect the stolen loot, the merchandise you and I paid for (through markups from insurance costs to retailers) is partially recovered. Fewer injuries that way than getting into a battle with the mob at the mall. > > If that is a real cop slashing tires, he would have had a law-enforcement reason to do that. > > spike If you read the article, you'd have seen, in the first paragraph: "The Star Tribune has identified the officers puncturing tires as state troopers and deputies from the Anoka County Sheriff?s Office." This was two days after the story broke. Initially, though, the state troopers denied involvement and the sheriff's office didn't respond: "The officers appear to be state troopers or county police, though it?s not clear from the videos. Neither the Minnesota State Patrol nor the Hennepin County Sheriff?s Office responded to requests from Mother Jones. The Minneapolis Police Department and Minnesota National Guard denied involvement." This initial denial would call into question whether this action had the rationale offered. After all, a rationale that would seem fit as well is they were just making life miserable for any (out of state?) protesters without regard to whether the latter were peaceful or carrying anything suspicious around. That makes sense too, no? Or do you seriously believe the police never do anything wrong or vindictive? It's interesting, though, that your first instinct here is not to identify them as police, but as perhaps "vandals" "dress[ing] like police and caus[ing] all manner of chaos." Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 20:40:39 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 15:40:39 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I am simply not interested enough in it to read a book. But just a hint or two about how to deal with crime without police would be a help. bill w On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 3:37 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I don't have all the answers here, but personal self-defense and voluntary > defense associations for those extremely rare occasions when violent > confrontations happen. Private security already plays a role in current > US-American society, such as security guards inside shopping malls and the > like. So I don't see any reason why people can't specialize in security and > things like detection and apprehension of suspects. What wouldn't exist > under such a system is a group of people who have special privileges > because of this specialization. (And self-help wouldn't be outlawed.) > > Elsewhere I mentioned Bruce L. Benson's 1990 book _The Enterprise of > Law: Justice Without the State_. He goes over much of this in far more > depth than me. Also, market anarchists have been discussing how to deal > with crime without the state for decades now. This is all part of the > literature of libertarian thought, no? (What shocks me is meeting people > who call themselves libertarians who seem unaware of this work. Have you > heard of Benson's work? That's not his only book. How about George H. > Smith? Have you read his essay "Justice Entrepreneurship In a Free Market"? > He wrote on this subject back in 1979!) > > Regards, > > Dan > Sample my Kindle books at: > > http://author.to/DanUst > > On Jun 8, 2020, at 3:21 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > ? > dan wrote - I don't agree with the view that somehow having no police > around all the thugs will go on a crime spree > > Fine. But even if crime is less there have to be people to deal with it. > What do you suggest? > > bill w > >> >> It seems you believe I'm against people defending themselves and others. >> Is this so? In fact, I've argued for arming the masses -- not just the >> US-American masses, but worldwide. This is the correct Left position on >> this issue. (In fact, traditionally, the Right wants the masses disarmed to >> prevent them getting uppity. The strange thing is that many modern Leftists >> seem to want the opposite: disarmed masses and armed elites. To me, this is >> typically how those in the Left eventually turn to the Right on issues once >> they have power.) >> >> In fact, I'd argue that immigrants and other marginal people need to be >> armed and defended more so than your average person. For instance, >> immigrants in the US tend to commit less crime but suffer more crime than >> non-immigrants. This is so even though, as studies have shown, immigrants >> tend to under-report crimes committed against them. Ditto for trans people >> and for 'mentally ill' people.* >> >> That said, overall violence is down. I don't agree with the view that >> somehow having no police around all the thugs will go on a crime spree. >> That's like a Hollywood movie scenario. Real life, however, almost never >> looks like that. A case in point is almost any natural disaster. We >> generally don't see Mad Max: Fury Road playing out, but people usually >> helping each other. (Yet just about any movie about a natural disaster >> shows people turning vicious and against each other. Again, look at the >> real world events and data -- rather than movie or TV narrative.) >> >> As for your citing the COTUS, you should note well that the right has >> been infringed, and that should call into question your seeing the COTUS as >> some sort of shield against injustice. Either the COTUS authorized those >> infringements or did nothing to stop them. Or as Lysander Spooner >> (1808-1887) put it: >> >> 'But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much >> is certain ? that it has either authorized such a government as we have >> had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to >> exist.' >> >> Regards, >> >> Dan >> >> * I'm not the only one calling for this. See Jane Louise's piece from >> five years ago: >> >> https://c4ss.org/content/3966 >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 20:45:57 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 13:45:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Jun 9, 2020, at 1:06 PM, Darin Sunley via extropy-chat wrote: > To an inner city drug dealer, it absolutely applies. That Rolls is the result of maybe a few really good deals, and could be gone tomorrow. Ownership does not necessarily instill a responsibility on a Hobbesian state of nature. Here today, gone tomorrow. I've read, too, that the _average_ drug dealer isn't making a fortune -- not enough to be buying at sticker value that SUV. However, it's usually enough to justify the risks given the lack of other lucrative opportunities. (I recall reading a Quora member mentioning making tens of thousands of USD a year. This was a lot of money for that person, but it's not like someone making a six figure salary in a decent job with a retirement fund, paid medical, etc. is going to quit to start dealing on the street.) By the way, the problem you talk about ? securing property rights when one is involved in a black market ? is a problem Hernando de Soto covered in his _The Other Path_. He wasn?t dealing with the recreational drug trade, but things like housing and street vending in Peru. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 20:47:38 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 13:47:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: <005201d63e9a$4199ea20$c4cdbe60$@rainier66.com> References: <005201d63e9a$4199ea20$c4cdbe60$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <392705C6-873B-4049-8C5B-C18048E8B883@gmail.com> On Jun 9, 2020, at 1:19 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Darin Sunley via extropy-chat > Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 12:11 PM > To: ExI chat list > Cc: Darin Sunley > Subject: Re: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap > > >?Also, "crazy" isn't a behavioral model, it's merely an implicit confession that their behavior confuses you and you don't know how to model their behavior? > > > OK Darin, I will certainly admit I don?t understand how to model the behavior of driving a $300k Rolls to loot a department store. Can you make sense of that? > > Looters may imagine they are stealing from the rich, but in fact they are stealing from the poor. The insurance premiums will go up on all businesses anywhere near where rioting took place. This increases the prices of everything, which hits the poor the hardest. Since their local stores are burned out and my not be rebuilt, the poor now need to travel a greater distance to do their trading. Looters are the opposite of Robin Hood: they steal from the poor and give to themselves. > > Note the comments made by the mayor of Chicago: > > "I've been on calls and text messages with people all day who fought hard to bring economic development to areas of the city, only to see the Walgreens, the CVS, the grocery store, everything vanish in an eye blink. It's going to take a Herculean effort on the part of all of us to convince businesses not to disappear, to come back. We're prepared to fight that fight." > > "I haven't seen shit like this before. The number of places all over the South and West sides in particular that have been hit today has just been off the charts. Literally hundreds, if not thousands, of locations. Big stores, small stores, strip malls, many corner places, it is all over the city." > > The mayor did have an uplifting comment on the local residents form a volunteer guard, hoping to protect what is left. This is important considering the obvious new challenge: the remaining businesses are all they have left. > > ?The new guards are unarmed and solely in place to monitor activity on commercial corridors and notify the Chicago Police Department if any illegal activity occurs. None of the security guards have policing powers, but are another set of eyes and ears to support efforts to deter looters. All security officers will wear visible identification.? Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, 31 May 2020 You're presuming those who loot in general are making a political statement and have a genuine political philosophy behind it. Why wouldn't many of these case seem to be merely crimes of opportunity? The logic might be more like: There's stuff there easy for me to grab, so why not grab it? If I don't grab, someone else will (if I'm really thinking that far ahead). One time I was near a riot -- an anti-police one at that or one inspired by an off duty cop killing two outside a bar -- it was clear that those who did the looting, a few I knew, really cared much more about getting free stuff and just having some excitement. Finally, while these particular looters drove off in a very expensive ride, my guess is they're not typical for looters. Certainly, the aforementioned kids I knew who looted weren't driving around in ultra-high end SUVs. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 21:10:19 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 16:10:19 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <6865B53E-A3C8-44AC-B24D-60313B3D92DB@gmail.com> References: <6865B53E-A3C8-44AC-B24D-60313B3D92DB@gmail.com> Message-ID: Murder, aggravated assault, rape, armed robbery and more - you think you are going to talk them out of it? Maybe a few cases. But these crimes need strong police force - but no battery on the criminals, which happens a lot, including at the police station. Carrying a gun in the UK is a very serious offense I think, so the bobbies are not usually confronted with armed criminals. I dunno about other places. bill w On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 3:57 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Jun 8, 2020, at 3:31 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:? > > There are other ways to deal with such people rather than turning them > over to a group of people who are known to brutalize other people. > > Regards, > > Dan > > You want to give them a good talking to? Eh? Urge them to try therapy or > positive psychology? > bill w > > > Well, first you can stop them from doing the vandalizing. That seems to > have happened, no? Some people there stopped him forcibly from whatever it > was he was doing. That's part of what I meant. And, yes, talking works too. > Or do you think talking never works? How do people, including police in > other Western nations, quite frequently de-escalate situations like fights? > Usually through talk, no? (How do UK police get along with most of them not > carrying guns?) > > But it doesn't strike you at all as ironic that when protesting police > misconduct, especially if as a protester you believe this is rampant and > systemic, that you'd turn anyone over to the police? > > (My guess is most people, including many if not most protesters, lack > imagination and insight here. This is a terrible sin. The average person > gets upset at police misconduct -- though only after decades of such and > only after it's finally widely publicized to the point it's impossible to > ignore. I don't expect the average person to think of all the ramifications > here and that the problem almost certainly won't be solved by a few > reforms.) > > Regards, > > Dan > Sample my Kindle books at: > > http://author.to/DanUst > > > On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 4:37 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >> You keep mentioning Saul Alinsky as if he invented the protest. Bringing >> him up is no answer to the issues raised. >> >> By the way, it's actually questionable when protesting police misconduct >> _if_ turning over a vandal or a looter to the police is the right thing to >> do. There are other ways to deal with such people rather than turning them >> over to a group of people who are known to brutalize other people. >> >> Regards, >> >> Dan >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 9 21:32:31 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 14:32:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <6865B53E-A3C8-44AC-B24D-60313B3D92DB@gmail.com> References: <6865B53E-A3C8-44AC-B24D-60313B3D92DB@gmail.com> Message-ID: <002d01d63ea5$7c09c7b0$741d5710$@rainier66.com> >? On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Protest >?But it doesn't strike you at all as ironic that when protesting police misconduct, especially if as a protester you believe this is rampant and systemic, that you'd turn anyone over to the police? Dan There?s more to it than that. Black Lives Matter are protesting a particular type of police misconduct: racially-motivated police brutality. They don?t want to be conflated with these other groups who are taking advantage of them. I need to look again, but as I understood it, the guy they handed over was white and the people they gave him to were not the police, they were national guard. In any case, images are a powerful thing. That one short video differentiated BLM from vandals, anarchists, looters and those who specifically want to harm law enforcement. That one short video changed more minds than any fiery speech. It demonstrated that BLM is us: they want to stop racism. Well so do we. They want fairness for everyone, regardless of race. So do we. We are all with Black Lives Matter. We are against anarchy, against antifa, against vandalism, against harming police. We are in unison with Black Lives Matter. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 9 21:53:06 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 14:53:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: <392705C6-873B-4049-8C5B-C18048E8B883@gmail.com> References: <005201d63e9a$4199ea20$c4cdbe60$@rainier66.com> <392705C6-873B-4049-8C5B-C18048E8B883@gmail.com> Message-ID: <005101d63ea8$5bf4dc50$13de94f0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat >>? It's going to take a Herculean effort on the part of all of us to convince businesses not to disappear, to come back. We're prepared to fight that fight." Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, 31 May 2020 >?You're presuming those who loot in general are making a political statement and have a genuine political philosophy behind it? No not really. I realize they are in it for profit and that the looters are they because it is an opportunity. One would think a thief would take into account who they are stealing from. Perhaps they imagine they are stealing from a big rich insurance company, but insurance companies will always cover their losses by some means. Mayor Lightfoot?s comment seems to imply that businesses coming back is some kind of PR thing, or a political fight. It isn?t. Businesses do not respond to political pressure to come back. They respond to potential profit to be made at the site. They respond to availability of insurance to cover these stores, the price of which just went up dramatically. Some types of business might not be able to get insurance to operate there at all. So? they won?t be back. The buildings might not even be rebuilt. You can go to some parts of LA where buildings burned in the 1980s which never did get rebuilt. I speculate that ten years from now, some of these sites will still be vacant lots. They can?t even safely rebuild the structures, never mind rent them to businesses. Too dangerous down there. >?Finally, while these particular looters drove off in a very expensive ride, my guess is they're not typical for looters. ?Dan Agreed. The Rolls driver did more to damage the image of the looters than hammer-boy did to the image of ideology-driven vandals. We now identify both groups with hammer-boy and Rolls looter. Images are powerful things. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 22:06:25 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 15:06:25 -0700 Subject: [ExI] (no subject) Message-ID: Darin Sunley wrote: > People who, due to their circumstances, literally do not believe in the future, any future, frequently do things that can very reasonably be called "crazy". Which might lead you to wonder how such behavior (or the psychological traits behind it) could have evolved? > When you hyperbolicly discount any projected future utility more than a month or so out down to zero due to genuinely real uncertainty about still being alive and healthy then, a lot of very extreme actions start to seem rational. It is worse than individuals feeling this way because of memes. > When a critical mass of the population of an area becomes this nihilistic, the nihilism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the stone age, when a critical mass of the population became wound up, they went to war. This usually solved the problem (which was almost always a resource crisis) with an orgy of killing that reduced the population and improved the future outlook for the ones who were left. Bummer, but having to kill your own species to control population seems to be a feature of top predators. By comparison, birth control is a really good idea. Keith From rhanson at gmu.edu Tue Jun 9 22:14:05 2020 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin D Hanson) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 22:14:05 +0000 Subject: [ExI] No Recent Automation Revolution In-Reply-To: <005101d63ea8$5bf4dc50$13de94f0$@rainier66.com> References: <005201d63e9a$4199ea20$c4cdbe60$@rainier66.com> <392705C6-873B-4049-8C5B-C18048E8B883@gmail.com> <005101d63ea8$5bf4dc50$13de94f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <9037F08B-DEF7-438D-A8A0-97EBC2271299@gmu.edu> Unless you?ve been living under a rock, you know that for many years the media has been almost screaming that we entering a big automation revolution, with huge associated job losses, due to new AI tech, especially deep learning. ? Last December, Keller Scholl and I posted a working paper suggesting that this whole narrative is bullshit, at least so far. An automation revolution driven by a new kind of automation tech should induce changes in the total amount and rate of automation, and in which kinds of jobs get more automated. But looking at all U.S. jobs 1999-2019, we find no change whatsoever in the kinds of jobs more likely to be automated. We don?t even see a net change in overall level of automation, though language habits may be masking such changes. And having a job get more automated is not correlated at all with changes in its pay or employment. Our working paper is now published in a peer-reviewed journal. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/06/no-recent-automation-revolution.html https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1bCkWbZedqLrV Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu Future of Humanity Inst., Oxford University Assoc. Prof. Economics, George Mason University See my books: http://ageofem.com http://elephantinthebrain.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 22:18:29 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 15:18:29 -0700 Subject: [ExI] e: Acceleration of the wealth gap Message-ID: wrote: > OK Darin, I will certainly admit I don?t understand how to model the behavior of driving a $300k Rolls to loot a department store. Can you make sense of that? My guess would be the Rolls was stolen. > Looters may imagine they are stealing from the rich, but in fact they are stealing from the poor. Spike, if you captured a 1000 looters, and quizzed them, how many of them would understand this relatively simple analysis? Keith PS I find Spike's long lines and too much white space to be hard to read. Is is just me? From interzone at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 22:48:10 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 18:48:10 -0400 Subject: [ExI] No Recent Automation Revolution In-Reply-To: <9037F08B-DEF7-438D-A8A0-97EBC2271299@gmu.edu> References: <005201d63e9a$4199ea20$c4cdbe60$@rainier66.com> <392705C6-873B-4049-8C5B-C18048E8B883@gmail.com> <005101d63ea8$5bf4dc50$13de94f0$@rainier66.com> <9037F08B-DEF7-438D-A8A0-97EBC2271299@gmu.edu> Message-ID: Thanks much for posting this. I'm VERY interested to read your paper as this has been my gut instinct based on anecdotal review of automation and deep learning initiatives. Apple is a good example of attempting to automate an entire production line for the iPhone and failing miserably despite a ton of talent and money thrown at it. It's very hard to replace the versatility of a human being for most tasks at this point outside of some specialized use cases. Tesla is another one. On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 6:30 PM Robin D Hanson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Unless you?ve been living under a rock, you know that for many years the > media has been almost screaming that we entering a big automation > revolution, with huge associated job losses, due to new AI tech, especially > deep learning. ? Last December, Keller Scholl and I posted a working > paper suggesting that this whole narrative is bullshit, at least so far. > An automation revolution driven by a new kind of automation tech should > induce changes in the total amount and rate of automation, and in which > kinds of jobs get more automated. But looking at all U.S. jobs 1999-2019, > we find no change whatsoever in the kinds of jobs more likely to be > automated. We don?t even see a net change in overall level of automation, > though language habits may be masking such changes. And having a job get > more automated is not correlated at all with changes in its pay or > employment. Our working paper is now published in a peer-reviewed journal. > > http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/06/no-recent-automation-revolution.html > https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1bCkWbZedqLrV > > Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu > Future of Humanity Inst., Oxford University > Assoc. Prof. Economics, George Mason University > See my books: http://ageofem.com http://elephantinthebrain.com > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 23:15:35 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 18:15:35 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <002d01d63ea5$7c09c7b0$741d5710$@rainier66.com> References: <6865B53E-A3C8-44AC-B24D-60313B3D92DB@gmail.com> <002d01d63ea5$7c09c7b0$741d5710$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: I hope things change. I truly do. But I am a cynic about change, whether in individuals trying to lose weight, or some other habit, or in bigots who are holding on tightly to their delusions and isms. You can pass laws but you cannot legislate morality. If the laws on limited immunity get quashed, there will be multimillion dollar lawsuits against police brutality, and winning a few of those will change things more than anything else, in my entirely valid and correct opinion. Government at any level will notice and do something to stop the lawsuits. bill w On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 4:57 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *>?* *On Behalf Of *Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Protest > > > > > > >?But it doesn't strike you at all as ironic that when protesting police > misconduct, especially if as a protester you believe this is rampant and > systemic, that you'd turn anyone over to the police? > > Dan > > > > > > There?s more to it than that. Black Lives Matter are protesting a > particular type of police misconduct: racially-motivated police brutality. > They don?t want to be conflated with these other groups who are taking > advantage of them. > > > > I need to look again, but as I understood it, the guy they handed over was > white and the people they gave him to were not the police, they were > national guard. > > > > In any case, images are a powerful thing. That one short video > differentiated BLM from vandals, anarchists, looters and those who > specifically want to harm law enforcement. That one short video changed > more minds than any fiery speech. It demonstrated that BLM is us: they > want to stop racism. Well so do we. They want fairness for everyone, > regardless of race. So do we. We are all with Black Lives Matter. > > > > We are against anarchy, against antifa, against vandalism, against harming > police. We are in unison with Black Lives Matter. > > > > spike > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 9 23:19:32 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 18:19:32 -0500 Subject: [ExI] e: Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Spike, if you captured a 1000 looters, and quizzed them, how many of them would understand this relatively simple analysis? Keith I think it would be difficult to find any looter that cared whom his theft hurt. bill w On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 5:40 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > wrote: > > > OK Darin, I will certainly admit I don?t understand how to model the > behavior of driving a $300k Rolls to loot a department store. Can you make > sense of that? > > My guess would be the Rolls was stolen. > > > Looters may imagine they are stealing from the rich, but in fact they > are stealing from the poor. > > Spike, if you captured a 1000 looters, and quizzed them, how many of > them would understand this relatively simple analysis? > > Keith > > PS > > I find Spike's long lines and too much white space to be hard to read. > Is is just me? > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 10 00:03:59 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 17:03:59 -0700 Subject: [ExI] e: Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <002d01d63eba$a4a58b40$edf0a1c0$@rainier66.com> ...> On Behalf Of Keith Henson via extropy-chat Subject: [ExI] e: Acceleration of the wealth gap wrote: ...>> OK Darin, I will certainly admit I don?t understand how to model the behavior of driving a $300k Rolls to loot a department store. Can you make sense of that? >...My guess would be the Rolls was stolen. >>... Looters may imagine they are stealing from the rich, but in fact they are stealing from the poor. >...Spike, if you captured a 1000 looters, and quizzed them, how many of them would understand this relatively simple analysis? Keith PS I find Spike's long lines and too much white space to be hard to read. Is is just me? _______________________________________________ Hi Keith, I don't know why it looks different on your end with the lines and white space. kilolooter: I can imagine most of them go somewhere else to do their looting. Their big problem is that somewhere else comes to their neighborhood and burns their neighborhood stores. So many of these businesses got such a huge one-two punch with the virus, then the looters, it is easy to imagine few of them ever return to business. If that happens, some of the most tightly-packed cities will start to deflate. spike From danust2012 at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 00:05:10 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 17:05:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6548C2AC-60B2-436C-A989-F68EE12D2062@gmail.com> You shifted from what to do with a vandal In a protest situation like in the video versus everything else. Again, my point was they could handle that particular person without turning him (I?m presuming it was a guy) over to the police. And, once more, if you?re protesting police misconduct it seems painfully ironic to not seek another solution. In fact, they were already there: they stopped him from his act of vandalism. Did they need to do more? Maybe. Perhaps they could?ve told him to leave the area while taking away his hammer and other tools. Perhaps they could?ve photographed him and threatened to dox him of he was caught around the area again. Do you disagree here? You really think it was a great idea to turn him over to the police? You feel there was zero possibility that the police ? known for killing people for minor offenses like shoplifting or even just on w whim ? might abuse him? At least you get points here for not bringing up Saul Alinsky. ;) Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst > On Jun 9, 2020, at 2:49 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > ? > Murder, aggravated assault, rape, armed robbery and more - you think you are going to talk them out of it? Maybe a few cases. But these crimes need strong police force - but no battery on the criminals, which happens a lot, including at the police station. > > Carrying a gun in the UK is a very serious offense I think, so the bobbies are not usually confronted with armed criminals. I dunno about other places. bill w > >> On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 3:57 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote: >> On Jun 8, 2020, at 3:31 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote:? >>> >>> There are other ways to deal with such people rather than turning them over to a group of people who are known to brutalize other people. >>> >>> Regards, >>> >>> Dan >>> >>> You want to give them a good talking to? Eh? Urge them to try therapy or positive psychology? >>> bill w >> >> Well, first you can stop them from doing the vandalizing. That seems to have happened, no? Some people there stopped him forcibly from whatever it was he was doing. That's part of what I meant. And, yes, talking works too. Or do you think talking never works? How do people, including police in other Western nations, quite frequently de-escalate situations like fights? Usually through talk, no? (How do UK police get along with most of them not carrying guns?) >> >> But it doesn't strike you at all as ironic that when protesting police misconduct, especially if as a protester you believe this is rampant and systemic, that you'd turn anyone over to the police? >> >> (My guess is most people, including many if not most protesters, lack imagination and insight here. This is a terrible sin. The average person gets upset at police misconduct -- though only after decades of such and only after it's finally widely publicized to the point it's impossible to ignore. I don't expect the average person to think of all the ramifications here and that the problem almost certainly won't be solved by a few reforms.) >> >> Regards, >> >> Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 00:13:02 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 17:13:02 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: You must have missed the three examples I gave in my first two sentences: 1. ?personal self-defense? 2. ?voluntary defense associations for those extremely rare occasions when violent confrontations happen? 3. ?Private security? I brought up the Benson book and the Smith essay as examples of a vast literature by libertarians on how to deal with this issue. Not only is the literature vast, but it goes back decades. The idea of dismantling the police and government in general are not really all that new in libertarian circles. Again, they?ve been discussed and written about before I was born. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst > On Jun 9, 2020, at 2:21 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > I am simply not interested enough in it to read a book. But just a hint or two about how to deal with crime without police would be a help. bill w > >> On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 3:37 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote: >> I don't have all the answers here, but personal self-defense and voluntary defense associations for those extremely rare occasions when violent confrontations happen. Private security already plays a role in current US-American society, such as security guards inside shopping malls and the like. So I don't see any reason why people can't specialize in security and things like detection and apprehension of suspects. What wouldn't exist under such a system is a group of people who have special privileges because of this specialization. (And self-help wouldn't be outlawed.) >> >> Elsewhere I mentioned Bruce L. Benson's 1990 book _The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State_. He goes over much of this in far more depth than me. Also, market anarchists have been discussing how to deal with crime without the state for decades now. This is all part of the literature of libertarian thought, no? (What shocks me is meeting people who call themselves libertarians who seem unaware of this work. Have you heard of Benson's work? That's not his only book. How about George H. Smith? Have you read his essay "Justice Entrepreneurship In a Free Market"? He wrote on this subject back in 1979!) >> >> Regards, >> >> Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 10 00:47:42 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 17:47:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <6548C2AC-60B2-436C-A989-F68EE12D2062@gmail.com> References: <6548C2AC-60B2-436C-A989-F68EE12D2062@gmail.com> Message-ID: <006301d63ec0$c06b0390$41410ab0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Protest >?You shifted from what to do with a vandal In a protest situation like in the video versus everything else. Again, my point was they could handle that particular person without turning him (I?m presuming it was a guy) over to the police? I disagree. He needs to be in police custody. The BLM protestors handing him over to the police is the right thing. If their protest is that police are brutal only to black suspects, and this sleazy bastard is white, then they would argue he is perfectly safe in police custody. >?And, once more, if you?re protesting police misconduct it seems painfully ironic to not seek another solution? Not to me. The protestors are not vandals. The protestors do not like vandals. The protestors do not want to be equated with vandals, they want to distance themselves from vandals. So? they handed him over. He is white, so no problem, ja? >?In fact, they were already there: they stopped him from his act of vandalism? Good for them. >?Did they need to do more? Maybe. Perhaps they could?ve told him to leave the area while taking away his hammer and other tools. Perhaps they could?ve photographed him and threatened to dox him of he was caught around the area again. Do you disagree here? I do. Dan, images are everything. That image of BLM protestors handing the vandal over to the National Guard is a powerful image. It established their credibility as a protest movement. >?You really think it was a great idea to turn him over to the police? I do. >?You feel there was zero possibility that the police ? known for killing people for minor offenses like shoplifting or even just on w whim ? might abuse him? He is white. According to BLM point of view, he is safe in police custody. >?At least you get points here for not bringing up Saul Alinsky. ;) Regards, Dan Give me time Dan, I will think of something. OK, hmmm, I?m busted on that. But think about it: the Black Lives Matter movement is about police fearing black people and being more eager to use lethal force. Well hell, they are right about that. BLM has a good point. We get it. The BLM movement isn?t against policing, it is against police brutality particularly when it involves black people. Well OK we get that. but the BLM movement isn?t against policing. Plenty of them are from areas where they damn well know they need police. They aren?t arguing that all police are bad. They aren?t specifically anti-police they are anti-police brutality. Well, we are too. At the local BLM rally Sunday, the police chief spoke. There were a few hecklers in the audience, but these guys were seeing each other?s points of view. BLM wants peaceful rallies. They don?t want to fight the cops, they don?t want vandalism, they don?t want looters. All three of those groups detract from their message. Handing over the vandal was not only the right thing, it was the most powerful few seconds of video in their favor I have seen to date. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brent.allsop at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 00:54:06 2020 From: brent.allsop at gmail.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 18:54:06 -0600 Subject: [ExI] No Recent Automation Revolution In-Reply-To: References: <005201d63e9a$4199ea20$c4cdbe60$@rainier66.com> <392705C6-873B-4049-8C5B-C18048E8B883@gmail.com> <005101d63ea8$5bf4dc50$13de94f0$@rainier66.com> <9037F08B-DEF7-438D-A8A0-97EBC2271299@gmu.edu> Message-ID: Yea, funny how fast the herd flipps. You now see lots of articles like this: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/columnists/daniel-howes/2020/01/16/self-driving-vehicle-hype-reckoning-reality/4481239002/ while 6 month ago it was the opposite. On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 4:49 PM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Thanks much for posting this. I'm VERY interested to read your paper as > this has been my gut instinct based on anecdotal review of automation and > deep learning initiatives. Apple is a good example of attempting to > automate an entire production line for the iPhone and failing miserably > despite a ton of talent and money thrown at it. It's very hard to replace > the versatility of a human being for most tasks at this point outside of > some specialized use cases. Tesla is another one. > > On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 6:30 PM Robin D Hanson via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> Unless you?ve been living under a rock, you know that for many years the >> media has been almost screaming that we entering a big automation >> revolution, with huge associated job losses, due to new AI tech, especially >> deep learning. ? Last December, Keller Scholl and I posted a working >> paper suggesting that this whole narrative is bullshit, at least so far. >> An automation revolution driven by a new kind of automation tech should >> induce changes in the total amount and rate of automation, and in which >> kinds of jobs get more automated. But looking at all U.S. jobs 1999-2019, >> we find no change whatsoever in the kinds of jobs more likely to be >> automated. We don?t even see a net change in overall level of automation, >> though language habits may be masking such changes. And having a job get >> more automated is not correlated at all with changes in its pay or >> employment. Our working paper is now published in a peer-reviewed journal. >> >> http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/06/no-recent-automation-revolution.html >> https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1bCkWbZedqLrV >> >> Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu >> Future of Humanity Inst., Oxford University >> Assoc. Prof. Economics, George Mason University >> See my books: http://ageofem.com http://elephantinthebrain.com >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 01:03:37 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 18:03:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Clearly communicating the concept behind "defund the police" Message-ID: Thinking about the nomenclature problem with "defund the police"... (Politics being politics, there is potential to diverge into a number of related threads. I am explicitly declaring that I am thinking just of this subset of the problem, so as to carve off a problem small enough to be solvable in one step. All related problems are acknowledged and can be solved separately.) The issue is that people stop listening after hearing those three words. "Defund the police and then spend the money on...", people stop listening before "and then", and insert their own wild takes. So instead, how about, "relieve the police"? That doesn't seem as prone to such wild takes - meaning the usual reaction will be to ask, "relieve them of what"? That then gives an opening to explain: "relieve the police of non-police duties, by shifting funding: instead of paying the police for mental health duties, pay mental health experts, so the police can concentrate on police duties". This also allows changes beyond just funding shifts to remove non-police duties from the police - for example, changing laws and regulations so that 911 calls in response to someone defecating on the street would be routed to social services, rather than sending a cop as the first response. Exactly what "police duties" are can be debated, but there's a wide range of stuff that even the cops say they shouldn't be doing. Implicit in this is that, with less funding, there'll be less cops; even the unions and review boards won't be able to keep everyone on, leaving room to start actually removing the worst performers (starting with those who actively and routinely threaten human lives without legal cause; I'd say "moral cause", but too often they claim "because he was black" as sufficient moral cause to kill or injure someone). In the worst cases where an entire department needs to be cleaned out and restarted, that is "relieving" them in a more thorough sense, for those cases which engage in too many non-police duties. (Oppression of minorities being "not a valid police duty" in this context.) But this is not every case, unlike what "defund the police" implies. Does "relieve the police" seem a more useful (and ultimately at least as accurate) term as "defund the police"? (This won't replace "defund the police". People who are super-angry will keep chanting that. "Relieve the police" is suggested for those who wish to focus on convincing those currently opposed to police reform.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 01:12:01 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 20:12:01 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Perhaps I missed them because I thought when I read them that they were ludicrous. Personal defense is a good idea, but most people never get attacked. Private security would, I assume cost more than what we get with tax dollars and poor people could not afford it. Voluntary police: I can see this working if a town is not larger than a few hundred. Numerous problems here, including training, insurance if hurt, and the likelihood that an ordinary citizen would go on a call where shooting is occuring. I just can't see getting thousands of volunteers in big cities where violent crime is not rare at all but happens many times a day. Just to give one example: which of the above would deal with maniacs driving 120 mph on city streets? bill w On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 7:31 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > You must have missed the three examples I gave in my first two sentences: > > 1. ?personal self-defense? > > 2. ?voluntary defense associations for those extremely rare occasions when > violent confrontations happen? > > 3. ?Private security? > > I brought up the Benson book and the Smith essay as examples of a vast > literature by libertarians on how to deal with this issue. Not only is the > literature vast, but it goes back decades. The idea of dismantling the > police and government in general are not really all that new in libertarian > circles. Again, they?ve been discussed and written about before I was born. > > Regards, > > Dan > Sample my Kindle books at: > > http://author.to/DanUst > > On Jun 9, 2020, at 2:21 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > I am simply not interested enough in it to read a book. But just a hint > or two about how to deal with crime without police would be a help. bill w > > On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 3:37 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> I don't have all the answers here, but personal self-defense and >> voluntary defense associations for those extremely rare occasions when >> violent confrontations happen. Private security already plays a role in >> current US-American society, such as security guards inside shopping malls >> and the like. So I don't see any reason why people can't specialize in >> security and things like detection and apprehension of suspects. What >> wouldn't exist under such a system is a group of people who have special >> privileges because of this specialization. (And self-help wouldn't be >> outlawed.) >> >> Elsewhere I mentioned Bruce L. Benson's 1990 book _The Enterprise of >> Law: Justice Without the State_. He goes over much of this in far more >> depth than me. Also, market anarchists have been discussing how to deal >> with crime without the state for decades now. This is all part of the >> literature of libertarian thought, no? (What shocks me is meeting people >> who call themselves libertarians who seem unaware of this work. Have you >> heard of Benson's work? That's not his only book. How about George H. >> Smith? Have you read his essay "Justice Entrepreneurship In a Free Market"? >> He wrote on this subject back in 1979!) >> >> Regards, >> >> Dan >> >> _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 10 01:26:18 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 18:26:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Clearly communicating the concept behind "defund the police" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <009501d63ec6$2498d1d0$6dca7570$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat >?So instead, how about, "relieve the police"? That doesn't seem as prone to such wild takes - meaning the usual reaction will be to ask, "relieve them of what"? Excellent thinking Adrian, well done, me lad. Relieve them of enforcing drug law? That is a good start. Good chance police departments will be defunded in plenty of places, whether they wanted that or not. In the places were businesses were burned, the city revenue will be way down. So they will be defunding police departments anyway. So? they must find ways to relieve them of some of their duties. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 01:36:52 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 18:36:52 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Clearly communicating the concept behind "defund the police" In-Reply-To: <009501d63ec6$2498d1d0$6dca7570$@rainier66.com> References: <009501d63ec6$2498d1d0$6dca7570$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 6:29 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Relieve them of enforcing drug law? That is a good start. > 1) Leave that to specialist cops, who are trained in dealing with overdoses and other drug-related issues. 2) If they insist they need to enforce all the laws, then alter the laws to make it explicit that these are not ones that normal police may enforce. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 02:34:20 2020 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 22:34:20 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Clearly communicating the concept behind "defund the police" In-Reply-To: References: <009501d63ec6$2498d1d0$6dca7570$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Earlier today I suggested "Check the police" As in keep them in-check and also check as in make sure of. Also, tbh, check with and check on... because in some cases they have information or unmet needs like the elderly neighbor with no AC during summer heat & humidity. If a good-natured counterpoint to ensuring police are functioning properly seems too soft, we can use the hockey definition to check the police. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 02:55:02 2020 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 12:55:02 +1000 Subject: [ExI] Clearly communicating the concept behind "defund the police" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 at 11:15, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Thinking about the nomenclature problem with "defund the police"... > > (Politics being politics, there is potential to diverge into a number of > related threads. I am explicitly declaring that I am thinking just of this > subset of the problem, so as to carve off a problem small enough to be > solvable in one step. All related problems are acknowledged and can be > solved separately.) > > The issue is that people stop listening after hearing those three words. > "Defund the police and then spend the money on...", people stop listening > before "and then", and insert their own wild takes. > > So instead, how about, "relieve the police"? That doesn't seem as prone to > such wild takes - meaning the usual reaction will be to ask, "relieve them > of what"? > > That then gives an opening to explain: "relieve the police of non-police > duties, by shifting funding: instead of paying the police for mental health > duties, pay mental health experts, so the police can concentrate on police > duties". This also allows changes beyond just funding shifts to remove > non-police duties from the police - for example, changing laws and > regulations so that 911 calls in response to someone defecating on the > street would be routed to social services, rather than sending a cop as the > first response. > > Exactly what "police duties" are can be debated, but there's a wide range > of stuff that even the cops say they shouldn't be doing. Implicit in this > is that, with less funding, there'll be less cops; even the unions and > review boards won't be able to keep everyone on, leaving room to start > actually removing the worst performers (starting with those who actively > and routinely threaten human lives without legal cause; I'd say "moral > cause", but too often they claim "because he was black" as sufficient moral > cause to kill or injure someone). > > In the worst cases where an entire department needs to be cleaned out and > restarted, that is "relieving" them in a more thorough sense, for those > cases which engage in too many non-police duties. (Oppression of minorities > being "not a valid police duty" in this context.) But this is not every > case, unlike what "defund the police" implies. > > Does "relieve the police" seem a more useful (and ultimately at least as > accurate) term as "defund the police"? > > (This won't replace "defund the police". People who are super-angry will > keep chanting that. "Relieve the police" is suggested for those who wish to > focus on convincing those currently opposed to police reform.) > They did "defund the police" in Camden, New Jersey, in 2012 and it apparently turned out OK: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/09/us/disband-police-camden-new-jersey-trnd/index.html -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 10 12:58:25 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 05:58:25 -0700 Subject: [ExI] twittebots? Message-ID: <005401d63f26$d49c0470$7dd40d50$@rainier66.com> It occurred to me that we could perhaps create twitterbots. I don?t know how that service works; I have never used it. But from what I can tell, the level of discourse there isn?t high, and patterns are easy to recognize. We could perhaps create software which would generate tweets from any give point of view and create a massive tweetstorm. For instance, we could have the twitterbots create tweets on the theme that vandalism is bad, or looting is bad, then generate them by the millions, or perhaps a few hundred on each account. Perhaps this is already being done. How do we know this stuff we hear about on twitter isn?t already software-generated? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 13:15:16 2020 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 09:15:16 -0400 Subject: [ExI] twittebots? In-Reply-To: <005401d63f26$d49c0470$7dd40d50$@rainier66.com> References: <005401d63f26$d49c0470$7dd40d50$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:02 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > It occurred to me that we could perhaps create twitterbots. I don?t know > how that service works; I have never used it. But from what I can tell, > the level of discourse there isn?t high, and patterns are easy to > recognize. We could perhaps create software which would generate tweets > from any give point of view and create a massive tweetstorm. > How much garbage do you have to throw into the landfill before anyone notices the theme of your particular garbage? > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 13:45:39 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 08:45:39 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Clearly communicating the concept behind "defund the police" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The Camden police replacement story is excellent, even if missing a lot of details. How did they know who to rehire? I really like the part about the cops going up to houses and apartments, knocking on the door and getting to know the residents. Sounds like a good thing for every police department. Hard to argue with the results. bill w On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 9:58 PM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 at 11:15, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> Thinking about the nomenclature problem with "defund the police"... >> >> (Politics being politics, there is potential to diverge into a number of >> related threads. I am explicitly declaring that I am thinking just of this >> subset of the problem, so as to carve off a problem small enough to be >> solvable in one step. All related problems are acknowledged and can be >> solved separately.) >> >> The issue is that people stop listening after hearing those three words. >> "Defund the police and then spend the money on...", people stop listening >> before "and then", and insert their own wild takes. >> >> So instead, how about, "relieve the police"? That doesn't seem as prone >> to such wild takes - meaning the usual reaction will be to ask, "relieve >> them of what"? >> >> That then gives an opening to explain: "relieve the police of non-police >> duties, by shifting funding: instead of paying the police for mental health >> duties, pay mental health experts, so the police can concentrate on police >> duties". This also allows changes beyond just funding shifts to remove >> non-police duties from the police - for example, changing laws and >> regulations so that 911 calls in response to someone defecating on the >> street would be routed to social services, rather than sending a cop as the >> first response. >> >> Exactly what "police duties" are can be debated, but there's a wide range >> of stuff that even the cops say they shouldn't be doing. Implicit in this >> is that, with less funding, there'll be less cops; even the unions and >> review boards won't be able to keep everyone on, leaving room to start >> actually removing the worst performers (starting with those who actively >> and routinely threaten human lives without legal cause; I'd say "moral >> cause", but too often they claim "because he was black" as sufficient moral >> cause to kill or injure someone). >> >> In the worst cases where an entire department needs to be cleaned out and >> restarted, that is "relieving" them in a more thorough sense, for those >> cases which engage in too many non-police duties. (Oppression of minorities >> being "not a valid police duty" in this context.) But this is not every >> case, unlike what "defund the police" implies. >> >> Does "relieve the police" seem a more useful (and ultimately at least as >> accurate) term as "defund the police"? >> >> (This won't replace "defund the police". People who are super-angry will >> keep chanting that. "Relieve the police" is suggested for those who wish to >> focus on convincing those currently opposed to police reform.) >> > > They did "defund the police" in Camden, New Jersey, in 2012 and it > apparently turned out OK: > > > https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/09/us/disband-police-camden-new-jersey-trnd/index.html > > > > -- > Stathis Papaioannou > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 10 13:56:56 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 06:56:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] twittebots? In-Reply-To: References: <005401d63f26$d49c0470$7dd40d50$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <007b01d63f2f$014b6760$03e23620$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] twittebots? On Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:02 AM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: It occurred to me that we could perhaps create twitterbots. I don?t know how that service works; I have never used it. But from what I can tell, the level of discourse there isn?t high, and patterns are easy to recognize. We could perhaps create software which would generate tweets from any give point of view and create a massive tweetstorm. >?How much garbage do you have to throw into the landfill before anyone notices the theme of your particular garbage? That would be the challenge: making the tweets enough different from each other that they wouldn?t be recognized as coming from software. Might be we give it a theme and a number of different words. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 15:01:17 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 10:01:17 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Clearly communicating the concept behind "defund the police" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20317AA6-1EA5-4391-B625-4187AB387180@gmail.com> The ?koban? community policing style in Japan is very good. Police are a normal and respected part of people?s day. They help you find your lost phone or wallet, they give you directions (like a gas station would here in the states). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K?ban We could also do the ?311 transition? like NYC did, where non-emergency ?police? calls, for things like homeless people loitering, parking violations, etc are done through 311 and have a different tone to interactions. https://www.ny.gov/agencies/nyc-311 https://www.nyhabitat.com/blog/2019/04/01/nyc-311-tenants-guide/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.govtech.com/public-safety/New-York-Launches-311-Citizen-Service.html%3fAMP It might also be a good time to look at the Peelian Principles of Policing. Notably: (1) To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to [...] severity of legal punishment. (2) To recognise always that the power of the police [...] is dependent on public approval [...] and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect. (4) To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives. (5) To seek and preserve public favour [...] by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law [... and] by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life. (6) To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective. (7) To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public (8) To refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary, of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles > On Jun 10, 2020, at 8:45 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > The Camden police replacement story is excellent, even if missing a lot of details. How did they know who to rehire? I really like the part about the cops going up to houses and apartments, knocking on the door and getting to know the residents. Sounds like a good thing for every police department. Hard to argue with the results. bill w > >> On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 9:58 PM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> >>> On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 at 11:15, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat wrote: >>> Thinking about the nomenclature problem with "defund the police"... >>> >>> (Politics being politics, there is potential to diverge into a number of related threads. I am explicitly declaring that I am thinking just of this subset of the problem, so as to carve off a problem small enough to be solvable in one step. All related problems are acknowledged and can be solved separately.) >>> >>> The issue is that people stop listening after hearing those three words. "Defund the police and then spend the money on...", people stop listening before "and then", and insert their own wild takes. >>> >>> So instead, how about, "relieve the police"? That doesn't seem as prone to such wild takes - meaning the usual reaction will be to ask, "relieve them of what"? >>> >>> That then gives an opening to explain: "relieve the police of non-police duties, by shifting funding: instead of paying the police for mental health duties, pay mental health experts, so the police can concentrate on police duties". This also allows changes beyond just funding shifts to remove non-police duties from the police - for example, changing laws and regulations so that 911 calls in response to someone defecating on the street would be routed to social services, rather than sending a cop as the first response. >>> >>> Exactly what "police duties" are can be debated, but there's a wide range of stuff that even the cops say they shouldn't be doing. Implicit in this is that, with less funding, there'll be less cops; even the unions and review boards won't be able to keep everyone on, leaving room to start actually removing the worst performers (starting with those who actively and routinely threaten human lives without legal cause; I'd say "moral cause", but too often they claim "because he was black" as sufficient moral cause to kill or injure someone). >>> >>> In the worst cases where an entire department needs to be cleaned out and restarted, that is "relieving" them in a more thorough sense, for those cases which engage in too many non-police duties. (Oppression of minorities being "not a valid police duty" in this context.) But this is not every case, unlike what "defund the police" implies. >>> >>> Does "relieve the police" seem a more useful (and ultimately at least as accurate) term as "defund the police"? >>> >>> (This won't replace "defund the police". People who are super-angry will keep chanting that. "Relieve the police" is suggested for those who wish to focus on convincing those currently opposed to police reform.) >> >> They did "defund the police" in Camden, New Jersey, in 2012 and it apparently turned out OK: >> >> https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/09/us/disband-police-camden-new-jersey-trnd/index.html >> >> >> -- >> Stathis Papaioannou >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 15:16:29 2020 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 16:16:29 +0100 Subject: [ExI] twittebots? In-Reply-To: <005401d63f26$d49c0470$7dd40d50$@rainier66.com> References: <005401d63f26$d49c0470$7dd40d50$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 at 14:03, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > It occurred to me that we could perhaps create twitterbots. I don?t know how that service works; I have never used it. But from what I can tell, the level of discourse there isn?t high, and patterns are easy to recognize. We could perhaps create software which would generate tweets from any give point of view and create a massive tweetstorm. For instance, we could have the twitterbots create tweets on the theme that vandalism is bad, or looting is bad, then generate them by the millions, or perhaps a few hundred on each account. > > Perhaps this is already being done. How do we know this stuff we hear about on twitter isn?t already software-generated? > It has already been done. See: Quote: Proper usage includes broadcasting helpful information, automatically generating interesting or creative content, and automatically replying to users via direct message. Improper usage includes circumventing API rate limits, violating user privacy, spamming and sockpuppeting. Concerns about political Twitter bots include the promulgation of malicious content, increased polarization, and the spreading of fake news. ------------- BillK From sen.otaku at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 15:15:06 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 10:15:06 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <25A769F4-159F-4676-8044-93EFD841CBEF@gmail.com> I think maniacs driving 120mph are somewhat self limiting. But studies show that high speed chases are the wrong approach. https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a9096/why-high-speed-police-chases-are-going-away-15532838/ Voluntary police can still work IF the areas are made small enough. For example, someone would not want to police all of manhattan. But 4 blocks? I think they?d be willing to. And there?s enough dudes who try to be heroes anyway, so I think ?shots fired? would still get responded to. Withe voluntary community policing, crime becomes a personal affront. Whether that?s good or bad is a different story. SR Ballard > On Jun 9, 2020, at 8:12 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > Perhaps I missed them because I thought when I read them that they were ludicrous. Personal defense is a good idea, but most people never get attacked. Private security would, I assume cost more than what we get with tax dollars and poor people could not afford it. > > Voluntary police: I can see this working if a town is not larger than a few hundred. Numerous problems here, including training, insurance if hurt, and the likelihood that an ordinary citizen would go on a call where shooting is occuring. I just can't see getting thousands of volunteers in big cities where violent crime is not rare at all but happens many times a day. > > Just to give one example: which of the above would deal with maniacs driving 120 mph on city streets? bill w > >> On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 7:31 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote: >> You must have missed the three examples I gave in my first two sentences: >> >> 1. ?personal self-defense? >> >> 2. ?voluntary defense associations for those extremely rare occasions when violent confrontations happen? >> >> 3. ?Private security? >> >> I brought up the Benson book and the Smith essay as examples of a vast literature by libertarians on how to deal with this issue. Not only is the literature vast, but it goes back decades. The idea of dismantling the police and government in general are not really all that new in libertarian circles. Again, they?ve been discussed and written about before I was born. >> >> Regards, >> >> Dan >> Sample my Kindle books at: >> http://author.to/DanUst >> >>> On Jun 9, 2020, at 2:21 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: >>> >>> I am simply not interested enough in it to read a book. But just a hint or two about how to deal with crime without police would be a help. bill w >>> >>>> On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 3:37 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote: >>>> I don't have all the answers here, but personal self-defense and voluntary defense associations for those extremely rare occasions when violent confrontations happen. Private security already plays a role in current US-American society, such as security guards inside shopping malls and the like. So I don't see any reason why people can't specialize in security and things like detection and apprehension of suspects. What wouldn't exist under such a system is a group of people who have special privileges because of this specialization. (And self-help wouldn't be outlawed.) >>>> >>>> Elsewhere I mentioned Bruce L. Benson's 1990 book _The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State_. He goes over much of this in far more depth than me. Also, market anarchists have been discussing how to deal with crime without the state for decades now. This is all part of the literature of libertarian thought, no? (What shocks me is meeting people who call themselves libertarians who seem unaware of this work. Have you heard of Benson's work? That's not his only book. How about George H. Smith? Have you read his essay "Justice Entrepreneurship In a Free Market"? He wrote on this subject back in 1979!) >>>> >>>> Regards, >>>> >>>> Dan >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 15:25:08 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 08:25:08 -0700 Subject: [ExI] twittebots? In-Reply-To: <005401d63f26$d49c0470$7dd40d50$@rainier66.com> References: <005401d63f26$d49c0470$7dd40d50$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 6:01 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Perhaps this is already being done. How do we know this stuff we hear > about on twitter isn?t already software-generated? > Oh, dear sweet summer child... https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+bots (Summary: not only have Twitter bots existed for a long time, they have been weaponized, and detection measures extensively studied.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 15:26:59 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 08:26:59 -0700 Subject: [ExI] e: Acceleration of the wealth gap Message-ID: wrote: > Hi Keith, I don't know why it looks different on your end with the lines and white space. Whatever you did fixed it. > kilolooter: I can imagine most of them go somewhere else to do their looting. Their big problem is that somewhere else comes to their neighborhood and burns their neighborhood stores. It's more complicated than you might think. Last night on a zoom chat, there was someone who has looked into the large scale organized looting. The vehicles involved are mostly stolen. Large scale demonstrations with the potential to turn into riots keep the police occupied so looking for stolen vehicles falls way down their list. As for the looters, " It ain?t just a question of misunderstood; Deep down inside him, he?s no good!" https://genius.com/Leonard-bernstein-gee-officer-krupke-film-lyrics Genetics isn't entirely fate, but recombination makes it sure that some out of every generation are just "no good." Something on the order of 1 percent are bad enough that people around them kill them. Over a long time, this has weeded out the worst characteristics of the race. Human domestication is a work in progress. The first time I heard about such a case was in the late 60s or early 70s. There was a young woman, Debby French, in Tucson who was so hard on the people around her that the 'peace and love' hippies took up a collection to have her killed. She heard about it, and skipped to Denver. The locals forward the collection to someone in Denver and sure enough, she wound up dead in a ditch. > So many of these businesses got such a huge one-two punch with the virus, then the looters, it is easy to imagine few of them ever return to business. If that happens, some of the most tightly-packed cities will start to deflate. Not likely. The reason people are packed into slums is that they can't afford to live anywhere else. See Jay Forrester's _Urban Dynamics_ for how this works. Keith From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 10 15:41:57 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 08:41:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] twittebots? In-Reply-To: References: <005401d63f26$d49c0470$7dd40d50$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <005001d63f3d$acff8470$06fe8d50$@rainier66.com> >...> On Behalf Of BillK via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] twittebots? On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 at 14:03, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > ... > >> Perhaps this is already being done. How do we know this stuff we hear about on twitter isn?t already software-generated? > It has already been done. See: Quote: >...Proper usage includes broadcasting helpful information, automatically generating interesting or creative content, and automatically replying to users via direct message. Improper usage includes circumventing API rate limits, violating user privacy, spamming and sockpuppeting. Concerns about political Twitter bots include the promulgation of malicious content, increased polarization, and the spreading of fake news. ------------- BillK _______________________________________________ BillK, we missed ya bigtime, me lad. Welcome back. We have been struggling to cut down on our howling at the moon, in order to bring back our high-quality posters, such as you. I have vowed to restrict my howling to only when the moon is full. Do pardon me phony Scottish brogue. I traced me family tree and found one of the latest immigrants to the colonies, from Scotland in about the 1730s. spike From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 10 15:51:05 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 08:51:05 -0700 Subject: [ExI] twittebots? In-Reply-To: References: <005401d63f26$d49c0470$7dd40d50$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <005601d63f3e$f3698770$da3c9650$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 8:25 AM To: ExI chat list Cc: Adrian Tymes Subject: Re: [ExI] twittebots? On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 6:01 AM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: Perhaps this is already being done. How do we know this stuff we hear about on twitter isn?t already software-generated? Oh, dear sweet summer child... https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+bots (Summary: not only have Twitter bots existed for a long time, they have been weaponized, and detection measures extensively studied.) Oh mercy, Adrian I am terminally not hip. That?s why I have you young hipsters as advisers. Cool I learn another new hip thing this day: summer child. Urban dictionary says it is someone who is na?ve and unaware of the horrors of the real world. HAH! Little do they know. This hipster urban dictionary knows nothing, NOTHING of the horrors of the engineering world. Blissfully ignorant are they of the impacts of 10.7 cm radiation on the upper atmosphere, and the resulting hazardous ionization potential created as a satellite passes through the diurnal bulge. Na?ve they are, perhaps thinking the dreaded diurnal bulge is when a man gets exited in the middle of the afternoon. These urban Websters are sooo not hip in MY world! spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 15:52:35 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 10:52:35 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: <25A769F4-159F-4676-8044-93EFD841CBEF@gmail.com> References: <25A769F4-159F-4676-8044-93EFD841CBEF@gmail.com> Message-ID: The last thing we need is people who go out and try to be heroes. And I doubt you'd get any volunteers to police Harlem. You are right about high speed chases, but calling ahead and putting down tire destroyers (or whatever they are called) does work. I think that volunteers could easily be added to neighborhoods - unarmed, strolling around saying Hi to people and getting to know them, wearing a badge but no uniform or other equipment. These volunteers could get to know the criminals, the places too easy to rob, and so on. But I cannot see relying on them alone. Maybeyou could put a volunteer together with a cop in a patrol car. Sometimes you need two people in the cop car, but they don't have to both be cops. Someone to call 'officer in trouble' would come in handy. bill w On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 10:31 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I think maniacs driving 120mph are somewhat self limiting. But studies > show that high speed chases are the wrong approach. > > > https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a9096/why-high-speed-police-chases-are-going-away-15532838/ > > Voluntary police can still work IF the areas are made small enough. For > example, someone would not want to police all of manhattan. But 4 blocks? I > think they?d be willing to. > > And there?s enough dudes who try to be heroes anyway, so I think ?shots > fired? would still get responded to. > > Withe voluntary community policing, crime becomes a personal affront. > Whether that?s good or bad is a different story. > > SR Ballard > > On Jun 9, 2020, at 8:12 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > Perhaps I missed them because I thought when I read them that they were > ludicrous. Personal defense is a good idea, but most people never get > attacked. Private security would, I assume cost more than what we get with > tax dollars and poor people could not afford it. > > Voluntary police: I can see this working if a town is not larger than a > few hundred. Numerous problems here, including training, insurance if > hurt, and the likelihood that an ordinary citizen would go on a call where > shooting is occuring. I just can't see getting thousands of volunteers in > big cities where violent crime is not rare at all but happens many times a > day. > > Just to give one example: which of the above would deal with maniacs > driving 120 mph on city streets? bill w > > On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 7:31 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> You must have missed the three examples I gave in my first two sentences: >> >> 1. ?personal self-defense? >> >> 2. ?voluntary defense associations for those extremely rare occasions >> when violent confrontations happen? >> >> 3. ?Private security? >> >> I brought up the Benson book and the Smith essay as examples of a vast >> literature by libertarians on how to deal with this issue. Not only is the >> literature vast, but it goes back decades. The idea of dismantling the >> police and government in general are not really all that new in libertarian >> circles. Again, they?ve been discussed and written about before I was born. >> >> Regards, >> >> Dan >> Sample my Kindle books at: >> >> http://author.to/DanUst >> >> On Jun 9, 2020, at 2:21 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >> I am simply not interested enough in it to read a book. But just a hint >> or two about how to deal with crime without police would be a help. bill w >> >> On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 3:37 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> I don't have all the answers here, but personal self-defense and >>> voluntary defense associations for those extremely rare occasions when >>> violent confrontations happen. Private security already plays a role in >>> current US-American society, such as security guards inside shopping malls >>> and the like. So I don't see any reason why people can't specialize in >>> security and things like detection and apprehension of suspects. What >>> wouldn't exist under such a system is a group of people who have special >>> privileges because of this specialization. (And self-help wouldn't be >>> outlawed.) >>> >>> Elsewhere I mentioned Bruce L. Benson's 1990 book _The Enterprise of >>> Law: Justice Without the State_. He goes over much of this in far more >>> depth than me. Also, market anarchists have been discussing how to deal >>> with crime without the state for decades now. This is all part of the >>> literature of libertarian thought, no? (What shocks me is meeting people >>> who call themselves libertarians who seem unaware of this work. Have you >>> heard of Benson's work? That's not his only book. How about George H. >>> Smith? Have you read his essay "Justice Entrepreneurship In a Free Market"? >>> He wrote on this subject back in 1979!) >>> >>> Regards, >>> >>> Dan >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 15:56:41 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 10:56:41 -0500 Subject: [ExI] e: Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The first time I heard about such a case was in the late 60s or early 70s. There was a young woman, Debby French, in Tucson who was so hard on the people around her that the 'peace and love' hippies took up a collection to have her killed. She heard about it, and skipped to Denver. The locals forward the collection to someone in Denver and sure enough, she wound up dead in a ditch. keith If I've said it before, well, I'll say it again: if you want to find women with abnormally high testosterone levels, look in women's prisons. Women who act as bad as bad men. What they could use is hormone treatments: female hormones to counteract the testosterones. No, I have not heard of any such treatment, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Rafal? bill w On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 10:47 AM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > wrote: > > > Hi Keith, I don't know why it looks different on your end with the lines > and > white space. > > Whatever you did fixed it. > > > kilolooter: I can imagine most of them go somewhere else to do their > looting. Their big problem is that somewhere else comes to their > neighborhood and burns their neighborhood stores. > > It's more complicated than you might think. Last night on a zoom > chat, there was someone who has looked into the large scale organized > looting. The vehicles involved are mostly stolen. Large scale > demonstrations with the potential to turn into riots keep the police > occupied so looking for stolen vehicles falls way down their list. > > As for the looters, > > " It ain?t just a question of misunderstood; > Deep down inside him, he?s no good!" > > https://genius.com/Leonard-bernstein-gee-officer-krupke-film-lyrics > > Genetics isn't entirely fate, but recombination makes it sure that > some out of every generation are just "no good." Something on the > order of 1 percent are bad enough that people around them kill them. > Over a long time, this has weeded out the worst characteristics of the > race. Human domestication is a work in progress. > > The first time I heard about such a case was in the late 60s or early > 70s. There was a young woman, Debby French, in Tucson who was so hard > on the people around her that the 'peace and love' hippies took up a > collection to have her killed. She heard about it, and skipped to > Denver. The locals forward the collection to someone in Denver and > sure enough, she wound up dead in a ditch. > > > So many of these businesses got such a huge one-two punch with the virus, > then the looters, it is easy to imagine few of them ever return to > business. > If that happens, some of the most tightly-packed cities will start to > deflate. > > Not likely. The reason people are packed into slums is that they > can't afford to live anywhere else. See Jay Forrester's _Urban > Dynamics_ for how this works. > > Keith > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 15:58:30 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 10:58:30 -0500 Subject: [ExI] twittebots? In-Reply-To: <005001d63f3d$acff8470$06fe8d50$@rainier66.com> References: <005401d63f26$d49c0470$7dd40d50$@rainier66.com> <005001d63f3d$acff8470$06fe8d50$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Do pardon me phony Scottish brogue. I traced me family tree and found one of the latest immigrants to the colonies, from Scotland in about the 1730s. spike *I have read that people from Ireland populated Scotland. So add St. Paddy's Day to Kwanzai for your holiday celebrations. bill w* On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 10:54 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > >...> On Behalf Of BillK via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] twittebots? > > On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 at 14:03, spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > ... > > > >> Perhaps this is already being done. How do we know this stuff we hear > about on twitter isn?t already software-generated? > > > > > It has already been done. > > See: > Quote: > >...Proper usage includes broadcasting helpful information, automatically > generating interesting or creative content, and automatically replying to > users via direct message. Improper usage includes circumventing API rate > limits, violating user privacy, spamming and sockpuppeting. > Concerns about political Twitter bots include the promulgation of > malicious content, increased polarization, and the spreading of fake news. > ------------- > > BillK > > _______________________________________________ > > > BillK, we missed ya bigtime, me lad. Welcome back. We have been > struggling to cut down on our howling at the moon, in order to bring back > our high-quality posters, such as you. I have vowed to restrict my howling > to only when the moon is full. > > Do pardon me phony Scottish brogue. I traced me family tree and found one > of the latest immigrants to the colonies, from Scotland in about the 1730s. > > spike > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 10 16:22:19 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 09:22:19 -0700 Subject: [ExI] e: Acceleration of the wealth gap In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <007201d63f43$51096fe0$f31c4fa0$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Keith Henson via extropy-chat Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 8:27 AM To: ExI chat list Cc: Keith Henson Subject: Re: [ExI] e: Acceleration of the wealth gap wrote: > Hi Keith, I don't know why it looks different on your end with the > lines and white space. Whatever you did fixed it. >> kilolooter: I can imagine most of them go somewhere else to do their looting. Their big problem is that somewhere else comes to their neighborhood and burns their neighborhood stores. >...It's more complicated than you might think. Last night on a zoom chat, there was someone who has looked into the large scale organized looting. The vehicles involved are mostly stolen... This caper in Fairfield with the forklift has me thinking. Front door is bashed in, after the store is closed. Mysteriously there is a crowd already there in the closed store parking lot, as if they knew something like that was going to happen. There are perhaps 100 or more looters and not that many police, but even if they had enough, it probably wouldn't be a good idea to rush in and start fighting the looters. A better, cheaper alternative: slash exactly one drive tire on every car in the parking lot. Theory: every car there has looting on its mind. Bad guys put the loot in trunk, drive off with a flat tire, constables calmly bag the perp a coupla miles down the freeway with the evidence in her trunk, recover the loot and the stolen car in good condition (minus one tire (tires are cheap)) arrest the looter under safer conditions than the chaotic parking lot at the mall. >...As for the looters, >..." It ain?t just a question of misunderstood; Deep down inside him, he?s no good!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7TT4jnnWys Keith thanks for that. All my life I have heard people quote from West Side Story, but I never actually saw the musical. I like all the songs from it, so now I will finally get around to viewing that classic. >... The locals forward the collection to someone in Denver and sure enough, she wound up dead in a ditch... Do you ever worry about the dark web and strong encryption? Perhaps many of these latest Chicago murders are a result of someone making a deal with a hit-human who resides on the dark web and accepts Bit Coin. I worry about that. >>...If that happens, some of the most tightly-packed cities will start to deflate. >...Not likely. The reason people are packed into slums is that they can't afford to live anywhere else. See Jay Forrester's _Urban Dynamics_ for how this works. Keith _______________________________________________ In some of the most dangerous slums, conditions will change dramatically as a result of the looting. In Chicago, they are looking around in some of those wards trying to locate the nearest remaining pharmacy and grocery store, and finding it is a long ways off. There is some critically important infrastructure that has been damaged or destroyed. I am working thru the math trying to estimate the challenges involved in rebuilding at least some of that. Can you even imagine? In many cases the building itself was damaged or destroyed by fire, so in the very best case (which I do not expect) just getting a new building could take at least a coupla years. spike From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 10 17:06:18 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 10:06:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] twittebots? In-Reply-To: References: <005401d63f26$d49c0470$7dd40d50$@rainier66.com> <005001d63f3d$acff8470$06fe8d50$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00b301d63f49$7603a080$620ae180$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] twittebots? Do pardon me phony Scottish brogue. I traced me family tree and found one of the latest immigrants to the colonies, from Scotland in about the 1730s. spike I have read that people from Ireland populated Scotland. So add St. Paddy's Day to Kwanzai for your holiday celebrations. bill w Bzzzzt BillW, St. Paddy?s is specific to Ireland. The Scottish people are careful to differentiate themselves from their benighted Irish cousins, with a good example being to don the Scotch tartan rather than the extravagant Irish plaid. Wastrels are these Irish lads, scandalously profligate, they are! BillW, in the spirit of your post however, I would add to my Kwanzaa and Hogmanay celebrations the solemn festival of Yom Kippur. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 17:24:59 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 12:24:59 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <25A769F4-159F-4676-8044-93EFD841CBEF@gmail.com> Message-ID: If you live in Harlem, policing your own block isn?t such a big deal. You know them and they know you. But I do think a professional ?police officer? and a civilian ?peace officer? doing patrols together would be a really good thing. The type of people who do Cop Watch come to mind. Very unlikely to turn off a body cam, and very likely to report improprieties. By switching up the pairs on a semi-regular basis, and allowing anonymous reports, I think that would be a good option. Another option: 1 cop, 1 social worker. SR Ballard > On Jun 10, 2020, at 10:52 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > The last thing we need is people who go out and try to be heroes. And I doubt you'd get any volunteers to police Harlem. You are right about high speed chases, but calling ahead and putting down tire destroyers (or whatever they are called) does work. I think that volunteers could easily be added to neighborhoods - unarmed, strolling around saying Hi to people and getting to know them, wearing a badge but no uniform or other equipment. These volunteers could get to know the criminals, the places too easy to rob, and so on. But I cannot see relying on them alone. Maybeyou could put a volunteer together with a cop in a patrol car. Sometimes you need two people in the cop car, but they don't have to both be cops. Someone to call 'officer in trouble' would come in handy. > > bill w > >> On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 10:31 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat wrote: >> I think maniacs driving 120mph are somewhat self limiting. But studies show that high speed chases are the wrong approach. >> >> https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a9096/why-high-speed-police-chases-are-going-away-15532838/ >> >> Voluntary police can still work IF the areas are made small enough. For example, someone would not want to police all of manhattan. But 4 blocks? I think they?d be willing to. >> >> And there?s enough dudes who try to be heroes anyway, so I think ?shots fired? would still get responded to. >> >> Withe voluntary community policing, crime becomes a personal affront. Whether that?s good or bad is a different story. >> >> SR Ballard >> >>> On Jun 9, 2020, at 8:12 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: >>> >>> Perhaps I missed them because I thought when I read them that they were ludicrous. Personal defense is a good idea, but most people never get attacked. Private security would, I assume cost more than what we get with tax dollars and poor people could not afford it. >>> >>> Voluntary police: I can see this working if a town is not larger than a few hundred. Numerous problems here, including training, insurance if hurt, and the likelihood that an ordinary citizen would go on a call where shooting is occuring. I just can't see getting thousands of volunteers in big cities where violent crime is not rare at all but happens many times a day. >>> >>> Just to give one example: which of the above would deal with maniacs driving 120 mph on city streets? bill w >>> >>>> On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 7:31 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote: >>>> You must have missed the three examples I gave in my first two sentences: >>>> >>>> 1. ?personal self-defense? >>>> >>>> 2. ?voluntary defense associations for those extremely rare occasions when violent confrontations happen? >>>> >>>> 3. ?Private security? >>>> >>>> I brought up the Benson book and the Smith essay as examples of a vast literature by libertarians on how to deal with this issue. Not only is the literature vast, but it goes back decades. The idea of dismantling the police and government in general are not really all that new in libertarian circles. Again, they?ve been discussed and written about before I was born. >>>> >>>> Regards, >>>> >>>> Dan >>>> Sample my Kindle books at: >>>> http://author.to/DanUst >>>> >>>>> On Jun 9, 2020, at 2:21 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: >>>>> >>>>> I am simply not interested enough in it to read a book. But just a hint or two about how to deal with crime without police would be a help. bill w >>>>> >>>>>> On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 3:37 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote: >>>>>> I don't have all the answers here, but personal self-defense and voluntary defense associations for those extremely rare occasions when violent confrontations happen. Private security already plays a role in current US-American society, such as security guards inside shopping malls and the like. So I don't see any reason why people can't specialize in security and things like detection and apprehension of suspects. What wouldn't exist under such a system is a group of people who have special privileges because of this specialization. (And self-help wouldn't be outlawed.) >>>>>> >>>>>> Elsewhere I mentioned Bruce L. Benson's 1990 book _The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State_. He goes over much of this in far more depth than me. Also, market anarchists have been discussing how to deal with crime without the state for decades now. This is all part of the literature of libertarian thought, no? (What shocks me is meeting people who call themselves libertarians who seem unaware of this work. Have you heard of Benson's work? That's not his only book. How about George H. Smith? Have you read his essay "Justice Entrepreneurship In a Free Market"? He wrote on this subject back in 1979!) >>>>>> >>>>>> Regards, >>>>>> >>>>>> Dan >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> extropy-chat mailing list >>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 17:29:16 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 12:29:16 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder In-Reply-To: References: <25A769F4-159F-4676-8044-93EFD841CBEF@gmail.com> Message-ID: Make that a psychiatric social worker. I agree with all of what you wrote. bill w On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 12:27 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > If you live in Harlem, policing your own block isn?t such a big deal. You > know them and they know you. > > But I do think a professional ?police officer? and a civilian ?peace > officer? doing patrols together would be a really good thing. The type of > people who do Cop Watch come to mind. Very unlikely to turn off a body cam, > and very likely to report improprieties. > > By switching up the pairs on a semi-regular basis, and allowing anonymous > reports, I think that would be a good option. > > Another option: 1 cop, 1 social worker. > > SR Ballard > > On Jun 10, 2020, at 10:52 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > The last thing we need is people who go out and try to be heroes. And I > doubt you'd get any volunteers to police Harlem. You are right about high > speed chases, but calling ahead and putting down tire destroyers (or > whatever they are called) does work. I think that volunteers could easily > be added to neighborhoods - unarmed, strolling around saying Hi to people > and getting to know them, wearing a badge but no uniform or other > equipment. These volunteers could get to know the criminals, the places > too easy to rob, and so on. But I cannot see relying on them alone. > Maybeyou could put a volunteer together with a cop in a patrol car. > Sometimes you need two people in the cop car, but they don't have to both > be cops. Someone to call 'officer in trouble' would come in handy. > > bill w > > On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 10:31 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> I think maniacs driving 120mph are somewhat self limiting. But studies >> show that high speed chases are the wrong approach. >> >> >> https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a9096/why-high-speed-police-chases-are-going-away-15532838/ >> >> Voluntary police can still work IF the areas are made small enough. For >> example, someone would not want to police all of manhattan. But 4 blocks? I >> think they?d be willing to. >> >> And there?s enough dudes who try to be heroes anyway, so I think ?shots >> fired? would still get responded to. >> >> Withe voluntary community policing, crime becomes a personal affront. >> Whether that?s good or bad is a different story. >> >> SR Ballard >> >> On Jun 9, 2020, at 8:12 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >> Perhaps I missed them because I thought when I read them that they were >> ludicrous. Personal defense is a good idea, but most people never get >> attacked. Private security would, I assume cost more than what we get with >> tax dollars and poor people could not afford it. >> >> Voluntary police: I can see this working if a town is not larger than a >> few hundred. Numerous problems here, including training, insurance if >> hurt, and the likelihood that an ordinary citizen would go on a call where >> shooting is occuring. I just can't see getting thousands of volunteers in >> big cities where violent crime is not rare at all but happens many times a >> day. >> >> Just to give one example: which of the above would deal with maniacs >> driving 120 mph on city streets? bill w >> >> On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 7:31 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> You must have missed the three examples I gave in my first two sentences: >>> >>> 1. ?personal self-defense? >>> >>> 2. ?voluntary defense associations for those extremely rare occasions >>> when violent confrontations happen? >>> >>> 3. ?Private security? >>> >>> I brought up the Benson book and the Smith essay as examples of a vast >>> literature by libertarians on how to deal with this issue. Not only is the >>> literature vast, but it goes back decades. The idea of dismantling the >>> police and government in general are not really all that new in libertarian >>> circles. Again, they?ve been discussed and written about before I was born. >>> >>> Regards, >>> >>> Dan >>> Sample my Kindle books at: >>> >>> http://author.to/DanUst >>> >>> On Jun 9, 2020, at 2:21 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >>> >>> I am simply not interested enough in it to read a book. But just a hint >>> or two about how to deal with crime without police would be a help. bill w >>> >>> On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 3:37 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >>> >>>> I don't have all the answers here, but personal self-defense and >>>> voluntary defense associations for those extremely rare occasions when >>>> violent confrontations happen. Private security already plays a role in >>>> current US-American society, such as security guards inside shopping malls >>>> and the like. So I don't see any reason why people can't specialize in >>>> security and things like detection and apprehension of suspects. What >>>> wouldn't exist under such a system is a group of people who have special >>>> privileges because of this specialization. (And self-help wouldn't be >>>> outlawed.) >>>> >>>> Elsewhere I mentioned Bruce L. Benson's 1990 book _The Enterprise of >>>> Law: Justice Without the State_. He goes over much of this in far more >>>> depth than me. Also, market anarchists have been discussing how to deal >>>> with crime without the state for decades now. This is all part of the >>>> literature of libertarian thought, no? (What shocks me is meeting people >>>> who call themselves libertarians who seem unaware of this work. Have you >>>> heard of Benson's work? That's not his only book. How about George H. >>>> Smith? Have you read his essay "Justice Entrepreneurship In a Free Market"? >>>> He wrote on this subject back in 1979!) >>>> >>>> Regards, >>>> >>>> Dan >>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 19:20:45 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 14:20:45 -0500 Subject: [ExI] hope it doesn't happen Message-ID: In my 30 years of teaching ending in 1997, I saw several black professors hired, one in my department. Not one was academically qualified. The faculty objected in every case and the dean said that if we wanted to get paid, we had to show the legislators that we were serious about hiring blacks. I led a search committee for a new psych prof. The first thing I was told was to advertise in a black journal whose prices were out of sight. When we picked our final candidate I was grilled repeatedly about the ads, which got no response. Our pay was way out of line with what qualified black professionals could get at major universities. So what we could get were the unqualified ones, and you can imagine that they did not get a roaring reception by the faculty, all of whom knew the circumstances in which the black profs were hired. I can only see more of this happening. White faculty will be pushed out, white applicants will get little attention, until some quota is met in the eyes of the authorities - legislature, president,governor, etc. I hope that qualified blacks get exactly the same opportunities that other qualified candidates get, but that won't happen. What you will see is that the frustration will be passed from the blacks to the whites. Some will think that's what should happen. I, of course, treated the black profs at Montevallo the same as I treated anyone, but they did not get that from everyone, I can assure you. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 10 20:20:50 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 13:20:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] new catalog Message-ID: <012401d63f64$a2b7c3c0$e8274b40$@rainier66.com> Here ya go, first view this 44 second video of a fashion catalog: https://youtu.be/8siezzLXbNo Then I will tell you that every one of these images, including the movement of the models, is generated by AI. None of these are real people. Tragic is this, because I was already getting attached to some of them. Which leads to the next industry-crusher: once AI obviates fashion models by generating photo-realistic images to model their clothing, the same AI could be created to create photo-realistic images without the clothing. Horrors! This could devastate the porno industry. Models willing to show it all may no longer be needed. Tragic is this, because I was already getting attached to some of them. While I struggle to get over that, it occurs to me that this is important in my notion of making software avatars to converse with and entertain the elderly. It adds an entire new dimension to the term "entertain." spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 20:29:34 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 15:29:34 -0500 Subject: [ExI] new catalog In-Reply-To: <012401d63f64$a2b7c3c0$e8274b40$@rainier66.com> References: <012401d63f64$a2b7c3c0$e8274b40$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: That is the most dispirited dancing I ever saw. I don't know what they got but they ain't got rhythm. bill w On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 3:23 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > > Here ya go, first view this 44 second video of a fashion catalog: > > > > https://youtu.be/8siezzLXbNo > > > > Then I will tell you that every one of these images, including the > movement of the models, is generated by AI. None of these are real > people. Tragic is this, because I was already getting attached to some of > them. > > > > Which leads to the next industry-crusher: once AI obviates fashion models > by generating photo-realistic images to model their clothing, the same AI > could be created to create photo-realistic images without the clothing. > Horrors! This could devastate the porno industry. Models willing to show > it all may no longer be needed. Tragic is this, because I was already > getting attached to some of them. > > > > While I struggle to get over that, it occurs to me that this is important > in my notion of making software avatars to converse with and entertain the > elderly. It adds an entire new dimension to the term ?entertain.? > > > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 20:42:53 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 16:42:53 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Dropping Flynn case is "a gross abuse of prosecutorial power" court-appointed lawyer says Message-ID: This just came out: UNITED STATES DISTRICT *"The facts surrounding the filing of the Government's motion constitute clear evidence of gross prosecutorial abuse. They reveal an unconvincing effort to disguise as legitimate a decision to dismiss that is based solely on the fact that Flynn is a political ally of President Trump *[...] *The Justice Department abdicated the responsibility to prosecute defendants without fear or favor by attempting to provide special treatment to a favored friend and political ally of the President of the United States [...] **It has treated the case like no other, and in doing so has undermined the public's confidence in the rule of law"* John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 20:47:15 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 13:47:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Dropping Flynn case is "a gross abuse of prosecutorial power" court-appointed lawyer says In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: That's just the replacement prosecutor's statement. We'll see if the court follows through and rejects the motion to dismiss, though it appears likely that it will. On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 1:44 PM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > This just came out: > > UNITED STATES DISTRICT > > > *"The facts surrounding the filing of the Government's motion constitute > clear evidence of gross prosecutorial abuse. They reveal an unconvincing > effort to disguise as legitimate a decision to dismiss that is based solely > on the fact that Flynn is a political ally of President Trump *[...] *The > Justice Department abdicated the responsibility to prosecute defendants > without fear or favor by attempting to provide special treatment to a > favored friend and political ally of the President of the United States > [...] **It has treated the case like no other, and in doing so has > undermined the public's confidence in the rule of law"* > > John K Clark > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 10 20:52:35 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 13:52:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] new catalog In-Reply-To: References: <012401d63f64$a2b7c3c0$e8274b40$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <013901d63f69$11d55d40$358017c0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] new catalog >?That is the most dispirited dancing I ever saw? Sure, so dancers? careers are safe. For now. But you notice the dispirited dancing of the group was in perfect unison: not one avatar was screwing up. Software spirited dancing is coming. I can already imagine that avatars would do all the background stuff, while the modern Fred Estaire does his thing with a software-generated troupe behind him. >?I don't know what they got but they ain't got rhythm. bill w They don?t yet. Stand by sir. The future doesn?t need us. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu Wed Jun 10 21:15:49 2020 From: hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu (Henry Rivera) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:15:49 -0400 Subject: [ExI] new catalog In-Reply-To: <013901d63f69$11d55d40$358017c0$@rainier66.com> References: <013901d63f69$11d55d40$358017c0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <741524E9-91EE-4073-9A5B-F0B88B5524A6@alumni.virginia.edu> Deep fakes are a real threat: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robtoews/2020/05/25/deepfakes-are-going-to-wreak-havoc-on-society-we-are-not-prepared/ I?m not so worried about the adult entertainment uses of this technology however: https://thenextweb.com/neural/2020/06/01/new-ar-app-will-let-you-model-a-virtual-companion-on-anyone-you-want/ https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arworld/650999899?ref=46nkc0&token=d946d61d -Henry >> On Jun 10, 2020, at 5:00 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > ? > > > > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] new catalog > > > > >?That is the most dispirited dancing I ever saw? > > Sure, so dancers? careers are safe. For now. But you notice the dispirited dancing of the group was in perfect unison: not one avatar was screwing up. Software spirited dancing is coming. > > I can already imagine that avatars would do all the background stuff, while the modern Fred Estaire does his thing with a software-generated troupe behind him. > > >?I don't know what they got but they ain't got rhythm. bill w > > They don?t yet. Stand by sir. The future doesn?t need us. > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 21:44:21 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 16:44:21 -0500 Subject: [ExI] monumental change Message-ID: And I am not kidding. NASCAR is unbelievably huge in the South, where rednecks wearing Confederate flags on their heads, cars, etc. party at the races.. NASCAR just banned Confederate flags at all their events. This could destroy their popularity. In other words, it was a huge step for them and a courageous one. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hibbard at wisc.edu Wed Jun 10 21:45:36 2020 From: hibbard at wisc.edu (Bill Hibbard) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 16:45:36 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [ExI] new catalog Message-ID: > This could devastate the porno industry. Already in the works, due to Covid-19: https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/arts-entertainment/sex-scenes-movies-replaced-cgi-coronavirus-safety From atymes at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 22:17:16 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 15:17:16 -0700 Subject: [ExI] twittebots? In-Reply-To: <005601d63f3e$f3698770$da3c9650$@rainier66.com> References: <005401d63f26$d49c0470$7dd40d50$@rainier66.com> <005601d63f3e$f3698770$da3c9650$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 9:01 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Cool I learn another new hip thing this day: summer child. Urban > dictionary says it is someone who is na?ve and unaware of the horrors of > the real world. > > > > HAH! Little do they know. This hipster urban dictionary knows nothing, > NOTHING of the horrors of the engineering world. Blissfully ignorant are > they of the impacts of 10.7 cm radiation on the upper atmosphere, and the > resulting hazardous ionization potential created as a satellite passes > through the diurnal bulge. Na?ve they are, perhaps thinking the dreaded > diurnal bulge is when a man gets exited in the middle of the afternoon. > These urban Websters are sooo not hip in MY world! > Indeed, but in this case it is accurate. For all the dangers of the world that you know and can conquer, there remain entire categories of menaces that you have been sheltered from, one of which you are only today learning of. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Thu Jun 11 01:01:50 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 18:01:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] new catalog In-Reply-To: <741524E9-91EE-4073-9A5B-F0B88B5524A6@alumni.virginia.edu> References: <013901d63f69$11d55d40$358017c0$@rainier66.com> <741524E9-91EE-4073-9A5B-F0B88B5524A6@alumni.virginia.edu> Message-ID: <007f01d63f8b$e4330040$ac9900c0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Henry Rivera via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] new catalog Deep fakes are a real threat: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robtoews/2020/05/25/deepfakes-are-going-to-wreak-havoc-on-society-we-are-not-prepared/ -Henry Henry we are lucky this is being introduced in commercials and comedy shows, so we can be aware of the technology. You may not be up on Al Pacino, but do let me assure you, we Pacino fans loooove this: https://youtu.be/kjI-JaRWG7s Having this guy morph into a young Pacino and back was a treat. I am still laughing about that bit. Of course this is a huge threat to the political system. We get that. This technology had gotten quite good. On the presidential race, both of the leading candidates (neither name I can recall at the moment) have actually said such goofy comments that it will be unclear which is genuine and which is fake. It may not really matter I suppose. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Thu Jun 11 04:49:56 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 21:49:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] they put him down Message-ID: <00aa01d63fab$c1ad35c0$4507a140$@rainier66.com> I still think they could have just unfunded him, but the clamoring mob insisted: https://babylonbee.com/news/mcgruff-the-crime-dog-put-down spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Thu Jun 11 04:56:46 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2020 00:56:46 -0400 Subject: [ExI] they put him down In-Reply-To: <00aa01d63fab$c1ad35c0$4507a140$@rainier66.com> References: <00aa01d63fab$c1ad35c0$4507a140$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: When I saw the subject, I thought this would be about one of the many statues destroyed recently by the peaceful protesters. On Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 12:51 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > I still think they could have just unfunded him, but the clamoring mob > insisted: > > > > https://babylonbee.com/news/mcgruff-the-crime-dog-put-down > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Thu Jun 11 06:50:28 2020 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2020 08:50:28 +0200 Subject: [ExI] The philosophy of Italian futurism: Riccardo Campa Message-ID: The philosophy of Italian futurism: Riccardo Campa I have been reading a very good book by my friend Riccardo Campa on the philosophy of Italian futurism... the writings of Italian futurists are full of transhumanist ideas... https://turingchurch.net/the-philosophy-of-italian-futurism-riccardo-campa-15469e317150 From danust2012 at gmail.com Thu Jun 11 11:02:34 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2020 04:02:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cory Massimino on advocating police abolition Message-ID: <475C9E2D-4FF5-457A-ADE9-548ED6E0034B@gmail.com> The idea of abolishing the police seems to be having something of a surge in popularity, even among people who wouldn't ordinarily consider such radical proposals. Nevertheless, many principled opponents of police violence (and some not so principled) are urging the rest of us not to emphasize abolition because it could alienate many people who would otherwise be on board with a basic case for extensive police reform. After all, incremental change is better than no change at all. Now, if you don't actually want to abolish the police, then obviously you shouldn't go around arguing to abolish the police. But if you do want to abolish the police, should you instead adopt a more moderate approach in the public discourse right now? I don't think so. Here are a few reasons why: 1. If someone disagrees with you about abolition but agrees with you about reform, then calling for abolition will not magically make them stop supporting reform. Abolitionism is not at odds with reform. It actually presupposes support for (genuine) reform since that's what gets you closer to actual abolition. 2. Focusing on reform over abolition simply reinforces the status quo, which there's already -- by definition -- a surplus of. Putting abolition on the table is the only long run way to shift the window of permissible views. Adopting the same view as everyone else will do nothing to affect change and instead drown your views in a sea of people dogmatically sticking to the party line. 3. A good chunk of the population is dismissive of the case for abolishing *anything* whether its police, prisons, militaries, borders, capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, central banks, taxes, etc. How far does one go in hiding their real opinions in all these different areas? 4. Engaging in rhetorical underhandedness, especially for uncertain strategic ends, is just wrong. Interlocutors deserve sincerity and transparency. If you don't express your real views out of a desire to nudge your interlocutor along the right gradual path, I don't think your treating your interlocutor as much of an equal, but instead someone to be manipulated into agreeing more with you than they already do. To conceal one's true views would also tend to undermine the very conditions that make discourse a fruitful, knowledge-generating process. 5. If I were instead living centuries ago, I wouldn't compromise the case for abolishing slavery one bit, despite knowing full well I would be in a radical minority. If your theory of social change demands you moderate your views on slavery, then it seems to me you should go back and reconsider your theory of social change rather than become a moderate regarding one of the most horrific of evils in all of human history. So, yes, don't hesitate to demand the immediate, unconditional abolition of the police. Here are two quotes to leave you with that I think are particularly relevant right now: "We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia... a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty, which is not too severely practical, and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote... Free trade and freedom of opportunity are ideals which still may arouse the imaginations of large numbers, but a mere ?reasonable freedom of trade? or a mere ?relaxation of controls? is neither intellectually respectable nor likely to inspire any enthusiasm.... Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this had rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost." - F.A. Hayek, 1949 ?I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; ? but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest ? I will not equivocate ? I will not excuse ? I will not retreat a single inch ? AND I WILL BE HEARD.? - William Lloyd Garrison, 1831 ?? The above applies, mutatis mutandis, to just about any advocacy of a radical position, no? Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Jun 11 12:23:58 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2020 08:23:58 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Cory Massimino on advocating police abolition In-Reply-To: <475C9E2D-4FF5-457A-ADE9-548ED6E0034B@gmail.com> References: <475C9E2D-4FF5-457A-ADE9-548ED6E0034B@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 7:05 AM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> The idea of abolishing the police seems to be having something of a > surge in popularity,* > Defunding the police is not the same as abolishing the police. Camden New Jersey defunded the police seven years ago and it turned out well. Back then Camden had the highest murder rate in the country and police corruption was so firmly entrenched that reform was impossible, and because of super powerful police unions it cost over $182,000 per officer so they only had 175 of them. Camden decided to start from scratch and fired the entire police force and started a new one; if an officer wanted to stay on the force he had to submit a job application just like everybody else. The move broke the powerful police union so now it only cost $99,600 to hire an officer, and so there are now over 400 of them. The result of all of this is today the murder rate is only a third what it was seven years ago before the police were defunded, and the Relationship between the police and the black community is much improved, the current police chief of Camden actually marched with the black lives matter people. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Jun 11 13:40:12 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2020 08:40:12 -0500 Subject: [ExI] antifa Message-ID: *KNOW THE SIGNS: HOW TO TELL IF YOUR GRANDPARENT HAS BECOME AN ANTIFA AGENT* For your birthday, she knits you an unwanted scarf. To be used as a balaclava? She belongs to a decentralized group with no leadership structure that claims to be discussing a ?book,? but no one ever reads the book and all they seem to do is drink wine. Is always talking on the phone with an ?aunt? you have never actually met in person. Aunt TIFA???? Always walking into rooms and claiming not to know why he walked into the room. Likely. He ?trips? over and breaks your child?s Lego police station when walking through the living room in the dark. Total and bewildering lack of nostalgia for good old days. Gathers with loose-knit, disorderly group of figures you have never met to play ?mah-jongg,? governed by mysterious ?rule cards? issued annually from a nebulous central authority. Suddenly, for no reason, will appear or pretend to be asleep. Insists on producing container of nuts whenever there is company. Why? Code of some kind? Carries peppermints (chemical irritant?) in purse at all times. Is taking Centrum Silver. But for what reason? Surely to build up strength for the coming confrontation. Keeps forwarding you what appear on the surface to be emails of jokes someone has typed out from a Reader?s Digest; claims to think you would ?enjoy?; must be some sort of recruitment or propaganda or hidden message. Hired a clown for your child?s birthday ? part of the Juggalo command structure? Big tin of Christmas popcorn mysteriously replenishes itself. WHO IS HELPING?! You gave her a Precious Moments figurine of a law enforcement officer, but she hasn?t displayed it. Remembers things from the past in incredible, exhausting detail, but recent ones only sporadically? Cover of some kind. She claims not to know how to use her phone, yet always appears upside-down on FaceTime, which should be impossible without hacking capabilities. If he is to be believed, he spends hours playing bridge. He is walking non-threateningly at a public protest. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu Thu Jun 11 13:46:03 2020 From: hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu (Henry Rivera) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2020 09:46:03 -0400 Subject: [ExI] new catalog Message-ID: ?I am a big fan of Pacino?s! I had never seen that vid. How weird and freaky. Like people in the comments there noted, I can imagine some people unaware of the admitted manipulation saying, ?Whoa, did you see that too?!? >> On Jun 10, 2020, at 9:02 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > ? > > > > On Behalf Of Henry Rivera via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] new catalog > > Deep fakes are a real threat: > https://www.forbes.com/sites/robtoews/2020/05/25/deepfakes-are-going-to-wreak-havoc-on-society-we-are-not-prepared/ > > > -Henry > > Henry we are lucky this is being introduced in commercials and comedy shows, so we can be aware of the technology. > > You may not be up on Al Pacino, but do let me assure you, we Pacino fans loooove this: > > https://youtu.be/kjI-JaRWG7s > > Having this guy morph into a young Pacino and back was a treat. I am still laughing about that bit. > > Of course this is a huge threat to the political system. We get that. This technology had gotten quite good. On the presidential race, both of the leading candidates (neither name I can recall at the moment) have actually said such goofy comments that it will be unclear which is genuine and which is fake. It may not really matter I suppose. > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Thu Jun 11 14:23:49 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2020 07:23:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] new catalog In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <004b01d63ffb$ed557430$c8005c90$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Henry Rivera via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] new catalog ?>?I am a big fan of Pacino?s! >?I had never seen that vid. How weird and freaky. Like people in the comments there noted, I can imagine some people unaware of the admitted manipulation saying, ?Whoa, did you see that too?!? I want to make one of these. I can do a pretty good Jimmy Stewart, and already look enough like him to make that work. Does anyone here know what kind of software they used? I might try doing Stewart?s Mr. Hobbs character. https://youtu.be/kjI-JaRWG7s If they make that software a commercial product, I can imagine all kindsa fun we could have with it. Then something really freaky occurred to me: I could morph into my grandfather. I have plenty of still images of him when we was the age I am now, and I know his speech patterns well. I can do the West Virginia mountain brogue and so forth. But it might upset my cousins bigtime. I better think twice or three times and perhaps a few more times before I do something like that. OK alternative: I could morph into my younger self from 40 yrs ago. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Thu Jun 11 17:16:17 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2020 10:16:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] e: Acceleration of the wealth gap Message-ID: wrote: snip > This caper in Fairfield with the forklift has me thinking. Front door is bashed in, after the store is closed. Mysteriously there is a crowd already there in the closed store parking lot, as if they knew something like that was going to happen. There are perhaps 100 or more looters and not that many police, but even if they had enough, it probably wouldn't be a good idea to rush in and start fighting the looters. A better, cheaper alternative: slash exactly one drive tire on every car in the parking lot. Theory: every car there has looting on its mind. > Bad guys put the loot in trunk, drive off with a flat tire, constables calmly bag the perp a coupla miles down the freeway with the evidence in her trunk, recover the loot and the stolen car in good condition (minus one tire (tires are cheap)) arrest the looter under safer conditions than the chaotic parking lot at the mall. It takes a dozen cops to stop someone on the freeway. The essence of riots/looting is that the cops are outnumbered. Besides, the looter's vehicles are unlikely to be far enough to go on a freeway. snip > Do you ever worry about the dark web and strong encryption? I knew Tim May and hung out on the cypherpunks list for a long time. > Perhaps many of these latest Chicago murders are a result of someone making a deal with a hit-human who resides on the dark web and accepts Bit Coin. I worry about that. Not a chance. A lot is random violence, stray bullets, but the chances of a street punk being involved with something as complex as bitcoin is close to zero. If you look at Oakland deaths over the years, it was a sawtooth. (Have not looked for years.) Every time the top drug dealer was taken out by law enforcement, there would be a high level of murders for the next year or two while the competing enterprises settled down >>...If that happens, some of the most tightly-packed cities will start to deflate. >...Not likely. The reason people are packed into slums is that they can't afford to live anywhere else. See Jay Forrester's _Urban Dynamics_ for how this works. Keith _______________________________________________ > In some of the most dangerous slums, conditions will change dramatically as a result of the looting. In Chicago, they are looking around in some of those wards trying to locate the nearest remaining pharmacy and grocery store, and finding it is a long ways off. There is some critically important infrastructure that has been damaged or destroyed. Problems are that these people have no place to go, no money to get there and very often few skills. > I am working thru the math trying to estimate the challenges involved in rebuilding at least some of that. Can you even imagine? In many cases, the building itself was damaged or destroyed by fire, so in the very best case (which I do not expect) just getting a new building could take at least a coupla years. You will see pharmacies and grocery stores set up in tents. The alternative would be famine areas in the cities. Keith From robot at ultimax.com Fri Jun 12 01:11:07 2020 From: robot at ultimax.com (robot at ultimax.com) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2020 21:11:07 -0400 Subject: [ExI] by tomorrow, more Americans will have died of COVID-19 than in WWI In-Reply-To: <5e6414a091b45bc817ad2d50a0b8159a@ultimax.com> References: <430dd5d80c31266c4a19a88ae41f27eb@ultimax.com> <5e6414a091b45bc817ad2d50a0b8159a@ultimax.com> Message-ID: <3b4724c0706281e313a7efe09edc76fb@ultimax.com> As I write this tonight, C19's toll is 115+K. US fatalities in Europe (combat AND non-combat) in WWI: 116,708. Which I expect us to hit by tomorrow night. My forecast in late April was off by six weeks. Sorry 'bout that, but these curves are only going to get more squirrelly as time goes on. It should sober you that less than 1% of the population is known to have been infected. K3 On 2020-04-19 16:05, robot at ultimax.com wrote: > Yesterday, I posted an incorrect estimate because I hit "SEND" before > thinking the post thru and re-checking my numbers. I regret the > error. > > Fatalities per day yesterday were half what I wrote, 2.5K/day not > 5K/day. > And, the second derivative has been negative for a week. > (However, anything on than first derivatives are notoriously > squirrely.) > Cumulative figure as of midday is 40K Americans. > So "next stop Vietnam" won't be until sometime next week. > > We came close to, but did not exceed, a 9/11 per day. > I hope we never do, but I am a student of history. > > K3 > > On 2020-04-18 10:51, robot at ultimax.com wrote: >> 37K, per Johns Hopkins -- we're past Korea now. >> >> "Next stop: Vietnam!" (per Country Joe McDonald live @ Woodstock) >> >> That is, at the current rate of accumulation of fatalities (~5K/day), >> we should hit that sad milestone, 58K, by early-middle next week. >> >> Next to come would be total American military deaths in WWI (combat + >> disease), 118K, which is just about double the butcher's bill for >> Vietnam. Again, at current rates of dying, we should expect to see >> that milestone hit by the 1st of May. >> >> Whether or not we do hit that will indicate whether those projections >> we're hearing from the White House ("plateau at 60K") are worth >> anything or not. Absent continued intervention, positive-feedback >> processes tend to run to completion, so it's difficult for me to >> believe that this one we're in is going to come to a sudden screeching >> halt in just a week. >> >> Wait and see, or, wait and not see... >> >> K3 >> >> PS. This listserver's subject line management needs tightening up. >> This discourse in this thread hasn't been about the ostensible subject >> line for a long time now, hundreds of posts. >> >> PPS. I've been studying pandemics and history for a long time. >> See: http://www.ultimax.com/whitepapers/deadmediarev.html . >> For decades, I've been citing >> Hans Zinsser's /Rats Lice and History/ (1935 & 1960), >> William McNeill's /Plagues and Peoples/ (1976) (he was required >> reading in National Security Studies), and >> Jared Diamond's /Guns Germs and Steel/ (1997). >> You should read them too if you want to understand what really shapes >> human history. >> Just started a book recommended by a hacker friend: /The Fate of Rome/ >> by Kyle Harper, 2017, Princeton University Press. Good interview here >> on Utah public radio: "Plagues And The Fate Of Rome" >> https://radiowest.kuer.org/post/plagues-and-fate-rome . >> >> >> On 2020-04-18 09:20, extropy-chat-request at lists.extropy.org wrote: >>> Message: 12 >>> Date: Sat, 18 Apr 2020 05:04:37 -0400 >>> From: John Clark >>> To: rafal at smigrodzki.org, ExI chat list >>> >>> Subject: Re: [ExI] More Americans died of COVID-19 than died in >>> battle >>> in Korea >>> On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 8:29 PM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat < >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >>> >>> *> Universal quarantine should have never started* >>> >>> Any particular reason why? We know from centuries of experience with >>> diseases that quarantines work. From danust2012 at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 02:04:54 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2020 19:04:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] by tomorrow, more Americans will have died of COVID-19 than in WWI In-Reply-To: <3b4724c0706281e313a7efe09edc76fb@ultimax.com> References: <3b4724c0706281e313a7efe09edc76fb@ultimax.com> Message-ID: <39C67DFA-AF1D-4299-9FA6-AC74D2AC8868@gmail.com> On Jun 11, 2020, at 6:30 PM, Robert G. Kennedy III, PE via extropy-chat wrote: > > ?As I write this tonight, C19's toll is 115+K. > US fatalities in Europe (combat AND non-combat) in WWI: 116,708. > Which I expect us to hit by tomorrow night. > > My forecast in late April was off by six weeks. Sorry 'bout that, but these curves are only going to get more squirrelly as time goes on. It should sober you that less than 1% of the population is known to have been infected. > > K3 More than half of the US WW1 deaths were due to influenza. Not that that alters your point. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 03:14:32 2020 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 13:14:32 +1000 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <006301d63ec0$c06b0390$41410ab0$@rainier66.com> References: <6548C2AC-60B2-436C-A989-F68EE12D2062@gmail.com> <006301d63ec0$c06b0390$41410ab0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 at 10:49, spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Protest > > > > >?You shifted from what to do with a vandal In a protest situation like > in the video versus everything else. Again, my point was they could handle > that particular person without turning him (I?m presuming it was a guy) > over to the police? > > > > I disagree. He needs to be in police custody. The BLM protestors handing > him over to the police is the right thing. If their protest is that > police are brutal only to black suspects, and this sleazy bastard is white, > then they would argue he is perfectly safe in police custody. > > > > > > > > >?And, once more, if you?re protesting police misconduct it seems > painfully ironic to not seek another solution? > > > > Not to me. The protestors are not vandals. The protestors do not like > vandals. The protestors do not want to be equated with vandals, they want > to distance themselves from vandals. So? they handed him over. He is > white, so no problem, ja? > > > > >?In fact, they were already there: they stopped him from his act of > vandalism? > > > > Good for them. > > > > >?Did they need to do more? Maybe. Perhaps they could?ve told him to leave > the area while taking away his hammer and other tools. Perhaps they > could?ve photographed him and threatened to dox him of he was caught around > the area again. Do you disagree here? > > > > I do. Dan, images are everything. That image of BLM protestors handing > the vandal over to the National Guard is a powerful image. It established > their credibility as a protest movement. > > > > >?You really think it was a great idea to turn him over to the police? > > > > I do. > > > > >?You feel there was zero possibility that the police ? known for killing > people for minor offenses like shoplifting or even just on w whim ? might > abuse him? > > > > He is white. According to BLM point of view, he is safe in police custody. > > > > >?At least you get points here for not bringing up Saul Alinsky. ;) > > > > Regards, Dan > > > > Give me time Dan, I will think of something. > > > > OK, hmmm, I?m busted on that. But think about it: the Black Lives Matter > movement is about police fearing black people and being more eager to use > lethal force. Well hell, they are right about that. BLM has a good > point. We get it. > > > > The BLM movement isn?t against policing, it is against police brutality > particularly when it involves black people. Well OK we get that. but the > BLM movement isn?t against policing. Plenty of them are from areas where > they damn well know they need police. They aren?t arguing that all police > are bad. They aren?t specifically anti-police they are anti-police > brutality. Well, we are too. > > > > At the local BLM rally Sunday, the police chief spoke. There were a few > hecklers in the audience, but these guys were seeing each other?s points of > view. BLM wants peaceful rallies. They don?t want to fight the cops, they > don?t want vandalism, they don?t want looters. All three of those groups > detract from their message. > > > > Handing over the vandal was not only the right thing, it was the most > powerful few seconds of video in their favor I have seen to date. > What I find disturbing about the Black Lives Matter protests around the world is that participants seem to think black lives don?t matter if death is due to the coronavirus. > -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 03:38:03 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2020 20:38:03 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: <6548C2AC-60B2-436C-A989-F68EE12D2062@gmail.com> <006301d63ec0$c06b0390$41410ab0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 8:18 PM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > What I find disturbing about the Black Lives Matter protests around the > world is that participants seem to think black lives don?t matter if death > is due to the coronavirus. > The coronavirus does not consciously treat black lives as not mattering. It kills humans approximately the same regardless of their skin color (after controlling for local health care, disparities in which are more an issue of wealth inequality than skin color). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 12 03:48:29 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2020 20:48:29 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: <6548C2AC-60B2-436C-A989-F68EE12D2062@gmail.com> <006301d63ec0$c06b0390$41410ab0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <000b01d6406c$5637a020$02a6e060$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat >?What I find disturbing about the Black Lives Matter protests around the world is that participants seem to think black lives don?t matter if death is due to the coronavirus. -- Stathis Papaioannou On the contrary Stathis. George Floyd was C-19 positive. He still gets to count as a C-19 related fatality, even if he had contributing health issues, such as being asphyxiated by law enforcement. Our system is weird that way. China?s is weird too. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 04:42:23 2020 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 14:42:23 +1000 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: <6548C2AC-60B2-436C-A989-F68EE12D2062@gmail.com> <006301d63ec0$c06b0390$41410ab0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 12 Jun 2020 at 13:39, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 8:18 PM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> What I find disturbing about the Black Lives Matter protests around the >> world is that participants seem to think black lives don?t matter if death >> is due to the coronavirus. >> > > The coronavirus does not consciously treat black lives as not mattering. > It kills humans approximately the same regardless of their skin color > (after controlling for local health care, disparities in which are more an > issue of wealth inequality than skin color). > Protesting crowds will propagate the virus, killing some of those infected. The protestors presumably know this, but decide to protest anyway. It would make sense if more lives were likely to be saved by protesting than lost, but I don?t think anyone could reasonably argue that that would be the case. > -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 11:19:24 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 07:19:24 -0400 Subject: [ExI] by tomorrow, more Americans will have died of COVID-19 than in WWI In-Reply-To: <3b4724c0706281e313a7efe09edc76fb@ultimax.com> References: <430dd5d80c31266c4a19a88ae41f27eb@ultimax.com> <5e6414a091b45bc817ad2d50a0b8159a@ultimax.com> <3b4724c0706281e313a7efe09edc76fb@ultimax.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 9:31 PM Robert G. Kennedy III, PE via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> As I write this tonight, C19's toll is 115+K. US fatalities in Europe > (combat AND non-combat) in WWI: 116,708. Which I expect us to hit by > tomorrow night.* > And it's just June and the deaths only started in March, yet Incredibly some still say the shutdown was a "huge overreaction"! And Trump is going to stage another of his nitwit rallies in Tulsa Oklahoma on July 19 and concentrate thousands of screaming spittle scattering MAGA Hatters into one indoor room, and we can expect that few if any of them will be wearing face masks because Trump has turned that matter of personal hygiene into a political statement. But before anyone is allowed inside the BOC Center (capacity 19,199) they must sign a disclaimer so that neither Trump or his companies or the BOC Center can get sued: *"By attending the Rally, you and any guests voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19 and agree not to hold Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.; BOK Center; ASM Global; or any of their affiliates, directors, officers, employees, agents, contractors, or volunteers liable for any illness or injury." * This is leadership in a time of crisis? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 12:09:32 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 08:09:32 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <000b01d6406c$5637a020$02a6e060$@rainier66.com> References: <6548C2AC-60B2-436C-A989-F68EE12D2062@gmail.com> <006301d63ec0$c06b0390$41410ab0$@rainier66.com> <000b01d6406c$5637a020$02a6e060$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 11:52 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> George Floyd was C-19 positive. * I know. > *He still gets to count as a C-19 related fatality, * Where in the world did you get that idea?! George Floyd was autopsied, *TWICE*, and both said the case of death was homicide; one said the death was caused "as a result of mechanical asphyxiation" and the other said it was due to "cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint and neck compression". Neither autopsie said COVID-19 had anything to do with it. Everybody who tests positive for COVID-19 and dies is NOT Automatically counted as a COVID-19 casualty. *> Our system is weird that way. China?s is weird too.* So now you think China is overestimating the number of its citizens that have died from COVID-19, if so then China has done an even better job at containing the disease than they claim. A month ago you were saying the opposite, you were saying China was MASSIVELY underestimating the number that have died. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From steinberg.will at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 12:57:52 2020 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 08:57:52 -0400 Subject: [ExI] antifa In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: This may be the first time the word 'Juggalo' has ever been printed on this list! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From steinberg.will at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 12:58:18 2020 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 08:58:18 -0400 Subject: [ExI] antifa In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 8:57 AM Will Steinberg wrote: > This may be the first time the word 'Juggalo' has ever been printed on > this list! > (The ExI listhost) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 12 13:01:43 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 06:01:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: <6548C2AC-60B2-436C-A989-F68EE12D2062@gmail.com> <006301d63ec0$c06b0390$41410ab0$@rainier66.com> <000b01d6406c$5637a020$02a6e060$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <002e01d640b9$a01841c0$e048c540$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Protest On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 11:52 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: > George Floyd was C-19 positive. I know. >> He still gets to count as a C-19 related fatality, >?Where in the world did you get that idea?! Here: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/white-house-taking-very-liberal-approach-counting-covid-19-deaths If a person has C-19, the hospital gets to bill the government for the expenses. >> Our system is weird that way. China?s is weird too. >?So now you think China is overestimating the number of its citizens that have died from COVID-19? John K Clark I only said it was weird. I didn?t say they were overestimating. Neither country is estimating. We are over-reporting, they are under-reporting, both for clearly understandable reasons. Even if the discovered a vaccine or a complete cure, the covid case load in China did not suddenly go to zero. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 14:21:40 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 07:21:40 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ML maps deep geologic structures Message-ID: https://phys.org/news/2020-06-scientists-unexpected-widespread-earth-core.html Hoping this can be used to put together ever more features of the early Earth. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 14:53:41 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 09:53:41 -0500 Subject: [ExI] antifa In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8DEB0EE6-BEE5-464F-832D-B0A8D5143878@gmail.com> And hopefully the last. Or I?ll be forced to share factoids. SR Ballard > On Jun 12, 2020, at 7:57 AM, Will Steinberg via extropy-chat wrote: > > This may be the first time the word 'Juggalo' has ever been printed on this list! > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From foozler83 at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 15:16:02 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 10:16:02 -0500 Subject: [ExI] antifa In-Reply-To: <8DEB0EE6-BEE5-464F-832D-B0A8D5143878@gmail.com> References: <8DEB0EE6-BEE5-464F-832D-B0A8D5143878@gmail.com> Message-ID: Oh c'mon SR, we love factoids . Release them at will, or any one of us. bill w On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 9:55 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > And hopefully the last. Or I?ll be forced to share factoids. > > SR Ballard > > > On Jun 12, 2020, at 7:57 AM, Will Steinberg via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > This may be the first time the word 'Juggalo' has ever been printed on > this list! > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 15:15:47 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 11:15:47 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <002e01d640b9$a01841c0$e048c540$@rainier66.com> References: <6548C2AC-60B2-436C-A989-F68EE12D2062@gmail.com> <006301d63ec0$c06b0390$41410ab0$@rainier66.com> <000b01d6406c$5637a020$02a6e060$@rainier66.com> <002e01d640b9$a01841c0$e048c540$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 9:23 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> *He still gets to count as a C-19 related fatality, * > > >?Where in the world did you get that idea?! > > > *> Here:* > > > > > https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/white-house-taking-very-liberal-approach-counting-covid-19-deaths > Things change quickly in a pandemic. That article is ANCIENT, it's from the olden days of April 11 when the American death toll from the virus was only 24,121, as of today at 15:14 GMT it has killed 116,132. And as of April 11 very few virus tests had even been performed in the USA, at a time when other countries were testing tens of thousands of their citizens for the virus every day the US was testing fewer than a hundred, so undoubtedly lots of people died from COVID-19 but the death certificate said death was caused by pneumonia or the common seasonal flu. There is more evidence the number of COVID-19 deaths has been consistently underreported, even though the number of deaths from car accidents is lower this year than last the total number of deaths from all causes in the US is considerably higher this year than last even when you add in the official number of deaths from COVID-19. Something is clearly missing. Also, you could find better places to get your news, "justthenews.com" does not just give the news, it's a conservative pro Trump website that hired conspiracy theorist Sharyl Attkisson who still loves Benghazi and claims that vaccines cause autism, a malignant meme virus that could prove deadly to those infected with it. It is a very hard virus to kill even though the scientific community has rejected it as nonsense over and over again. *> If a person has C-19, the hospital gets to bill the government for the > expenses.* > And where in the world did you get that idea?! *> We are over-reporting, they* [China] *are under-reporting* And you know that to be true because you want it to be true. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 12 15:30:52 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 08:30:52 -0700 Subject: [ExI] antifa In-Reply-To: <8DEB0EE6-BEE5-464F-832D-B0A8D5143878@gmail.com> References: <8DEB0EE6-BEE5-464F-832D-B0A8D5143878@gmail.com> Message-ID: <003701d640ce$75e6d0f0$61b472d0$@rainier66.com> >...> On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] antifa >...And hopefully the last. Or I?ll be forced to share factoids. SR Ballard But SR, we like it when you share factoids. Share away. That's what friends are for. spike From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 12 15:58:29 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 08:58:29 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: <6548C2AC-60B2-436C-A989-F68EE12D2062@gmail.com> <006301d63ec0$c06b0390$41410ab0$@rainier66.com> <000b01d6406c$5637a020$02a6e060$@rainier66.com> <002e01d640b9$a01841c0$e048c540$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <005701d640d2$51728da0$f457a8e0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Sent: Friday, June 12, 2020 8:16 AM To: ExI chat list Cc: John Clark Subject: Re: [ExI] Protest On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 9:23 AM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: >> He still gets to count as a C-19 related fatality, >?Where in the world did you get that idea?! > Here: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/white-house-taking-very-liberal-approach-counting-covid-19-deaths Things change quickly in a pandemic. That article is ANCIENT? >?Also, you could find better places to get your news, "justthenews.com " does not just give the news, it's a conservative pro ? Is C-Span conservative? I never really thought of them as a conservative group https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4868448/user-clip-liberal-approach-mortality but if you insist, I shall flee to a safe space, such as Mother Jones (no relation.) Oh, I see that CNN and MSNBC are also in on the conservative conspiracy, as well as the other news majors. Oh wait, Mother Jones ran that clip too. Are Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci part of the conspiracy? There are no safe spaces left, what shall we do? I Googled ??took a very liberal approach to covid mortality? and justthenews was the first one that came up. John, everyone here is not political. The way countries count covid mortality is not necessarily politically driven, there are other motives, such as financial reasons. In the US, there was no conspiracy needed: hospitals set up a special billing fund if the patient died of covid. So, they tested the patients for covid after they were already dead. They tested George Floyd after he was already dead and they knew he had a co-morbidity (asphyxiation.) >?Trump? As soon as you mention the name of any politician or party, we know you are back to your incessant campaigning, haranguing this list where it isn?t appropriate or welcome, as we have told you repeatedly. Please take it elsewhere. Even if many on this list agree in principal, the constant howling at the moon is most annoying and counterproductive. The reason many of our most valued posters have left this space John, is that the constant campaigning is not what we are here for. If we want politics, we know where to find that. If you are campaigning in a post about covid, it comes across as if you are cheering for the virus. Separate those two concepts please. Then kindly eliminate the one: we are tired of it. When Kennedy posts about covid, he doesn?t campaign, and it doesn?t come across as cheering for the virus. The virus is not an opportunity, it?s a crisis. Some crises should go to waste. > We are over-reporting, they [China] are under-reporting >?And you know that to be true because you want it to be true. John K Clark Do you believe China?s case load suddenly dropped to zero and has never come back? Every other country, including those where the government has the authority to shut down everything until their people starve still has cases. China is reporting zero. China gave this horrifying epidemic to this planet through their dishonesty in attempting a coverup back when we had time to react. I don?t believe China. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 17:26:42 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 13:26:42 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <005701d640d2$51728da0$f457a8e0$@rainier66.com> References: <6548C2AC-60B2-436C-A989-F68EE12D2062@gmail.com> <006301d63ec0$c06b0390$41410ab0$@rainier66.com> <000b01d6406c$5637a020$02a6e060$@rainier66.com> <002e01d640b9$a01841c0$e048c540$@rainier66.com> <005701d640d2$51728da0$f457a8e0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 12:01 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> John, everyone here is not political. * You could've fooled me! >?Trump? > > > *> As soon as you mention the name of any politician....* Odd... back when Obama was president I don't recall the mere mention of his name setting off a similar flow of angry comments. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 17:57:00 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 10:57:00 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest Message-ID: wrote: snip On the contrary Stathis. George Floyd was C-19 positive. He tested positive for _antibodies_ to COVID-19. Which means he had the virus and got over it. That's relatively common for Blacks and Latinos and is entirely accounted for by the kinds of high contact jobs they do. Unless we get a vaccine, everyone will eventually be subject to being infected. Keith From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 12 18:19:07 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 11:19:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: <6548C2AC-60B2-436C-A989-F68EE12D2062@gmail.com> <006301d63ec0$c06b0390$41410ab0$@rainier66.com> <000b01d6406c$5637a020$02a6e060$@rainier66.com> <002e01d640b9$a01841c0$e048c540$@rainier66.com> <005701d640d2$51728da0$f457a8e0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00d201d640e5$f7c30550$e7490ff0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Protest On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 12:01 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: > John, everyone here is not political. You could've fooled me! >?Trump? > As soon as you mention the name of any politician.... Odd... back when Obama was president I don't recall the mere mention of his name setting off a similar flow of angry comments. John K Clark Ja. His name wasn?t mentioned often. I didn?t remember his name, so I know I didn?t. This is all US politics. We have posters from all over the world. Many of the most valued posters are not from the USA and aren?t interested in the minutia of our political system. I am a US citizen and even I am not interested in the minutia of our political system. I don?t know or care who is running Australia, Britain or Italy. All of those places have valuable contributors. As you already know, I do care about one particular aspect of American politics: the runaway debt. It often feels to me like none of the current crop of politicians see the enormous risk growing with each oversized budget. From that perspective, the current crop of politicians and parties are indistinguishable. Do let us keep an international perspective. We are science and technology people here with eyes on the future. We just witnessed a rocket privately owned by a company take two guys to orbit. For the first time in history, space exploration is becoming a commercial pursuit. There is no reason to be pessimistic. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 12 18:37:38 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 11:37:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <00ea01d640e8$8e4efd60$aaecf820$@rainier66.com> >...> On Behalf Of Keith Henson via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Protest wrote: snip On the contrary Stathis. George Floyd was C-19 positive. He tested positive for _antibodies_ to COVID-19. Which means he had the virus and got over it. That's relatively common for Blacks and Latinos and is entirely accounted for by the kinds of high contact jobs they do. Unless we get a vaccine, everyone will eventually be subject to being infected. Keith _______________________________________________ Hi Keith, ja. What I have heard (I hope someone here can comment) is that more effective treatments have been found, such as using a ventilator only as a desperate last resort. They gave me an oxygen mask when was in the hospital in December with viral pneumonia. That worked. Do let us hope covid-19 follows the 2003 SARS epidemic, which just went away, rather than the horrifying 1918 second wave. Those covid case spikes in California worry me. Keith I heard many of those are happening in your area down there, oy vey, mercy. Best wishes that you and your bride stay healthy. Do have your groceries and supplies delivered, ja? spike From jasonresch at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 18:46:22 2020 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 13:46:22 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The present and future of AI Message-ID: I wrote an analysis of the current capabilities of modern AI systems: https://alwaysasking.com/when-will-ai-take-over/ I found what some systems are capable of, especially in terms of computational creativity, and general purpose learning algorithms, to be shocking. For instance, DeepMind has a single AI that has learned to play every Atari game better than any human. GANs have been made that produce original art pieces and can take a single photo and envision it as a talking head. Google's Duplex can make phone calls and hold conversations so well the person at the other end of the line doesn't realize they're talking to a machine. I am curious how close members on this list feel we are from achieving AGI. Most estimates seem to put it around 2040 plus or minus 10 years. Is that the general consensus? Could it happen much sooner? Does anyone here believe it will happen much later than that? Jason -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 12 19:13:56 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 12:13:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] unfiltered news: was RE: The present and future of AI Message-ID: <011901d640ed$9eb5cdf0$dc2169d0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Jason Resch via extropy-chat Subject: [ExI] The present and future of AI >? Google's Duplex can make phone calls and hold conversations so well the person at the other end of the line doesn't realize they're talking to a machine?Jason Hi Jason, I want to see what happens if we get two Google Duplex systems talking to each other. If they did, would either of them realize it is talking to another machine? What would two machines talk about? Could we give them a general topic, then see where the discussion drifts? Perhaps the topic would be as interesting and chaotic as ExI discussions, which morph quickly and unpredictably. Which machine would catch on first? How fast would the conversations be? The reason I changed the subject line: we recognize that news organizations filter news according to their own viewpoint of what news is worth printing. But what if? we had a fixed camera/microphone watching and listening to something, offering it up via livestreaming, without filtering or commentary. That would be like being there. I think we could do this: the equipment would be privately owned with the message going out to all. I do want to see how things are going in the CHAZ area, specifically how they are getting supplies in there, and if they are getting in there in sufficient quantities to support the locals and guests. We capitalists have been generally unsuccessful in dealing with the growing problem of homelessness. Do let us see if those who took over CHAZ are any more successful than we are. If they fail too, perhaps we can get two Google Duplex systems to discuss the problem and find new solutions we carbon units never discovered. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 19:42:33 2020 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 20:42:33 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The present and future of AI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, 12 Jun 2020 at 19:50, Jason Resch via extropy-chat wrote: > > I wrote an analysis of the current capabilities of modern AI systems: > https://alwaysasking.com/when-will-ai-take-over/ > > I found what some systems are capable of, especially in terms of computational creativity, and general purpose learning algorithms, to be shocking. > > For instance, DeepMind has a single AI that has learned to play every Atari game better than any human. GANs have been made that produce original art pieces and can take a single photo and envision it as a talking head. Google's Duplex can make phone calls and hold conversations so well the person at the other end of the line doesn't realize they're talking to a machine. > > I am curious how close members on this list feel we are from achieving AGI. Most estimates seem to put it around 2040 plus or minus 10 years. Is that the general consensus? Could it happen much sooner? Does anyone here believe it will happen much later than that? > > Jason > _______________________________________________ Brian Wang has a recent article considering AGI development. Estimates depend on whether you believe that progress will be exponential or linear. Also whether financial / political / climate / environment / epidemic etc. disasters might derail the train of progress. The military and politicians are beginning to think of superhuman AGI in the same way that they think of nuclear weapons. So researchers will not be left alone when they appear to be nearing successful development. BillK From foozler83 at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 19:46:28 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 14:46:28 -0500 Subject: [ExI] facial recognition software Message-ID: I see where Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM have started refusing to sell this software to police depts. until the issue is settled at the federal level. I am of two minds about that software: to some extent it keeps us safe by identifying perps for the cops to bring in. But it is also an invasion of privacy, and I think that outweighs the good usage above. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 19:52:09 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 14:52:09 -0500 Subject: [ExI] word usage-picky picky Message-ID: Estimates depend on whether you believe that progress will be exponential or linear. bill k Exponents can be negative. I read where something is a fraction of something else. Fractions can be 15/7 or 767/5. Hardly communicating something small. I suggest 'small fraction'. More clarity in language, please. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 20:14:07 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 13:14:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] antifa derangement syndrome In-Reply-To: <1920782879.49906.1591991533979@mail.yahoo.com> References: <1920782879.49906.1591991533979@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <3C58FFF0-1107-4467-ACE7-417E72857A9C@gmail.com> Which is related to Saul Alinsky derangement syndrome... https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/northwest/shocked-locals-make-public-apology-to-spokane-family-harassed-in-forks/ This story from nearby shows what happens when some people start to see antifa behind every tree and bush. There's a lack of common sense here that was noticed before. Recall the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi back in 2001. Sodhi was shot to death by Frank Silva Roque. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 20:25:57 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 13:25:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cory Massimino on advocating police abolition In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Jun 11, 2020, at 5:26 AM, John Clark via extropy-chat wrote:? >> On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 7:05 AM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> > The idea of abolishing the police seems to be having something of a surge in popularity, > > Defunding the police is not the same as abolishing the police. Camden New Jersey defunded the police seven years ago and it turned out well. Back then Camden had the highest murder rate in the country and police corruption was so firmly entrenched that reform was impossible, and because of super powerful police unions it cost over $182,000 per officer so they only had 175 of them. Camden decided to start from scratch and fired the entire police force and started a new one; if an officer wanted to stay on the force he had to submit a job application just like everybody else. The move broke the powerful police union so now it only cost $99,600 to hire an officer, and so there are now over 400 of them. The result of all of this is today the murder rate is only a third what it was seven years ago before the police were defunded, and the Relationship between the police and the black community is much improved, the current police chief of Camden actually marched with the black lives matter people. No shit, but Cory _was_ discussing police abolition -- not confusing it with defunding the police. Or did you not read my subject line and his first sentence? Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 20:27:21 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 13:27:21 -0700 Subject: [ExI] monumental change In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <05026C47-538A-4CB5-AC7C-A4EEEE08F6B7@gmail.com> On Jun 10, 2020, at 2:54 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > And I am not kidding. NASCAR is unbelievably huge in the South, where rednecks wearing Confederate flags on their heads, cars, etc. party at the races.. NASCAR just banned Confederate flags at all their events. This could destroy their popularity. > > In other words, it was a huge step for them and a courageous one. > > bill w Call me cynical, but I feel it's not courageous now. Ten or twenty years ago, it would've been courageous. But now it's merely good marketing. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 20:29:00 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 13:29:00 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <713126007.49569.1591990498196@mail.yahoo.com> References: <713126007.49569.1591990498196@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <3E4B038F-9527-424A-8524-E1A8DB0D0EC5@gmail.com> Regarding Trump, I think the problem is and remains similar to an observation Hunter S. Thompson made with regard to Nixon: 'The slow-rising central horror of "Watergate" is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it.' Naturally, as a libertarian, the chief lesson should be not to have political authority at all. Or for those who can't embrace the idea because of lack of imagination or psychological blinders: to severely limit political authority. (The latter is at best a holding operation as any concentration of political power tends to grow over time simply because crises and emergencies will arise and people will forget what happened the last time around. Especially those who claim to love liberty will be susceptible to increasing/concentrating political authority because they'll imagine somehow they're like doctors who can't get sick.) Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 21:39:15 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 14:39:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: <005801d63d27$2745c0f0$75d142d0$@rainier66.com> References: <005801d63d27$2745c0f0$75d142d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Jun 7, 2020, at 5:06 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > ?From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > > >?judging who's Black depends both on overall social rules and how people present themselves?Dan > > > Hi Dan, since we have DNA tests now, why not just have a number? Numbers are such marvelous things. > > We can find a SubSaharan African group where we can be confident there is little outside genetic material, get some DNA tests, get some from here, from there, then when one does the test, we just see how much DNA they share with an identifiable group. > > This would be completely objective and independent on how one presents herself. This latest part is particularly of interest, because of the recent comment and apology by a politician (whose name I cannot recall) who suggested one?s political choices determines one?s race. Dan, regarding the comment ??depends?how people present themselves?? I ask: does that determine in any way one?s race? > > These DNA tests are really only reliable back about 6 generations or so, but my own African ancestor is only 5 generations back. The 60 dollar DNA tests picked it up in all of us who are on that branch of the family tree. So I have an actual number (verified by multiple DNA tests (two different services for several relatives (rather than a breezy claim (or a dark complexion (which can be faked.))))) > > Numbers are my friends. > > spike What would the number signify and why would it matter? The everyday concept of race really doesn't map onto biological concept of a population group. In fact, any clear look at the numbers here shows, for instance, that everyday racial groups overlap different biological populations. And if one were to use a ruthlessly population biology view, there are some serious problems. How many populations are there? There's no clear line between populations, but are there five or fifty or a thousand? And the highest level of genetic differences is between sub-Saharan African populations. So, if you knew nothing else about humans and were just armed with genomic evidence, you might conclude there were dozens of "races" but most of them were in sub-Saharan Africa. Consider here the work of Joshua Glasgow and Sally Haslander. In particular, I recommend the former's ?Another Look at the Reality of Race, by which I Mean Racef? in _New Waves in Metaphysics_ and the latter's "(What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?" The latter is available online at: http://www.mit.edu/~shaslang/papers/WIGRnous.pdf On how people present themselves, I bring up again the Rachel Dolezal case. She presented herself as Black or African American and up until her parents "outed" her as White, she was very successful at this. I'm guessing had you met her before she was outed, you might have simply thought her a light-skinned African American. Add to this, the everyday concept of race (the one most people use and mean when they say person X is a member of race Y; and all this varies by community*) tends to look for social markers as well as physical ones. This doesn't mean everyone can pass, but it shows that the everyday concept of race isn't really related to underlying DNA or such. (How would an Australian aborigine be classified if they moved to the US, spoke English like an American, and lived in, say, LA or Seattle, but didn't tell anyone that they were an Australian aborigine? My guess is you and almost everyone else would see them as African American without question.) The everyday concept, too, when it underlies racism, tends to also put certain psychological traits into the same bucket. Thus, members of a given race might be seen as lazy, dishonest, criminally inclined, of lesser intelligence, cowardly, violent, overly emotional, and the like. (Or their opposites, if the race is seen as a superior one.) Another interesting phenomena with regard to race is how the view of a given group changes over time. I mentioned the Irish in America above. There's also the case of Italians. Initially, they were seen as basically non-White and during the middle of the 20th century, this view started to shift. Thaddeus Russell goes over this in his popular book _A Renegade History of the United States_. The pattern is basically new groups generally get identified as Blacks or near Blacks and move up over time, eventually even being accepted as Whites in cases like the Irish and Italians. (Older people I know can attest to this too: they viewed Italians and other immigrants from Southern Europe basically basically as Blacks or semi-Blacks.) Regards, Dan * Why would the Irish be thought of as of another race by US-Americans when they first started immigrating here? Do you know of Ben Franklin's views of Germans and Swedes? He didn't think they were related to the British at all and that they were inferior. This is at a period when modern racism and modern racial concepts were forming. Historian Anthony Comegna discusses some earlier Colonial origins of American racism here: https://reason.com/2020/05/31/i-got-tear-gassed-at-baltimores-city-hall/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 22:00:56 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 16:00:56 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: References: <005801d63d27$2745c0f0$75d142d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: I don't think race, per se, was an issue with the Irish. The issue was that they were, Catholic! Catholics tended to be treated as a lower species, and it didn't matter much whether they were pale redheads from the north or brown-skinned Mediterranean types. On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 3:42 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Jun 7, 2020, at 5:06 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > ?*From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > > > > *>?*judging who's Black depends both on overall social rules and how > people present themselves?Dan > > > > > Hi Dan, since we have DNA tests now, why not just have a number? Numbers > are such marvelous things. > > > > We can find a SubSaharan African group where we can be confident there is > little outside genetic material, get some DNA tests, get some from here, > from there, then when one does the test, we just see how much DNA they > share with an identifiable group. > > > > This would be completely objective and independent on how one presents > herself. This latest part is particularly of interest, because of the > recent comment and apology by a politician (whose name I cannot recall) who > suggested one?s political choices determines one?s race. Dan, regarding > the comment ??depends?how people present themselves?? I ask: does that > determine in any way one?s race? > > > > These DNA tests are really only reliable back about 6 generations or so, > but my own African ancestor is only 5 generations back. The 60 dollar DNA > tests picked it up in all of us who are on that branch of the family tree. > So I have an actual number (verified by multiple DNA tests (two different > services for several relatives (rather than a breezy claim (or a dark > complexion (which can be faked.))))) > > > > Numbers are my friends. > > > > spike > > > What would the number signify and why would it matter? The everyday > concept of race really doesn't map onto biological concept of a population > group. In fact, any clear look at the numbers here shows, for instance, > that everyday racial groups overlap different biological populations. And > if one were to use a ruthlessly population biology view, there are some > serious problems. How many populations are there? There's no clear line > between populations, but are there five or fifty or a thousand? And the > highest level of genetic differences is between sub-Saharan African > populations. So, if you knew nothing else about humans and were just armed > with genomic evidence, you might conclude there were dozens of "races" but > most of them were in sub-Saharan Africa. > > Consider here the work of Joshua Glasgow and Sally Haslander. In > particular, I recommend the former's ?Another Look at the Reality of Race, > by which I Mean Racef? in _New Waves in Metaphysics_ and the latter's > "(What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?" The latter is available > online at: > > http://www.mit.edu/~shaslang/papers/WIGRnous.pdf > > On how people present themselves, I bring up again the Rachel Dolezal > case. She presented herself as Black or African American and up until her > parents "outed" her as White, she was very successful at this. I'm guessing > had you met her before she was outed, you might have simply thought her a > light-skinned African American. Add to this, the everyday concept of race > (the one most people use and mean when they say person X is a member of > race Y; and all this varies by community*) tends to look for social markers > as well as physical ones. This doesn't mean everyone can pass, but it shows > that the everyday concept of race isn't really related to underlying DNA or > such. (How would an Australian aborigine be classified if they moved to the > US, spoke English like an American, and lived in, say, LA or Seattle, but > didn't tell anyone that they were an Australian aborigine? My guess is you > and almost everyone else would see them as African American without > question.) > > The everyday concept, too, when it underlies racism, tends to also put > certain psychological traits into the same bucket. Thus, members of a given > race might be seen as lazy, dishonest, criminally inclined, of lesser > intelligence, cowardly, violent, overly emotional, and the like. (Or their > opposites, if the race is seen as a superior one.) > > Another interesting phenomena with regard to race is how the view of a > given group changes over time. I mentioned the Irish in America above. > There's also the case of Italians. Initially, they were seen as basically > non-White and during the middle of the 20th century, this view started to > shift. Thaddeus Russell goes over this in his popular book _A Renegade > History of the United States_. The pattern is basically new groups > generally get identified as Blacks or near Blacks and move up over time, > eventually even being accepted as Whites in cases like the Irish and > Italians. (Older people I know can attest to this too: they viewed Italians > and other immigrants from Southern Europe basically basically as Blacks or > semi-Blacks.) > > Regards, > > Dan > > * Why would the Irish be thought of as of another race by US-Americans > when they first started immigrating here? Do you know of Ben Franklin's > views of Germans and Swedes? He didn't think they were related to the > British at all and that they were inferior. This is at a period when modern > racism and modern racial concepts were forming. Historian Anthony Comegna > discusses some earlier Colonial origins of American racism here: > > https://reason.com/2020/05/31/i-got-tear-gassed-at-baltimores-city-hall/ > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 12 22:05:12 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 15:05:12 -0700 Subject: [ExI] antifa derangement syndrome In-Reply-To: <3C58FFF0-1107-4467-ACE7-417E72857A9C@gmail.com> References: <1920782879.49906.1591991533979@mail.yahoo.com> <3C58FFF0-1107-4467-ACE7-417E72857A9C@gmail.com> Message-ID: <01fc01d64105$8c164540$a442cfc0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat Sent: Friday, June 12, 2020 1:14 PM To: ExI chat list Cc: Dan TheBookMan Subject: [ExI] antifa derangement syndrome Which is related to Saul Alinsky derangement syndrome... https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/northwest/shocked-locals-make-public-apology-to-spokane-family-harassed-in-forks/ This story from nearby shows what happens when some people start to see antifa behind every tree and bush. There's a lack of common sense here that was noticed before. Recall the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi back in 2001. Sodhi was shot to death by Frank Silva Roque. Regards, Dan Hi Dan, thanks for posting this. My father in law has lived in Spokane for the last 47 years and is acquainted personally with this family in the article. I heard about that incident from him. That poor family is terrorized and my father in law is convinced the apocalypse is upon us. {8^D They have a home-brew camper made from a retired school bus, which they painted but it is still ugly. Turns out, a friend of my brother in law from Olympia gave us a pretty good description of what happened in Forks. They cut down the trees to block them in, tense moments ensued, but they talked and listened, realized they blew it bigtime. Some locals got their chainsaws, cut up and removed the trees that they had dropped across the road, tried their best to patch it up but I there is a good chance that family will vacation to the east rather than to the west. They are forgiving sorts, but they were traumatized. Fun aside: I have been to that area, camping (it is gorgeous out there (but oh boy, if you want to see backward, you haven?t seen it until you out there on the Olympic Pen (if you ever saw the movie Rambo, that back there is where the sergeant gets into it with the local police force.))) What if? you lived in that Seattle neighborhood surrounding the CHAZ, and you owned a business. What would it be like, knowing all those people in there are getting steadily hungrier? That must be most unpleasant. If you want a beautiful place to camp, the Olympic National Park is hard to beat. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Fri Jun 12 22:05:36 2020 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 22:05:36 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ExI] The present and future of AI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <103167237.77264.1591999536605@mail.yahoo.com> I would say that we are close enough that we need to have a better definition of AGI. For example does a honeybee have "general intelligence"? If so, we are already really close because we can currently compute neural networks with the complexity of a honeybee brain. Assuming neuron number is a correlate of intelligence, it will be about 44 years until Moore's law reaches human brain parity. But we might reach rat or raven parity in about 14 years. See old thread "Benchmarking the SIngularity" for more info: ?http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2019-July/097196.html Stuart LaForge On Friday, June 12, 2020, 11:48:45 AM PDT, Jason Resch via extropy-chat wrote: I wrote an analysis of the current capabilities of modern AI systems:? https://alwaysasking.com/when-will-ai-take-over/ I found what some systems are capable of, especially in terms of computational creativity, and general purpose learning algorithms, to be shocking. For instance, DeepMind has a single AI that has learned to play every Atari game better than any human.? GANs have been made that produce original art pieces and can take a single photo and envision it as a talking head. Google's Duplex can make phone calls and hold conversations so well the person at the other end of the line doesn't realize they're talking to a machine. I am curious how close members on this list feel we are from achieving?AGI. Most estimates seem to put it around 2040 plus or minus 10 years. Is that the general consensus? Could it happen much sooner? Does anyone here believe it will happen much later than that? Jason From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 22:15:15 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 18:15:15 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The present and future of AI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 2:50 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> I am curious how close members on this list feel we are from > achieving AGI. Most estimates seem to put it around 2040 plus or minus 10 > years. Is that the general consensus? * That would be my best guess but it's only a guess; the inherent iterative nature of the thing makes predicting a future timeline difacult. *> Could it happen much sooner? * Sure, it could come suddenly out of the blue with little warning; if for example somebody developed a computer program that could improve software as well as Alphazero can improve gameplay for GO or Chess with no assistance from humans needed. If that happened then we could wake up one morning and find ourselves in the possession of a high level computer language that was so easy to use that grade school kids could learn it with no problem but ran as efficiently as the very best machine code produced by expert human programmers could with the help of assembly language. *> Does anyone here believe it will happen much later than that?* It could be later but if it does I think it would be due to societal factors and not because of technological limitations. I say this because thanks to biology we know of an upper limit on the amount of complexity a seed AI would need. In the entire human genome there are only 3 billion base pairs, there are 4 bases so each base can represent 2 bits, there are 8 bits per byte so that comes out to 750 meg which you could fit on an old fashioned CD audio disk. And there is a huge amount of redundancy in the genome so with file compression you'd probably need less than a third of that CD audio disk, and of course much of the genome is about stuff that has nothing to do with the brain or intelligence. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 22:20:24 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 18:20:24 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Cory Massimino on advocating police abolition In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 4:29 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > *No shit, but Cory _was_ discussing police abolition -- not confusing it > with defunding the police. Or did you not read my subject line and his > first sentence?* > The police are not going to be abolished, it just ain't gonna happen. Pretending otherwise is a fantasy. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 22:25:35 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 15:25:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] monumental change In-Reply-To: <05026C47-538A-4CB5-AC7C-A4EEEE08F6B7@gmail.com> References: <05026C47-538A-4CB5-AC7C-A4EEEE08F6B7@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 1:36 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Call me cynical, but I feel it's not courageous now. Ten or twenty years > ago, it would've been courageous. But now it's merely good marketing. > If all it takes to enact this sort of change is to make it good marketing, I'll take it. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 22:28:46 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 15:28:46 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: <6548C2AC-60B2-436C-A989-F68EE12D2062@gmail.com> <006301d63ec0$c06b0390$41410ab0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 9:44 PM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Protesting crowds will propagate the virus, killing some of those > infected. The protestors presumably know this, but decide to protest > anyway. It would make sense if more lives were likely to be saved by > protesting than lost, but I don?t think anyone could reasonably argue that > that would be the case. > I'm not so sure - especially if you count the lasting effect of changes that would not have happened if not for the protests. This particular coronavirus will kill a number of people this year, and probably a number next year, perhaps also more than zero in 2022. Racism has been cutting lives short for over a century. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 22:37:33 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 15:37:33 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <0E173799-07E9-40C7-94C7-9978FD8F5803@gmail.com> On Jun 12, 2020, at 3:13 PM, Darin Sunley via extropy-chat wrote: > > I don't think race, per se, was an issue with the Irish. The issue was that they were, Catholic! > > Catholics tended to be treated as a lower species, and it didn't matter much whether they were pale redheads from the north or brown-skinned Mediterranean types. I agree religion played a role, but it wasn?t an either/or here. The Irish were seen as both members of another faith and of another race. And their eventual integration into the broader White community involved differentiating themselves from African Americans in the eyes of other Whites. There?d be little need for such differentiation if they were already seen as White. And there were Catholic groups in America before the Irish started migrating in large numbers, particularly the French. The latter were viewed as Whites. Again, race is socially constructed. This is how French Catholics in Acadia were White whilst Irish Catholic immigrants in Boston or NY were not (for decades), and the pattern was repeated with Italian immigrants decades later. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 22:44:27 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 18:44:27 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The present and future of AI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 6:30 PM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > *> Does anyone here believe it will happen much later than that?* > > > It could be later but if it does I think it would be due to societal > factors and not because of technological limitations. I say this because > thanks to biology we know of an upper limit on the amount of complexity a > seed AI would need. In the entire human genome there are only 3 billion > base pairs, there are 4 bases so each base can represent 2 bits, there are > 8 bits per byte so that comes out to 750 meg which you could fit on an old > fashioned CD audio disk. And there is a huge amount of redundancy in the > genome so with file compression you'd probably need less than a third of > that CD audio disk, and of course much of the genome is about stuff that > has nothing to do with the brain or intelligence. > > John K Clark > > You're missing a lot of additional information involved in creating a human being from scratch. The minimum information required goes very far beyond knowing the sequence of the genome and is still not clear. The order in which genes are turned on and off and in what order during development is crucial, and additionally vary by tissue type. Additionally, the information encoded in the exome alone just tells you the linear order of amino acids strung together. It tells you nothing about the information encoded in the 3 dimensional folding of that protein and its interactions with other proteins. That's not even touching on the impact of methylation in promoting or suppressing genes. I realize we're most interested in the brain here, but it may be very difficult to disentangle from these other factors in coming up with an understanding how to build a brain from scratch. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 12 22:48:10 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 15:48:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: References: <005801d63d27$2745c0f0$75d142d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <025501d6410b$8cf090f0$a6d1b2d0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat >?What would the number signify and why would it matter? The everyday concept of race really doesn't map onto biological concept of a population group. In fact, any clear look at the numbers here shows, for instance, that everyday racial groups overlap different biological populations?. Regards, Dan Hi Dan, the number is mostly to educate people about themselves. That?s what it did for me. I did one of these commercial DNA tests when they dropped to 100 bucks. Now they are 60, but in the past 6 yrs, I have bought 34 kits for relatives and done DNA mapping to try to figure out connections with genetic diseases. That?s how I found out about the black ancestor: all of us on that branch show it, none of us knew. But now we do. Here?s bit of American history you might find interesting. The traditional version of slavery in the south suggests that escaped slaves went north to freedom, but it is a little more subtle than that. If they were in Georgia, some went south into Florida, which was sparsely populated and they could join the local population. You can see the evidence in the Seminole tribe, which did not evacuate Florida but accepted the Africans. In Virginia, the escapees from the slave plantations could head north, but their better chances were in heading west, to get over the Appalachians. Over on the west side, in what is now West Virginia but was then part of Virginia, they still had (theoretically) legal slavery but no one owned slaves out there from what I can tell from the census records. My great^3 grandfather was a fiery Methodist minister who spoke often and thunderously on this topic. So the slaves would sometimes go west, get over the mountains and set up camp in the hollers on the west side, often going into the coal business, where they could be free, work harder than before under far more dangerous conditions, while still being as destitute as they were as slaves. But they were free, and they were equal to the local whites there. Decades went by. My grandmother was born and grew up there. She was telling me how life was in the mountain country. There was a choice of careers: you could do anything you like, as long as you like coal mining. There the black men and white men were truly equals: after a half an hour in the mine, everyone was the same color. The black and white families lived in the same row of company-owned shotgun houses. They accepted each other as equals. This explains a long-standing puzzle: we couldn?t figure out why my great^3 grandmother ended up there of all places, from Georgia. Reason: she was Scotch-Irish with an African baby. She ended up in the coal country of West Virginia, where they had no heartburn with that kind of thing. The 1920s came along. The miners decided they would politely ask the company to lift a finger to help keep them alive, the company politely refused, the miners began to unionize, the company brought in strike-breakers from Italy. The labor force detested the Italians, but black and (non-Italian) white were friends, united in common cause against Italians. Race is both more and less than DNA, if it is anything at all. With that in mind as a background, you may come to understand why your comments on the DNA-component of race interests me. You can do some interesting tricks with these low-cost DNA tests, but perhaps the most important one of all is that it educates people about themselves. It did that for me. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 22:49:38 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 18:49:38 -0400 Subject: [ExI] word usage-picky picky In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 4:10 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > *Exponents can be negative. * > Yes, and in that case the rate of change would be moving faster and faster toward zero at an exponential rate. *> I read where something is a fraction of something else. Fractions can > be 15/7 or 767/5. Hardly communicating something small. I suggest 'small > fraction'. More clarity in language, please.* > That would not bring more clarity because we're talking about rates of change and not constants. A "small fractional" change would be a linear change such as Y= nX where n is a constant such as 2/3. A geometric change would be Y= X^n. And an exponential change would be Y=n^X. These are 3 different types of changes with fundamentally different properties. Exponential change grows (positively or negatively depending on specifics) vastly faster than the other two and should not be confused. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 22:55:17 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 17:55:17 -0500 Subject: [ExI] monumental change In-Reply-To: References: <05026C47-538A-4CB5-AC7C-A4EEEE08F6B7@gmail.com> Message-ID: dan and adrian Call me cynical, but I feel it's not courageous now. Ten or twenty years ago, it would've been courageous. But now it's merely good marketing. If all it takes to enact this sort of change is to make it good marketing, I'll take it. I am guessing that neither of you has any idea how popular NASCAR is in the South or places like the South - Hamilton OH, for one. We'll know the first race where people are allowed. Or maybe not. Maybe they will be so starved for racing that they come even though they are angry with NASCAR. In any case, just dis the Confederate flag south of the Mason Dixon line and see what happens. The move was quite courageous and marketing had nothing to do with it. Blacks just don't go to those races. bill w On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 5:49 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 1:36 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> Call me cynical, but I feel it's not courageous now. Ten or twenty years >> ago, it would've been courageous. But now it's merely good marketing. >> > > If all it takes to enact this sort of change is to make it good marketing, > I'll take it. > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jasonresch at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 22:57:18 2020 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 17:57:18 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The present and future of AI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 2:45 PM BillK via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Fri, 12 Jun 2020 at 19:50, Jason Resch via extropy-chat > wrote: > > > > I wrote an analysis of the current capabilities of modern AI systems: > > https://alwaysasking.com/when-will-ai-take-over/ > > > > I found what some systems are capable of, especially in terms of > computational creativity, and general purpose learning algorithms, to be > shocking. > > > > For instance, DeepMind has a single AI that has learned to play every > Atari game better than any human. GANs have been made that produce > original art pieces and can take a single photo and envision it as a > talking head. Google's Duplex can make phone calls and hold conversations > so well the person at the other end of the line doesn't realize they're > talking to a machine. > > > > I am curious how close members on this list feel we are from achieving > AGI. Most estimates seem to put it around 2040 plus or minus 10 years. Is > that the general consensus? Could it happen much sooner? Does anyone here > believe it will happen much later than that? > > > > Jason > > _______________________________________________ > > > Brian Wang has a recent article considering AGI development. > < > https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/05/time-for-iterations-and-costs-going-from-inferior-agi-to-superhuman-agi.html > > > > Estimates depend on whether you believe that progress will be > exponential or linear. > Also whether financial / political / climate / environment / epidemic > etc. disasters might derail the train of progress. > > The military and politicians are beginning to think of superhuman AGI > in the same way that they think of nuclear weapons. So researchers > will not be left alone when they appear to be nearing successful > development. > > > The difference is it took a meaningful percentage of national electricity to refine uranium. The tools of AI are open source, and the necessary equipment available for anyone to purchase on Amazon's or Google's clouds. The algorithms behind learning, creativity, and understanding are already known. I think the only thing standing in the way of superhuman AI is the compute resources and perhaps the data sets necessary for training. Jason -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jasonresch at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 23:01:25 2020 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 18:01:25 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Fwd: The present and future of AI In-Reply-To: References: <6EC6AE90-369C-40A4-9488-0531BC2AEDD3@gmu.edu> Message-ID: (Sorry re-sending, sen't to wrong address) On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 3:14 PM Robin D Hanson wrote: > Yes of course I?m considering exp progress in stuff that has been exp, and > linear progress in stuff that has been linear. > The hard part about human AI is doing every thing WELL. You can?t really > pick an ability X and say ?no AI can do X?. > Almost always, there is some system that does X, except just very BADLY. > I came up with the following list of human-specific traits of intelligence: - Communicate via natural language - Learn, adapt, and grow - Move through a dynamic environment - Recognize sights and sounds - Be creative in music, art, writing and invention - Reason with logic and rationality to solve problems Is there anything important that I've forgotten? Because there has been major progress in each of these domains. It's hard to imagine that after a 1,000 or million-fold increase in compute they won't be vastly superior. This is where we stand today, if we put everything together in one system: "We would get an AI that could hold a conversation in any of 100 languages over the phone. It would beat everyone at Jeopardy, Chess, Go, Poker, as well any old video game. The AI would be able to recognize any object or face ? even detect cancer better than most doctors. It would also be accomplished and creative, having invented things, discovered laws of physics, and identified new drugs. The AI could compose as well as Bach and paint as well as van Gogh. It would also be seen as highly original in its own artistic styles." ?Let?s put all these together,? and then it will be smart. -- Marvin Minsky Jason > > On Jun 12, 2020, at 3:12 PM, Jason Resch wrote: > > On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 1:57 PM Robin D Hanson wrote: > >> There have been substantial advances in the last decade. But then there >> have been substantial advances every decade since 1950. We are still a LONG >> way from broad human level abilities; it will take a LOT longer than 10-30 >> years to get there. >> >> What do you see as the most difficult aspects of human ability we have > yet to achieve? > > Also, are you considering exponential progress in your 10-30 year > projection over the future (which could see a billion-fold increase in > computing power? > > > Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu > Future of Humanity Inst., Oxford University > Assoc. Prof. Economics, George Mason University > See my books: http://ageofem.com http://elephantinthebrain.com > > > > > > > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 23:03:02 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 16:03:02 -0700 Subject: [ExI] facial recognition software In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: It's broken, misidentifying people n far too many cases. Police relying on it would thus conduct enforcement against innocent people in far too many cases. Say what you will about privacy, but "the cops would arrest the wrong person if they used it" seems like a good enough reason not to use it, even for people who do not care about the privacy of others. On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 12:59 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I see where Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM have started refusing to sell this > software to police depts. until the issue is settled at the federal level. > > I am of two minds about that software: to some extent it keeps us safe by > identifying perps for the cops to bring in. > > But it is also an invasion of privacy, and I think that outweighs the good > usage above. > > bill w > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 23:03:31 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 16:03:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] antifa derangement syndrome In-Reply-To: <01fc01d64105$8c164540$a442cfc0$@rainier66.com> References: <01fc01d64105$8c164540$a442cfc0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst On Jun 12, 2020, at 3:20 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > Sent: Friday, June 12, 2020 1:14 PM > To: ExI chat list > Cc: Dan TheBookMan > Subject: [ExI] antifa derangement syndrome > > Which is related to Saul Alinsky derangement syndrome... > > https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/northwest/shocked-locals-make-public-apology-to-spokane-family-harassed-in-forks/ > > This story from nearby shows what happens when some people start to see antifa behind every tree and bush. There's a lack of common sense here that was noticed before. Recall the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi back in 2001. Sodhi was shot to death by Frank Silva Roque. > > Regards, > > > Dan > > > Hi Dan, thanks for posting this. My father in law has lived in Spokane for the last 47 years and is acquainted personally with this family in the article. Small world. > I heard about that incident from him. That poor family is terrorized and my father in law is convinced the apocalypse is upon us. {8^D They have a home-brew camper made from a retired school bus, which they painted but it is still ugly. > > Turns out, a friend of my brother in law from Olympia gave us a pretty good description of what happened in Forks. They cut down the trees to block them in, tense moments ensued, but they talked and listened, realized they blew it bigtime. Some locals got their chainsaws, cut up and removed the trees that they had dropped across the road, tried their best to patch it up but I there is a good chance that family will vacation to the east rather than to the west. They are forgiving sorts, but they were traumatized. > > Fun aside: I have been to that area, camping (it is gorgeous out there (but oh boy, if you want to see backward, you haven?t seen it until you out there on the Olympic Pen (if you ever saw the movie Rambo, that back there is where the sergeant gets into it with the local police force.))) I think I saw it when I was very young. A year or two ago, I decided to watch the Twin Peaks series. Nothing to do with Forks. Actually, it?s set in a fictional town near the border with Idaho and Canada. But it was mostly filmed around Bend. There?s a lot of other stuff set around here that either does or doesn?t match things... The funniest is The Killing, an American remake of a Danish series. Set in Seattle, there are a few location shots and then the rest is really Toronto. And, of course, there?s lots of rain in the series ? downpours that are unusual for this area. (Despite my watching two seasons of it, it wasn?t that good. Haven?t seen the Danish original.) > What if? you lived in that Seattle neighborhood surrounding the CHAZ, and you owned a business. What would it be like, knowing all those people in there are getting steadily hungrier? That must be most unpleasant. > > If you want a beautiful place to camp, the Olympic National Park is hard to beat. > > spike I love hiking in the Olympics, but being a day hiker limits me to going to places like Mount Townsend or Lake of the Angels. I usually hike in the Cascades, typically in the Northern Cascades. Were it now for COVID-19 and all that, I?d probably be hiking near Teanaway as the North Cascades are still under a lot of snow this year. Unlike many, I see CHAZ as opening up possibilities rather than closing them down. I?m guessing it?ll only last so long before the police move in again. From what I?ve seen, it looks peaceful inside the Zone. Don?t tell me you think it?s Mad Max: Fury Road there. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 23:06:58 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 16:06:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cory Massimino on advocating police abolition In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <23C853C8-9D21-4480-98D6-700154C40D36@gmail.com> On Jun 12, 2020, at 3:46 PM, John Clark via extropy-chat wrote: > >> On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 4:29 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> > No shit, but Cory _was_ discussing police abolition -- not confusing it with defunding the police. Or did you not read my subject line and his first sentence? > > The police are not going to be abolished, it just ain't gonna happen. Pretending otherwise is a fantasy. That?s what you believe, but it still doesn?t explain why you thought Cory (or yours truly) confused abolition with defunding. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 23:09:12 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 16:09:12 -0700 Subject: [ExI] monumental change In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6CCE6573-0478-4B04-8DB9-409712EEAD1B@gmail.com> On Jun 12, 2020, at 3:56 PM, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat wrote: > >> On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 1:36 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote: > >> Call me cynical, but I feel it's not courageous now. Ten or twenty years ago, it would've been courageous. But now it's merely good marketing. > > If all it takes to enact this sort of change is to make it good marketing, I'll take it. But let?s not call good marketing courageous. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 23:29:57 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 19:29:57 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The present and future of AI Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 6:45 PM Dylan Distasio wrote: *> You're missing a lot of additional information involved in creating a > human being from scratch. The minimum information required goes very far > beyond knowing the sequence of the genome and is still not clear. The > order in which genes are turned on and off and in what order during > development is crucial, and additionally vary by tissue type. * > Yes, and that order information is also encoded in the genome. > *Additionally, the information encoded in the exome alone just tells you > the linear order of amino acids strung together. It tells you nothing > about the information encoded in the 3 dimensional folding of that protein* > The genome doesn't need to encode the 3D shape of a protein because the minimum amount of information required to produce that is just information about the linear sequence of amino acids, the additional information needed to fold into the proper shape is obtained from the environment. And a seed AI would start out as being pretty stupid, and Einstein wasn't very intelligent when he was first born either, but he learned from the environment and the seed AI would do the same. A seed AI is the amount of information needed to produce super intelligence that the environment cannot supply. *> That's not even touching on the impact of methylation in promoting or > suppressing genes.* > There can only be 2 places where the information about what bases in the DNA molecule get a methyl group attached to them and which bases don't can come from, the genome itself or the environment. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 23:33:17 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 18:33:17 -0500 Subject: [ExI] antifa In-Reply-To: <003701d640ce$75e6d0f0$61b472d0$@rainier66.com> References: <8DEB0EE6-BEE5-464F-832D-B0A8D5143878@gmail.com> <003701d640ce$75e6d0f0$61b472d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: ICP once ruined an entire venue, as in their fans completely trashed all the metal and all the flooring, from spraying so much faygo (IPC?s iconic drink from their hometown). Other venues fear the same: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.inverse.com/article/7357-san-diego-insane-clown-posse-show-cancelled-because-of-fear-of-faygo-damage/amp SR Ballard > On Jun 12, 2020, at 10:30 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > >> ...> On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] antifa > >> ...And hopefully the last. Or I?ll be forced to share factoids. > > SR Ballard > > > But SR, we like it when you share factoids. Share away. That's what friends are for. > > spike > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 23:34:25 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 16:34:25 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest Message-ID: wrote: snip ? Do you believe China?s case load suddenly dropped to zero and has never come back? Yes, though in fact there were a couple of large scale lockdowns after the original one. But lies about this topic would rapidly be exposed. > Every other country, including those where the government has the authority to shut down everything until their people starve still has cases. China is reporting zero. They are also reporting zero for the original SARS virus. > China gave this horrifying epidemic to this planet through their dishonesty in attempting a coverup back when we had time to react. That's not the case. The US threw away the early warning they got. > I don?t believe China. It's always worth considerating source and motivation. In this case, they have no motivation to give out false data. China is correct in imposing a quarantine on people coming in. But it is currently stupid for the US to limit air travel from China. Keith From jasonresch at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 23:36:33 2020 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 18:36:33 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The present and future of AI In-Reply-To: <103167237.77264.1591999536605@mail.yahoo.com> References: <103167237.77264.1591999536605@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 5:22 PM The Avantguardian via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I would say that we are close enough that we need to have a better > definition of AGI. For example does a honeybee have "general intelligence"? > If so, we are already really close because we can currently compute neural > networks with the complexity of a honeybee brain. Assuming neuron number is > a correlate of intelligence, it will be about 44 years until Moore's law > reaches human brain parity. But we might reach rat or raven parity in about > 14 years. > > See old thread "Benchmarking the SIngularity" for more info: > > http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2019-July/097196.html > > Stuart, Thanks for sharing that, it was very interesting. Regarding parity of the human brain, how are you estimating the computational complexity of the brain? The Summit supercomputer can perform as many Ops/second as a generous estimate of total synaptic firings the human brain can have per second. Jason -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 23:40:45 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 18:40:45 -0500 Subject: [ExI] word usage-picky picky In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Actually, John, I was just talking about simple fractions, not exponents. "She got a fraction of the estate" - just too vague. bill w On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 6:38 PM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 4:10 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > *Exponents can be negative. * >> > > Yes, and in that case the rate of change would be moving faster and faster > toward zero at an exponential rate. > > *> I read where something is a fraction of something else. Fractions can >> be 15/7 or 767/5. Hardly communicating something small. I suggest 'small >> fraction'. More clarity in language, please.* >> > > That would not bring more clarity because we're talking about rates of > change and not constants. A "small fractional" change would be a linear > change such as Y= nX where n is a constant such as 2/3. A geometric change > would be Y= X^n. And an exponential change would be Y=n^X. These are 3 > different types of changes with fundamentally different properties. > Exponential change grows (positively or negatively depending on specifics) > vastly faster than the other two and should not be confused. > > John K Clark > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 23:44:47 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 18:44:47 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: <6548C2AC-60B2-436C-A989-F68EE12D2062@gmail.com> <006301d63ec0$c06b0390$41410ab0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Racism has been cutting lives short for over a century. adrian How about ever since different races appeared? I keep saying that racism, sexism and some other isms are perfectly normal; expected. It would be astonishing if they weren't bases for discrimination (not prejudice - we in the South know blacks quite well and are not prejudiced. Discriminatory, of course.) bill w On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 5:58 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 9:44 PM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> Protesting crowds will propagate the virus, killing some of those >> infected. The protestors presumably know this, but decide to protest >> anyway. It would make sense if more lives were likely to be saved by >> protesting than lost, but I don?t think anyone could reasonably argue that >> that would be the case. >> > > I'm not so sure - especially if you count the lasting effect of changes > that would not have happened if not for the protests. > > This particular coronavirus will kill a number of people this year, and > probably a number next year, perhaps also more than zero in 2022. > > Racism has been cutting lives short for over a century. > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Fri Jun 12 23:50:59 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 18:50:59 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: <025501d6410b$8cf090f0$a6d1b2d0$@rainier66.com> References: <005801d63d27$2745c0f0$75d142d0$@rainier66.com> <025501d6410b$8cf090f0$a6d1b2d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: You can do some interesting tricks with these low-cost DNA tests, but perhaps the most important one of all is that it educates people about themselves. It did that for me. spike *If one is totally free of racism, then it should not matter what color your ancestors were. As a matter of historical interest, sure. bill w* On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 6:27 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > > > > >?What would the number signify and why would it matter? The everyday > concept of race really doesn't map onto biological concept of a population > group. In fact, any clear look at the numbers here shows, for instance, > that everyday racial groups overlap different biological populations?. > Regards, Dan > > > > > > Hi Dan, the number is mostly to educate people about themselves. That?s > what it did for me. > > > > I did one of these commercial DNA tests when they dropped to 100 bucks. > Now they are 60, but in the past 6 yrs, I have bought 34 kits for relatives > and done DNA mapping to try to figure out connections with genetic > diseases. That?s how I found out about the black ancestor: all of us on > that branch show it, none of us knew. But now we do. > > > > Here?s bit of American history you might find interesting. The > traditional version of slavery in the south suggests that escaped slaves > went north to freedom, but it is a little more subtle than that. If they > were in Georgia, some went south into Florida, which was sparsely populated > and they could join the local population. You can see the evidence in the > Seminole tribe, which did not evacuate Florida but accepted the Africans. > > > > In Virginia, the escapees from the slave plantations could head north, but > their better chances were in heading west, to get over the Appalachians. > Over on the west side, in what is now West Virginia but was then part of > Virginia, they still had (theoretically) legal slavery but no one owned > slaves out there from what I can tell from the census records. My great^3 > grandfather was a fiery Methodist minister who spoke often and thunderously > on this topic. So the slaves would sometimes go west, get over the > mountains and set up camp in the hollers on the west side, often going into > the coal business, where they could be free, work harder than before under > far more dangerous conditions, while still being as destitute as they were > as slaves. But they were free, and they were equal to the local whites > there. > > > > Decades went by. My grandmother was born and grew up there. She was > telling me how life was in the mountain country. There was a choice of > careers: you could do anything you like, as long as you like coal mining. > There the black men and white men were truly equals: after a half an hour > in the mine, everyone was the same color. The black and white families > lived in the same row of company-owned shotgun houses. They accepted each > other as equals. > > > > This explains a long-standing puzzle: we couldn?t figure out why my > great^3 grandmother ended up there of all places, from Georgia. Reason: > she was Scotch-Irish with an African baby. She ended up in the coal > country of West Virginia, where they had no heartburn with that kind of > thing. > > > > The 1920s came along. The miners decided they would politely ask the > company to lift a finger to help keep them alive, the company politely > refused, the miners began to unionize, the company brought in > strike-breakers from Italy. The labor force detested the Italians, but > black and (non-Italian) white were friends, united in common cause against > Italians. > > > > Race is both more and less than DNA, if it is anything at all. > > > > With that in mind as a background, you may come to understand why your > comments on the DNA-component of race interests me. You can do some > interesting tricks with these low-cost DNA tests, but perhaps the most > important one of all is that it educates people about themselves. It did > that for me. > > > > spike > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 00:19:43 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 19:19:43 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Fwd: The present and future of AI In-Reply-To: References: <6EC6AE90-369C-40A4-9488-0531BC2AEDD3@gmu.edu> Message-ID: I came up with the following list of human-specific traits of intelligence: - Communicate via natural language - Learn, adapt, and grow - Move through a dynamic environment - Recognize sights and sounds - Be creative in music, art, writing and invention - Reason with logic and rationality to solve problems Jason Every one of these traits is found all over the animal kingdom, excepting the creativity part (and birds may make up songs),. Language is not spoken, literally, but whales and dolphins, for example, communicate by mouth sounds - not all instinct. Rats may not have formal logic, but they can think their way out of a maze - they would amaze you with their intelligence. bill w On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 7:04 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > (Sorry re-sending, sen't to wrong address) > > > > On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 3:14 PM Robin D Hanson wrote: > >> Yes of course I?m considering exp progress in stuff that has been exp, >> and linear progress in stuff that has been linear. >> The hard part about human AI is doing every thing WELL. You can?t really >> pick an ability X and say ?no AI can do X?. >> Almost always, there is some system that does X, except just very BADLY. >> > > I came up with the following list of human-specific traits of intelligence: > > > - Communicate via natural language > - Learn, adapt, and grow > - Move through a dynamic environment > - Recognize sights and sounds > - Be creative in music, art, writing and invention > - Reason with logic and rationality to solve problems > > Is there anything important that I've forgotten? Because there has been > major progress in each of these domains. It's hard to imagine that after a > 1,000 or million-fold increase in compute they won't be vastly superior. > > This is where we stand today, if we put everything together in one system: > > "We would get an AI that could hold a conversation in any of 100 languages > over the phone. It would beat everyone at Jeopardy, Chess, Go, Poker, as > well any old video game. The AI would be able to recognize any object or > face ? even detect cancer better than most doctors. It would also be > accomplished and creative, having invented things, discovered laws of > physics, and identified new drugs. The AI could compose as well as Bach and > paint as well as van Gogh. It would also be seen as highly original in its > own artistic styles." > > ?Let?s put all these together,? and then it will be smart. -- Marvin > Minsky > > > Jason > > > >> >> On Jun 12, 2020, at 3:12 PM, Jason Resch wrote: >> >> On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 1:57 PM Robin D Hanson wrote: >> >>> There have been substantial advances in the last decade. But then there >>> have been substantial advances every decade since 1950. We are still a LONG >>> way from broad human level abilities; it will take a LOT longer than 10-30 >>> years to get there. >>> >>> What do you see as the most difficult aspects of human ability we have >> yet to achieve? >> >> Also, are you considering exponential progress in your 10-30 year >> projection over the future (which could see a billion-fold increase in >> computing power? >> >> >> Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu >> Future of Humanity Inst., Oxford University >> Assoc. Prof. Economics, George Mason University >> See my books: http://ageofem.com http://elephantinthebrain.com >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 13 01:30:23 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 18:30:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] antifa derangement syndrome In-Reply-To: References: <01fc01d64105$8c164540$a442cfc0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <009f01d64122$363a4410$a2aecc30$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat >>?If you want a beautiful place to camp, the Olympic National Park is hard to beat. spike >?I love hiking in the Olympics, but being a day hiker limits me to going to places like Mount Townsend or Lake of the Angels. I usually hike in the Cascades, typically in the Northern Cascades. Were it now for COVID-19 and all that, I?d probably be hiking near Teanaway as the North Cascades are still under a lot of snow this year? Hi Dan, ja that worries me. My bride managed to score permits for the west side of Mount Rainier so we have a 4-day thru hike next month from Mowich Lake to Longmire. >?Unlike many, I see CHAZ as opening up possibilities rather than closing them down. I?m guessing it?ll only last so long before the police move in again. From what I?ve seen, it looks peaceful inside the Zone. Don?t tell me you think it?s Mad Max: Fury Road there. Regards, Dan Dan we don?t know who is the new authority in CHAZ, but it really doesn?t matter that no one has been elected, making CHAZ an autocracy, but it would be irrelevant anyway, for the real power is entirely in the hands of? the insurance company. If the insurance company pulls out (well, imagine that, over a bit of uncertainty on who exactly are the law enforcement?) then businesses must come to an end. Businesses cannot operate without insurance, for someone or something with money (lots of it) must insure all the merchandize in every retail outlet against theft, riot, arson, etc. Otherwise the suppliers cannot risk sending in supplies. OK, we get that. Suppose you are the insurance underwriter. Would you bet on CHAZ? I would. But I would want a bit of a rate hike. I want a factor of 10 over what I was getting before. Eh, make it 20, just to be safe, because I already know I have zero competitors in that market and no risk of new ones coming in the foreseeable. I looked at Pike and 12th in Google maps street view (I know that area vaguely but needed reminding) and noted that there are many condos and apartment buildings, many of which are likely rentals. Rentals need insurance as well. Who will underwrite that? I will. But I want a tooooonnnnn of money to do it. Otherwise? the landlords cannot accept the liability. The tenants must go. Unless they accept a rather dramatic rent cost of course. OK, we lose the businesses and the renters, but not the homeless. They can stay. Until they run out of food. Insurance companies are in charge. A police force makes the insurance affordable. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 02:01:41 2020 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 12:01:41 +1000 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <005701d640d2$51728da0$f457a8e0$@rainier66.com> References: <6548C2AC-60B2-436C-A989-F68EE12D2062@gmail.com> <006301d63ec0$c06b0390$41410ab0$@rainier66.com> <000b01d6406c$5637a020$02a6e060$@rainier66.com> <002e01d640b9$a01841c0$e048c540$@rainier66.com> <005701d640d2$51728da0$f457a8e0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 13 Jun 2020 at 02:00, spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *John Clark via extropy-chat > *Sent:* Friday, June 12, 2020 8:16 AM > *To:* ExI chat list > *Cc:* John Clark > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Protest > > > > On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 9:23 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > >> *He still gets to count as a C-19 related fatality, * > > >?Where in the world did you get that idea?! > > *> **Here:* > > > https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/white-house-taking-very-liberal-approach-counting-covid-19-deaths > > > > Things change quickly in a pandemic. That article is ANCIENT? > > > > >?Also, you could find better places to get your news, "justthenews.com" > does not just give the news, it's a conservative pro ? > > > > Is C-Span conservative? I never really thought of them as a conservative > group > > > > https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4868448/user-clip-liberal-approach-mortality > > > > but if you insist, I shall flee to a safe space, such as Mother Jones (no > relation.) Oh, I see that CNN and MSNBC are also in on the conservative > conspiracy, as well as the other news majors. Oh wait, Mother Jones ran > that clip too. Are Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci part of the conspiracy? There > are no safe spaces left, what shall we do? > > > > I Googled ??took a very liberal approach to covid mortality? and > justthenews was the first one that came up. > > > > John, everyone here is not political. The way countries count covid > mortality is not necessarily politically driven, there are other motives, > such as financial reasons. In the US, there was no conspiracy needed: > hospitals set up a special billing fund if the patient died of covid. So, > they tested the patients for covid after they were already dead. They > tested George Floyd after he was already dead and they knew he had a > co-morbidity (asphyxiation.) > > > > >?Trump? > > > > As soon as you mention the name of any politician or party, we know you > are back to your incessant campaigning, haranguing this list where it isn?t > appropriate or welcome, as we have told you repeatedly. Please take it > elsewhere. Even if many on this list agree in principal, the constant > howling at the moon is most annoying and counterproductive. The reason > many of our most valued posters have left this space John, is that the > constant campaigning is not what we are here for. If we want politics, we > know where to find that. > > > > If you are campaigning in a post about covid, it comes across as if you > are cheering for the virus. Separate those two concepts please. Then > kindly eliminate the one: we are tired of it. When Kennedy posts about > covid, he doesn?t campaign, and it doesn?t come across as cheering for the > virus. The virus is not an opportunity, it?s a crisis. Some crises should > go to waste. > > > > *> **We are over-reporting, they* [China] *are under-reporting* > > > > >?And you know that to be true because you want it to be true. John K > Clark > > > > Do you believe China?s case load suddenly dropped to zero and has never > come back? Every other country, including those where the government has > the authority to shut down everything until their people starve still has > cases. China is reporting zero. China gave this horrifying epidemic to > this planet through their dishonesty in attempting a coverup back when we > had time to react. I don?t believe China. > There are several countries that have done very well containing and limiting cases. Taiwan is an example, even though it is densely populated and close to China. The behaviour of the virus is non-linear, and relatively small differences in management of the situation can make large differences in the numbers. > -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brent.allsop at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 02:16:17 2020 From: brent.allsop at gmail.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 20:16:17 -0600 Subject: [ExI] facial recognition software In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: All I hear when people say they want to stay anonymous is: "I want to slap you, anonymously, today, so I can continue to slap you every day, also anonymously, for the foreseeable future." Society can't work without a good identity system, can it? On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 6:12 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > It's broken, misidentifying people n far too many cases. > > Police relying on it would thus conduct enforcement against > innocent people in far too many cases. > > Say what you will about privacy, but "the cops would arrest the wrong > person if they used it" seems like a good enough reason not to use it, even > for people who do not care about the privacy of others. > > On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 12:59 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> I see where Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM have started refusing to sell this >> software to police depts. until the issue is settled at the federal level. >> >> I am of two minds about that software: to some extent it keeps us safe >> by identifying perps for the cops to bring in. >> >> But it is also an invasion of privacy, and I think that outweighs the >> good usage above. >> >> bill w >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 02:33:12 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 19:33:12 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <7EB6E298-2AA7-4BD9-9E5B-2BDEBBE9D5DE@gmail.com> On Jun 12, 2020, at 6:45 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > Racism has been cutting lives short for over a century. adrian > > How about ever since different races appeared? I keep saying that racism, sexism and some other isms are perfectly normal; expected. It would be astonishing if they weren't bases for discrimination (not prejudice - we in the South know blacks quite well and are not prejudiced. Discriminatory, of course.) > > bill w Not really. If you go back far enough, yeah, people do discriminate, but it?s along different lines. For instance, recall the piece I sent citing Bacon?s Rebellion. That was mostly a class rebellion but the authorities managed to drive a wedge between lower class Whites and Blacks. This meant that before the rebellion Blacks and Whites were working together against the upper class. Of course, if meant when modern racial classifications took root, okay, but those were fairly recent. They start in the modern period and particularly pick up steam in the late 18th century. They don?t go back to prehistory or even ancient times. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 13 02:33:35 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 19:33:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character In-Reply-To: References: <005801d63d27$2745c0f0$75d142d0$@rainier66.com> <025501d6410b$8cf090f0$a6d1b2d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00f501d6412b$0a0a88b0$1e1f9a10$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Sent: Friday, June 12, 2020 4:51 PM To: ExI chat list Cc: William Flynn Wallace Subject: Re: [ExI] Well-roundedness and character >>?You can do some interesting tricks with these low-cost DNA tests, but perhaps the most important one of all is that it educates people about themselves. It did that for me. spike >?If one is totally free of racism, then it should not matter what color your ancestors were. As a matter of historical interest, sure. bill w Ja, it allowed me to find out extremely detailed bits of history I never would have understood or cared about had I not discovered the history. It has led to learning some astonishing detail in obscure historical narratives, incidents which have been recorded perhaps once in millions of history books. Regarding that finding on my great^3 grandmother, I read the account by looking up the only reference I could find to her name, year of birth and state of birth, read the story, vaguely concluded this was someone else, later found out she was the subject of that story, recorded in one family history book written perhaps 100 years ago, in a print volume in the Sutro genealogical library. I found the story by looking up a name, read the story because it was interesting, found out 30 years later that was my own ancestor. I like knowing about that. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Sat Jun 13 05:09:21 2020 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 05:09:21 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ExI] The present and future of AI In-Reply-To: References: <103167237.77264.1591999536605@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1026670232.155653.1592024961743@mail.yahoo.com> My pleasure, Jason. I must apologize for top posting but Yahoo seems to bounce my emails back to me as attempted spam if I don't top post on this account. I did not factor in the time-complexity of the human brain at all. I simply extrapolated the average memory cost for individual neurons and synapse weights in tensorflow for AlphaGo and scaled up the number of neurons and synapse weights to that of the human brain in a linear fashion. So my analysis was more based on the Kolmogorov complexity than computational complexity. I do realize that this results in oversimplification, but it was more of a back of the envelope first approximation rather than an in-depth analysis.? If you factor in time complexity, then AGI will already be superhuman before space-complexity parity with the human brain is reached due to the speed differences. How effectively one can trade space for time in AI is a fascinating question. I think it would necessarily be limited by the required non-linearity of the neural activation function. Let me think more on this. Stuart LaForge On Friday, June 12, 2020, 06:27:17 PM PDT, Jason Resch via extropy-chat wrote: On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 5:22 PM The Avantguardian via extropy-chat wrote: > I would say that we are close enough that we need to have a better definition of AGI. For example does a honeybee have "general intelligence"? If so, we are already really close because we can currently compute neural networks with the complexity of a honeybee brain. Assuming neuron number is a correlate of intelligence, it will be about 44 years until Moore's law reaches human brain parity. But we might reach rat or raven parity in about 14 years. > > See old thread "Benchmarking the SIngularity" for more info: > > ?http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2019-July/097196.html > Stuart, Thanks for sharing that, it was very interesting. Regarding parity of the human brain, how are you estimating the computational complexity of the brain? The Summit supercomputer can perform as many Ops/second as a generous estimate of total synaptic firings the human brain can have per second. Jason? _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From giulio at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 06:57:47 2020 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 08:57:47 +0200 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? Message-ID: As I see things: 1. If Trump wins US astronauts will probably walk on the Moon before the end of the decade. Not by 2024 (the last year of Trump's second term), which doesn't seem feasible. But enough money will have been spent on Artemis by the end of 2014 to make it impossible for the next administration to cancel the program. So, humans on the Moon by the end of the decade. But this would be yet another unsustainable stunt without a clear follow-up strategy. 2. If Trump loses, good bye Artemis and the hope to return to the Moon. The US space program will be limited to politically correct Earth and climate science missions, with some token planetary and space science missions. 3. There's no hope of real bipartisan support for ambitious space programs. Not in these days of toxic political polarization between two camps that hate each other and don't want to work together for the common good. 4. China wins. Did I miss something? From danust2012 at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 08:21:36 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 01:21:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Have you looked at what happened prior to Trump, especially under Obama? The COTS program (sure, started under Bush fils, but came to fruition during Obama?s tenure), for instance, and the various interplanetary missions. Actually, there?s no reason everyone can?t win in space. I don?t see Chinese success as negating anyone else?s. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst > On Jun 13, 2020, at 12:01 AM, Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat wrote: > > ?As I see things: > > 1. If Trump wins US astronauts will probably walk on the Moon before > the end of the decade. Not by 2024 (the last year of Trump's second > term), which doesn't seem feasible. But enough money will have been > spent on Artemis by the end of 2014 to make it impossible for the next > administration to cancel the program. So, humans on the Moon by the > end of the decade. But this would be yet another unsustainable stunt > without a clear follow-up strategy. > > 2. If Trump loses, good bye Artemis and the hope to return to the > Moon. The US space program will be limited to politically correct > Earth and climate science missions, with some token planetary and > space science missions. > > 3. There's no hope of real bipartisan support for ambitious space > programs. Not in these days of toxic political polarization between > two camps that hate each other and don't want to work together for the > common good. > > 4. China wins. > > Did I miss something? > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 11:25:36 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 07:25:36 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Cory Massimino on advocating police abolition In-Reply-To: <23C853C8-9D21-4480-98D6-700154C40D36@gmail.com> References: <23C853C8-9D21-4480-98D6-700154C40D36@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 8:34 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> The police are not going to be abolished, it just ain't gonna happen. >> Pretending otherwise is a fantasy. > > > > That?s what you believe, but it still doesn?t explain why you thought > Cory (or yours truly) confused abolition with defunding. > Because the phrase "defund the police" is suddenly all in the news and is basically a good idea, however it's a very poor name to give it because it's practically begging to be misinterpreted; right wingers have tried with some success to tar those who advocate it with the very silly idea of abolishing the police. What "defund the police" really means is to stop using cops to give tickets for minor violations of the traffic laws (robot cameras or the equivalent of meter maids could just write down license plate numbers) and decriminalized the drug laws so police would not be needed to enforce that either, thus the budgets of police departments could be reduced significantly and the money saved used for more important things like drug rehabilitation; unfortunately all that won't fit on a bumper sticker. But they've got to find a better phrase than "defund the police". John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 11:42:44 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 07:42:44 -0400 Subject: [ExI] monumental change In-Reply-To: <6CCE6573-0478-4B04-8DB9-409712EEAD1B@gmail.com> References: <6CCE6573-0478-4B04-8DB9-409712EEAD1B@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 8:41 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > *let?s not call good marketing courageous. * > OK, but I still think you should give NASCAR some credit for doing the right thing even if it was late in the day. At least their racism was not so ingrained that they rejected an obviously good marketing idea, and there are prominent examples of people in very high positions of power who have done exactly that. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 13:11:22 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 08:11:22 -0500 Subject: [ExI] facial recognition software In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I think lack of in person anonymity causes issues also. When one makes a mistake it can never be outrun. One cannot ?go to the frontier? or ?go into the wilds? or any such thing. One cannot take up a different name and live a different life, never to be reminded of their past. You can NEVER start over. Employers are legally required to dredge up your past even for fast food jobs. There will always be evidence of that baby you gave up for adoption, or what have you. I don?t think that?s good. SR Ballard > On Jun 12, 2020, at 9:16 PM, Brent Allsop via extropy-chat wrote: > > > All I hear when people say they want to stay anonymous is: > > "I want to slap you, anonymously, today, so I can continue to slap you every day, also anonymously, for the foreseeable future." > > Society can't work without a good identity system, can it? > > >> On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 6:12 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat wrote: >> It's broken, misidentifying people n far too many cases. >> >> Police relying on it would thus conduct enforcement against innocent people in far too many cases. >> >> Say what you will about privacy, but "the cops would arrest the wrong person if they used it" seems like a good enough reason not to use it, even for people who do not care about the privacy of others. >> >>> On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 12:59 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: >>> I see where Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM have started refusing to sell this software to police depts. until the issue is settled at the federal level. >>> >>> I am of two minds about that software: to some extent it keeps us safe by identifying perps for the cops to bring in. >>> >>> But it is also an invasion of privacy, and I think that outweighs the good usage above. >>> >>> bill w >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 13 13:12:44 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 06:12:44 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <003401d64184$54a33940$fde9abc0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? As I see things: >...1. If Trump wins ... >...2. If Trump loses... Oy vey, now ya dun it. >...3. There's no hope of real bipartisan support for ... That has been gone some time ago. >...4. China wins... Ja. That has been coming for some time. >...Did I miss something? Ja, the role that business plays vs government. The US government must find the least efficient way to do any space program because it needs to spread the contracts over all the states, in order to get senators and representatives to support it (presidents can make suggestions if they want, but congress must allocate the funds.) China doesn't do that: it has a different form of government. Private business doesn't do that either: it finds the most efficient way to get things done. Last week we saw a privately owned rocket carry two guys to the station in style and the first stage landed with dignity on its feet. We have a lotta smart guys, such as Elon Musk and our own Adrian doing commercialization of space. They are the future of space. Governments stand down, let private industry take over. spike _______________________________________________ From steinberg.will at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 13:13:25 2020 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 09:13:25 -0400 Subject: [ExI] antifa In-Reply-To: References: <8DEB0EE6-BEE5-464F-832D-B0A8D5143878@gmail.com> <003701d640ce$75e6d0f0$61b472d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Fwiw the Gathering of the Juggalos looks really chill from documentary stuff I've seen about it. People seem extremely accepting and mostly anti-conflict On Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 20:58 SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > ICP once ruined an entire venue, as in their fans completely trashed all > the metal and all the flooring, from spraying so much faygo (IPC?s iconic > drink from their hometown). > > Other venues fear the same: > https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.inverse.com/article/7357-san-diego-insane-clown-posse-show-cancelled-because-of-fear-of-faygo-damage/amp > > SR Ballard > > On Jun 12, 2020, at 10:30 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > ...> On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat > > Subject: Re: [ExI] antifa > > ...And hopefully the last. Or I?ll be forced to share factoids. > > > SR Ballard > > > But SR, we like it when you share factoids. Share away. That's what > friends are for. > > spike > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 13:26:25 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 08:26:25 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: <7EB6E298-2AA7-4BD9-9E5B-2BDEBBE9D5DE@gmail.com> References: <7EB6E298-2AA7-4BD9-9E5B-2BDEBBE9D5DE@gmail.com> Message-ID: Can we agree that for a long time humans existed as tribes? Good. Then you have tribalism - your tribe is right about everything. The neighboring tribe isd a bunch of robbers and rapists etc. A person with different clothes, face paint etc. was one to fear. This gave rise to xenophobia - in the genes I assume. So humans discriminate against anyone different, just like the hens pecking to death a chick who looks malformed. Not like us - that's the motto. It can be skin color or just anything. And we still do it- by race, by religion, by nationality and so on. All the way back. A million years? Fear is our most important emotion. It keeps us alive. It goes back to the beginning. bill w On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 9:42 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Jun 12, 2020, at 6:45 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > Racism has been cutting lives short for over a century. adrian > > How about ever since different races appeared? I keep saying that racism, > sexism and some other isms are perfectly normal; expected. It would be > astonishing if they weren't bases for discrimination (not prejudice - we in > the South know blacks quite well and are not prejudiced. Discriminatory, > of course.) > > bill w > > > Not really. If you go back far enough, yeah, people do discriminate, but > it?s along different lines. For instance, recall the piece I sent citing > Bacon?s Rebellion. That was mostly a class rebellion but the authorities > managed to drive a wedge between lower class Whites and Blacks. This meant > that before the rebellion Blacks and Whites were working together against > the upper class. > > Of course, if meant when modern racial classifications took root, okay, > but those were fairly recent. They start in the modern period and > particularly pick up steam in the late 18th century. They don?t go back to > prehistory or even ancient times. > > Regards, > > Dan > Sample my Kindle books at: > > http://author.to/DanUst > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 13 14:19:52 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 07:19:52 -0700 Subject: [ExI] facial recognition software In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <003801d6418d$b5a51f20$20ef5d60$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] facial recognition software >?When one makes a mistake it can never be outrun. One cannot ?go to the frontier? or ?go into the wilds? or any such thing. One cannot take up a different name and live a different life, never to be reminded of their past? You can NEVER start over. Employers are legally required to dredge up your past even for fast food jobs. I teach this to my scouts. In their world, there is no do-over. The age of accountability marches steadily back. Be careful what you post. I could forget finding a job with a clearance now because of what I have posted on ExI: a potential employer wouldn?t know me well enough to know most of what I post is to entertain the proletariat. >?There will always be evidence of that baby you gave up for adoption, or what have you? Not necessarily. In California and other places, we managed to get a ballot measure that allows anyone to hand over a baby without identification of the person, no attempt to identify, no paperwork, just go to the police station or fire station or hospital, hand over the baby, walk away, no questions asked. I don?t know why that took so long to get that law in place: it saves lives. >?I don?t think that?s good. SR Ballard It does make life complicated for those who go wrong in their early years, I will agree. I don?t know what to do about it: in its various forms, information technology keeps marching on. spike ? On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 12:59 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat > wrote: I see where Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM have started refusing to sell this software to police depts. until the issue is settled at the federal level. I am of two minds about that software: to some extent it keeps us safe by identifying perps for the cops to bring in. But it is also an invasion of privacy, and I think that outweighs the good usage above. bill w _______________________________________________ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 14:39:52 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 07:39:52 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Trusting China information was Protest Message-ID: Keith Henson wrote: snip > China is correct in imposing a quarantine on people coming in. But it is currently stupid for the US to limit air travel from China. Looks like I spoke too soon. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/13/beijing-district-in-wartime-emergency-after-virus-spike-shuts-market.html Spike, do you think the Chinese are lying about this report? If so, why Keith From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 13 15:07:27 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 08:07:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Trusting China information was Protest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <000a01d64194$5a9640d0$0fc2c270$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Keith Henson via extropy-chat Sent: Saturday, June 13, 2020 7:40 AM To: ExI chat list Cc: Keith Henson Subject: [ExI] Trusting China information was Protest Keith Henson wrote: snip > China is correct in imposing a quarantine on people coming in. But it is currently stupid for the US to limit air travel from China. Looks like I spoke too soon. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/13/beijing-district-in-wartime-emergency-after- virus-spike-shuts-market.html Spike, do you think the Chinese are lying about this report? If so, why Keith _______________________________________________ Keith this was explained to me by my neighbor who came from China to the US about 25 yrs ago. All the news we hear about China is from their metropolis areas. The government tightly controls those, the economy cooks there. Out in the country, the government doesn't care much what people do: they never seriously enforced the one-child rule for instance. People are poor and don't have much out there. So the government doesn't do much, if anything. But, the rural people travel to the cities to trade, and return. I don't believe the China caseload dropped to zero, as they reported, because they would still have cases out in their rural areas that the government didn't know about, or care about even if they knew. These cases would keep the virus churning around at a low level, even if they managed to lock down the cities. In the cities, there are essential services, just as there are anywhere. I think that virus didn't go to zero there. They would have us believe it did. I agree some places did a good job of controlling the virus, but those places have power that our governors do not have. Our county health departments have some authority, but most of us here saw at least some cases of people and businesses ignoring the county's orders, without serious consequences. I heard a rumor (unconfirmed) that a local gun shop was given a (symbolic) fifty dollar fine one time but it is unlikely to be paid. It isn't clear that kind of thing happens in China (people treating the governor's orders as sage advice) so sure they controlled it better. We saw massive riots during the lockdown, with rioters and looters ignoring social distancing guidelines, but none were charged with disobeying the health department guidlines. I don't think China completely eliminated the virus. spike From danust2012 at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 15:30:12 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 08:30:12 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Major media outlet runs doctored photos of CHAZ Message-ID: <83E9346E-3922-4FC8-A0CC-99CF4FAF38AB@gmail.com> https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/fox-news-runs-digitally-altered-images-in-coverage-of-seattles-protests-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone/ I?m hoping they haven?t shaped the narrative here for many people, but there it is. Hoping to see for myself today. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 15:55:16 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 08:55:16 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cory Massimino on advocating police abolition In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <70B2664D-A003-47F4-BD4B-CC9F351390B0@gmail.com> On Jun 13, 2020, at 4:28 AM, John Clark via extropy-chat wrote: > > On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 8:34 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote: > >>> >> The police are not going to be abolished, it just ain't gonna happen. Pretending otherwise is a fantasy. >> >> > That?s what you believe, but it still doesn?t explain why you thought Cory (or yours truly) confused abolition with defunding. > > Because the phrase "defund the police" is suddenly all in the news and is basically a good idea, however it's a very poor name to give it because it's practically begging to be misinterpreted; right wingers have tried with some success to tar those who advocate it with the very silly idea of abolishing the police. What "defund the police" really means is to stop using cops to give tickets for minor violations of the traffic laws (robot cameras or the equivalent of meter maids could just write down license plate numbers) and decriminalized the drug laws so police would not be needed to enforce that either, thus the budgets of police departments could be reduced significantly and the money saved used for more important things like drug rehabilitation; unfortunately all that won't fit on a bumper sticker. But they've got to find a better phrase than "defund the police". > > John K Clark That doesn?t make sense given your response. You could?ve said that you disagree with Cory and then went on to talk about how some folks, particularly those in the Right, tend to confuse police abolition with defunding the police (or for that matter, anything that rolls back police power and privilege). Instead, you clipped my post and made a comment that can only be interpreted as if both Cory and I were responsible for the confusion. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 16:20:18 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 09:20:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Trusting China information was Protest Message-ID: snip > I don't think China completely eliminated the virus. Obviously not. However, when they said they had, I am reasonably sure they thought that was true. The question I was asking was is if you think the data from China about this outbreak is factual and if you don't, why are they reporting this incident? Keith From dsunley at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 16:50:35 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 10:50:35 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: <7EB6E298-2AA7-4BD9-9E5B-2BDEBBE9D5DE@gmail.com> Message-ID: Tribalism would be significantly more functional if we didn't, for some reason, insist on building transnational empires instead of nice, small, relatively stable ethnostates. I mean, I can sort of see it, because those nice, contained, stable ethno-states did start WWI. But it was the transnational empires getting dragged in that really put the "W" in WWI. On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 7:43 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Can we agree that for a long time humans existed as tribes? Good. Then > you have tribalism - your tribe is right about everything. The neighboring > tribe isd a bunch of robbers and rapists etc. A person with different > clothes, face paint etc. was one to fear. > > This gave rise to xenophobia - in the genes I assume. So humans > discriminate against anyone different, just like the hens pecking to death > a chick who looks malformed. > > Not like us - that's the motto. It can be skin color or just anything. > And we still do it- by race, by religion, by nationality and so on. All > the way back. A million years? > > Fear is our most important emotion. It keeps us alive. It goes back to > the beginning. > > bill w > > On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 9:42 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> On Jun 12, 2020, at 6:45 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >> Racism has been cutting lives short for over a century. adrian >> >> How about ever since different races appeared? I keep saying that >> racism, sexism and some other isms are perfectly normal; expected. It >> would be astonishing if they weren't bases for discrimination (not >> prejudice - we in the South know blacks quite well and are not prejudiced. >> Discriminatory, of course.) >> >> bill w >> >> >> Not really. If you go back far enough, yeah, people do discriminate, but >> it?s along different lines. For instance, recall the piece I sent citing >> Bacon?s Rebellion. That was mostly a class rebellion but the authorities >> managed to drive a wedge between lower class Whites and Blacks. This meant >> that before the rebellion Blacks and Whites were working together against >> the upper class. >> >> Of course, if meant when modern racial classifications took root, okay, >> but those were fairly recent. They start in the modern period and >> particularly pick up steam in the late 18th century. They don?t go back to >> prehistory or even ancient times. >> >> Regards, >> >> Dan >> Sample my Kindle books at: >> >> http://author.to/DanUst >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 19:01:32 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 12:01:32 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest Message-ID: William Flynn Wallace wrote: > Can we agree that for a long time humans existed as tribes? Good. Then you have tribalism - your tribe is right about everything. The neighboring tribe is a bunch of robbers and rapists etc. A person with different clothes, face paint etc. was one to fear. Bill, you have most of it, but you miss the fact that *most of the time*, your tribe swapped women with the neighboring tribe. > This gave rise to xenophobia - in the genes I assume. So humans discriminate against anyone different, You are right that it is in the genes (what isn't?) but xenophobia buildup typically follows a current or pending resource crisis. Besides an evolved trait to xenophobia, there is a behavioral switch flipped by the resource crisis, or in more modern terms falling income per capita. The sequence in the tribal era was resource crisis -> xenophobia -> to war. The war reduced the population which solved the resource crisis until the population built up and another resource crisis came along. Rinse, repeat for a million years. > Not like us - that's the motto. It can be skin color or just anything. Yep. Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia for recent examples. > And we still do it- by race, by religion, by nationality and so on. It is possible to keep the whole sequence turned off. Steady or rising income per capita will keep these stone-age traits switched off. Birth control is essential. Not that the population cannot rise, it just needs to rise slower than economic growth. That's why the IRA went out of business. Keith From danust2012 at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 19:40:34 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 12:40:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <48A4C837-D748-4C4E-96B2-41EBD1C4B63D@gmail.com> It was more bands than tribes, but recall my second sentence: ?If you go back far enough, yeah, people do discriminate, but it?s along different lines.? In other words, yeah, discrimination goes back a long ways, probably into prehistory. My point was, rather, that modern categories of race are rather recent ? dating to the modern period and, specifically, growing stronger in the 18th century. Sure, before that people found other ways to despise each other, but earlier people?s found other distinctions more compelling. Also, I think there are some built-in defaults for people or one?s acquired early in life. Gender seems to be acquired very early ? to the point that Cordelia Fine calls young children ?gender detectives.? (See her _Delusions of Gebder_.) This might mean that if children aren?t raised to inculcate conventional categories, then they won?t default to these as adults. And people hold many false ideas and stupid behaviors that would be better for them to change, don?t you think? For instance, it seems if you ask most people their view of everyday physics isn?t even Newtonian. It?s pre-Newtonian. Should we just give up and forget about trying to correct ideas that can actually be dangerous to hold? (Not understanding momentum and inertia can get you killed in many situations.) Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst > On Jun 13, 2020, at 6:43 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > ? > Can we agree that for a long time humans existed as tribes? Good. Then you have tribalism - your tribe is right about everything. The neighboring tribe isd a bunch of robbers and rapists etc. A person with different clothes, face paint etc. was one to fear. > > This gave rise to xenophobia - in the genes I assume. So humans discriminate against anyone different, just like the hens pecking to death a chick who looks malformed. > > Not like us - that's the motto. It can be skin color or just anything. And we still do it- by race, by religion, by nationality and so on. All the way back. A million years? > > Fear is our most important emotion. It keeps us alive. It goes back to the beginning. > > bill w > >> On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 9:42 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote: >>> On Jun 12, 2020, at 6:45 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: >>> Racism has been cutting lives short for over a century. adrian >>> >>> How about ever since different races appeared? I keep saying that racism, sexism and some other isms are perfectly normal; expected. It would be astonishing if they weren't bases for discrimination (not prejudice - we in the South know blacks quite well and are not prejudiced. Discriminatory, of course.) >>> >>> bill w >> >> Not really. If you go back far enough, yeah, people do discriminate, but it?s along different lines. For instance, recall the piece I sent citing Bacon?s Rebellion. That was mostly a class rebellion but the authorities managed to drive a wedge between lower class Whites and Blacks. This meant that before the rebellion Blacks and Whites were working together against the upper class. >> >> Of course, if meant when modern racial classifications took root, okay, but those were fairly recent. They start in the modern period and particularly pick up steam in the late 18th century. They don?t go back to prehistory or even ancient times. >> >> Regards, >> >> Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 19:44:12 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 14:44:12 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Thanks, Keith. Swapping women to avoid the interbreeding problem has fascinated me. Did they really know what they were doing? That close kin breeding led to increased deformity? I suppose they did know. There must have been a lot of males in puppy love who saw their darling girl go to another tribe. I also seem to recall that some males went too. Very hazy memory: some of the men were criminals that were accepted into the other tribe as slaves in exchange for goods. bill w On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 2:04 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > William Flynn Wallace wrote: > > > Can we agree that for a long time humans existed as tribes? Good. Then > you have tribalism - your tribe is right about everything. The neighboring > tribe is a bunch of robbers and rapists etc. A person with different > clothes, face paint etc. was one to fear. > > Bill, you have most of it, but you miss the fact that *most of the > time*, your tribe swapped women with the neighboring tribe. > > > This gave rise to xenophobia - in the genes I assume. So humans > discriminate against anyone different, > > You are right that it is in the genes (what isn't?) but xenophobia > buildup typically follows a current or pending resource crisis. > Besides an evolved trait to xenophobia, there is a behavioral switch > flipped by the resource crisis, or in more modern terms falling income > per capita. The sequence in the tribal era was resource crisis -> > xenophobia -> to war. The war reduced the population which solved the > resource crisis until the population built up and another resource > crisis came along. Rinse, repeat for a million years. > > > Not like us - that's the motto. It can be skin color or just anything. > > Yep. Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia for recent examples. > > > And we still do it- by race, by religion, by nationality and so on. > > It is possible to keep the whole sequence turned off. Steady or > rising income per capita will keep these stone-age traits switched > off. Birth control is essential. Not that the population cannot > rise, it just needs to rise slower than economic growth. > > That's why the IRA went out of business. > > Keith > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ben at zaiboc.net Sat Jun 13 20:36:34 2020 From: ben at zaiboc.net (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 21:36:34 +0100 Subject: [ExI] ExI] Fwd: The present and future of AI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 13/06/2020 00:33, Jason Resch wrote: > > I came up with the following list of human-specific traits of > intelligence: > > * Communicate via natural language > * Learn, adapt, and grow > * Move through a dynamic environment > * Recognize sights and sounds > * Be creative in music, art, writing and invention > * Reason with logic and rationality to solve problems > I'd say that theory of mind, including self-awareness, is more important than any of these, especially in an AGI. Creating interactive internal models, including of oneself, underlies, or is an important element of, most or even all of these things. -- Ben Zaiboc -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 20:39:30 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 15:39:30 -0500 Subject: [ExI] facial recognition software In-Reply-To: <003801d6418d$b5a51f20$20ef5d60$@rainier66.com> References: <003801d6418d$b5a51f20$20ef5d60$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <2FA54314-A62E-4B61-ADEE-7FC810C2B72E@gmail.com> > >?There will always be evidence of that baby you gave up for adoption, or what have you? > > Not necessarily. In California and other places, we managed to get a ballot measure that allows anyone to hand over a baby without identification of the person, no attempt to identify, no paperwork, just go to the police station or fire station or hospital, hand over the baby, walk away, no questions asked. I don?t know why that took so long to get that law in place: it saves lives. You misunderstand. Even with these laws there is some shred of evidence? a photo online, a hospital bill, etc that would always out you. If for some reason someone wanted to know if you had a baby, I feel quite certain they would find a way to know. A woman can?t really ?go help their aunt for a year on the farm?. Their husband couldn?t have ?died in the war?, etc. there are ways to check. Every year there are fewer jobs for true misanthropes. Loggers are no longer solitary. Trappers barely exist as most skins are farmed. Hunters are supplanted by commercial farms. Less fire-watch as there are less forests and more satellites. Small towns die and big cities explode. Manual jobs are supplanted by technology and service jobs. What do we do with all the stupid people? Is stupid a disability now? I ask because there are people who apply to work with me (fast food) who are literally too stupid to take orders, make desserts, and pour drinks. It?s crazy common. These are things I am very concerned about. Normal things are increasingly criminalized. I don?t find it to be a good thing. Being an asshole shouldn?t be illegal. Being stupid shouldn?t be illegal. I really am concerned that when we are making and imaging the future that we?re only making spaces for people like ourselves or who we wish we were, and forgetting about everyone else. > On Jun 13, 2020, at 9:19 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] facial recognition software > > >?When one makes a mistake it can never be outrun. One cannot ?go to the frontier? or ?go into the wilds? or any such thing. One cannot take up a different name and live a different life, never to be reminded of their past? You can NEVER start over. Employers are legally required to dredge up your past even for fast food jobs. > > > I teach this to my scouts. In their world, there is no do-over. The age of accountability marches steadily back. Be careful what you post. I could forget finding a job with a clearance now because of what I have posted on ExI: a potential employer wouldn?t know me well enough to know most of what I post is to entertain the proletariat. > > >?There will always be evidence of that baby you gave up for adoption, or what have you? > > Not necessarily. In California and other places, we managed to get a ballot measure that allows anyone to hand over a baby without identification of the person, no attempt to identify, no paperwork, just go to the police station or fire station or hospital, hand over the baby, walk away, no questions asked. I don?t know why that took so long to get that law in place: it saves lives. > > >?I don?t think that?s good. > > SR Ballard > > It does make life complicated for those who go wrong in their early years, I will agree. I don?t know what to do about it: in its various forms, information technology keeps marching on. > > spike > > > ? > > > On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 12:59 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > I see where Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM have started refusing to sell this software to police depts. until the issue is settled at the federal level. > > I am of two minds about that software: to some extent it keeps us safe by identifying perps for the cops to bring in. > > But it is also an invasion of privacy, and I think that outweighs the good usage above. > > bill w > > > _______________________________________________ > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 21:42:52 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 16:42:52 -0500 Subject: [ExI] facial recognition software In-Reply-To: <2FA54314-A62E-4B61-ADEE-7FC810C2B72E@gmail.com> References: <003801d6418d$b5a51f20$20ef5d60$@rainier66.com> <2FA54314-A62E-4B61-ADEE-7FC810C2B72E@gmail.com> Message-ID: A couple of questions: is 'stupid' the same as unintelligent? 2 - who hired these bozos? I would think that they would have some kind of exercises where the applicant does what he will do on the job, and if people can't do what you said, they wouldn't have been hired. 'Stupid' has a different connotation for me. To me it means knowing better but not doing better. I know that's not in the dictionary, but we need a word for the gap between knowledge and proper actions. bill w On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 3:50 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >?There will always be evidence of that baby you gave up for adoption, or > what have you? > > > > Not necessarily. In California and other places, we managed to get a > ballot measure that allows anyone to hand over a baby without > identification of the person, no attempt to identify, no paperwork, just go > to the police station or fire station or hospital, hand over the baby, walk > away, no questions asked. I don?t know why that took so long to get that > law in place: it saves lives. > > > You misunderstand. Even with these laws there is some shred of evidence? a > photo online, a hospital bill, etc that would always out you. If for some > reason someone wanted to know if you had a baby, I feel quite certain they > would find a way to know. > > A woman can?t really ?go help their aunt for a year on the farm?. Their > husband couldn?t have ?died in the war?, etc. there are ways to check. > > Every year there are fewer jobs for true misanthropes. Loggers are no > longer solitary. Trappers barely exist as most skins are farmed. Hunters > are supplanted by commercial farms. Less fire-watch as there are less > forests and more satellites. Small towns die and big cities explode. Manual > jobs are supplanted by technology and service jobs. > > What do we do with all the stupid people? Is stupid a disability now? I > ask because there are people who apply to work with me (fast food) who are > literally too stupid to take orders, make desserts, and pour drinks. It?s > crazy common. > > These are things I am very concerned about. Normal things are increasingly > criminalized. I don?t find it to be a good thing. Being an asshole > shouldn?t be illegal. Being stupid shouldn?t be illegal. > > I really am concerned that when we are making and imaging the future that > we?re only making spaces for people like ourselves or who we wish we were, > and forgetting about everyone else. > > On Jun 13, 2020, at 9:19 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *SR Ballard via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] facial recognition software > > > > >?When one makes a mistake it can never be outrun. One cannot ?go to the > frontier? or ?go into the wilds? or any such thing. One cannot take up a > different name and live a different life, never to be reminded of their > past? You can NEVER start over. Employers are legally required to dredge up > your past even for fast food jobs. > > > > > > I teach this to my scouts. In their world, there is no do-over. The age > of accountability marches steadily back. Be careful what you post. I > could forget finding a job with a clearance now because of what I have > posted on ExI: a potential employer wouldn?t know me well enough to know > most of what I post is to entertain the proletariat. > > > > >?There will always be evidence of that baby you gave up for adoption, or > what have you? > > > > Not necessarily. In California and other places, we managed to get a > ballot measure that allows anyone to hand over a baby without > identification of the person, no attempt to identify, no paperwork, just go > to the police station or fire station or hospital, hand over the baby, walk > away, no questions asked. I don?t know why that took so long to get that > law in place: it saves lives. > > > > >?I don?t think that?s good. > > > > SR Ballard > > > > It does make life complicated for those who go wrong in their early years, > I will agree. I don?t know what to do about it: in its various forms, > information technology keeps marching on. > > > > spike > > > > > ? > > > > On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 12:59 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > I see where Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM have started refusing to sell this > software to police depts. until the issue is settled at the federal level. > > > > I am of two minds about that software: to some extent it keeps us safe by > identifying perps for the cops to bring in. > > > > But it is also an invasion of privacy, and I think that outweighs the good > usage above. > > > > bill w > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 22:13:48 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 17:13:48 -0500 Subject: [ExI] facial recognition software In-Reply-To: References: <003801d6418d$b5a51f20$20ef5d60$@rainier66.com> <2FA54314-A62E-4B61-ADEE-7FC810C2B72E@gmail.com> Message-ID: <97BEEC5B-D370-4369-BAB8-B212AD7CA784@gmail.com> It?s not legal (per our insurance) for them to try the job. SR Ballard > On Jun 13, 2020, at 4:42 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > A couple of questions: is 'stupid' the same as unintelligent? 2 - who hired these bozos? I would think that they would have some kind of exercises where the applicant does what he will do on the job, and if people can't do what you said, they wouldn't have been hired. > > 'Stupid' has a different connotation for me. To me it means knowing better but not doing better. I know that's not in the dictionary, but we need a word for the gap between knowledge and proper actions. bill w > > On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 3:50 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat wrote: >>> >?There will always be evidence of that baby you gave up for adoption, or what have you? >>> >>> >>> >>> Not necessarily. In California and other places, we managed to get a ballot measure that allows anyone to hand over a baby without identification of the person, no attempt to identify, no paperwork, just go to the police station or fire station or hospital, hand over the baby, walk away, no questions asked. I don?t know why that took so long to get that law in place: it saves lives. >>> >> >> You misunderstand. Even with these laws there is some shred of evidence? a photo online, a hospital bill, etc that would always out you. If for some reason someone wanted to know if you had a baby, I feel quite certain they would find a way to know. >> >> A woman can?t really ?go help their aunt for a year on the farm?. Their husband couldn?t have ?died in the war?, etc. there are ways to check. >> >> Every year there are fewer jobs for true misanthropes. Loggers are no longer solitary. Trappers barely exist as most skins are farmed. Hunters are supplanted by commercial farms. Less fire-watch as there are less forests and more satellites. Small towns die and big cities explode. Manual jobs are supplanted by technology and service jobs. >> >> What do we do with all the stupid people? Is stupid a disability now? I ask because there are people who apply to work with me (fast food) who are literally too stupid to take orders, make desserts, and pour drinks. It?s crazy common. >> >> These are things I am very concerned about. Normal things are increasingly criminalized. I don?t find it to be a good thing. Being an asshole shouldn?t be illegal. Being stupid shouldn?t be illegal. >> >> I really am concerned that when we are making and imaging the future that we?re only making spaces for people like ourselves or who we wish we were, and forgetting about everyone else. >> >>> On Jun 13, 2020, at 9:19 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat >>> Subject: Re: [ExI] facial recognition software >>> >>> >>> >>> >?When one makes a mistake it can never be outrun. One cannot ?go to the frontier? or ?go into the wilds? or any such thing. One cannot take up a different name and live a different life, never to be reminded of their past? You can NEVER start over. Employers are legally required to dredge up your past even for fast food jobs. >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> I teach this to my scouts. In their world, there is no do-over. The age of accountability marches steadily back. Be careful what you post. I could forget finding a job with a clearance now because of what I have posted on ExI: a potential employer wouldn?t know me well enough to know most of what I post is to entertain the proletariat. >>> >>> >>> >>> >?There will always be evidence of that baby you gave up for adoption, or what have you? >>> >>> >>> >>> Not necessarily. In California and other places, we managed to get a ballot measure that allows anyone to hand over a baby without identification of the person, no attempt to identify, no paperwork, just go to the police station or fire station or hospital, hand over the baby, walk away, no questions asked. I don?t know why that took so long to get that law in place: it saves lives. >>> >>> >>> >>> >?I don?t think that?s good. >>> >>> >>> >>> SR Ballard >>> >>> >>> >>> It does make life complicated for those who go wrong in their early years, I will agree. I don?t know what to do about it: in its various forms, information technology keeps marching on. >>> >>> >>> >>> spike >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> ? >>> >>> >>> >>> On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 12:59 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: >>> >>> I see where Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM have started refusing to sell this software to police depts. until the issue is settled at the federal level. >>> >>> >>> >>> I am of two minds about that software: to some extent it keeps us safe by identifying perps for the cops to bring in. >>> >>> >>> >>> But it is also an invasion of privacy, and I think that outweighs the good usage above. >>> >>> >>> >>> bill w >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mbb386 at main.nc.us Sat Jun 13 22:12:54 2020 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 18:12:54 -0400 Subject: [ExI] facial recognition software In-Reply-To: <2FA54314-A62E-4B61-ADEE-7FC810C2B72E@gmail.com> References: <003801d6418d$b5a51f20$20ef5d60$@rainier66.com> <2FA54314-A62E-4B61-ADEE-7FC810C2B72E@gmail.com> Message-ID: <2402c1fd3be0561b088bd38d9d64772f.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> SR, you remind me of Chapter 22 of The Bell Curve, where the authors lament the changing of the world - where people who are less intelligent are unable to find their place. What they said is true: everyone needs a valued place in our world, but it's become too complicated for any but the coginitive elite to properly cope with. And that it would only get worse. I remember the pain I felt when I read that chapter, way back in 1995, and how I wept for I identified with those who would have no place in the world if things continued as they were. Regards, MB On Sat, June 13, 2020 16:39, SR Ballard via extropy-chat wrote: > > Every year there are fewer jobs for true misanthropes. Loggers are no > longer solitary. Trappers barely exist as most skins are farmed. Hunters > are supplanted by commercial farms. Less fire-watch as there are less > forests and more satellites. Small towns die and big cities explode. > Manual jobs are supplanted by technology and service jobs. > > What do we do with all the stupid people? Is stupid a disability now? I > ask because there are people who apply to work with me (fast food) who are > literally too stupid to take orders, make desserts, and pour drinks. It?s > crazy common. > > These are things I am very concerned about. Normal things are increasingly > criminalized. I don?t find it to be a good thing. Being an asshole > shouldn?t be illegal. Being stupid shouldn?t be illegal. > > I really am concerned that when we are making and imaging the future that > we?re only making spaces for people like ourselves or who we wish we were, > and forgetting about everyone else. > From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 22:39:02 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 15:39:02 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Protest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Best wishes, Keith On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 12:44 PM William Flynn Wallace wrote: > > Thanks, Keith. Swapping women to avoid the interbreeding problem has fascinated me. Did they really know what they were doing? No. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect Keith From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 13 23:24:11 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 18:24:11 -0500 Subject: [ExI] facial recognition software In-Reply-To: <97BEEC5B-D370-4369-BAB8-B212AD7CA784@gmail.com> References: <003801d6418d$b5a51f20$20ef5d60$@rainier66.com> <2FA54314-A62E-4B61-ADEE-7FC810C2B72E@gmail.com> <97BEEC5B-D370-4369-BAB8-B212AD7CA784@gmail.com> Message-ID: I am not sure that there are rules crazier than that one. How many bad days does it take to fire them? bill w On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 5:17 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > It?s not legal (per our insurance) for them to try the job. > > SR Ballard > > On Jun 13, 2020, at 4:42 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > A couple of questions: is 'stupid' the same as unintelligent? 2 - who > hired these bozos? I would think that they would have some kind of > exercises where the applicant does what he will do on the job, and if > people can't do what you said, they wouldn't have been hired. > > 'Stupid' has a different connotation for me. To me it means knowing > better but not doing better. I know that's not in the dictionary, but we > need a word for the gap between knowledge and proper actions. bill w > > On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 3:50 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >?There will always be evidence of that baby you gave up for adoption, or >> what have you? >> >> >> >> Not necessarily. In California and other places, we managed to get a >> ballot measure that allows anyone to hand over a baby without >> identification of the person, no attempt to identify, no paperwork, just go >> to the police station or fire station or hospital, hand over the baby, walk >> away, no questions asked. I don?t know why that took so long to get that >> law in place: it saves lives. >> >> >> You misunderstand. Even with these laws there is some shred of evidence? >> a photo online, a hospital bill, etc that would always out you. If for some >> reason someone wanted to know if you had a baby, I feel quite certain they >> would find a way to know. >> >> A woman can?t really ?go help their aunt for a year on the farm?. Their >> husband couldn?t have ?died in the war?, etc. there are ways to check. >> >> Every year there are fewer jobs for true misanthropes. Loggers are no >> longer solitary. Trappers barely exist as most skins are farmed. Hunters >> are supplanted by commercial farms. Less fire-watch as there are less >> forests and more satellites. Small towns die and big cities explode. Manual >> jobs are supplanted by technology and service jobs. >> >> What do we do with all the stupid people? Is stupid a disability now? I >> ask because there are people who apply to work with me (fast food) who are >> literally too stupid to take orders, make desserts, and pour drinks. It?s >> crazy common. >> >> These are things I am very concerned about. Normal things are >> increasingly criminalized. I don?t find it to be a good thing. Being an >> asshole shouldn?t be illegal. Being stupid shouldn?t be illegal. >> >> I really am concerned that when we are making and imaging the future that >> we?re only making spaces for people like ourselves or who we wish we were, >> and forgetting about everyone else. >> >> On Jun 13, 2020, at 9:19 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >> >> >> >> >> *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf >> Of *SR Ballard via extropy-chat >> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] facial recognition software >> >> >> >> >?When one makes a mistake it can never be outrun. One cannot ?go to the >> frontier? or ?go into the wilds? or any such thing. One cannot take up a >> different name and live a different life, never to be reminded of their >> past? You can NEVER start over. Employers are legally required to dredge up >> your past even for fast food jobs. >> >> >> >> >> >> I teach this to my scouts. In their world, there is no do-over. The age >> of accountability marches steadily back. Be careful what you post. I >> could forget finding a job with a clearance now because of what I have >> posted on ExI: a potential employer wouldn?t know me well enough to know >> most of what I post is to entertain the proletariat. >> >> >> >> >?There will always be evidence of that baby you gave up for adoption, or >> what have you? >> >> >> >> Not necessarily. In California and other places, we managed to get a >> ballot measure that allows anyone to hand over a baby without >> identification of the person, no attempt to identify, no paperwork, just go >> to the police station or fire station or hospital, hand over the baby, walk >> away, no questions asked. I don?t know why that took so long to get that >> law in place: it saves lives. >> >> >> >> >?I don?t think that?s good. >> >> >> >> SR Ballard >> >> >> >> It does make life complicated for those who go wrong in their early >> years, I will agree. I don?t know what to do about it: in its various >> forms, information technology keeps marching on. >> >> >> >> spike >> >> >> >> >> ? >> >> >> >> On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 12:59 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >> I see where Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM have started refusing to sell this >> software to police depts. until the issue is settled at the federal level. >> >> >> >> I am of two minds about that software: to some extent it keeps us safe >> by identifying perps for the cops to bring in. >> >> >> >> But it is also an invasion of privacy, and I think that outweighs the >> good usage above. >> >> >> >> bill w >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sun Jun 14 00:28:50 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 19:28:50 -0500 Subject: [ExI] facial recognition software In-Reply-To: References: <003801d6418d$b5a51f20$20ef5d60$@rainier66.com> <2FA54314-A62E-4B61-ADEE-7FC810C2B72E@gmail.com> <97BEEC5B-D370-4369-BAB8-B212AD7CA784@gmail.com> Message-ID: No need to fire them. We have a good crew and as a crew we don?t tolerate it. We force them to work as hard as we do. They can?t handle the stress. They quit. SR Ballard > On Jun 13, 2020, at 6:24 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > I am not sure that there are rules crazier than that one. How many bad days does it take to fire them? bill w > >> On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 5:17 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat wrote: >> It?s not legal (per our insurance) for them to try the job. >> >> SR Ballard >> >>> On Jun 13, 2020, at 4:42 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: >>> >>> A couple of questions: is 'stupid' the same as unintelligent? 2 - who hired these bozos? I would think that they would have some kind of exercises where the applicant does what he will do on the job, and if people can't do what you said, they wouldn't have been hired. >>> >>> 'Stupid' has a different connotation for me. To me it means knowing better but not doing better. I know that's not in the dictionary, but we need a word for the gap between knowledge and proper actions. bill w >>> >>> On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 3:50 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat wrote: >>>>> >?There will always be evidence of that baby you gave up for adoption, or what have you? >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> Not necessarily. In California and other places, we managed to get a ballot measure that allows anyone to hand over a baby without identification of the person, no attempt to identify, no paperwork, just go to the police station or fire station or hospital, hand over the baby, walk away, no questions asked. I don?t know why that took so long to get that law in place: it saves lives. >>>>> >>>> >>>> You misunderstand. Even with these laws there is some shred of evidence? a photo online, a hospital bill, etc that would always out you. If for some reason someone wanted to know if you had a baby, I feel quite certain they would find a way to know. >>>> >>>> A woman can?t really ?go help their aunt for a year on the farm?. Their husband couldn?t have ?died in the war?, etc. there are ways to check. >>>> >>>> Every year there are fewer jobs for true misanthropes. Loggers are no longer solitary. Trappers barely exist as most skins are farmed. Hunters are supplanted by commercial farms. Less fire-watch as there are less forests and more satellites. Small towns die and big cities explode. Manual jobs are supplanted by technology and service jobs. >>>> >>>> What do we do with all the stupid people? Is stupid a disability now? I ask because there are people who apply to work with me (fast food) who are literally too stupid to take orders, make desserts, and pour drinks. It?s crazy common. >>>> >>>> These are things I am very concerned about. Normal things are increasingly criminalized. I don?t find it to be a good thing. Being an asshole shouldn?t be illegal. Being stupid shouldn?t be illegal. >>>> >>>> I really am concerned that when we are making and imaging the future that we?re only making spaces for people like ourselves or who we wish we were, and forgetting about everyone else. >>>> >>>>> On Jun 13, 2020, at 9:19 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat >>>>> Subject: Re: [ExI] facial recognition software >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >?When one makes a mistake it can never be outrun. One cannot ?go to the frontier? or ?go into the wilds? or any such thing. One cannot take up a different name and live a different life, never to be reminded of their past? You can NEVER start over. Employers are legally required to dredge up your past even for fast food jobs. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> I teach this to my scouts. In their world, there is no do-over. The age of accountability marches steadily back. Be careful what you post. I could forget finding a job with a clearance now because of what I have posted on ExI: a potential employer wouldn?t know me well enough to know most of what I post is to entertain the proletariat. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >?There will always be evidence of that baby you gave up for adoption, or what have you? >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> Not necessarily. In California and other places, we managed to get a ballot measure that allows anyone to hand over a baby without identification of the person, no attempt to identify, no paperwork, just go to the police station or fire station or hospital, hand over the baby, walk away, no questions asked. I don?t know why that took so long to get that law in place: it saves lives. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >?I don?t think that?s good. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> SR Ballard >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> It does make life complicated for those who go wrong in their early years, I will agree. I don?t know what to do about it: in its various forms, information technology keeps marching on. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> spike >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> ? >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 12:59 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: >>>>> >>>>> I see where Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM have started refusing to sell this software to police depts. until the issue is settled at the federal level. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> I am of two minds about that software: to some extent it keeps us safe by identifying perps for the cops to bring in. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> But it is also an invasion of privacy, and I think that outweighs the good usage above. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> bill w >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>> extropy-chat mailing list >>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> extropy-chat mailing list >>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Sun Jun 14 01:15:03 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 18:15:03 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Another example of antifa derangement syndrome Message-ID: https://www.9news.com/mobile/article/news/investigations/loveland-man-antifa-roofing-employees/73-c9e63588-b99d-45c5-bc34-81e22093cf91 This time from Colorado. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 14 02:11:36 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2020 19:11:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Trusting China information was Protest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <011d01d641f1$231e2430$695a6c90$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Keith Henson via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Trusting China information was Protest snip > I don't think China completely eliminated the virus. Obviously not. However, when they said they had, I am reasonably sure they thought that was true. The question I was asking was is if you think the data from China about this outbreak is factual and if you don't, why are they reporting this incident? Keith _______________________________________________ Hi Keith, hmmm hard to say. I tend to think of these kinds of questions in percentages, as people who play real-money ideas futures do. I would estimate about a 5% chance China reported their covid cases accurately to within an order of magnitude. I will grant they didn't know (or care) about their rural cases. I don't know why they are reporting this outbreak, but best guess is that we have eyes and ears inside China reporting it, so we already knew. It would further damage their credibility to deny it. spike From giulio at gmail.com Sun Jun 14 06:51:56 2020 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 08:51:56 +0200 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: <003401d64184$54a33940$fde9abc0$@rainier66.com> References: <003401d64184$54a33940$fde9abc0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Spike: "We have a lotta smart guys, such as Elon Musk and our own Adrian doing commercialization of space. They are the future of space. Governments stand down, let private industry take over." I agree in principle. Musk & co are the future of space. But not the present. At this moment, they must still rely on government support. They have gone 90 percent of the way, but the remaining 10 percent is uphill and they need support. The government should help by buying their services and refraining from over-regulating. If the politicians (both democrats and republicans) don't feel that they are in the driver seat, they'll kill the commercial space industry in the cradle with over-regulation. I keep dreaming of grassroots global fundraising initiatives able to directly raise the money for a Moon mission and settlement, but this is just a dream atm. On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 3:25 PM spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > On Behalf Of Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat > Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? > > As I see things: > > >...1. If Trump wins ... > > >...2. If Trump loses... > > Oy vey, now ya dun it. > > > >...3. There's no hope of real bipartisan support for ... > > That has been gone some time ago. > > > >...4. China wins... > > Ja. That has been coming for some time. > > >...Did I miss something? > > Ja, the role that business plays vs government. The US government must find > the least efficient way to do any space program because it needs to spread > the contracts over all the states, in order to get senators and > representatives to support it (presidents can make suggestions if they want, > but congress must allocate the funds.) China doesn't do that: it has a > different form of government. Private business doesn't do that either: it > finds the most efficient way to get things done. > > Last week we saw a privately owned rocket carry two guys to the station in > style and the first stage landed with dignity on its feet. > > We have a lotta smart guys, such as Elon Musk and our own Adrian doing > commercialization of space. They are the future of space. > > Governments stand down, let private industry take over. > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From pharos at gmail.com Sun Jun 14 13:55:50 2020 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 14:55:50 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Video - Royal Institution lecture on AI and neural networks by Vint Cerf Message-ID: Will Computers Ever Think Like Human Beings? This talk was filmed in the RI on 9 March 2020. 58 minutes. The rise of artificial intelligence has seen computers beating chess experts and performing incredibly complex tasks. But why can?t they think the same way we do? We have built incredibly powerful, multi-layered, neural networks capable of learning incredibly quickly and carrying out seemingly impossible tasks, but they still can?t always tell the difference between a polar bear and a dishwasher. In this talk ?Father of the Internet? Vint Cerf explores why it is so challenging for any computer-based system, however elaborate, to reason in the same way we do. ----------------- Reviews are mostly enthusiastic. Example: what an amazing speaker.. he goes from a simple example, extends on it, and gently pushes you into the deep end of the pool where you're swimming in understanding before you even realize that you've just learned an entirely new way of looking at neural networks.. brilliant! I love it! --------------------------- BillK From foozler83 at gmail.com Sun Jun 14 14:19:34 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 09:19:34 -0500 Subject: [ExI] police Message-ID: Have any of you seen stories about the police and the police unions' opinions of what is being said and done? I have not. Am I missing them or is there a stony silence? bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 14 14:38:35 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 07:38:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] police In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <005501d64259$7d31da30$77958e90$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: [ExI] police Have any of you seen stories about the police and the police unions' opinions of what is being said and done? I have not. Am I missing them or is there a stony silence? bill w Hi BillW, there are many things being said done. Do focus your question to something Google can find. In my world, what is being said and done is far different from what I think you are asking. The local constables (in general) never heard of any of it. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sun Jun 14 16:16:26 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 09:16:26 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Trusting China information was Protest Message-ID: wrote: [keith[ >> The question I was asking was is if you think the data from China about this outbreak is factual and if you don't, why are they reporting this incident? > Hi Keith, hmmm hard to say. I tend to think of these kinds of questions in percentages, as people who play real-money ideas futures do. I would estimate about a 5% chance China reported their covid cases accurately to within an order of magnitude. I will grant they didn't know (or care) about their rural cases. They certainly should or they would get rapid spread when one of the rural infected came to town. > I don't know why they are reporting this outbreak, but best guess is that we have eyes and ears inside China reporting it, so we already knew. It was public news in China. It's hard to do large scale lockdowns without telling people. > It would further damage their credibility to deny it. I am not a fan of the Chinese government and they can be secretive, but there are things like this pandemic that don't make sense to try to cover up. And there is next to no reason for them to cover up how they have done. It is much better than the US has done. The US, for a variety of reasons, squandered a couple of months at the start. Keith From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 14 16:55:57 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 09:55:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Trusting China information was Protest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <007901d6426c$ad2d0bc0$07872340$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Keith Henson via extropy-chat >...And there is next to no reason for them to cover up how they have done. It is much better than the US has done. The US, for a variety of reasons, squandered a couple of months at the start. Keith _______________________________________________ Hi Keith, ja, one could go that route, but keep in mind the US doesn't have the authority at any level to control the behavior of individuals. China does. Presidential and governors' executive orders do not apply to individuals. We are seeing these riots where people are clearly violating social distancing rules, looting in flash mobs, some without masks, ignoring social distancing rules. We see the CHAZ area in Seattle having enormous rallies where it isn't clear if social distancing rules apply. China can stop all kind of things, because they have the functional equivalent of a dictatorship, with no guarantee of free speech. The government controls the message. They likely wielded power the US does not have at any level, and we don't know if we can trust the message. We still don't know. We have no intentions of handing the government (at any level) the authority that China already has. In China, the government can dictate down to the level of detail including how many children a couple may have. We don't do that. spike From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 14 16:56:06 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 09:56:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Trusting China information was Protest Message-ID: <007a01d6426c$b27a77c0$176f6740$@rainier66.com> >...And there is next to no reason for them to cover up how they have done. It is much better than the US has done. The US, for a variety of reasons, squandered a couple of months at the start. Keith Hi Keith, I noticed the hardest-hit countries by covid were Belgium, UK, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Ireland, Netherlands, USA, Switzerland, Canada, Ecuador, Brazil, in that order. We all had the same news from the same sources about covid in January of 2020, but we can see a common factor: the hardest-hit places were those with a lot of international travel. All those places had citizens abroad when the pandemic struck, and plenty of Chinese citizens doing business before we knew the danger. There is not one thing these governments could do with those cases: people have a right to return to their own homes. Some were infected. They can make them self-quarantine for a couple of weeks, but as far as I know there is no legal means of enforcing that anywhere in these hardest-hit countries. I have a neighbor who we think had covid. He still went out walking in the neighborhood as soon as he was physically able (we gave him plenty of space (on his sincere advice.)) I don't know how it works in China, but I have heard that if the government (at any level) gives orders, the people must obey, and they do. Here, there are no known legal repercussions if we ignore social distancing orders from the county while we riot, burn and loot. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sun Jun 14 17:26:54 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 10:26:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? Message-ID: Giulio Prisco wrote: snip > I keep dreaming of grassroots global fundraising initiatives able to directly raise the money for a Moon mission and settlement, but this is just a dream atm. This was attempted back in 1977. If you google for "chris basler" staging company it will take you to some information. I think my copy of the prospectus was sent to an archive, but it may be available somewhere if you want to look at a failed attempt. Keith From ben at zaiboc.net Sun Jun 14 20:40:36 2020 From: ben at zaiboc.net (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 21:40:36 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Video - Royal Institution lecture on AI and neural networks by Vint Cerf In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 14/06/2020 15:20, BillK wrote: > Will Computers Ever Think Like Human Beings? > This talk was filmed in the RI on 9 March 2020. 58 minutes. > OK, interesting, if a bit rambling, but it didn't address the question in the title, "Will computers ever think like human beings?". It just pointed out that they currently don't, which we all know, so the title is misleading, even if the video is worth watching for other reasons. -- Ben Zaiboc From avant at sollegro.com Sun Jun 14 20:58:51 2020 From: avant at sollegro.com (Stuart LaForge) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 13:58:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The professional licensure of police Message-ID: <20200614135851.Horde.N-MXnfmWJZk-twNM3Tb_jEc@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Here is a way to fix the law-enforcement problem that the US faces by professionalizing the police and bringing it into the 21st century: Step 1. Defund the police. Let's face it, the system is broke. We can't kick the can down the road any longer. The goal here is to put policing on a level with the remainder of the criminal justice system. Step 2. Pass legislation requiring police to be licensed independent contractors and carry their own malpractice/liability insurance. Perhaps give them some additional perks, like the ability to deputize bystanders, with the cop assuming complete liability for it. Said legislation should also allow for police academies to operate as educational institutions that grant a unique policing degree equivalent to a bachelor?s degree in law enforcement with pretty much the same police powers that they already have. Step 3. Hire back former police that reapply after they take a few college classes provided they have good records with respect to unnecessary violence. That?s it in a nutshell. Stuart LaForge From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 14 21:11:04 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 14:11:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Video - Royal Institution lecture on AI and neural networks by Vint Cerf In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <002601d64290$511bd270$f3537750$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat Sent: Sunday, June 14, 2020 1:41 PM To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Cc: Ben Zaiboc Subject: Re: [ExI] Video - Royal Institution lecture on AI and neural networks by Vint Cerf On 14/06/2020 15:20, BillK wrote: > Will Computers Ever Think Like Human Beings? > This talk was filmed in the RI on 9 March 2020. 58 minutes. > OK, interesting, if a bit rambling, but it didn't address the question in the title, "Will computers ever think like human beings?". It just pointed out that they currently don't, which we all know, so the title is misleading, even if the video is worth watching for other reasons. -- Ben Zaiboc _______________________________________________ Ben when I see these kinds of questions, I think about computer chess. The human vs computer competitions ended about a dozen yrs ago as it became clear the best software can take the best of us. Since then, the sport has been computer vs computer. What I find fascinating is that the games silicon vs silicon produce are often more interesting than top-level carbon vs carbon. Clearly this software isn't thinking the way humans do, but humans take interest in their games. We have figured out how to write software which starts from scratch and figures out how to win at a game humans have been playing in its modern form for over 500 years. We have chatterbots. So let us see what software/software conversations are about. Will they "think" outside the box? Will they come up with anything that simulates understanding of our world? Can they learn to make interesting conversation? Can we make it interesting to those of us who have specific interests? I think we can. Computers don't need to think like we do, they only need to entertain us with the digital prattling. spike From foozler83 at gmail.com Sun Jun 14 22:04:41 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 17:04:41 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The professional licensure of police In-Reply-To: <20200614135851.Horde.N-MXnfmWJZk-twNM3Tb_jEc@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> References: <20200614135851.Horde.N-MXnfmWJZk-twNM3Tb_jEc@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Message-ID: Said legislation should also allow for police academies to operate as educational institutions that grant a unique policing degree equivalent to a bachelor?s degree in law enforcement with pretty much the same police powers that they already have. stuart This sounds good, but it will require a considerable increase in funds. And an officer with a bachelor's degree in policing will require considerably more salary than at present. Lot of places cannot afford that. bill w On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 4:05 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > Here is a way to fix the law-enforcement problem that the US faces by > professionalizing the police and bringing it into the 21st century: > > Step 1. Defund the police. Let's face it, the system is broke. We > can't kick the can down the road any longer. The goal here is to put > policing on a level with the remainder of the criminal justice system. > > Step 2. Pass legislation requiring police to be licensed independent > contractors and carry their own malpractice/liability insurance. > Perhaps give them some additional perks, like the ability to deputize > bystanders, with the cop assuming complete liability for it. > > Said legislation should also allow for police academies to operate as > educational institutions that grant a unique policing degree > equivalent to a bachelor?s degree in law enforcement with pretty much > the same police powers that they already have. > > Step 3. Hire back former police that reapply after they take a few > college classes provided they have good records with respect to > unnecessary violence. > > That?s it in a nutshell. > > Stuart LaForge > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sun Jun 14 22:17:01 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 17:17:01 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The professional licensure of police In-Reply-To: References: <20200614135851.Horde.N-MXnfmWJZk-twNM3Tb_jEc@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Message-ID: <5838C5BA-540E-47BF-9D81-9203D6E090E4@gmail.com> How much do police make in your area that they would need a raise? Here a Sheriff?s Deputy makes $50K+ and a city cop makes the same. SR Ballard > On Jun 14, 2020, at 5:04 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > Said legislation should also allow for police academies to operate as > educational institutions that grant a unique policing degree > equivalent to a bachelor?s degree in law enforcement with pretty much > the same police powers that they already have. stuart > > This sounds good, but it will require a considerable increase in funds. And an officer with a bachelor's degree in policing will require considerably more salary than at present. > > Lot of places cannot afford that. bill w > >> On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 4:05 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> Here is a way to fix the law-enforcement problem that the US faces by >> professionalizing the police and bringing it into the 21st century: >> >> Step 1. Defund the police. Let's face it, the system is broke. We >> can't kick the can down the road any longer. The goal here is to put >> policing on a level with the remainder of the criminal justice system. >> >> Step 2. Pass legislation requiring police to be licensed independent >> contractors and carry their own malpractice/liability insurance. >> Perhaps give them some additional perks, like the ability to deputize >> bystanders, with the cop assuming complete liability for it. >> >> Said legislation should also allow for police academies to operate as >> educational institutions that grant a unique policing degree >> equivalent to a bachelor?s degree in law enforcement with pretty much >> the same police powers that they already have. >> >> Step 3. Hire back former police that reapply after they take a few >> college classes provided they have good records with respect to >> unnecessary violence. >> >> That?s it in a nutshell. >> >> Stuart LaForge >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Sun Jun 14 22:17:53 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 16:17:53 -0600 Subject: [ExI] The professional licensure of police In-Reply-To: References: <20200614135851.Horde.N-MXnfmWJZk-twNM3Tb_jEc@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Message-ID: They certainly can't afford their current level of policing. But it's amazing how much less police coverage we would actually have to buy if we divested the police of what is currently their primary [and utterly absurd] function - the interdiction of self-destructive behavior using lethal force. On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 4:12 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Said legislation should also allow for police academies to operate as > educational institutions that grant a unique policing degree > equivalent to a bachelor?s degree in law enforcement with pretty much > the same police powers that they already have. stuart > > This sounds good, but it will require a considerable increase in funds. > And an officer with a bachelor's degree in policing will require > considerably more salary than at present. > > Lot of places cannot afford that. bill w > > On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 4:05 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >> Here is a way to fix the law-enforcement problem that the US faces by >> professionalizing the police and bringing it into the 21st century: >> >> Step 1. Defund the police. Let's face it, the system is broke. We >> can't kick the can down the road any longer. The goal here is to put >> policing on a level with the remainder of the criminal justice system. >> >> Step 2. Pass legislation requiring police to be licensed independent >> contractors and carry their own malpractice/liability insurance. >> Perhaps give them some additional perks, like the ability to deputize >> bystanders, with the cop assuming complete liability for it. >> >> Said legislation should also allow for police academies to operate as >> educational institutions that grant a unique policing degree >> equivalent to a bachelor?s degree in law enforcement with pretty much >> the same police powers that they already have. >> >> Step 3. Hire back former police that reapply after they take a few >> college classes provided they have good records with respect to >> unnecessary violence. >> >> That?s it in a nutshell. >> >> Stuart LaForge >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 15 01:56:28 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 20:56:28 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The professional licensure of police In-Reply-To: <5838C5BA-540E-47BF-9D81-9203D6E090E4@gmail.com> References: <20200614135851.Horde.N-MXnfmWJZk-twNM3Tb_jEc@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> <5838C5BA-540E-47BF-9D81-9203D6E090E4@gmail.com> Message-ID: The only data I could find was for the whole state. $35,350. I should add that the highway patrol has only about half the officers it should have. We have about one patrolman per county. We are last in pay, just like we are last in just about everything. The Republican legislators won't raise needed taxes, and so we have roads and bridges in critical condition, worse than most states. Their mantra seems to be to choke government until it dies. We are regularly sued by the feds. bill w On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 5:28 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > How much do police make in your area that they would need a raise? > > Here a Sheriff?s Deputy makes $50K+ and a city cop makes the same. > > SR Ballard > > On Jun 14, 2020, at 5:04 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > Said legislation should also allow for police academies to operate as > educational institutions that grant a unique policing degree > equivalent to a bachelor?s degree in law enforcement with pretty much > the same police powers that they already have. stuart > > This sounds good, but it will require a considerable increase in funds. > And an officer with a bachelor's degree in policing will require > considerably more salary than at present. > > Lot of places cannot afford that. bill w > > On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 4:05 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >> Here is a way to fix the law-enforcement problem that the US faces by >> professionalizing the police and bringing it into the 21st century: >> >> Step 1. Defund the police. Let's face it, the system is broke. We >> can't kick the can down the road any longer. The goal here is to put >> policing on a level with the remainder of the criminal justice system. >> >> Step 2. Pass legislation requiring police to be licensed independent >> contractors and carry their own malpractice/liability insurance. >> Perhaps give them some additional perks, like the ability to deputize >> bystanders, with the cop assuming complete liability for it. >> >> Said legislation should also allow for police academies to operate as >> educational institutions that grant a unique policing degree >> equivalent to a bachelor?s degree in law enforcement with pretty much >> the same police powers that they already have. >> >> Step 3. Hire back former police that reapply after they take a few >> college classes provided they have good records with respect to >> unnecessary violence. >> >> That?s it in a nutshell. >> >> Stuart LaForge >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Mon Jun 15 02:50:33 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 19:50:33 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The professional licensure of police In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <855E1A25-67A6-4A77-A9C1-B0C2ECC261E5@gmail.com> On Jun 14, 2020, at 7:04 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote:? > The only data I could find was for the whole state. $35,350. I should add that the highway patrol has only about half the officers it should have. We have about one patrolman per county. We are last in pay, just like we are last in just about everything. The Republican legislators won't raise needed taxes, and so we have roads and bridges in critical condition, worse than most states. Their mantra seems to be to choke government until it dies. We are regularly sued by the feds. > > bill w Salary.com reports the average for Mississippi (that?s where you live?) as a bit higher than that: https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/police-officer-salary/ms Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 15 03:21:08 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 20:21:08 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The professional licensure of police In-Reply-To: <855E1A25-67A6-4A77-A9C1-B0C2ECC261E5@gmail.com> References: <855E1A25-67A6-4A77-A9C1-B0C2ECC261E5@gmail.com> Message-ID: <005d01d642c4$068c75a0$13a560e0$@rainier66.com> The only data I could find was for the whole state. $35,350. I should add that the highway patrol has only about half the officers it should have. ? bill w If we want to remove something from the cops? duty list, the drug enforcement thing is good, but an even better one to remove is domestic disturbance. Cops will tell you those are the scariest most unpleasant calls they must respond to: they don?t know which is the bad guy, they don?t know if they will survive that call. My bride?s great great grandfather was slain in the line of duty on a domestic disturbance call. If we take away just one distasteful task from the force, I would suggest that one. Domestic abuse call, the dispatcher says ?Pal you married her, now if she kills you, well, adios amigo.? I agree with Dan and Adrian, we could refocus the scope of police work, without vilifying them to the point they just walk away. If the cops just quit, they will be like the girl in this video: we will miss them when they are gone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmSbXsFE3l8 spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Mon Jun 15 04:07:53 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 23:07:53 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The professional licensure of police In-Reply-To: <005d01d642c4$068c75a0$13a560e0$@rainier66.com> References: <855E1A25-67A6-4A77-A9C1-B0C2ECC261E5@gmail.com> <005d01d642c4$068c75a0$13a560e0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: I know you?re joking Spike but being killed by your husband/wife, boyfriend/girlfriend, fianc?/fianc?e, mom/dad is not super fun. I had my father threaten to kill me but that wasn?t enough to get help ? but it was enough to get cops to point guns at my parents and handcuff them, and threaten to get my dad fired. Completely unnecessary. I just needed a way out, not any kind of vengeance. If someone of my fianc??s power were to attack someone my size, even when I was winning lifting competitions, he would easily kill me, likely even if I had a gun. But also, the law and officers need to treat domestic violence differently. No assuming it was him or her. Assume neither/both. Separate them. No one gets to stay in the house and no one goes to jail unless it?s obvious. Develop some kind of ?halfway housing? or something while everything is sorted out. Men/women usually don?t leave because they feel they can?t. Make them feel like they can, mandate counceling, whatever. But what we are doing isn?t fair, and it isn?t working. SR Ballard > On Jun 14, 2020, at 10:21 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > The only data I could find was for the whole state. $35,350. I should add that the highway patrol has only about half the officers it should have. ? > > bill w > > > > > If we want to remove something from the cops? duty list, the drug enforcement thing is good, but an even better one to remove is domestic disturbance. Cops will tell you those are the scariest most unpleasant calls they must respond to: they don?t know which is the bad guy, they don?t know if they will survive that call. My bride?s great great grandfather was slain in the line of duty on a domestic disturbance call. > > If we take away just one distasteful task from the force, I would suggest that one. Domestic abuse call, the dispatcher says ?Pal you married her, now if she kills you, well, adios amigo.? > > I agree with Dan and Adrian, we could refocus the scope of police work, without vilifying them to the point they just walk away. If the cops just quit, they will be like the girl in this video: we will miss them when they are gone: > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmSbXsFE3l8 > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 15 05:11:49 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 22:11:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The professional licensure of police In-Reply-To: References: <855E1A25-67A6-4A77-A9C1-B0C2ECC261E5@gmail.com> <005d01d642c4$068c75a0$13a560e0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <008801d642d3$79e2aec0$6da80c40$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] The professional licensure of police >?I know you?re joking Spike but being killed by your husband/wife, boyfriend/girlfriend, fianc?/fianc?e, mom/dad is not super fun? Hi SR, I am not making light of the suffering of those with domestic conflict. I just don?t think we should expect the cops to deal with that in most cases. There should be an escape route for those who feel their lives are endangered by their own family. >?If someone of my fianc??s power were to attack someone my size, even when I was winning lifting competitions, he would easily kill me, likely even if I had a gun? Whenever I post about humanlike sexbots, people think I am only trying to think of some silly notion to make a buttload of money. They are right of course, but there is more to it than just that. It is easy enough for me to recognize that we boys are not really good for much besides that, and if sexbots can replace us, the ladies won?t accept the risk of having us around. Of course it works the other way too. It is easy enough for me to see it as a solution to overpopulation. This check off the top two items on my bucket list: humanity is saved and I make a buttload. >?.But also, the law and officers need to treat domestic violence differently. No assuming it was him or her. Assume neither/both. Separate them. No one gets to stay in the house and no one goes to jail unless it?s obvious. Develop some kind of ?halfway housing? or something while everything is sorted out? Well said. I agree. >?Men/women usually don?t leave because they feel they can?t. Make them feel like they can, mandate counceling, whatever? SR, thanks for posting that. I am eager to admit, I am the luckiest man outside of baseball. We know that guy whose name I can?t remember, the one who had Lou Gehrig?s disease, is the luckiest man in baseball. I am the luckiest man outside of baseball. I don?t play it, but I have a wonderfully stable family life, none in my home have a bad temper. My bride and I have been wed 36 years and never had a serious quarrel. My son is 13, we have never had a serious misunderstanding with him either. I chose my bride for her gentle disposition. That and her shapely boobs of course, but as much for the gentle disposition. I know how outrageously lucky I am, for most of my friends are not so much. I am far luckier than I deserve with my paltry socially-redeeming qualities, far luckier that what?s his name, the baseball player with Lou Gehrig?s disease, way luckier than he ever was. If I had religion I would get down on my knees and thank whatever deity I had chosen to thank. I feel silly thanking evolution for my good fortune, but hey, my brain is in control rather than my heart. >?But what we are doing isn?t fair, and it isn?t working. SR Ballard We should do the things you proposed, and stop making the constables be social workers. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 15 05:20:45 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 22:20:45 -0700 Subject: [ExI] sweet avatars, was: RE: The professional licensure of police Message-ID: <008f01d642d4$bc53b230$34fb1690$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] The professional licensure of police >?Whenever I post about humanlike sexbots, people think I am only trying to think of some silly notion to make a buttload of money. They are right of course, but there is more to it than just that. It is easy enough for me to recognize that we boys are not really good for much besides that, and if sexbots can replace us, the ladies won?t accept the risk of having us around?spike SR, your commentary has me thinking about those talking avatars again. We could perhaps write them to say all that gooey sweet stuff that ladies like to hear, even if they know we are full of baloney and only trying to get them in the mood, they tolerate us anyway. I bet I could write some fun stuff for a male avatar to say that might work, or be a fun toy. What I don?t know is how to get the avatar to respond to the right cues, to go to the right spot in its catalog of gooey sweet comments to choose exactly the right one. Thinking more, this same avatar could be used by men as a training tool. They would interact with that to see how to treat their wives and girlfriends. Well done, SR! When I figure it out and sell a jillion of them, as I am sitting on my pile of money I will toss one down to you. Failing that, I will say nice things about you for giving me the idea to start with. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Mon Jun 15 07:22:31 2020 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 09:22:31 +0200 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Thanks Keith! What I found is this: https://space.nss.org/wp-content/uploads/L5-News-1977-12.pdf Why did this attempt fail, and what (if any) conditions exist today that could enable a successful version of the idea? On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 7:34 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat wrote: > > Giulio Prisco wrote: > > snip > > > I keep dreaming of grassroots global fundraising initiatives able to > directly raise the money for a Moon mission and settlement, but this > is just a dream atm. > > This was attempted back in 1977. If you google for "chris basler" > staging company it will take you to some information. I think my copy > of the prospectus was sent to an archive, but it may be available > somewhere if you want to look at a failed attempt. > > Keith > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Jun 15 11:48:36 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 07:48:36 -0400 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 3:02 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > *If Trump wins US astronauts will probably walk on the Moon before the > end of the decade. [...] If Trump loses, good bye Artemis and the hope to > return to the Moon.* Good. At this point in our technological development I see little point in sending astronauts to the moon and even less to Mars. I can understand wanting to have a 2 planet civilization but It makes no sense to spend $1 trillion to send a couple of people to Mars and then spend another $2 trillion to bring them back. I'm in favor of sending people into space I'm just not in favor of bringing them back; when we have the technological capability to make a fully self-sufficient colony on the moon or on Mars then it would be time to send people there but not before, and right now we can't even make a self-sufficient colony on Antarctica. In the meantime It would be vastly more scientifically productive if the government forgot about Buck Rogers and just gave NASA the money it needs (which would be many orders of magnitude less than manned spaceflight) so it can build all 4 projects in this video, although the first one talked about, HabEx, is my least favorite: 4 Future Space Telescopes NASA wants to build John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 15 15:51:38 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 08:51:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image Message-ID: <003d01d6432c$dbb4ce90$931e6bb0$@rainier66.com> Images are more powerful than words. This one was from England, where there was a big BLM rally in London. A white guy was there who was not part of BLM, but was injured, conked on the head, stunned, on the ground, clearly at risk for being trampled or attacked. Several protestors pushed back the crowd and formed a protective perimeter. A burley BLMer scooped him up, carried him through the angry crowd to safety, handed him over to the bobbies: The news people found the guy who carried that man out of there and interviewed him. He explained that BLM isn't there to riot, it isn't there to burn or destroy property, they don't want to fight or injure anyone, they are not promoting communism or capitalism or any political ism, they just want black people to have a fair shake. Well hell, this one photo proves his point better than a million yakkity words. Good for him. I am with him. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 26529 bytes Desc: not available URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 15 17:25:19 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 12:25:19 -0500 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: <003d01d6432c$dbb4ce90$931e6bb0$@rainier66.com> References: <003d01d6432c$dbb4ce90$931e6bb0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Well hell, this one photo proves his point better than a million yakkity words. Good for him. I am with him. spike The only black people I have ever known in any capacity have been low class people - laborers on the farm or at the railroad station and so on, most of them illiterate. I cannot speak for blacks of higher classes, but from my limited experience I can attest that for kindness of heart they are at least our equals. bill w On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 10:55 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > Images are more powerful than words. This one was from England, where > there was a big BLM rally in London. A white guy was there who was not > part of BLM, but was injured, conked on the head, stunned, on the ground, > clearly at risk for being trampled or attacked. Several protestors pushed > back the crowd and formed a protective perimeter. A burley BLMer scooped > him up, carried him through the angry crowd to safety, handed him over to > the bobbies: > > > > > > The news people found the guy who carried that man out of there and > interviewed him. He explained that BLM isn?t there to riot, it isn?t there > to burn or destroy property, they don?t want to fight or injure anyone, > they are not promoting communism or capitalism or any political ism, they > just want black people to have a fair shake. > > > > Well hell, this one photo proves his point better than a million yakkity > words. Good for him. I am with him. > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 26529 bytes Desc: not available URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Mon Jun 15 19:13:37 2020 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 15:13:37 -0400 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d6432c$dbb4ce90$931e6bb0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 1:28 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > The only black people I have ever known in any capacity have been low > class people - laborers on the farm or at the railroad station and so on, > most of them illiterate. I cannot speak for blacks of higher classes, but > from my limited experience I can attest that for kindness of heart they are > at least our equals. bill w > > i was already "smh" and about to just brush the whole thread off... but that falls under the idea of silence equals acceptance. the first problem is seeing "blacks" as "they" - you need to fix that kind of thinking. And if you don't like my use of singular you, then how about "we" as in "we need to fix that kind of thinking" I propose that you have the discipline to replace all future expression of "blacks" as "black people" so you are constantly reminded that color is an adjective and not a noun. The common thing between "black people" and "white people" is that we're all "people". It should be a simple enough change that it might even be possible. We should at least TRY. If you are going to say something about "black people" that would also be true of "white people" then you shouldn't even mention color. "I cannot speak for [unnecessary qualifier] people of higher classes..." because the point you might be making is about classism or economic privilege, and in that case there is no need to confuse the point with racist-sounding rhetoric. If you were to make the point that you don't know any "black people" from higher classes than those laborers, then I will conclude that you either live in a place that is remote/sheltered or very privileged to have maintained isolation from an entire demographic of people. That's not in itself wrong; but it's a bias that you should be able to check at the door. After that, you're then admitting that there might be a systemic imbalance in the opportunity afforded to a subset of the population such that you've lived a life of uneven distribution and equal access. I think the reform that #BLM is looking for, needs to start in the ideas that separate as well as unify. I think #BLM has too much momentum to redefine their message at this point, but as far as memes go I think #BLM will unravel and fly apart before it achieves a self-sustaining change. Maybe that will create enough space for the next seed to grow to maturity. I can't see that far ahead. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Mon Jun 15 19:57:36 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 12:57:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] police In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Jun 14, 2020, at 7:26 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote:? > > Have any of you seen stories about the police and the police unions' opinions of what is being said and done? I have not. > > Am I missing them or is there a stony silence? > > bill w Mostly, they've been silent, but here's an interview with FOP national president Patrick Yoes on NPR: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/10/873624473/fraternal-order-of-police-president-discusses-police-reforms Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Mon Jun 15 20:09:07 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 13:09:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ExI] are we publishing? In-Reply-To: <2064523492.1200570.1592247524315@mail.yahoo.com> References: <2064523492.1200570.1592247524315@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: See: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/19/daniel-ellsberg-edward-snowden-and-the-modern-whistle-blower TL:DR: There are different types of leaks and leakers. Snowden and Assange are different than Ellsberg. Regards, Dan On Tuesday, May 28, 2019, 10:57:23 AM PDT, wrote: From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of BillK Subject: Re: [ExI] ExI] are we publishing? Paradox is piled upon irony in this weird case. Julian damn well did publish classified info, but they never really hoped to convict him on that, because? the New York Times published the highly-classified Pentagon Papers a long time ago, and they were US citizens, and they didn?t get charged. Yet? what Julian?s adversaries really had the heartburn about was his publishing information that was not even classified, hell it wasn?t even properly secured (Password is not a good password.) If one argues that the consequences were enormous, that in itself does not establish the crime, or even who is guilty. Does the guy who set his password to Password share any guilt? In my eyes he does. In systems where the username is patterned (such as first initial last name at something dot org) there are software routines that go down thru guessing the few hundred most common passwords. Password is the most common password. OK somebody got in. Surprise! Sheesh. So? Julian published information that was not classified and was not even properly secured, given to him by a third party. Result: the leading POTUS candidate ?joked? about murdering him with a drone. OK suppose you are Julian and you read that. I can imagine he was not ROTFL-ing. I vaguely imagine he had no trouble sitting right there in his chair, perhaps not even a giggle from that hilarious joke as he sat there in that de-facto maximum security prison with no way out, thinking: Oh how funny! The USA, with aaaaallll its agents and aaaalllll its covert this and that, and aaaaaalllll its military technology, is about to elect a Commander in Chief who jokes about killing me, jocularity how hilarious is that little gag that hundreds of millions of people read about, any one of which could come in here and kill me? Looks to me like that little joke was the western equivalent of a stealth fatwa. I wouldn?t find that a damn bit funny, and perhaps just a wee bit? disconcerting. But hey, I am that way, heh heh, so unreasonably suspicious I am. In light of that, I can vaguely imagine Julian would prefer that particular candidate would lose that election, even if he had no particular viewpoint with respect to another country?s politics. Ja? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Mon Jun 15 20:11:52 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 13:11:52 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Trusting China information was Protest In-Reply-To: <007901d6426c$ad2d0bc0$07872340$@rainier66.com> References: <007901d6426c$ad2d0bc0$07872340$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <5555FFFF-41F2-4528-9A46-6386BE492BBA@gmail.com> On Jun 14, 2020, at 10:03 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > Hi Keith, ja, one could go that route, but keep in mind the US doesn't have > the authority at any level to control the behavior of individuals. China > does. Presidential and governors' executive orders do not apply to > individuals. > > We are seeing these riots where people are clearly violating social > distancing rules, looting in flash mobs, some without masks, ignoring social > distancing rules. We see the CHAZ area in Seattle having enormous rallies > where it isn't clear if social distancing rules apply. > > China can stop all kind of things, because they have the functional > equivalent of a dictatorship, with no guarantee of free speech. The > government controls the message. They likely wielded power the US does not > have at any level, and we don't know if we can trust the message. We still > don't know. We have no intentions of handing the government (at any level) > the authority that China already has. In China, the government can dictate > down to the level of detail including how many children a couple may have. > We don't do that. > > spike Regarding CHAZ, what do you mean by 'enormous rallies'? Compared to what? And when did these take place? It looks like, within the context of a protest, these folks are semi-following the rules (just like protesters pretty much everywhere esle): https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/14/inside-seattle-autonomous-zone-black-protesters-seek-lasting-change/3179232001/ And the crowd doesn't seem all that large. See also: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/us/seattle-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone-monday/index.html One protest I saw near me on Friday -- not in the CHAZ -- was a few dozen people all wearing masks though a bit closer together than the six foot rule. The thing is I don't see people uniformly following 'social' distancing rules around Seattle. In the more hip areas, yes, but the outlying areas tend to be mixed. (CHAZ is in one of the hip areas by my reckoning.) One standard: you'll see fewer maskless people the closer you get a Whole Foods. :) I'm not so sure about the PRC government exactly having the power you say. Yeah, sure, it's an authoritarian regime. The problem for such regimes though is there's more a show of power and a show of compliance. And when officials aren't looking? Well, then, like everywhere else, people take more chances and do what they can get away with, no? Or do you believe if the sign says no speeding, no one speeds? Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst From danust2012 at gmail.com Mon Jun 15 20:22:25 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 13:22:25 -0700 Subject: [ExI] police In-Reply-To: <005501d64259$7d31da30$77958e90$@rainier66.com> References: <005501d64259$7d31da30$77958e90$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <000619F0-2612-4F54-A8DB-F921F1496AA6@gmail.com> On Jun 14, 2020, at 7:48 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > Hi BillW, there are many things being said done. Do focus your question to something Google can find. In my world, what is being said and done is far different from what I think you are asking. The local constables (in general) never heard of any of it. > > spike Are you using ?constables? to mean ?police? or actual constables? If the former, it?s an example of the sort language change I mentioned earlier: the meaning of existing terms alters over time. In another post, I shared a link to a recent NPR interview* where a police union official does respond to calls for reforms. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst * https://www.npr.org/2020/06/10/873624473/fraternal-order-of-police-president-discusses-police-reforms -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 15 20:32:06 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 15:32:06 -0500 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d6432c$dbb4ce90$931e6bb0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: The reason for 'them' and 'they' is that they are different from me in ways that are significant to me. Morally. Theirs is a different culture. And I don't want to be considered any part of it. I am not a part of the relativism movement in moral philosophy. It is a point that several black professors of national standing have made and said that blacks need to correct if they want to be regarded as equals. If you do not know what I am talking about, you are quite ignorant and you might want to fix that. Another thing you might want to fix is preaching to me. I suggest you pick another person if you want to try to 'correct' their moral thinking. I will, as always, continue to disregard their color and treat them as I will anyone else. This is the end of my part of this thread. bill w On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 2:16 PM Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 1:28 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >> The only black people I have ever known in any capacity have been low >> class people - laborers on the farm or at the railroad station and so on, >> most of them illiterate. I cannot speak for blacks of higher classes, but >> from my limited experience I can attest that for kindness of heart they are >> at least our equals. bill w >> >> > i was already "smh" and about to just brush the whole thread off... but > that falls under the idea of silence equals acceptance. > > the first problem is seeing "blacks" as "they" - you need to fix that kind > of thinking. And if you don't like my use of singular you, then how about > "we" as in "we need to fix that kind of thinking" I propose that you have > the discipline to replace all future expression of "blacks" as "black > people" so you are constantly reminded that color is an adjective and not a > noun. The common thing between "black people" and "white people" is that > we're all "people". It should be a simple enough change that it might even > be possible. We should at least TRY. > > If you are going to say something about "black people" that would also be > true of "white people" then you shouldn't even mention color. "I cannot > speak for [unnecessary qualifier] people of higher classes..." because the > point you might be making is about classism or economic privilege, and in > that case there is no need to confuse the point with racist-sounding > rhetoric. > > If you were to make the point that you don't know any "black people" from > higher classes than those laborers, then I will conclude that you either > live in a place that is remote/sheltered or very privileged to have > maintained isolation from an entire demographic of people. That's not in > itself wrong; but it's a bias that you should be able to check at the > door. After that, you're then admitting that there might be a systemic > imbalance in the opportunity afforded to a subset of the population such > that you've lived a life of uneven distribution and equal access. > > I think the reform that #BLM is looking for, needs to start in the ideas > that separate as well as unify. I think #BLM has too much momentum to > redefine their message at this point, but as far as memes go I think #BLM > will unravel and fly apart before it achieves a self-sustaining change. > Maybe that will create enough space for the next seed to grow to maturity. > I can't see that far ahead. > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 15 22:56:24 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 15:56:24 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Trusting China information was Protest In-Reply-To: <5555FFFF-41F2-4528-9A46-6386BE492BBA@gmail.com> References: <007901d6426c$ad2d0bc0$07872340$@rainier66.com> <5555FFFF-41F2-4528-9A46-6386BE492BBA@gmail.com> Message-ID: <00a001d64368$32b598b0$9820ca10$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Trusting China information was Protest On Jun 14, 2020, at 10:03 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > . > >.> We are seeing these riots where people are clearly violating social > distancing rules, looting in flash mobs, some without masks, ignoring > social distancing rules. We see the CHAZ area in Seattle having > enormous rallies where it isn't clear if social distancing rules apply.. spike >.Regarding CHAZ, what do you mean by 'enormous rallies'? Compared to what? And when did these take place? It looks like, within the context of a protest, these folks are semi-following the rules (just like protesters pretty much everywhere esle)... Regards, Dan Hi Dan, this: spike . -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 83206 bytes Desc: not available URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 15 23:03:45 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 18:03:45 -0500 Subject: [ExI] rubber bullets Message-ID: Is anyone concerned that rubber bullets and tear gas are being used against peaceful protesters exercising their 1st Amendment rights? Are the police immune to lawsuits claiming denial of constitutional rights? If so, that is one of the things we need to change. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 15 23:05:53 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 16:05:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] police In-Reply-To: <000619F0-2612-4F54-A8DB-F921F1496AA6@gmail.com> References: <005501d64259$7d31da30$77958e90$@rainier66.com> <000619F0-2612-4F54-A8DB-F921F1496AA6@gmail.com> Message-ID: <00ae01d64369$85e73ec0$91b5bc40$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] police On Jun 14, 2020, at 7:48 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: Hi BillW?The local constables (in general) never heard of any of it. spike >?Are you using ?constables? to mean ?police? or actual constables? If the former, it?s an example of the sort language change I mentioned earlier: the meaning of existing terms alters over time. Regards, Dan Hi Dan, ?constables? are city-level police, a general term that covers the SWAT team, the specialty stuff that city-level cops do. At the county level are the deputies with the sheriff as their boss. State level police are troopers, national level are Feds. Four different types of police. When my bride?s great great grandfather was slain in the line of duty at age 32, leaving two young children and a widow, he was referred to as Constable Blundell in the news articles because he worked for the city. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 00:21:57 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 19:21:57 -0500 Subject: [ExI] rubber bullets In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I care, of course. I think it is the police department which is sued rather than individual officers, because I believe that since the police are acting on orders that the fault falls mainly on the one who issued the order. The police department will, of course, plain that the protestors who were tear gassed and shot were: not peaceful, refusing an order to disperse, did not have a permit for assembly, were violating social distancing, or resisting arrest. Did you know you can be tried and convicted or resisting arrest even if they don?t file any other charges against you? That you have no right to protest an unlawful order by police? One is supposed to comply with the unlawful order and then sue. I do not think a police officer, under his own power, can deny your 1st amendment right. The coordinated actions of a police department would, however, possibly deny you that right. SR Ballard > On Jun 15, 2020, at 6:03 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > Is anyone concerned that rubber bullets and tear gas are being used against peaceful protesters exercising their 1st Amendment rights? Are the police immune to lawsuits claiming denial of constitutional rights? If so, that is one of the things we need to change. > > bill w > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 00:26:56 2020 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 20:26:56 -0400 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d6432c$dbb4ce90$931e6bb0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 4:45 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > The reason for 'them' and 'they' is that they are different from me in > ways that are significant to me. Morally. Theirs is a different culture. > And I don't want to be considered any part of it. I am not a part of the > relativism movement in moral philosophy. > > It is a point that several black professors of national standing have made > and said that blacks need to correct if they want to be regarded as > equals. If you do not know what I am talking about, you are quite ignorant > and you might want to fix that. > > Another thing you might want to fix is preaching to me. I suggest you > pick another person if you want to try to 'correct' their moral thinking. > > I will, as always, continue to disregard their color and treat them as I > will anyone else. > > This is the end of my part of this thread. > Wow. I wonder if anyone else reading this thread would like to arbitrate? I specifically directed "i vs you" to "we" so to subject could be less prone to being physically slighted. I just had this same conversation with my dad for how his use of language makes him sound racist and how that makes my wife immediately confrontational about it. Theirs is a different culture. Yours is a different culture. Mine is a different culture. Yours is the morally superior position. I'm ignorant, but have nothing to learn from the end of your part of this thread. For anyone else that might explain how this thread could go so wrong in two replies... what is the nature of the difficulty here? Was my point so poorly made that offense was the only way to react? > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 00:39:19 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 19:39:19 -0500 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d6432c$dbb4ce90$931e6bb0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Im sorry Bill but? >The reason for 'them' and 'they' is that they are different from me in ways that are significant to me. Morally. All black people are significantly morally different than yourself? How do you arrive at that conclusion? > >Theirs is a different culture. And I don't want to be considered any part of it. It?s not as if ?black culture? is a monolith any more than ?white culture? is. I am 100% sure than my cultural background is different than yours, and not due to any differences in pigmentation that might (or might not) exist between us. If you are not a black person, I doubt people will accuse you of being part of ?black culture?. >I am not a part of the relativism movement in moral philosophy. Moral relativism is not inherently a part of ?black culture?. What it is part of is contemporary western culture broadly. It seems that decline in cultural religiosity is at least weakly correlated with increased moral relativism. I am generally a moral relativist, and fail to appreciate it?s vileness. Morally everything is relative, despite any objection or disgust I have toward it (or conversely my desire or praise for it). Who sets such moral determinations outside of religion? However, despite that, some things are helpful to a certain ends and some are detrimental, some things prop up society and some destroy it. When I make a moral judgement I base it on those things, personally, but I understand and accept that others use different moral frameworks and tend not to be bothered by them. There are exceptions, obviously, but speaking generally. My views on moral relativism are probably heavily colored by my cultural upbringing. I am a TCK, and my family is a carnival family. Moral absolutism and moral idealism don?t adequately function my anecdotal experience. SR Ballard > On Jun 15, 2020, at 3:32 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > The reason for 'them' and 'they' is that they are different from me in ways that are significant to me. Morally. Theirs is a different culture. And I don't want to be considered any part of it. I am not a part of the relativism movement in moral philosophy. > > It is a point that several black professors of national standing have made and said that blacks need to correct if they want to be regarded as equals. If you do not know what I am talking about, you are quite ignorant and you might want to fix that. > > Another thing you might want to fix is preaching to me. I suggest you pick another person if you want to try to 'correct' their moral thinking. > > I will, as always, continue to disregard their color and treat them as I will anyone else. > > This is the end of my part of this thread. > > bill w > >> On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 2:16 PM Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat wrote: >>> On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 1:28 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: >> >>> >>> The only black people I have ever known in any capacity have been low class people - laborers on the farm or at the railroad station and so on, most of them illiterate. I cannot speak for blacks of higher classes, but from my limited experience I can attest that for kindness of heart they are at least our equals. bill w >>> >>> >> >> i was already "smh" and about to just brush the whole thread off... but that falls under the idea of silence equals acceptance. >> >> the first problem is seeing "blacks" as "they" - you need to fix that kind of thinking. And if you don't like my use of singular you, then how about "we" as in "we need to fix that kind of thinking" I propose that you have the discipline to replace all future expression of "blacks" as "black people" so you are constantly reminded that color is an adjective and not a noun. The common thing between "black people" and "white people" is that we're all "people". It should be a simple enough change that it might even be possible. We should at least TRY. >> >> If you are going to say something about "black people" that would also be true of "white people" then you shouldn't even mention color. "I cannot speak for [unnecessary qualifier] people of higher classes..." because the point you might be making is about classism or economic privilege, and in that case there is no need to confuse the point with racist-sounding rhetoric. >> >> If you were to make the point that you don't know any "black people" from higher classes than those laborers, then I will conclude that you either live in a place that is remote/sheltered or very privileged to have maintained isolation from an entire demographic of people. That's not in itself wrong; but it's a bias that you should be able to check at the door. After that, you're then admitting that there might be a systemic imbalance in the opportunity afforded to a subset of the population such that you've lived a life of uneven distribution and equal access. >> >> I think the reform that #BLM is looking for, needs to start in the ideas that separate as well as unify. I think #BLM has too much momentum to redefine their message at this point, but as far as memes go I think #BLM will unravel and fly apart before it achieves a self-sustaining change. Maybe that will create enough space for the next seed to grow to maturity. I can't see that far ahead. >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 00:47:02 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 19:47:02 -0500 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d6432c$dbb4ce90$931e6bb0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <0BA25249-8394-41AE-85BF-3A29F990B411@gmail.com> Mike, I?d say you came off extremely judgementally, and sounded as if you were preaching to someone about their ?sin? of non-PC speech and general ?thought crimes?. You?re speaking in a way directly associated with ?call out culture?, and it?s part of why that culture is regarded so poorly outside of activist culture. It?s incredibly abrasive. I?m abrasive, generally, but I understand that and accept it. I don?t think the same is true of yourself. You corrected him on ?I vs they? when it didn?t need correcting, in the sense that he said what he meant. He didn?t say ?we? because, as you can see from his reply, he did not mean ?we?. He is intentionally distancing himself verbally. You can disagree with that, but that?s the fundamental truth of the situation. Activists can say all they want about how people shouldn?t ?tone police? but tone matters. Not saying my tone was/is any better. But again, I accept that I am abrasive and understand when people react poorly to that. SR Ballard > On Jun 15, 2020, at 7:26 PM, Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat wrote: > >> On Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 4:45 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: >> The reason for 'them' and 'they' is that they are different from me in ways that are significant to me. Morally. Theirs is a different culture. And I don't want to be considered any part of it. I am not a part of the relativism movement in moral philosophy. >> >> It is a point that several black professors of national standing have made and said that blacks need to correct if they want to be regarded as equals. If you do not know what I am talking about, you are quite ignorant and you might want to fix that. >> >> Another thing you might want to fix is preaching to me. I suggest you pick another person if you want to try to 'correct' their moral thinking. >> >> I will, as always, continue to disregard their color and treat them as I will anyone else. >> >> This is the end of my part of this thread. > > > Wow. I wonder if anyone else reading this thread would like to arbitrate? > > I specifically directed "i vs you" to "we" so to subject could be less prone to being physically slighted. I just had this same conversation with my dad for how his use of language makes him sound racist and how that makes my wife immediately confrontational about it. > > Theirs is a different culture. Yours is a different culture. Mine is a different culture. Yours is the morally superior position. I'm ignorant, but have nothing to learn from the end of your part of this thread. > > For anyone else that might explain how this thread could go so wrong in two replies... what is the nature of the difficulty here? > > Was my point so poorly made that offense was the only way to react? >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 01:01:59 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 18:01:59 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d6432c$dbb4ce90$931e6bb0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 5:34 PM Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 4:45 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> This is the end of my part of this thread. >> > > Wow. I wonder if anyone else reading this thread would like to arbitrate? > There seems to be nothing to arbitrate. Will has said his piece, and is done. > his use of language makes him sound racist and how that makes my wife > immediately confrontational about it. > That's not his error. That's your wife's, and maybe yours. For anyone else that might explain how this thread could go so wrong in two > replies... what is the nature of the difficulty here? > > Was my point so poorly made that offense was the only way to react? > Your mistake is in insisting - demanding - there is racism where there is none. "Your words make you sound racist" when there is in fact nothing racist about the words, is an attack. Check his words again: "The reason for 'them' and 'they' is that they are different from me in ways that are significant to me. Morally. Theirs is a different culture. And I don't want to be considered any part of it. I am not a part of the relativism movement in moral philosophy." He considers the black people he has personally encountered to be different than him. Not "worse", not "inferior", and certainly not "should be legally segregated" or "okay to brutalize". Also note he earlier said: "The only black people I have ever known in any capacity have been low class people - laborers on the farm or at the railroad station and so on, most of them illiterate. I cannot speak for blacks of higher classes, but from my limited experience I can attest that for kindness of heart they are at least our equals." So he's talking about a different social class than he is in. Of course a different social class would be different, regardless of race. What he is saying boils down to, "my personal experience confirms the point of view that black lives are moral lives too". Note that "black lives are moral lives too" is part of the meaning of "Black Lives Matter". -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ilsa.bartlett at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 01:02:15 2020 From: ilsa.bartlett at gmail.com (ilsa) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 18:02:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: <003d01d6432c$dbb4ce90$931e6bb0$@rainier66.com> References: <003d01d6432c$dbb4ce90$931e6bb0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Two black men were hung from trees today one in LA On Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 8:54 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > Images are more powerful than words. This one was from England, where > there was a big BLM rally in London. A white guy was there who was not > part of BLM, but was injured, conked on the head, stunned, on the ground, > clearly at risk for being trampled or attacked. Several protestors pushed > back the crowd and formed a protective perimeter. A burley BLMer scooped > him up, carried him through the angry crowd to safety, handed him over to > the bobbies: > > > > > > The news people found the guy who carried that man out of there and > interviewed him. He explained that BLM isn?t there to riot, it isn?t there > to burn or destroy property, they don?t want to fight or injure anyone, > they are not promoting communism or capitalism or any political ism, they > just want black people to have a fair shake. > > > > Well hell, this one photo proves his point better than a million yakkity > words. Good for him. I am with him. > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 26529 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 26529 bytes Desc: not available URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 16 01:09:24 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 18:09:24 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d6432c$dbb4ce90$931e6bb0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <007401d6437a$c9916b30$5cb44190$@rainier66.com> On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat This is the end of my part of this thread. BillW >?Wow. I wonder if anyone else reading this thread would like to arbitrate? Hi Mike, OK. Do let us end this particular thread please. If unresolved, do feel free to contact each other offlist. Remember we are among friends here. Thanks! spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 01:20:28 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 18:20:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] rubber bullets In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 4:17 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Is anyone concerned that rubber bullets and tear gas are being used > against peaceful protesters exercising their 1st Amendment rights? Are the > police immune to lawsuits claiming denial of constitutional rights? If so, > that is one of the things we need to change. > Many police believe with good reason that they are in fact immune, at least within the US, so long as the exact thing they did - down to every detail - has not been previously found illegal. That's not "fire tear gas at protestors" but "fire this specific brand of tear gas under these exact weather conditions at this range (and so on for pages) at protestors". Look up "qualified immunity". It seems to be getting used a lot more as a legal defense these days. Note that the Supreme Court just today declined to hear a number of cases seeking to overturn qualified immunity. I agree, it is among the list of things that urgently need changing. It may be small compensation that, after this was done in DC, there was a string of high brass in the DOD stepping forward to say they had no part in authorizing it. (In fact, it wasn't the military at all, but U.S. Park Police - with some evidence the order may have come from AG Barr. The incident happened on ground that apparently has the legal designation of a national park, which would give the USPP jurisdiction.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 01:32:28 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 20:32:28 -0500 Subject: [ExI] rubber bullets In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Which brings up the question: why do you have to get a permit to exercise your constitutional rights? bill w On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 7:25 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I care, of course. I think it is the police department which is sued > rather than individual officers, because I believe that since the police > are acting on orders that the fault falls mainly on the one who issued the > order. > > The police department will, of course, plain that the protestors who were > tear gassed and shot were: not peaceful, refusing an order to disperse, did > not have a permit for assembly, were violating social distancing, or > resisting arrest. > > Did you know you can be tried and convicted or resisting arrest even if > they don?t file any other charges against you? That you have no right to > protest an unlawful order by police? One is supposed to comply with the > unlawful order and then sue. > > I do not think a police officer, under his own power, can deny your 1st > amendment right. The coordinated actions of a police department would, > however, possibly deny you that right. > > SR Ballard > > On Jun 15, 2020, at 6:03 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > Is anyone concerned that rubber bullets and tear gas are being used > against peaceful protesters exercising their 1st Amendment rights? Are the > police immune to lawsuits claiming denial of constitutional rights? If so, > that is one of the things we need to change. > > bill w > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 02:15:38 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 19:15:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image Message-ID: SR Ballard wrote: snip > If you are not a black person, I doubt people will accuse you of being part of ?black culture?. That kicked off an idea which is so crazy that it might have merit. Decades back, a white reporter put on "all over" blackface and passed for black somewhere in the south. Needless to say, he had some interesting experiences. (The book he wrote *might* be "Black like me." It's been too long and I don't feel like searching with google.) Anyway, at this point, there are a lot of activists out there who might be able to change the behavior of the police in a big way. I don't know how the real blacks would feel about this, but a bunch of white guys in blackface driving around and being stopped, then revealing they are actually white seems like it might make the police pause and think. "Be careful, the black you pull over might actually be a white guy" would at least confuse the heck out of the police. This might be a stupid idea, or perhaps it is only suitable for a comedy sketch, but it seems like it would be amusing if it were tried out. Of course, in the long run, you can be any color you want. Sort of like hair color today. Comments? Keith From atymes at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 03:18:39 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 20:18:39 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 7:19 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Anyway, at this point, there are a lot of activists out there who > might be able to change the behavior of the police in a big way. I > don't know how the real blacks would feel about this, but a bunch of > white guys in blackface driving around and being stopped, then > revealing they are actually white seems like it might make the police > pause and think. "Be careful, the black you pull over might actually > be a white guy" would at least confuse the heck out of the police. > > This might be a stupid idea, or perhaps it is only suitable for a > comedy sketch, but it seems like it would be amusing if it were tried > out. > It'd be taken very poorly as comedy. Not viable on that angle. Blackface is easy to recognize up close. The cops wouldn't be fooled. But the biggest problem is believing the cops would care. There might be brutality against black folks, but there's brutality against white folks who support the protests too. The error cycle is that a cop sees a black person and incorrectly assumes a threat; if a cop thinks blackface is any indication of intent to be a threat like black people are perceived to be, the cop may in fact be more willing to shoot. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 03:23:56 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 20:23:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: What happens to US space programs when a new President enters office? The same thing that always happens to US space programs when a new President enters office. Maybe this time SLS will get recognized as the jobs-but-never-actually-space program it's always been (what, you think the program's executives intend to ever launch if they can avoid it, with their chain of broken promises about when this will happen and how much it will cost?) and get defunded. Or maybe not. Maybe there will be more focus on getting actual space-based industry started up. Or maybe not. But I can guarantee NASA will still be there after November. (And after January, when the new Presidential term actually begins.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 03:56:57 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 20:56:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] police In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Many of the police unions are trying to get out in front of the wave of changes, making their own proposals - which, of course, tend not to do things like completely eliminate the police unions. Doubtless, in some cases their proposals will win and in others they will not. On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 7:26 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Have any of you seen stories about the police and the police unions' > opinions of what is being said and done? I have not. > > Am I missing them or is there a stony silence? > > bill w > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ilsa.bartlett at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 05:21:16 2020 From: ilsa.bartlett at gmail.com (ilsa) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 22:21:16 -0700 Subject: [ExI] police In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On France24 tv a video of police response, ilsa On Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 8:57 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Many of the police unions are trying to get out in front of the wave of > changes, making their own proposals - which, of course, tend not to do > things like completely eliminate the police unions. > > Doubtless, in some cases their proposals will win and in others they will > not. > > On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 7:26 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> Have any of you seen stories about the police and the police unions' >> opinions of what is being said and done? I have not. >> >> Am I missing them or is there a stony silence? >> >> bill w >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 06:59:23 2020 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 08:59:23 +0200 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: John, we DO have the technological capability to do these things. And I think that, at this moment, re-igniting the human spirit with ambitious crewed space missions to the Moon and Mars is more important than astronomy. Are you sure you aren't letting your dislike for Trump dictate your opinions on space policy? That would more than prove one of my main points, that the current climate of extreme political polarization is very toxic. On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 2:02 PM John Clark via extropy-chat wrote: > > On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 3:02 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat wrote: > >> > If Trump wins US astronauts will probably walk on the Moon before the end of the decade. [...] If Trump loses, good bye Artemis and the hope to return to the Moon. > > > Good. At this point in our technological development I see little point in sending astronauts to the moon and even less to Mars. I can understand wanting to have a 2 planet civilization but It makes no sense to spend $1 trillion to send a couple of people to Mars and then spend another $2 trillion to bring them back. I'm in favor of sending people into space I'm just not in favor of bringing them back; when we have the technological capability to make a fully self-sufficient colony on the moon or on Mars then it would be time to send people there but not before, and right now we can't even make a self-sufficient colony on Antarctica. In the meantime It would be vastly more scientifically productive if the government forgot about Buck Rogers and just gave NASA the money it needs (which would be many orders of magnitude less than manned spaceflight) so it can build all 4 projects in this video, although the first one talked about, HabEx, is my least favorite: > > 4 Future Space Telescopes NASA wants to build > > John K Clark > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From giulio at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 07:09:17 2020 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 09:09:17 +0200 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Sure, NASA will still be there after november. But perhaps it will be managed by the Department of Agriculture, like in a Stephen Baxter novel (Space). If a new US President always cancels the space programs of the previous administration upon taking office, then the US space program is stuck on the ground forever. That in a democracy the color of the administration changes every few years is GOOD. What is NO GOOD is a two-party system split in two roughly equal camps that hate each other and don't want to work together for the common good. Nothing good can come out of that. Of course I agree that the SLS should be canceled and the money used to buy launch and cargo services from Musk &co. But that would be a political decision that only an administration with an ambitious space program would make. Otherwise, better let large legacy companies and their politicians continue to profit from the status quo. On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 5:34 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat wrote: > > What happens to US space programs when a new President enters office? > > The same thing that always happens to US space programs when a new President enters office. > > Maybe this time SLS will get recognized as the jobs-but-never-actually-space program it's always been (what, you think the program's executives intend to ever launch if they can avoid it, with their chain of broken promises about when this will happen and how much it will cost?) and get defunded. Or maybe not. > > Maybe there will be more focus on getting actual space-based industry started up. Or maybe not. > > But I can guarantee NASA will still be there after November. (And after January, when the new Presidential term actually begins.) > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From atymes at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 07:18:15 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 00:18:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 12:13 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Of course I agree that the SLS should be canceled and the money used > to buy launch and cargo services from Musk &co. But that would be a > political decision that only an administration with an ambitious space > program would make. Otherwise, better let large legacy companies and > their politicians continue to profit from the status quo. > Whatever else can (and should) be said about Trump, he is in favor of ambitious space programs. And yet, SLS does not look like it will be defunded this side of November. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 07:30:25 2020 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 09:30:25 +0200 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I guess that, IF Trump is re-elected and IF his administration is really in favor of ambitious space programs, sooner or later they will be forced to realize that the SLS is far too expensive compared to emerging commercial alternatives. But canceling the SLS and switching Artemis to commercial launch/cargo providers would require major political actions and backstage negotiations. It doesn't make sense for the current administration to do that before November. On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 9:20 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat wrote: > > On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 12:13 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> Of course I agree that the SLS should be canceled and the money used >> to buy launch and cargo services from Musk &co. But that would be a >> political decision that only an administration with an ambitious space >> program would make. Otherwise, better let large legacy companies and >> their politicians continue to profit from the status quo. > > > Whatever else can (and should) be said about Trump, he is in favor of ambitious space programs. And yet, SLS does not look like it will be defunded this side of November. > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From atymes at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 07:40:41 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 00:40:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Right, but what about the past 3 years? If Trump is reelected, I doubt he would cancel SLS despite having an ambitious space program. It takes a realistic space program to do that, one that actually tries to accomplish its goals instead of being bread and circuses - and realism is not one of Trump's strong suits. On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 12:32 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I guess that, IF Trump is re-elected and IF his administration is > really in favor of ambitious space programs, sooner or later they will > be forced to realize that the SLS is far too expensive compared to > emerging commercial alternatives. But canceling the SLS and switching > Artemis to commercial launch/cargo providers would require major > political actions and backstage negotiations. It doesn't make sense > for the current administration to do that before November. > > On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 9:20 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat > wrote: > > > > On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 12:13 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> > >> Of course I agree that the SLS should be canceled and the money used > >> to buy launch and cargo services from Musk &co. But that would be a > >> political decision that only an administration with an ambitious space > >> program would make. Otherwise, better let large legacy companies and > >> their politicians continue to profit from the status quo. > > > > > > Whatever else can (and should) be said about Trump, he is in favor of > ambitious space programs. And yet, SLS does not look like it will be > defunded this side of November. > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ben at zaiboc.net Tue Jun 16 07:43:31 2020 From: ben at zaiboc.net (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 08:43:31 +0100 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> On 15/06/2020 18:25, spike wrote: > ... England, where there was a big BLM rally in London. What I don't understand is, why? What was the point of a rally like this, in a country where probably 95% of the population agree with the protesters? London is one of the most cosmopolitan places I know, and racial prejudice is almost nonexistent, as far as I'm aware. I was just mentioning to someone yesterday that an everyday sight here - a group of people walking down the street, consisting of white, black, brown, you-name-it, individuals, of miscellaneous ages and sexes - would be very rare or even almost impossible in certain places in America. She wasn't sure if I was serious or not. We routinely see every combination of types of people you could think of. I've never, ever, seen anyone discriminated against on the basis of their skin colour here. So I don't understand the need, or the point, of such a rally in London. They are hardly going to change anyone's mind, or introduce a startling new viewpoint, as everyone here already agrees with them. -- Ben Zaiboc From giulio at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 07:51:31 2020 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 09:51:31 +0200 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Perhaps canceling the SLS before the first practical demonstration that SpaceX is able to take human astronauts to the ISS and back, cheaper than other options, would be seen as too risky? Of course Trump himself wants only bread and circuses. All politicians are like that. But at least Trump's bread and circuses empower NASA and SpaceX &co to build a space program that achieves its goals. No? On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 9:43 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat wrote: > > Right, but what about the past 3 years? > > If Trump is reelected, I doubt he would cancel SLS despite having an ambitious space program. It takes a realistic space program to do that, one that actually tries to accomplish its goals instead of being bread and circuses - and realism is not one of Trump's strong suits. > > On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 12:32 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> I guess that, IF Trump is re-elected and IF his administration is >> really in favor of ambitious space programs, sooner or later they will >> be forced to realize that the SLS is far too expensive compared to >> emerging commercial alternatives. But canceling the SLS and switching >> Artemis to commercial launch/cargo providers would require major >> political actions and backstage negotiations. It doesn't make sense >> for the current administration to do that before November. >> >> On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 9:20 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat >> wrote: >> > >> > On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 12:13 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> >> >> Of course I agree that the SLS should be canceled and the money used >> >> to buy launch and cargo services from Musk &co. But that would be a >> >> political decision that only an administration with an ambitious space >> >> program would make. Otherwise, better let large legacy companies and >> >> their politicians continue to profit from the status quo. >> > >> > >> > Whatever else can (and should) be said about Trump, he is in favor of ambitious space programs. And yet, SLS does not look like it will be defunded this side of November. >> > _______________________________________________ >> > extropy-chat mailing list >> > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 10:41:32 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 06:41:32 -0400 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 3:02 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > *John, we DO have the technological capability to do these things.* It would be vastly easier to make a totally self-sufficient colony on Antarctica then on Mars or the Moon, and yet we don't even know how to do that. Prove me wrong and set up such a colony, and then we'll talk. > * > I think that, at this moment, re-igniting the human spirit with > ambitious crewed space missions to the Moon and Mars is more important than > astronomy.* That's where we strongly disagree. I think getting from astronomy a better understanding of the relationship between us and the Cosmos and hints about the very nature of reality could ignite the human spirit much more profoundly than yet another non-scripted TV show, even one with blockbuster ratings. Apollo 11 was a worldwide sensation but when Apollo 12 came along people felt it was just a rerun; I remember my grandmother complaining about how all the special reports about it we're interfering with her soap operas. And people were only interested in Apollo 13 because something went wrong. The first Mars mission would be the talk of the town, but ask yourself how much igniting of the human spirit the SECOND two-way non-colonization manned mission to Mars will create. I think it would ignite a worldwide yawn, a yawn that would cost many trillions of dollars to create. And the space shuttle was an utter failure that didn't deliver on any of the economic or safety claims made about it before it actually flew; they said it would only take two weeks to turn around a shuttle and have it fly again, but two years turned out to be closer to the truth. It would've been cheaper to just keep the old Saturn-5 production line going, and 14 people would not be dead. And don't get me started on the International Space Station. the most expensive and most useless "scientific" project in history. > > *Are you sure you aren't letting your dislike for Trump dictate your > opinions on space policy?* Yes I'm sure. I've thought both the US and Russia have placed far too much emphasis on manned space flight from long before Trump Was president or was even a candidate for the presidency, and I have said so on this very list. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 12:42:34 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 08:42:34 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Quantum Key Distribution for Cryptography Message-ID: Chinese researchers report in the journal Nature that they have used quantum entanglement and a satellite to send a Cryptographic key over a record distance of 1120 Kilometers as securely as the laws of physics allow and do so with unprecedented speed and low error rates. The transmission speed was about one bit every eight seconds, that may sound slow but it's several orders of magnitude faster than anything done before, and you'd only be using it to send the cryptographic key, not an entire message. If quantum computers become practical it may be the only form of cryptography that still works. US researchers say it would take at least three years to equal what the Chinese have done. Entanglement-based secure quantum cryptography over 1,120 kilometres John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 13:05:11 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 09:05:11 -0400 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 10:20 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: * > Decades back, a white reporter put on "all over" blackface and passed > for black somewhere in the south. Needless to say, he had some interesting > experiences. (The book he wrote *might* be "Black like me." [...] This > might be a stupid idea, or perhaps it is only suitable for a comedy > sketch, * White Like Me Black White Supremacist John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 16 14:39:41 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 07:39:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <00ae01d643eb$f8983af0$e9c8b0d0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? >... sooner or later they will be forced to realize that the SLS is far too expensive compared to emerging commercial alternatives... Hi Giulio, in the meantime, we could use the SLS as a really high-priced hotel. Musk can haul tourists up there to it once the boosters are sufficiently advanced to take the occupant controls away. The passengers are spam in a can, heading for a fun weekend in space for about 20 million bucks per prole. That notion would churn their money back into the economy, it would give that expensive space station something to do. It would be just the ticket for the super-rich: it is something that only the world's elite get to do, it is exciting, it is crazy expensive, and as an added bonus: they get to show their friends how brave they are because they might die. Everybody wins. g From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 16 14:52:21 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 07:52:21 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> Message-ID: <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image On 15/06/2020 18:25, spike wrote: > ... England, where there was a big BLM rally in London. >...What I don't understand is, why? >...So I don't understand the need, or the point, of such a rally in London. They are hardly going to change anyone's mind, or introduce a startling new viewpoint, as everyone here already agrees with them. -- Ben Zaiboc _______________________________________________ Hi Ben, everyone in the US would agree with them too, if BLM manages to distance themselves from the rioters and anarchists. Their biggest problem at the moment is that the other groups are taking advantage of BLM. This rioting is going to cause all manner of problems: https://twitter.com/i/status/1272359799028514816 It really has me thinking of ways to deal, such as reviving a lot of food-processing "technology" that has been lost over the decades of progress. I remember visiting on my great grandmother's farm back in the 60s and early 70s. She lived out there with her daughter. The nearest grocery store was about half an hour away by car. They did a lot of preserving and food processing out there, skills people don't generally have today. But what if... rioting causes food deserts in some of the bigger cities and the insurance company decides to pull out, so they never restore the local outlets. The building owner decides to just leave everything as is, for a bitter reminder to the community: turn off the electricity and walk away from it. Soon the nearest grocery store might be half an hour drive away, but now there are a million families that need it rather than my great grandmother's community which had about 50 families, all of which had (and used) the ability to go two weeks between trips there. We have kicked around the idea of a minimum basic income, OK sure. But that doesn't do any good if there is no place left to trade the cash for basic supplies. spike From sen.otaku at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 14:56:43 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 09:56:43 -0500 Subject: [ExI] rubber bullets In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9E55C58A-1889-452B-83E5-3F56E1B0A92F@gmail.com> No clue. To prevent rioting/lynching? SR Ballard > On Jun 15, 2020, at 8:32 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > Which brings up the question: why do you have to get a permit to exercise your constitutional rights? bill w > >> On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 7:25 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat wrote: >> I care, of course. I think it is the police department which is sued rather than individual officers, because I believe that since the police are acting on orders that the fault falls mainly on the one who issued the order. >> >> The police department will, of course, plain that the protestors who were tear gassed and shot were: not peaceful, refusing an order to disperse, did not have a permit for assembly, were violating social distancing, or resisting arrest. >> >> Did you know you can be tried and convicted or resisting arrest even if they don?t file any other charges against you? That you have no right to protest an unlawful order by police? One is supposed to comply with the unlawful order and then sue. >> >> I do not think a police officer, under his own power, can deny your 1st amendment right. The coordinated actions of a police department would, however, possibly deny you that right. >> >> SR Ballard >> >>> On Jun 15, 2020, at 6:03 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: >>> >>> Is anyone concerned that rubber bullets and tear gas are being used against peaceful protesters exercising their 1st Amendment rights? Are the police immune to lawsuits claiming denial of constitutional rights? If so, that is one of the things we need to change. >>> >>> bill w >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 16 15:03:36 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 08:03:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Quantum Key Distribution for Cryptography In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <00b701d643ef$50637b70$f12a7250$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: [ExI] Quantum Key Distribution for Cryptography >? The transmission speed was about one bit every eight seconds, that may sound slow but it's several orders of magnitude faster than anything done before?John K Clark Think of it as 120 milli-Hertz. Or if you want to think in carrier frequency and Nyquist terminology, we are already up to 240 milli-Hertz. It?s a start. It has me thinking: we could send most of the signal over traditional lines with the last part being send using some kind of technology like this. Then the new challenge is to figure out the most efficient way to send a signal securely with the highest speed and utilizing but simultaneously minimizing reliance on quantum voodoo. This is the new space race: getting crypto-keys transferred faster gives currency-traders the advantage. A new ocean-floor fiber optic cable is being built to shave off a few milliseconds transmission time between London and Tokyo. He who finds a way to exchange data securely a little faster owns the planet. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 15:29:51 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 10:29:51 -0500 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> Addition of money allows for grocery delivery. If something like Shipt could accept food stamps + waive delivery fee (bill govt instead) then I think that whole issue would be basically solved. > On Jun 16, 2020, at 9:52 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > >> On Behalf Of Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image > >> On 15/06/2020 18:25, spike wrote: >> ... England, where there was a big BLM rally in London. > >> ...What I don't understand is, why? > >> ...So I don't understand the need, or the point, of such a rally in London. > > They are hardly going to change anyone's mind, or introduce a startling new > viewpoint, as everyone here already agrees with them. > > -- > Ben Zaiboc > > _______________________________________________ > > > Hi Ben, everyone in the US would agree with them too, if BLM manages to > distance themselves from the rioters and anarchists. Their biggest problem > at the moment is that the other groups are taking advantage of BLM. > > This rioting is going to cause all manner of problems: > > https://twitter.com/i/status/1272359799028514816 > > It really has me thinking of ways to deal, such as reviving a lot of > food-processing "technology" that has been lost over the decades of > progress. I remember visiting on my great grandmother's farm back in the > 60s and early 70s. She lived out there with her daughter. The nearest > grocery store was about half an hour away by car. They did a lot of > preserving and food processing out there, skills people don't generally have > today. > > But what if... rioting causes food deserts in some of the bigger cities and > the insurance company decides to pull out, so they never restore the local > outlets. The building owner decides to just leave everything as is, for a > bitter reminder to the community: turn off the electricity and walk away > from it. Soon the nearest grocery store might be half an hour drive away, > but now there are a million families that need it rather than my great > grandmother's community which had about 50 families, all of which had (and > used) the ability to go two weeks between trips there. > > We have kicked around the idea of a minimum basic income, OK sure. But that > doesn't do any good if there is no place left to trade the cash for basic > supplies. > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 16:07:33 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 11:07:33 -0500 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> Message-ID: How about if a neighborhood forms a collective and places grocery orders every week (or some other time frame) and a van rented or owned by the collective goes to the stores, loads up, and delivers to the neighborhood (to the doorstep for the disabled, or to a central location for everyone else)? I think you can rent a van for a few hours, say half a day, very cheaply. Or someone could go into business and do this for several collectives. bill w On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 10:31 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Addition of money allows for grocery delivery. If something like Shipt > could accept food stamps + waive delivery fee (bill govt instead) then I > think that whole issue would be basically solved. > > > On Jun 16, 2020, at 9:52 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > >> On Behalf Of Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat > > Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image > > > >> On 15/06/2020 18:25, spike wrote: > >> ... England, where there was a big BLM rally in London. > > > >> ...What I don't understand is, why? > > > >> ...So I don't understand the need, or the point, of such a rally in > London. > > > > They are hardly going to change anyone's mind, or introduce a startling > new > > viewpoint, as everyone here already agrees with them. > > > > -- > > Ben Zaiboc > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > > > > Hi Ben, everyone in the US would agree with them too, if BLM manages to > > distance themselves from the rioters and anarchists. Their biggest > problem > > at the moment is that the other groups are taking advantage of BLM. > > > > This rioting is going to cause all manner of problems: > > > > https://twitter.com/i/status/1272359799028514816 > > > > It really has me thinking of ways to deal, such as reviving a lot of > > food-processing "technology" that has been lost over the decades of > > progress. I remember visiting on my great grandmother's farm back in the > > 60s and early 70s. She lived out there with her daughter. The nearest > > grocery store was about half an hour away by car. They did a lot of > > preserving and food processing out there, skills people don't generally > have > > today. > > > > But what if... rioting causes food deserts in some of the bigger cities > and > > the insurance company decides to pull out, so they never restore the > local > > outlets. The building owner decides to just leave everything as is, for > a > > bitter reminder to the community: turn off the electricity and walk away > > from it. Soon the nearest grocery store might be half an hour drive > away, > > but now there are a million families that need it rather than my great > > grandmother's community which had about 50 families, all of which had > (and > > used) the ability to go two weeks between trips there. > > > > We have kicked around the idea of a minimum basic income, OK sure. But > that > > doesn't do any good if there is no place left to trade the cash for basic > > supplies. > > > > spike > > > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 16 16:15:11 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 09:15:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> Message-ID: <001701d643f9$5081f460$f185dd20$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image >...Addition of money allows for grocery delivery. If something like Shipt could accept food stamps + waive delivery fee (bill govt instead) then I think that whole issue would be basically solved... SR I can think of a couple of obvious problems SR. If the grocery store is at risk, the delivery truck is more at risk. Imagine you are insuring that delivery. What do you charge to underwrite that activity? Suppose you bill the government and they can't pay? Both the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois are facing huge revenue shortfalls and the Fed will likely not pay for that delivery. The delivery company would attach an additional delivery charge to cover the risk they wouldn't be paid and the risk they don't get their truck back, or it comes back damaged. So... that delivery fee must be tacked on. For groceries we already know that fee is huge, which is why we have grocery stores to start with: a lot of mass and bulk, making it incompatible with point to point delivery. You can't order a watermelon on Amazon Fresh. It would cost 30 bucks, if you are willing to wait three weeks for whatever is left of it. I could imagine some kind of outdoor produce market of some kind, where food could be bought in bulk and distributed in tents. They can be set up on the sites where grocery stores were before the fires. Those could work if they lean away from factory food, the kind most of us eat, but rather sell raw produce in bulk, a sack of potatoes, a sack of rice, sacks of beans, a 20 pound hunk of pork, that sorta thing. It would be retro in a way, but it could sustain the locals for the next two to five years as these grocery chains re-establish themselves, if they do. I wouldn't want to be the mayor of Chicago today. spike From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 16:23:05 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 11:23:05 -0500 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: <001701d643f9$5081f460$f185dd20$@rainier66.com> References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <001701d643f9$5081f460$f185dd20$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Food deserts are a real problem in the MS delta. Hospitals and grocery stores can't make any money there (theft is always a problem with poor people - of any color, if I have to add that). bill w (Spike, did you forget to send me a context for that video of blacks attacking whites?) On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 11:18 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > On Behalf Of SR Ballard via > extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image > > > > > > >...Addition of money allows for grocery delivery. If something like Shipt > could accept food stamps + waive delivery fee (bill govt instead) then I > think that whole issue would be basically solved... SR > > > > I can think of a couple of obvious problems SR. If the grocery store is at > risk, the delivery truck is more at risk. Imagine you are insuring that > delivery. What do you charge to underwrite that activity? Suppose you > bill > the government and they can't pay? Both the city of Chicago and the state > of Illinois are facing huge revenue shortfalls and the Fed will likely not > pay for that delivery. The delivery company would attach an additional > delivery charge to cover the risk they wouldn't be paid and the risk they > don't get their truck back, or it comes back damaged. > > So... that delivery fee must be tacked on. For groceries we already know > that fee is huge, which is why we have grocery stores to start with: a lot > of mass and bulk, making it incompatible with point to point delivery. You > can't order a watermelon on Amazon Fresh. It would cost 30 bucks, if you > are willing to wait three weeks for whatever is left of it. > > I could imagine some kind of outdoor produce market of some kind, where > food > could be bought in bulk and distributed in tents. They can be set up on > the > sites where grocery stores were before the fires. Those could work if they > lean away from factory food, the kind most of us eat, but rather sell raw > produce in bulk, a sack of potatoes, a sack of rice, sacks of beans, a 20 > pound hunk of pork, that sorta thing. > > It would be retro in a way, but it could sustain the locals for the next > two > to five years as these grocery chains re-establish themselves, if they do. > > I wouldn't want to be the mayor of Chicago today. > > spike > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 16 16:33:43 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 09:33:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> Message-ID: <003b01d643fb$e684e650$b38eb2f0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image How about if a neighborhood forms a collective and places grocery orders every week (or some other time frame) and a van rented or owned by the collective goes to the stores, loads up, and delivers to the neighborhood (to the doorstep for the disabled, or to a central location for everyone else)? I think you can rent a van for a few hours, say half a day, very cheaply. Or someone could go into business and do this for several collectives. bill w Ja. BillW, we have in my scout troop a family who lived in Ukraine through their transition from communism to now a kind of hybrid socialist-almost-capitalist. They teach a particular merit badge: citizenship in the world, for they are uniquely qualified, having lived under communist, socialist and capitalism. I was at their house recently and she found some images of grocery stores in Ukraine in the late 80s and early 90s (during the transition.) This one is typical of what a grocery store looked like in those days in the cool months (note the babushka in red in the foreground.) There wasn?t a lot need for advertising, because they could sell everything they received. According to our friends, grocery shopping is waaaaay the hell easier here than there: you just go, get what you need, fast checkout, done. There, the lines were very long for everything, so the process of getting food took a lot of time investment. Those who are eager to transition to that system don?t know what they are asking for: Well, OK. We can have outdoor farmer?s markets on the burnt-out sites in Chicago where grocery stores once stood, set up under tents. That solution will last until about mid-September when the cold winds, blow away those tents, which drop out of the sky upon puzzled residents of southern Ohio. This would cause the markets there to depend on the denser produce, such as potatoes and melons which are less likely to take flight by either wind or theft. I suspect the locals will not like the new system as much as the ones the rioters burned and looted. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 31594 bytes Desc: not available URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 16:45:06 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 09:45:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: <00ae01d643eb$f8983af0$e9c8b0d0$@rainier66.com> References: <00ae01d643eb$f8983af0$e9c8b0d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 7:41 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > in the meantime, we could use the SLS as a really high-priced > hotel. Musk can haul tourists up there to it once the boosters are > sufficiently advanced to take the occupant controls away. Uh...what? SLS is a rocket, not a location in orbit. The only way it would work as a hotel is if you repurpose its stages on the ground - which wouldn't leave much room for guests, and be a major environmental challenge (read: guaranteed to lose lots of money, possibly more than continuing to try to build SLS as a rocket). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 16 16:46:11 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 09:46:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <001701d643f9$5081f460$f185dd20$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <005401d643fd$a4eb01a0$eec104e0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image Food deserts are a real problem in the MS delta. Hospitals and grocery stores can't make any money there (theft is always a problem with poor people - of any color, if I have to add that). bill w Food deserts in MS delta: they are better off than Chicago, because the south does not have the same magnitude of problem with severe weather. I have traveled thru Chicago in winter. Chicago O?Hare is a marvelous airport to have a layover: the food is so good there. I watched the blizzards thru the glass from inside. The remarkable part was that the most memorable trip was in late November. I went outdoors just to experience the brutal blast of wind at sub-freezing temperature. That foray lasted about 11 seconds: OK experienced, didn?t like it, let?s get on a plane and go back to California forthwith. Oh evolution have mercy upon those hapless residents in the food deserts during the coming months. Supply chains there really need to know what they are doing to deliver supplies under those conditions. I suspect they will fail, resulting in fatalities. The rioters were not only committing larceny, they were committing mass murder. I don?t know how the hell they are going to manage feeding the masses this winter. If they resort to supply trucks, what happens if starving masses attack? What happens in the homes of the disabled? Will some merciful person deliver stuff to them? What stuff? Produce? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 16:46:48 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 11:46:48 -0500 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: <003b01d643fb$e684e650$b38eb2f0$@rainier66.com> References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <003b01d643fb$e684e650$b38eb2f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Sad how we keep deserving Pogo's comment. bill w On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 11:40 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] powerful image > > > > How about if a neighborhood forms a collective and places grocery orders > every week (or some other time frame) and a van rented or owned by the > collective goes to the stores, loads up, and delivers to the neighborhood > (to the doorstep for the disabled, or to a central location for everyone > else)? I think you can rent a van for a few hours, say half a day, very > cheaply. Or someone could go into business and do this for several > collectives. > > bill w > > > > > > > > Ja. BillW, we have in my scout troop a family who lived in Ukraine > through their transition from communism to now a kind of hybrid > socialist-almost-capitalist. They teach a particular merit badge: > citizenship in the world, for they are uniquely qualified, having lived > under communist, socialist and capitalism. > > > > I was at their house recently and she found some images of grocery stores > in Ukraine in the late 80s and early 90s (during the transition.) This one > is typical of what a grocery store looked like in those days in the cool > months (note the babushka in red in the foreground.) There wasn?t a lot > need for advertising, because they could sell everything they received. > > > > According to our friends, grocery shopping is waaaaay the hell easier here > than there: you just go, get what you need, fast checkout, done. There, > the lines were very long for everything, so the process of getting food > took a lot of time investment. > > > > Those who are eager to transition to that system don?t know what they are > asking for: > > > > > > Well, OK. We can have outdoor farmer?s markets on the burnt-out sites in > Chicago where grocery stores once stood, set up under tents. That solution > will last until about mid-September when the cold winds, blow away those > tents, which drop out of the sky upon puzzled residents of southern Ohio. > This would cause the markets there to depend on the denser produce, such as > potatoes and melons which are less likely to take flight by either wind or > theft. > > > > I suspect the locals will not like the new system as much as the ones the > rioters burned and looted. > > > > spike > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 31594 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 16:56:58 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 09:56:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image Message-ID: Ben Zaiboc wrote: snip > So I don't understand the need, or the point, of such a rally in London. They are hardly going to change anyone's mind, or introduce a startling new viewpoint, as everyone here already agrees with them. It was a sympathy-with-US-protesters demonstration. There were some good moments. Kendal and Sid?na tell #BBCBreakfast how proud they are of their dad, #PatrickHutchinson, after he carried an opposing demonstrator out of harms way. More here: https://bbc.in/3eje1E9 Keith From atymes at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 17:01:36 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 10:01:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 3:45 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 3:02 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > *John, we DO have the technological capability to do these things.* > > > It would be vastly easier to make a totally self-sufficient colony on > Antarctica then on Mars or the Moon > Actually, it wouldn't - from a practical, as opposed to theoretical, point of view. Regular resupply is relatively easy to achieve to Antarctica. Therefore, it's much harder to make the economic argument for a self-sufficient colony in Antarctica, therefore it doesn't happen. Granted, it takes more resources and tech to do self-sufficiency on the Moon. But resupply is much harder - hard enough that the economic argument can be made, and is being made, at least enough that serious R&D for self-sufficiency on the Moon is happening, where you can't even get R&D funding for self-sufficiency in Antarctica. > The first Mars mission would be the talk of the town, but ask yourself how > much igniting of the human spirit the SECOND two-way non-colonization > manned mission to Mars will create. I think it would ignite a worldwide > yawn, a yawn that would cost many trillions of dollars to create. > Agreed. A much better motivation would be money - if we find some way to make colonization of outer space profitable. There are a few ways to do that, and they are starting to be studied. The best options so far (for lunar colonization, at least) seem to be mining - for return to Earth - things that are not so economical to mine on Earth given current conditions, and manufacturing stuff to be put into Earth orbit. Both of these are direct replacements for things people pay money for today, and might be able to be done with a higher profit margin than how they are done on Earth today. In theory both of these things could be completely automated and teleoperated, but in both cases it looks like in practice having humans there would make things more reliable - and thus more profitable even with the high cost of resupply and life support. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 16 17:13:38 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 10:13:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: <00ae01d643eb$f8983af0$e9c8b0d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <009001d64401$7a69f9f0$6f3dedd0$@rainier66.com> On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 7:41 AM spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: in the meantime, we could use the SLS as a really high-priced hotel. Musk can haul tourists up there to it once the boosters are sufficiently advanced to take the occupant controls away. >?Uh...what?... SLS is a rocket, not a location in orbit. ISS rather, not SLS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System One of the notions I thought about back when we had the shuttle is to carry the external tank into orbit and use it as a pressure vessel to let tourists float around. I don?t think those could be retrofitted for that use, but one can imagine something that looks like the SLS, kinda like the old shuttle without the space plane, but rather an shuttle external tank with liquid boosters either side (or possibly solid) along with a capsule return vehicle with a more traditional heat-shield re-entry system. That is a different idea than using the ISS as a hotel. That would be cool too, and would get it off our hands. It was really cool back in the 90s, but now it returns very little science per dollar. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 16 18:01:55 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 11:01:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <003b01d643fb$e684e650$b38eb2f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <002701d64408$3981bfc0$ac853f40$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image Sad how we keep deserving Pogo's comment. bill w Ja. Without even looking up either Pogo or his comment, I am guessing you meant the profound: We have met the enemy and he is us. Pogo I remembered the comment made by a colleage who was with me that time we were in OHair in November. After I told someone at the office we had been in a Chicago blizzard. She reminded me that was not a Chicago blizzard, speculating that I had never seen one, and probably would never. In a Chicago blizzard, the wind comes from the northeast and is going about twice the speed of that gentle 30 knot wind from the northwest. In a real blizzard, planes cannot fly: too dangerous. Now I am really pondering what in the hell we are going to do in those South Chicago food deserts when the gales of November come slashing down off that lake. Oh mercy upon those hapless residents, and shame, shame upon those who would loot and burn the lifeline of that city. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 18:03:28 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 14:03:28 -0400 Subject: [ExI] A breakthrough in COVID-19? Message-ID: Oxford University researchers say that a very cheap steroid drug called "dexamethasone" that has long been safely used to treat arthritis can save the lives of about a third of severely ill COVID-19 patients, such as those who are sick enough to be put on a respirator, it doesn't seem to help much for patients who are only slightly sick. Britain?s health ministry Immediately approved dexamethasone for this purpose, imposed export restrictions on it, and has already stockpiled 200,000 doses. Steroid drug hailed as 'breakthrough' in COVID-19 John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 18:09:33 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 14:09:33 -0400 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: <002701d64408$3981bfc0$ac853f40$@rainier66.com> References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <003b01d643fb$e684e650$b38eb2f0$@rainier66.com> <002701d64408$3981bfc0$ac853f40$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Chicago has some additional problems. For those wishing to track them: https://heyjackass.com/ On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 2:04 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] powerful image > > > > Sad how we keep deserving Pogo's comment. bill w > > > > > > Ja. Without even looking up either Pogo or his comment, I am guessing you > meant the profound: > > > > We have met the enemy and he is us. Pogo > > > > I remembered the comment made by a colleage who was with me that time we > were in OHair in November. After I told someone at the office we had been > in a Chicago blizzard. She reminded me that was not a Chicago blizzard, > speculating that I had never seen one, and probably would never. In a > Chicago blizzard, the wind comes from the northeast and is going about > twice the speed of that gentle 30 knot wind from the northwest. In a real > blizzard, planes cannot fly: too dangerous. > > > > Now I am really pondering what in the hell we are going to do in those > South Chicago food deserts when the gales of November come slashing down > off that lake. Oh mercy upon those hapless residents, and shame, shame > upon those who would loot and burn the lifeline of that city. > > > > spike > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 18:09:40 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 14:09:40 -0400 Subject: [ExI] OK, this might be the real deal Message-ID: This comes from the journal Nature, so it has my full attention: Coronavirus breakthrough: dexamethasone is first drug shown to save lives John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 18:37:14 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 13:37:14 -0500 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: <002701d64408$3981bfc0$ac853f40$@rainier66.com> References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <003b01d643fb$e684e650$b38eb2f0$@rainier66.com> <002701d64408$3981bfc0$ac853f40$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: I understand the problem. I was in Boston and we went out to eat. Temperature -14F, wind about 20-30 (wind chill factor = -40s). I wore pantyhose, several layers of clothes, etc. and the run to the restaurant was the coldest I have ever been. It was just indescribable. How anyone lives outside in those conditions is remarkable. Since all the Detroit auto jobs have been gone for some time, maybe we will see an exodus back down South of the poor people. bill w On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 1:05 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] powerful image > > > > Sad how we keep deserving Pogo's comment. bill w > > > > > > Ja. Without even looking up either Pogo or his comment, I am guessing you > meant the profound: > > > > We have met the enemy and he is us. Pogo > > > > I remembered the comment made by a colleage who was with me that time we > were in OHair in November. After I told someone at the office we had been > in a Chicago blizzard. She reminded me that was not a Chicago blizzard, > speculating that I had never seen one, and probably would never. In a > Chicago blizzard, the wind comes from the northeast and is going about > twice the speed of that gentle 30 knot wind from the northwest. In a real > blizzard, planes cannot fly: too dangerous. > > > > Now I am really pondering what in the hell we are going to do in those > South Chicago food deserts when the gales of November come slashing down > off that lake. Oh mercy upon those hapless residents, and shame, shame > upon those who would loot and burn the lifeline of that city. > > > > spike > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 19:05:13 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 15:05:13 -0400 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <003b01d643fb$e684e650$b38eb2f0$@rainier66.com> <002701d64408$3981bfc0$ac853f40$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: You trying to tell us something, Bill? NTTAWWT. On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 2:48 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I wore pantyhose > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 19:35:56 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 14:35:56 -0500 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <003b01d643fb$e684e650$b38eb2f0$@rainier66.com> <002701d64408$3981bfc0$ac853f40$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: I would have worn a brassiere and lipstick if it would have helped against that cold. bill w On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 2:08 PM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > You trying to tell us something, Bill? NTTAWWT. > > On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 2:48 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> I wore pantyhose >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 16 19:42:25 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 12:42:25 -0700 Subject: [ExI] A breakthrough in COVID-19? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <007d01d64416$432bc6c0$c9835440$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: [ExI] A breakthrough in COVID-19? >?Oxford University researchers say that a very cheap steroid drug called "dexamethasone" ?for? COVID-19 patients? Steroid drug hailed as 'breakthrough' in COVID-19 John K Clark Hey cool, if I get sick, I take that stuff, come away a buff dude and don?t even need to go broke. Hafta give up my Olympic dreams, but it would be worth it. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 20:02:27 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 16:02:27 -0400 Subject: [ExI] A breakthrough in COVID-19? In-Reply-To: <007d01d64416$432bc6c0$c9835440$@rainier66.com> References: <007d01d64416$432bc6c0$c9835440$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Those aren't the steroids you're looking for! :-). These are anti-inflammatories. They're actually standard of care for any severe upper respiratory infection like the one I had in January that I thought had to be CV-19 (I was negative on serological test, so I was wrong there). I received the same class of steroids both IV and a week of oral and my condition quickly improved. I'm not sure why the incompetent WHO contradicated them in the standard of care for CV-19 over concerns that immune depression as a side effect would make CV-19 more fatal. They're to blame yet again. Suddenly it's a revelation that steroids work to reduce the inflammatory damage caused by a cytokine storm after months of unnecessary deaths. This is not a surprising outcome in the study, but I'm pleased to see someone has finally woken up to the obvious and it has been published in Nature. On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 3:45 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *John Clark via extropy-chat > *Subject:* [ExI] A breakthrough in COVID-19? > > > > >?Oxford University researchers say that a very cheap steroid drug called > "dexamethasone" ?for? COVID-19 patients? > > > > Steroid drug hailed as 'breakthrough' in COVID-19 > > > > > John K Clark > > > > > > Hey cool, if I get sick, I take that stuff, come away a buff dude and > don?t even need to go broke. Hafta give up my Olympic dreams, but it would > be worth it. > > > > spike > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 16 20:04:35 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 13:04:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <003b01d643fb$e684e650$b38eb2f0$@rainier66.com> <002701d64408$3981bfc0$ac853f40$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00a001d64419$5c0f3520$142d9f60$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image >?Chicago has some additional problems. For those wishing to track them: https://heyjackass.com/ >?Dylan Oh mercy, Chicago does have some severe problems. I didn?t realize it is this bad. When I was travelling a lot, my business was not in Chicago but I passed thru on the way to another destination. The others advised me that if I ever was stranded in Chicago, don?t leave the airport, just stay right there and keep trying to get on the next available flight anywhere, then fly home from wherever they took you. It is better to explain to the boss why she on the hook for a plane ticket to London and another one from London to California than to have her explain to your grieving family that she sent you into a war zone on business. Well at least the trend is generally downward, with that big red spike in 2016. I suspect 2020 will be a bad year too: Dylan I am trying to work thru the logistics of how the hell those bad areas will do this winter where the local grocery outlets were looted. I can easily envision the owners letting those fields lie fallow for a year or two so when they start rebuilding, the locals will appreciate what they had before, and perhaps will help fight back when looters want to start up. Putting that aside, how do we supply them this coming winter? Think like a general rather than like a sergeant: logistics rather than tactics. The best I can do is set up a robust defensive perimeter about some non-destroyed huge warehouse, such as Costco or Walmart, move out all the other merchandise which is not food, use those as distribution centers, with supply lines defended like we mean business (because we do.) spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 46446 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 20:22:21 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 13:22:21 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? Message-ID: In most ways, it doesn't matter. The current plans are for more useless flags and footprints. I am not so sure that it makes any sense for humans to live on the moon even if there is something economic to do there. I.e., what can people do that robots/teleoperation can't? Keith From atymes at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 20:32:29 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 13:32:29 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 1:26 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I am not so sure that it makes any sense for humans to live on the > moon even if there is something economic to do there. I.e., what can > people do that robots/teleoperation can't? > Fix stuff when the robots break in unexpected ways, which is either very difficult/expensive or impossible to fix with the robots themselves. In theory this never happens. In practice this almost always happens with new tech of this nature. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 20:35:05 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 13:35:05 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 1:32 PM Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 1:26 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> I am not so sure that it makes any sense for humans to live on the >> moon even if there is something economic to do there. I.e., what can >> people do that robots/teleoperation can't? >> > > Fix stuff when the robots break in unexpected ways, which is either very > difficult/expensive or impossible to fix with the robots themselves. > > In theory this never happens. In practice this almost always happens with > new tech of this nature. > Also, relatively cheap general-purpose labor. This is less relatively cheap given the cost of life support on the Moon, but given the range of general-purpose labor that is replaced, it's arguable that humans would still be cheaper - once you have enough of an operation to warrant their costs. (So, not at first: fully teleoperated bootstrapping, including to construct initial life support.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 16 20:46:37 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 13:46:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <003b01d643fb$e684e650$b38eb2f0$@rainier66.com> <002701d64408$3981bfc0$ac853f40$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00d301d6441f$3b890a00$b29b1e00$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image >?I would have worn a brassiere and lipstick if it would have helped against that cold. bill w BillW, since you shared something so personal as the pantyhose comment (NTTAWWT) I will offer a funny story. That time we were in Chicago, my colleague was heading to Pittsburgh but I had to go to Rochester New York. We were changing planes in Chicago when this freezing gale started up. In Rochester it was even worse: colder and stronger wind, coming mostly out of the west northwest. The parking lot was west of the building so I would hafta walk into that to get to my car. I started out, but then quickly came back in, because there was something like what I described as granular ice particles coming out of the sky. I mentioned that to the locals and remarked that it was puzzling, for the sky wasn?t even cloudy: you could see the setting sun thru a hazy but not cloudy sky. These ice crystals would hurt like hell when they struck a prole. So I suggested I would just stay indoors until this stopped (thinking it would be a few minutes) but they informed me I might be here until next Tuesday. I marveled that it could possibly be snowing under a mostly cloudless sky. They explained to me lake-effect snow. I had a plane to catch back to merciful California, and I did not intend to miss it, so I went back out, only to return. I informed my colleagues from Rochester that this was going to kill me and that I planned to just save time, find a funeral home willing to make deliveries, they bring out the coffin, I hand them my credit card, I would get in and close the lid, just save everybody the time, be done with it all, good bye cruel world. One kind soul had gone out there, fetched his car from the lot, and drove it up on the damn sidewalk in front of the building, tooted his horn and motioned for me to come. He drove the helpless California summer child to my car. About a year later, they were in my office when we had a small earthquake. They freaked. I told them no worries, I could tell by the S-wave that it was from deep subterranean fault motion, quite unlikely to wreck anything important. So the Rochester people are afraid of earthquakes and California people are afraid of ? snowflakes. Well, certainly northeast-style ?snow.? In any case? I am thinking of that incident while I ponder what the Chicago newly-formed food deserts will look like. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 21:26:03 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 16:26:03 -0500 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On the Moon: 1/6 gravity, isn't it? Ideal for crippled people, old people, high jumpers, Moonies bill w On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 3:44 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 1:32 PM Adrian Tymes wrote: > >> On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 1:26 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> I am not so sure that it makes any sense for humans to live on the >>> moon even if there is something economic to do there. I.e., what can >>> people do that robots/teleoperation can't? >>> >> >> Fix stuff when the robots break in unexpected ways, which is either very >> difficult/expensive or impossible to fix with the robots themselves. >> >> In theory this never happens. In practice this almost always happens >> with new tech of this nature. >> > > Also, relatively cheap general-purpose labor. This is less relatively > cheap given the cost of life support on the Moon, but given the range of > general-purpose labor that is replaced, it's arguable that humans would > still be cheaper - once you have enough of an operation to warrant their > costs. (So, not at first: fully teleoperated bootstrapping, including to > construct initial life support.) > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 21:33:08 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 16:33:08 -0500 Subject: [ExI] jon stewart Message-ID: Long but interesting: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/15/magazine/jon-stewart-interview.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=The%20New%20York%20Times%20Magazine -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 22:16:20 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 17:16:20 -0500 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: <001701d643f9$5081f460$f185dd20$@rainier66.com> References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <001701d643f9$5081f460$f185dd20$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Spike, what are you talking about with the trucks? Shipt does not have ?trucks?, just John Q Public buying your groceries and giving them to you. The majority of the risk would be to the retailer in this scenario ? they would be accepting the majority of the risk of people paying via foodstamps. Companies like Shipt could simply increase deliveries to other customers to offset the risks associated with the government not paying out. SR Ballard > On Jun 16, 2020, at 11:15 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > -----Original Message----- > On Behalf Of SR Ballard via > extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image > > > > > >> ...Addition of money allows for grocery delivery. If something like Shipt > could accept food stamps + waive delivery fee (bill govt instead) then I > think that whole issue would be basically solved... SR > > > > I can think of a couple of obvious problems SR. If the grocery store is at > risk, the delivery truck is more at risk. Imagine you are insuring that > delivery. What do you charge to underwrite that activity? Suppose you bill > the government and they can't pay? Both the city of Chicago and the state > of Illinois are facing huge revenue shortfalls and the Fed will likely not > pay for that delivery. The delivery company would attach an additional > delivery charge to cover the risk they wouldn't be paid and the risk they > don't get their truck back, or it comes back damaged. > > So... that delivery fee must be tacked on. For groceries we already know > that fee is huge, which is why we have grocery stores to start with: a lot > of mass and bulk, making it incompatible with point to point delivery. You > can't order a watermelon on Amazon Fresh. It would cost 30 bucks, if you > are willing to wait three weeks for whatever is left of it. > > I could imagine some kind of outdoor produce market of some kind, where food > could be bought in bulk and distributed in tents. They can be set up on the > sites where grocery stores were before the fires. Those could work if they > lean away from factory food, the kind most of us eat, but rather sell raw > produce in bulk, a sack of potatoes, a sack of rice, sacks of beans, a 20 > pound hunk of pork, that sorta thing. > > It would be retro in a way, but it could sustain the locals for the next two > to five years as these grocery chains re-establish themselves, if they do. > > I wouldn't want to be the mayor of Chicago today. > > spike > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 16 23:17:50 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 16:17:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <001701d643f9$5081f460$f185dd20$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <013c01d64434$5c8d7190$15a854b0$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image >...Spike, what are you talking about with the trucks? Shipt does not have ?trucks?, just John Q Public buying your groceries and giving them to you... I see, and who owns the risk from the time Mr. Public receives the groceries to the time the groceries are delivered? I can imagine it becoming very dangerous in the CHAZ/CHOP to be seen carrying a sack of groceries. People there are hungry and they know that no police will come regardless of what they do. >...The majority of the risk would be to the retailer in this scenario ? they would be accepting the majority of the risk of people paying via foodstamps... Are those not debit cards? Food stamps are used, the retailer is already paid. As I understand it, those are debit cards. I don't know otherwise. >...Companies like Shipt could simply increase deliveries to other customers to offset the risks associated with the government not paying out. SR Ballard Ja, or they could just refuse to deliver to CHAZ/CHOP, which is what I think will happen. What I meant by risk is that at some point, a truck must somehow disgorge its contents to someone who has purchased the items. That truck is filled with supplies that a lawless mob could descend upon and devour. I can imagine the insurance company telling the trucking company: we have a new policy in place. If one of your trucks gets within a two mile radius of the intersection of 12th and Pine, and the truck is robbed or looted at that point inside that radius, we don't pay, sign zee papers. SR, our society is now under the functional dictatorship of insurance companies. There is no conceivable way to break that iron grip that I can see. Can you? spike > On Jun 16, 2020, at 11:15 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > -----Original Message----- > On Behalf Of SR Ballard via > extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image > > > > > >> ...Addition of money allows for grocery delivery. If something like >> Shipt > could accept food stamps + waive delivery fee (bill govt instead) then > I think that whole issue would be basically solved... SR > > > > I can think of a couple of obvious problems SR. If the grocery store > is at risk, the delivery truck is more at risk. Imagine you are > insuring that delivery. What do you charge to underwrite that > activity? Suppose you bill the government and they can't pay? Both > the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois are facing huge revenue > shortfalls and the Fed will likely not pay for that delivery. The > delivery company would attach an additional delivery charge to cover > the risk they wouldn't be paid and the risk they don't get their truck back, or it comes back damaged. > > So... that delivery fee must be tacked on. For groceries we already > know that fee is huge, which is why we have grocery stores to start > with: a lot of mass and bulk, making it incompatible with point to > point delivery. You can't order a watermelon on Amazon Fresh. It > would cost 30 bucks, if you are willing to wait three weeks for whatever is left of it. > > I could imagine some kind of outdoor produce market of some kind, > where food could be bought in bulk and distributed in tents. They can > be set up on the sites where grocery stores were before the fires. > Those could work if they lean away from factory food, the kind most of > us eat, but rather sell raw produce in bulk, a sack of potatoes, a > sack of rice, sacks of beans, a 20 pound hunk of pork, that sorta thing. > > It would be retro in a way, but it could sustain the locals for the > next two to five years as these grocery chains re-establish themselves, if they do. > > I wouldn't want to be the mayor of Chicago today. > > spike > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From avant at sollegro.com Wed Jun 17 00:30:43 2020 From: avant at sollegro.com (Stuart LaForge) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 17:30:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Dogs can detect COVID in human sweat Message-ID: <20200616173043.Horde.iVimcA6wZj0vc3fK9DSlpot@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> This is pretty good news for COVID testing especially since it is so quick and accurate. https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/dogs-can-smell-covid-19-in-human-sweat/?fbclid=IwAR30Z3IKdEtvxlFUsr6CaRhMKRGiwf433Xx3qgGlZKPyvskrDksmYzO6D78#.XuhIffepqUA.facebook https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.03.132134v1.full -------------------------- Abstract The aim of this study is to evaluate if the sweat produced by COVID-19 persons (SARS-CoV-2 PCR positive) has a different odour for trained detection dogs than the sweat produced by non COVID-19 persons. The study was conducted on 3 sites, following the same protocol procedures, and involved a total of 18 dogs. A total of 198 armpits sweat samples were obtained from different hospitals. For each involved dog, the acquisition of the specific odour of COVID-19 sweat samples required from one to four hours, with an amount of positive samples sniffing ranging from four to ten. For this proof of concept, we kept 8 dogs of the initial group (explosive detection dogs and colon cancer detection dogs), who performed a total of 368 trials, and will include the other dogs in our future studies as their adaptation to samples scenting takes more time. The percentages of success of the dogs to find the positive sample in a line containing several other negative samples or mocks (2 to 6) were 100/100 for 4 dogs, and respectively 83/100, 84/100, 90/100 and 94/100 for the others, all significantly different from the percentage of success that would be obtained by chance alone. We conclude that there is a very high evidence that the armpits sweat odour of COVID-19+ persons is different, and that dogs can detect a person infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. -------------------------- Stuart LaForge From danust2012 at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 00:49:56 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 17:49:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Flight to the city Message-ID: <21154819-6B65-4B19-92C3-D4262EC2F9E3@gmail.com> http://cityobservatory.org/youth_movement_june2020/ Instead of from it. Nothing new to see here. Threw this in because some here are predicting the death of cities Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 01:25:36 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 18:25:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Good news Message-ID: https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/06/15/1750218/two-hairstylists-who-had-coronavirus-saw-140-clients-no-new-infections-have-been-linked-to-the-salon-officials-say Keith From sen.otaku at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 01:31:39 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 20:31:39 -0500 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: <013c01d64434$5c8d7190$15a854b0$@rainier66.com> References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <001701d643f9$5081f460$f185dd20$@rainier66.com> <013c01d64434$5c8d7190$15a854b0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Spike, you said that Shipt would have difficulty getting paid, and now you see no problem with the payments? I?m a bit confused. You can keep people from taking things my means other than police. Security guards and bouncers come to mind. Who would be seen carrying groceries, exactly? Inside of a car it would be quite simple to hide said groceries. If a retailer is outside the autonomous zone then there is not any more inherent danger than before. A roving band of humans who lack cars travels approximately 3 miles per hour. I think they could easily be detected. To decrease risk, smaller trucks could be used to shorten unloading times. Our society has been under the dictatorship of insurance companies looooong before this. SR Ballard > On Jun 16, 2020, at 6:17 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image > > > > >> ...Spike, what are you talking about with the trucks? Shipt does not have ?trucks?, just John Q Public buying your groceries and giving them to you... > > I see, and who owns the risk from the time Mr. Public receives the groceries to the time the groceries are delivered? I can imagine it becoming very dangerous in the CHAZ/CHOP to be seen carrying a sack of groceries. People there are hungry and they know that no police will come regardless of what they do. > >> ...The majority of the risk would be to the retailer in this scenario ? they would be accepting the majority of the risk of people paying via foodstamps... > > Are those not debit cards? Food stamps are used, the retailer is already paid. As I understand it, those are debit cards. I don't know otherwise. > >> ...Companies like Shipt could simply increase deliveries to other customers to offset the risks associated with the government not paying out. SR Ballard > > Ja, or they could just refuse to deliver to CHAZ/CHOP, which is what I think will happen. > > What I meant by risk is that at some point, a truck must somehow disgorge its contents to someone who has purchased the items. That truck is filled with supplies that a lawless mob could descend upon and devour. I can imagine the insurance company telling the trucking company: we have a new policy in place. If one of your trucks gets within a two mile radius of the intersection of 12th and Pine, and the truck is robbed or looted at that point inside that radius, we don't pay, sign zee papers. > > SR, our society is now under the functional dictatorship of insurance companies. There is no conceivable way to break that iron grip that I can see. Can you? > > spike > > > > > > > > > > > >> On Jun 16, 2020, at 11:15 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> On Behalf Of SR Ballard via >> extropy-chat >> Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image >> >> >> >> >> >>> ...Addition of money allows for grocery delivery. If something like >>> Shipt >> could accept food stamps + waive delivery fee (bill govt instead) then >> I think that whole issue would be basically solved... SR >> >> >> >> I can think of a couple of obvious problems SR. If the grocery store >> is at risk, the delivery truck is more at risk. Imagine you are >> insuring that delivery. What do you charge to underwrite that >> activity? Suppose you bill the government and they can't pay? Both >> the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois are facing huge revenue >> shortfalls and the Fed will likely not pay for that delivery. The >> delivery company would attach an additional delivery charge to cover >> the risk they wouldn't be paid and the risk they don't get their truck back, or it comes back damaged. >> >> So... that delivery fee must be tacked on. For groceries we already >> know that fee is huge, which is why we have grocery stores to start >> with: a lot of mass and bulk, making it incompatible with point to >> point delivery. You can't order a watermelon on Amazon Fresh. It >> would cost 30 bucks, if you are willing to wait three weeks for whatever is left of it. >> >> I could imagine some kind of outdoor produce market of some kind, >> where food could be bought in bulk and distributed in tents. They can >> be set up on the sites where grocery stores were before the fires. >> Those could work if they lean away from factory food, the kind most of >> us eat, but rather sell raw produce in bulk, a sack of potatoes, a >> sack of rice, sacks of beans, a 20 pound hunk of pork, that sorta thing. >> >> It would be retro in a way, but it could sustain the locals for the >> next two to five years as these grocery chains re-establish themselves, if they do. >> >> I wouldn't want to be the mayor of Chicago today. >> >> spike >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 17 02:31:59 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 19:31:59 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <001701d643f9$5081f460$f185dd20$@rainier66.com> <013c01d64434$5c8d7190$15a854b0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <01f401d6444f$7a8a2fb0$6f9e8f10$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image Spike, you said that Shipt would have difficulty getting paid, and now you see no problem with the payments? I?m a bit confused. You can keep people from taking things my means other than police. Security guards and bouncers come to mind. Who would be seen carrying groceries, exactly? Inside of a car it would be quite simple to hide said groceries. If a retailer is outside the autonomous zone then there is not any more inherent danger than before. A roving band of humans who lack cars travels approximately 3 miles per hour. I think they could easily be detected. To decrease risk, smaller trucks could be used to shorten unloading times. Our society has been under the dictatorship of insurance companies looooong before this. SR Ballard Hi SR, hmmm, OK I do see plenty of difficulty in the logistics of all this. I see new risks to this supply line everywhere. Any time anyone takes physical possession of products (of any kind) the risk starts there. The risk it fails to make it to the end point is non-zero. Someone somewhere assumes that risk. Detection of theft inside the CHAZ/CHOP is irrelevant: the enforcement will not come. I go on Google maps street view and see that there are 4 and 5 story condos there, which means there are plenty of residents. In any group of residents, there are people who are not sympathizers, who are antagonistic to those who are turning their neighborhood into an autonomous zone or organized protest. They were OK with things as they were before. They want to just be CH with no AZ nor OP. What of those residents? How do they get supplies now? Can they get to and from their jobs without difficulty? If so, then can carry their supplies home in their own cars. Regarding those who do not have cars in the CHAZ/CHOP, hard to say. I see plenty of people who will have difficulties introduced for the first time by the protestors. I am trying to envision what it would be like if someone started erecting barriers around my neighborhood and claiming to be the new leader. How do you suppose it will work out? spike From sen.otaku at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 02:53:37 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 21:53:37 -0500 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: <01f401d6444f$7a8a2fb0$6f9e8f10$@rainier66.com> References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <001701d643f9$5081f460$f185dd20$@rainier66.com> <013c01d64434$5c8d7190$15a854b0$@rainier66.com> <01f401d6444f$7a8a2fb0$6f9e8f10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <5FF66917-54FC-402A-8C3C-DDB97F2109B7@gmail.com> I?m not sure if it will die down, new laws creating special administrative regions will develop, or if it will turn into armed insurrection. I don?t personally know much to compare it to except Hong Kong. SR Ballard > On Jun 16, 2020, at 9:31 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat > > Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image > > Spike, you said that Shipt would have difficulty getting paid, and now you see no problem with the payments? I?m a bit confused. > > You can keep people from taking things my means other than police. Security guards and bouncers come to mind. > > Who would be seen carrying groceries, exactly? Inside of a car it would be quite simple to hide said groceries. > > If a retailer is outside the autonomous zone then there is not any more inherent danger than before. > > A roving band of humans who lack cars travels approximately 3 miles per hour. I think they could easily be detected. > > To decrease risk, smaller trucks could be used to shorten unloading times. > > Our society has been under the dictatorship of insurance companies looooong before this. > > SR Ballard > > > > > > Hi SR, hmmm, OK I do see plenty of difficulty in the logistics of all this. I see new risks to this supply line everywhere. Any time anyone takes physical possession of products (of any kind) the risk starts there. The risk it fails to make it to the end point is non-zero. Someone somewhere assumes that risk. > > Detection of theft inside the CHAZ/CHOP is irrelevant: the enforcement will not come. I go on Google maps street view and see that there are 4 and 5 story condos there, which means there are plenty of residents. In any group of residents, there are people who are not sympathizers, who are antagonistic to those who are turning their neighborhood into an autonomous zone or organized protest. They were OK with things as they were before. They want to just be CH with no AZ nor OP. > > What of those residents? How do they get supplies now? Can they get to and from their jobs without difficulty? If so, then can carry their supplies home in their own cars. > > Regarding those who do not have cars in the CHAZ/CHOP, hard to say. I see plenty of people who will have difficulties introduced for the first time by the protestors. I am trying to envision what it would be like if someone started erecting barriers around my neighborhood and claiming to be the new leader. > > How do you suppose it will work out? > > spike > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 03:14:57 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 20:14:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] (no subject) Message-ID: wrote: snip > Oh mercy, Chicago does have some severe problems. I didn't realize it is this bad. For 2019 I get 16.8 per 100k people for Chicago. I get 16.3 per 100k for Oakland which is within 3%. > When I was traveling a lot, my business was not in Chicago but I passed thru on the way to another destination. The others advised me that if I ever was stranded in Chicago, don?t leave the airport, just stay right there and keep trying to get on the next available flight anywhere, then fly home from wherever they took you. It is better to explain to the boss why she on the hook for a plane ticket to London and another one from London to California than to have her explain to your grieving family that she sent you into a war zone on business. Ah, come on Spike. Back in the 70s, I was through O'Hare airport 17 times in the first 1/4 of one of those years. The couple of times I got lost in black areas, the natives were helpful in giving directions. Of course, when you consider some of the other things I have done (like duking it out with the clam cult), driving around in Oakland or Chicago hardly rates. Keith From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 17 03:19:43 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 20:19:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: <5FF66917-54FC-402A-8C3C-DDB97F2109B7@gmail.com> References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <001701d643f9$5081f460$f185dd20$@rainier66.com> <013c01d64434$5c8d7190$15a854b0$@rainier66.com> <01f401d6444f$7a8a2fb0$6f9e8f10$@rainier66.com> <5FF66917-54FC-402A-8C3C-DDB97F2109B7@gmail.com> Message-ID: <01f501d64456$25888af0$7099a0d0$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image >...I?m not sure if it will die down, new laws creating special administrative regions will develop, or if it will turn into armed insurrection. I don?t personally know much to compare it to except Hong Kong. SR Ballard SR, this I doubt sincerely. CHAZ/CHOP is landlocked, completely dependent upon its neighbors in all directions, unable to grow its own food or generate its own power, populated with people of unknown loyalty. Stay and watch. Their name change from CHAZ to CHOP is an early indication they see dim prospects in the immediate future. In any autonomy, any autocrat is free to auto-select herself as the new or rival autocrat. Hong Kong, on the other hand, hard to say where that ends. I suspect life will return to normal within CHAZ/CHOP in two to four weeks. spike From natasha at natashavita-more.com Tue Jun 16 22:16:07 2020 From: natasha at natashavita-more.com (natasha natashavita-more.com) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 22:16:07 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Extropy Website Message-ID: The old website was up last week, but down today. Does anyone know who currently owns the site? Thank you, Natasha Dr. Natasha Vita-More Executive Director, Humanity+, Inc. Professor Emeritus, Technology, Ethics & Innovation Tech Founder & Lead Researcher: Memory Project Scientific Advisory Board, Life Extension Advocacy Foundation -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: winmail.dat Type: application/ms-tnef Size: 13452 bytes Desc: not available URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 17 04:43:19 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 21:43:19 -0700 Subject: [ExI] (no subject) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <001701d64461$d3901540$7ab03fc0$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Keith Henson via extropy-chat >...Ah, come on Spike. Back in the 70s, I was through O'Hare airport 17 times in the first 1/4 of one of those years. The couple of times I got lost in black areas, the natives were helpful in giving directions. >...Of course, when you consider some of the other things I have done (like duking it out with the clam cult), driving around in Oakland or Chicago hardly rates. Keith _______________________________________________ Hi Keith, I am not going to compete with you in the intestinal fortitude arena. I will just hand you the trophy in that, nolo contendere. Good chance it just depends on where you are in Chicago. Some of it is safe, I can see from the map. Your statistics compare all of Chicago to all of Oakland. The crime is concentrated down in the south side of Chicago, the baddest part of town. I don't get the whole big city thing. I don't understand why people choose it. Looks to me like you take enormous risk of failure of the intricate mechanisms of life support. The supply chain can get broken at any one of a number of points, and the whole system can collapse. Well, there is no need to speculate: we see it. Riots, grocery stores looted and destroyed. Now what? spike From sen.otaku at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 05:16:17 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 00:16:17 -0500 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: <01f501d64456$25888af0$7099a0d0$@rainier66.com> References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <001701d643f9$5081f460$f185dd20$@rainier66.com> <013c01d64434$5c8d7190$15a854b0$@rainier66.com> <01f401d6444f$7a8a2fb0$6f9e8f10$@rainier66.com> <5FF66917-54FC-402A-8C3C-DDB97F2109B7@gmail.com> <01f501d64456$25888af0$7099a0d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: You sincerely doubt what Spike? I said I see three possibilities: (1) It will die down, aka, ?I suspect life will return to normal within CHAZ/CHOP in two to four weeks.? (2) They will create a special administrative region. Technically, this is what Hong Kong is in China, what Tokyo?s 23 wards are in Japan, the City of London (not the same as London) inside of England, Scotland/Wales/Northern Ireland in the UK, Puerto Rico in the US, DC in the US... etc... (3) There will be an armed insurrection. [a violent uprising against an authority or government; revolt, rebellion, uprising] I?m not saying that they?ll WIN anything. I?m merely saying that someone might try. I?m not even saying that they?ll attempt to secede. Basically doing the same thing they were already doing, but now with guns. I?m not sure how you can say you disagree with me (?this I doubt sincerely?) the turn around and agree with my option #1, (?I suspect life will return to normal within CHAZ/CHOP in two to four weeks.?) As a side note, all people are ?people of unknown loyalty?. SR Ballard > On Jun 16, 2020, at 10:19 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image > >> ...I?m not sure if it will die down, new laws creating special administrative regions will develop, or if it will turn into armed insurrection. I don?t personally know much to compare it to except Hong Kong. > > SR Ballard > > > > SR, this I doubt sincerely. CHAZ/CHOP is landlocked, completely dependent upon its neighbors in all directions, unable to grow its own food or generate its own power, populated with people of unknown loyalty. > > Stay and watch. Their name change from CHAZ to CHOP is an early indication they see dim prospects in the immediate future. In any autonomy, any autocrat is free to auto-select herself as the new or rival autocrat. > > Hong Kong, on the other hand, hard to say where that ends. > > I suspect life will return to normal within CHAZ/CHOP in two to four weeks. > > spike > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 05:18:22 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 22:18:22 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? Message-ID: Adrian Tymes wrote: On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 1:26 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> I am not so sure that it makes any sense for humans to live on the >> moon even if there is something economic to do there. I.e., what can >> people do that robots/teleoperation can't? > Fix stuff when the robots break in unexpected ways, which is either very difficult/expensive or impossible to fix with the robots themselves. > In theory this never happens. In practice this almost always happens with new tech of this nature. The time to get a new robot to the moon is around two weeks. Is it worth the many billion it would cost to keep humans on the moon? How do you propose to protect them from radiation? I am highly biassed in the direction of people in space, on the moon, and on Mars. But I can't make an economic case for them. Keith From giulio at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 06:10:26 2020 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 08:10:26 +0200 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: John, I am not talking of "a totally self-sufficient colony" on the Moon or Mars, not yet. I am perfectly OK with letting these things take the time they must take. I am talking of a small lab on the Moon, permanently occupied by astronauts. Like an ISS on the Moon. I am talking of the smallest and least ambitious moonbase that we can build and operate with the money and the technology we have. We CAN do this, and commercial space companies are bringing the cost down. I think re-igniting the human spirit is a top priority. As you say, different people get this ignition from different things. All I can say is that I and many others didn't get it from the ISS and the ISS-centered Shuttle, but would get it from a moonbase. It is that you look up at the Moon, think that there are people living and working there, think that there will be many more in the future, feel like a small part of a big cosmic wave, and draw positive energy from the wave that you can use here and now. Simple as that. My experience is that some people get my point immediately, and some never. Different psychological makeups I guess. Therefore we (the former) must find practical arguments (business, military, whatever) to sell a moonbase to the latter. I personally couldn't give less of a damn, I think we must do it because we must do it. On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 12:45 PM John Clark via extropy-chat wrote: > > On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 3:02 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat wrote: > >> > John, we DO have the technological capability to do these things. > > > It would be vastly easier to make a totally self-sufficient colony on Antarctica then on Mars or the Moon, and yet we don't even know how to do that. Prove me wrong and set up such a colony, and then we'll talk. > >> >> > I think that, at this moment, re-igniting the human spirit with ambitious crewed space missions to the Moon and Mars is more important than astronomy. > > > That's where we strongly disagree. I think getting from astronomy a better understanding of the relationship between us and the Cosmos and hints about the very nature of reality could ignite the human spirit much more profoundly than yet another non-scripted TV show, even one with blockbuster ratings. Apollo 11 was a worldwide sensation but when Apollo 12 came along people felt it was just a rerun; I remember my grandmother complaining about how all the special reports about it we're interfering with her soap operas. And people were only interested in Apollo 13 because something went wrong. The first Mars mission would be the talk of the town, but ask yourself how much igniting of the human spirit the SECOND two-way non-colonization manned mission to Mars will create. I think it would ignite a worldwide yawn, a yawn that would cost many trillions of dollars to create. > > And the space shuttle was an utter failure that didn't deliver on any of the economic or safety claims made about it before it actually flew; they said it would only take two weeks to turn around a shuttle and have it fly again, but two years turned out to be closer to the truth. It would've been cheaper to just keep the old Saturn-5 production line going, and 14 people would not be dead. And don't get me started on the International Space Station. the most expensive and most useless "scientific" project in history. > >> >> > Are you sure you aren't letting your dislike for Trump dictate your opinions on space policy? > > > Yes I'm sure. I've thought both the US and Russia have placed far too much emphasis on manned space flight from long before Trump Was president or was even a candidate for the presidency, and I have said so on this very list. > > John K Clark > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 12:56:54 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 08:56:54 -0400 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 2:14 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> John, I am not talking of "a totally self-sufficient colony" on the Moon > or Mars, not yet. I am perfectly OK with letting these things take the time > they must take.* I am perfectly OK with waiting until the time is right, that is to say until we have the technology to make a extraterrestrial colony self-sufficient. People seriously interested in human space colonization should be pushing for a proof of concept, a self-sufficient colony in Antarctica would be a great prototype. > > * >I am talking of a small lab on the Moon, permanently occupied by > astronauts. Like an ISS on the Moon. * That's exactly what I'm worried about, it would be like a ISS on the Moon only even more horrendously expensive, a place where astronauts spend 80% of their time just making sure they stay alive and the other 20% performing science-fair level experiments that are never written up by Nature or Science or any top journal. What little scientific output that has come from the ISS has come from automated equipment that does not need the help of astronauts, like the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and the Cold Atom Laboratory. Such instruments are on the ISS not because they need people to operate them but because they need lots of electrical power and the ISS with all its solar panels has lots of that, they only thing they need from the astronauts is for them to stay out of the way and not to touch anything. > > *> I am talking of the smallest and least ambitious moonbase that we can > build and operate with the money and the technology we have.* The ISS cost $150 billion to build and it costs $4 billion a year to keep operational, a permanent moon base would cost much more to build and if it was not self-sufficient it would cost vastly more to keep resupplied. > I think re-igniting the human spirit is a top priority. Such a moon base would make the ISS look cheap and would ignite the human spirit for about one week, but after that people would get tired of watching reruns and want something new. If you were willing to spend between 10 and 100 times as much as a Moon base cost you could have a Mars base, and that would buy you one additional week's worth of human spirit ignition. And then they'd get tired of watching that rerun too. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 17 13:32:41 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 06:32:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <001701d643f9$5081f460$f185dd20$@rainier66.com> <013c01d64434$5c8d7190$15a854b0$@rainier66.com> <01f401d6444f$7a8a2fb0$6f9e8f10$@rainier66.com> <5FF66917-54FC-402A-8C3C-DDB97F2109B7@gmail.com> <01f501d64456$25888af0$7099a0d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <003001d644ab$c7635300$5629f900$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- > On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image >...You sincerely doubt what Spike? Hi SR, I doubt there will be an armed insurrection against the city of Seattle or anyone outside the region. I don't doubt there will be an internal armed resistance where the guns are aimed at each other, as several rivals claim to be the leader in some capacity: king, emperor, warlord, president, mayor, chief, sheriff. Hard to say. I can imagine a series of autocrats being assassinated as she goes around trying to convince people she is their new mayor. The police chief is holding back, letting it play out, perhaps guessing the homeless are getting restless and wanting more food, which is in short supply and getting more expensive by the day. Comparing to Hong Kong: that community had a government before it was considered part of China. They have a lot of stored wealth there, access to the sea and air, plenty going for it that CHAZ/CHOP does not have. I agree all people are of unknown loyalty. CHAZ/CHOP has a special challenge in that it formed a border around an area which includes businesses and residents, who were not asked if they wished to be part of this experiment in government. spike I said I see three possibilities: (1) It will die down, aka, ?I suspect life will return to normal within CHAZ/CHOP in two to four weeks.? (2) They will create a special administrative region. Technically, this is what Hong Kong is in China, what Tokyo?s 23 wards are in Japan, the City of London (not the same as London) inside of England, Scotland/Wales/Northern Ireland in the UK, Puerto Rico in the US, DC in the US... etc... (3) There will be an armed insurrection. [a violent uprising against an authority or government; revolt, rebellion, uprising] I?m not saying that they?ll WIN anything. I?m merely saying that someone might try. I?m not even saying that they?ll attempt to secede. Basically doing the same thing they were already doing, but now with guns. I?m not sure how you can say you disagree with me (?this I doubt sincerely?) the turn around and agree with my option #1, (?I suspect life will return to normal within CHAZ/CHOP in two to four weeks.?) As a side note, all people are ?people of unknown loyalty?. SR Ballard > On Jun 16, 2020, at 10:19 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image > >> ...I?m not sure if it will die down, new laws creating special administrative regions will develop, or if it will turn into armed insurrection. I don?t personally know much to compare it to except Hong Kong. > > SR Ballard > > > > SR, this I doubt sincerely. CHAZ/CHOP is landlocked, completely dependent upon its neighbors in all directions, unable to grow its own food or generate its own power, populated with people of unknown loyalty. > > Stay and watch. Their name change from CHAZ to CHOP is an early indication they see dim prospects in the immediate future. In any autonomy, any autocrat is free to auto-select herself as the new or rival autocrat. > > Hong Kong, on the other hand, hard to say where that ends. > > I suspect life will return to normal within CHAZ/CHOP in two to four weeks. > > spike > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 17 14:55:25 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 07:55:25 -0700 Subject: [ExI] why sleep? Message-ID: <004d01d644b7$55882ce0$009886a0$@rainier66.com> This research group claims to be closing in on figuring out what actually slays the insomniac: https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation-kills-20200604/ If we can prove this study correct and figure out an alternative means of accomplishing the same thing without sleeping, oh that would be cool: you get the functional equivalent of a third more time to do fun stuff. As cool as this is, I must admit skepticism. Any organism which never sleeps would have such a big advantage over sleepers in the survival department, one would think evolution would have stumbled upon whatever we can do in the lab at some point. The insomniac beast could hunt night and day, find sleeping beasts to attack and devour, get a huge advantage. On the other hand, we can do some pretty cool stuff in the lab. So. let us hope it is true. Aside: we have long theorized that sleeping gives our muscles time to repair and regenerate tissue etc, but in our modern world, muscles are seldom taxed (other than voluntarily.) We sit in front of a computer a lot of the time. So we could perhaps find a way to deal with the phenom described in the article. Then if that is the only lethal mechanism in severe insomnia (which I doubt (but certainly hope is true)) and we figure out a way around that, then we get most of our time to do fun stuff. Cool! spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 17 17:37:24 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 10:37:24 -0700 Subject: [ExI] about a 5.0 Message-ID: <009501d644cd$f7119f40$e534ddc0$@rainier66.com> WOWsers we just had an earthquake. Bay Area ExIers, everybody OK? Felt like about a 5.0 to me, short duration, time 10:35 local. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 17 17:46:37 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 10:46:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] about a 5.0 In-Reply-To: <009501d644cd$f7119f40$e534ddc0$@rainier66.com> References: <009501d644cd$f7119f40$e534ddc0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <009c01d644cf$407b9bd0$c172d370$@rainier66.com> From: spike at rainier66.com Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2020 10:37 AM To: 'ExI chat list' Cc: spike at rainier66.com Subject: about a 5.0 WOWsers we just had an earthquake. Bay Area ExIers, everybody OK? Felt like about a 5.0 to me, short duration, time 10:35 local. spike OK the USGS is telling me that was a lot closer and smaller than I originally estimated. I am accustomed to those being bigger and more distant, but this one had epicenter about 6 km from here, about a 3.6 magnitude. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 17:49:29 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 12:49:29 -0500 Subject: [ExI] why sleep? In-Reply-To: <004d01d644b7$55882ce0$009886a0$@rainier66.com> References: <004d01d644b7$55882ce0$009886a0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Dolphins can hunt while ?sleeping?. Migratory birds fly while ?sleeping?. And so on. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep SR Ballard > On Jun 17, 2020, at 9:55 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > This research group claims to be closing in on figuring out what actually slays the insomniac: > > https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation-kills-20200604/ > > If we can prove this study correct and figure out an alternative means of accomplishing the same thing without sleeping, oh that would be cool: you get the functional equivalent of a third more time to do fun stuff. > > As cool as this is, I must admit skepticism. Any organism which never sleeps would have such a big advantage over sleepers in the survival department, one would think evolution would have stumbled upon whatever we can do in the lab at some point. The insomniac beast could hunt night and day, find sleeping beasts to attack and devour, get a huge advantage. > > On the other hand, we can do some pretty cool stuff in the lab. So? let us hope it is true. > > Aside: we have long theorized that sleeping gives our muscles time to repair and regenerate tissue etc, but in our modern world, muscles are seldom taxed (other than voluntarily.) We sit in front of a computer a lot of the time. So we could perhaps find a way to deal with the phenom described in the article. Then if that is the only lethal mechanism in severe insomnia (which I doubt (but certainly hope is true)) and we figure out a way around that, then we get most of our time to do fun stuff. Cool! > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 17:50:35 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 10:50:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] about a 5.0 In-Reply-To: <009501d644cd$f7119f40$e534ddc0$@rainier66.com> References: <009501d644cd$f7119f40$e534ddc0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Didn't feel it in Mountain View. On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 10:40 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > WOWsers we just had an earthquake. > > > > Bay Area ExIers, everybody OK? Felt like about a 5.0 to me, short > duration, time 10:35 local. > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 18:01:27 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 13:01:27 -0500 Subject: [ExI] about a 5.0 In-Reply-To: <009c01d644cf$407b9bd0$c172d370$@rainier66.com> References: <009501d644cd$f7119f40$e534ddc0$@rainier66.com> <009c01d644cf$407b9bd0$c172d370$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: So, give us a framework: does a 3.6 knock glasses off the table, shake the house, what? bill w On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 12:50 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *From:* spike at rainier66.com > *Sent:* Wednesday, June 17, 2020 10:37 AM > *To:* 'ExI chat list' > *Cc:* spike at rainier66.com > *Subject:* about a 5.0 > > > > > > > > WOWsers we just had an earthquake. > > > > Bay Area ExIers, everybody OK? Felt like about a 5.0 to me, short > duration, time 10:35 local. > > > > spike > > > > > > OK the USGS is telling me that was a lot closer and smaller than I > originally estimated. I am accustomed to those being bigger and more > distant, but this one had epicenter about 6 km from here, about a 3.6 > magnitude. > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 18:10:45 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 11:10:45 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 5:59 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 2:14 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > *> John, I am not talking of "a totally self-sufficient colony" on the >> Moon or Mars, not yet. I am perfectly OK with letting these things take the >> time they must take.* > > > I am perfectly OK with waiting until the time is right, that is to say > until we have the technology to make a extraterrestrial colony > self-sufficient. People seriously interested in human space colonization > should be pushing for a proof of concept, a self-sufficient colony in > Antarctica would be a great prototype. > How about a self-sufficient and enclosed colony in Arizona? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 17 18:21:24 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 11:21:24 -0700 Subject: [ExI] why sleep? In-Reply-To: References: <004d01d644b7$55882ce0$009886a0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00d001d644d4$1bfd29e0$53f77da0$@rainier66.com> On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] why sleep? >?Dolphins can hunt while ?sleeping?. Migratory birds fly while ?sleeping?. And so on. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep SR Ballard Hi SR, cool, that might work: figure out a way to let one hemisphere sleep at a time. I know a lot of tasks I can do with half a brain. I can do my weekly routine, the other hemisphere wakes up to a nice clean dive, cool! But there are some issues. One hemisphere is awake, gets mama in the mood, later the other hemisphere wakes up and finds out he missed out while he was asleep, he?s pissed at the other hemisphere, they get to fighting over her, later that day he wants some of what the other side got, the boys downstairs are calling for mercy. OK this idea needs work. spike On Jun 17, 2020, at 9:55 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: This research group claims to be closing in on figuring out what actually slays the insomniac: https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation-kills-20200604/ If we can prove this study correct and figure out an alternative means of accomplishing the same thing without sleeping, oh that would be cool? spike _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 17 18:28:50 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 11:28:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] why sleep? In-Reply-To: <00d001d644d4$1bfd29e0$53f77da0$@rainier66.com> References: <004d01d644b7$55882ce0$009886a0$@rainier66.com> <00d001d644d4$1bfd29e0$53f77da0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00e401d644d5$26025c20$72071460$@rainier66.com> From: spike at rainier66.com ? >?But there are some issues. One hemisphere is awake, gets mama in the mood? OK this idea needs work. spike On the other hand? if we can do this, then mama can put one hemisphere to bed as well. Between them now there are four possible couples (think about it.) Each semi-couple would relate differently. We could record and measure, see which couple works best together, have contests to see who can get who going, that sorta thing, and none of it would be outside society?s accepted behavior spectrum. Retract, there are 9 possible couples: both with both awake, four with both participants in semi-sleep, four arrangements with one participant in semi-sleep. Oh man we could set up some really cool sex contests with nine possible teams. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 18:45:11 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 13:45:11 -0500 Subject: [ExI] about a 5.0 In-Reply-To: References: <009501d644cd$f7119f40$e534ddc0$@rainier66.com> <009c01d644cf$407b9bd0$c172d370$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <139DD0EA-0679-456D-9088-13CE48E63999@gmail.com> > So, give us a framework: does a 3.6 knock glasses off the table, shake the house, what? It depends. http://www.geo.mtu.edu/UPSeis/magnitude.html For the lay person, it has it?s issues. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/richter-scale ?Magnitude is best known from the historic Richter Scale which gives local magnitude, M or ML, and is widely reported after earthquakes. It correlates with the amount of energy released at the hypocentre for medium-sized local events. (It is important to note that this scientific measure of magnitude may not relate to damage or felt intensity due to distance, depth and other factors.)? This is why Shindo is a Better system for laypeople. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/06/27/national/closer-look-shindo-seismic-scale/#.XupjEiVOmEc I experienced many Shindo 1 & 2 while in Japan. They?re amusing. SR Ballard > On Jun 17, 2020, at 1:01 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > So, give us a framework: does a 3.6 knock glasses off the table, shake the house, what? bill w > >> On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 12:50 PM spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> >> >> >> From: spike at rainier66.com >> Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2020 10:37 AM >> To: 'ExI chat list' >> Cc: spike at rainier66.com >> Subject: about a 5.0 >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> WOWsers we just had an earthquake. >> >> >> >> Bay Area ExIers, everybody OK? Felt like about a 5.0 to me, short duration, time 10:35 local. >> >> >> >> spike >> >> >> >> >> >> OK the USGS is telling me that was a lot closer and smaller than I originally estimated. I am accustomed to those being bigger and more distant, but this one had epicenter about 6 km from here, about a 3.6 magnitude. >> >> >> >> spike >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 18:51:28 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 13:51:28 -0500 Subject: [ExI] why sleep? In-Reply-To: <00d001d644d4$1bfd29e0$53f77da0$@rainier66.com> References: <004d01d644b7$55882ce0$009886a0$@rainier66.com> <00d001d644d4$1bfd29e0$53f77da0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <841F01F3-B5BC-4C2C-94E5-29B2FFC99306@gmail.com> Due to the fact that Dolphins are not impaired with recall and learning tasks while ?sleeping?, I would imagine that ?right-brain you? and ?left-brain you? would not in fact be distinct ?yous?. Dolphins seem to share memories in some way during their sleep. Perhaps us golden oldies would never be able to sleep that way and only kids could learn to do it, so that structures in the brain would grow correctly to facilitate that sleep style. It would be interesting though if people experienced different handedness. ?Sorry my signature looks wack, not used to being a lefty!? > On Jun 17, 2020, at 1:21 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] why sleep? > > >?Dolphins can hunt while ?sleeping?. Migratory birds fly while ?sleeping?. And so on. > > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep > > SR Ballard > > > > Hi SR, cool, that might work: figure out a way to let one hemisphere sleep at a time. I know a lot of tasks I can do with half a brain. I can do my weekly routine, the other hemisphere wakes up to a nice clean dive, cool! > > But there are some issues. One hemisphere is awake, gets mama in the mood, later the other hemisphere wakes up and finds out he missed out while he was asleep, he?s pissed at the other hemisphere, they get to fighting over her, later that day he wants some of what the other side got, the boys downstairs are calling for mercy. OK this idea needs work. > > spike > > > > > > On Jun 17, 2020, at 9:55 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > This research group claims to be closing in on figuring out what actually slays the insomniac: > > https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation-kills-20200604/ > > If we can prove this study correct and figure out an alternative means of accomplishing the same thing without sleeping, oh that would be cool? > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 18:55:25 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 13:55:25 -0500 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <0EE9642B-05AA-4095-89CD-42FBF0116749@gmail.com> So nothing makes humans excited for more than one week. I guess we?re doomed. SR Ballard > On Jun 17, 2020, at 7:56 AM, John Clark via extropy-chat wrote: > >> On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 2:14 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> > John, I am not talking of "a totally self-sufficient colony" on the Moon or Mars, not yet. I am perfectly OK with letting these things take the time they must take. > > I am perfectly OK with waiting until the time is right, that is to say until we have the technology to make a extraterrestrial colony self-sufficient. People seriously interested in human space colonization should be pushing for a proof of concept, a self-sufficient colony in Antarctica would be a great prototype. > >> >I am talking of a small lab on the Moon, permanently occupied by astronauts. Like an ISS on the Moon. > > That's exactly what I'm worried about, it would be like a ISS on the Moon only even more horrendously expensive, a place where astronauts spend 80% of their time just making sure they stay alive and the other 20% performing science-fair level experiments that are never written up by Nature or Science or any top journal. What little scientific output that has come from the ISS has come from automated equipment that does not need the help of astronauts, like the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and the Cold Atom Laboratory. Such instruments are on the ISS not because they need people to operate them but because they need lots of electrical power and the ISS with all its solar panels has lots of that, they only thing they need from the astronauts is for them to stay out of the way and not to touch anything. > >> > I am talking of the smallest and least ambitious moonbase that we can build and operate with the money >> and the technology we have. > > The ISS cost $150 billion to build and it costs $4 billion a year to keep operational, a permanent moon base would cost much more to build and if it was not self-sufficient it would cost vastly more to keep resupplied. > >> > I think re-igniting the human spirit is a top priority. > > Such a moon base would make the ISS look cheap and would ignite the human spirit for about one week, but after that people would get tired of watching reruns and want something new. If you were willing to spend between 10 and 100 times as much as a Moon base cost you could have a Mars base, and that would buy you one additional week's worth of human spirit ignition. And then they'd get tired of watching that rerun too. > > John K Clark > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 19:03:04 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 12:03:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Another attempt to correct misinterpretations Message-ID: <21B015C5-53E5-46CE-8DBF-0996E6956F1C@gmail.com> https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/15/dont-listen-to-fox-heres-whats-really-going-on-in-seattles-protest-zone-321507 Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 17 19:11:34 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 12:11:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] about a 5.0 In-Reply-To: References: <009501d644cd$f7119f40$e534ddc0$@rainier66.com> <009c01d644cf$407b9bd0$c172d370$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <011e01d644db$1e942440$5bbc6cc0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] about a 5.0 So, give us a framework: does a 3.6 knock glasses off the table, shake the house, what? bill w Hi BillW, a 3.6 doesn?t wreck anything, nothing even falls off the shelf, picture frames don?t fall face down. You can feel it for sure if it is as close as this one, you can hear it, because the house cracks and creaks, windows might rattle a little, a hanging light fixture will swing thru a few degrees of arc perhaps. Visitors from New York will freak, dogs will be startled, squirrels won?t notice. It requires two numbers: a distance from epicenter and a magnitude at epicenter. This one was close and mild. spike On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 12:50 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: From: spike at rainier66.com > Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2020 10:37 AM To: 'ExI chat list' > Cc: spike at rainier66.com Subject: about a 5.0 WOWsers we just had an earthquake. Bay Area ExIers, everybody OK? Felt like about a 5.0 to me, short duration, time 10:35 local. spike OK the USGS is telling me that was a lot closer and smaller than I originally estimated. I am accustomed to those being bigger and more distant, but this one had epicenter about 6 km from here, about a 3.6 magnitude. spike _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 19:20:34 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 15:20:34 -0400 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 2:34 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> How about a self-sufficient and enclosed colony in Arizona?* > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 > Biosphere two was a fiasco that was never self-sufficient, not even for food and air much less for more sophisticated stuff. John K Clark > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 19:38:24 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 12:38:24 -0700 Subject: [ExI] police In-Reply-To: <00ae01d64369$85e73ec0$91b5bc40$@rainier66.com> References: <00ae01d64369$85e73ec0$91b5bc40$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <8252E0FA-7C2B-45C8-8FB1-AE9B9AEA5DF2@gmail.com> Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst On Jun 15, 2020, at 4:34 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] police > > On Jun 14, 2020, at 7:48 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > Hi BillW?The local constables (in general) never heard of any of it. > > spike > > >?Are you using ?constables? to mean ?police? or actual constables? If the former, it?s an example of the sort language change I mentioned earlier: the meaning of existing terms alters over time. > > > Regards, > > Dan > > > Hi Dan, ?constables? are city-level police, a general term that covers the SWAT team, the specialty stuff that city-level cops do. At the county level are the deputies with the sheriff as their boss. State level police are troopers, national level are Feds. Four different types of police. > > When my bride?s great great grandfather was slain in the line of duty at age 32, leaving two young children and a widow, he was referred to as Constable Blundell in the news articles because he worked for the city. > > spike How the term was used in your spouse?s great-great-grandfather?s time probably isn?t a guide for how it?s used now. For California law ? and be prepared for some legalese ? see: http://www.clrc.ca.gov/pub/2001/MM01-09.pdf Is this mistaken? Or is there some official local title in your area of constable? You also keep using the term bride also to mean wife, I presume. Or is your marriage to her quite recent? I mean recent as a week ago or less. Again, an example of how language usage doesn?t adhere to the standard. (No problem for me as I know basically what you mean when you say ?constable? or ?my bride.? My point is why you have a hard time reading ?fash? as slang for ?fascist.?) Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 19:47:03 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 15:47:03 -0400 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 1:38 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > *The best options so far (for lunar colonization, at least) seem to be > mining - for return to Earth - things that are not so economical to mine on > Earth given current conditions, and manufacturing stuff to be put into > Earth orbit. Both of these are direct replacements for things people pay > money for today, and might be able to be done with a higher profit margin > than how they are done on Earth today.* Using lunar material to build large orbital structures might be economically viable if there was an economic reason to build large orbital structures; but the moon's crust It's not rich in the heavy metals that are most lucrative to mine. If you want to mine in space then you'd do better mining a M class asteroid like 16 Psyche which seems to be one big chunk of metal. The only thing I can think of that you could mine on the moon that would be worth taking back to earth would be Helium-3, and even then only when Aneutronic Fusion becomes feasible. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 20:05:38 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 13:05:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Trusting China information was Protest Message-ID: <6A7F2118-A257-4E2B-956A-A40892AC4E63@gmail.com> ?On Jun 15, 2020, at 4:09 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] Trusting China information was Protest > > On Jun 14, 2020, at 10:03 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > >?> We are seeing these riots where people are clearly violating social > > distancing rules, looting in flash mobs, some without masks, ignoring > > social distancing rules. We see the CHAZ area in Seattle having > > enormous rallies where it isn't clear if social distancing rules apply?. spike > > >?Regarding CHAZ, what do you mean by 'enormous rallies'? Compared to what? And when did these take place? It looks like, within the context of a protest, these folks are semi-following the rules (just like protesters pretty much everywhere esle)... Regards, Dan > > Hi Dan, this: > > Regarding the photo, how is this any different than protests elsewhere? The folks in the photo are standing closer together, but this isn?t specific to CHAZ/CHOP. And they all (or most of them) are wearing masks. Seems no reason to single out CHAZ/CHOP for special mention. What?s the actual link you grabbed this photo from? Specifically, I wanted to know when it was taken. And, by enormous, you mean several hundred people? Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 20:10:44 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 16:10:44 -0400 Subject: [ExI] A dark matter experiment MIGHT have detected something interesting Message-ID: Sigma is only 3.5, you need 5 to claim a discovery, but still... Dark Matter Experiment Finds Unexplained Signal John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 17 20:16:14 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 13:16:14 -0700 Subject: [ExI] about a 5.0 In-Reply-To: <139DD0EA-0679-456D-9088-13CE48E63999@gmail.com> References: <009501d644cd$f7119f40$e534ddc0$@rainier66.com> <009c01d644cf$407b9bd0$c172d370$@rainier66.com> <139DD0EA-0679-456D-9088-13CE48E63999@gmail.com> Message-ID: <018101d644e4$26ddf140$7499d3c0$@rainier66.com> The USGS map shows this location as where that M3.6 happened this morning. On the left is the city of San Jose in the background. Someone posted claiming you can see the actual fault in this photo, at the left almost halfway up the photo, going up and to the right. Does that sound right to you? I have half a mind to hike up there and look at that. I think some joker might be blowing smoke. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 67229 bytes Desc: not available URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 17 20:27:48 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 13:27:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] police In-Reply-To: <8252E0FA-7C2B-45C8-8FB1-AE9B9AEA5DF2@gmail.com> References: <00ae01d64369$85e73ec0$91b5bc40$@rainier66.com> <8252E0FA-7C2B-45C8-8FB1-AE9B9AEA5DF2@gmail.com> Message-ID: <01b801d644e5$c4db1520$4e913f60$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat >?How the term was used in your spouse?s great-great-grandfather?s time probably isn?t a guide for how it?s used now. For California law ? and be prepared for some legalese ? see: http://www.clrc.ca.gov/pub/2001/MM01-09.pdf >?Is this mistaken? Or is there some official local title in your area of constable? Thanks for the article Dan. We use the term to mean the city law enforcement who go about under flashing lights, as opposed to the office guys, the detectives, the ranking officials in the local PD: constables are the line-level guys we see enough to recognize their faces. In some cases we know their names. I am fortunate to live in a community which is on good terms with our law enforcement. It is said to be the first city in California to require a 4 year college degree as a requirement to be a police officer. >?You also keep using the term bride also to mean wife, I presume. Or is your marriage to her quite recent? I mean recent as a week ago or less? Dan I did use that term when we had been wed a week or less. I just never gave it up. We recently celebrated 36 years of wedded bliss. She is still my bride, I am still her dedicated manservant, catering to her every wish, fulfilling her every random whim. She doesn?t mind my referring to her as my bride. I don?t mind her referring to me as her sex slave. Eh, the proles who hang out here know me. I figure we are all among friends here. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 17 20:35:12 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 13:35:12 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Trusting China information was Protest In-Reply-To: <6A7F2118-A257-4E2B-956A-A40892AC4E63@gmail.com> References: <6A7F2118-A257-4E2B-956A-A40892AC4E63@gmail.com> Message-ID: <01ce01d644e6$cdb0a100$6911e300$@rainier66.com> On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat >?What?s the actual link you grabbed this photo from? Specifically, I wanted to know when it was taken. >?And, by enormous, you mean several hundred people? Regards, Dan Hi Dan, I went into Google, hit CHAZ Seattle crowd and selected images. A page of these came up. What we really need are fixed cameras livestreaming to the web. We would get just unfiltered images and sound. We wouldn?t need to have it filtered through news agencies. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 20:52:33 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 15:52:33 -0500 Subject: [ExI] police In-Reply-To: <01b801d644e5$c4db1520$4e913f60$@rainier66.com> References: <00ae01d64369$85e73ec0$91b5bc40$@rainier66.com> <8252E0FA-7C2B-45C8-8FB1-AE9B9AEA5DF2@gmail.com> <01b801d644e5$c4db1520$4e913f60$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: the proles who hang out here know me. I figure we are all among friends here. spike I mention 'pantyhose' and get a whimsical reply. You mention sex slave. Is there an emoticom for 'embarrassed giggle'? bill w On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 3:48 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > > > > >?How the term was used in your spouse?s great-great-grandfather?s time > probably isn?t a guide for how it?s used now. For California law ? and be > prepared for some legalese ? see: > > > > http://www.clrc.ca.gov/pub/2001/MM01-09.pdf > > > > >?Is this mistaken? Or is there some official local title in your area of > constable? > > > > Thanks for the article Dan. We use the term to mean the city law > enforcement who go about under flashing lights, as opposed to the office > guys, the detectives, the ranking officials in the local PD: constables are > the line-level guys we see enough to recognize their faces. In some cases > we know their names. > > > > I am fortunate to live in a community which is on good terms with our law > enforcement. It is said to be the first city in California to require a 4 > year college degree as a requirement to be a police officer. > > > > > > >?You also keep using the term bride also to mean wife, I presume. Or is > your marriage to her quite recent? I mean recent as a week ago or less? > Dan > > > > > > I did use that term when we had been wed a week or less. I just never > gave it up. We recently celebrated 36 years of wedded bliss. She is still > my bride, I am still her dedicated manservant, catering to her every wish, > fulfilling her every random whim. She doesn?t mind my referring to her as > my bride. I don?t mind her referring to me as her sex slave. > > > > Eh, the proles who hang out here know me. I figure we are all among > friends here. > > > > spike > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gsantostasi at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 20:58:30 2020 From: gsantostasi at gmail.com (Giovanni Santostasi) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 13:58:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] why sleep? In-Reply-To: <004d01d644b7$55882ce0$009886a0$@rainier66.com> References: <004d01d644b7$55882ce0$009886a0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Half of my scientific career has been in the field of neuroscience of sleep (the other half in gravitational waves that is one of the topics we discuss here often). I worked with Tononi a the University of Wisconsin, Madison and at Northwestern University Circadian and Sleep Laboratory. I have a patent in this field about a device to enhance Slow Wave sleep that is the most restorative part of sleep. https://patents.justia.com/inventor/giovanni-santostasi We received a lot of press coverage for this invention (Times, ABC, Smithsonian, WSJ), several grants including one from DARPA. Here a podcast where I discuss my work in the field https://neurohacker.com/people/giovanni-santostasi. In the transhumanist community the topic of doing without sleep comes often up and of course I have my very strong bias and reservations having worked in the field and realized the fundamental importance of sleep. Sleep has many functions. It is basically a time off for the system to reset and do a lot of things that would not be a very good idea to do while the system is operating and interacting with the world. One of the main functions of sleep is memory consolidation, that is a process where new information acquired during the day, is selected and then integrated and redistributed in the brain. New memories are made permanent and other erased. The brain needs to be isolated from the environment and produce slow oscillations (that don't support consciousness) for this fundamental process to take place. Other important function of sleep is the production and regulation of hormones (Human Growth Hormone for example, testosterone in men) that have important anti-aging effects, immune system learning, repair of tissues and so on. Almost all animals sleep, from unicellular ones to the largest creatures, even if sleep may mean just a time off for the simplest ones. It is true there are notable exceptions like dolphins that can have some level of low alertness because they learned how to make half of the brain sleep while the other is functional but at very low level of operation. The main reason they do this is because they need to come up to the surface to breath. They still sleep a total of 33 % of their day as humans though. That half asleep state is not very efficient and it is basically almost like napping. May be able to do simple automatic actions (maybe hunting slow moving fish) but I doubt their attention and higher functions are engaged. I intended to study more this topic of dolphin sleep but I had not chance yet. But in general it is the exception that confirms the rule that sleep is so fundamental that all the complex organisms do it and they do it for a large part of their day. The paradox is that sleep seems a waste of time in terms of basic priorities like food procurement and mating but also because it exposes the organism (given it is motionless and with most senses shut off during sleep) to predators that have reversed the sleep patterns (they sleep during the day for example). This points to the fundamental importance of sleep. My intuition has been for sometime that even AIs that mimic brain architecture would have some form of time off that would be the equivalent of sleep. This article that come out recently confirms this intuition: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/artificial-intelligence-human-sleep-ai-los-alamos-neural-network-a9554271.html It is not really wasted time but it is a fundamental part of being alive. By the way my invention is about making more efficient sleep by enhancing its restorative property in particular memory consolidation. We created a Brain Computer Interface that locks to the brain waves using machine learning algos to boost the slow waves and this boost in amplitude correlates with improved cognition. There are other groups around the world that showed that this approach can also improve learning, immune system performance and cardiovascular health. https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2017/april/pink-noise-sound-enhance-deep-sleep-memory/ On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 7:58 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > This research group claims to be closing in on figuring out what actually > slays the insomniac: > > > > https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation-kills-20200604/ > > > > If we can prove this study correct and figure out an alternative means of > accomplishing the same thing without sleeping, oh that would be cool: you > get the functional equivalent of a third more time to do fun stuff. > > > > As cool as this is, I must admit skepticism. Any organism which never > sleeps would have such a big advantage over sleepers in the survival > department, one would think evolution would have stumbled upon whatever we > can do in the lab at some point. The insomniac beast could hunt night and > day, find sleeping beasts to attack and devour, get a huge advantage. > > > > On the other hand, we can do some pretty cool stuff in the lab. So? let > us hope it is true. > > > > Aside: we have long theorized that sleeping gives our muscles time to > repair and regenerate tissue etc, but in our modern world, muscles are > seldom taxed (other than voluntarily.) We sit in front of a computer a lot > of the time. So we could perhaps find a way to deal with the phenom > described in the article. Then if that is the only lethal mechanism in > severe insomnia (which I doubt (but certainly hope is true)) and we figure > out a way around that, then we get most of our time to do fun stuff. Cool! > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 21:16:14 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 14:16:14 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 10:24 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Adrian Tymes wrote: > > On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 1:26 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > >> I am not so sure that it makes any sense for humans to live on the > >> moon even if there is something economic to do there. I.e., what can > >> people do that robots/teleoperation can't? > > > Fix stuff when the robots break in unexpected ways, which is either very > difficult/expensive or impossible to fix with the robots themselves. > > > In theory this never happens. In practice this almost always happens > with > new tech of this nature. > > The time to get a new robot to the moon is around two weeks. > Not including time to diagnose the fault, build a robot from scratch to fix the fault (which starts after the diagnosis, which starts after the fault), and this approach would seem to be launching several tons of robot instead of much less food & resupply. > Is it worth the many billion it would cost to keep humans on the moon? > Would it in fact cost many billions? Granted, ISS maintenance is over $1B - it's about $3-4B - but that includes expansion, experiments, and all other costs as well as keeping the humans alive. I'm having trouble finding hard data on how that breaks down, but it looks like a distinct minority actually goes into life support, and the bulk of it is just NASA's bureaucratic overhead, not actually producing anything (except jobs to support federal funding). > How do you propose to protect them from radiation? The best answer I have yet seen on this is to set up the colony in a lava tube, which has enough overhead mass to reduce radiation to or below average-Earth-surface level. There are other methods too, but this is a simple, robust, and low cost solution. Perhaps put entrance shafts to one side of the lava tube, rather than on top, so you don't have a "radiation sunlight" part of the tube that people should stay out of. > I am highly > biassed in the direction of people in space, on the moon, and on Mars. > But I can't make an economic case for them. > Good on you for even thinking of the economics. That's the most critical part that most who propose this ignore. I haven't completely solved it either, but the more I analyze it, the more it seems the case will have to be made by what the colony can return to Earth, rather than the usual orbital/interplanetary servicing options that keep coming up. This is for two reasons: 1) Today, there is either literally no or a very tiny (depending on what you count) off-Earth market. Either way, insufficient funds can be extracted to support the colony until an off-Earth market builds up. 2) Even once an off-Earth market does build up, for a long time it will be dwarfed by the size of the on-Earth market. Even a tiny sliver of the on-Earth market will provide way more support than the entire off-Earth market can provide, likely for decades after the colony's founding. (Decades after founding, the colony will presumably be much more self-sufficient than right after it is founded.) So, what can a lunar colony provide for Earth? (I haven't thought through what a Martian colony might provide, as a lunar colony is likely to happen first: even assuming completely independent lunar and Martian colonization efforts, the lunar one needs less resources and thus is likely to establish a colony before the Martian effort does.) The main things I am currently aware of are: 1) Power, from solar panels manufactured on the Moon and relayed (probably via one or more intermediary satellites) to rectennas on Earth's surface. You have made extensive studies of Earth-launched solar power satellites; I would be curious to see your take on this alternative. Assume that any intermediate satellites are built on and launched from the Moon as well; they're simple enough that it seems less cost to set up the manufacturing facilities on the Moon than to launch from Earth. 2) Constructing & launching Earth-orbiting satellites. Aside from simple cases, like the above, I don't think this is really a viable market, as most satellites need complex enough electronics manufacturing that setting up the facilities on the Moon outweighs the launch cost savings, at least for a long while. 3) Mining Rare Earth elements for return to & sale on Earth. Lunar Prospector confirmed there is a concentration of KREEP (potassium, rare earth elements, and phosphorus) in the Oceanus Procellarum and Mare Imbrium. While valuable minerals on the Moon tend to be spread across a wider area than on Earth - if there are ore veins, we apparently haven't found them yet (though close range survey of lava tubes is a promising candidate if they are there) - they are already ground up, so we exchange less grinding work for more collecting work. This would benefit from a local power source being set up first, such as item #1 on this list but not entirely (if at all) devoted to returning energy to Earth. In any of these cases, one starts with an all-teleoperated system. It's easier to absorb cost & schedule impacts when, say, you're just doing initial prospecting instead of when you're in heavy production mode. Cost it out with reasonable assumptions; in theory, once the operation is set up, cases 1 & 3 cost nothing or almost nothing per unit (megawatt or ton) delivered to a customer's choice of locations on Earth, so to achieve profitability, you have to deliver enough value (as measured by dollars) to more than overcome the initial investment within a reasonable number of years. (For instance, magnesium is about 10% of lunar regolith and currently sells for about $6 per kg, so figure out how many kg of magnesium an effort could deliver back to Earth within 10 or 20 years, and compare that to the cost of setup. The priciest of rare earth elements sell for much more than that, and so may be more viable to base an effort around, but are also not present just anywhere on the Moon. Even more viable, but harder to model, might be multi-element mining: return magnesium and rare earth elements and aluminum and other things without much additional effort.) Then, once one has that going, if history is a guide the added value of humans will become apparent - as mentioned previously, from things that in theory should not matter but in practice often do. Often these are hard to directly measure financially (without analysis efforts that themselves can cost billions of dollars; see examples from NASA); the trick is to have enough profit to pay for setting up and maintaining life support before you get to this point, to help overcome the alternative proposal of simply abandoning the effort. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 17 21:18:54 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 14:18:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] why sleep? In-Reply-To: References: <004d01d644b7$55882ce0$009886a0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <020901d644ec$e84f9ab0$b8eed010$@rainier66.com> From: Giovanni Santostasi Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2020 1:59 PM To: ExI chat list Cc: spike at rainier66.com Subject: Re: [ExI] why sleep? Half of my scientific career has been in the field of neuroscience of sleep (the other half in gravitational waves that is one of the topics we discuss here often). I worked with Tononi a the University of Wisconsin, Madison and at Northwestern University Circadian and Sleep Laboratory. I have a patent in this field about a device to enhance Slow Wave sleep that is the most restorative part of sleep. https://patents.justia.com/inventor/giovanni-santostasi ... Dr. Santostasi! This is really cool. I don?t recall your ever having mentioned any of this before, or your telling us you are a PhD. Far too humble are you, me lad. It?s a trick, I tells ya! He is getting us overconfident for the Humility Olympics. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 21:20:18 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 14:20:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 12:42 PM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 2:34 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > *> How about a self-sufficient and enclosed colony in Arizona?* >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 >> > > Biosphere two was a fiasco that was never self-sufficient, not even for > food and air much less for more sophisticated stuff. > True. But at least they tried, which is far more than most investigations do; those who studied its failure now know some things not to do. And its remnants are still producing related science. An effort like Biosphere 2 doesn't have to completely successfully replicate a lunar colony in order to successfully produce useful results. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 21:23:26 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 14:23:26 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 1:06 PM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > If you want to mine in space then you'd do better mining a M class > asteroid like 16 Psyche which seems to be one big chunk of metal. > Agreed. Personally, I suspect that bringing a non-tiny M-class asteroid into the Earth-Moon system (decelerating it into some degree of Earth orbit, perhaps GEO) and making a colony out of that is more viable than setting one up on the Moon. But Keith was asking specifically about lunar colonization. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 21:42:22 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 16:42:22 -0500 Subject: [ExI] why sleep? In-Reply-To: References: <004d01d644b7$55882ce0$009886a0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Giovanni wrote: It is true there are notable exceptions like dolphins that can have some level of low alertness because they learned how to make half of the brain sleep while the other is functional but at very low level of operation Good post - thanks. My question: do you really mean 'learned' in that clip above? Why not just genetic? bill w On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 4:20 PM Giovanni Santostasi via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Half of my scientific career has been in the field of neuroscience of > sleep (the other half in gravitational waves that is one of the topics we > discuss here often). > I worked with Tononi a the University of Wisconsin, Madison and at > Northwestern University Circadian and Sleep Laboratory. > I have a patent in this field about a device to enhance Slow Wave sleep > that is the most restorative part of sleep. > https://patents.justia.com/inventor/giovanni-santostasi We received a > lot of press coverage for this invention (Times, ABC, Smithsonian, WSJ), > several grants including one from DARPA. > Here a podcast where I discuss my work in the field > https://neurohacker.com/people/giovanni-santostasi. > In the transhumanist community the topic of doing without sleep comes > often up and of course I have my very strong bias and reservations having > worked in the field and realized the fundamental importance of sleep. > Sleep has many functions. It is basically a time off for the system to > reset and do a lot of things that would not be a very good idea to do while > the system is operating and interacting with the world. > One of the main functions of sleep is memory consolidation, that is a > process where new information acquired during the day, is selected and then > integrated and redistributed in the brain. New memories are made permanent > and other erased. The brain needs to be isolated from the environment and > produce slow oscillations (that don't support consciousness) for this > fundamental process to take place. > Other important function of sleep is the production and regulation of > hormones (Human Growth Hormone for example, testosterone in men) that have > important anti-aging effects, immune system learning, repair of tissues and > so on. > Almost all animals sleep, from unicellular ones to the largest creatures, > even if sleep may mean just a time off for the simplest ones. > It is true there are notable exceptions like dolphins that can have some > level of low alertness because they learned how to make half of the brain > sleep while the other is functional but at very low level of operation. The > main reason they do this is because they need to come up to the surface to > breath. They still sleep a total of 33 % of their day as humans though. > That half asleep state is not very efficient and it is basically almost > like napping. May be able to do simple automatic actions (maybe hunting > slow moving fish) but I doubt their attention and higher functions are > engaged. I intended to study more this topic of dolphin sleep but I had not > chance yet. But in general it is the exception that confirms the rule that > sleep is so fundamental that all the complex organisms do it and they do it > for a large part of their day. The paradox is that sleep seems a waste of > time in terms of basic priorities like food procurement and mating but also > because it exposes the organism (given it is motionless and with most > senses shut off during sleep) to predators that have reversed the sleep > patterns (they sleep during the day for example). This points to the > fundamental importance of sleep. > My intuition has been for sometime that even AIs that mimic brain > architecture would have some form of time off that would be the equivalent > of sleep. This article that come out recently confirms this intuition: > https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/artificial-intelligence-human-sleep-ai-los-alamos-neural-network-a9554271.html > > It is not really wasted time but it is a fundamental part of being alive. > By the way my invention is about making more efficient sleep by enhancing > its restorative property in particular memory consolidation. We created a > Brain Computer Interface that locks to the brain waves using machine > learning algos to boost the slow waves and this boost in amplitude > correlates with improved cognition. There are other groups around the world > that showed that this approach can also improve learning, immune system > performance and cardiovascular health. > > https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2017/april/pink-noise-sound-enhance-deep-sleep-memory/ > > > > > > > On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 7:58 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >> >> This research group claims to be closing in on figuring out what actually >> slays the insomniac: >> >> >> >> https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation-kills-20200604/ >> >> >> >> If we can prove this study correct and figure out an alternative means of >> accomplishing the same thing without sleeping, oh that would be cool: you >> get the functional equivalent of a third more time to do fun stuff. >> >> >> >> As cool as this is, I must admit skepticism. Any organism which never >> sleeps would have such a big advantage over sleepers in the survival >> department, one would think evolution would have stumbled upon whatever we >> can do in the lab at some point. The insomniac beast could hunt night and >> day, find sleeping beasts to attack and devour, get a huge advantage. >> >> >> >> On the other hand, we can do some pretty cool stuff in the lab. So? let >> us hope it is true. >> >> >> >> Aside: we have long theorized that sleeping gives our muscles time to >> repair and regenerate tissue etc, but in our modern world, muscles are >> seldom taxed (other than voluntarily.) We sit in front of a computer a lot >> of the time. So we could perhaps find a way to deal with the phenom >> described in the article. Then if that is the only lethal mechanism in >> severe insomnia (which I doubt (but certainly hope is true)) and we figure >> out a way around that, then we get most of our time to do fun stuff. Cool! >> >> >> >> spike >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 21:43:44 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 16:43:44 -0500 Subject: [ExI] about a 5.0 In-Reply-To: <018101d644e4$26ddf140$7499d3c0$@rainier66.com> References: <009501d644cd$f7119f40$e534ddc0$@rainier66.com> <009c01d644cf$407b9bd0$c172d370$@rainier66.com> <139DD0EA-0679-456D-9088-13CE48E63999@gmail.com> <018101d644e4$26ddf140$7499d3c0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <3CA4D102-9B5B-45BF-896E-0D3C4D118DBF@gmail.com> Maybe don?t poke an active fault line with a stick? Then again I am the superstitious type... SR Ballard > On Jun 17, 2020, at 3:16 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > > The USGS map shows this location as where that M3.6 happened this morning. > > On the left is the city of San Jose in the background. > > Someone posted claiming you can see the actual fault in this photo, at the left almost halfway up the photo, going up and to the right. > > Does that sound right to you? I have half a mind to hike up there and look at that. I think some joker might be blowing smoke. > > spike > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 21:43:57 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 14:43:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cities Message-ID: wrote: snip > Your statistics compare all of Chicago to all of Oakland. The crime is concentrated down in the south side of Chicago, the baddest part of town. My point, if I had one, was that you don't have to go a couple of thousand miles to find dangerous places. > I don't get the whole big city thing. I don't understand why people choose it. Mostly they don't have a choice. It's where the housing is and the jobs were. Urban Dynamics is hard to find but worth reading. > Looks to me like you take enormous risk of failure of the intricate mechanisms of life support. The supply chain can get broken at any one of a number of points, and the whole system can collapse. That's always been the case. We live in a golden age where most of the time most people get enough to eat. That has not been the case in the past. Did you see the article I posted a link to where the US population in pre-civil war times was stunted because of a lack of food? > Well, there is no need to speculate: we see it. Riots, grocery stores looted and destroyed. Now what? They will be rebuilt. Humans are flexible, and where there is a need, they will fix things as required. Keith From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 17 21:44:41 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 14:44:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] police In-Reply-To: References: <00ae01d64369$85e73ec0$91b5bc40$@rainier66.com> <8252E0FA-7C2B-45C8-8FB1-AE9B9AEA5DF2@gmail.com> <01b801d644e5$c4db1520$4e913f60$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <024001d644f0$82592b50$870b81f0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] police the proles who hang out here know me. I figure we are all among friends here. spike I mention 'pantyhose' and get a whimsical reply. You mention sex slave. Is there an emoticom for 'embarrassed giggle'? bill w BillW, probably there is such an emoticon, but I fear I lack the actual emotion that goes with embarrassment. I have a theory on this. We all are born with a certain reservoir of emotions, beyond which one cannot go. Or perhaps just becomes inured to it, at which time it becomes one?s natural state. All this is another way of saying: emotion is relative. For instance, many of us know those who seem to go around annoyed all the time. The person may not even realize she is angry, for after a number of years, that is just the normal state: she wakes irked, goes thru the day miffed at everything that happens and everything that is said and done, is still irritated at dinner, goes to bed still pissed. For her, all that was ordinary. She didn?t even realize there was any other emotional state. She wore out that emotion, or became so accustomed to it, the different shades of angry are subtle to the point of near irrelevance. I did and said so many goofy things in my misspent youth that by the time I reached adolescence, I had lost my capacity to feel embarrassment, wore it out, exhausted my reservoir of shame. This becomes a form of freedom, which is just another word for nothing left to lose. If one has burned away all human dignity, then one is free to do or say any goofy thing that comes to mind. This too has its advantages, even in the business setting. Example, suppose the engineering team is up against a really tough problem. The boss calls everybody together to think, think outside the box. She goes around the room having people come up with some idea. When each engineer is out of ideas, he or she can pass, and we go around until everyone passes. In those exercises, if one crazy goof is unafraid to suggest some silly idea which would embarrass anyone with any actual dignity, that one guy can rattle off idea after idea after idea, when every other prole in the room sits in silent awe, or is debilitated with laughter at how silly are the absurdities being spouted by their embarrassment-immune colleague, as even the eternally-pissed boss seems genuinely amused, an unaccustomed state for her. She specializes in angry, I specialize in creative self-embarrassment. Most of the time, a solution can be derived from one of the most absurd notions. Had I not worn out my ability to experience embarrassment, I could not be that guy, for I would be far too abashed to even propose the course we eventually chose. Richard Feynman writes about this phenom in his marvelous book ?What Do You Care What Other People Think?? I really relate to that guy. He and I are alike in so many ways. Of course he was a brilliant physicist and I suck. But other than that? we are alike. spike On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 3:48 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: From: extropy-chat > On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat >?How the term was used in your spouse?s great-great-grandfather?s time probably isn?t a guide for how it?s used now. For California law ? and be prepared for some legalese ? see: http://www.clrc.ca.gov/pub/2001/MM01-09.pdf >?Is this mistaken? Or is there some official local title in your area of constable? Thanks for the article Dan. We use the term to mean the city law enforcement who go about under flashing lights, as opposed to the office guys, the detectives, the ranking officials in the local PD: constables are the line-level guys we see enough to recognize their faces. In some cases we know their names. I am fortunate to live in a community which is on good terms with our law enforcement. It is said to be the first city in California to require a 4 year college degree as a requirement to be a police officer. >?You also keep using the term bride also to mean wife, I presume. Or is your marriage to her quite recent? I mean recent as a week ago or less? Dan I did use that term when we had been wed a week or less. I just never gave it up. We recently celebrated 36 years of wedded bliss. She is still my bride, I am still her dedicated manservant, catering to her every wish, fulfilling her every random whim. She doesn?t mind my referring to her as my bride. I don?t mind her referring to me as her sex slave. Eh, the proles who hang out here know me. I figure we are all among friends here. spike _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Jun 17 21:46:13 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 14:46:13 -0700 Subject: [ExI] about a 5.0 In-Reply-To: <018101d644e4$26ddf140$7499d3c0$@rainier66.com> References: <009501d644cd$f7119f40$e534ddc0$@rainier66.com> <009c01d644cf$407b9bd0$c172d370$@rainier66.com> <139DD0EA-0679-456D-9088-13CE48E63999@gmail.com> <018101d644e4$26ddf140$7499d3c0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 1:34 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Does that sound right to you? I have half a mind to hike up there and > look at that. I think some joker might be blowing smoke. > Just don't go up there intending to dig (especially with explosives) trying to get to the fault. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 17 22:41:47 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 15:41:47 -0700 Subject: [ExI] about a 5.0 In-Reply-To: <3CA4D102-9B5B-45BF-896E-0D3C4D118DBF@gmail.com> References: <009501d644cd$f7119f40$e534ddc0$@rainier66.com> <009c01d644cf$407b9bd0$c172d370$@rainier66.com> <139DD0EA-0679-456D-9088-13CE48E63999@gmail.com> <018101d644e4$26ddf140$7499d3c0$@rainier66.com> <3CA4D102-9B5B-45BF-896E-0D3C4D118DBF@gmail.com> Message-ID: <004001d644f8$7d212270$77636750$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2020 2:44 PM To: ExI chat list Cc: SR Ballard Subject: Re: [ExI] about a 5.0 Maybe don?t poke an active fault line with a stick? Then again I am the superstitious type... SR Ballard SR, I don?t think that previous photo was really the fault. It is possible to find the San Andreas fault in a lotta places around here, but that other photo isn?t what the fault looks like really. This is photo was taken in those hills above San Jose in 1906: This one was taken in 1989 near here at a park where I go camping sometimes: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 39176 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image004.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 40462 bytes Desc: not available URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 00:02:07 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 19:02:07 -0500 Subject: [ExI] police In-Reply-To: <024001d644f0$82592b50$870b81f0$@rainier66.com> References: <00ae01d64369$85e73ec0$91b5bc40$@rainier66.com> <8252E0FA-7C2B-45C8-8FB1-AE9B9AEA5DF2@gmail.com> <01b801d644e5$c4db1520$4e913f60$@rainier66.com> <024001d644f0$82592b50$870b81f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Actually I was thinking about the ones reading sex slave that would be giggling. Sunniness of disposition is genetic. At one end we have those who got the full sunniness and are hard to depress. Other end - grouchy all the time,mostly. One girl in my class said that she was a bitch and was never sunny - just the genetic breaks. "I ain't got but one nerve left and you just got on it". Or ""I am running out of estrogen and I have a gun." Seen on a T shirt. But I cannot go along with the idea of exhaustible well of emotions. Some other metaphor will have to do. I am glad you mentioned Feynman. I have been meaning to re-read all his books and keep forgetting. I do wonder what it is like to be that smart and lose it. No genius that I know of makes earth-shaking discoveries in his older age (do you?) My memory isn't what it used to be and neither is my analytical ability. Just a tad off - just a bit slow. Synthesis, arguably the highest cognitive function, shows up rarely. I hope I don't get much worse. bill w One day I went to a senior level class with my shirt buttoned up wrong - higher on one side. I kept getting looks during the class but wasn't told about it till the class was over by one guy. I was not exactly embarrassed, but I did make up a story that I did it intentionally to test them. I think he bought it! I don't embarrass easily - I was reading a novel at home when I got a call from the office saying that a class full of students were awaiting my arrival for their final exam. I went, gave the test, which was easily finished with the time left, and acted like nothing had happened and said nothing. On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 5:38 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] police > > > > the proles who hang out here know me. I figure we are all among friends > here. > > > > spike > > I mention 'pantyhose' and get a whimsical reply. You mention sex slave. > Is there an emoticom for 'embarrassed giggle'? bill w > > > > BillW, probably there is such an emoticon, but I fear I lack the actual > emotion that goes with embarrassment. I have a theory on this. We all are > born with a certain reservoir of emotions, beyond which one cannot go. Or > perhaps just becomes inured to it, at which time it becomes one?s natural > state. All this is another way of saying: emotion is relative. > > For instance, many of us know those who seem to go around annoyed all the > time. The person may not even realize she is angry, for after a number of > years, that is just the normal state: she wakes irked, goes thru the day > miffed at everything that happens and everything that is said and done, is > still irritated at dinner, goes to bed still pissed. For her, all that was > ordinary. She didn?t even realize there was any other emotional state. > She wore out that emotion, or became so accustomed to it, the different > shades of angry are subtle to the point of near irrelevance. > > I did and said so many goofy things in my misspent youth that by the time > I reached adolescence, I had lost my capacity to feel embarrassment, wore > it out, exhausted my reservoir of shame. This becomes a form of freedom, > which is just another word for nothing left to lose. If one has burned > away all human dignity, then one is free to do or say any goofy thing that > comes to mind. > > This too has its advantages, even in the business setting. Example, > suppose the engineering team is up against a really tough problem. The > boss calls everybody together to think, think outside the box. She goes > around the room having people come up with some idea. When each engineer > is out of ideas, he or she can pass, and we go around until everyone > passes. In those exercises, if one crazy goof is unafraid to suggest some > silly idea which would embarrass anyone with any actual dignity, that one > guy can rattle off idea after idea after idea, when every other prole in > the room sits in silent awe, or is debilitated with laughter at how silly > are the absurdities being spouted by their embarrassment-immune colleague, > as even the eternally-pissed boss seems genuinely amused, an unaccustomed > state for her. She specializes in angry, I specialize in creative > self-embarrassment. > > Most of the time, a solution can be derived from one of the most absurd > notions. > > Had I not worn out my ability to experience embarrassment, I could not be > that guy, for I would be far too abashed to even propose the course we > eventually chose. > > Richard Feynman writes about this phenom in his marvelous book ?What Do > You Care What Other People Think?? > > I really relate to that guy. He and I are alike in so many ways. Of > course he was a brilliant physicist and I suck. But other than that? we > are alike. > > spike > > > > > > On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 3:48 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > > > > >?How the term was used in your spouse?s great-great-grandfather?s time > probably isn?t a guide for how it?s used now. For California law ? and be > prepared for some legalese ? see: > > > > http://www.clrc.ca.gov/pub/2001/MM01-09.pdf > > > > >?Is this mistaken? Or is there some official local title in your area of > constable? > > > > Thanks for the article Dan. We use the term to mean the city law > enforcement who go about under flashing lights, as opposed to the office > guys, the detectives, the ranking officials in the local PD: constables are > the line-level guys we see enough to recognize their faces. In some cases > we know their names. > > > > I am fortunate to live in a community which is on good terms with our law > enforcement. It is said to be the first city in California to require a 4 > year college degree as a requirement to be a police officer. > > > > > > >?You also keep using the term bride also to mean wife, I presume. Or is > your marriage to her quite recent? I mean recent as a week ago or less? > Dan > > > > > > I did use that term when we had been wed a week or less. I just never > gave it up. We recently celebrated 36 years of wedded bliss. She is still > my bride, I am still her dedicated manservant, catering to her every wish, > fulfilling her every random whim. She doesn?t mind my referring to her as > my bride. I don?t mind her referring to me as her sex slave. > > > > Eh, the proles who hang out here know me. I figure we are all among > friends here. > > > > spike > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 00:02:49 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 17:02:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] #RebootThePolice Message-ID: Is Elizier still on this list? His suggestions on this topic seem worth debating. https://medium.com/@yudkowsky/a-comprehensive-reboot-of-law-enforcement-b76bfab850a3 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gsantostasi at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 00:08:20 2020 From: gsantostasi at gmail.com (Giovanni Santostasi) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 17:08:20 -0700 Subject: [ExI] why sleep? In-Reply-To: References: <004d01d644b7$55882ce0$009886a0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Well, "learned" via whatever mean, yes genetic, just a poetic license for acquiring an ability. Spike, yes I think I did mentioned before my dissertation was on gravitational waves (I developed a special filter to detect signals using a cryogenic bar detector, there was at the time the only functional in all US, at the lab where I worked as a PhD) and the other half on possible gravitational waves models from the remnant of 1987A. I worked for LIGO for sometime too. I switched to neuroscience 2009. Now 2 startups one that tries to commercialize the patent on the sleep device and the other is a algo trading company to trade stocks and crypto. Too many career changes, lol. https://alphahub.us/ Shameless self promotion (talking about being humble, lol): By the way if any of you is interested in testing my trading algos let me know we are doing an alpha testing right now. Sign up with code GIOVANNI1. One of the algo did 3x last year (trading 1 stock x day) Giovanni On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 3:02 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Giovanni wrote: It is true there are notable exceptions like dolphins > that can have some level of low alertness because they learned how to make > half of the brain sleep while the other is functional but at very low level > of operation > > Good post - thanks. My question: do you really mean 'learned' in that > clip above? Why not just genetic? bill w > > On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 4:20 PM Giovanni Santostasi via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> Half of my scientific career has been in the field of neuroscience of >> sleep (the other half in gravitational waves that is one of the topics we >> discuss here often). >> I worked with Tononi a the University of Wisconsin, Madison and at >> Northwestern University Circadian and Sleep Laboratory. >> I have a patent in this field about a device to enhance Slow Wave sleep >> that is the most restorative part of sleep. >> https://patents.justia.com/inventor/giovanni-santostasi We received a >> lot of press coverage for this invention (Times, ABC, Smithsonian, WSJ), >> several grants including one from DARPA. >> Here a podcast where I discuss my work in the field >> https://neurohacker.com/people/giovanni-santostasi. >> In the transhumanist community the topic of doing without sleep comes >> often up and of course I have my very strong bias and reservations having >> worked in the field and realized the fundamental importance of sleep. >> Sleep has many functions. It is basically a time off for the system to >> reset and do a lot of things that would not be a very good idea to do while >> the system is operating and interacting with the world. >> One of the main functions of sleep is memory consolidation, that is a >> process where new information acquired during the day, is selected and then >> integrated and redistributed in the brain. New memories are made permanent >> and other erased. The brain needs to be isolated from the environment and >> produce slow oscillations (that don't support consciousness) for this >> fundamental process to take place. >> Other important function of sleep is the production and regulation of >> hormones (Human Growth Hormone for example, testosterone in men) that have >> important anti-aging effects, immune system learning, repair of tissues and >> so on. >> Almost all animals sleep, from unicellular ones to the largest creatures, >> even if sleep may mean just a time off for the simplest ones. >> It is true there are notable exceptions like dolphins that can have some >> level of low alertness because they learned how to make half of the brain >> sleep while the other is functional but at very low level of operation. The >> main reason they do this is because they need to come up to the surface to >> breath. They still sleep a total of 33 % of their day as humans though. >> That half asleep state is not very efficient and it is basically almost >> like napping. May be able to do simple automatic actions (maybe hunting >> slow moving fish) but I doubt their attention and higher functions are >> engaged. I intended to study more this topic of dolphin sleep but I had not >> chance yet. But in general it is the exception that confirms the rule that >> sleep is so fundamental that all the complex organisms do it and they do it >> for a large part of their day. The paradox is that sleep seems a waste of >> time in terms of basic priorities like food procurement and mating but also >> because it exposes the organism (given it is motionless and with most >> senses shut off during sleep) to predators that have reversed the sleep >> patterns (they sleep during the day for example). This points to the >> fundamental importance of sleep. >> My intuition has been for sometime that even AIs that mimic brain >> architecture would have some form of time off that would be the equivalent >> of sleep. This article that come out recently confirms this intuition: >> https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/artificial-intelligence-human-sleep-ai-los-alamos-neural-network-a9554271.html >> >> It is not really wasted time but it is a fundamental part of being alive. >> By the way my invention is about making more efficient sleep by enhancing >> its restorative property in particular memory consolidation. We created a >> Brain Computer Interface that locks to the brain waves using machine >> learning algos to boost the slow waves and this boost in amplitude >> correlates with improved cognition. There are other groups around the world >> that showed that this approach can also improve learning, immune system >> performance and cardiovascular health. >> >> https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2017/april/pink-noise-sound-enhance-deep-sleep-memory/ >> >> >> >> >> >> >> On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 7:58 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> >>> >>> This research group claims to be closing in on figuring out what >>> actually slays the insomniac: >>> >>> >>> >>> https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation-kills-20200604/ >>> >>> >>> >>> If we can prove this study correct and figure out an alternative means >>> of accomplishing the same thing without sleeping, oh that would be cool: >>> you get the functional equivalent of a third more time to do fun stuff. >>> >>> >>> >>> As cool as this is, I must admit skepticism. Any organism which never >>> sleeps would have such a big advantage over sleepers in the survival >>> department, one would think evolution would have stumbled upon whatever we >>> can do in the lab at some point. The insomniac beast could hunt night and >>> day, find sleeping beasts to attack and devour, get a huge advantage. >>> >>> >>> >>> On the other hand, we can do some pretty cool stuff in the lab. So? let >>> us hope it is true. >>> >>> >>> >>> Aside: we have long theorized that sleeping gives our muscles time to >>> repair and regenerate tissue etc, but in our modern world, muscles are >>> seldom taxed (other than voluntarily.) We sit in front of a computer a lot >>> of the time. So we could perhaps find a way to deal with the phenom >>> described in the article. Then if that is the only lethal mechanism in >>> severe insomnia (which I doubt (but certainly hope is true)) and we figure >>> out a way around that, then we get most of our time to do fun stuff. Cool! >>> >>> >>> >>> spike >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gsantostasi at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 00:23:51 2020 From: gsantostasi at gmail.com (Giovanni Santostasi) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 17:23:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] why sleep? In-Reply-To: References: <004d01d644b7$55882ce0$009886a0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: The gravitational wave stuff was so interesting but one of the reasons I switched was because I was looking at noise for years with no signals, lol. We were confident at that time GW existed but not 100 % certain. It was weird to work in a scientific field where you just look at noise all day long and no signal at all. We had even a sociologist in our community that studied exactly this kind of anomaly and how scientists managed. Also my dad died of ALS and my job as a professor at the small college where I was teaching had to let go all the new hires because of the crisis in 2008. That was the year that I was supposed to get tenure. So I wanted to use this negative situation to do something new and challenging and more practical and went into biomed (also closer to transhumanistic type of research). Given the anti-aging and cognition enhancing connection with hacking sleep I feel I'm contributing to the field of life extension and that is fulfilling. By the way Franco-Cortese and I have a paper that was published in Aubrey scientific Journal about a possible approach to radical life extention. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Whole-Body-Induced-Cell-Turnover%3A-A-Proposed-for-Cortese-Santostasi/bf269924f14f41d8b5fe49c40d7697484019b135 This paper was mentioned in Juvenescence book with his own chapter https://www.amazon.com/Juvenescence-Investing-longevity-Mellon-Jim/dp/0993047815 This should serve as a introduction as myself given you didn't know I was a PhD, I'm catching up. On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 5:08 PM Giovanni Santostasi wrote: > Well, "learned" via whatever mean, yes genetic, just a poetic license for > acquiring an ability. > > Spike, yes I think I did mentioned before my dissertation was on > gravitational waves (I developed a special filter to detect signals using a > cryogenic bar detector, there was at the time the only functional in all > US, at the lab where I worked as a PhD) and the other half on possible > gravitational waves models from the remnant of 1987A. I worked for LIGO for > sometime too. > I switched to neuroscience 2009. Now 2 startups one that tries to > commercialize the patent on the sleep device and the other is a algo > trading company to trade stocks and crypto. Too many career changes, lol. > https://alphahub.us/ > Shameless self promotion (talking about being humble, lol): > By the way if any of you is interested in testing my trading algos let me > know we are doing an alpha testing right now. Sign up with code GIOVANNI1. > One of the algo did 3x last year (trading 1 stock x day) > > Giovanni > > > On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 3:02 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> Giovanni wrote: It is true there are notable exceptions like dolphins >> that can have some level of low alertness because they learned how to make >> half of the brain sleep while the other is functional but at very low level >> of operation >> >> Good post - thanks. My question: do you really mean 'learned' in that >> clip above? Why not just genetic? bill w >> >> On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 4:20 PM Giovanni Santostasi via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> Half of my scientific career has been in the field of neuroscience of >>> sleep (the other half in gravitational waves that is one of the topics we >>> discuss here often). >>> I worked with Tononi a the University of Wisconsin, Madison and at >>> Northwestern University Circadian and Sleep Laboratory. >>> I have a patent in this field about a device to enhance Slow Wave sleep >>> that is the most restorative part of sleep. >>> https://patents.justia.com/inventor/giovanni-santostasi We received a >>> lot of press coverage for this invention (Times, ABC, Smithsonian, WSJ), >>> several grants including one from DARPA. >>> Here a podcast where I discuss my work in the field >>> https://neurohacker.com/people/giovanni-santostasi. >>> In the transhumanist community the topic of doing without sleep comes >>> often up and of course I have my very strong bias and reservations having >>> worked in the field and realized the fundamental importance of sleep. >>> Sleep has many functions. It is basically a time off for the system to >>> reset and do a lot of things that would not be a very good idea to do while >>> the system is operating and interacting with the world. >>> One of the main functions of sleep is memory consolidation, that is a >>> process where new information acquired during the day, is selected and then >>> integrated and redistributed in the brain. New memories are made permanent >>> and other erased. The brain needs to be isolated from the environment and >>> produce slow oscillations (that don't support consciousness) for this >>> fundamental process to take place. >>> Other important function of sleep is the production and regulation of >>> hormones (Human Growth Hormone for example, testosterone in men) that have >>> important anti-aging effects, immune system learning, repair of tissues and >>> so on. >>> Almost all animals sleep, from unicellular ones to the largest >>> creatures, even if sleep may mean just a time off for the simplest ones. >>> It is true there are notable exceptions like dolphins that can have some >>> level of low alertness because they learned how to make half of the brain >>> sleep while the other is functional but at very low level of operation. The >>> main reason they do this is because they need to come up to the surface to >>> breath. They still sleep a total of 33 % of their day as humans though. >>> That half asleep state is not very efficient and it is basically almost >>> like napping. May be able to do simple automatic actions (maybe hunting >>> slow moving fish) but I doubt their attention and higher functions are >>> engaged. I intended to study more this topic of dolphin sleep but I had not >>> chance yet. But in general it is the exception that confirms the rule that >>> sleep is so fundamental that all the complex organisms do it and they do it >>> for a large part of their day. The paradox is that sleep seems a waste of >>> time in terms of basic priorities like food procurement and mating but also >>> because it exposes the organism (given it is motionless and with most >>> senses shut off during sleep) to predators that have reversed the sleep >>> patterns (they sleep during the day for example). This points to the >>> fundamental importance of sleep. >>> My intuition has been for sometime that even AIs that mimic brain >>> architecture would have some form of time off that would be the equivalent >>> of sleep. This article that come out recently confirms this intuition: >>> https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/artificial-intelligence-human-sleep-ai-los-alamos-neural-network-a9554271.html >>> >>> It is not really wasted time but it is a fundamental part of being >>> alive. >>> By the way my invention is about making more efficient sleep by >>> enhancing its restorative property in particular memory consolidation. We >>> created a Brain Computer Interface that locks to the brain waves using >>> machine learning algos to boost the slow waves and this boost in amplitude >>> correlates with improved cognition. There are other groups around the world >>> that showed that this approach can also improve learning, immune system >>> performance and cardiovascular health. >>> >>> https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2017/april/pink-noise-sound-enhance-deep-sleep-memory/ >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 7:58 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >>> >>>> >>>> >>>> This research group claims to be closing in on figuring out what >>>> actually slays the insomniac: >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation-kills-20200604/ >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> If we can prove this study correct and figure out an alternative means >>>> of accomplishing the same thing without sleeping, oh that would be cool: >>>> you get the functional equivalent of a third more time to do fun stuff. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> As cool as this is, I must admit skepticism. Any organism which never >>>> sleeps would have such a big advantage over sleepers in the survival >>>> department, one would think evolution would have stumbled upon whatever we >>>> can do in the lab at some point. The insomniac beast could hunt night and >>>> day, find sleeping beasts to attack and devour, get a huge advantage. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> On the other hand, we can do some pretty cool stuff in the lab. So? >>>> let us hope it is true. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> Aside: we have long theorized that sleeping gives our muscles time to >>>> repair and regenerate tissue etc, but in our modern world, muscles are >>>> seldom taxed (other than voluntarily.) We sit in front of a computer a lot >>>> of the time. So we could perhaps find a way to deal with the phenom >>>> described in the article. Then if that is the only lethal mechanism in >>>> severe insomnia (which I doubt (but certainly hope is true)) and we figure >>>> out a way around that, then we get most of our time to do fun stuff. Cool! >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> spike >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> extropy-chat mailing list >>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 01:13:36 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 18:13:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? Message-ID: Adrian Tymes wrote: On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 10:24 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: snip > >> The time to get a new robot to the moon is around two weeks. > Not including time to diagnose the fault, build a robot from scratch to fix the fault (which starts after the diagnosis, which starts after the fault), and this approach would seem to be launching several tons of robot instead of much less food & resupply. It is a replacement, you just abandon the failed one. >> Is it worth the many billion it would cost to keep humans on the moon? > >Would it in fact cost many billions? Yes. Industrializing the moon might run more than $2 T. O'Neill's 1975 proposal is close to half a trillion in current dollars. > Granted, ISS maintenance is over $1B - it's about $3-4B - but that includes expansion, experiments, and all other costs as well as keeping the humans alive. I'm having trouble finding hard data on how that breaks down, but it looks like a distinct minority actually goes into life support, and the bulk of it is just NASA's bureaucratic overhead, not actually producing anything (except jobs to support federal funding). It takes the full-time efforts of 3 people to maintain the ISS. >> How do you propose to protect them from radiation? > The best answer I have yet seen on this is to set up the colony in a lava tube, which has enough overhead mass to reduce radiation to or below average-Earth-surface level. There are other methods too, but this is a simple, robust, and low cost solution. Perhaps put entrance shafts to one side of the lava tube, rather than on top, so you don't have a "radiation sunlight" part of the tube that people should stay out of. That means your lunar base is located in a lave tube, not where you want it to be for other reasons. > I am highly > biassed in the direction of people in space, on the moon, and on Mars. > But I can't make an economic case for them. > Good on you for even thinking of the economics. That's the most critical part that most who propose this ignore. > I haven't completely solved it either, but the more I analyze it, the more it seems the case will have to be made by what the colony can return to Earth, rather than the usual orbital/interplanetary servicing options that keep coming up. This is for two reasons: 1) Today, there is either literally no or a very tiny (depending on what you count) off-Earth market. Either way, insufficient funds can be extracted to support the colony until an off-Earth market builds up. 2) Even once an off-Earth market does build up, for a long time it will be dwarfed by the size of the on-Earth market. Even a tiny sliver of the on-Earth market will provide way more support than the entire off-Earth market can provide, likely for decades after the colony's founding. (Decades after founding, the colony will presumably be much more self-sufficient than right after it is founded.) > So, what can a lunar colony provide for Earth? (I haven't thought through what a Martian colony might provide, as a lunar colony is likely to happen first: even assuming completely independent lunar and Martian colonization efforts, the lunar one needs less resources and thus is likely to establish a colony before the Martian effort does.) The main things I am currently aware of are: 1) Power, from solar panels manufactured on the Moon and relayed (probably via one or more intermediary satellites) to rectennas on Earth's surface. You have made extensive studies of Earth-launched solar power satellites; I would be curious to see your take on this alternative. Assume that any intermediate satellites are built on and launched from the Moon as well; they're simple enough that it seems less cost to set up the manufacturing facilities on the Moon than to launch from Earth. Constructing power satellites for placement in GEO was what O'Neill proposed. Relaying is just out of the question though, the losses are too high. The lunar surface is an awful place for collecting solar power, two weeks of darkness. The same problem makes it difficult to set up any energy-intensive processing on the moon. Selling power to the earth is not easy in any case. There are a lot of ways to make energy and the market is highly competitive. snip 3) Mining Rare Earth elements for return to & sale on Earth. Rare earth elements are not that rare. I don't think anyone of them is worth the cost to ship to earth. Certainly, magnesium i and aluminum are not valuable enough for them to be worth shipping. Keith From atymes at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 07:17:46 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 00:17:46 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > > >> Is it worth the many billion it would cost to keep humans on the moon? > > > > >Would it in fact cost many billions? > > Yes. Industrializing the moon might run more than $2 T. O'Neill's > 1975 proposal is close to half a trillion in current dollars. > I didn't ask if a proposal from decades ago, without the benefits of all the research and advances since then, would cost many billions. Yes, NASA has come up with many very expensive proposals. And? Others, with more reason to believe their estimates, have come up with cheaper and more reliable ways to do it. > It takes the full-time efforts of 3 people to maintain the ISS. > Three people is hardly billions, even including life support. > That means your lunar base is located in a lave tube, not where you > want it to be for other reasons. > There are lava tubes all over, and it's quite possible lava tubes would be colocated with KREEP deposits in particular. > Rare earth elements are not that rare. I don't think anyone of them > is worth the cost to ship to earth. Certainly, magnesium i and > aluminum are not valuable enough for them to be worth shipping. > Once the facilities are set up, what's the per-unit cost to ship them back to Earth? Assume a reusable railgun has been set up, and that you've got enough solar panels (in lunar or even Earth orbit if you prefer) to fully power the works. If the cost is not at least $6/kg, then magnesium would seem profitable to ship - and some rare earth elements sell for much more than that. Of course, the facilities will have to be paid for - but if you can make a profit per unit, then paying off the facilities is just a matter of shipping back and selling enough material. How many kg is enough, and how many years would it take to ship that much material? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 07:33:19 2020 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 09:33:19 +0200 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: <0EE9642B-05AA-4095-89CD-42FBF0116749@gmail.com> References: <0EE9642B-05AA-4095-89CD-42FBF0116749@gmail.com> Message-ID: With the ongoing bombardment of fake news and political propaganda from all sides, this is not surprising. But things are done by those who have a real interest in something and follow real news relevant to their interests. On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 9:14 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat wrote: > > So nothing makes humans excited for more than one week. I guess we?re doomed. > > SR Ballard > > On Jun 17, 2020, at 7:56 AM, John Clark via extropy-chat wrote: > > On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 2:14 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat wrote: > >> > John, I am not talking of "a totally self-sufficient colony" on the Moon or Mars, not yet. I am perfectly OK with letting these things take the time they must take. > > > I am perfectly OK with waiting until the time is right, that is to say until we have the technology to make a extraterrestrial colony self-sufficient. People seriously interested in human space colonization should be pushing for a proof of concept, a self-sufficient colony in Antarctica would be a great prototype. > > >> >I am talking of a small lab on the Moon, permanently occupied by astronauts. Like an ISS on the Moon. > > > That's exactly what I'm worried about, it would be like a ISS on the Moon only even more horrendously expensive, a place where astronauts spend 80% of their time just making sure they stay alive and the other 20% performing science-fair level experiments that are never written up by Nature or Science or any top journal. What little scientific output that has come from the ISS has come from automated equipment that does not need the help of astronauts, like the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and the Cold Atom Laboratory. Such instruments are on the ISS not because they need people to operate them but because they need lots of electrical power and the ISS with all its solar panels has lots of that, they only thing they need from the astronauts is for them to stay out of the way and not to touch anything. > >> >> > I am talking of the smallest and least ambitious moonbase that we can build and operate with the money >> and the technology we have. > > > The ISS cost $150 billion to build and it costs $4 billion a year to keep operational, a permanent moon base would cost much more to build and if it was not self-sufficient it would cost vastly more to keep resupplied. > >> > I think re-igniting the human spirit is a top priority. > > > Such a moon base would make the ISS look cheap and would ignite the human spirit for about one week, but after that people would get tired of watching reruns and want something new. If you were willing to spend between 10 and 100 times as much as a Moon base cost you could have a Mars base, and that would buy you one additional week's worth of human spirit ignition. And then they'd get tired of watching that rerun too. > > John K Clark > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From giulio at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 07:37:21 2020 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 09:37:21 +0200 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 10:05 PM John Clark via extropy-chat wrote: > The only thing I can think of that you could mine on the moon that would be worth taking back to earth would be Helium-3, and even then only when Aneutronic Fusion becomes feasible. > There are promising indications that using helium-3 in fusion reactors could be the way to achieve practical nuclear fusion. Further developments have been funded by large energy companies and could create a huge market for lunar helium-3. http://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-plasma-research-collaboration-gives-fusion-heating-boost-0821 https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a27961/mit-nuclear-fusion-experiment-increases-efficiency/ http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-newly-formed-company-launch-novel-approach-fusion-power-0309 From atymes at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 08:00:41 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 01:00:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 12:53 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > There are promising indications that using helium-3 in fusion reactors > could be the way to achieve practical nuclear fusion. Further > developments have been funded by large energy companies and could > create a huge market for lunar helium-3. > That's not a market until they achieve commercial breakeven. A friend of mine puts up https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/521750967214014504/720279743970410566/LkKBNe1NW51Wh-8nLSTRdQtTha2sV1yY46vhUWcu_6g.png.webp whenever this discussion arises, to demonstrate the real challenge that needs to be overcome to make fusion a reality. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 08:15:51 2020 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 10:15:51 +0200 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 10:02 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat wrote: > > On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 12:53 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> There are promising indications that using helium-3 in fusion reactors >> could be the way to achieve practical nuclear fusion. Further >> developments have been funded by large energy companies and could >> create a huge market for lunar helium-3. > > > That's not a market until they achieve commercial breakeven. > > A friend of mine puts up https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/521750967214014504/720279743970410566/LkKBNe1NW51Wh-8nLSTRdQtTha2sV1yY46vhUWcu_6g.png.webp whenever this discussion arises, to demonstrate the real challenge that needs to be overcome to make fusion a reality. > Adrian, that's why I said "could create" instead of "have created." Ongoing developments, e.g. https://cfs.energy/ , could (I said could, which doesn't mean will, but neither means won't) demonstrate the practical feasibility of He3-enabled fusion. IF (I said IF) that happens, the need for industrial supplies of He3 will be established and lunar He3 mining initiatives will be funded. This is an ideal scenario worth working toward. From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 10:54:13 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 06:54:13 -0400 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 3:53 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: * >> T*he only thing I can think of that you could mine on the moon that would >> be worth taking back to earth would be Helium-3, and even then only when >> Aneutronic Fusion becomes feasible. > > > * > There are promising indications that using helium-3 in fusion reactors > could be the way to achieve practical nuclear fusion.* I hope so but even practical Deuterium/Tritium fusion power has proven to be extremely difficult to achieve, and it's easier than Aneutronic Fusion. Even if it does become a practical source of electrical power Helium-3 would face competition from an element that is far easier to obtain, Boron (20 Mule Team Borax is full of it) because Boron can also achieve Aneutronic Fusion, although it wouldn't be easy. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 11:11:35 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 07:11:35 -0400 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 9:17 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> It is a replacement, you just abandon the failed one.* Yes, if something breaks in space it would be far cheaper to just abandon it and send a new one rather than pay to have an astronaut hanging around to repair it, which he probably couldn't do anyway unless the problem was obvious and the solution simple. And the broken instrument was probably using technology that was 15 or 20 years old, so the replacement would be a big improvement. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 12:39:56 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 08:39:56 -0400 Subject: [ExI] #RebootThePolice In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 8:15 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> Is Elizier still on this list? * > If he is on the list he isn't posting, unfortunately it's been a long time since he has. > *> His suggestions on this topic seem worth debating.* > > > https://medium.com/@yudkowsky/a-comprehensive-reboot-of-law-enforcement-b76bfab850a3 > > Elizier said "*One of my acquaintances recently mentioned that many of the bullies he knew in high school went on to join police forces*". I'm not the one that mentioned that to him but I have a similar story. I'm 4 or 5 inches taller than average but there was a huge notorious bully that I knew in grade school and high school that made me look like a midget, I received more than one bruise from that jerk as had many others. He was on the football team and, although his grades were poor, socially he was at the very top of the school pecking order in both grade school and high school. Over the years I kept running across his name in the newspapers, It seems that immediately after graduating from high school he became a city of Miami police officer, after being a cop for about two years he was caught on tape taking bribes and conspiring with South American drug cartels to import cocaine into the US. He was convicted and sent to prison, I don't know for how long. About 25 years later his name showed up again, he was firing a gun in the air out of the window of his apartment, the police were called and as they were making their way up a stairway he fired a shotgun in their direction. Miraculously he didn't hit any of the police officers but he was sent back to prison, the article said he had "a long criminal record" but didn't go into any details. A few years later he made the news yet again, he got into a fight with a prison guard and was injured and had to spend a week in the prison hospital. After that they sent him to solitary confinement aka "the hole" for a month as punishment. When he got out of solitary he filed a civil lawsuit against the guard that had injured him. The suit was thrown out of court almost immediately. Three or four years after that I read his brief obituary, it didn't mention the cause of death. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 13:55:57 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 08:55:57 -0500 Subject: [ExI] police etc. Message-ID: The guy featured in John's post should never have been hired as a police officer. I am reading articles about how cops need to be trained differently and so on, and that is certainly needed. However, John's bully would have been caught rather easily if some background checks had been in place. If not, the personality tests would have shown what kind of character he was, and then kept him out of police school altogether. I am not saying that personality tests are 100% accurate, but it would catch some of the bullies, racists, and so on. This is one reason I am saying that we need more money for the police dept., not less. Hiring consultants, testing and interviewing, will take a good chunk of money, and probably at first only large cities will be able to do that. Does anyone know of a police dept. that does this sort of thing? To me, this is a no-brainer. Get bad guys in and no amount of training and education will change their character. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 14:05:42 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 09:05:42 -0500 Subject: [ExI] contest Message-ID: My full name is on Quora. I take no precautions about privacy when I surf or use the web in any way. So I am curious: how long would it take you to find me, my home address, phone number, my wife's name, etc.? bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 14:31:46 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 09:31:46 -0500 Subject: [ExI] police etc. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <881DBE1F-E676-4D31-AF20-5A1CEB14D412@gmail.com> A call center that pays me $9/hr already does that stuff. No need to pay police departments excessive amounts. SR Ballard > On Jun 18, 2020, at 8:55 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > The guy featured in John's post should never have been hired as a police officer. I am reading articles about how cops need to be trained differently and so on, and that is certainly needed. > > However, John's bully would have been caught rather easily if some background checks had been in place. If not, the personality tests would have shown what kind of character he was, and then kept him out of police school altogether. > > I am not saying that personality tests are 100% accurate, but it would catch some of the bullies, racists, and so on. > > This is one reason I am saying that we need more money for the police dept., not less. Hiring consultants, testing and interviewing, will take a good chunk of money, and probably at first only large cities will be able to do that. > > Does anyone know of a police dept. that does this sort of thing? To me, this is a no-brainer. Get bad guys in and no amount of training and education will change their character. > > bill w > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 14:39:21 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 09:39:21 -0500 Subject: [ExI] police etc. In-Reply-To: <881DBE1F-E676-4D31-AF20-5A1CEB14D412@gmail.com> References: <881DBE1F-E676-4D31-AF20-5A1CEB14D412@gmail.com> Message-ID: By 'that stuff' you mean interviewing, personality testing and interpretation? I have to express some doubt about the education of the people who are doing it. You don't get Ph. D.s for $9 an hour. bill w On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 9:35 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > A call center that pays me $9/hr already does that stuff. No need to pay > police departments excessive amounts. > > SR Ballard > > On Jun 18, 2020, at 8:55 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > The guy featured in John's post should never have been hired as a police > officer. I am reading articles about how cops need to be trained > differently and so on, and that is certainly needed. > > However, John's bully would have been caught rather easily if some > background checks had been in place. If not, the personality tests would > have shown what kind of character he was, and then kept him out of police > school altogether. > > I am not saying that personality tests are 100% accurate, but it would > catch some of the bullies, racists, and so on. > > This is one reason I am saying that we need more money for the police > dept., not less. Hiring consultants, testing and interviewing, will take a > good chunk of money, and probably at first only large cities will be able > to do that. > > Does anyone know of a police dept. that does this sort of thing? To me, > this is a no-brainer. Get bad guys in and no amount of training and > education will change their character. > > bill w > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 14:54:29 2020 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 10:54:29 -0400 Subject: [ExI] contest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: https://www.mylife.com/william-wallace/e913803132036 AKA:william flynn wallace, wallace william flynn, william f wallace Associates:robert l wallace , joel david wallace , rosalind marie wallace , phyllis beamer Work: at International Assc Of Lions School: Add Info Summary: William Wallace was born on 01/20/1942 and is 78 years old. William Wallace lives in Brandon, MS; previous cities include Crossville TN, Columbus MS and Vernon AL. Other names that William uses includes William Flynn Wallace, Wallace William Flynn and William F Wallace. William's ethnicity is Caucasian, whose political affiliation is currently a registered Republican; and religious views are listed as Christian. As of this date, William is married. William's personal network of family, friends, associates & neighbors include Robert Wallace , Joel Wallace , Rosalind Wallace , Phyllis Beamer and Jimmie Donnell . William's reported annual income is about $100 - 149,999; with a net worth that tops $50,000 - $99,999. Read Full Summary View Full Background Info Write Review Edit Profile Lock Info Write Message Search for your Reputation Profile Search by Name Learn about your Reputation Score & how to improve it. [image: Search for your Reputation Profile] Are you William Wallace?Control This Profile On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 10:09 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > My full name is on Quora. I take no precautions about privacy when I surf > or use the web in any way. So I am curious: how long would it take you to > find me, my home address, phone number, my wife's name, etc.? > > bill w > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 15:06:16 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 10:06:16 -0500 Subject: [ExI] contest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I assume it did not take you long. Free? Registered Republican???? Wow. That was many decades ago (have not voted Repub since Nixon). Not a Christian either. Thanks Dave. I'll go to the site and see if I cannot update some of the info. bill w On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 9:57 AM Dave Sill via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > https://www.mylife.com/william-wallace/e913803132036 > > AKA:william flynn wallace, wallace william flynn, william f wallace > Associates:robert l wallace > , joel david wallace > , rosalind marie > wallace , phyllis > beamer > Work: at International Assc Of Lions > > School: Add Info > > Summary: William Wallace was born on 01/20/1942 and is 78 years old. > William Wallace lives in Brandon, MS; previous cities include Crossville > TN, Columbus MS and Vernon AL. Other names that William uses includes > William Flynn Wallace, Wallace William Flynn and William F Wallace. > William's ethnicity is Caucasian, whose political affiliation is currently > a registered Republican; and religious views are listed as Christian. As of > this date, William is married. William's personal network of family, > friends, associates & neighbors include Robert Wallace > , Joel Wallace > , Rosalind Wallace > , Phyllis Beamer > and Jimmie Donnell > . William's reported > annual income is about $100 - 149,999; with a net worth that tops $50,000 - > $99,999. Read Full Summary > > > View Full Background Info > > Write > Review > Edit > Profile > Lock > Info > Write > Message > Search for your Reputation Profile > Search by Name > Learn about your Reputation Score & how to improve it. > [image: Search for your Reputation Profile] > Are you William Wallace?Control This Profile > > > On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 10:09 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> My full name is on Quora. I take no precautions about privacy when I >> surf or use the web in any way. So I am curious: how long would it take >> you to find me, my home address, phone number, my wife's name, etc.? >> >> bill w >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 15:27:10 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 10:27:10 -0500 Subject: [ExI] contest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <3E1FB735-40E6-4845-93A8-D6E5BFFC3EC0@gmail.com> I?m not a professional but I find you more difficult to find than basically anyone my age. Probably because you consistently use your name. Your name is not unique in the way many usernames are unique. It contains: - Sir William Wallace - Bill ?Superfoot? Wallace (Karate Champ) - Bill Wallace (dead children?s author) - This (apparently dead) guy on Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/william.f.wallace - Foozler is obscured by scrabble and ?The band only known as foozler? You said you were only using your full name, but I found this Quora: https://www.quora.com/profile/Bill-Wallace-42 for Bill Wallace PhD He works at colombia university: https://arthistory.artsci.wustl.edu/people/william-wallace He can be reached at this email: wwallace at wustl.edu And this phone number: 314-935-5223 However, when one looks at his books, this bill wallace has an ?E? for a middle name, most likely. Not our guy. Then we find this guy william wallace: https://www.paemst.org/finalist_profile/4209 ?Bill Wallace currently teaches Physiology and Research Methods in Biology to juniors and seniors at Georgetown Day School. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Paul Greengard at Yale and Rockefeller universities. As faculty, he investigated the molecular biology of Alzheimer?s disease at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the National Institute on Aging.? This would seem to be our man, no? He seems to be good stuff over that that school: https://www.gds.org/about/news/story/~board/gds-news/post/gds-faculty-staff-in-print ?High School science teacher Bill Wallace collaborated with Dr. Christopher Harris of Backyard Brains and NIH to bring neurorobotics to the High School classroom. Their ongoing work with students was documented in this news story and in our spring edition of the Georgetown Daysmagazine (page 4). Bill co-authored ?Short Neurorobotics Workshop for High School Students Promotes Competence and Confidence in Computational Neuroscience.? ? If that?s not him, let?s drive over to the High School (4200 Davenport Street, NW, Washington, DC20016) and invite him onto the list :) Or we could forward him an invitation email: wwallace at gds.org He used to do research with this dude who passed away last year: https://www.rockefeller.edu/our-scientists/heads-of-laboratories/1177-paul-greengard/ That guy won a nobel prize! Cool that Mr. Wallace would know that guy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Greengard However he did get found guilty of discriminating against people in his lab, which is a bit sad. Our man gave some kind of speech I guess: https://www.societyforscience.org/blog/teacher-volunteers-as-broadcom-masters-judge-to-promote-experiential-learning/ He also is some kind of uber teacher: https://www.lausannelearning.com/mentor-listing/bill-wallace Then again there?s also this financial dude: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-f-wallace-96655a17a Or Bill N Wallace, Yale grad, pitcher, and sportswriter. He also seems to have sailed the atlantic solo? But back to the science guy, he seems cool! If he has a linked in I can?t find it because, well, so many people have his name! I?m finding it difficult to properly separate him from this guy: https://www.essie.ufl.edu/people/name/william-bill-wallace/ He?s an environmental engineer and all around interesting dude. We could get him on the list too! Okay, well that?s 1 hour and I need to run off to work. SR Ballard > On Jun 18, 2020, at 9:05 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > My full name is on Quora. I take no precautions about privacy when I surf or use the web in any way. So I am curious: how long would it take you to find me, my home address, phone number, my wife's name, etc.? > > bill w > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 15:32:34 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 10:32:34 -0500 Subject: [ExI] police etc. In-Reply-To: References: <881DBE1F-E676-4D31-AF20-5A1CEB14D412@gmail.com> Message-ID: <4FDA26D2-8046-44EA-8750-4491E796278C@gmail.com> I mean I have interviews, they do background checks, and run half-assed personality tests. And people fail those steps. I?m saying those are jobs where I get paid $9/hr. I don?t know or care what the interviewer makes but I can promise you they don?t have a PhD. SR Ballard > On Jun 18, 2020, at 9:39 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > By 'that stuff' you mean interviewing, personality testing and interpretation? I have to express some doubt about the education of the people who are doing it. You don't get Ph. D.s for $9 an hour. bill w > >> On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 9:35 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat wrote: >> A call center that pays me $9/hr already does that stuff. No need to pay police departments excessive amounts. >> >> SR Ballard >> >>> On Jun 18, 2020, at 8:55 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: >>> >>> The guy featured in John's post should never have been hired as a police officer. I am reading articles about how cops need to be trained differently and so on, and that is certainly needed. >>> >>> However, John's bully would have been caught rather easily if some background checks had been in place. If not, the personality tests would have shown what kind of character he was, and then kept him out of police school altogether. >>> >>> I am not saying that personality tests are 100% accurate, but it would catch some of the bullies, racists, and so on. >>> >>> This is one reason I am saying that we need more money for the police dept., not less. Hiring consultants, testing and interviewing, will take a good chunk of money, and probably at first only large cities will be able to do that. >>> >>> Does anyone know of a police dept. that does this sort of thing? To me, this is a no-brainer. Get bad guys in and no amount of training and education will change their character. >>> >>> bill w >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 15:48:59 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 10:48:59 -0500 Subject: [ExI] police etc. In-Reply-To: <4FDA26D2-8046-44EA-8750-4491E796278C@gmail.com> References: <881DBE1F-E676-4D31-AF20-5A1CEB14D412@gmail.com> <4FDA26D2-8046-44EA-8750-4491E796278C@gmail.com> Message-ID: Thanks. I am glad to hear that. It's a start on a better system. bill w On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 10:46 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I mean I have interviews, they do background checks, and run half-assed > personality tests. And people fail those steps. > > I?m saying those are jobs where I get paid $9/hr. I don?t know or care > what the interviewer makes but I can promise you they don?t have a PhD. > > SR Ballard > > On Jun 18, 2020, at 9:39 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > By 'that stuff' you mean interviewing, personality testing and > interpretation? I have to express some doubt about the education of the > people who are doing it. You don't get Ph. D.s for $9 an hour. bill w > > On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 9:35 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> A call center that pays me $9/hr already does that stuff. No need to pay >> police departments excessive amounts. >> >> SR Ballard >> >> On Jun 18, 2020, at 8:55 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >> The guy featured in John's post should never have been hired as a police >> officer. I am reading articles about how cops need to be trained >> differently and so on, and that is certainly needed. >> >> However, John's bully would have been caught rather easily if some >> background checks had been in place. If not, the personality tests would >> have shown what kind of character he was, and then kept him out of police >> school altogether. >> >> I am not saying that personality tests are 100% accurate, but it would >> catch some of the bullies, racists, and so on. >> >> This is one reason I am saying that we need more money for the police >> dept., not less. Hiring consultants, testing and interviewing, will take a >> good chunk of money, and probably at first only large cities will be able >> to do that. >> >> Does anyone know of a police dept. that does this sort of thing? To me, >> this is a no-brainer. Get bad guys in and no amount of training and >> education will change their character. >> >> bill w >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Thu Jun 18 16:17:09 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 09:17:09 -0700 Subject: [ExI] police etc. In-Reply-To: <4FDA26D2-8046-44EA-8750-4491E796278C@gmail.com> References: <881DBE1F-E676-4D31-AF20-5A1CEB14D412@gmail.com> <4FDA26D2-8046-44EA-8750-4491E796278C@gmail.com> Message-ID: <010d01d6458b$eaf95db0$c0ec1910$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] police etc. >?I mean I have interviews, they do background checks, and run half-assed personality tests. And people fail those steps. >?I?m saying those are jobs where I get paid $9/hr. I don?t know or care what the interviewer makes but I can promise you they don?t have a PhD. >?SR Ballard SR, your post brings up an interesting question I have wondered about. In our times, we have a lot of uses for customer service call ?centers? which do not need to be ?centers? in the sense that employees would need to be in any particular place. MicroSloth for example has tech support all over the planet. I have heard that one can request tech support in any language, even the obscure stuff. Not Xhosa perhaps, but Swahili, and Rotokas and that sorta thing. The county where my grandparents lived and my parents grew up is way the hell and gone out in the Appalachians in West Virginia. Oh mercy, and the reason I mention it is that if one lives there, 9 bucks an hour will provide one with more money than most locals: from their point of view, you have more money than you know what to do with, which is why you aren?t seen out on the front porch shucking corn and stringing beans, the way plenty of them do back in that part of the world: the do a lot of their own food processing at home, starting with garden produce and bulk vegetables. Those areas are very poor, but safe: you can go thru there and never really feel in danger. The population densities are not high anywhere. You have posted comments that make it sound like you are struggling. But there must be call-in product support jobs available anywhere, and rural America is anywhere. Homes are cheap out there. This is a common sight: ladies out there coring apples, peeling potatoes and stringing beans. Even more common is to see two or more of them out there visiting and enjoying each other?s company as they work. See that device on the stool in the foreground? Ya don?t even know what that is, do yas? HA! Summer children! Well, OK, I don?t either. I think it is an apple coring machine or a manual particle accelerator or something. Couldn?t one do phone tech support out there? You could buy a house like this one for pocket change. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 23134 bytes Desc: not available URL: From sparge at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 19:12:12 2020 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 15:12:12 -0400 Subject: [ExI] contest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: No, it was trivial. I highlighted your name, right clicked, selected search DuckDuckGo. It was the first result. That much is free. Of course they'll sell you the juicy deets if you want them. -Dave On Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 11:09 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I assume it did not take you long. Free? Registered Republican???? > Wow. That was many decades ago (have not voted Repub since Nixon). Not a > Christian either. Thanks Dave. I'll go to the site and see if I cannot > update some of the info. bill w > > On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 9:57 AM Dave Sill via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> https://www.mylife.com/william-wallace/e913803132036 >> >> AKA:william flynn wallace, wallace william flynn, william f wallace >> Associates:robert l wallace >> , joel david wallace >> , rosalind marie >> wallace , phyllis >> beamer >> Work: at International Assc Of Lions >> >> School: Add Info >> >> Summary: William Wallace was born on 01/20/1942 and is 78 years old. >> William Wallace lives in Brandon, MS; previous cities include Crossville >> TN, Columbus MS and Vernon AL. Other names that William uses includes >> William Flynn Wallace, Wallace William Flynn and William F Wallace. >> William's ethnicity is Caucasian, whose political affiliation is currently >> a registered Republican; and religious views are listed as Christian. As of >> this date, William is married. William's personal network of family, >> friends, associates & neighbors include Robert Wallace >> , Joel Wallace >> , Rosalind Wallace >> , Phyllis Beamer >> and Jimmie Donnell >> . William's >> reported annual income is about $100 - 149,999; with a net worth that tops >> $50,000 - $99,999. Read Full Summary >> >> >> View Full Background Info >> >> Write >> Review >> Edit >> Profile >> Lock >> Info >> Write >> Message >> Search for your Reputation Profile >> Search by Name >> Learn about your Reputation Score & how to improve it. >> [image: Search for your Reputation Profile] >> Are you William Wallace?Control This Profile >> >> >> On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 10:09 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> My full name is on Quora. I take no precautions about privacy when I >>> surf or use the web in any way. So I am curious: how long would it take >>> you to find me, my home address, phone number, my wife's name, etc.? >>> >>> bill w >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Thu Jun 18 19:51:42 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 12:51:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] contest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <005b01d645a9$e5166cd0$af434670$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Dave Sill via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] contest No, it was trivial. I highlighted your name, right clicked, selected search DuckDuckGo. It was the first result. That much is free. Of course they'll sell you the juicy deets if you want them. -Dave Dave perhaps you recall about 20 yrs ago when we were talking about this a lot: privacy slips away over the years. There was a fun joke in Asimov Laughs book that went something like this. Two dejected old men sit quietly on park bench. One of them muses: A lifetime. A lifetime of good deeds. Medical school, hard work, generosity, charity work I did. Meh. I would walk down the street, old ladies would point after me and say ?There goes Mrs. Schwarzkopf?s boy, fine boy, so proud. DOCTUH he is, DOCTUH Schwarzkopf, that boy?? Everywhere I went, they were so proud. Then one time, just ooone time, I get caught with oooone little pecker? I referenced that very old joke to make a point, something that SR or someone pointed out recently: in our world today, there is no longer any away to run to, if you screw up bigtime. We are running out of away. Eliezer predicted this back in about 1999. He said something along the lines of: Memory is already cheap and getting cheaper. Access is already fast and getting faster. Search engines are improving. It will become harder and harder to outrun your past. Eli offered an example of something he posted to one of the alt.groups when he was 13, a short story SciFi story about Barney the purple dinosaur, a bit of text which embarrassed the 18 yr old Eliezer to no end. Of course we all looked it up, and I thought it was marvelous for a 14 yr old. But he opined if he had a time machine, he would go back to 1993 and not post that story. I just looked, it?s still there, a 27 yr old piece of writing. If we generate any juicy deets in our lives, they will never go away. The stain of embarrassment can never be washed away. Clarification: for those capable of that particular emotion, it can never be washed away. For me it would be more like an ink stain on a black trousers. But for normal people the stain of embarrassment can never be washed. Quoting Eliezer?s prescient words: The internet never forgets. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 20:30:50 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 15:30:50 -0500 Subject: [ExI] contest In-Reply-To: <005b01d645a9$e5166cd0$af434670$@rainier66.com> References: <005b01d645a9$e5166cd0$af434670$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Here is what you do with old embarrassments: forgive yourself completely so that it becomes, if anything, funny - stupid funny, maybe like the Three Stooges. I dealt with a lot of embarrassment when I quit drinking. So many years of vodka and things done that I wish I hadn't done. I learned to forgive others some time before (doctors who had killed both my parents). It worked. I was rid of the anger. So, I thought, just use it on yourself, you dope. It worked. It works even if you are totally to blame and have nothing and no one to blame but yourself. Forgive yourself and sit down and listen to that great Eagle's song: Get Over It! bill w On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 2:54 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *Dave Sill via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] contest > > > > No, it was trivial. I highlighted your name, right clicked, selected > search DuckDuckGo. It was the first result. > > > > That much is free. Of course they'll sell you the juicy deets if you want > them. > > > > -Dave > > > > > > > > Dave perhaps you recall about 20 yrs ago when we were talking about this > a lot: privacy slips away over the years. > > > > There was a fun joke in Asimov Laughs book that went something like this. > > > > Two dejected old men sit quietly on park bench. One of them muses: A > lifetime. A lifetime of good deeds. Medical school, hard work, > generosity, charity work I did. Meh. I would walk down the street, old > ladies would point after me and say ?There goes Mrs. Schwarzkopf?s boy, > fine boy, so proud. DOCTUH he is, DOCTUH Schwarzkopf, that boy?? > Everywhere I went, they were so proud. Then one time, just ooone time, I > get caught with oooone little pecker? > > > > I referenced that very old joke to make a point, something that SR or > someone pointed out recently: in our world today, there is no longer any > away to run to, if you screw up bigtime. We are running out of away. > > > > Eliezer predicted this back in about 1999. He said something along the > lines of: Memory is already cheap and getting cheaper. Access is already > fast and getting faster. Search engines are improving. It will become > harder and harder to outrun your past. > > > > Eli offered an example of something he posted to one of the alt.groups > when he was 13, a short story SciFi story about Barney the purple dinosaur, > a bit of text which embarrassed the 18 yr old Eliezer to no end. Of course > we all looked it up, and I thought it was marvelous for a 14 yr old. But > he opined if he had a time machine, he would go back to 1993 and not post > that story. > > > > I just looked, it?s still there, a 27 yr old piece of writing. > > > > If we generate any juicy deets in our lives, they will never go away. The > stain of embarrassment can never be washed away. Clarification: for those > capable of that particular emotion, it can never be washed away. For me it > would be more like an ink stain on a black trousers. But for normal people > the stain of embarrassment can never be washed. > > > > Quoting Eliezer?s prescient words: The internet never forgets. > > > > spike > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Thu Jun 18 21:46:44 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 14:46:44 -0700 Subject: [ExI] why sleep? Message-ID: Giovanni Santostasi wrote: snip Fascinating tale. We seem to be in a similar class for dipping into a mess of fields. I have a minor connection to sleep research, designed the analog front end of a sleep monitor. I wonder if that cryogenic bar gravity wave detector was the one Robert Forward worked on when he was a grad student? There can't be very many of them. Something else sleep related. I found in my early 20s that Vic C cut several hours off my sleep requirement. A little calcium reversed the effect. I don't know how much that affected my life trajectory, but for many years I had perhaps 20% more waking hours than the people around me. Keith From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Fri Jun 19 00:54:59 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 17:54:59 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Processing food was Re: police etc. Message-ID: snip > In our times, we have a lot of uses for customer service call ?centers? which do not need to be ?centers? in the sense that employees would need to be in any particular place. MicroSloth for example has tech support all over the planet. I have heard that one can request tech support in any language, even the obscure stuff. Not Xhosa perhaps, but Swahili, and Rotokas and that sorta thing. You need to be on broadband to work tech support. Not sure how much of West Virginia is wired up. There is a big area around Greenbank where WiFi is illegal. > The county where my grandparents lived and my parents grew up is way the hell and gone out in the Appalachians in West Virginia. Oh mercy, and the reason I mention it is that if one lives there, 9 bucks an hour will provide one with more money than most locals: from their point of view, you have more money than you know what to do with, which is why you aren?t seen out on the front porch shucking corn and stringing beans, the way plenty of them do back in that part of the world: the do a lot of their own food processing at home, starting with garden produce and bulk vegetables. I have done this. We had a substantial garden, raised rabbits, chickens, ducks, geese, goats, and I baked all the bread we ate for years, made cheese. Providing a serious part of the food we ate burned through an amazing amount of time. For most of that period, we didn't have a TV. My parents grew up on farms. I have plenty of stories from those days. Life was hardscrabble in the best of times. > Those areas are very poor, but safe: you can go thru there and never really feel in danger. The population densities are not high anywhere. Relatively safe anyway. The murder rate for the state is around 4 per 100,000 which is around 1/4 of Chicago or Oakland. > You have posted comments that make it sound like you are struggling. But there must be call-in product support jobs available anywhere, and rural America is anywhere. Homes are cheap out there. This is a common sight: ladies out there coring apples, peeling potatoes and stringing beans. Even more common is to see two or more of them out there visiting and enjoying each other?s company as they work. There are reasons people pack into cities. One of them is medical care which is very hard to get in the rural areas. > See that device on the stool in the foreground? Ya don?t even know what that is, do yas? HA! Summer children! Well, OK, I don?t either. I think it is an apple coring machine or a manual particle accelerator or something. Sheesh, Spike, I _have_ one of them. I had two before giving one away last time I moved. They peel, core, and slice apples in one pass. This is a more elaborate model than any I have seen. The peelings should have gone into a tub to be taken to the hog pen. Keith From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 19 03:33:07 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 20:33:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Processing food was Re: police etc. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <001501d645ea$5cbd4520$1637cf60$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Keith Henson via extropy-chat >> In our times, we have a lot of uses for customer service call centers... >...You need to be on broadband to work tech support. Not sure how much of West Virginia is wired up. There is a big area around Greenbank Green Bank WV: the "secret" underground bunker for congress should we have a nuclear war. I have long suspected that whole business was a cover story of some sort. But it could be true I suppose. I don't know how to verify. >...where WiFi is illegal...Keith _______________________________________________ Keith since those DNA tests came along, a bunch of us distant cousins found each other and we have an email circle (plus some Face Book pages.) Most of my WV cousins have DSL, and they complain that it slows down a lot when the neighbor starts downloading the latest porno video. This is a photo I took of my great grandmother in 1967 when I was age 6 and she was 81. She and a spinster daughter were still running the farm where my grandfather and his 8 siblings grew up, in that house in the background. They didn't have electricity out there until after the war, but even in the 1960s they didn't really use it much. They had a refrigerator, but not laundry machines (still used washboards then.) Granny is making apple butter in this enormous copper kettle she had. She would build a fire underneath it with branches or scrap lumber to stew the apples until it was just right, then they would put it in jars and store it under the house for the coming winter. I don't remember much about my cheerfully misspent childhood, but I remember this day, because Granny's world was so different from mine. In those days it was all about getting into space in my world. In hers, it was about working the garden, getting the vegetables and apples preserved for the coming season. I remember comments she made. She would put two new silver dollars in with the apples while they stewed, to be recovered afterwards. She claimed the silver dollars would prevent the apples from sticking to her copper kettle. She said the newest silver dollars didn't work for some reason, so she had to get the ones from about 1964 or earlier. Their lives were far different from mine. If Granny were here today, right now, she would be astonished to see a picture of herself on this TV-like machine (she never owned a TV but knew what they were (she had a radio (so when I saw her in 1969 and mentioned the men walking on the moon she commented "Oh I heard about those fellers doing that."))) Theirs was a different world. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 26427 bytes Desc: not available URL: From giulio at gmail.com Fri Jun 19 05:13:53 2020 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2020 07:13:53 +0200 Subject: [ExI] What happens to US space programs after November? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 12:56 PM John Clark via extropy-chat wrote: > > On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 3:53 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat wrote: > >>> >> The only thing I can think of that you could mine on the moon that would be worth taking back to earth would be Helium-3, and even then only when Aneutronic Fusion becomes feasible. >> >> >> > There are promising indications that using helium-3 in fusion reactors could be the way to achieve practical nuclear fusion. > > > I hope so but even practical Deuterium/Tritium fusion power has proven to be extremely difficult to achieve, and it's easier than Aneutronic Fusion. Even if it does become a practical source of electrical power Helium-3 would face competition from an element that is far easier to obtain, Boron (20 Mule Team Borax is full of it) because Boron can also achieve Aneutronic Fusion, although it wouldn't be easy. > If both Helium and Boron fusion become operationally and commercially practical before we have mining facilities on the Moon, Boron fusion would be superior because it would permit achieving clean fusion with supplies available in sufficient quantities on Earth. However, Boron fusion requires higher temperatures, which means that it may be operationally achieved decades after Helium fusion. In this case, the cost of lunar mining could be commercially justified. From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Jun 19 08:56:34 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2020 04:56:34 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Processing food was Re: police etc. In-Reply-To: <001501d645ea$5cbd4520$1637cf60$@rainier66.com> References: <001501d645ea$5cbd4520$1637cf60$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 11:37 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> ...*You need to be on broadband to work tech support. Not sure how >> much of West Virginia is wired up. There is a big area around Greenbank >> where WiFi is illegal. * > > > Green Bank WV: the "secret" underground bunker for congress should we > have a nuclear war. > The once secret underground bunker for congress is in Greenbrier WV, Green Bank WV is 96 miles away and contains the nation's largest radio telescopes, that's why Wi-Fi is illegal there. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 19 12:53:28 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2020 05:53:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Processing food was Re: police etc. In-Reply-To: References: <001501d645ea$5cbd4520$1637cf60$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <002801d64638$a1d21160$e5763420$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Sent: Friday, June 19, 2020 1:57 AM To: ExI chat list Cc: John Clark Subject: Re: [ExI] Processing food was Re: police etc. On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 11:37 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: >> ...You need to be on broadband to work tech support. Not sure how much of West Virginia is wired up. There is a big area around Greenbank where WiFi is illegal. > Green Bank WV: the "secret" underground bunker for congress should we have a nuclear war. The once secret underground bunker for congress is in Greenbrier WV, Green Bank WV is 96 miles away and contains the nation's largest radio telescopes, that's why Wi-Fi is illegal there. John K Clark Ah, that would explain why I couldn?t find it. John do you buy that story of the Greenbrier bunker? That would be one hell of a big facility to support 400 congress critters and probably hangers on. Reliable sources say it is true. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Jun 19 14:00:00 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2020 10:00:00 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Processing food was Re: police etc. In-Reply-To: <002801d64638$a1d21160$e5763420$@rainier66.com> References: <001501d645ea$5cbd4520$1637cf60$@rainier66.com> <002801d64638$a1d21160$e5763420$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 8:57 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> The once secret underground bunker for congress is in Greenbrier >> WV, Green Bank WV is 96 miles away and contains the nation's largest radio >> telescopes, that's why Wi-Fi is illegal there. John K Clark >> > > > *> Ah, that would explain why I couldn?t find it. John do you buy that > story of the Greenbrier bunker? That would be one hell of a big facility > to support 400 congress critters and probably hangers on. Reliable sources > say it is true.* > Yes I buy it, I'm old enough to remember Duck and Cover drills in grade school that were supposed to protect me from H bombs. And you can take a public tour of the huge Greenbrier bunker built under the even larger and far more lavish Greenbrier Hotel, although it'll cost you $39. The Greenbrier bunker tour This is what you'll see: The Bunker At The Greenbrier John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Fri Jun 19 15:01:20 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2020 08:01:20 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Processing food was Re: police etc. In-Reply-To: References: <001501d645ea$5cbd4520$1637cf60$@rainier66.com> <002801d64638$a1d21160$e5763420$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <007b01d6464a$7eff40b0$7cfdc210$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Sent: Friday, June 19, 2020 7:00 AM To: ExI chat list Cc: John Clark Subject: Re: [ExI] Processing food was Re: police etc. On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 8:57 AM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: >>> The once secret underground bunker for congress is in Greenbrier WV, Green Bank WV is 96 miles away and contains the nation's largest radio telescopes, that's why Wi-Fi is illegal there. John K Clark >> Ah, that would explain why I couldn?t find it. John do you buy that story of the Greenbrier bunker? That would be one hell of a big facility to support 400 congress critters and probably hangers on. Reliable sources say it is true. >?Yes I buy it, I'm old enough to remember Duck and Cover drills in grade school that were supposed to protect me from H bombs? I too am old enough to remember duck and cover drills, along with the cartoon they showed us in school of the Mikey the Monkey that evil communist bastard, who put stick of dynamite on a fishing pole and tried to blow up Bert the Turtle, but Bert did the duck and cover, so he was OK, but Mikey blew himself up so thoroughly, they never found a shred of his corpse. I attempted to explain this whole thing to my younger friends, who were certain it as a drug-induced hallucination. Fortunately? the internet never forgets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKqXu-5jw60 Understatement, the internet remembers stuff we long since forgot. It breathes life into long forgotten collective madness. By the time I hit first grade, that bit of unpleasantness in 1962 was in the past (when we hung our toes over the sheer precipice of nuclear annihilation with Cuba.) A teacher came in and showed us that Bert the Turtle film on one those rattly old film projectors (young people ask your grandparents) then explained why they didn?t make us do duck and covers: the bombs are much bigger now than they were when Bert took cover in his shell with their paltry A-bombs, so don?t worry about it, he calmly reassured us, there is no surviving an H-bomb now go out and play. No wonder the 60s were so weird: we were raised believing we could die at any moment and there was nothing we could do about it. So? might as well enjoy the moment. Recreational drugs became very popular. Now of course we don?t do that anymore. Instead, we brutally scare the wits out of first graders with the new duck and cover, in the form of armed intruder on campus drills, teaching them equally-useless procedures, arranging future clientele for future psychologists. There is no madness like collective madness. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Jun 19 16:30:52 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2020 12:30:52 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Smarter monkeys through Genetic Engineering? Message-ID: A gene called "ARHGAP11B" that is found in humans and in no other animal has long been thought to be at least partially responsible for humans having an extremely large brain with a high degree of cortical folding. All other primates have a similar gene, but a point mutation happened between 500,000 and 1.5 million years ago and a single C was changed to a G in the human version. In yesterday's issue of the journal Science researchers report than when Genetic engineering was used to insert the human gene ARHGAP11B into the fertilized egg of a small monkey (a marmoset ) the result was a fetus with about 45% more neurons in the neocortex than a normal fetus and 3 times as many glial cells. A marmoset gestation period is 152 days but because it had a human gene in it the fetus was aborted after just 101 days due to ethical guidelines, so it's not known how such an animal's behavior would change if it was allowed to come to term. Human-specific ARHGAP11B increases size and folding of primate neocortex in the fetal marmoset John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Fri Jun 19 16:35:21 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2020 12:35:21 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Smarter monkeys through Genetic Engineering? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Great, just what we need...Pandemics, riots, and now this! ;-) https://youtu.be/idsxgLjGXGI On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 12:33 PM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > A gene called "ARHGAP11B" that is found in humans and in no other animal > has long been thought to be at least partially responsible for humans > having an extremely large brain with a high degree of cortical folding. All > other primates have a similar gene, but a point mutation happened between > 500,000 and 1.5 million years ago and a single C was changed to a G in the > human version. In yesterday's issue of the journal Science researchers > report than when Genetic engineering was used to insert the human gene > ARHGAP11B into the fertilized egg of a small monkey (a marmoset ) the > result was a fetus with about 45% more neurons in the neocortex than a > normal fetus and 3 times as many glial cells. A marmoset gestation period > is 152 days but because it had a human gene in it the fetus was aborted > after just 101 days due to ethical guidelines, so it's not known how such > an animal's behavior would change if it was allowed to come to term. > > Human-specific ARHGAP11B increases size and folding of primate neocortex > in the fetal marmoset > > > John K Clark > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 20 14:01:22 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2020 09:01:22 -0500 Subject: [ExI] racial joke Message-ID: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I understand there are a good many Southerners in the room tonight. I know the South very well. I spent twenty years there one night. Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant and this white waitress came up to me and said, "We don't serve colored people here." I said, "That's all right. I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken." Then these three white boys came up to me and said, "Boy, we're giving you fair warning. Anything you do to that chicken, we're gonna do to you." So I put down my knife and fork, I picked up that chicken and I kissed it. dick gregory bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 20 16:16:10 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2020 09:16:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real Message-ID: <00d001d6471e$1c83f7d0$558be770$@rainier66.com> Ya gotta love New Zealand. They take such a refreshing look at things. This old world has come a long ways since we learned about it from National Geographic: https://youtu.be/94mINLDSWlk spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 20 17:01:43 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2020 12:01:43 -0500 Subject: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real In-Reply-To: <00d001d6471e$1c83f7d0$558be770$@rainier66.com> References: <00d001d6471e$1c83f7d0$558be770$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Yes, a few men get addicted, but overall I am in favor of kids learning about sex from a very young age - none of this stork business. What that will do is make the lies and mistakes about sex he will hear in school (rather, after school) ring false. If you have all the visual knowledge and the correct terminology, there should be no giggling and embarrassment - it's just life the way adults practice it. I would have no trouble with kids seeing consensual, normal sex. Farm kids are no more neurotic about sex than city kids - less so, in fact. If you raise a kid like this, he or she will be the go-to person in the school and neighborhood for good info. My memory keeps going back to an incident in college: a girl ran from her biology class shouting "Not my mother! Not my mother!" This kind of trauma is ridiculous, and would never happen in kids who were properly educated. And yes, in schools. We cannot rely on the parents to teach sex, no matter how they promised themselve they would do. They did not get any education from their parents and wanted to. The average (that is to say, fairly stupid) mind conflates teaching about sex with their wanting to do it right away. Data are just the opposite. Did you know that I was a member of the Society for the SCienfitic Study of Sex? Gave a paper in Boston. The had a clothing optional masked ball (heeheehee) bill w On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 11:19 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > Ya gotta love New Zealand. They take such a refreshing look at things. > This old world has come a long ways since we learned about it from National > Geographic: > > > > https://youtu.be/94mINLDSWlk > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 20 17:26:11 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2020 10:26:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real In-Reply-To: References: <00d001d6471e$1c83f7d0$558be770$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <012f01d64727$e4df1490$ae9d3db0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real ? Did you know that I was a member of the Society for the SCienfitic Study of Sex? Gave a paper in Boston. The had a clothing optional masked ball (heeheehee) bill w Further proof life is soooo not fair. While BillW was doing nekkid masquerade parties, my generations was stuck with worn-out old National Geographics in the back of the library. I mentioned that to a guy my age, and observed how NatGeo began to get an inkling that perhaps, just maybe, theoretically, this wasn?t quite kosher to be publishing these photos of the Amazon tribes?women. He opined that early political correctness had nothing to do with it. The reason they stopped doing that is that Playboy magazine had dominated that market. Hmmm, well that comment has the ring of truth. The result of course is that schools soon stopped teaching geography, as the students lost all interest in the magazine which was the best source for actual cultural information (ja, we did sometimes read the actual articles in there (I am not kidding, we read the text (we really did (I learned stuff from that (well, I mean other than the obvious (I learned about the actual Amazon and stuff (it wasn?t as boring as we assumed (it just had a lot of competitive distractions in those pages.)))))))) Sheesh no wonder our generation was so screwed up. spike On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 11:19 AM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: Ya gotta love New Zealand. They take such a refreshing look at things. This old world has come a long ways since we learned about it from National Geographic: https://youtu.be/94mINLDSWlk spike _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 20 17:39:33 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2020 12:39:33 -0500 Subject: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real In-Reply-To: <012f01d64727$e4df1490$ae9d3db0$@rainier66.com> References: <00d001d6471e$1c83f7d0$558be770$@rainier66.com> <012f01d64727$e4df1490$ae9d3db0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Sheesh no wonder our generation was so screwed up. spike *Just think of the Victorian era, where 'leg' was forbidden in conversation and women had to hide when they were pregnant. bill* On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 12:29 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real > > > > ? > > > > Did you know that I was a member of the Society for the SCienfitic Study > of Sex? Gave a paper in Boston. The had a clothing optional masked ball > (heeheehee) > > > > bill w > > > > > > Further proof life is soooo not fair. While BillW was doing nekkid > masquerade parties, my generations was stuck with worn-out old National > Geographics in the back of the library. > > > > I mentioned that to a guy my age, and observed how NatGeo began to get an > inkling that perhaps, just maybe, theoretically, this wasn?t quite kosher > to be publishing these photos of the Amazon tribes?women. He opined that > early political correctness had nothing to do with it. The reason they > stopped doing that is that Playboy magazine had dominated that market. > Hmmm, well that comment has the ring of truth. > > > > The result of course is that schools soon stopped teaching geography, as > the students lost all interest in the magazine which was the best source > for actual cultural information (ja, we did sometimes read the actual > articles in there (I am not kidding, we read the text (we really did (I > learned stuff from that (well, I mean other than the obvious (I learned > about the actual Amazon and stuff (it wasn?t as boring as we assumed (it > just had a lot of competitive distractions in those pages.)))))))) > > > > Sheesh no wonder our generation was so screwed up. > > > > spike > > > > > > > > > > > > On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 11:19 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > Ya gotta love New Zealand. They take such a refreshing look at things. > This old world has come a long ways since we learned about it from National > Geographic: > > > > https://youtu.be/94mINLDSWlk > > > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 20 19:07:25 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2020 12:07:25 -0700 Subject: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real In-Reply-To: References: <00d001d6471e$1c83f7d0$558be770$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <003601d64736$09423bb0$1bc6b310$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real >?Yes, a few men get addicted, but overall I am in favor of ?bill w BillW, I have a another take on this for yas. Picture in your mind the ?resources? available for a curious adolescent 1960s or early 70s era nerd, math geek. Normal girls won?t talk to him of course (that was before Bill Gates when being a nerd was actually a bad thing (Bill made nerdiness cool, geek chic.) The hapless adolescent has no access to the theoretical Playboy magazine, even though he has seen one (briefly (before losing consciousness.)) Adults will not talk about these sensitive matters, because they assume he needs to be 17 or so (which is years away (so it really is National Geographic (it?s all we had.))) OK now, picture the contrast between that, which is the best or perhaps the only resources available, to the very most titillating images or video available free on the internet today. OK you can stop imagining that now. Pay attention please. Eyes up here youse guys. Compare those two imaginary scenarios for? titillation-ness. Titillability? (What is the noun form of that term?) Call it titillation factor, K sub t. If your mind works the way mine does, those two K sub t factors are at least a couple of orders of magnitude from each other. The titality of old NatGeos vs now really is that big, two orders of magnitude. Here?s my fun thought for the day. If you take the availability of good music or funny entertaining video now compared to what we had in my misspent childhood, that too is at least a coupla orders of magnitude better now than then, but I would estimate way more than that, perhaps three orders of magnitude compared to 50 yrs ago. If you take the availability of educational materials from those benighted times and compare to free resources today, I would estimate those at four full orders of magnitude better now compared to then. Even poor people can get to it in most places: our local public school is loaning Chrome Books and the library is offering free WiFi. I do think we have collectively achieved a full four orders, a factor of ten-thousand in quality and availability in useful, interesting compelling, free educational resources, as we have seen a factor of a thousand improvement in entertainment, a factor of a hundred in? hey, eyes up here guys, focus, pay attention. In our current challenging times with the pandemic and the lawlessness, do keep in mind: Life? Is?. Goooooooood? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 20 19:28:19 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2020 14:28:19 -0500 Subject: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real In-Reply-To: <003601d64736$09423bb0$1bc6b310$@rainier66.com> References: <00d001d6471e$1c83f7d0$558be770$@rainier66.com> <003601d64736$09423bb0$1bc6b310$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: As to what is going to happen in November. I just dunno. Blank. I used to think that my mama lived through the most changes in our world - born in 1907. Died in 1980. Now I think I have experienced the most - 1942 to present. How long is this positively accelerated curve of scientific and tech discoveries going to take to slow down? There is a theory the Repubs like called 'trickle down' - which of course you know. It doesn't work, as we know. Apply the idea to these discoveries and ask yourself if they have trickled down to our lowest class. As far as electronic equipment, yes they have. As far as helping life people out of poverty nothing science and technology has discovered seems to have made a dent. However, I do see, in Nigeria I think, a geneered bean is going to really help the famines they have. I read previously that many African countries have banned GMO crops. Talk about - I just can't think of a good metaphor for the terrible decisions those are. When I think about particle accelerators (they want another one!) and the enormous cost of the things, I think that if you have so many people dying of diseases, starving, dying of dehydration because of water availability, you cannot justify pure research to the extent we are doing now. Genetic modification is going to save hundreds of millions of lives and make many more more enjoyable. billw On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 2:10 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real > > > > > > > > > > >?Yes, a few men get addicted, but overall I am in favor of ?bill w > > > > > > BillW, I have a another take on this for yas. > > > > Picture in your mind the ?resources? available for a curious adolescent > 1960s or early 70s era nerd, math geek. Normal girls won?t talk to him of > course (that was before Bill Gates when being a nerd was actually a bad > thing (Bill made nerdiness cool, geek chic.) The hapless adolescent has no > access to the theoretical Playboy magazine, even though he has seen one > (briefly (before losing consciousness.)) Adults will not talk about these > sensitive matters, because they assume he needs to be 17 or so (which is > years away (so it really is National Geographic (it?s all we had.))) > > > > OK now, picture the contrast between that, which is the best or perhaps > the only resources available, to the very most titillating images or video > available free on the internet today. > > > > OK you can stop imagining that now. Pay attention please. Eyes up here > youse guys. > > > > Compare those two imaginary scenarios for? titillation-ness. > Titillability? (What is the noun form of that term?) Call it titillation > factor, K sub t. If your mind works the way mine does, those two K sub t > factors are at least a couple of orders of magnitude from each other. The > titality of old NatGeos vs now really is that big, two orders of magnitude. > > > > Here?s my fun thought for the day. If you take the availability of good > music or funny entertaining video now compared to what we had in my > misspent childhood, that too is at least a coupla orders of magnitude > better now than then, but I would estimate way more than that, perhaps > three orders of magnitude compared to 50 yrs ago. > > > > If you take the availability of educational materials from those benighted > times and compare to free resources today, I would estimate those at four > full orders of magnitude better now compared to then. Even poor people can > get to it in most places: our local public school is loaning Chrome Books > and the library is offering free WiFi. > > > > I do think we have collectively achieved a full four orders, a factor of > ten-thousand in quality and availability in useful, interesting compelling, > free educational resources, as we have seen a factor of a thousand > improvement in entertainment, a factor of a hundred in? hey, eyes up here > guys, focus, pay attention. > > > > In our current challenging times with the pandemic and the lawlessness, do > keep in mind: > > > > Life? Is?. Goooooooood? > > > > spike > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 20 19:57:22 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2020 12:57:22 -0700 Subject: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real In-Reply-To: References: <00d001d6471e$1c83f7d0$558be770$@rainier66.com> <003601d64736$09423bb0$1bc6b310$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <007601d6473d$03c33430$0b499c90$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real >?As to what is going to happen in November. I just dunno. Blank? I can help there: it will get bitterly cold and blustery in places where people will need to travel far and often for supplies. I am worried about that. >?Apply the idea to these discoveries and ask yourself if they have trickled down to our lowest class. As far as electronic equipment, yes they have. As far as helping life people out of poverty nothing science and technology has discovered seems to have made a dent? Oh very much to the contrary sir. Many of those at the bottom of the economic ladder have access to so much more, have much better lives than their grandparents, if they choose to use it. They have educational opportunities previous generations could only dream about. They still hafta reach out and get what is there. They might need to find a way to get on out of those blighted inner cities (those arrangements don?t look promising to me.) spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 21 00:18:01 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2020 17:18:01 -0700 Subject: [ExI] list down? Message-ID: <002301d64761$6d0fa530$472eef90$@rainier66.com> I think the list may be down. Checking that. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From john at ziaspace.com Sun Jun 21 00:33:23 2020 From: john at ziaspace.com (John Klos) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 00:33:23 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ExI] list down? In-Reply-To: <002301d64761$6d0fa530$472eef90$@rainier66.com> References: <002301d64761$6d0fa530$472eef90$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: > I think the list may be down. Checking that. Well, I got this ;) Is anyone experiencing issues? John From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 21 00:49:44 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2020 17:49:44 -0700 Subject: [ExI] list down? In-Reply-To: References: <002301d64761$6d0fa530$472eef90$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <003201d64765$db49e390$91ddaab0$@rainier66.com> Ja. I heard from one of the regulars today who was having trouble. Are we back up? s -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of John Klos via extropy-chat Sent: Saturday, June 20, 2020 5:33 PM To: spike jones via extropy-chat Cc: John Klos Subject: Re: [ExI] list down? > I think the list may be down. Checking that. Well, I got this ;) Is anyone experiencing issues? John _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From john at ziaspace.com Sun Jun 21 01:11:59 2020 From: john at ziaspace.com (John Klos) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 01:11:59 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ExI] list down? In-Reply-To: <003201d64765$db49e390$91ddaab0$@rainier66.com> References: <002301d64761$6d0fa530$472eef90$@rainier66.com> <003201d64765$db49e390$91ddaab0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: > Ja. I heard from one of the regulars today who was having trouble. Are we > back up? I don't see any signs we were ever down. What kind of trouble was it? Feel free to email directly. John From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 21 01:21:16 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2020 18:21:16 -0700 Subject: [ExI] list down? In-Reply-To: References: <002301d64761$6d0fa530$472eef90$@rainier66.com> <003201d64765$db49e390$91ddaab0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <003501d6476a$43546c40$c9fd44c0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Klos via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] list down? > Ja. I heard from one of the regulars today who was having trouble. > Are we back up? I don't see any signs we were ever down. What kind of trouble was it? Feel free to email directly. John _______________________________________________ No worries, some messages weren't go thing thru before but it looks like it is OK now. Anyone having trouble posting? Thanks John! spike From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sun Jun 21 02:07:54 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2020 21:07:54 -0500 Subject: [ExI] list down? In-Reply-To: <003501d6476a$43546c40$c9fd44c0$@rainier66.com> References: <002301d64761$6d0fa530$472eef90$@rainier66.com> <003201d64765$db49e390$91ddaab0$@rainier66.com> <003501d6476a$43546c40$c9fd44c0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: I got only 1 email today so I was wondering as well. Had a lot of internet problems today in general. SR > On Jun 20, 2020, at 8:21 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > >> On Behalf Of John Klos via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] list down? > >> Ja. I heard from one of the regulars today who was having trouble. >> Are we back up? > > I don't see any signs we were ever down. What kind of trouble was it? Feel > free to email directly. > > John > _______________________________________________ > > > No worries, some messages weren't go thing thru before but it looks like it > is OK now. > > Anyone having trouble posting? > > Thanks John! > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From foozler83 at gmail.com Sun Jun 21 14:32:16 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 09:32:16 -0500 Subject: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real In-Reply-To: <007601d6473d$03c33430$0b499c90$@rainier66.com> References: <00d001d6471e$1c83f7d0$558be770$@rainier66.com> <003601d64736$09423bb0$1bc6b310$@rainier66.com> <007601d6473d$03c33430$0b499c90$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: A couple of things: first I would change your word 'worry' to 'concern'. You surely don't want to tax your body's resources with the anxiety of an unpredictable future. You care, but you are not going to worry about it, especially since there is little to nothing you can do about. You can sit and think up ideas to pass along- that's the best you can do. There are high rise gardens in some places - a whole building devoted to vegetable crops. You can put those in big cities and the food is close by and often can cut out the middle man. I think one answer to some problems is vat raised meat. Scientists will work on it and work on it until people will eat it and not tell the difference. Exit expensive pasture land and a lot of methane. One problem: we can have good ideas, but how do we get them in the minds of the right people? bill w On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 2:59 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real > > > > >?As to what is going to happen in November. I just dunno. Blank? > > > > I can help there: it will get bitterly cold and blustery in places where > people will need to travel far and often for supplies. I am worried about > that. > > > > > > >?Apply the idea to these discoveries and ask yourself if they have > trickled down to our lowest class. As far as electronic equipment, yes > they have. As far as helping life people out of poverty nothing science > and technology has discovered seems to have made a dent? > > > > Oh very much to the contrary sir. Many of those at the bottom of the > economic ladder have access to so much more, have much better lives than > their grandparents, if they choose to use it. They have educational > opportunities previous generations could only dream about. They still > hafta reach out and get what is there. They might need to find a way to > get on out of those blighted inner cities (those arrangements don?t look > promising to me.) > > > > spike > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 21 15:25:35 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 08:25:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] farm country, was: RE: kiwis keeping it real Message-ID: <005801d647e0$369ec6f0$a3dc54d0$@rainier66.com> Subject: Re: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real >?There are high rise gardens in some places - a whole building devoted to vegetable crops. You can put those in big cities and the food is close by and often can cut out the middle man?.bill w Ja, the problem with such a notion is the energy balance. It is as I fear: many modern people don?t really see the scale required to raise crops commercially. It is something that cannot be done economically in a building, which is why it isn?t done that way now. High rise gardens are there for high-value specialty stuff, rather than food crops. But I can offer help. If you have time and the inclination, travel to a big farming area such as the central valley in California, rent a car, drive from Sacramento down 99 or Interstate 5, take any one of the county roads anywhere you want. Great motorcycle roads out there. You can ride for hour after hour after hour and see nothing but food crops, either side of the road as far as the eye can see. You can ride so long and see so many farms, it almost feels like there is some cosmic trick some supernatural joker has pulled: you are on a giant treadmill, with the same scenery going by over and over. Failing that, go into Google, search California, hit Maps. Go to satellite view, notice that huge green streak going north and south. That?s the central valley. Now zoom in. In, in, in, until you see a road somewhere, pretty much anywhere in farm country, go to street view. Some of those street view photos are made when the trees are bare, but some are taken during harvest season, so you can get a pretty good feel for how much land is under cultivation: it?s huge. It?s one of the really cool features of our world today: you can learn so much without leaving your home. The internet brings it to you. Going there is better, but Google street view is also a good way to learn of the vast scale of it all. Another educational drive, or failing that Google street view: the wheat fields of eastern Oregon and eastern Washington. Go out there in farm country (you need to get out away from the interstate to see it.) It does something to one?s head to be there, to ride on a pleasant late-spring day, hour after hour, seeing the wheat fields blowing in the breeze, creating what looks like shimmering green sea out there, or as the song goes, the amber waves of grain. When you see that, you wonder how in the hell could one species possibly devour all that food? Well, we do. Lesson: it takes a looootta lotta sunlight to feed this many proles. There are no viable factory food alternatives anywhere on the horizon. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sun Jun 21 15:33:09 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 10:33:09 -0500 Subject: [ExI] farm country, was: RE: kiwis keeping it real In-Reply-To: <005801d647e0$369ec6f0$a3dc54d0$@rainier66.com> References: <005801d647e0$369ec6f0$a3dc54d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <5666607F-F045-425F-990D-9AFE76D4100E@gmail.com> Well, Spike, we actually throw away at least half of that food. Maybe high rise growing won?t completely solve the problem. In fact I doubt it will. But green is good for human psychology, so are trees. Nothing wrong with that. They will also help to reduce pollution. Reducing transportation reduces cost, fossil fuels, and deadly accidents. SR Ballard > On Jun 21, 2020, at 10:25 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > > Subject: Re: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real > > > >?There are high rise gardens in some places - a whole building devoted to vegetable crops. You can put those in big cities and the food is close by and often can cut out the middle man?.bill w > > Ja, the problem with such a notion is the energy balance. It is as I fear: many modern people don?t really see the scale required to raise crops commercially. It is something that cannot be done economically in a building, which is why it isn?t done that way now. High rise gardens are there for high-value specialty stuff, rather than food crops. > > But I can offer help. If you have time and the inclination, travel to a big farming area such as the central valley in California, rent a car, drive from Sacramento down 99 or Interstate 5, take any one of the county roads anywhere you want. Great motorcycle roads out there. You can ride for hour after hour after hour and see nothing but food crops, either side of the road as far as the eye can see. You can ride so long and see so many farms, it almost feels like there is some cosmic trick some supernatural joker has pulled: you are on a giant treadmill, with the same scenery going by over and over. > > Failing that, go into Google, search California, hit Maps. Go to satellite view, notice that huge green streak going north and south. That?s the central valley. Now zoom in. In, in, in, until you see a road somewhere, pretty much anywhere in farm country, go to street view. Some of those street view photos are made when the trees are bare, but some are taken during harvest season, so you can get a pretty good feel for how much land is under cultivation: it?s huge. It?s one of the really cool features of our world today: you can learn so much without leaving your home. The internet brings it to you. Going there is better, but Google street view is also a good way to learn of the vast scale of it all. > > Another educational drive, or failing that Google street view: the wheat fields of eastern Oregon and eastern Washington. Go out there in farm country (you need to get out away from the interstate to see it.) It does something to one?s head to be there, to ride on a pleasant late-spring day, hour after hour, seeing the wheat fields blowing in the breeze, creating what looks like shimmering green sea out there, or as the song goes, the amber waves of grain. When you see that, you wonder how in the hell could one species possibly devour all that food? Well, we do. > > Lesson: it takes a looootta lotta sunlight to feed this many proles. There are no viable factory food alternatives anywhere on the horizon. > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 21 16:06:04 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 09:06:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] farm country, was: RE: kiwis keeping it real In-Reply-To: <5666607F-F045-425F-990D-9AFE76D4100E@gmail.com> References: <005801d647e0$369ec6f0$a3dc54d0$@rainier66.com> <5666607F-F045-425F-990D-9AFE76D4100E@gmail.com> Message-ID: <008501d647e5$decda3f0$9c68ebd0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] farm country, was: RE: kiwis keeping it real >?Well, Spike, we actually throw away at least half of that food. >?Maybe high rise growing won?t completely solve the problem. In fact I doubt it will. But green is good for human psychology, so are trees. Nothing wrong with that. They will also help to reduce pollution. >?Reducing transportation reduces cost, fossil fuels, and deadly accidents?SR Ballard Hi SR, ja I agree with everything you wrote. Indoor farming will always be specialty high-value crops, rather than a means of feeding the masses. The kinds of stuff one would grow there might be orchids and wasabi and that kind of thing, where a prole might be able to offer tickets, where proles might pay to come in there and work the crops, their only means of getting their hands dirty, create kind of a Tom Sawyer farm analogous to the time Aunt Polly made Tom paint the fence, but he managed to convince the other boys it was such grand fun, Tom had them paying him for the privilege of painting that fence. We do that with a big indoor hydroponic farm in the middle of the city. Consider: Stanford has a community garden where volunteers come regularly to play farmer. One day a week they have no-engine Saturday. It is what it sounds like: a day where all the work is done by hand tools and manual labor. Imagine a mid-city farm as a big indoor foliage park. Advertise it as a place to breathe pure high-oxygen low carbon dioxide air, a calm clean place to mediate, refresh the soul, cleanse the system in a serene environment among a verdant explosion of plant life, that kinda crap. Charge them twenty bucks an hour to be there, heh, plenty of big city suckers would pay. Oh my, the profits to be made, mercy, just thinking about it makes my butt hurt. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sun Jun 21 17:18:40 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 12:18:40 -0500 Subject: [ExI] farm country, was: RE: kiwis keeping it real In-Reply-To: <008501d647e5$decda3f0$9c68ebd0$@rainier66.com> References: <005801d647e0$369ec6f0$a3dc54d0$@rainier66.com> <5666607F-F045-425F-990D-9AFE76D4100E@gmail.com> <008501d647e5$decda3f0$9c68ebd0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: What is depressing to me is that so many poor people don't raise any food. All it takes is a 5 gallon bucket, available every mile or so on the highway, and you have a tomato bed. Probably inside watching TV. I wonder just how much time is spent unproductively - TV, smartphone, video games and more. We have somehow taken people off the farms, lured them into cities where they can't grow much food, never mind keeping goats and pigs, and so they have nothing to do with their spare time but get the electronics out. Most proles in history would not understand the meaning of 'spare time' .."Men work from sun to sun but a woman's work is never done." spike - we drove from LA to SF on back roads. We stopped once so I could go into a supermarket and get some artichokes, big fields of which we had just passed. Surprise!! Same price as back home. I still wonder about that. bill w On Sun, Jun 21, 2020 at 11:08 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *SR Ballard via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] farm country, was: RE: kiwis keeping it real > > > > >?Well, Spike, we actually throw away at least half of that food. > > > > >?Maybe high rise growing won?t completely solve the problem. In fact I > doubt it will. But green is good for human psychology, so are trees. > Nothing wrong with that. They will also help to reduce pollution. > > > > >?Reducing transportation reduces cost, fossil fuels, and deadly > accidents?SR Ballard > > > > Hi SR, ja I agree with everything you wrote. Indoor farming will always > be specialty high-value crops, rather than a means of feeding the masses. > The kinds of stuff one would grow there might be orchids and wasabi and > that kind of thing, where a prole might be able to offer tickets, where > proles might pay to come in there and work the crops, their only means of > getting their hands dirty, create kind of a Tom Sawyer farm analogous to > the time Aunt Polly made Tom paint the fence, but he managed to convince > the other boys it was such grand fun, Tom had them paying him for the > privilege of painting that fence. We do that with a big indoor hydroponic > farm in the middle of the city. > > Consider: Stanford has a community garden where volunteers come regularly > to play farmer. One day a week they have no-engine Saturday. It is what > it sounds like: a day where all the work is done by hand tools and manual > labor. > > Imagine a mid-city farm as a big indoor foliage park. Advertise it as a > place to breathe pure high-oxygen low carbon dioxide air, a calm clean > place to mediate, refresh the soul, cleanse the system in a serene > environment among a verdant explosion of plant life, that kinda crap. > Charge them twenty bucks an hour to be there, heh, plenty of big city > suckers would pay. Oh my, the profits to be made, mercy, just thinking > about it makes my butt hurt. > > spike > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sun Jun 21 17:40:41 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 10:40:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] farm country, was: RE: kiwis keeping it real In-Reply-To: <008501d647e5$decda3f0$9c68ebd0$@rainier66.com> References: <005801d647e0$369ec6f0$a3dc54d0$@rainier66.com> <5666607F-F045-425F-990D-9AFE76D4100E@gmail.com> <008501d647e5$decda3f0$9c68ebd0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Jun 21, 2020 at 9:07 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Indoor farming will always be specialty high-value crops, rather than a > means of feeding the masses. > That's the claim, but I wonder about that. Feeding the masses requires growing at least one of rice, corn, and/or wheat in volume. Almost anything else can be dismissed as a specialty crop, given the relative amounts grown (though sugar cane and soybeans are up there). So then you get research projects like https://inhabitat.com/aeroponic-vertical-farm-high-yield-terraced-rice-paddies-for-the-philipines/ that are all about reducing energy and water use. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Sun Jun 21 18:21:58 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 11:21:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Urban density and coronavirus Message-ID: https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/06/18/being-more-densely/ Seems like the notion that living in cities is bad is groundless. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From steinberg.will at gmail.com Sun Jun 21 18:53:07 2020 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 14:53:07 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Magic the Gathering Message-ID: Ok how many of you play Magic the Gathering? Very good game. I think Spike would like it a lot if he doesn't already play -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 21 18:56:02 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 11:56:02 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Urban density and coronavirus In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <004001d647fd$9cafc030$d60f4090$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat Subject: [ExI] Urban density and coronavirus https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/06/18/being-more-densely/ Seems like the notion that living in cities is bad is groundless. Regards, Dan Hi Dan, this article is focused on covid, but there is are other (and perhaps more immediate) risks in the city, such as widespread lawlessness. What happens if a chain-reaction looting of the food retailers takes place in other big cities as it has in parts of Chicago? That doesn?t happen much in the burbs. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sun Jun 21 18:57:42 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 13:57:42 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Magic the Gathering In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I play with my fianc?, my roommate, his girlfriend, and his brother. SR Ballard > On Jun 21, 2020, at 1:53 PM, Will Steinberg via extropy-chat wrote: > > Ok how many of you play Magic the Gathering? Very good game. I think Spike would like it a lot if he doesn't already play > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From interzone at gmail.com Sun Jun 21 19:08:17 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 15:08:17 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Magic the Gathering In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Although I'm a big RPG guy going back to the original D&D red box, I've never played Magic or alot of other deck based games. One of these days! On Sun, Jun 21, 2020, 2:55 PM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Ok how many of you play Magic the Gathering? Very good game. I think > Spike would like it a lot if he doesn't already play > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hibbard at wisc.edu Sun Jun 21 19:33:28 2020 From: hibbard at wisc.edu (Bill Hibbard) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 14:33:28 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real Message-ID: > As to what is going to happen in November. I just dunno. Blank. Yeah, life is getting pretty crazy. > I used to think that my mama lived through the most changes in our world - > born in 1907. Died in 1980. Now I think I have experienced the most - > 1942 to present. How long is this positively accelerated curve of > scientific and tech discoveries going to take to slow down? My mom was born in 1914. Shortly before she died in 2001 she said, "You can't imagine how much things have changed since I was young," and I thought, you ain't seen nothin' yet, mom. The smartest folks, with huge budgets, are working hard on AI and biotech. Rather than a slow down, technological change will continue to accelerate. Lots of problems solved but also overloading many peoples' capacity to adapt to change, leading to social disruption such as we currently observe. I think most societies will employ a combination of social welfare and social control to avoid craziness spinning out of control. One of my favorite movies, Bedazzled with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, ends with God laughing. I try to hear the gods laughing. From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Jun 21 20:23:56 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 16:23:56 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Urban density and coronavirus In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, Jun 21, 2020 at 2:24 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/06/18/being-more-densely/ > > > *Seems like the notion that living in cities is bad is groundless.* > I'm not surprised that factors other than population density are more important given that China, India, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and even Bangladesh have MUCH lower COVID-19 deaths than the USA in both absolute numbers and per capita. The three countries with the highest virus deaths are the USA, Brazil and the UK, and all three have a similar type of leader right now, totalitarian and dumb. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Jun 21 20:42:45 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 16:42:45 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Urban density and coronavirus In-Reply-To: <004001d647fd$9cafc030$d60f4090$@rainier66.com> References: <004001d647fd$9cafc030$d60f4090$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Jun 21, 2020 at 3:05 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > *> Hi Dan, this article is focused on covid, but there is are other (and > perhaps more immediate) risks in the city, such as widespread lawlessness. > What happens if a chain-reaction looting of the food retailers takes place > in other big cities as it has in parts of Chicago? * COVID-19 has, just since March, killed 122,211 Americans, that's more than twice as many as died in the entire Vietnam war. As far as I know protesters, and even looters and rioters, have not killed or even seriously injured one single person, so as "widespread lawlessness" goes that's pretty tame. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 21 20:57:18 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 13:57:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Urban density and coronavirus In-Reply-To: References: <004001d647fd$9cafc030$d60f4090$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <002d01d6480e$8d18e7d0$a74ab770$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat >? As far as I know protesters, and even looters and rioters, have not killed or even seriously injured one single person, so as "widespread lawlessness" goes that's pretty tame. John K Clark The full impact of that lawlessness on parts of Chicago have not yet been seen. That starts in November or December. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sun Jun 21 21:11:27 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 14:11:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Urban density and coronavirus In-Reply-To: References: <004001d647fd$9cafc030$d60f4090$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Jun 21, 2020 at 1:46 PM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > COVID-19 has, just since March, killed 122,211 Americans, that's more than > twice as many as died in the entire Vietnam war. As far as I know > protesters, and even looters and rioters, have not killed or even seriously > injured one single person, so as "widespread lawlessness" goes that's > pretty tame. > I'm sure the number of fatalities (from all protests in the US so far in 2020) is greater than zero. OTOH, I'm also sure it's well under 100,000 - probably under 10,000, possibly less than 1,000 - so your point about relevant amounts of danger is true. > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sun Jun 21 21:41:00 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 14:41:00 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Magic the Gathering In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I used to play, back in the '90s. I was given a deck. Played enough to amass around 200 cards, favoring a red-green combo centered around Mana Flare, Stream of Life, and direct damage (such as Fireball and Lightning). Lost all but my active deck to someone making a five-finger discount. Passed along that deck to someone else. Haven't played much since. The game's gotten a lot more complicated, with enough special-case rules that you can't reasonably make a pro-grade deck without serious amounts of study to even learn of them all*, and as a result less appealing to me. That they have explicitly banned Mana Flare (and a few other cards I favored) from modern-format tournaments didn't help. Whatever degree of pay to win it was back then, it's more so now. * The volume of rules about planeswalkers is a particular symbol of the added complexity. If you disagree with this objection, I suspect you don't understand what I'm actually objecting to. Don't try to explain the rules, but instead take note of how long the complete list of planeswalker rules is, including everything specific to planeswalkers - which includes everything to do with loyalty counters, that being one of their core mechanics. Arguably this also includes all rules about the Legendary type, as all planeswalkers are now Legendary (but one has to know this in order to play optimally, in case one encounters - in one's own hand or someone else's - an older-but-still-legal planeswalker card - such as certain prints of Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker or Liliana of the Veil - that doesn't say "Legendary"). Compare how long this list is to, say, the rules about untapping, which have not changed appreciably from when I played. On Sun, Jun 21, 2020 at 11:56 AM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Ok how many of you play Magic the Gathering? Very good game. I think > Spike would like it a lot if he doesn't already play > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Jun 21 22:12:03 2020 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 08:12:03 +1000 Subject: [ExI] Urban density and coronavirus In-Reply-To: References: <004001d647fd$9cafc030$d60f4090$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 22 Jun 2020 at 06:45, John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Sun, Jun 21, 2020 at 3:05 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > >> *> Hi Dan, this article is focused on covid, but there is are other (and >> perhaps more immediate) risks in the city, such as widespread lawlessness. >> What happens if a chain-reaction looting of the food retailers takes place >> in other big cities as it has in parts of Chicago? * > > > COVID-19 has, just since March, killed 122,211 Americans, that's more than > twice as many as died in the entire Vietnam war. As far as I know > protesters, and even looters and rioters, have not killed or even seriously > injured one single person, so as "widespread lawlessness" goes that's > pretty tame. > Not directly, but they might be responsible for the deaths of thousands through increasing spread of the virus. > -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sun Jun 21 22:16:17 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 17:16:17 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Urban density and coronavirus In-Reply-To: <004001d647fd$9cafc030$d60f4090$@rainier66.com> References: <004001d647fd$9cafc030$d60f4090$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <5FB2B92F-C0A0-4401-8FF2-294453EC1BB0@gmail.com> I don?t experience any more ?lawlessness? either suburban or urban. Rural places, in my experience, are bastions of lawlessness. At least in the South. Drunk driving a golf cart down the centerline ?fishing for gators?, anyone? Intentional unsafe discharge of firearms. Shooting and poisoning pets. Sure, this happens in the burbs or the city, but someone actually does something about it. Rurally? Not so much. SR Ballard > On Jun 21, 2020, at 1:56 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > > On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat > Subject: [ExI] Urban density and coronavirus > > https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/06/18/being-more-densely/ > > Seems like the notion that living in cities is bad is groundless. > > Regards, > > > Dan > > > > > > > Hi Dan, this article is focused on covid, but there is are other (and perhaps more immediate) risks in the city, such as widespread lawlessness. > > What happens if a chain-reaction looting of the food retailers takes place in other big cities as it has in parts of Chicago? That doesn?t happen much in the burbs. > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Jun 21 22:22:39 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 18:22:39 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Urban density and coronavirus In-Reply-To: References: <004001d647fd$9cafc030$d60f4090$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Jun 21, 2020 at 6:14 PM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> COVID-19 has, just since March, killed 122,211 Americans, that's more >> than twice as many as died in the entire Vietnam war. As far as I know >> protesters, and even looters and rioters, have not killed or even seriously >> injured one single person, so as "widespread lawlessness" goes that's >> pretty tame. >> > > *> Not directly, but they might be responsible for the deaths of thousands > through increasing spread of the virus.* > True. But at least the protests happened outdoors and many, perhaps most, of the protesters wore virus face-masks, unlike the obscenity that occurred in Tulsa Oklahoma yesterday. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sun Jun 21 22:34:02 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 17:34:02 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Urban density and coronavirus In-Reply-To: References: <004001d647fd$9cafc030$d60f4090$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <627A8F91-7B92-4DEA-B594-40F6FAA5CAD8@gmail.com> That?s true. Just like big venues that are opening up again, movie theatres, political rallies, shopping centers. Just bad timing all around. SR > On Jun 21, 2020, at 5:12 PM, Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat wrote: > > > >> On Mon, 22 Jun 2020 at 06:45, John Clark via extropy-chat wrote: >>> On Sun, Jun 21, 2020 at 3:05 PM spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: >>> >>> >>> > Hi Dan, this article is focused on covid, but there is are other (and perhaps more immediate) risks in the city, such as widespread lawlessness. What happens if a chain-reaction looting of the food retailers takes place in other big cities as it has in parts of Chicago? >> >> COVID-19 has, just since March, killed 122,211 Americans, that's more than twice as many as died in the entire Vietnam war. As far as I know protesters, and even looters and rioters, have not killed or even seriously injured one single person, so as "widespread lawlessness" goes that's pretty tame. > > Not directly, but they might be responsible for the deaths of thousands through increasing spread of the virus. > -- > Stathis Papaioannou > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Mon Jun 22 09:43:12 2020 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 11:43:12 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Book project: Yet another spaceflight manifesto Message-ID: Book project: Yet another spaceflight manifesto I have started writing a book, tentatively titled ?Yet another spaceflight manifesto.?... https://turingchurch.net/book-project-yet-another-spaceflight-manifesto-633e82ca3141 From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Jun 22 11:48:46 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 07:48:46 -0400 Subject: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real In-Reply-To: References: <00d001d6471e$1c83f7d0$558be770$@rainier66.com> <003601d64736$09423bb0$1bc6b310$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 3:32 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > As far as helping life people out of poverty nothing science and > technology has discovered seems to have made a dent. > That is factually incorrect. In 1950 63% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty but today, even though the population is three times larger, only 9.6% live in extreme poverty. And there has never been a time in history when human beings live longer or were better educated than right now. > However, I do see, in Nigeria I think, a geneered bean is going to really > help the famines they have. I read previously that many African countries > have banned GMO crops. Talk about - I just can't think of a good metaphor > for the terrible decisions those are. > It isn't just backward African countries that have made ridiculous anti-scientific decisions, the highest elected official in the largest economy in the world has made speeches about how vaccines cause autism. With the possible exception of the flush toilet vaccines have saved more lives than any other invention in history. > When I think about particle accelerators (they want another one!) and the > enormous cost of the things, > 25 years ago some physicist publicly testified before Congress and said the US shouldn't build the Superconducting Super Collider because the money could be spent in other ways that would advanced physics research more; they were right but that turned out to be the correct answer to a question that was never asked, the politicians just wanted to get reelected and if the SSC couldn't help with that they lost interest. So the SSC ended up being canceled, but that didn't help science because the money was not spent on other science projects, it wasn't spent on anything. Today I think if you had $20 billion to spend on physics research you could spend it more wisely than on building a new colossal particle accelerator, such as on new Neutrino and gravitational waves detectors, but once again that's not the point. And 20 billion may sound like a lot of money but not to a country that spent 2500 billion dollars to destroy weapons of mass destruction that never existed. > I think that if you have so many people dying of diseases, starving, > dying of dehydration because of water availability, you cannot justify pure > research to the extent we are doing now. Genetic modification is going to > save hundreds of millions of lives and make many more more enjoyable. billw > But genetic modification would not be possible today if decades of pure research had not been done first. > As to what is going to happen in November. I just dunno. Blank. > Unfortunately I don't draw a blank, I can imagine all sorts of nightmare situations that could occur on November 3 2020 and on January 20 2021. I keep being assured by some that such things would be physically impossible to happen because a fragile paper document in a glass case in Washington DC would always protect us from them, but I'm not so sure that totem really has such magical powers. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Mon Jun 22 12:56:24 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 08:56:24 -0400 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: <001701d643f9$5081f460$f185dd20$@rainier66.com> References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <001701d643f9$5081f460$f185dd20$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 12:17 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > I wouldn't want to be the mayor of Chicago today. > > spike > > Just another Father's Day weekend in Chicago. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results: 102 shot, 14 fatally, over Father?s Day weekend in Chicago Five children were among the 14 people killed, including a 3-year-old boy and 13-year-old girl killed in separate shootings in Austin on Saturday, https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/20/21297470/chicago-fathers-day-weekend-shootings-homicide-gun-violence-june-19-22 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 22 13:40:10 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 06:40:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <001701d643f9$5081f460$f185dd20$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <008201d6489a$a6cf1140$f46d33c0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] powerful image On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 12:17 PM spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: I wouldn't want to be the mayor of Chicago today. spike >?Just another Father's Day weekend in Chicago. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results: >?102 shot, 14 fatally, over Father?s Day weekend in Chicago You would think they could just make guns illegal in Chicago, then this problem would end. Oh wait? Ours is a tragically murderous species in our current form. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 22 16:06:52 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 09:06:52 -0700 Subject: [ExI] riots where? Message-ID: <00c201d648af$2548e820$6fdab860$@rainier66.com> Oy vey, barmherzigkeit! Twitter is claiming they are seeing rioting and looting in. Germany.? https://twitter.com/i/status/1274584360902066176 https://twitter.com/i/status/1274501647906099200 I don't know if this is fake news (it might be.) If it is true, who do we blame? Merkel? Or can we just say the American riots have demonstrated to the entire world a new and effective means of robbery? Or this would happen anyway eventually: get a secret circle of people on the internet, arrange for a flash mob to hit in a particular place at a particular time, it becomes a crime of opportunity? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Jun 22 16:43:07 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 09:43:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real In-Reply-To: References: <00d001d6471e$1c83f7d0$558be770$@rainier66.com> <003601d64736$09423bb0$1bc6b310$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 4:52 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > 25 years ago some physicist publicly testified before Congress and said > the US shouldn't build the Superconducting Super Collider because the money > could be spent in other ways that would advanced physics research more; > they were right but that turned out to be the correct answer to a question > that was never asked, the politicians just wanted to get reelected and if > the SSC couldn't help with that they lost interest. > So the SSC ended up being canceled, but that didn't help science because > the money was not spent on other science projects, it wasn't spent on > anything. > Generally, "but we could better spend the money on X" is an invalid argument when discussing how something like Congress spends its money. The proposal is always and only whether to spend the money on the particular thing being discussed. There is no specific alternative that the money can controllably be routed to as part of the current discussion. If it is desired to fund an alternative, that alternative must be submitted and considered entirely on its own merits, without regard to it being an alternative. It's like people think the money is tagged to only be spent on science (or whatever domain). It never is. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Jun 22 17:37:17 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 10:37:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <001701d643f9$5081f460$f185dd20$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 6:00 AM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > 102 shot, 14 fatally, over Father?s Day weekend in Chicago > Five children were among the 14 people killed, including a 3-year-old boy > and 13-year-old girl killed in separate shootings in Austin on Saturday, > > https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/20/21297470/chicago-fathers-day-weekend-shootings-homicide-gun-violence-june-19-22 > Including shootings in Austin, in crime statistics for Chicago, seems questionable. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Mon Jun 22 17:47:23 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 13:47:23 -0400 Subject: [ExI] powerful image In-Reply-To: References: <905a044a-cf8b-b06a-66cb-fab70a9aec8a@zaiboc.net> <00b001d643ed$bde2b5f0$39a821d0$@rainier66.com> <2373A7B8-4CC8-451E-BF01-D1C9A319E614@gmail.com> <001701d643f9$5081f460$f185dd20$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: It's a suburb of Chicago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin,_Chicago On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 1:38 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 6:00 AM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> 102 shot, 14 fatally, over Father?s Day weekend in Chicago >> Five children were among the 14 people killed, including a 3-year-old boy >> and 13-year-old girl killed in separate shootings in Austin on Saturday, >> >> https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/20/21297470/chicago-fathers-day-weekend-shootings-homicide-gun-violence-june-19-22 >> > > Including shootings in Austin, in crime statistics for Chicago, seems > questionable. > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 22 18:14:50 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 11:14:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real In-Reply-To: References: <00d001d6471e$1c83f7d0$558be770$@rainier66.com> <003601d64736$09423bb0$1bc6b310$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <004d01d648c1$05ac3c30$1104b490$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 4:52 AM John Clark via extropy-chat > wrote: 25 years ago some physicist publicly testified before Congress and said the US shouldn't build the Superconducting Super Collider because the money could be spent in other ways ? >?Generally, "but we could better spend the money on X" is an invalid argument when discussing how something like Congress spends its money?It's like people think the money is tagged to only be spent on science (or whatever domain). It never is? Adrian Adrian I do thank you for that comment. There is no ?the money.? All money is someone?s money. There is a reason why I mention this. We had a local bond measure which took 11 years to pass (it kept being rejected every 2 yrs) but the locals eventually voted for it. It provided about 380 bucks to upgrade the schools and build several new structures for the high school. I applied for and was selected for an oversight board tasked with watching the contractors and the school board, compare with the wording of the bond measure as it was written on the ballot and the voters accepted. I am happy to report that the contractors are doing a marvelous job. The difficulty is that with the pandemic? our needs very suddenly changed. Now every meeting, eeeeevery damn meeting, during the public comments time, yahoos will get up and say, because of such and such, we need to spend THE MONEY on this and spend THE MONEY on that. We aren?t allowed to interrupt the speaker but inside I am screaming THERE IS NO THE MONEY! Our task is to review the plans, review the outcome, answer a simple question yes or no: Is this what the voters voted for? Yes or no. All of these proposals violate both the letter and the spirit of the bond measure. We do not have the option of spending bond measure funds on anything besides what the voters chose. It isn?t a big pile of money to be used for the current needs, there is no THE money. If we could get people in general to realize this fact, the nature of political discourse would change for the better. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 22 18:20:58 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 13:20:58 -0500 Subject: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real In-Reply-To: <004d01d648c1$05ac3c30$1104b490$@rainier66.com> References: <00d001d6471e$1c83f7d0$558be770$@rainier66.com> <003601d64736$09423bb0$1bc6b310$@rainier66.com> <004d01d648c1$05ac3c30$1104b490$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: The money. I don't remember, of course, but at some point we became aware that Social Security was not a big moneybag full of our contributions. All money came out of current income. So SS cannot be broke, since we are borrowing the money. bill w On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 1:16 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real > > > > On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 4:52 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > 25 years ago some physicist publicly testified before Congress and said > the US shouldn't build the Superconducting Super Collider because the money > could be spent in other ways ? > > > > >?Generally, "but we could better spend the money on X" is an invalid > argument when discussing how something like Congress spends its money?It's > like people think the money is tagged to only be spent on science (or > whatever domain). It never is? Adrian > > > > > > Adrian I do thank you for that comment. There is no ?the money.? All > money is someone?s money. > > > > There is a reason why I mention this. We had a local bond measure which > took 11 years to pass (it kept being rejected every 2 yrs) but the locals > eventually voted for it. It provided about 380 bucks to upgrade the > schools and build several new structures for the high school. I applied > for and was selected for an oversight board tasked with watching the > contractors and the school board, compare with the wording of the bond > measure as it was written on the ballot and the voters accepted. > > > > I am happy to report that the contractors are doing a marvelous job. > > > > The difficulty is that with the pandemic? our needs very suddenly > changed. Now every meeting, eeeeevery damn meeting, during the public > comments time, yahoos will get up and say, because of such and such, we > need to spend THE MONEY on this and spend THE MONEY on that. We aren?t > allowed to interrupt the speaker but inside I am screaming THERE IS NO THE > MONEY! Our task is to review the plans, review the outcome, answer a > simple question yes or no: Is this what the voters voted for? Yes or no. > > > > All of these proposals violate both the letter and the spirit of the bond > measure. We do not have the option of spending bond measure funds on > anything besides what the voters chose. It isn?t a big pile of money to be > used for the current needs, there is no THE money. > > > > If we could get people in general to realize this fact, the nature of > political discourse would change for the better. > > > > spike > > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Jun 22 18:26:10 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 11:26:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real In-Reply-To: <004d01d648c1$05ac3c30$1104b490$@rainier66.com> References: <00d001d6471e$1c83f7d0$558be770$@rainier66.com> <003601d64736$09423bb0$1bc6b310$@rainier66.com> <004d01d648c1$05ac3c30$1104b490$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 11:16 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > The difficulty is that with the pandemic? our needs very suddenly > changed. Now every meeting, eeeeevery damn meeting, during the public > comments time, yahoos will get up and say, because of such and such, we > need to spend THE MONEY on this and spend THE MONEY on that. We aren?t > allowed to interrupt the speaker but inside I am screaming THERE IS NO THE > MONEY! Our task is to review the plans, review the outcome, answer a > simple question yes or no: Is this what the voters voted for? Yes or no. > > > > All of these proposals violate both the letter and the spirit of the bond > measure. We do not have the option of spending bond measure funds on > anything besides what the voters chose. It isn?t a big pile of money to be > used for the current needs, there is no THE money. > > > > If we could get people in general to realize this fact, the nature of > political discourse would change for the better. > Couldn't you just, after the speaker is done, acknowledge and thank them and comment, "Unfortunately, what you propose would be illegal for this committee, so we can not consider it. You would have to propose it to the (city/county) council as a new project instead. Next speaker."? They're done speaking, so they can't reply. When you give that same response over and over again, some people might start to understand that yours is not a useful venue for proposing alternative projects. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 22 18:46:42 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 11:46:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real In-Reply-To: References: <00d001d6471e$1c83f7d0$558be770$@rainier66.com> <003601d64736$09423bb0$1bc6b310$@rainier66.com> <004d01d648c1$05ac3c30$1104b490$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <007a01d648c5$79075850$6b1608f0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat >>?All of these proposals violate both the letter and the spirit of the bond measure. We do not have the option of spending bond measure funds on anything besides what the voters chose. It isn?t a big pile of money to be used for the current needs, there is no THE money. ? >?Couldn't you just, after the speaker is done, acknowledge and thank them and comment, "Unfortunately, what you propose would be illegal for this committee, so we can not consider it. You would have to propose it to the (city/county) council as a new project instead. Next speaker."? >?They're done speaking, so they can't reply. When you give that same response over and over again, some people might start to understand that yours is not a useful venue for proposing alternative projects? Ja, that is pretty close to what we do. Then the same yahoos show up at the school board meetings and say the same things. The school board kicks them back to us, already knowing we will kick them back to the school board. Eventually they get the message. Sometimes. I will offer this: if one is not gifted with a gross excess of patience, never volunteer for anything aaaaaanything having to do with the school board or public school anything. Eschew it, young people, run away. Flee in all directions at once! spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Mon Jun 22 20:07:45 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 15:07:45 -0500 Subject: [ExI] riots where? In-Reply-To: <00c201d648af$2548e820$6fdab860$@rainier66.com> References: <00c201d648af$2548e820$6fdab860$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <8253814A-C045-44A2-AF17-D077B946E649@gmail.com> All riots in history have eventually ended. Including the one in Boston when like... 5 people were killed. Maybe you heard of it? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Massacre SR Ballard > On Jun 22, 2020, at 11:06 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > Oy vey, barmherzigkeit! > > Twitter is claiming they are seeing rioting and looting in? Germany?? > > https://twitter.com/i/status/1274584360902066176 > > https://twitter.com/i/status/1274501647906099200 > > I don?t know if this is fake news (it might be.) If it is true, who do we blame? Merkel? > > Or can we just say the American riots have demonstrated to the entire world a new and effective means of robbery? Or this would happen anyway eventually: get a secret circle of people on the internet, arrange for a flash mob to hit in a particular place at a particular time, it becomes a crime of opportunity? > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 22 20:10:59 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 15:10:59 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Nature.com article Message-ID: Mathematicians call for police work boycott More than 1,400 researchers have signed a letter urging their colleagues to stop collaborating with police because of the widely documented disparities in how US law-enforcement agencies treat people of different races and ethnicities. They concentrate their criticism on predictive policing, a maths-based technique aimed at stopping crime before it occurs. Critics say that the data used to feed such algorithms contain racial biases, and that the ?control conditions? for predictive policing ? ordinary policing ? are racially skewed. ?It is simply too easy to create a ?scientific? veneer for racism,? the mathematicians write. Of course it's racism. It has to be. Crime isn't spread randomly around town. Do they want the police to spend as much time patrolling gated communities as the ghettos? I can't believe mathematicians are so stupid. Wait, I can too. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Mon Jun 22 21:16:20 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 17:16:20 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Nature.com article In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: It's very troubling to see scientists overtly wading into politics lately between this and that idiotic #defundSTEM movement, and top tier publications like Nature and Science carrying water for them. On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 4:18 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Mathematicians call for police work boycott > > > More than 1,400 researchers have signed a letter urging their colleagues > to stop collaborating with police > because > of the widely documented disparities in how US law-enforcement agencies > treat people of different races and ethnicities. They concentrate their > criticism on predictive policing, a maths-based technique aimed at stopping > crime before it occurs. Critics say that the data used to feed such > algorithms contain racial biases, and that the ?control conditions? for > predictive policing ? ordinary policing ? are racially skewed. ?It is > simply too easy to create a ?scientific? veneer for racism,? the > mathematicians write. > > > Of course it's racism. It has to be. Crime isn't spread randomly around > town. Do they want the police to spend as much time patrolling gated > communities as the ghettos? > > I can't believe mathematicians are so stupid. Wait, I can too. > > bill w > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Jun 22 22:11:50 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 15:11:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] kiwis keeping it real In-Reply-To: <007a01d648c5$79075850$6b1608f0$@rainier66.com> References: <00d001d6471e$1c83f7d0$558be770$@rainier66.com> <003601d64736$09423bb0$1bc6b310$@rainier66.com> <004d01d648c1$05ac3c30$1104b490$@rainier66.com> <007a01d648c5$79075850$6b1608f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 11:48 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat > > > *>>?*All of these proposals violate both the letter and the spirit of the > bond measure. We do not have the option of spending bond measure funds on > anything besides what the voters chose. It isn?t a big pile of money to be > used for the current needs, there is no THE money. > > >?Couldn't you just, after the speaker is done, acknowledge and thank them > and comment, "Unfortunately, what you propose would be illegal for this > committee, so we can not consider it. You would have to propose it to the > (city/county) council as a new project instead. Next speaker."? > > > > >?They're done speaking, so they can't reply. When you give that same > response over and over again, some people might start to understand that > yours is not a useful venue for proposing alternative projects? > > Ja, that is pretty close to what we do. Then the same yahoos show up at > the school board meetings and say the same things. The school board kicks > them back to us, already knowing we will kick them back to the school > board. Eventually they get the message. Sometimes. > Well that seems easy enough to fix. Show up at a school board meeting and say something like the following. "On multiple occasions, [name of your committee] has been asked to reallocate funding. It would be illegal for us to do so, due to [cite the regulations by number and perhaps title]. We have been informed that a majority of these cases stem from this school board requesting that people with funding proposals take their concerns to our meetings. "We therefore formally request that this board immediately cease and desist directing people to ask us to break the law. If this continues, we shall refer the matter to legal counsel." Specifically use the words "break the law". According to what you have described, the matter is that serious. That is, of course, assuming the school board could legally consider the proposals. If not, then you shouldn't be referring them to the school board either. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Jun 22 22:46:25 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 18:46:25 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Morality experts Message-ID: The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is complaining about several promising COVID-19 vaccines because they were manufactured with the help of cells from a fetus that was aborted way back in 1972. It's too bad these experts on morality didn't express the same moral outrage when they heard about sexual abuse of young boys by their priests. Vaccines that use human fetal cells draw fire John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 12:38:26 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 08:38:26 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Japan now has the most powerful computer in the world Message-ID: Yesterday the new supercomputer rankings were released and for the first time Japan has the fastest computer on earth, it's called "Fugaku" and it's 2.8 times faster than the previous champion, the "Summit" supercomputer in the USA. It's also the first time ever that the same computer was ranked number one on four different test workloads, including double precision and reduced precision calculations that are used for many Machine Learning and AI applications. TOP500 LIST - JUNE 2020 In a related story, today the President of the USA signed an executive order that would block US computer companies from bringing foreign computer engineers and scientists into the country so they can work for them. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 23 13:17:50 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 06:17:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] school proposal Message-ID: <003d01d64960$b28d48a0$17a7d9e0$@rainier66.com> Our local high school is proposing to reopen in August in split sessions. All the students and teachers would be required to wear the surgical masks at all times on campus. This has me wondering what school would be like under those conditions. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 13:29:35 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 08:29:35 -0500 Subject: [ExI] school proposal In-Reply-To: <003d01d64960$b28d48a0$17a7d9e0$@rainier66.com> References: <003d01d64960$b28d48a0$17a7d9e0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Probably less smooching in the hallways. What do you think? bill w On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 8:21 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > Our local high school is proposing to reopen in August in split sessions. > All the students and teachers would be required to wear the surgical masks > at all times on campus. This has me wondering what school would be like > under those conditions. > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From steinberg.will at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 14:07:11 2020 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 10:07:11 -0400 Subject: [ExI] school proposal In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d64960$b28d48a0$17a7d9e0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: I was wearing a KN95 mask for less than an hour and used a pulse oximeter and got a reading of 87; took off the mask and it went up to normal value around 98. That really freaked me out...idk if it's good for people to be wearing these things all day. On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 9:30 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Probably less smooching in the hallways. What do you think? bill w > > On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 8:21 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >> >> Our local high school is proposing to reopen in August in split >> sessions. All the students and teachers would be required to wear the >> surgical masks at all times on campus. This has me wondering what school >> would be like under those conditions. >> >> >> >> spike >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 14:29:06 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 09:29:06 -0500 Subject: [ExI] all of them Message-ID: The people who lived in the past are all guilty of benefiting from the work of slaves. If they did not directly benefit, then they are guilty of not doing anything about racism and slavery. Sins of omission. I haven't done anything either, so I am as guilty as all the rest. They should pull my statue down. (Wait, I don't have a statue - yet.) Once overgeneralization gets going there is no logical place to stop. They smeared Voltaire's statue. Voltaire? VOLTAIRE?? OK, well, everyone everywhere benefited from buying and selling slaves, and their labor. They influenced the price of cotton all over the world, for one thing. Will someone tell me how this is going to stop? In the analogy of the mind, where the unconscious is an elephant and the conscious is the rider, the elephant has clearly started going wherever it wants to. What is it going to trample next? bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 14:31:19 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 09:31:19 -0500 Subject: [ExI] school proposal In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d64960$b28d48a0$17a7d9e0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Maybe you can make big bucks out of this: you have found a method of filtering out oxygen. Maybe there's a market for that. bill w On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 9:10 AM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I was wearing a KN95 mask for less than an hour and used a pulse oximeter > and got a reading of 87; took off the mask and it went up to normal value > around 98. That really freaked me out...idk if it's good for people to be > wearing these things all day. > > On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 9:30 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> Probably less smooching in the hallways. What do you think? bill w >> >> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 8:21 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> >>> >>> Our local high school is proposing to reopen in August in split >>> sessions. All the students and teachers would be required to wear the >>> surgical masks at all times on campus. This has me wondering what school >>> would be like under those conditions. >>> >>> >>> >>> spike >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 15:31:53 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 08:31:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] all of them In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <51CB0DB0-54EE-4359-BDD4-338F708B291F@gmail.com> On Jun 23, 2020, at 7:32 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote:? > The people who lived in the past are all guilty of benefiting from the work of slaves. If they did not directly benefit, then they are guilty of not doing anything about racism and slavery. Sins of omission. > > I haven't done anything either, so I am as guilty as all the rest. They should pull my statue down. (Wait, I don't have a statue - yet.) > > Once overgeneralization gets going there is no logical place to stop. They smeared Voltaire's statue. Voltaire? VOLTAIRE?? OK, well, everyone everywhere benefited from buying and selling slaves, and their labor. They influenced the price of cotton all over the world, for one thing. > > Will someone tell me how this is going to stop? > > In the analogy of the mind, where the unconscious is an elephant and the conscious is the rider, the elephant has clearly started going wherever it wants to. What is it going to trample next? > > bill w Hunter-gatherer peoples in general did not and do not today have slaves. So, there are peoples who never had slavery in their history and slavery didn?t exist before a certain time in history. I believe there was no slavery in Australia before the arrival of Europeans. Also, even in societies with slavery, one can argue there were huge asymmetries in benefits. Obviously, the lowest slaves didn?t benefit on net. And the lowest class of people ? ones who couldn?t afford slaves ? probably didn?t benefit on net. They were even competing for positions slaves might have ? where it was permitted for them to do similar work or hold similar positions. There?s a big difference between owning slaves and being a poor but free worker in the same society. (Which isn?t to say the poor free worker didn?t have some privileges that slaves didn?t have.) I also see nothing wrong with pulling down public statues of slavers. To me, this is little different than Eastern Europeans tearing down monuments from the Soviet era. Any large scale social change, such as we seem to be seeing is likely to have unforeseen consequences. Like with your use of the elephant analogy, all social change is like that. It?s not really controlled from the top and can be scary when it happens quickly. (This is what happens in protest movements generally: a small group might try to steer them but they can quickly shift away from that group ? maybe to be exploited by others (such as happened with OWS which started out as basically anarchist but has been mostly coopted by politicians over the decade since it started). New movements may arise from within or parallel to it. And minor grievances might morph into calls for radical change.) Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From steinberg.will at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 19:03:18 2020 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 15:03:18 -0400 Subject: [ExI] school proposal In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d64960$b28d48a0$17a7d9e0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: I think more of a consequence of CO2 accumulation inside the mask, or at least that's what I assumed On Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:40 William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Maybe you can make big bucks out of this: you have found a method of > filtering out oxygen. Maybe there's a market for that. bill w > > On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 9:10 AM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> I was wearing a KN95 mask for less than an hour and used a pulse oximeter >> and got a reading of 87; took off the mask and it went up to normal value >> around 98. That really freaked me out...idk if it's good for people to be >> wearing these things all day. >> >> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 9:30 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> Probably less smooching in the hallways. What do you think? bill w >>> >>> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 8:21 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >>> >>>> >>>> >>>> Our local high school is proposing to reopen in August in split >>>> sessions. All the students and teachers would be required to wear the >>>> surgical masks at all times on campus. This has me wondering what school >>>> would be like under those conditions. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> spike >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> extropy-chat mailing list >>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 19:43:30 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 14:43:30 -0500 Subject: [ExI] school proposal In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d64960$b28d48a0$17a7d9e0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: So you are rebreathing the air you just exhaled, then. Answer: breathe through your mouth. bill w On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 2:06 PM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I think more of a consequence of CO2 accumulation inside the mask, or at > least that's what I assumed > > On Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:40 William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> Maybe you can make big bucks out of this: you have found a method of >> filtering out oxygen. Maybe there's a market for that. bill w >> >> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 9:10 AM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> I was wearing a KN95 mask for less than an hour and used a pulse >>> oximeter and got a reading of 87; took off the mask and it went up to >>> normal value around 98. That really freaked me out...idk if it's good for >>> people to be wearing these things all day. >>> >>> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 9:30 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >>> >>>> Probably less smooching in the hallways. What do you think? bill w >>>> >>>> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 8:21 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < >>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> Our local high school is proposing to reopen in August in split >>>>> sessions. All the students and teachers would be required to wear the >>>>> surgical masks at all times on campus. This has me wondering what school >>>>> would be like under those conditions. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> spike >>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>> extropy-chat mailing list >>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> extropy-chat mailing list >>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From veronesepk at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 19:44:48 2020 From: veronesepk at gmail.com (Keith Veronese) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 14:44:48 -0500 Subject: [ExI] school proposal In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d64960$b28d48a0$17a7d9e0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: What region are you in? We are still waiting to hear something in Alabama. - KV On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 2:44 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > So you are rebreathing the air you just exhaled, then. Answer: breathe > through your mouth. > bill w > > On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 2:06 PM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> I think more of a consequence of CO2 accumulation inside the mask, or at >> least that's what I assumed >> >> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:40 William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> Maybe you can make big bucks out of this: you have found a method of >>> filtering out oxygen. Maybe there's a market for that. bill w >>> >>> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 9:10 AM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat < >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >>> >>>> I was wearing a KN95 mask for less than an hour and used a pulse >>>> oximeter and got a reading of 87; took off the mask and it went up to >>>> normal value around 98. That really freaked me out...idk if it's good for >>>> people to be wearing these things all day. >>>> >>>> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 9:30 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < >>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >>>> >>>>> Probably less smooching in the hallways. What do you think? bill w >>>>> >>>>> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 8:21 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < >>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> Our local high school is proposing to reopen in August in split >>>>>> sessions. All the students and teachers would be required to wear the >>>>>> surgical masks at all times on campus. This has me wondering what school >>>>>> would be like under those conditions. >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> spike >>>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>>> extropy-chat mailing list >>>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>>>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>>>>> >>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>> extropy-chat mailing list >>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> extropy-chat mailing list >>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 19:52:30 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 15:52:30 -0400 Subject: [ExI] school proposal In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d64960$b28d48a0$17a7d9e0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: When I had my severe respiratory infection earlier this year, they made me put on a surgical mask when I walked in to the ER (I later found out my O2 was already at 87 without a mask due to the infection). Even with just a surgical mask on, I felt like I was suffocating. It was pretty horrible. Luckily once I got into the ER bay, the doctor told me to take it off. This was in January before the CV-19 really hit the fan though. Anyways, I have typically worn a real N95 out when this thing was raging (I'm in lower CT/work(ed) in Manhattan) and if you think a KN95 is bad, try wearing one of those for more than a short period of time (and forget about it in the heat). Now that the curve is pretty dead out this way, I've switched over to a more breathable mask, although they all still fog up my glasses, and the breathable ones are worse for that. I don't know what the answer is, but I won't wear one any longer than I need to for errands like grocery shopping. Movie theaters have reopened around here, and are requiring masks. There's no way I would put myself through 2 hours willingly in one to go see a show so I'll be streaming for the foreseeable future. On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 10:09 AM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I was wearing a KN95 mask for less than an hour and used a pulse oximeter > and got a reading of 87; took off the mask and it went up to normal value > around 98. That really freaked me out...idk if it's good for people to be > wearing these things all day. > > On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 9:30 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> Probably less smooching in the hallways. What do you think? bill w >> >> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 8:21 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> >>> >>> Our local high school is proposing to reopen in August in split >>> sessions. All the students and teachers would be required to wear the >>> surgical masks at all times on campus. This has me wondering what school >>> would be like under those conditions. >>> >>> >>> >>> spike >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 20:05:33 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 13:05:33 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Morality experts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <08823545-DE6D-407E-888E-A6BE8158E728@gmail.com> On Jun 22, 2020, at 3:57 PM, John Clark via extropy-chat wrote:? > > The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is complaining about several promising COVID-19 vaccines because they were manufactured with the help of cells from a fetus that was aborted way back in 1972. It's too bad these experts on morality didn't express the same moral outrage when they heard about sexual abuse of young boys by their priests. > > Vaccines that use human fetal cells draw fire Why would anyone think them morality experts? (Not saying you do. This is kind of a rhetorical question.) Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 20:09:30 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 15:09:30 -0500 Subject: [ExI] school proposal In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d64960$b28d48a0$17a7d9e0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: I am in Central Mississippi. I did read this morning that Alabama was one of the states reporting higher rates of infections. But it's going to be all over if people won't wash their hands and use masks. Experts say that we are still in the first phase and are getting impatient way too soon. bill w On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 2:55 PM Keith Veronese via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > What region are you in? We are still waiting to hear something in Alabama. > - KV > > On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 2:44 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> So you are rebreathing the air you just exhaled, then. Answer: breathe >> through your mouth. >> bill w >> >> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 2:06 PM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> I think more of a consequence of CO2 accumulation inside the mask, or at >>> least that's what I assumed >>> >>> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:40 William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >>> >>>> Maybe you can make big bucks out of this: you have found a method of >>>> filtering out oxygen. Maybe there's a market for that. bill w >>>> >>>> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 9:10 AM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat < >>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >>>> >>>>> I was wearing a KN95 mask for less than an hour and used a pulse >>>>> oximeter and got a reading of 87; took off the mask and it went up to >>>>> normal value around 98. That really freaked me out...idk if it's good for >>>>> people to be wearing these things all day. >>>>> >>>>> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 9:30 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat >>>>> wrote: >>>>> >>>>>> Probably less smooching in the hallways. What do you think? bill w >>>>>> >>>>>> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 8:21 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < >>>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>>> >>>>>>> >>>>>>> Our local high school is proposing to reopen in August in split >>>>>>> sessions. All the students and teachers would be required to wear the >>>>>>> surgical masks at all times on campus. This has me wondering what school >>>>>>> would be like under those conditions. >>>>>>> >>>>>>> >>>>>>> >>>>>>> spike >>>>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>>>> extropy-chat mailing list >>>>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>>>>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>>>>>> >>>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>>> extropy-chat mailing list >>>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>>>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>>>>> >>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>> extropy-chat mailing list >>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> extropy-chat mailing list >>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 20:17:15 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 15:17:15 -0500 Subject: [ExI] school proposal In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d64960$b28d48a0$17a7d9e0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Okay but normal people aren?t using KN95. Just the one that looks like blue and white tissue paper. I wear a black polyester one for work. (Uniform issued) Some people are wearing cut up socks. SR Ballard > On Jun 23, 2020, at 9:07 AM, Will Steinberg via extropy-chat wrote: > > I was wearing a KN95 mask for less than an hour and used a pulse oximeter and got a reading of 87; took off the mask and it went up to normal value around 98. That really freaked me out...idk if it's good for people to be wearing these things all day. > >> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 9:30 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: >> Probably less smooching in the hallways. What do you think? bill w >> >>> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 8:21 AM spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: >>> >>> >>> Our local high school is proposing to reopen in August in split sessions. All the students and teachers would be required to wear the surgical masks at all times on campus. This has me wondering what school would be like under those conditions. >>> >>> >>> >>> spike >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 20:22:03 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 13:22:03 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Morality experts In-Reply-To: <08823545-DE6D-407E-888E-A6BE8158E728@gmail.com> References: <08823545-DE6D-407E-888E-A6BE8158E728@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 1:18 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Jun 22, 2020, at 3:57 PM, John Clark via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:? > > The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is complaining about several > promising COVID-19 vaccines because they were manufactured with the help of > cells from a fetus that was aborted way back in 1972. It's too bad these > experts on morality didn't express the same moral outrage when they heard > about sexual abuse of young boys by their priests. > > Vaccines that use human fetal cells draw fire > > > > Why would anyone think them morality experts? (Not saying you do. This is > kind of a rhetorical question.) > Because they claim to be, and a large number of people (who call themselves Catholics) were brought up to unquestioningly believe they are. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 20:22:44 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 15:22:44 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Morality experts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9D53E8F4-6CFB-4DD6-A0D3-B2ED112E71D2@gmail.com> http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/child-and-youth-protection/charter.cfm Sent from my iPhone > On Jun 22, 2020, at 5:46 PM, John Clark via extropy-chat wrote: > > The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is complaining about several promising COVID-19 vaccines because they were manufactured with the help of cells from a fetus that was aborted way back in 1972. It's too bad these experts on morality didn't express the same moral outrage when they heard about sexual abuse of young boys by their priests. > > Vaccines that use human fetal cells draw fire > > John K Clark > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ben at zaiboc.net Tue Jun 23 20:23:43 2020 From: ben at zaiboc.net (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 21:23:43 +0100 Subject: [ExI] , Morality experts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 23/06/2020 20:45, John K Clark wrote: > The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is complaining about several > promising COVID-19 vaccines because they were manufactured with the > help of cells from a fetus that was aborted way back in 1972. It's too > bad these experts on morality didn't express the same moral outrage > when they heard about sexual abuse of young boys by their priests. > > Vaccines that use human fetal cells draw fire > > The biggest problem with this, as I see it, is not the immediate issue of condemning a promising vaccine (which is bad enough), but the much more serious and longer-term one of stigmatising an entire field that should be taken seriously, but because of these religious idiots, is more likely to be either derided and ignored, or cause confusion for the majority of people. Genuine ethical concerns about new technology are routinely conflated with superstitious beliefs and prejudices. This is leading to babies being thrown out with bathwater. I've even caught myself thinking "ethics, schmethics", but then realised that there actually are genuine ethical concerns that need to be addressed. Just not by religiously-motivated 'bioethicists'. What we need is a way to claim back morality and ethics from religion, and turn them from obeisance to an imaginary tyrant to concern for people's well-being. -- Ben Zaiboc -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 20:44:47 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 16:44:47 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Morality experts In-Reply-To: <08823545-DE6D-407E-888E-A6BE8158E728@gmail.com> References: <08823545-DE6D-407E-888E-A6BE8158E728@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 4:19 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> Why would anyone think them morality experts?* Catholic Bishops expect other people to sit at their feet while they preach to them about what is moral and what is not, so obviously they must think they have more expertise on this subject than sinful laity like you and me. John K Ckark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ben at zaiboc.net Tue Jun 23 20:48:27 2020 From: ben at zaiboc.net (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 21:48:27 +0100 Subject: [ExI] all of them In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <7ff22fc5-627e-cefb-eeb0-5b9ec03d25af@zaiboc.net> The whole thing is unutterably stupid. The past is past. Statues are just lumps of stone or metal. If someone proposed putting up a statue of Adolf Hitler, with a plaque at the bottom saying "Remember what he did", I don't doubt there would be an uproar. But I would be in support of such a statue. We do need reminding. Instead of pulling down statues of the likes of Cecil Rhodes, we should be taking the opportunity to educate people about the things they did, both good and bad. Pull them down, and we forget. And make the same mistakes again. I've no problem with having a class of memorials that are 'shame memorials', but destroying them altogether? That's just wrong. -- Ben Zaiboc From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 21:11:19 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 16:11:19 -0500 Subject: [ExI] school proposal In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d64960$b28d48a0$17a7d9e0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: I have read where a mask will not help you but will help others if you have it, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So, is that right? bill w On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 3:39 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Okay but normal people aren?t using KN95. Just the one that looks like > blue and white tissue paper. > > I wear a black polyester one for work. (Uniform issued) > > Some people are wearing cut up socks. > > SR Ballard > > On Jun 23, 2020, at 9:07 AM, Will Steinberg via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > I was wearing a KN95 mask for less than an hour and used a pulse oximeter > and got a reading of 87; took off the mask and it went up to normal value > around 98. That really freaked me out...idk if it's good for people to be > wearing these things all day. > > On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 9:30 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> Probably less smooching in the hallways. What do you think? bill w >> >> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 8:21 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> >>> >>> Our local high school is proposing to reopen in August in split >>> sessions. All the students and teachers would be required to wear the >>> surgical masks at all times on campus. This has me wondering what school >>> would be like under those conditions. >>> >>> >>> >>> spike >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 21:15:57 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 16:15:57 -0500 Subject: [ExI] , Morality experts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Them: God said it in the Bible so it must be true according to the experts on the Bible. What do you have for credibility? What's your morality based on? What makes it right? Many Catholics are ignoring the church's doctrines, esp. about birth control, divorce and other things. So some of them are appealing to reason, not to the church. The church is weakening, partly because of all the exposes about child molestation. Check out church attendance in Ireland, for example. bill w On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 4:04 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On 23/06/2020 20:45, John K Clark wrote: > > The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is complaining about several > promising COVID-19 vaccines because they were manufactured with the help of > cells from a fetus that was aborted way back in 1972. It's too bad these > experts on morality didn't express the same moral outrage when they heard > about sexual abuse of young boys by their priests. > > Vaccines that use human fetal cells draw fire > > > > The biggest problem with this, as I see it, is not the immediate issue of > condemning a promising vaccine (which is bad enough), but the much more > serious and longer-term one of stigmatising an entire field that should be > taken seriously, but because of these religious idiots, is more likely to > be either derided and ignored, or cause confusion for the majority of > people. > > Genuine ethical concerns about new technology are routinely conflated with > superstitious beliefs and prejudices. This is leading to babies being > thrown out with bathwater. I've even caught myself thinking "ethics, > schmethics", but then realised that there actually are genuine ethical > concerns that need to be addressed. Just not by religiously-motivated > 'bioethicists'. > > What we need is a way to claim back morality and ethics from religion, and > turn them from obeisance to an imaginary tyrant to concern for people's > well-being. > > -- > Ben Zaiboc > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 21:47:12 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 16:47:12 -0500 Subject: [ExI] school proposal In-Reply-To: References: <003d01d64960$b28d48a0$17a7d9e0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Most masks cannot protect you from small droplets. They can however trap your own large droplets. SR Ballard > On Jun 23, 2020, at 4:11 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > I have read where a mask will not help you but will help others if you have it, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So, is that right? bill w > >> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 3:39 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat wrote: >> Okay but normal people aren?t using KN95. Just the one that looks like blue and white tissue paper. >> >> I wear a black polyester one for work. (Uniform issued) >> >> Some people are wearing cut up socks. >> >> SR Ballard >> >>> On Jun 23, 2020, at 9:07 AM, Will Steinberg via extropy-chat wrote: >>> >>> I was wearing a KN95 mask for less than an hour and used a pulse oximeter and got a reading of 87; took off the mask and it went up to normal value around 98. That really freaked me out...idk if it's good for people to be wearing these things all day. >>> >>>> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 9:30 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: >>>> Probably less smooching in the hallways. What do you think? bill w >>>> >>>>> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 8:21 AM spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> Our local high school is proposing to reopen in August in split sessions. All the students and teachers would be required to wear the surgical masks at all times on campus. This has me wondering what school would be like under those conditions. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> spike >>>>> >>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>> extropy-chat mailing list >>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> extropy-chat mailing list >>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 23:22:29 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 16:22:29 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Morality experts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Jun 23, 2020, at 1:48 PM, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat wrote: >> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 1:18 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote: > >> On Jun 22, 2020, at 3:57 PM, John Clark via extropy-chat wrote:? >>> >>> The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is complaining about several promising COVID-19 vaccines because they were manufactured with the help of cells from a fetus that was aborted way back in 1972. It's too bad these experts on morality didn't express the same moral outrage when they heard about sexual abuse of young boys by their priests. >>> >>> Vaccines that use human fetal cells draw fire >> >> Why would anyone think them morality experts? (Not saying you do. This is kind of a rhetorical question.) > > Because they claim to be, and a large number of people (who call themselves Catholics) were brought up to unquestioningly believe they are. Of course, but society in general, which in the US is not made up mostly of Catholics, shouldn?t take them at their word on this. This is similar to how if there?s a conference on medicine, the attendees don?t take the idea that faith-healing works even if a segment of the population does. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Jun 23 23:37:37 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 16:37:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] , Morality experts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Jun 23, 2020, at 2:36 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > Them: God said it in the Bible so it must be true according to the experts on the Bible. > What do you have for credibility? What's your morality based on? What makes it right? Therein lies a big problem because abortion isn?t literally mentioned as a sin or as bad in the Bible. > Many Catholics are ignoring the church's doctrines, esp. about birth control, divorce and other things. So some of them are appealing to reason, not to the church. The church is weakening, partly because of all the exposes about child molestation. Check out church attendance in Ireland, for example. bill w To be sure, with any religious group, doctrinal determinism ? the idea that members will adhere rigidly and religiously (pun intended) to the doctrines of their religion doesn?t hold. In fact, this even applies when they know and can recite clearly said doctrines. This doesn?t just apply to stuff like abortion, contraception, and sex, but to more mundane things like believing in luck. D. J. Slone goes over this in his _ Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn't_. It?s pervasive and not limited to Christians. He even uses Buddhists in his examples. My guess is it?s typical of all times to hold a religious (or other) doctrine and not practice it, especially when the doctrine is costly to practice but even if it?s just inconvenient. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Jun 24 00:10:44 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 17:10:44 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Morality experts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 4:24 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Jun 23, 2020, at 1:48 PM, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 1:18 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> On Jun 22, 2020, at 3:57 PM, John Clark via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:? >> >> The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is complaining about several >> promising COVID-19 vaccines because they were manufactured with the help of >> cells from a fetus that was aborted way back in 1972. It's too bad these >> experts on morality didn't express the same moral outrage when they heard >> about sexual abuse of young boys by their priests. >> >> Vaccines that use human fetal cells draw fire >> >> >> >> Why would anyone think them morality experts? (Not saying you do. This is >> kind of a rhetorical question.) >> > > Because they claim to be, and a large number of people (who call > themselves Catholics) were brought up to unquestioningly believe they are. > > > Of course, but society in general, which in the US is not made up mostly > of Catholics, shouldn?t take them at their word on this. This is similar to > how if there?s a conference on medicine, the attendees don?t take the idea > that faith-healing works even if a segment of the population does. > Agreed, but you were asking about "anyone", not society in general. ;) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Wed Jun 24 00:15:10 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 18:15:10 -0600 Subject: [ExI] , Morality experts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >Genuine ethical concerns about new technology are routinely conflated with superstitious beliefs and prejudices. This is leading to babies being thrown out with bathwater. Nice turn of the phrase. "Babies being thrown out with bathwater" is exactly the thing the bishops are complaining about. On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 5:39 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Jun 23, 2020, at 2:36 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > Them: God said it in the Bible so it must be true according to the > experts on the Bible. > What do you have for credibility? What's your morality based on? What > makes it right? > > > Therein lies a big problem because abortion isn?t literally mentioned as a > sin or as bad in the Bible. > > Many Catholics are ignoring the church's doctrines, esp. about birth > control, divorce and other things. So some of them are appealing to > reason, not to the church. The church is weakening, partly because of all > the exposes about child molestation. Check out church attendance in > Ireland, for example. bill w > > > To be sure, with any religious group, doctrinal determinism ? the idea > that members will adhere rigidly and religiously (pun intended) to the > doctrines of their religion doesn?t hold. In fact, this even applies when > they know and can recite clearly said doctrines. This doesn?t just apply to > stuff like abortion, contraception, and sex, but to more mundane things > like believing in luck. > > D. J. Slone goes over this in his _ Theological Incorrectness: Why > Religious People Believe What They Shouldn't_. It?s pervasive and not > limited to Christians. He even uses Buddhists in his examples. My guess is > it?s typical of all times to hold a religious (or other) doctrine and not > practice it, especially when the doctrine is costly to practice but even if > it?s just inconvenient. > > Regards, > > Dan > Sample my Kindle books at: > > http://author.to/DanUst > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 24 01:41:20 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 20:41:20 -0500 Subject: [ExI] sex Message-ID: (did this originate with the Hole in the Wall Gang?) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/11/new-yorkers-encouraged-wear-masks-having-sex-stop-spreading/ bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From avant at sollegro.com Wed Jun 24 14:15:50 2020 From: avant at sollegro.com (Stuart LaForge) Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2020 07:15:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Smallest nanomotor yet: 16 atoms Message-ID: <20200624071550.Horde.Fi0DiWbH6Z2bA0qfJHu3FGi@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/the-worlds-smallest-motor/ Excerpt: Not only has a motor been constructed from just 16 atoms, its movement has been directly observed by scanning tunneling microscopy (see the inset in the video below). The colorful parts of the video are a computer simulation of the motor. In this simulation, the grey spinning unit represents a molecule of acetylene, which is made of just two carbon atoms and two protons. The Swiss team who built this motor, placed the acetylene rotor on a base (the blue and red atoms), which is a part of a crystal that is made from 12 atoms of palladium and gallium. Once in place, the system was cooled down to 17 degrees above absolute zero. At this temperature, an electrical current was applied, which gave rise to the controlled spinning motion. The Engineering ?For a motor to actually do useful work, it is essential that [it] allows the rotor to move in only one direction,? says Oliver Gr?ning, the project lead. Just imagine if a car motor randomly changed the direction of crankshaft rotation. A trip to the grocery store would be slightly less predictable. This is a problem that has been facing research in the field of atomic scale engines for a long time. In fact, at temperatures higher than 17? above absolute zero, this system behaved in the same way, with the acetylene unit spinning randomly on the base. At low temperatures however, the energetic barrier for rotation in one direction became significantly higher than the barrier in the other direction. ?The motor therefore has 99% directional stability, which distinguishes it from other similar molecular motors,? says Gr?ning. This difference in the energetic favorability of rotation in one direction is provided by the base. The palladium gallium crystal structure allows movement across the surface in one direction more easily than in the other direction. Energy Harvesting Harvesting the kinetic energy provided by the pint-sized motor is by no means straightforward. The team is currently working on understanding the processes involved in this molecular machine, work that may one day allow the acetylene rotor to be put to work. ------------------------------------------- If cooling the motor down to 17K and applying an electric current causes the rotor to spin in one direction, then would using low-temperature thermal fluctuations torque the motor and generate an electric current like a Brownian ratchet? Stuart LaForge From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 24 16:31:36 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2020 11:31:36 -0500 Subject: [ExI] crispr Message-ID: Like the musical song goes: this could be the start of something big. bill w CRISPR for sickle-cell, one year on As the one year anniversary of her receiving a ground-breaking treatment for sickle-cell disease approaches, it?s good news for Victoria Gray ? the first person in the United States to undergo CRISPR gene therapy to treat a genetic disorder . It?s too soon for scientists to reach firm conclusions about the long-term safety and effectiveness of the approach. But for Gray, life is very different from the severe pain attacks and frequent blood transfusions she experienced before. ?It's hard to put into words the joy that I feel ? being grateful for a change this big. It's been amazing,? said Gray. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 24 16:56:39 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2020 09:56:39 -0700 Subject: [ExI] crispr In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <007a01d64a48$6e207550$4a615ff0$@rainier66.com> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: [ExI] crispr Like the musical song goes: this could be the start of something big. bill w BillW, you need to offer them a clue. These young people have never heard of Tony Bennett or Andy Williams. If you listen, check out that band, my goodness, SMOKING hot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICZG9-eatr8 CRISPR for sickle-cell, one year on As the one year anniversary of her receiving a ground-breaking treatment for sickle-cell disease approaches, it?s good news for Victoria Gray ? the first person in the United States to undergo CRISPR gene therapy to treat a genetic disorder . ??It's hard to put into words the joy that I feel ? being grateful for a change this big. It's been amazing,? said Gray? Bill It is my regret that you never got a chance to meet Robert Bradbury. This is exactly what he was talking about when he predicted 20 yrs ago at a dramatic moment at Extro4 that in vivo genetic modification would someday be possible. http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2011/03/remembering-robert-bradbury.html Robert has been gone nine years, but Milan Cirkovic is apparently alive and well. This article is from less than 2 yrs ago: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/our-attitude-toward-aliens-proves-we-still-think-we-re-special He?s another one of our visionaries who has lived to see it unfold. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Wed Jun 24 17:37:43 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2020 12:37:43 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Scientists begin to investigate Diabetes-Covid interaction Message-ID: <5866824A-3459-4353-BE82-015F5418563D@gmail.com> Mounting clues suggest the coronavirus might trigger (Type 1) diabetes > Evidence from tissue studies and some people with COVID-19 shows that the virus damages insulin-producing cells. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01891-8?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=a3d3db509e-briefing-dy-20200624&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-a3d3db509e-45248210 ?Diabetes is already known to be a key risk factor for developing severe COVID-191 and people with the condition are more likely to die2.? ?Now Zimmet is among a growing number of researchers who think that diabetes doesn?t just make people more vulnerable to the coronavirus, but that the virus might also trigger diabetes in some3.? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 24 18:00:06 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2020 13:00:06 -0500 Subject: [ExI] crispr In-Reply-To: <007a01d64a48$6e207550$4a615ff0$@rainier66.com> References: <007a01d64a48$6e207550$4a615ff0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: What I thought I was going to get: "What do you mean 'musical song'? What other kind is there? Bennett is still with us - age 93. Been doing duets with artists of just about every genre. I have read that cystic fibrosis may also be fairly easily fixed with CRISPR. Hope so. bill w On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 12:00 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat > *Subject:* [ExI] crispr > > > Like the musical song goes: this could be the start of something big. > bill w BillW, you need to offer them a clue. These young people have > never heard of Tony Bennett or Andy Williams. If you listen, check out > that band, my goodness, SMOKING hot: > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICZG9-eatr8 CRISPR for sickle-cell, one > year on > > > As the one year anniversary of her receiving a ground-breaking treatment > for sickle-cell disease approaches, it?s good news for Victoria Gray ? the > first person in the United States to undergo CRISPR gene therapy to treat a > genetic disorder > . > ??It's hard to put into words the joy that I feel ? being grateful for a > change this big. It's been amazing,? said Gray? > > > > Bill It is my regret that you never got a chance to meet Robert Bradbury. > This is exactly what he was talking about when he predicted 20 yrs ago at a > dramatic moment at Extro4 that in vivo genetic modification would someday > be possible. > > > http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2011/03/remembering-robert-bradbury.html > > Robert has been gone nine years, but Milan Cirkovic is apparently alive > and well. This article is from less than 2 yrs ago: > > > https://getpocket.com/explore/item/our-attitude-toward-aliens-proves-we-still-think-we-re-special > > He?s another one of our visionaries who has lived to see it unfold. > > spike > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Wed Jun 24 18:55:13 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2020 13:55:13 -0500 Subject: [ExI] crispr In-Reply-To: References: <007a01d64a48$6e207550$4a615ff0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <1189814E-BAE8-4BB5-9DEE-9274CD7F3323@gmail.com> I assume you cannot find every song inside a musical (a film or play characterized by scenes which involve telling the plot via singing rather than speaking). Some examples include: Snow White Les Mis Sweeny Todd In other meanings, one might refer to the genre ?noise? as being ?non-musical?. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_music Or something which lacks one of the following: Rhythm, Melody, and Harmony. Why some people consider contemporary pop music to ?not be music?: https://youtu.be/K0Vn9V-tRCo (the death of melody) What happens when you don?t observe good rhythm: https://youtu.be/eSuK_5zW2iM (worst jazz solo of all time) There are also other ?fringe? musical avenues which many might not consider music: Microtonal Music : https://youtu.be/H4KIwA8O9LU Polytonal Music: https://youtu.be/lxPvWRXkEbE ?G Major? Music: https://youtu.be/vAF3MTywwVU I can go on. SR Ballard > On Jun 24, 2020, at 1:00 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > What I thought I was going to get: "What do you mean 'musical song'? What other kind is there? > > Bennett is still with us - age 93. Been doing duets with artists of just about every genre. > > I have read that cystic fibrosis may also be fairly easily fixed with CRISPR. Hope so. > > bill w > > >> On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 12:00 PM spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> >> >> >> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat >> Subject: [ExI] crispr >> >> >> >> Like the musical song goes: this could be the start of something big. bill w >> >> BillW, you need to offer them a clue. These young people have never heard of Tony Bennett or Andy Williams. >> >> If you listen, check out that band, my goodness, SMOKING hot: >> >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICZG9-eatr8 >> >> >> CRISPR for sickle-cell, one year on >> As the one year anniversary of her receiving a ground-breaking treatment for sickle-cell disease approaches, it?s good news for Victoria Gray ? the first person in the United States to undergo CRISPR gene therapy to treat a genetic disorder. ??It's hard to put into words the joy that I feel ? being grateful for a change this big. It's been amazing,? said Gray? >> >> >> >> Bill It is my regret that you never got a chance to meet Robert Bradbury. This is exactly what he was talking about when he predicted 20 yrs ago at a dramatic moment at Extro4 that in vivo genetic modification would someday be possible. >> >> http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2011/03/remembering-robert-bradbury.html >> >> Robert has been gone nine years, but Milan Cirkovic is apparently alive and well. This article is from less than 2 yrs ago: >> >> https://getpocket.com/explore/item/our-attitude-toward-aliens-proves-we-still-think-we-re-special >> >> He?s another one of our visionaries who has lived to see it unfold. >> >> spike >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 24 19:48:28 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2020 14:48:28 -0500 Subject: [ExI] crispr In-Reply-To: <1189814E-BAE8-4BB5-9DEE-9274CD7F3323@gmail.com> References: <007a01d64a48$6e207550$4a615ff0$@rainier66.com> <1189814E-BAE8-4BB5-9DEE-9274CD7F3323@gmail.com> Message-ID: With a few exceptions, mostly in my youth (and mostly related to dancing), I keep to classical music. I like some polytonal, polyrhythmic pieces, but not 12 tone rows or random music. I don't pay any attention to people who want to define music. If I hear it and like it, that's all it takes for me. Predictably, I did not like any of the music I heard on your Youtube links. For that matter, I don't like 95% of traditional classical music, either. What's great I love, the rest is boring. I don't put down new music. I just can't find much I like. You just can't help what you like, is my theory. However, if I were in a nightclub in the right mood, I would dance to just about anything, though quite a bit less strenuous that what I used to do. bill w On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 1:58 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I assume you cannot find every song inside a musical (a film or play > characterized by scenes which involve telling the plot via singing rather > than speaking). > > Some examples include: > > Snow White > Les Mis > Sweeny Todd > > In other meanings, one might refer to the genre ?noise? as being > ?non-musical?. > > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_music > > Or something which lacks one of the following: Rhythm, Melody, and Harmony. > > Why some people consider contemporary pop music to ?not be music?: > https://youtu.be/K0Vn9V-tRCo (the death of melody) > > What happens when you don?t observe good rhythm: > https://youtu.be/eSuK_5zW2iM (worst jazz solo of all time) > > There are also other ?fringe? musical avenues which many might not > consider music: > > Microtonal Music : https://youtu.be/H4KIwA8O9LU > > Polytonal Music: https://youtu.be/lxPvWRXkEbE > > ?G Major? Music: > https://youtu.be/vAF3MTywwVU > > I can go on. > > SR Ballard > > On Jun 24, 2020, at 1:00 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > What I thought I was going to get: "What do you mean 'musical song'? > What other kind is there? > > Bennett is still with us - age 93. Been doing duets with artists of just > about every genre. > > I have read that cystic fibrosis may also be fairly easily fixed with > CRISPR. Hope so. > > bill w > > > On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 12:00 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >> >> >> >> *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat >> *Subject:* [ExI] crispr >> >> >> Like the musical song goes: this could be the start of something big. >> bill w BillW, you need to offer them a clue. These young people have >> never heard of Tony Bennett or Andy Williams. If you listen, check out >> that band, my goodness, SMOKING hot: >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICZG9-eatr8 CRISPR for sickle-cell, one >> year on >> >> >> As the one year anniversary of her receiving a ground-breaking treatment >> for sickle-cell disease approaches, it?s good news for Victoria Gray ? the >> first person in the United States to undergo CRISPR gene therapy to treat a >> genetic disorder >> . >> ??It's hard to put into words the joy that I feel ? being grateful for a >> change this big. It's been amazing,? said Gray? >> >> >> >> Bill It is my regret that you never got a chance to meet Robert >> Bradbury. This is exactly what he was talking about when he predicted 20 >> yrs ago at a dramatic moment at Extro4 that in vivo genetic modification >> would someday be possible. >> >> >> http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2011/03/remembering-robert-bradbury.html >> >> Robert has been gone nine years, but Milan Cirkovic is apparently alive >> and well. This article is from less than 2 yrs ago: >> >> >> https://getpocket.com/explore/item/our-attitude-toward-aliens-proves-we-still-think-we-re-special >> >> He?s another one of our visionaries who has lived to see it unfold. >> >> spike >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 24 20:08:30 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2020 13:08:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] crispr In-Reply-To: References: <007a01d64a48$6e207550$4a615ff0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <004101d64a63$3b43dfd0$b1cb9f70$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] crispr >?What I thought I was going to get: "What do you mean 'musical song'? What other kind is there? Hip Hop. >?Bennett is still with us - age 93. Been doing duets with artists of just about every genre? Ja. Pat Boone does heavy metal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASOEIPrYj50 Likewise, Alice Cooper can do ballads, after a fashion. He?s no Pat Boone, but he can sing, which leads to the question: Why didn?t he do it for all these years? https://youtu.be/cVvwO7pvX5E I have read that cystic fibrosis may also be fairly easily fixed with CRISPR. Hope so. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Jun 25 20:26:04 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2020 16:26:04 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Visible light from two Black Holes with the help of a third Message-ID: For the first time astronomers think they may have detected the Gravitational Waves from the merger of two black holes and also visible light emissions from the collision; light from neutron star smash ups have been seen before but not from black holes. On May 21 2019 LIGO detected a merger 4 billion light years away of 2 black holes of about equal size that resulted in a new hole of at least 100 solar masses. At first astronomers detected no flash but 34 days later a quasar in the right place in the sky that was 4 billion light years away underwent a very unusual visible flare and there is reason to think the two things may be related. Gravitational waves carry an enormous amount of energy but for them to heat up gas to incandescence it would have to be extremely close to the source of those waves and be very dense, there is only one place that fits that bill, the accretion disk around an even larger black hole. A model was developed in which the two black holes were in orbit in the accretion disk around a third black hole, a supermassive one of about 100 million solar masses. In such a situation the Gravitational Waves would heat the gas to enormous temperatures but it would take about a month for that spike of heat energy to work its way to the outside of the accretion disk so it could be radiated away and let us see it. They made a testable prediction to figure out if the model is correct. The black holes were spinning very rapidly so If the model is right the new merged hole would shoot up at right angles to the accretion disk at about 120 miles a second which would shut off the flare, but the black hole would then fall back down through the disk again in 1.6 years, so they predict we should see the quasar give out another unusual flair around Christmas time of this year. Candidate Electromagnetic Counterpart to the Binary Black Hole Merger Gravitational-Wave Event S190521g John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Thu Jun 25 20:44:56 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2020 13:44:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Visible light from two Black Holes with the help of a third In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <004001d64b31$7cfceec0$76f6cc40$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: [ExI] Visible light from two Black Holes with the help of a third For the first time astronomers think they may have detected the Gravitational Waves from the merger of two black holes and also visible light emissions from the collision? Candidate Electromagnetic Counterpart to the Binary Black Hole Merger Gravitational-Wave Event S190521g John K Clark John did you eeeeever think you and I would live to see something as outrageously cool as this? I remember this being discussed some time ago, but they always presented it as something that is absurdly cool but that we would never get to see. Well, theeeey were wrong and I hope theeeey are still with us, to see it. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Jun 25 22:34:27 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2020 17:34:27 -0500 Subject: [ExI] sartre Message-ID: He said that man brought Nothingness into the world. There is no Nothingness. According to the eminent philosopher Gilda Radner: "It's always something." bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 11:57:04 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 07:57:04 -0400 Subject: [ExI] sartre In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 6:38 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > He said that man brought Nothingness into the world. There is no > Nothingness. > "Nothing" is infinite unbounded homogeneity. And that explains nothing. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 14:16:58 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 10:16:58 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? Message-ID: PizzaGate is back and has almost reached the Intensity levels it had during the last presidential election. In 2016 a conspiracy theory with started that said Hillary Clinton was a head of a child sex molestation ring headquartered in the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC; one nut case enter the restaurant with an assault rifle and demanded to be taken to the basement so he could confront Hillary. The restaurant has no basement. The conspiracy theory has mutated and so today Hillary has retired and the child sex slave ring is now ruled by an evil cabal consisting of Bill Gates, Ellen DeGeneres, and Oprah Winfrey; but it's still run out of the nonexistent basement of that pizza restaurant. In the first week of June PizzaGate got 800,000 likes on Facebook and 600,000 on Instagram. On TikTok posts with the #PizzaGate hashtag have been viewed more than 82 million times, and Google searches for PizzaGate have increased enormously. Weekly Google search popularity for ?PizzaGate? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 14:59:21 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 09:59:21 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Conspiracies never die. It might be bots but also conspiracies do this by themselves anyways. SR Ballard > On Jun 27, 2020, at 9:16 AM, John Clark via extropy-chat wrote: > > PizzaGate is back and has almost reached the Intensity levels it had during the last presidential election. In 2016 a conspiracy theory with started that said Hillary Clinton was a head of a child sex molestation ring headquartered in the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC; one nut case enter the restaurant with an assault rifle and demanded to be taken to the basement so he could confront Hillary. The restaurant has no basement. The conspiracy theory has mutated and so today Hillary has retired and the child sex slave ring is now ruled by an evil cabal consisting of Bill Gates, Ellen DeGeneres, and Oprah Winfrey; but it's still run out of the nonexistent basement of that pizza restaurant. In the first week of June PizzaGate got 800,000 likes on Facebook and 600,000 on Instagram. On TikTok posts with the #PizzaGate hashtag have been viewed more than 82 million times, and Google searches for PizzaGate have increased enormously. > > Weekly Google search popularity for ?PizzaGate? > > John K Clark > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 15:07:52 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 09:07:52 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Wait, you mean having the mainstream media [whom they already believe to be eyeballs deep in the conspiracy] mock and sneer at them didn't work?!? No one could possibly have predicted that! Sneering at our enemies ALWAYS wins their hearts and minds! ALWAYS! I demand to speak to the manager of the sneering division! On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 9:01 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Conspiracies never die. It might be bots but also conspiracies do this by > themselves anyways. > > SR Ballard > > On Jun 27, 2020, at 9:16 AM, John Clark via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > PizzaGate is back and has almost reached the Intensity levels it had > during the last presidential election. In 2016 a conspiracy theory with > started that said Hillary Clinton was a head of a child sex molestation > ring headquartered in the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC; > one nut case enter the restaurant with an assault rifle and demanded to be > taken to the basement so he could confront Hillary. The restaurant has no > basement. The conspiracy theory has mutated and so today Hillary has > retired and the child sex slave ring is now ruled by an evil cabal > consisting of Bill Gates, Ellen DeGeneres, and Oprah Winfrey; but it's > still run out of the nonexistent basement of that pizza restaurant. In the > first week of June PizzaGate got 800,000 likes on Facebook and 600,000 on > Instagram. On TikTok posts with the #PizzaGate hashtag have been viewed > more than 82 million times, and Google searches for PizzaGate have > increased enormously. > > Weekly Google search popularity for ?PizzaGate? > > > John K Clark > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 15:08:55 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 09:08:55 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: We may have to escalate to punching them. That will make them see reason and love us for SURE! On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 9:07 AM Darin Sunley wrote: > Wait, you mean having the mainstream media [whom they already believe to > be eyeballs deep in the conspiracy] mock and sneer at them didn't work?!? > > No one could possibly have predicted that! > > Sneering at our enemies ALWAYS wins their hearts and minds! ALWAYS! > > I demand to speak to the manager of the sneering division! > > On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 9:01 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> Conspiracies never die. It might be bots but also conspiracies do this by >> themselves anyways. >> >> SR Ballard >> >> On Jun 27, 2020, at 9:16 AM, John Clark via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >> PizzaGate is back and has almost reached the Intensity levels it had >> during the last presidential election. In 2016 a conspiracy theory with >> started that said Hillary Clinton was a head of a child sex molestation >> ring headquartered in the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC; >> one nut case enter the restaurant with an assault rifle and demanded to be >> taken to the basement so he could confront Hillary. The restaurant has no >> basement. The conspiracy theory has mutated and so today Hillary has >> retired and the child sex slave ring is now ruled by an evil cabal >> consisting of Bill Gates, Ellen DeGeneres, and Oprah Winfrey; but it's >> still run out of the nonexistent basement of that pizza restaurant. In the >> first week of June PizzaGate got 800,000 likes on Facebook and 600,000 on >> Instagram. On TikTok posts with the #PizzaGate hashtag have been viewed >> more than 82 million times, and Google searches for PizzaGate have >> increased enormously. >> >> Weekly Google search popularity for ?PizzaGate? >> >> >> John K Clark >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 27 15:11:28 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 08:11:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? >? enter the restaurant with an assault rifle ?John K Clark What is an ?assault rifle? please? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 15:11:32 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 09:11:32 -0600 Subject: [ExI] sartre In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: No. A "void" is infinite unbounded homogenity. "Nothing" has no physical or temporal extent. /Much/ harder to visualize. On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 6:00 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 6:38 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > He said that man brought Nothingness into the world. There is no >> Nothingness. >> > > "Nothing" is infinite unbounded homogeneity. And that explains nothing. > > John K Clark > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 27 15:15:27 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 08:15:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <008c01d64c95$ca455db0$5ed01910$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? Conspiracies never die. It might be bots but also conspiracies do this by themselves anyways. SR Ballard How do we know conspiracies do this by themselves? If we have a system in which we create positive feedback loops by paying content providers a fraction of a cent for each like, then they create likebots which like the post a few hundred million times, how would we know any human ever liked that post? If we have such a system, it is money laying unclaimed for anyone who can write a likebot, ja? The conspiracy itself could have died long ago, but would still make money for the person who wrote and somehow deployed the likebot. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 15:24:15 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 09:24:15 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Ooh! Better yet! Strip their right to vote! That'll convince them they aren't the brave opposition to a powerful Washington conspiracy, /and/ have the bonus of restricting political discourse in this country to right-thinking, qualified people only! On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 9:08 AM Darin Sunley wrote: > We may have to escalate to punching them. > > That will make them see reason and love us for SURE! > > On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 9:07 AM Darin Sunley wrote: > >> Wait, you mean having the mainstream media [whom they already believe to >> be eyeballs deep in the conspiracy] mock and sneer at them didn't work?!? >> >> No one could possibly have predicted that! >> >> Sneering at our enemies ALWAYS wins their hearts and minds! ALWAYS! >> >> I demand to speak to the manager of the sneering division! >> >> On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 9:01 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> Conspiracies never die. It might be bots but also conspiracies do this >>> by themselves anyways. >>> >>> SR Ballard >>> >>> On Jun 27, 2020, at 9:16 AM, John Clark via extropy-chat < >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >>> >>> PizzaGate is back and has almost reached the Intensity levels it had >>> during the last presidential election. In 2016 a conspiracy theory with >>> started that said Hillary Clinton was a head of a child sex molestation >>> ring headquartered in the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC; >>> one nut case enter the restaurant with an assault rifle and demanded to be >>> taken to the basement so he could confront Hillary. The restaurant has no >>> basement. The conspiracy theory has mutated and so today Hillary has >>> retired and the child sex slave ring is now ruled by an evil cabal >>> consisting of Bill Gates, Ellen DeGeneres, and Oprah Winfrey; but it's >>> still run out of the nonexistent basement of that pizza restaurant. In the >>> first week of June PizzaGate got 800,000 likes on Facebook and 600,000 on >>> Instagram. On TikTok posts with the #PizzaGate hashtag have been viewed >>> more than 82 million times, and Google searches for PizzaGate have >>> increased enormously. >>> >>> Weekly Google search popularity for ?PizzaGate? >>> >>> >>> John K Clark >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>> >> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 27 15:24:40 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 08:24:40 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: <008c01d64c95$ca455db0$5ed01910$@rainier66.com> References: <008c01d64c95$ca455db0$5ed01910$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <009801d64c97$13e36290$3baa27b0$@rainier66.com> From: spike at rainier66.com Subject: RE: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? >?How do we know conspiracies do this by themselves? ? money laying unclaimed for anyone who can write a likebot, ja? The conspiracy itself could have died long ago, but would still make money for the person who wrote and somehow deployed the likebot. Spike Then it occurred to me? I just accidently created a likebot conspiracy. But wait, the term conspiracy is based on Latin meaning breathe together, or plan a bad deed as a group. Writing a likebot doesn?t require more than one person, so we need a term for that. A unispiracy? I plotted this all alone: saw a way to make money by deploying software to like my? whatever it is, the goofier the better, a criminal ring hiding the basement, aliens at Area 51, doesn?t matter what it is, it all pays the same, for the likebot doesn?t know or care what stories it is liking. Cool now we can stretch the definition of the term ?like? even more than it already is, being nearly universal teenspeak, where everything is like this and like that and like like until ya wanna like scream. Idea: replace the thumbs-up like with cool, or excellent, or agree, or fun, or interesting, or something, aaaaanything other than the long-since worn out term like. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 15:27:43 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 09:27:43 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> References: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: >What is an ?assault rifle? please? This one's easy. It's a rifle whose aesthetic, non-functional, decorative features make it an "assault" to the senses of all right thinking Americans [who should be the only ones allowed to vote, /obviously/]. On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 9:22 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *John Clark via extropy-chat > *Subject:* [ExI] Russians bots at work again? > > > > >? enter the restaurant with an assault rifle ?John K Clark > > > > What is an ?assault rifle? please? > > > > spike > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 15:27:40 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 11:27:40 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> References: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: I think it's one of those machine gun doohickeys... On Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 11:22 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *John Clark via extropy-chat > *Subject:* [ExI] Russians bots at work again? > > > > >? enter the restaurant with an assault rifle ?John K Clark > > > > What is an ?assault rifle? please? > > > > spike > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 16:02:18 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 11:02:18 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Or it's a rifle that fires rubber bullets that puts people's eyes out. bill w On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 10:59 AM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >What is an ?assault rifle? please? > > This one's easy. > > It's a rifle whose aesthetic, non-functional, decorative features make it > an "assault" to the senses of all right thinking Americans [who should be > the only ones allowed to vote, /obviously/]. > > On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 9:22 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >> >> >> >> > *On Behalf Of *John Clark via extropy-chat >> *Subject:* [ExI] Russians bots at work again? >> >> >> >> >? enter the restaurant with an assault rifle ?John K Clark >> >> >> >> What is an ?assault rifle? please? >> >> >> >> spike >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 27 16:07:14 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 09:07:14 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <004601d64c9d$064a2ff0$12de8fd0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Darin Sunley via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? >?Ooh! Better yet! Strip their right to vote! That'll convince them they aren't the brave opposition to a powerful Washington conspiracy, /and/ have the bonus of restricting political discourse in this country to right-thinking, qualified people only! Darin Darin think about it: we have long held the Spanish Inquisition theory on the Singularity. It just shows up suddenly, nobody expected the Singularity when it happened. https://external-preview.redd.it/0QjQq-mB5x88k_87B4e6hAK0OqeVNfCM5lAKNwRXo1I.gif?format=mp4 &s=773b9870e5d4e9339405640b6078b11064842a6c Sure, the Singularity just happens one day, bursts thru the door with some mysteriously hilarious comment; call that the Spanish Inquisition model. But what if? the singularity just happens gradually, call it the kudzu model, where your hedges have a parasitic vine, you need to go out and take care of that but you hit the snooze button and it keeps growing, you see it gradually more and more every day, no sudden change on any particular day until you realize it has now become difficult to tell the plants from the kudzu. What if? people find ways to make money with bots on the internet, in a kind of parasitic way, such as likebots gobbling up advertising dollars. One might argue that likebots are not parasitic, the companies offer Face Book and Twitter money to air their ads, it is a bargain for the company, Face Book and Twitter make money, the bots don?t care how many ads they ?see? so it isn?t parasitic. But? somewhere somehow someone has to pay for all that, and it hasta be the end consumer, ja? What if? the singularity gradually happens and we get to where we cannot tell which stories are real, which are being massively likebotted, which are being generated by memebots and trendbots then massively liked by likebots? We look around one day and realize we can no longer reliably tell meat world reality from virtual reality. The singularity happened when no one was looking, or if they were looking they didn?t recognize it while it was underway. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 27 16:11:47 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 09:11:47 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <005201d64c9d$a8fd3030$faf79090$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Darin Sunley via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? >>What is an ?assault rifle? please? spike >?This one's easy. >?It's a rifle whose aesthetic, non-functional, decorative features make it an "assault" to the senses of all right thinking Americans [who should be the only ones allowed to vote, /obviously/]. Darin Darin, I have a better one, a criterion used by California lawmakers: An ?assault rifle? is a rifle which has ergonomic features. The Cal-legislature doesn?t like the notion of rifles suitable for people with physical handicaps. The American With Disabilities Act does not apply to that one area. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 27 16:19:13 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 09:19:13 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <006001d64c9e$b26f7140$174e53c0$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? >>>? enter the restaurant with an assault rifle ?John K Clark >>?What is an ?assault rifle? please? spike >?I think it's one of those machine gun doohickeys... Dylan Not at all, for machine gun doohickeys were already functionally illegal in the US since the 1930s when the gangsters used Tommy guns to slay each other in mass. Today you can get one legally as a hobbyist, if you go thru a pile of licensing procedures that take a lotta time and cost a lotta money, but those are extremely rare. I have never even seen one in person outside a gun show. Dylan or anyone else, can you explain what the term ?assault rifle? really means, knowing it specifically is not a machine gun doohickey? The legislature can?t either. The real answer to this is significant and extremely educational, which is why I stay right on this subject. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 16:21:17 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 11:21:17 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: <004601d64c9d$064a2ff0$12de8fd0$@rainier66.com> References: <004601d64c9d$064a2ff0$12de8fd0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: There is no Heaven without a Hell. bill w On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 11:16 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *Darin Sunley via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? > > > > >?Ooh! Better yet! Strip their right to vote! That'll convince them they > aren't the brave opposition to a powerful Washington conspiracy, /and/ have > the bonus of restricting political discourse in this country > to right-thinking, qualified people only! Darin > > > > Darin think about it: we have long held the Spanish Inquisition theory on > the Singularity. It just shows up suddenly, nobody expected the > Singularity when it happened. > > > > > https://external-preview.redd.it/0QjQq-mB5x88k_87B4e6hAK0OqeVNfCM5lAKNwRXo1I.gif?format=mp4&s=773b9870e5d4e9339405640b6078b11064842a6c > > > > Sure, the Singularity just happens one day, bursts thru the door with some > mysteriously hilarious comment; call that the Spanish Inquisition model. > But what if? the singularity just happens gradually, call it the kudzu > model, where your hedges have a parasitic vine, you need to go out and take > care of that but you hit the snooze button and it keeps growing, you see it > gradually more and more every day, no sudden change on any particular day > until you realize it has now become difficult to tell the plants from the > kudzu. > > > > What if? people find ways to make money with bots on the internet, in a > kind of parasitic way, such as likebots gobbling up advertising dollars. > One might argue that likebots are not parasitic, the companies offer Face > Book and Twitter money to air their ads, it is a bargain for the company, > Face Book and Twitter make money, the bots don?t care how many ads they > ?see? so it isn?t parasitic. But? somewhere somehow someone has to pay for > all that, and it hasta be the end consumer, ja? > > > > What if? the singularity gradually happens and we get to where we cannot > tell which stories are real, which are being massively likebotted, which > are being generated by memebots and trendbots then massively liked by > likebots? We look around one day and realize we can no longer reliably > tell meat world reality from virtual reality. The singularity happened > when no one was looking, or if they were looking they didn?t recognize it > while it was underway. > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 17:01:00 2020 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 18:01:00 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Click bots, chat bots, bots, bots....... Message-ID: On Sat, 27 Jun 2020 at 17:17, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > What if? the singularity gradually happens and we get to where we cannot tell which stories are real, which are being massively likebotted, which are being generated by memebots and trendbots then massively liked by likebots? We look around one day and realize we can no longer reliably tell meat world reality from virtual reality. The singularity happened when no one was looking, or if they were looking they didn?t recognize it while it was underway. > Dear spike, you little treasure - The bot industry can do almost anything nowadays. What Is Click Fraud? | How Click Bots Work Climate change denier bots ---- You want followers ?????? Customers a pain? Let a bot deal with them. Is anything on the internet real?? BillK From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 27 16:27:10 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 09:27:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <007701d64c9f$cebbe620$6c33b260$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? >?Or it's a rifle that fires rubber bullets that puts people's eyes out. bill w Red Rider BB guns do that, since BBs have eye-seeking technology but rubber bullets seldom have such technology. Perhaps it is a rifle which can be swung like a baseball bat, to swat some reprehensible villain or victim, which would meet my understanding of the term ?assault? but not a fixed-emplacement anti-aircraft weapon such as an M-60 or a T-44, which are too big and bulky to be used in that bizarre manner. When you hear the answer to this, a lotta stuff will start to make sense. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 17:09:13 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 13:09:13 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 11:10 AM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > *Sneering at our enemies ALWAYS wins their hearts and minds! ALWAYS!* Some people very much deserve to be sneered at. And if it's not safe to sneer at such irrationality on the Extropian list where would it be safe to do so? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 17:16:50 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 13:16:50 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> References: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 11:23 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > *What is an ?assault rifle? please?* > So I guess the most outrageous thing about the entire Pizzagate business is not Hillary Clinton and Bill Gates running a child sex slave ring out of a basement pizza parlor but my use of the term "assault rifle". John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From steinberg.will at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 17:27:35 2020 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 13:27:35 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: <007701d64c9f$cebbe620$6c33b260$@rainier66.com> References: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> <007701d64c9f$cebbe620$6c33b260$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Shells can be filled with rock salt for a less lethal round. I believe this is what they call a salt rifle -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 17:31:11 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 13:31:11 -0400 Subject: [ExI] sartre In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 11:30 AM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: No. A "void" is infinite unbounded homogenity. > > "Nothing" has no physical or temporal extent. > If X is homogeneous then it's unchanging so time can't exist, and if X is unbounded too then infinite space would be indistinguishable from zero space. That is to say X would have no physical or temporal extent because meaning needs contrast; everything having the klogknee property Is equivalent to nothing having the klogknee property. John K Clark > > /Much/ harder to visualize. > > On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 6:00 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> On Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 6:38 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >> > He said that man brought Nothingness into the world. There is no >>> Nothingness. >>> >> >> "Nothing" is infinite unbounded homogeneity. And that explains nothing. >> >> John K Clark >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 17:34:13 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 12:34:13 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: <007701d64c9f$cebbe620$6c33b260$@rainier66.com> References: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> <007701d64c9f$cebbe620$6c33b260$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Technically, in the law, you can be assaulted just by being looked at, though probably that hasn't been in the courts for many years. Battery is when you get hit. *assault - defined* as intentionally putting another person in reasonable apprehension of an imminent harmful or offensive contact. Physical injury is not required. bill w On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 12:27 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? > > > > >?Or it's a rifle that fires rubber bullets that puts people's eyes out. > bill w > > > > Red Rider BB guns do that, since BBs have eye-seeking technology but > rubber bullets seldom have such technology. > > > > Perhaps it is a rifle which can be swung like a baseball bat, to swat some > reprehensible villain or victim, which would meet my understanding of the > term ?assault? but not a fixed-emplacement anti-aircraft weapon such as an > M-60 or a T-44, which are too big and bulky to be used in that bizarre > manner. > > > > When you hear the answer to this, a lotta stuff will start to make sense. > > > > spike > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 17:34:09 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 10:34:09 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? Message-ID: John Clark wrote: > PizzaGate is back Humans are (at best) social semi-domesticated wild animals. Whatever psychological traits we have they are the result of natural selection, mostly in the stone age. So what is the evolved function of being able to hold nonsense beliefs like this one? The logical math model for prehistory human populations was growth and (mostly due to weather) periodic starvation or wars that cut the population back. Of course, if it was possible to move, people did that, which is why humans spread over the entire planet. I make the case that humans were strongly selected for the traits to go to war when the population to resource ratio was unfavorable (or looked like it would be). Belief in the others being bad guys (who had to be killed) was part of the process that worked the tribe's warriors up to a do or die attempt to kill the neighbors. The guy who went into the pizza restaurant with a weapon was far out on the bell curve, but not entirely atypical. The Russian bots may be amplifying this "social movement" but why now? Keith From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 17:35:31 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 12:35:31 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Click bots, chat bots, bots, bots....... In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Bill K- define 'real' (i have been reading from Plato on about metaphysics and still have not come up with a good definition) bill w On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 12:20 PM BillK via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Sat, 27 Jun 2020 at 17:17, spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: > > > What if? the singularity gradually happens and we get to where we cannot > tell which stories are real, which are being massively likebotted, which > are being generated by memebots and trendbots then massively liked by > likebots? We look around one day and realize we can no longer reliably > tell meat world reality from virtual reality. The singularity happened > when no one was looking, or if they were looking they didn?t recognize it > while it was underway. > > > > > Dear spike, you little treasure - The bot industry can do almost > anything nowadays. > > What Is Click Fraud? | How Click Bots Work > > > Climate change denier bots ---- > < > https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/21/climate-tweets-twitter-bots-analysis > > > > You want followers ?????? > > > Customers a pain? Let a bot deal with them. > < > https://chatbotslife.com/top-5-free-chatbot-for-customer-service-b0300e216b94 > > > > Is anything on the internet real?? > > BillK > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 17:42:13 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 12:42:13 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > > > *Sneering at our enemies ALWAYS wins their hearts and minds! ALWAYS!* > > > Some people very much deserve to be sneered at. And if it's not safe to > sneer at such irrationality on the Extropian list where would it be safe to > do so? > > John K Clark > Yeah, sure, but what's the point? Waste of a good sneer, I say, if the recipient doesn't know it. bill w > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 27 17:46:50 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 10:46:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Click bots, chat bots, bots, bots....... In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <00dc01d64caa$f024e770$d06eb650$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of BillK via extropy-chat Subject: [ExI] Click bots, chat bots, bots, bots....... On Sat, 27 Jun 2020 at 17:17, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: >> What if? the singularity gradually happens and we get to where we cannot tell which stories are real, which are being massively likebotted, which are being generated by memebots and trendbots then massively liked by likebots? We look around one day and realize we can no longer reliably tell meat world reality from virtual reality. The singularity happened when no one was looking, or if they were looking they didn?t recognize it while it was underway. > >...Dear spike, you little treasure - ... Hey I never claimed to be a mod hipster. Only creative. >...The bot industry can do almost anything nowadays... Is anything on the internet real?? BillK Your link to the customer service-bot really has me thinking BillK. Plenty of us here have played with Eliza back in the day, and we have dealt with useless customer service reps until we were so frustrated we decided it would be better to smash the recalcitrant product to flinders with a well-aimed crowbar than to have a stroke from sheer frustration. OK, no worries, imagine a resale business on thin profit margin (it isn't hard to do.) They cannot afford real meat customer service so they resort to the low cost alternative, a speech recognition customer "service" rep based on Eliza, but with speech recognition and generation, and a cool twist: if the customer angrily shrieks she wishes to talk to the manager, the bot changes its accent and continues its laser-focus efforts to make this annoying customer go away. Let the system ratchet up to higher and higher level virtual managers, each with an accent progressing steadily toward British nobility, until the service-bot claims to be Reginald Prufrock Windor-Whitefield, who then assures the irate customer he knows exactly how to help, at which time he transfers the voice back to the original Pakistani-accented service-bot. Customer smashes product with sledge hammer, warranty voided, done. None of this costs the company much of anything. Then it occurred to me: computers make us evil. spike From danust2012 at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 18:11:54 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 11:11:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6D08988D-410F-4EBD-981D-DF78C4D29150@gmail.com> On Jun 27, 2020, at 8:01 AM, SR Ballard via extropy-chat wrote: > Conspiracies never die. It might be bots but also conspiracies do this by themselves anyways. > > SR Ballard I wouldn?t say they never die, but they do tend to stick around long past their debunking. Today, of course, it?s much easy for them to stick around given quick and easy access to them online. I think there?s also more a conspiratorial mindset. People who have this to a large degree tend to be much more immediately accepting of a given conspiracy theory and tend to have very high bars for falsification. There seems to be some evidence of this given that people who believe one conspiracy theory often will be easy sell on others. (To be fair, though, conspiracy theories are fairly widespread ? not relegated to the lunatic fringe or one section of the political spectrum or even to particular income or education levels.) That said, I don?t mean to imply that there are no conspiracies. There definitely are, but there tend be much more mundane* and not global in reach. By the way, again, I?d like to bring up Jesse Walker?s _The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory_. He goes over conspiracy theories from Colonial times to today in America. (I?d like to see a more global treatment because US-Americans certainly aren?t peculiar in this fashion.) Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst * Think of any bank job involving more than one person. Definitely a conspiracy, but not one involving world leaders or likely to change the fate of nations. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 18:13:15 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 13:13:15 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: <008c01d64c95$ca455db0$5ed01910$@rainier66.com> References: <008c01d64c95$ca455db0$5ed01910$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <70B0089D-2FD8-4D63-BDB7-34BFF7CE11CF@gmail.com> Conspiracy theories existed long before the internet, Spike. They have a strong habit of morphing instead of dying. SR Ballard > On Jun 27, 2020, at 10:15 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > > On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat > > Subject: Re: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? > > Conspiracies never die. It might be bots but also conspiracies do this by themselves anyways. > > SR Ballard > > > How do we know conspiracies do this by themselves? If we have a system in which we create positive feedback loops by paying content providers a fraction of a cent for each like, then they create likebots which like the post a few hundred million times, how would we know any human ever liked that post? If we have such a system, it is money laying unclaimed for anyone who can write a likebot, ja? The conspiracy itself could have died long ago, but would still make money for the person who wrote and somehow deployed the likebot. > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 18:24:07 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 13:24:07 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> <007701d64c9f$cebbe620$6c33b260$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Technical definitions aside, ?assault rifle? seems to mean any normal rifle, which is black, with a plastic stock, versus a ?normal rifle? with brassing and a wooden stock. More specifically, these features seem to be ?okay?: - lever action - .22 - BB gun - Pellet gun - Iron sight - magazine 9 or less - wooden stock - brassing - antiques https://www.cabelas.com/product/home/rimfire-rifles-and-pistols/lever-action-rimfire-rifles/pc/105625080/c/1611677880/sc/105532380/henry-golden-boy-lever-action-and-hmr-rimfire-rifles/1381524.uts?slotId=0 These features are ?questionable?: - .308 - bolt action - magazine 10-20 These features seem to be ?assault?: - black - plastic stick - camo pattern - scope - magazine higher than 20 - fully automatic - calibers abover .308 - side feeding - hollow point https://www.usa-gun-shop.com/6-best-50-bmg-rifles-for-sale-in-2019/ Please note that in the term ?assault rifle? assault means ?tactical?, or ?reminiscent of military equipment?, rather than referring to to the crime ?assault/battery?. SR Ballard > On Jun 27, 2020, at 12:34 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > Technically, in the law, you can be assaulted just by being looked at, though probably that hasn't been in the courts for many years. Battery is when you get hit. > > assault - defined as intentionally putting another person in reasonable apprehension of an imminent harmful or offensive contact. Physical injury is not required. bill w > >> On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 12:27 PM spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> >> >> >> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat >> Subject: Re: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? >> >> >> >> >?Or it's a rifle that fires rubber bullets that puts people's eyes out. bill w >> >> >> >> Red Rider BB guns do that, since BBs have eye-seeking technology but rubber bullets seldom have such technology. >> >> >> >> Perhaps it is a rifle which can be swung like a baseball bat, to swat some reprehensible villain or victim, which would meet my understanding of the term ?assault? but not a fixed-emplacement anti-aircraft weapon such as an M-60 or a T-44, which are too big and bulky to be used in that bizarre manner. >> >> >> >> When you hear the answer to this, a lotta stuff will start to make sense. >> >> >> >> spike >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dsunley at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 18:45:08 2020 From: dsunley at gmail.com (Darin Sunley) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 12:45:08 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: <70B0089D-2FD8-4D63-BDB7-34BFF7CE11CF@gmail.com> References: <008c01d64c95$ca455db0$5ed01910$@rainier66.com> <70B0089D-2FD8-4D63-BDB7-34BFF7CE11CF@gmail.com> Message-ID: My point about sneering had nothing to do with whether it was deserved or not, or even whether this is the appropriate place to do it. It's that it doesn't /work/. It is /counter/-productive. It is literally /ir/rational. You have operational goals with respect to these people. You wish them to come to believe certain things, and you wish them to come to act in certain ways. Sneering not only does /not/ advance your goals, it /hurts/ them. No matter how good it feels to sneer at the deplorable outgroup, it is a dumb thing to do. Sneering at the "deplorable" outgroup arguably got Trump elected. It is a stupid, self-destructive, irrational thing to do. On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 12:37 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Conspiracy theories existed long before the internet, Spike. They have a > strong habit of morphing instead of dying. > > SR Ballard > > On Jun 27, 2020, at 10:15 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *SR Ballard via extropy-chat > > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? > > > > Conspiracies never die. It might be bots but also conspiracies do this by > themselves anyways. > > SR Ballard > > > > > > How do we know conspiracies do this by themselves? If we have a system in > which we create positive feedback loops by paying content providers a > fraction of a cent for each like, then they create likebots which like the > post a few hundred million times, how would we know any human ever liked > that post? If we have such a system, it is money laying unclaimed for > anyone who can write a likebot, ja? The conspiracy itself could have died > long ago, but would still make money for the person who wrote and somehow > deployed the likebot. > > > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 27 18:47:30 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 11:47:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <014001d64cb3$6a077960$3e166c20$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat > What is an ?assault rifle? please? >?So I guess the most outrageous thing about the entire Pizzagate business is not Hillary Clinton and Bill Gates running a child sex slave ring out of a basement pizza parlor but my use of the term "assault rifle". John K Clark Can we prove any of those stories were true? If a guy stormed a Pizza house, can we determine if the Clinton/Gates conspiracy had anything to do with it? If not, why do we bother repeating the conspiracy theory? What if the guy was just nuts? Can you define the term assault rifle? Please do. There is a reason why I went off on that tangent: lawmakers do not know how to define that term either. They are sure assault rifles are bad, but they cannot distinguish between assault rifles and non-assault rifles. Can you? How? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 27 19:10:43 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 12:10:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> <007701d64c9f$cebbe620$6c33b260$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <017101d64cb6$a846cf20$f8d46d60$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? >?These features seem to be ?assault?: OK thanks SR, we can run with this ball. The legislation was aimed at the most popular rifle sold in America today, the AR-15. When the California assault rifle ban legislation came out it was clear enough they were trying to describe the AR-15. If so, let us look at the list: >?- black Many AR-15s are black, but they don?t need to be. Many non-AR-15s are black, but are not the target of the legislation. In our world today, they definitely do not want to issue a blanket ban on black. >?- plastic stick I think you meant stock, but the AR-15 doesn?t necessarily have a plastic stock. The stock on those is an accessory. >?- camo pattern Ja, it might have that or might not. How you paint your rifle is your own business. >?- scope Any rifle might or might not have one. My aged .22 rimfire bolt action has one. A scope is an accessory. >?- magazine higher than 20 Another accessory. >?- fully automatic Those are functionally illegal. You can get one legally if you are rich and patient. >?- calibers above .308 Ja, that doesn?t apply to the real target, the AR-15 which is a .223 caliber. >?- side feeding Sure. Those are ammo-belt style used in larger caliber fixed placement systems, quite rare for amateurs, for you could fire thru a hundred bucks worth of ammo in a few seconds. >?- hollow point That is a feature of the ammo, not the rifle. https://www.usa-gun-shop.com/6-best-50-bmg-rifles-for-sale-in-2019/ >?Please note that in the term ?assault rifle? assault means ?tactical?, or ?reminiscent of military equipment?, rather than referring to to the crime ?assault/battery?. SR Ballard I am with you there. The legislators were looking for ways to talk around their real intent, which is to attack the industry at its most popular point. My drive here is to point out that legislators do not write legislation. They don?t even read it unless and until it passes. They hire professionals to write legislation. They couldn?t say ?no AR-15? for that would single out a particular business, the Armalite Corporation, which would sue the legislature out of business. It would be the equivalent of banning Maytag washer, which would then suggest they were in the pockets of Whirlpool. Interviews with the legislators after the passage of the ban demonstrated they had no idea what they had just voted on. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 19:14:04 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 15:14:04 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: <008c01d64c95$ca455db0$5ed01910$@rainier66.com> <70B0089D-2FD8-4D63-BDB7-34BFF7CE11CF@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 2:49 PM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> My point about sneering had nothing to do with whether it was deserved > or not, or even whether this is the appropriate place to do it.It's that it > doesn't /work/. It is /counter/-productive.* That depends on what my objective was. I'm not a politician trying to be politically correct and get votes by being hypocritical and pretending to respect people who are not respectable. And I wasn't trying to win the hearts and minds (such as they are) of dimwitted deplorables either. I was trying to communicate with members of this list who are, I presume, not dimwitted deplorables. Hillary told the truth and got into a lot of trouble for doing so, and I agree a good politician should know better than to do anything as foolish as to tell the truth, but I'm not running for office. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 19:35:59 2020 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 12:35:59 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: <014001d64cb3$6a077960$3e166c20$@rainier66.com> References: <014001d64cb3$6a077960$3e166c20$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <28C66CCE-AA1A-4CDE-9AEE-E8555B11BCC5@gmail.com> The guy who stormed the pizza restaurant (Edgar Maddison Welch) and fired shots said so and he went to jail and paid damages over it. See: https://www.forbes.com/sites/fruzsinaeordogh/2016/12/07/with-pizzagate-is-cybersteria-the-new-normal/#1ee527b02b68 This was widely reported at the time. Do you think it was made up? The simplest explanation here seems to be that Welch believed the conspiracy theory. He said so later in court and actually apologized for the incident. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst > On Jun 27, 2020, at 11:55 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat > > > > What is an ?assault rifle? please? > > >?So I guess the most outrageous thing about the entire Pizzagate business is not Hillary Clinton and Bill Gates running a child sex slave ring out of a basement pizza parlor but my use of the term "assault rifle". > > John K Clark > > > Can we prove any of those stories were true? If a guy stormed a Pizza house, can we determine if the Clinton/Gates conspiracy had anything to do with it? If not, why do we bother repeating the conspiracy theory? What if the guy was just nuts? > > Can you define the term assault rifle? Please do. > > There is a reason why I went off on that tangent: lawmakers do not know how to define that term either. They are sure assault rifles are bad, but they cannot distinguish between assault rifles and non-assault rifles. Can you? How? > > spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 27 19:36:41 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 12:36:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: <008c01d64c95$ca455db0$5ed01910$@rainier66.com> <70B0089D-2FD8-4D63-BDB7-34BFF7CE11CF@gmail.com> Message-ID: <018901d64cba$48c61f20$da525d60$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 2:49 PM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat > wrote: > My point about sneering had nothing to do with whether it was deserved or not, or even whether this is the appropriate place to do it.It's that it doesn't /work/. It is /counter/-productive. >?That depends on what my objective was. I'm not a politician trying to be politically correct and get votes by being hypocritical and pretending to respect people who are not respectable. And I wasn't trying to win the hearts and minds (such as they are) of dimwitted deplorables either. I was trying to communicate with members of this list who are, I presume, not dimwitted deplorables. Hillary told the truth and got into a lot of trouble for doing so, and I agree a good politician should know better than to do anything as foolish as to tell the truth, but I'm not running for office. John K Clark Image interviewing for a job, being questioned by a board of four people. In a very true response, you comment ?A quarter of the people on this board are in a basket of deplorables, racist, sexist, homophobic?? If you reveal your honest attitudes, do you suppose you would get that job? As soon as you uttered that comment, all four would shout in unison ?NEXT!? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 19:44:45 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 14:44:45 -0500 Subject: [ExI] legal (?) thievery Message-ID: I ordered an 8" foam mattress from Amazon. Two nights of it gave me a terrible backache, so I told Amazon. They refunded my money and told me to keep the mattress. Health issues, I suppose. Quick and dirty way to get a free mattress. All you have to do is lie about its defectiveness which I did not do. This is not the first time Amazon has told me to keep a product and refunded my money. Sure, if I did it too many times they would catch me if I tried to make a business out of it, but I can see how thieves can just pass this around a group and rip off Amazon big time. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 27 19:53:28 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 12:53:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: <28C66CCE-AA1A-4CDE-9AEE-E8555B11BCC5@gmail.com> References: <014001d64cb3$6a077960$3e166c20$@rainier66.com> <28C66CCE-AA1A-4CDE-9AEE-E8555B11BCC5@gmail.com> Message-ID: <01bd01d64cbc$a0dd2b20$e2978160$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? >?The guy who stormed the pizza restaurant (Edgar Maddison Welch) and fired shots said so and he went to jail and paid damages over it. See: https://www.forbes.com/sites/fruzsinaeordogh/2016/12/07/with-pizzagate-is-cybersteria-the-new-normal/#1ee527b02b68 This was widely reported at the time. Do you think it was made up? The simplest explanation here seems to be that Welch believed the conspiracy theory. He said so later in court and actually apologized for the incident. Regards, Dan Hi Dan, sounds like Welch was just crazy. This was clearly an internet joke that got outta hand. Our world is filled with crazies who believe anything they read. In our world today, even mainstream ?news? sources spew debunked conspiracy theories. Note we heard for over two years that there was some conspiracy involving Russians in our elections. Two years of investigation found nothing. That conspiracy theory still has not died. There are still plenty of people who believe in it. Meanwhile actual high-level conspiracies are mostly ignored or treated as unimportant, such as wrongdoing at the FBI. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 20:36:03 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 16:36:03 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: <014001d64cb3$6a077960$3e166c20$@rainier66.com> References: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> <014001d64cb3$6a077960$3e166c20$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 2:55 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> What if the guy was just nuts?* Hillary Clinton and Bill Gates running a child sex slave ring from the basement of a pizza parlor that has no basement? Of course the guy was nuts! But there are millions of Americans who are almost as nuts and they all voted for the same man in 2016 and they intend to do it again in 2020. *> There is a reason why I went off on that tangent: lawmakers do not know > how to define that term either. They are sure assault rifles are bad, but > they cannot distinguish between assault rifles and non-assault rifles. Can > you? * > For some reason lawmakers got into a tizzy over silly cosmetic differences, but the only thing that matters is that an assault rifle is capable of semi-automatic operation, it's the type of weapon favored by virtually all the infantry soldiers in all the armies of the world since about 1950; before then most military men were satisfied with manually operated bolt action rifles. And before that, at the time when the second amendment was written, soldiers thought muzzle loading smooth bore muskets were good enough to defend a nation or to take over another one. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 20:57:35 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 13:57:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? Message-ID: wrote: > Can we prove any of those stories were true? https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/22/533941689/pizzagate-gunman-sentenced-to-4-years-in-prison https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/comet-pizza-gunman-to-appear-at-plea-deal-hearing-friday-morning/2017/03/23/e12c91ba-0986-11e7-b77c-0047d15a24e0_story.html Depends. Do you consider NPR and The Washington Post to be reliable sources? Incidentally, all this took was "pizza assault rifle basement" as search terms in Google News. > If a guy stormed a Pizza house, can we determine if the Clinton/Gates conspiracy had anything to do with it? This was long before Gates was added. But yes "The unfounded "Pizzagate" Internet rumor at the center of this case accused the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria of being the home of a Satanic child sex abuse ring involving top Democrats such as Hillary Clinton. "Speculation and fabrications tied to the bizarre conspiracy theory have been relentlessly circulated by politically motivated fringe sites," as The Two-Way has reported. "Welch heard about the conspiracy theory last December and spent three days reading about it and watching videos, according to a statement that was part of his plea agreement. He then decided to go investigate the matter himself. "The defendant then took it upon himself to act in what he believed would be a violent confrontation at the restaurant," the statement reads. Welch unsuccessfully attempted to try to persuade friends to join him. He said he believed it would involve "sacraficing [sic] the lives of a few for the lives of many," according to court documents." > If not, why do we bother repeating the conspiracy theory? What if the guy was just nuts? Fortunately, nobody was killed this time. But some people are vulnerable to memes of this class. Timothy McVeigh for example. Both were memeoids, that is people who have been taken over by a meme to the extent that their own survival becomes inconsequential. Examples include kamikazes, suicide bombers, and cult members who commit mass suicide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics#Terminology Keith From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 27 21:14:54 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 14:14:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> <014001d64cb3$6a077960$3e166c20$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <004401d64cc8$010c1eb0$03245c10$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? > There is a reason why I went off on that tangent: lawmakers do not know how to define that term either. They are sure assault rifles are bad, but they cannot distinguish between assault rifles and non-assault rifles. Can you? >?For some reason lawmakers got into a tizzy over silly cosmetic differences, but the only thing that matters is that an assault rifle is capable of semi-automatic operation? John K Clark I know the reason: they can?t just ban semi-autos because most rifles sold today are semi-autos. They can?t just say all firearms except muzzle-loading smooth-bores are banned, they can?t say they wish to ban semi-autos. They can?t just come right out and say it. A few will do it, but that?s the end of that political career. Lawmakers do not write the bills they present. They don?t even read them. That is how we get comments such as ??we must hurry and pass this bill so we can find out what?s in it?? They honestly do not know what is in there. They hire experts in legalese to design those bills. Lawmakers decide on how they will vote based on who is voting for and who is voting against. Result: we get absurdities such as ?assault weapon? bans in which there are only cosmetic and ergonomic descriptions to define what is banned, rather than functional ones. The legislators appear to be passing laws to discriminate against those with physical handicaps that the ergonomic features could help alleviate. This would appear to violate the Americans With Disabilities Act. John I do encourage you to form a political party and run on the platform of banning semi-automatic firearms. Make very clear exactly your party?s position on that. Make sure to campaign in places like Seattle, where anarchists have seized entire city blocks. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 21:49:47 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 17:49:47 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Wall Message-ID: Maybe Mexico will pay for the wall after all, they might want it to keep Americans from escaping into Mexico. The Per capita infection of COVID-19 is vastly larger in the USA than in Mexico, and larger than in most other countries too. So Canada might want to start thinking about building a wall of their own. Total confirmed cases of COVID-19 per million people John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 22:02:01 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 17:02:01 -0500 Subject: [ExI] legal (?) thievery In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <695A2641-1491-486E-96B2-F8DADF36997B@gmail.com> I thought we were gonna talk about Civil Forfeiture. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States SR Ballard > On Jun 27, 2020, at 2:44 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > I ordered an 8" foam mattress from Amazon. Two nights of it gave me a terrible backache, so I told Amazon. > > They refunded my money and told me to keep the mattress. Health issues, I suppose. > > Quick and dirty way to get a free mattress. All you have to do is lie about its defectiveness which I did not do. This is not the first time Amazon has told me to keep a product and refunded my money. Sure, if I did it too many times they would catch me if I tried to make a business out of it, but I can see how thieves can just pass this around a group and rip off Amazon big time. > > bill w > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 27 22:10:55 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 15:10:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Wall In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <007101d64ccf$d47cfab0$7d76f010$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: [ExI] The Wall >?Maybe Mexico will pay for the wall after all, they might want it to keep Americans from escaping into Mexico? Illegal immigration into Mexico is way more serious than illegal immigration into the USA. >? The Per capita infection of COVID-19 is vastly larger in the USA than in Mexico, and larger than in most other countries too. So Canada might want to start thinking about building a wall of their own. Total confirmed cases of COVID-19 per million people John K Clark https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ Here?s one that doesn?t depend as much on testing rates. USA is big number 9 if we go by death rates per capita. If we could treat New York City as its own country, USA falls to number 26 in deaths per capita, and New York City moves into first place. Oh wait, never mind, that data is from 13 minutes ago, disregard, outdated. Had New York City merely enforced their borders, they could have been completely covid-free today. spike * # Country, Other Total Cases New Cases Total Deaths New Deaths Total Recovered Active Cases Serious, Critical Tot Cases/ 1M pop Deaths/ 1M pop Total Tests Tests/ 1M pop Population 1 San Marino 698 42 656 0 20,572 1,238 5,669 167,079 33,930 2 Belgium 61,209 +103 9,732 +1 16,941 34,536 35 5,282 840 1,191,959 102,852 11,589,102 3 Andorra 855 52 799 4 11,066 673 3,750 48,535 77,264 4 UK 310,250 +890 43,514 +100 N/A N/A 276 4,570 641 9,067,577 133,578 67,882,162 5 Spain 295,549 +564 28,341 +3 N/A N/A 617 6,321 606 5,162,909 110,426 46,754,627 6 Italy 240,136 +175 34,716 +8 188,584 16,836 97 3,972 574 5,277,273 87,282 60,462,488 7 Sweden 65,137 5,280 N/A N/A 171 6,450 523 444,607 44,027 10,098,554 8 France 162,936 29,778 75,649 57,509 634 2,496 456 1,384,633 21,213 65,272,172 9 USA 2,590,266 +37,310 128,108 +468 1,078,326 1,383,832 15,775 7,826 387 31,940,793 96,503 330,981,104 10 Netherlands 50,074 +69 6,105 +2 N/A N/A 29 2,922 356 577,437 33,700 17,134,521 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 22:13:18 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 17:13:18 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: <017101d64cb6$a846cf20$f8d46d60$@rainier66.com> References: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> <007701d64c9f$cebbe620$6c33b260$@rainier66.com> <017101d64cb6$a846cf20$f8d46d60$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <860161EE-DE32-44B8-B8E5-F59207965A20@gmail.com> Spike, you keep ?debunking? me by saying that things are accessories or not accessories. However, by doing that you ignore the fact that *I* am not disagreeing with you, merely describing the facts as I see them. For many non-educated on gun topics, an ?accessory? is an indispensable part of the ?gun?. I bet money that if you showed someone who wants to ban ?assault rifles? an AR-15 with a black stock and a scope on it, and another one with a wood stock and no scope, they would label one as an ?assault rifle? and the other as fine, as long as you don?t tell people they?re both AR-15s. People have an emotional fear of ?assault rifles?, due to school and workplace shootings, not data. I believe the data would indicate that the majority of firearm violence in the US is perpetrated using pistols/handguns. SR Ballard > On Jun 27, 2020, at 2:10 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > > On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat > Subject: Re: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? > > > >?These features seem to be ?assault?: > > OK thanks SR, we can run with this ball. > > The legislation was aimed at the most popular rifle sold in America today, the AR-15. When the California assault rifle ban legislation came out it was clear enough they were trying to describe the AR-15. If so, let us look at the list: > > >?- black > > Many AR-15s are black, but they don?t need to be. Many non-AR-15s are black, but are not the target of the legislation. In our world today, they definitely do not want to issue a blanket ban on black. > > >?- plastic stick > > I think you meant stock, but the AR-15 doesn?t necessarily have a plastic stock. The stock on those is an accessory. > > >?- camo pattern > > Ja, it might have that or might not. How you paint your rifle is your own business. > > >?- scope > > Any rifle might or might not have one. My aged .22 rimfire bolt action has one. A scope is an accessory. > > >?- magazine higher than 20 > > Another accessory. > > >?- fully automatic > > Those are functionally illegal. You can get one legally if you are rich and patient. > > >?- calibers above .308 > > Ja, that doesn?t apply to the real target, the AR-15 which is a .223 caliber. > > >?- side feeding > > Sure. Those are ammo-belt style used in larger caliber fixed placement systems, quite rare for amateurs, for you could fire thru a hundred bucks worth of ammo in a few seconds. > > >?- hollow point > > That is a feature of the ammo, not the rifle. > > > https://www.usa-gun-shop.com/6-best-50-bmg-rifles-for-sale-in-2019/ > > >?Please note that in the term ?assault rifle? assault means ?tactical?, or ?reminiscent of military equipment?, rather than referring to to the crime ?assault/battery?. > > SR Ballard > > I am with you there. The legislators were looking for ways to talk around their real intent, which is to attack the industry at its most popular point. > > My drive here is to point out that legislators do not write legislation. They don?t even read it unless and until it passes. They hire professionals to write legislation. > > They couldn?t say ?no AR-15? for that would single out a particular business, the Armalite Corporation, which would sue the legislature out of business. It would be the equivalent of banning Maytag washer, which would then suggest they were in the pockets of Whirlpool. > > Interviews with the legislators after the passage of the ban demonstrated they had no idea what they had just voted on. > > spike > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 22:43:07 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 17:43:07 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The Wall In-Reply-To: <007101d64ccf$d47cfab0$7d76f010$@rainier66.com> References: <007101d64ccf$d47cfab0$7d76f010$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Had New York City merely enforced their borders, they could have been completely covid-free today. spike tell me the logic of that, please bill w On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 5:12 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *John Clark via extropy-chat > *Subject:* [ExI] The Wall > > > > >?Maybe Mexico will pay for the wall after all, they might want it to keep > Americans from escaping into Mexico? > > > > Illegal immigration into Mexico is way more serious than illegal > immigration into the USA. > > > > > > >? The Per capita infection of COVID-19 is vastly larger in the USA than > in Mexico, and larger than in most other countries too. So Canada might > want to start thinking about building a wall of their own. > > > > Total confirmed cases of COVID-19 per million people > > > > > John K Clark > > > > > > > > > > https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ > > > > Here?s one that doesn?t depend as much on testing rates. USA is big > number 9 if we go by death rates per capita. > > > > If we could treat New York City as its own country, USA falls to number 26 > in deaths per capita, and New York City moves into first place. > > > > Oh wait, never mind, that data is from 13 minutes ago, disregard, outdated. > > > > Had New York City merely enforced their borders, they could have been > completely covid-free today. > > > > spike > > > > > > - > > *#* > > > *Country,Other* > > > *TotalCases* > > > *NewCases* > > > *TotalDeaths* > > > *NewDeaths* > > > *TotalRecovered* > > > *ActiveCases* > > > *Serious,Critical* > > > *Tot Cases/1M pop* > > > *Deaths/1M pop* > > > *TotalTests* > > > *Tests/1M pop* > > *Population* > > 1 > > *San Marino > * > > *698* > > *42* > > *656* > > *0* > > *20,572* > > *1,238* > > *5,669* > > *167,079* > > *33,930 > * > > 2 > > *Belgium * > > *61,209* > > *+103* > > *9,732* > > *+1* > > *16,941* > > *34,536* > > *35* > > *5,282* > > *840* > > *1,191,959* > > *102,852* > > *11,589,102 > * > > 3 > > *Andorra * > > *855* > > *52* > > *799* > > *4* > > *11,066* > > *673* > > *3,750* > > *48,535* > > *77,264 > * > > 4 > > *UK * > > *310,250* > > *+890* > > *43,514* > > *+100* > > *N/A* > > *N/A* > > *276* > > *4,570* > > *641* > > *9,067,577* > > *133,578* > > *67,882,162 > * > > 5 > > *Spain * > > *295,549* > > *+564* > > *28,341* > > *+3* > > *N/A* > > *N/A* > > *617* > > *6,321* > > *606* > > *5,162,909* > > *110,426* > > *46,754,627 > * > > 6 > > *Italy * > > *240,136* > > *+175* > > *34,716* > > *+8* > > *188,584* > > *16,836* > > *97* > > *3,972* > > *574* > > *5,277,273* > > *87,282* > > *60,462,488 > * > > 7 > > *Sweden * > > *65,137* > > *5,280* > > *N/A* > > *N/A* > > *171* > > *6,450* > > *523* > > *444,607* > > *44,027* > > *10,098,554 > * > > 8 > > *France * > > *162,936* > > *29,778* > > *75,649* > > *57,509* > > *634* > > *2,496* > > *456* > > *1,384,633* > > *21,213* > > *65,272,172 > * > > 9 > > *USA * > > *2,590,266* > > *+37,310* > > *128,108* > > *+468* > > *1,078,326* > > *1,383,832* > > *15,775* > > *7,826* > > *387* > > *31,940,793* > > *96,503* > > *330,981,104 > * > > 10 > > *Netherlands > * > > *50,074* > > *+69* > > *6,105* > > *+2* > > *N/A* > > *N/A* > > *29* > > *2,922* > > *356* > > *577,437* > > *33,700* > > *17,134,521 > * > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 27 22:48:59 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 15:48:59 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: <860161EE-DE32-44B8-B8E5-F59207965A20@gmail.com> References: <007f01d64c95$3bf924b0$b3eb6e10$@rainier66.com> <007701d64c9f$cebbe620$6c33b260$@rainier66.com> <017101d64cb6$a846cf20$f8d46d60$@rainier66.com> <860161EE-DE32-44B8-B8E5-F59207965A20@gmail.com> Message-ID: <009401d64cd5$25d21bc0$71765340$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? >?Spike, you keep ?debunking? me by saying that things are accessories or not accessories. However, by doing that you ignore the fact that *I* am not disagreeing with you, merely describing the facts as I see them. For many non-educated on gun topics, an ?accessory? is an indispensable part of the ?gun?. I bet money that if you showed someone who wants to ban ?assault rifles? an AR-15 with a black stock and a scope on it, and another one with a wood stock and no scope, they would label one as an ?assault rifle? and the other as fine, as long as you don?t tell people they?re both AR-15s. People have an emotional fear of ?assault rifles?, due to school and workplace shootings, not data. I believe the data would indicate that the majority of firearm violence in the US is perpetrated using pistols/handguns. SR Ballard Hi SR, my intention is not to debunk you for you are right on, and one who comes across as someone who knows the topic, certainly better than the people making law on the subject. By far most crime, violence, workplace shootings, school shootings, mass murder, all of the bad stuff is done with handguns, for a very clear reason: they can be hidden under clothing. So, just ban handguns, crime goes away, magic. Or rather it would go away if criminals paid any attention to laws. Yet our helpful legislators never just propose banning handguns. They choose to ban something which doesn?t solve anything because it isn?t the weapons used in crime. We can go one step further: the ban on the AR-15 is sexist in a way, because it is by far the most popular rifle with women (other than the ubiquitous .22 rimfire.) The reason for this is clear to me: they kick a lot less than their larger bore counterparts. The adjustable stock allows the smaller shooter to set it up comfortably, the ammo costs less than the larger bore counterpart, everything is smaller and lighter. But we can go one step further and ask if there are any reasons why the AR-15 is specifically popular with the teenage female shooter, and I have an answer for that one. If a teenage girl dreams of joining the marines or Navy Seals or any special forces ground assault team, perhaps the best combat job would be sharpshooter, for the sharpshooters stay back in safer zones to cover her comrades. In order to qualify for that job a candidate must already be an expert marksman right up front, in order to win the competitions. So? she takes up the sport in her young teens. As with any sport, if one starts young, one gets way better than those who take it up later. She turns 18, joins Marines already an expert markman perhaps with competition medals already around her neck, she wins competition, gets chosen for sharpshooter school, soon has three stripes on the sleeve, has a good career, retires at age 38 with a pension and plenty of time to take up something else. SR, my apologies if I came across as disagreeing with anything you wrote. That was not my intention. spike On Jun 27, 2020, at 2:10 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: > On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? >?These features seem to be ?assault?: OK thanks SR, we can run with this ball. The legislation was aimed at the most popular rifle sold in America today, the AR-15. When the California assault rifle ban legislation came out it was clear enough they were trying to describe the AR-15. If so, let us look at the list: >?- black Many AR-15s are black, but they don?t need to be. Many non-AR-15s are black, but are not the target of the legislation. In our world today, they definitely do not want to issue a blanket ban on black. >?- plastic stick I think you meant stock, but the AR-15 doesn?t necessarily have a plastic stock. The stock on those is an accessory. >?- camo pattern Ja, it might have that or might not. How you paint your rifle is your own business. >?- scope Any rifle might or might not have one. My aged .22 rimfire bolt action has one. A scope is an accessory. >?- magazine higher than 20 Another accessory. >?- fully automatic Those are functionally illegal. You can get one legally if you are rich and patient. >?- calibers above .308 Ja, that doesn?t apply to the real target, the AR-15 which is a .223 caliber. >?- side feeding Sure. Those are ammo-belt style used in larger caliber fixed placement systems, quite rare for amateurs, for you could fire thru a hundred bucks worth of ammo in a few seconds. >?- hollow point That is a feature of the ammo, not the rifle. https://www.usa-gun-shop.com/6-best-50-bmg-rifles-for-sale-in-2019/ >?Please note that in the term ?assault rifle? assault means ?tactical?, or ?reminiscent of military equipment?, rather than referring to to the crime ?assault/battery?. SR Ballard I am with you there. The legislators were looking for ways to talk around their real intent, which is to attack the industry at its most popular point. My drive here is to point out that legislators do not write legislation. They don?t even read it unless and until it passes. They hire professionals to write legislation. They couldn?t say ?no AR-15? for that would single out a particular business, the Armalite Corporation, which would sue the legislature out of business. It would be the equivalent of banning Maytag washer, which would then suggest they were in the pockets of Whirlpool. Interviews with the legislators after the passage of the ban demonstrated they had no idea what they had just voted on. spike _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 27 22:51:01 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 18:51:01 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Wall Message-ID: spike jones Wrote: > *USA is big number 9 if we go by death rates per capita.* Given the recent explosively huge COVID-19 Infection rate spike I think there is little to no chance of that number remaining as low as 9 for long. *> If we could treat New York City as its own country, USA falls to number > 26 in deaths per capita, * And if we had some cream we could have strawberries and cream .... if we had some strawberries. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sat Jun 27 22:55:47 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 15:55:47 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Wall In-Reply-To: References: <007101d64ccf$d47cfab0$7d76f010$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00ab01d64cd6$19319340$4b94b9c0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] The Wall >>?Had New York City merely enforced their borders, they could have been completely covid-free today. >?spike tell me the logic of that, please bill w BillW, there are no borders around New York City. The USA has no effective borders either, none that are rigorously enforced. USians travel all over the planet and were there already with the virus broke free in China. Obviously there is no way to prevent them from returning home. Anything that evolves anywhere on Earth will come to the USA (and everywhere else too) and there is not one thing we can do to stop it, not one damn thing. New York, well, they could have prevented some of the fatalities by not sending covid patients into nursing homes. That was insanity bordering on criminal malice. But they can?t keep it out. No state can keep it out, and no economy can stay locked down indefinitely. This current nightmare will happen again and again, with similar results next time, possibly worse, because we have an ageing population. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sun Jun 28 02:16:53 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 19:16:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? Message-ID: wrote: snip > As with any sport, if one starts young, one gets way better than those who take it up later. That's not the case. Marksmanship is largely genetic, how well you can shoot depends on how much you shake and that is dependent on properties of your nervous system. If you don't have a steady hand, it doesn't matter how young you start. > She turns 18, joins Marines already an expert markman perhaps with competition medals already around her neck, she wins competition, gets chosen for sharpshooter school, soon has three stripes on the sleeve, has a good career, retires at age 38 with a pension and plenty of time to take up something else. Spike, this scenario sounds unlikely in the extreme. Are there any examples you can locate about a female sharpshooter in the military? Those guys *DO NOT* use the AR-15. I think they are more likely to use a 50 caliber than even a 30.06. Keith From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 28 02:30:01 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 19:30:01 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <003301d64cf4$06832ec0$13898c40$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of Keith Henson via extropy-chat >> She turns 18, joins Marines already an expert markman perhaps with competition medals already around her neck, she wins competition, gets chosen for sharpshooter school, soon has three stripes on the sleeve, has a good career, retires at age 38 with a pension and plenty of time to take up something else. >...Spike, this scenario sounds unlikely in the extreme. Are there any examples you can locate about a female sharpshooter in the military? Here ya go Keith: https://connectingvets.radio.com/articles/first-woman-to-graduate-special-fo rces-training#:~:text=Among%20the%20students%20expected%20to,at%20the%20Spec ial%20Warfare%20Center. >...Those guys *DO NOT* use the AR-15. I think they are more likely to use a 50 caliber than even a 30.06. Keith They qualify for sharpshooter school by competing using the M-16 which is an AR-15 with a setting to go to full automatic. spike From avant at sollegro.com Sun Jun 28 04:13:07 2020 From: avant at sollegro.com (Stuart LaForge) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 21:13:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? Message-ID: <20200627211307.Horde.H4vZ3E32M0316aYhSxxtNPw@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Quoting Spike: >> There is a reason why I went off on that tangent: lawmakers do not >> know how to define that term either. They are sure assault rifles >> are bad, but they cannot distinguish between assault rifles and >> non-assault rifles. Can you? How? In the military parlance, an assault rifle is generally considered to be a gas-operated, magazine-fed, automatic rifle of medium range, small to medium caliber, and light weight capable of being carried and served with a full complement of ammunition by an individual infantryman. Machine guns, on the other hand, are generally belt-fed large-caliber crew-served automatic rifles often mounted on tripods or bipods needing at least two infantrymen to transport with ammunition and generally used to defend positions rather than during a mobile assault. That being said, when dealing with politicians rather than military, the term of art seems to be "assault weapon" which is certainly more nebulous and arbitrary. Of course these are the same lawyers and politicians that classify tomatoes as vegetables for bizarre purposes related to taxation despite the fact that they are scientifically fruit. Of course who cares about facts anymore in this age of emotionally-driven identity-politics? Stuart LaForge From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 28 04:32:19 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 21:32:19 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: <20200627211307.Horde.H4vZ3E32M0316aYhSxxtNPw@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> References: <20200627211307.Horde.H4vZ3E32M0316aYhSxxtNPw@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Message-ID: <001b01d64d05$1c5eabf0$551c03d0$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat >...That being said, when dealing with politicians rather than military, the term of art seems to be "assault weapon" which is certainly more nebulous and arbitrary. Of course these are the same lawyers and politicians that classify tomatoes as vegetables for bizarre purposes related to taxation despite the fact that they are scientifically fruit. Of course who cares about facts anymore in this age of emotionally-driven identity-politics? Stuart LaForge _______________________________________________ Stuart, I have a little fun with it. I suggest to people with strong feelings on the matter to take a list of the 10 most popular selling long guns (never mind handguns for now) and put a rating, one number on assaultiness, or assaultiety, a factor, call it K sub a. It can be a function of how much fear it strikes in the onlooker, or some function of what type of stock it has, whatever you want. SR made a good point: you can show a lot of people the same rifle, one with an adjustable stock, the other with the old time wooden stock, the adjustable ergonomic one looks scarier, so it gets a higher K sub a. Make a list, assign Ka to each, now sort the list by L.a assaultfulness. Now draw a line somewhere on that list dividing the assault rifles from the non-assault rifles. Repeat with someone else. Compare the lists and where the line is drawn, if there is a line drawn. If I do that exercise, there will be no line, because none of the top ten most popular models sold today are assault rifles. Assault rifles are so rare that the casual hobby shooter can live a long life and never see one. California's assault weapons ban expired after a few years. It had zero measurable impact on crime. Of course now they want to try it again. spike From avant at sollegro.com Sun Jun 28 05:40:22 2020 From: avant at sollegro.com (Stuart LaForge) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 22:40:22 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20200627224022.Horde.bQy9bA5r_S7kb8A23jcIbrQ@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Quoting Keith Henson: > The guy who went into the pizza restaurant with a weapon was far out > on the bell curve, but not entirely atypical. > > The Russian bots may be amplifying this "social movement" but why now? Because Putin is smart and wants to destroy liberal democracy wherever it exists in the world. We are struggling with a pandemic and civil unrest at the moment and are therefore vulnerable. Note that in addition he has been putting a bounty on American scalps in Afghanistan. The man is playing the game of thrones for keeps and his timing is ruthlessly rational and deliberate. The more chaos and confusion, fear and violence that he can sow right now, the likelier that the U.S. will collapse on its own and become a bunch of Balkanized banana republics. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/12/russia-liberal-democracy/510011/ And like I said, it is not just the United States. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48795764 When it comes to Bond villainy, Elon is positively benign and wholesome compared Vladimir. Stuart LaForge From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Jun 28 10:45:38 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2020 06:45:38 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: <20200627224022.Horde.bQy9bA5r_S7kb8A23jcIbrQ@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> References: <20200627224022.Horde.bQy9bA5r_S7kb8A23jcIbrQ@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 1:43 AM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: Quoting Keith Henson: >> * > The Russian bots may be amplifying this "social movement" but why >> now?* > > > > Because Putin is smart and wants to destroy liberal democracy wherever > it exists in the world. Yes, but also because Putin wants to keep his puppet stooge in power for at least the next 4 years, and after that Don Junior could take over and start a dynasty. > * > When it comes to Bond villainy, Elon is positively benign > and wholesome compared Vladimir.* I agree, the only living dictator who could beat Vladimir in the pure villainy department would be Kim Jong-un, the guy POTUS said he had "fell in love" with. I wouldn't trust Xi Jinping further that I could throw him and he violently opposes giving the Chinese people any of the freedoms we take for granted in the USA, but at least he's economically competent and has given them economic prosperity which is unusual for a dictator. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sun Jun 28 19:58:52 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2020 14:58:52 -0500 Subject: [ExI] just a idea Message-ID: I wonder what would be the reactions if they had changed Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima to white. Not trying to be funny here. ------------------ I wondered when it would happen -it just had to - Washington and Jefferson monuments go down. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Sun Jun 28 22:57:30 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2020 15:57:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] classic material fail Message-ID: <002401d64d9f$80fc3740$82f4a5c0$@rainier66.com> The engineering types among us will recognize the classic material failure mode in the image below. I installed shelves in my house about 25 years ago. The top shelf was grossly overloaded (and I knew it (but hoped for the best.)) Yesterday it failed catastrophically, bringing down the shelf which took out the shelf below it. This is the primary failure mode, a classic stress concentration serial fail: metal close to its yield strength will have its covalent bonds give up one after another until one day BOOM. The metal thickness is about 1.5 mm and length of rupture about 6 mm. Just for fun I calculated how many covalent bonds were giving up per second. I calculated about half a million failed bonds per second, day and night for most of my adult life. Since the other side (not visible in this image) also had a similar failure, I could say a million covalent bonds broke every second for a quarter of a century. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 17234 bytes Desc: not available URL: From avant at sollegro.com Mon Jun 29 02:27:20 2020 From: avant at sollegro.com (Stuart LaForge) Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2020 19:27:20 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? Message-ID: <20200628192720.Horde.o9SL4g8UBTv7dHXkhz4yKRS@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> https://www.embopress.org/doi/10.15252/emmm.202012481?fbclid=IwAR3YClOFxx3Vy6hOD0VqLCynrTxRQxrUigVvLfMhkxRqHPxST9VdEhGWSlk& --------------Excerpt------------------------------------------ Despite early exposure, its dense and aging population, and little social distancing measures, Japan reports low infection and low death from COVID?19. Here, we speculate on and discuss the possible reasons that may account for this anomaly. There is a lot of interest brewing as to why Japan has such low numbers of confirmed infected cases of the COVID?19 disease, caused by the SARS?CoV?2 virus (Fig 1), despite its high population density (over 6,100 persons/sqkm in Tokyo, 2.4 times higher than New York City) and large percentage of high?risk individuals over 65 years of age (about 26%, compared with 15% in the USA). In Singapore and Hong Kong, rapid and strict quarantine rules and contact tracing have helped to ?flatten the curve?. In South Korea, mass testing and quarantine measures appear to have reduced the rate of new cases. However, Japan has not engaged in expansive testing, contact tracing, or strict quarantine measures and yet is reporting a slow growth rate of infected persons and a death rate that is currently just 1/10th of world average. It is difficult to make direct comparison of infection rates, because the number of tests per capita varies dramatically between countries. However, this low death rate cannot be simply explained by lack of testing or reporting, as no surge in death from respiratory syndromes has been reported either. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Is it due to differences in the prevalence of underlying conditions? This one has me stumped. Stuart LaForge From sen.otaku at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 03:20:54 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2020 22:20:54 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: <20200628192720.Horde.o9SL4g8UBTv7dHXkhz4yKRS@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> References: <20200628192720.Horde.o9SL4g8UBTv7dHXkhz4yKRS@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Message-ID: <6D2D891E-6234-4A78-BE18-42C24D84CEDA@gmail.com> Well, there are some differences: - masks are more than socially acceptable, they are socially required in this situation. They are also used to wearing masks and thus wear them correctly. I have only on a very, very few occasions seen a Japanese person with their nose outside their mask. - dramatically lower obesity and diabetes levels. Also dramatically more exercise - in general, Japanese do not touch things Americans touch. (I have only lived in these two countries so that?s my frame of reference.) I have never seen a Japanese person touch a windowpane, either purposely or incidentally. One hardly ever sees fingerprints outside of tourist areas. Japanese people are significantly less likely to touch railings when walking up and down stairs, or when riding escalators than Americans. They are more likely to take stairs or escalators as compared to elevators. This reduces touching (buttons) and an enclosed breathing environment. When they shop they are not likely to touch multiple products or look at the information without buying that product. They are also less likely to ?decide against? purchasing a product they have already put in their basket. The do not tend to touch walls, door frames, ledges, or other railings as often. They do not lean on or touch furniture as often. Many things can be done ?hands-free?, such as using an IC card for the train, grocery store, or restaurant. Where IC cards are accepted, it is completely contactless, no pin or button pressing required. Service workers wearing gloves, in at least some sectors, is normal. My grocery store in Japan had all the cashiers wearing gloves in 2018. For other professions, like train attendants or policemen fabric gloves are either required or possible. It?s not, seemingly, as ?weird?. In many shopping centers, doors are either automatic or just... not there. Sometimes you do open doors, obviously, but I would say a place like my restaurant in Japan would have automatic doors or an open doorway rather than the ?two doors with a tiny useless foyer? thing which is very common in US restaurants. I never saw this in Japan. Perhaps it is a leftover from coat-check, or to save on cooling/heating bills. These ?airlocks? are found in basically every single US store or shopping center, in public libraries, government buildings, some schools. This doubles door touching AND collects stagnant, covid-filled air. - Different interaction style. While Japanese people are often forced to sit closer to each other due to the size of rooms and buildings, that?s not their general preference. The level of physical touching among friends is a bit lower but also a different type. People seem unlikely to touch each other?s skin, generally. Friends don?t tend to ?pal around? or ?horseplay?. Couples rarely hold hands or kiss in public. I witnessed 0 Japanese people hugging other Japanese people in the 3 months I lived there. I?m 100% sure it happens but the ?hug to say hi? thing... it?s not a thing. No cheek kissing either. And the mouth kissing thing my family does? Even less of a thing. Like negative a thing. SR Ballard > On Jun 28, 2020, at 9:27 PM, Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat wrote: > > > https://www.embopress.org/doi/10.15252/emmm.202012481?fbclid=IwAR3YClOFxx3Vy6hOD0VqLCynrTxRQxrUigVvLfMhkxRqHPxST9VdEhGWSlk& > > --------------Excerpt------------------------------------------ > Despite early exposure, its dense and aging population, and little social distancing measures, Japan reports low infection and low death from COVID?19. Here, we speculate on and discuss the possible reasons that may account for this anomaly. > > There is a lot of interest brewing as to why Japan has such low numbers of confirmed infected cases of the COVID?19 disease, caused by the SARS?CoV?2 virus (Fig 1), despite its high population density (over 6,100 persons/sqkm in Tokyo, 2.4 times higher than New York City) and large percentage of high?risk individuals over 65 years of age (about 26%, compared with 15% in the USA). In Singapore and Hong Kong, rapid and strict quarantine rules and contact tracing have helped to ?flatten the curve?. In South Korea, mass testing and quarantine measures appear to have reduced the rate of new cases. However, Japan has not engaged in expansive testing, contact tracing, or strict quarantine measures and yet is reporting a slow growth rate of infected persons and a death rate that is currently just 1/10th of world average. It is difficult to make direct comparison of infection rates, because the number of tests per capita varies dramatically between countries. However, this low death rate cannot be simply explained by lack of testing or reporting, as no surge in death from respiratory syndromes has been reported either. > ------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Is it due to differences in the prevalence of underlying conditions? This one has me stumped. > > Stuart LaForge > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 10:51:09 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 06:51:09 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: <6D2D891E-6234-4A78-BE18-42C24D84CEDA@gmail.com> References: <20200628192720.Horde.o9SL4g8UBTv7dHXkhz4yKRS@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> <6D2D891E-6234-4A78-BE18-42C24D84CEDA@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 11:23 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > *> Well, there are some differences: - masks are more than socially > acceptable, they are socially required in this situation. * And the USA is the only country in the world In which wearing a virus preventing mask has become part of the culture wars, and is the only country in which the president makes a point of not setting an example and never being photographed wearing one because he thinks everything is about him and wearing such a medical mask is a political statement of disapproval of him personally. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 11:07:22 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 07:07:22 -0400 Subject: [ExI] just a idea In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 4:02 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I wonder what would be the reactions if they had changed Uncle Ben and > Aunt Jemima to white. > I wonder what the reaction would be if they remade the movie Gone With The Wind with an all black cast except for three or four sweet but stupid white submissive slaves used for comic relief. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 12:51:53 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 07:51:53 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: References: <20200628192720.Horde.o9SL4g8UBTv7dHXkhz4yKRS@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> <6D2D891E-6234-4A78-BE18-42C24D84CEDA@gmail.com> Message-ID: Well, the government handling has been different John, but in general Japan has been been hands off. SR Ballard > On Jun 29, 2020, at 5:51 AM, John Clark via extropy-chat wrote: > >> On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 11:23 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> > Well, there are some differences: >> - masks are more than socially acceptable, they are socially required in this situation. > > And the USA is the only country in the world In which wearing a virus preventing mask has become part of the culture wars, and is the only country in which the president makes a point of not setting an example and never being photographed wearing one because he thinks everything is about him and wearing such a medical mask is a political statement of disapproval of him personally. > > John K Clark > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 16:35:33 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 09:35:33 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? Message-ID: wrote: snip >>...Spike, this scenario sounds unlikely in the extreme. Are there any examples you can locate about a female sharpshooter in the military? > Here ya go Keith: https://connectingvets.radio.com/articles/first-woman-to-graduate-special-fo rces-training#:~:text=Among%20the%20students%20expected%20to,at%20the%20Spec ial%20Warfare%20Center. The ver;y first female Green Beret, 11 days ago. Not strange that I didn't know about it. But the article does not say anything about her being a sniper or a sharpshooter. Though to have gotten this far, I am sure she is a reasonable marksman (markswoman?). >>...Those guys *DO NOT* use the AR-15. I think they are more likely to use a 50 caliber than even a 30.06. Keith > They qualify for sharpshooter school by competing using the M-16 which is an AR-15 with a setting to go to full automatic. Incidentally, full auto is the opposite of sharpshooting. If you are using it, you are spraying bullets in a general direction, not aiming. It's still an unlikely career path, perhaps 1/100th the chances of a high school football player getting into the NFL. Keith From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 16:59:44 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 09:59:44 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Russians bots at work again? Message-ID: Stuart LaForge wrote: Quoting Keith Henson: >> The guy who went into the pizza restaurant with a weapon was far out >> on the bell curve, but not entirely atypical. > >> The Russian bots may be amplifying this "social movement" but why now? > Because Putin is smart and wants to destroy liberal democracy wherever it exists in the world. We are struggling with a pandemic and civil unrest at the moment and are therefore vulnerable. Note that in addition he has been putting a bounty on American scalps in Afghanistan. The man is playing the game of thrones for keeps and his timing is ruthlessly rational and deliberate. The more chaos and confusion, fear and violence that he can sow right now, the likelier that the U.S. will collapse on its own and become a bunch of Balkanized banana republics. That, I suppose, is possible. However, the last time an industrialized democracy (Germany) came to the brink of collapse, the results were not favorable to Russia. It is said that democracies don't start wars. However, a population under resource stress may switch to an authoritarian government, and they do start wars. Keith From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 17:14:42 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 12:14:42 -0500 Subject: [ExI] just a idea In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: They remade the Wizard of Oz, didn't they? The Wiz. Somehow I missed it. bill w On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 6:10 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 4:02 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > I wonder what would be the reactions if they had changed Uncle Ben and >> Aunt Jemima to white. >> > > I wonder what the reaction would be if they remade the movie Gone With The > Wind with an all black cast except for three or four sweet but stupid white > submissive slaves used for comic relief. > > John K Clark > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 29 17:32:56 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 10:32:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] green berette, was: RE: Russians bots at work again? Message-ID: <00f001d64e3b$542116e0$fc6344a0$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Keith Henson via extropy-chat >...The very first female Green Beret, 11 days ago. Not strange that I didn't know about it. But the article does not say anything about her being a sniper or a sharpshooter. Though to have gotten this far, I am sure she is a reasonable marksman (markswoman?)... Ja, the green berets are elite troops. There is no getting into that unless one is an expert marks-human and a super-athlete, an expert at all military tactics. I applaud this young lady: she must be one hell of an athlete, smart as a whip, good at everything they make these fellers do. >...It's still an unlikely career path, perhaps 1/100th the chances of a high school football player getting into the NFL... Keith Certainly that. I often think of that when I see the local high school football teams bashing their brains to inert jelly, many with dreams of scholarships or the big leagues, when only a very few can get that far. Another one is women's gymnastics. Look at how dangerous are those sports, and imagine the trail of broken bodies leading to the Olympics, where you see the elite of the elite, many of whom already have permanent damage to their bodies by the time they are too old (which is about 20 for women's gymnastics.) Consider pole vaulting, sheesh, the best guys are going way up there higher than the length of the pole. That is the coolest sport to watch, if one can overcome the guilt, knowing that for every Olympian, there is likely half a dozen proles who injured themselves in trying to get there. I was watching when some guy took one to the southern boys a few years back, owwwwww. By watching those dangerous sports, we sell ads and make money for the agencies which cover the sports, which encourages young people to take up recreational danger. If they get injured, we spectators are indirectly responsible. I repent in advance, then watch them anyway. Conclusion: unlikely career paths do little to deter young people. It might deter their parents, but young people dream big. They get injured, it's partially our fault, damn. spike From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 29 17:33:59 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 10:33:59 -0700 Subject: [ExI] competition markshumanship Message-ID: <00f101d64e3b$79797bd0$6c6c7370$@rainier66.com> Keith, regarding women's marksmanship, in 2016 the first Olympic gold was awarded to Ginny Thrasher, a West Virginian and distant cousin to me. When you commented about marksmanship being largely a talent rather than a skill honed over years of practice, I was reminded that Ginny had only taken up the sport about a year before. Your comment about marksmanship being as much an innate talent as an acquired skill has the ring of truth. Supporting detail available. Think about this: every sport has men's and women's divisions, even stuff you would not think would need them, such as chess. But top level chess is dominated by men. Currently there are no women in the among the highest ranking players. I don't know why: perhaps evolutionary psychology could offer insight. If one speculates that every sport is dominated by men, there is one puzzling exception: marksmanship. I know the debate drones on to this day, but I also know that marksmanship competitions have been mixed gender in the past, including at the Olympics. If there is a single sport that men have the lowest inherent advantage, it would be that one. I have some fun details on that last comment if you want them. I speculate that in the foreseeable, women will dominate the sport in the USA, because of Title IX. Reasoning: the insurance costs of collegiate sports is going up. Title IX requires colleges to offer scholarships to men and women, regardless of the fact that more spectators pay more money to see men's sports. If insurance becomes the dominant cost, it emphasizes the economic viability of the lower risk sports. Marksmanship is the second-safest collegiate sport, behind chess. Those are two sports where you can't hurt yourself. So... the insurance is cheap. It doesn't cost much to do either sport, so both are attractive as ways to spend Title IX dollars. This would bring more women into competitive shooting, allowing us to discover inherent talent in the sport, eventually resulting in women dominating even the mixed-gender competitions. Fun detail available on request for that too. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 17:50:34 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 12:50:34 -0500 Subject: [ExI] green berette, was: RE: Russians bots at work again? In-Reply-To: <00f001d64e3b$542116e0$fc6344a0$@rainier66.com> References: <00f001d64e3b$542116e0$fc6344a0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: 'You need to go out for football, boy.' Well, maybe not 'boy' to a Black boy. I watch golf, and they have been working out for some time now, and maybe of them are really athletes who could play football or some other sport. (Remember the Superstar competitions where the bowler and the golfer and the NASCAR driver vied for last place? They had to sign up for several skill tests, and once I saw Mike Tyson, I think (anyway a very powerful boxer) stand up in the pool in the swim contest after half a lap when the rest had finished. This powerful man churning the water and getting nowhere. Look at another injury case - Tiger Woods. His can-do attitude exceeded every one's, and so he started lifting weights. Result: three back surgeries in his early 40s. But yeah, Spike, high school football, never mind the pros, is very hard on the body, esp. the knees. Many will need replacement surgery later on. Maybe that's why we have so many athletic golfers - they excused themselves from the football team by golfing. It would be OK with me, even given how many thousands of football games I have watched, if the sport was discontinued in high school, when for many their bodies are not even fully mature, making injury even more common and worse. And some die of heart attacks, perhaps the result of poor screening. And dehydration. When I was a baseball player we were told NOT to drink water or anything else. It would make you cramp. And die. Me? I joined the choir. bill w On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 12:35 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of > Keith Henson via extropy-chat > > > >...The very first female Green Beret, 11 days ago. Not strange that I > didn't know about it. But the article does not say anything about her > being > a sniper or a sharpshooter. Though to have gotten this far, I am sure she > is a reasonable marksman (markswoman?)... > > Ja, the green berets are elite troops. There is no getting into that > unless > one is an expert marks-human and a super-athlete, an expert at all military > tactics. I applaud this young lady: she must be one hell of an athlete, > smart as a whip, good at everything they make these fellers do. > > >...It's still an unlikely career path, perhaps 1/100th the chances of a > high school football player getting into the NFL... Keith > > > Certainly that. I often think of that when I see the local high school > football teams bashing their brains to inert jelly, many with dreams of > scholarships or the big leagues, when only a very few can get that far. > Another one is women's gymnastics. Look at how dangerous are those sports, > and imagine the trail of broken bodies leading to the Olympics, where you > see the elite of the elite, many of whom already have permanent damage to > their bodies by the time they are too old (which is about 20 for women's > gymnastics.) > > Consider pole vaulting, sheesh, the best guys are going way up there higher > than the length of the pole. That is the coolest sport to watch, if one > can > overcome the guilt, knowing that for every Olympian, there is likely half a > dozen proles who injured themselves in trying to get there. I was watching > when some guy took one to the southern boys a few years back, owwwwww. By > watching those dangerous sports, we sell ads and make money for the > agencies > which cover the sports, which encourages young people to take up > recreational danger. If they get injured, we spectators are indirectly > responsible. I repent in advance, then watch them anyway. > > Conclusion: unlikely career paths do little to deter young people. It > might > deter their parents, but young people dream big. They get injured, it's > partially our fault, damn. > > spike > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 17:52:38 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 10:52:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: References: <20200628192720.Horde.o9SL4g8UBTv7dHXkhz4yKRS@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> <6D2D891E-6234-4A78-BE18-42C24D84CEDA@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 3:53 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 11:23 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > >> >> *> Well, there are some differences: - masks are more than socially >> acceptable, they are socially required in this situation. * > > > And the USA is the only country in the world In which wearing a virus > preventing mask has become part of the culture wars, and is the only > country in which the president makes a point of not setting an example and > never being photographed wearing one because he thinks everything is about > him and wearing such a medical mask is a political statement of disapproval > of him personally. > To the latter point, Brazil's president was famously pretty much that - until a federal judge ordered him to wear a mask. Trump is not as alone as you think. However I will grant, it is questionable whether Trump would think such an order could apply to him should he receive a similar order. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 17:57:28 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 12:57:28 -0500 Subject: [ExI] competition markshumanship In-Reply-To: <00f101d64e3b$79797bd0$6c6c7370$@rainier66.com> References: <00f101d64e3b$79797bd0$6c6c7370$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: It is likely that a great marksperson has great vision and that is genetic. In baseball to be a great hitter you need great vision. Ted Williams had 20/10 vision. But baseball is a combination: you need the eyes and the years of skill training (to, for example, recognize a curve ball from a slider from a fast ball and so on). As vision gets worse with age, so does the baseballer's batting average. Pitchers don't need great vision - the only position that doesn't require hitting. I assume that it does not take long to judge the effect of the wind on a bullet. Details, details Spike bill w On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 12:42 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > Keith, regarding women's marksmanship, in 2016 the first Olympic gold was > awarded to Ginny Thrasher, a West Virginian and distant cousin to me. When > you commented about marksmanship being largely a talent rather than a skill > honed over years of practice, I was reminded that Ginny had only taken up > the sport about a year before. > > > > Your comment about marksmanship being as much an innate talent as an > acquired skill has the ring of truth. Supporting detail available. > > > > Think about this: every sport has men's and women's divisions, even stuff > you would not think would need them, such as chess. But top level chess is > dominated by men. Currently there are no women in the among the highest > ranking players. I don't know why: perhaps evolutionary psychology could > offer insight. > > > > If one speculates that every sport is dominated by men, there is one > puzzling exception: marksmanship. I know the debate drones on to this day, > but I also know that marksmanship competitions have been mixed gender in > the past, including at the Olympics. If there is a single sport that men > have the lowest inherent advantage, it would be that one. > > > > I have some fun details on that last comment if you want them. > > > > I speculate that in the foreseeable, women will dominate the sport in the > USA, because of Title IX. Reasoning: the insurance costs of collegiate > sports is going up. Title IX requires colleges to offer scholarships to > men and women, regardless of the fact that more spectators pay more money > to see men's sports. If insurance becomes the dominant cost, it emphasizes > the economic viability of the lower risk sports. Marksmanship is the > second-safest collegiate sport, behind chess. Those are two sports where > you can't hurt yourself. So... the insurance is cheap. It doesn't cost > much to do either sport, so both are attractive as ways to spend Title IX > dollars. This would bring more women into competitive shooting, allowing > us to discover inherent talent in the sport, eventually resulting in women > dominating even the mixed-gender competitions. > > > > Fun detail available on request for that too. > > > > spike > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From interzone at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 18:01:02 2020 From: interzone at gmail.com (Dylan Distasio) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 14:01:02 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: References: <20200628192720.Horde.o9SL4g8UBTv7dHXkhz4yKRS@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> <6D2D891E-6234-4A78-BE18-42C24D84CEDA@gmail.com> Message-ID: Sweden has also adopted very little mask wearing as another non-complying data point. On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 1:58 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 3:53 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 11:23 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >> >>> >>> *> Well, there are some differences: - masks are more than socially >>> acceptable, they are socially required in this situation. * >> >> >> And the USA is the only country in the world In which wearing a virus >> preventing mask has become part of the culture wars, and is the only >> country in which the president makes a point of not setting an example and >> never being photographed wearing one because he thinks everything is about >> him and wearing such a medical mask is a political statement of disapproval >> of him personally. >> > > To the latter point, Brazil's president was famously pretty much that - > until a federal judge ordered him to wear a mask. Trump is not as alone as > you think. > > However I will grant, it is questionable whether Trump would think such an > order could apply to him should he receive a similar order. > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 29 18:58:51 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 11:58:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] competition markshumanship In-Reply-To: References: <00f101d64e3b$79797bd0$6c6c7370$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <014201d64e47$549bf5c0$fdd3e140$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] competition markshumanship >>?If there is a single sport that men have the lowest inherent advantage, it would be that one. I have some fun details on that last comment if you want them? spike >?Details, details Spike bill w Over three decades ago, when I was younger than I am now, I worked for an engineer from Jordan, Daleed Aman. He was the oddball exception to every rule and pre-conceived notion: his favorite hobby was old west re-enactments and competitions. He was the only non-white-bread person at any of these, but he loved it, collected antique shootin arns, did the whole thing. He went to one of the competitions where they set up an old west town with the movie-set props and all that. The competitors had to play marshal, where the bad guys had done a big robbery and they were gunning for him in particular. They had pop-up and pop-out targets where the competitor had to make a shoot/no shoot decision, because some of the targets were towns-people, ladies with babies and such. They used period-piece six-shooters, the works. They had to walk down the main street in period costume, two weapons for a total of 12 available rounds, then they had placed a loaded shotgun propped against a well for the last targets in on the simulated main street. It sounded like more fun than a barrel of monkeys. This one year, Daleed came back so excited: the competition was completely dominated by a 16 yr old girl. She was really good, accurate, fast as lightning with the six shooter (they get points for minimizing the time it takes to slay the target (which inherently favors younger competitors.)) Daleed left the company and went into business selling antique ammo reloading equipment as a primary line, and reloaded antique ammo as the bread and butter steady money-maker. This all has a fun aside for technology fans. Daleed had commented that in his side-hustle, the biggest bite out of his profit was taken by advertising costs. In 1991, I had been introduced to the notion of HTML on the then-new World Wide Web. I came in to the office, mentioned it to Daleed, who realized if it ever amounted to anything it could carry some of the load on his ad costs. The WWW amounted to something, it took down his ad costs, his side-hustle became a viable business, he left being a mechanical design group supervisor and took up the antique shootin arn biz full time. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 19:04:53 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 15:04:53 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: References: <20200628192720.Horde.o9SL4g8UBTv7dHXkhz4yKRS@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> <6D2D891E-6234-4A78-BE18-42C24D84CEDA@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 2:11 PM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Sweden has also adopted very little mask wearing as another non-complying > data point. > *"Fearing the country?s lax approach to combating the coronavirus, Sweden?s Scandinavian neighbors *(*Denmark, Norway and Finland*)* have all closed their borders to Swedes. *[...] *While those countries went into strict lockdowns this spring, Sweden famously refused, and now has suffered roughly twice as many infections and five times as many deaths as the other three nations combined"* Sweden Tries Out a New Status: Pariah State John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 29 19:31:24 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 12:31:24 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: References: <20200628192720.Horde.o9SL4g8UBTv7dHXkhz4yKRS@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> <6D2D891E-6234-4A78-BE18-42C24D84CEDA@gmail.com> Message-ID: <016601d64e4b$e0a0b2f0$a1e218d0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 2:11 PM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat > wrote: > Sweden has also adopted very little mask wearing as another non-complying data point. "Fearing the country?s lax approach to combating the coronavirus, Sweden?s Scandinavian neighbors (Denmark, Norway and Finland) have all closed their borders to Swedes. [...] While those countries went into strict lockdowns this spring, Sweden famously refused, and now has suffered roughly twice as many infections and five times as many deaths as the other three nations combined" Sweden Tries Out a New Status: Pariah State John K Clark One wonders what Belgium did so wrong. They were hit much harder than Sweden, with almost half again the number of deaths per capita, .00084 vs Sweden?s .000523 death rate. # Country, Other Total Cases New Cases Total Deaths New Deaths Total Recovered Active Cases Serious, Critical Tot Cases/ 1M pop Deaths/ 1M pop Total Tests Tests/ 1M pop Population 1 San Marino 698 42 656 0 20,571 1,238 5,669 167,074 33,931 2 Belgium 61,361 +66 9,732 16,941 34,688 35 5,295 840 1,191,959 102,849 11,589,377 3 Andorra 855 52 799 4 11,066 673 3,750 48,534 77,265 4 UK 311,965 +814 43,575 +25 N/A N/A 276 4,596 642 9,290,215 136,854 67,884,107 5 Spain 296,050 +200 28,346 +3 N/A N/A 617 6,332 606 5,162,909 110,425 46,754,725 6 Italy 240,436 +126 34,744 +6 189,196 16,496 96 3,977 575 5,341,837 88,350 60,462,004 7 Sweden 65,137 5,280 N/A N/A 171 6,450 523 444,607 44,025 10,098,898 8 France 162,936 29,778 75,649 57,509 634 2,496 456 1,384,633 21,213 65,272,959 Belgium?s death rate is worse than Sweden and USA combined. Bright spot for that beleaguered country: if we look at the Covid death rate of New York City, it is over five times worse than Belgium, three times worse than big number 1 San Marino. Can anyone offer a theory or an explanation for why these particular countries have been so hard hit? Must we disregard this data, considering it is a full 19 minutes outdated? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 19:37:46 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 14:37:46 -0500 Subject: [ExI] competition markshumanship In-Reply-To: <00f101d64e3b$79797bd0$6c6c7370$@rainier66.com> References: <00f101d64e3b$79797bd0$6c6c7370$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Or women could be worse in most sports because they aren?t trained in sports from a young age. There used to be a lot more women in computing, then it became stereotypically male. Who knows: 3 elite female chess players: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L?szl?_Polg?r Computer assisted tutoring leads to younger chess champs: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/nyregion/queen-captured-by-mouse-more-chess-players-use-computers-for-edge.html Mother consistently underestimate the crawling abilities of 11 month old girls and overestimate it for boys of the same age: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.652.8492&rep=rep1&type=pdf Women in computing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing (Though I find it to be a bit biased) SR Ballard > On Jun 29, 2020, at 12:33 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > > > Keith, regarding women's marksmanship, in 2016 the first Olympic gold was awarded to Ginny Thrasher, a West Virginian and distant cousin to me. When you commented about marksmanship being largely a talent rather than a skill honed over years of practice, I was reminded that Ginny had only taken up the sport about a year before. > > Your comment about marksmanship being as much an innate talent as an acquired skill has the ring of truth. Supporting detail available. > > Think about this: every sport has men's and women's divisions, even stuff you would not think would need them, such as chess. But top level chess is dominated by men. Currently there are no women in the among the highest ranking players. I don't know why: perhaps evolutionary psychology could offer insight. > > If one speculates that every sport is dominated by men, there is one puzzling exception: marksmanship. I know the debate drones on to this day, but I also know that marksmanship competitions have been mixed gender in the past, including at the Olympics. If there is a single sport that men have the lowest inherent advantage, it would be that one. > > I have some fun details on that last comment if you want them. > > I speculate that in the foreseeable, women will dominate the sport in the USA, because of Title IX. Reasoning: the insurance costs of collegiate sports is going up. Title IX requires colleges to offer scholarships to men and women, regardless of the fact that more spectators pay more money to see men's sports. If insurance becomes the dominant cost, it emphasizes the economic viability of the lower risk sports. Marksmanship is the second-safest collegiate sport, behind chess. Those are two sports where you can't hurt yourself. So... the insurance is cheap. It doesn't cost much to do either sport, so both are attractive as ways to spend Title IX dollars. This would bring more women into competitive shooting, allowing us to discover inherent talent in the sport, eventually resulting in women dominating even the mixed-gender competitions. > > Fun detail available on request for that too. > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 19:39:52 2020 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 14:39:52 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: References: <20200628192720.Horde.o9SL4g8UBTv7dHXkhz4yKRS@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> <6D2D891E-6234-4A78-BE18-42C24D84CEDA@gmail.com> Message-ID: <022883EC-9DB5-45F0-A4B2-C0FB16642CCE@gmail.com> The ?borders closed to Swedes? is a joke. There are about a million exceptions, Swedes that work in their neighboring states, members of those states that work in Sweden, etc. SR Ballard > On Jun 29, 2020, at 2:04 PM, John Clark via extropy-chat wrote: > >> On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 2:11 PM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> > Sweden has also adopted very little mask wearing as another non-complying data point. > > "Fearing the country?s lax approach to combating the coronavirus, Sweden?s Scandinavian neighbors (Denmark, Norway and Finland) have all closed their borders to Swedes. [...] While those countries went into strict lockdowns this spring, Sweden famously refused, and now has suffered roughly twice as many infections and five times as many deaths as the other three nations combined" > > Sweden Tries Out a New Status: Pariah State > > John K Clark > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 19:46:16 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 15:46:16 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 3:34 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> One wonders what Belgium did so wrong. * *"Belgian officials say they are counting in a way that no other country in the world is currently doing: counting deaths in hospitals and care homes, but including deaths in care homes that are suspected, not confirmed, as Covid-19 cases. According to Belgium's latest official figures, out of 7,703 deaths, 53% have been in care homes. *[...]* Another factor is that many more people here put loved ones in care homes than elsewhere in Europe."* Coronavirus: Why so many people are dying in Belgium? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 29 20:04:37 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 13:04:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Sent: Monday, June 29, 2020 12:46 PM To: ExI chat list Cc: John Clark Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 3:34 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: > One wonders what Belgium did so wrong. "Belgian officials say they are counting in a way that no other country in the world is currently doing? I can think of at least one other country which counts that way: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/white-house-taking-very-liberal-approach-counting-covid-19-deaths >? counting deaths in hospitals and care homes, but including deaths in care homes that are suspected, not confirmed, as Covid-19 cases? The USA did that too. Notice how difficult it is to find per capita covid death rates per capita. Nearly any site which provides that will include the caveat that counting methods count. >? According to Belgium's latest official figures, out of 7,703 deaths, 53% have been in care homes. [...] Another factor is that many more people here put loved ones in care homes than elsewhere in Europe." We do that in the USA as well. Our elder-care death count is pretty similar to Belgium?s. New York?s is way worse than Belgium. NY?s elder-care policy was insane. Coronavirus: Why so many people are dying in Belgium? John K Clark Death rates shouldn?t be combined by country, they should be counted by jurisdiction. The US Federal government does not have much say in how states run their medical systems. The states should be counted separately because they are the level of jurisdiction on much of the covid policy. A US president has very little say in the matter. However? that method makes New York and New Jersey look really bad. Counting by jurisdiction, New York becomes the worst in the world. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 20:23:21 2020 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 16:23:21 -0400 Subject: [ExI] competition markshumanship In-Reply-To: References: <00f101d64e3b$79797bd0$6c6c7370$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 2:05 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > It is likely that a great marksperson has great vision and that is genetic. > Decent vision is required, not great. I was on the rifle team in college. We shot .22 rifles in three positions at 50'. Prone (laying down) is the most stable and easiest. Perfect scores, where the 10-ring is a dot, are common--expected at the collegiate level. Kneeling is less stable and perfect scores are much less common. Standing is the hardest. I don't think that a perfect score has been achieved. Shooting very well requires, as I said, good eyesight, breathing control, low pulse, the ability to find a stable position and maintain it, and, probably the biggest factor at the top levels, is being able to stay calm and focused. > I assume that it does not take long to judge the effect of the wind on a > bullet. > Au contraire. Short ranges (50-100 yards) aren't too bad, but wind direction can vary along the path to the target. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 20:31:00 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 16:31:00 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 4:07 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > *>>"Belgian officials say they are counting in a way that no other country >> in the world is currently doing?* > > > > > I can think of at least one other country which counts that way: > > > > > https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/white-house-taking-very-liberal-approach-counting-covid-19-deaths > And we know it's true that the White House is taking a very liberal approach in counting COVID-19 deaths because justthenews.com is a very liberal website and also becauseTrump said it's true, and everybody knows Trump always tells the truth. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 29 21:06:35 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 14:06:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 4:07 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: >>"Belgian officials say they are counting in a way that no other country in the world is currently doing? > I can think of at least one other country which counts that way: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/white-house-taking-very-liberal-approach-counting-covid-19-deaths And we know it's true that the White House is taking a very liberal approach in counting COVID-19 deaths because justthenews.com is a very liberal website and also becauseTrump said it's true, and everybody knows Trump always tells the truth. John K Clark Sure, but Trump didn?t say that however. Ambassador and head of the coronavirus task force, Dr. Deborah Birx said it. It doesn?t matter if it comes from a very liberal website, for this does not give it inherent credibility. Dr. Birx is still the source: "There are other countries that if you had a preexisting condition and let's say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem. Some countries are recording as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death?United States?the intent is right now that...if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that as a COVID-19 death." Dr. Deborah Birx Trump?s attitudes on covid are irrelevant for he has no jurisdiction on how states deal with it or how states count their covid mortality. There is very little the US Fed can do really. It can can restrict international travel which would help perhaps, but we can look at it this way. The USA has an ocean on either side. Nearly all international travel requires sitting on a plane for a long time with other proles. Anyone who thinks social distancing on a plane is effective against covid is fooling herself. If any single person has covid on a plane, every person on that plane is at risk. The passengers sitting close are more at risk, but all are at risk. With the long overseas flights, the risk is greater, for the risk is proportional to the amount of time spent on the plane. Think of trans-Pacific flights or even just to Hawaii. The US has a lot of international travelers. So does Belgium. So does Sweden, France, UK, Italy, all the really hard-hit places. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 21:33:42 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 14:33:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] competition markshumanship In-Reply-To: <014201d64e47$549bf5c0$fdd3e140$@rainier66.com> References: <00f101d64e3b$79797bd0$6c6c7370$@rainier66.com> <014201d64e47$549bf5c0$fdd3e140$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 12:00 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Over three decades ago, when I was younger than I am now > What, seriously? You didn't crawl out of the womb fully grown and wrinkled? :P -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 21:42:29 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 17:42:29 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 5:09 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > *Sure, but Trump didn?t say that however. * > The title of the puff piece was "*WHITE HOUSE*: US taking 'very liberal' approach to counting COVID-19 deaths", so... ..the White House is saying it but Trump isn't saying it? Who said 'very liberal', a house that happens to be white? >*Ambassador and head of the coronavirus task force, Dr. Deborah Birx * > No. Mike Pence is head of the coronavirus task force, the same guy who bungled the AIDS virus epidemic when he was governor of Indiana. *> said it. It doesn?t matter if it comes from a very liberal website, for > this does not give it inherent credibility. Dr. Birx is still the source:* > And Dr. Birx is the one who was standing 2 feet from Trump when he said on national TV that injecting people with disinfectant might be a good idea, and she said absolutely nothing to contradict him! Birx risks reputation in bid to keep on Trump's good side So far Trump hasn't been able to meddle with the official virus statistics.... but give him time... Trump?s plan to limit the pandemic?s death toll: Undercount the numbers John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 29 21:48:44 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 14:48:44 -0700 Subject: [ExI] competition markshumanship In-Reply-To: References: <00f101d64e3b$79797bd0$6c6c7370$@rainier66.com> <014201d64e47$549bf5c0$fdd3e140$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <01fb01d64e5f$0ff80360$2fe80a20$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] competition markshumanship On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 12:00 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: Over three decades ago, when I was younger than I am now >?What, seriously? You didn't crawl out of the womb fully grown and wrinkled? :P No! It was a TRICK, I tells ya. I was once younger and handso? eh? younger, and had yellow hair rather than white. But then suddenly, time went by, and I didn?t stop it so it was my fault perhaps for not doing anything about time going by. Then one day I noticed I was no longer young and han? no longer young. I was middle-age and getting middler. Never was much in the beauty department, so in a sense that made it easier. Beautiful people must have a hard time, for they have a lot more to lose than we ugly old boys do. Come to think of it, that makes perfect sense. It explains why in general women spend so much money and effort with beauty products, but we don?t. In most cultures I know of, the same pattern, it?s the women going out of their way to look good. We boys just shave, wash our hair, comb, look in the mirror, how do I look? About average? Cool, done, fully satisfied, good to go. We boys get saggy and flabby, but do we worry much about it? Not really, or rather I never did. I figure, hey no worries, my bride doesn?t complain and I don?t care what the other ladies think. I like being a man. Life is just easier when one is a man. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 21:51:40 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 16:51:40 -0500 Subject: [ExI] marksmanship Message-ID: I understand all those reasons for being good at it, but I still think that the people with very superior vision will be at the head of the class. All the other skills seem learnable to me - not nuclear physics. So the difference at the top of the class is genetic. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 29 22:00:40 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 15:00:40 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 5:09 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: > Sure, but Trump didn?t say that however. >?The title of the puff piece was "WHITE HOUSE: US taking 'very liberal' approach to counting COVID-19 deaths", so... ..the White House is saying it but Trump isn't saying it? Who said 'very liberal', a house that happens to be white? The White House cannot talk. It was Dr. Birx who said it: Q Can you talk about your concerns about deaths being misreported by coronavirus because of either testing or standards for how they?re characterized? DR. BIRX: So, I think, in this country, we?ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality, and I think the reporting here has been pretty straightforward over the last five to six weeks. Prior to that, when there wasn?t testing in January and February, that?s a very different situation and unknown. There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition and let?s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem ? some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. Right now, we?re still recording it, and we?ll ? I mean, the great thing about having forms that come in and a form that has the ability to mark it as COVID-19 infection ? the intent is, right now, that those ? if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death. Ambassador Dr. Deborah Birx, 7 April 2020 >?And Dr. Birx is the one who was standing 2 feet from Trump when he said on national TV that injecting people with disinfectant might be a good idea, and she said absolutely nothing to contradict him! John K Clark If we had one, it would be a good idea but we don?t. Plenty of people inject themselves with a disinfectant at the evening meal and other times during the day: ethanol is a disinfectant. When one devours ethanol, it ends up in the bloodstream. Unfortunately for humanity, alcohol is an example of a disinfectant that does not slay C-19 in the concentrations humans can tolerate. Of course if a vaccine or covid-19 killer is discovered, of course it would be a good idea to inject it. John, would you agree? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 29 22:11:01 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 15:11:01 -0700 Subject: [ExI] marksmanship In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <024501d64e62$2cc751f0$8655f5d0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: [ExI] marksmanship >?I understand all those reasons for being good at it, but I still think that the people with very superior vision will be at the head of the class. All the other skills seem learnable to me - not nuclear physics. So the difference at the top of the class is genetic. bill w Not nuclear physics? Why is it not nuclear physics? It was a surprise to me to find out when you really start digging in, nuclear physics isn?t as difficult as chemistry: there are fewer particles to memorize. Down at that level, everything works very logically and predictably. The math models are well-understood and they work to several digits of precision. Top level markshumans are (somehow) aware of their own heart rhythms. They don?t actually control them, but they work with their own hearts, according to some sources. Fun exercise, if you get a good analog weight scale, stand on it and watch your weight bop around by about a quarter of a pound as the heart shoots blood toward your head. Now get a good laser-enabled rifle and watch how your aim point also moves with your pulse. I don?t know how the hell those straight-shooters do it, but they do it. Nuke physics isn?t more difficult than other fields, BillW, it isn?t as difficult as yours, psychology. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 22:45:11 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 17:45:11 -0500 Subject: [ExI] marksmanship In-Reply-To: <024501d64e62$2cc751f0$8655f5d0$@rainier66.com> References: <024501d64e62$2cc751f0$8655f5d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Nothing is more complicated than my field. Much, perhaps most of what we think we know might be wrong. Now for something completely different: I am re-reading some of Faynman's popular works. One is There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom. 'It would be very easy to make an analysis of any complicated chemical substance; All one would have to do would be to look at it and see where the atoms are. The only trouble is that the electron microscope is one hundred times too poor.' Now if I am not mistaken I saw in the news the other day that for the first time scientists have been able to look at a single atom. (Took a long time, didn't it?) Now why have I not seen scientists ecstatic about it if it is as revolutionary as Feynman says it will be? bill w On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 5:12 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat > *Subject:* [ExI] marksmanship > > > > >?I understand all those reasons for being good at it, but I still think > that the people with very superior vision will be at the head of the > class. All the other skills seem learnable to me - not nuclear physics. > So the difference at the top of the class is genetic. > > > > bill w > > > > > > > > Not nuclear physics? Why is it not nuclear physics? It was a surprise to > me to find out when you really start digging in, nuclear physics isn?t as > difficult as chemistry: there are fewer particles to memorize. Down at > that level, everything works very logically and predictably. The math > models are well-understood and they work to several digits of precision. > > > > Top level markshumans are (somehow) aware of their own heart rhythms. > They don?t actually control them, but they work with their own hearts, > according to some sources. Fun exercise, if you get a good analog weight > scale, stand on it and watch your weight bop around by about a quarter of a > pound as the heart shoots blood toward your head. Now get a good > laser-enabled rifle and watch how your aim point also moves with your > pulse. I don?t know how the hell those straight-shooters do it, but they > do it. > > > > Nuke physics isn?t more difficult than other fields, BillW, it isn?t as > difficult as yours, psychology. > > > > spike > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 29 23:13:53 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 16:13:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] marksmanship In-Reply-To: References: <024501d64e62$2cc751f0$8655f5d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <001d01d64e6a$f5430b80$dfc92280$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] marksmanship Nothing is more complicated than my field. Much, perhaps most of what we think we know might be wrong. Now for something completely different: I am re-reading some of Faynman's popular works. One is There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom. 'It would be very easy to make an analysis of any complicated chemical substance; All one would have to do would be to look at it and see where the atoms are. The only trouble is that the electron microscope is one hundred times too poor.' Now if I am not mistaken I saw in the news the other day that for the first time scientists have been able to look at a single atom. (Took a long time, didn't it?) Now why have I not seen scientists ecstatic about it if it is as revolutionary as Feynman says it will be? bill w Scientists were most ecstatic when it was first done in 1989. Here?s an 11 yr old article about moving atoms one at a time: https://www.wired.com/2009/09/gallery-atomic-science/ We haven?t figured out how to build replicating assemblers. This is a good thing, for as soon as we do of course, then the planet turns to gray goo, ending all life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo The gray goo scenario has been suggested as a plausible explanation of Fermi Paradox: the notion is that every intelligent species eventually advances in technology sufficiently to discover nuclear weapons, which are generally survivable because it takes many people working together to make a nuke. But any mad scientist anywhere could theoretically figure out how to make a replicating assembler, which then devours everything to turn it into copies of itself, converting the top surface of the planet to gray goo. My fondest hope is that intelligence is really not a fatally maladaptive evolutionary trait. But at times I fear that this explanation of the silence of the cosmos is most disturbing in its plausibility. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Jun 29 23:50:36 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 16:50:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] (no subject) Message-ID: spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > Keith, regarding women's marksmanship, in 2016 the first Olympic gold was awarded to Ginny Thrasher, a West Virginian and distant cousin to me. When you commented about marksmanship being largely a talent rather than a skill honed over years of practice, I was reminded that Ginny had only taken up the sport about a year before. Not surprised. > Your comment about marksmanship being as much an innate talent as an acquired skill has the ring of truth. Supporting detail available. You gave an example. It would be very simple to test. Measure how much people shake, then see how they do with marksmanship. The military might be interested in doing this. They might impose a cutoff where people with more than a certain amount of shaking are diverted from wasting ammunition. > Think about this: every sport has men's and women's divisions, even stuff you would not think would need them, such as chess. But top level chess is dominated by men. Currently there are no women in the among the highest ranking players. I don't know why: perhaps evolutionary psychology could offer insight. I doubt EP is the right tool to explain chess players. People at the top of chess, math, and intelligence are way out on the tail of the distribution. The center of the distribution is known to be rather similar for both sexes, but the distribution is known to be wider for males. When you get out 4-6 SD from the center, the wider distribution makes a huge difference. Males suffer from this as well, there are more really low IQ males compared to females. One reason proposed is just what determines sex. Males have only one X, females two of them, even though one of them is randomly surprised (see Barr bodies). So the genes that build body and brain come from one copy in males and two in females. This gives females a more average genome and not an exceptionably good or bad one. While this seems reasonable, I don't know that anyone has proved it. > If one speculates that every sport is dominated by men, there is one puzzling exception: marksmanship. I know the debate drones on to this day, but I also know that marksmanship competitions have been mixed gender in the past, including at the Olympics. If there is a single sport that men have the lowest inherent advantage, it would be that one. If there is anything to the one X vs two X theory, then perhaps the genes for low shake don't reside on the X. > I have some fun details on that last comment if you want them. Sure. > I speculate that in the foreseeable, women will dominate the sport in the USA, because of Title IX. Reasoning: the insurance costs of collegiate sports is going up. Title IX requires colleges to offer scholarships to men and women, regardless of the fact that more spectators pay more money to see men's sports. Not now of course. > If insurance becomes the dominant cost, it emphasizes the economic viability of the lower risk sports. Marksmanship is the second-safest collegiate sport, behind chess. I suppose this is the case, but calling chess a sport pours sand in my mental gears. > Those are two sports where you can't hurt yourself. So... the insurance is cheap. It doesn't cost much to do either sport, so both are attractive as ways to spend Title IX dollars. This would bring more women into competitive shooting, allowing us to discover inherent talent in the sport, eventually resulting in women dominating even the mixed-gender competitions. Possible, but this is convoluted reasoning and I doubt it. Keith From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 30 00:01:44 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 19:01:44 -0500 Subject: [ExI] shaking Message-ID: A few weeks ago, I think, I posted a bit about the involuntary rest pause, or IRP. People who have few of those will do better at things like marksmanship. You would not want a person with a lot of them to be a radar screen reader - lots of mistakes of not seeing blips which were coincident with an IRP. Also, introverts have fewer of those and are, anyway, better suited to a boring job like that than extroverts are. Now I would wonder about the correlation between Introversion/Extroversion and marksmanship. Hypothesis: introverts are better. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Jun 30 00:05:31 2020 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 17:05:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? Message-ID: The Japanese were wearing face masks when I was there in 1955-6. Keith From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 30 00:38:43 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 20:38:43 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 6:03 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > Of course if a vaccine or covid-19 killer is discovered, of course it > would be a good idea to inject it. John, would you agree? > Spike, can nothing shake your faith in the wisdom of the leadership of Donald Trump, not even this graph? Seven day moving average of new cases of Coronavirus for United States, European Union and South Korea John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 30 00:45:45 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 17:45:45 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> From: John Clark Sent: Monday, June 29, 2020 5:22 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 6:03 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: > Of course if a vaccine or covid-19 killer is discovered, of course it would be a good idea to inject it. John, would you agree? Spike, can nothing shake your faith in the wisdom of the leadership of Donald Trump, not even this? John K Clark John, Trump has no authority in covid response. The Federal government does not control states? response to covid. States control states response to covid. Please explain why you can?t seem to get that John. Show us anything in the constitution which would empower the federal government do to anything about this. States can. States do. The Fed cannot, and it does not. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 30 00:51:50 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 17:51:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <006401d64e78$a43a8930$ecaf9b90$@rainier66.com> From: spike at rainier66.com Sent: Monday, June 29, 2020 5:46 PM To: 'ExI chat list' Cc: spike at rainier66.com Subject: RE: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? From: John Clark > Sent: Monday, June 29, 2020 5:22 PM To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 6:03 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: > Of course if a vaccine or covid-19 killer is discovered, of course it would be a good idea to inject it. John, would you agree? Spike, can nothing shake your faith in the wisdom of the leadership of Donald Trump, not even this? John K Clark John, Trump has no authority in covid response. The Federal government does not control states? response to covid. States control states response to covid. Please explain why you can?t seem to get that John. Show us anything in the constitution which would empower the federal government do to anything about this. States can. States do. The Fed cannot, and it does not. spike The Fed can stop all flights in and out of the USA. It can stop all ships. It cannot stop people from coming across the borders. To stop all flights and ships would be a bad thing indeed, far worse than the pandemic, for there are both imports and exports that we still need. In answer to your question, what have I ever posted to make you think I have faith in anyone? If I have faith in anyone, do inform me please on who it is I have faith in for I don?t recall ever meeting him or her, or even ever hearing of such a person. Do you have faith in anyone? Who? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Tue Jun 30 01:29:02 2020 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 21:29:02 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 8:48 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Show us anything in the constitution which would empower the federal > government do to anything about this. States can. States do. The Fed > cannot, and it does not. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause *The Commerce Clause describes an enumerated power listed in the United States Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3). The clause states that the United States Congress shall have power "[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." * So they need merely claim they're controlling interstate commerce. This is the source of the federal Drug War. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 30 04:42:18 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 21:42:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00b501d64e98$d6699ed0$833cdc70$@rainier66.com> From: Dave Sill Sent: Monday, June 29, 2020 6:29 PM To: ExI chat list Cc: Spike Jones Subject: Re: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 8:48 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: Show us anything in the constitution which would empower the federal government do to anything about this. States can. States do. The Fed cannot, and it does not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause The Commerce Clause describes an enumerated power listed in the United States Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3). The clause states that the United States Congress shall have power "[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." So they need merely claim they're controlling interstate commerce. This is the source of the federal Drug War. -Dave Hi Dave, Agree, I should have clarified my question. This Commerce Clause refers to what congress can do. If we grant in principle that the congress could theoretically act to control the pandemic, they will not. This is an important point, for we hear Americans complaining about businesses staying open during shutdown orders are flouting the law. Congress never passed any laws on shutting down anything. The California state legislature never passed any laws regarding any shutdowns, or anything related to the pandemic (as far as I know.) Businesses staying open during the pandemic are breaking no laws, for there are no laws on that topic. Legislatures make laws. Governors and presidents do not and cannot. Executive orders are not laws. As soon as you hear the name of a politician in any discussion on the pandemic, you immediately know the person uttering that name has the primary interest in leveraging a crisis into a political opportunity. This is crass and inappropriate. I agree the US legislature could theoretically act, but it hasn?t. The California legislature could act, but hasn?t. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 30 07:19:26 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 02:19:26 -0500 Subject: [ExI] marksmanship In-Reply-To: <001d01d64e6a$f5430b80$dfc92280$@rainier66.com> References: <024501d64e62$2cc751f0$8655f5d0$@rainier66.com> <001d01d64e6a$f5430b80$dfc92280$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: I am pretty sure I saw something about an advance in microscopy, but I guess I didn't see what I thought I saw. You are pulling my leg a bit about replicating assemblers, eh? If they did what you say they do, why would anyone try to build one? bill w On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 6:16 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > > > > *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] marksmanship > > > > Nothing is more complicated than my field. Much, perhaps most of what we > think we know might be wrong. Now for something completely different: > > > > I am re-reading some of Faynman's popular works. One is There is Plenty > of Room at the Bottom. > > > > 'It would be very easy to make an analysis of any complicated chemical > substance; All one would have to do would be to look at it and see where > the atoms are. The only trouble is that the electron microscope is one > hundred times too poor.' > > > > Now if I am not mistaken I saw in the news the other day that for the > first time scientists have been able to look at a single atom. (Took a > long time, didn't it?) > > > > Now why have I not seen scientists ecstatic about it if it is as > revolutionary as Feynman says it will be? > > > > bill w > > > > Scientists were most ecstatic when it was first done in 1989. > > > > Here?s an 11 yr old article about moving atoms one at a time: > > > > https://www.wired.com/2009/09/gallery-atomic-science/ > > > > We haven?t figured out how to build replicating assemblers. This is a > good thing, for as soon as we do of course, then the planet turns to gray > goo, ending all life: > > > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo > > > > The gray goo scenario has been suggested as a plausible explanation of > Fermi Paradox: the notion is that every intelligent species eventually > advances in technology sufficiently to discover nuclear weapons, which are > generally survivable because it takes many people working together to make > a nuke. But any mad scientist anywhere could theoretically figure out how > to make a replicating assembler, which then devours everything to turn it > into copies of itself, converting the top surface of the planet to gray goo. > > > > My fondest hope is that intelligence is really not a fatally maladaptive > evolutionary trait. But at times I fear that this explanation of the > silence of the cosmos is most disturbing in its plausibility. > > > > spike > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Jun 30 07:27:57 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 00:27:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] marksmanship In-Reply-To: References: <024501d64e62$2cc751f0$8655f5d0$@rainier66.com> <001d01d64e6a$f5430b80$dfc92280$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: People try to build self-replicating assemblers on the assumption - usually a justified one - that they can control or at least contain said assemblers. If nothing else, fire should do the job: self-replicating assemblers are almost guaranteed to require very precise molecular shape, which high temperatures disrupt. Assemblers that only make more of themselves are not very useful, save as a technology demonstration. Assemblers that can do that but also stop doing that and instead make something else are a potentially useful tool, depending on what else they can make. On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 12:21 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I am pretty sure I saw something about an advance in microscopy, but I > guess I didn't see what I thought I saw. > > You are pulling my leg a bit about replicating assemblers, eh? If they > did what you say they do, why would anyone try to build one? bill w > > On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 6:16 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> >> >> >> >> > *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat >> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] marksmanship >> >> >> >> Nothing is more complicated than my field. Much, perhaps most of what we >> think we know might be wrong. Now for something completely different: >> >> >> >> I am re-reading some of Faynman's popular works. One is There is Plenty >> of Room at the Bottom. >> >> >> >> 'It would be very easy to make an analysis of any complicated chemical >> substance; All one would have to do would be to look at it and see where >> the atoms are. The only trouble is that the electron microscope is one >> hundred times too poor.' >> >> >> >> Now if I am not mistaken I saw in the news the other day that for the >> first time scientists have been able to look at a single atom. (Took a >> long time, didn't it?) >> >> >> >> Now why have I not seen scientists ecstatic about it if it is as >> revolutionary as Feynman says it will be? >> >> >> >> bill w >> >> >> >> Scientists were most ecstatic when it was first done in 1989. >> >> >> >> Here?s an 11 yr old article about moving atoms one at a time: >> >> >> >> https://www.wired.com/2009/09/gallery-atomic-science/ >> >> >> >> We haven?t figured out how to build replicating assemblers. This is a >> good thing, for as soon as we do of course, then the planet turns to gray >> goo, ending all life: >> >> >> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo >> >> >> >> The gray goo scenario has been suggested as a plausible explanation of >> Fermi Paradox: the notion is that every intelligent species eventually >> advances in technology sufficiently to discover nuclear weapons, which are >> generally survivable because it takes many people working together to make >> a nuke. But any mad scientist anywhere could theoretically figure out how >> to make a replicating assembler, which then devours everything to turn it >> into copies of itself, converting the top surface of the planet to gray goo. >> >> >> >> My fondest hope is that intelligence is really not a fatally maladaptive >> evolutionary trait. But at times I fear that this explanation of the >> silence of the cosmos is most disturbing in its plausibility. >> >> >> >> spike >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue Jun 30 07:58:55 2020 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 08:58:55 +0100 Subject: [ExI] marksmanship In-Reply-To: References: <024501d64e62$2cc751f0$8655f5d0$@rainier66.com> <001d01d64e6a$f5430b80$dfc92280$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 30 Jun 2020 at 08:22, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote: > > I am pretty sure I saw something about an advance in microscopy, but I guess I didn't see what I thought I saw. > You are probably referring to: Quote: NEWS 03 June 2020 ?It opens up a whole new universe?: Revolutionary microscopy technique sees individual atoms for first time Cryo-electron microscopy breaks a key barrier that will allow the workings of proteins to be probed in unprecedented detail. ------------------- BillK From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 30 09:41:25 2020 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 04:41:25 -0500 Subject: [ExI] marksmanship In-Reply-To: References: <024501d64e62$2cc751f0$8655f5d0$@rainier66.com> <001d01d64e6a$f5430b80$dfc92280$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Yes, thanks. Now what about Spike's comment that it had been done in 1989? bill w On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 3:02 AM BillK via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Tue, 30 Jun 2020 at 08:22, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat > wrote: > > > > I am pretty sure I saw something about an advance in microscopy, but I > guess I didn't see what I thought I saw. > > > > You are probably referring to: > > > Quote: > NEWS 03 June 2020 > ?It opens up a whole new universe?: Revolutionary microscopy technique > sees individual atoms for first time > Cryo-electron microscopy breaks a key barrier that will allow the > workings of proteins to be probed in unprecedented detail. > ------------------- > > BillK > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 30 10:55:50 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 06:55:50 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: <006401d64e78$a43a8930$ecaf9b90$@rainier66.com> References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> <006401d64e78$a43a8930$ecaf9b90$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 8:54 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> In answer to your question, what have I ever posted to make you think I > have faith in anyone?* Perhaps I made a mistake, maybe I misunderstood. Perhaps you were just kidding when you seemed to spring to Trump's defense when I criticized him for that infamous press conference where he advocated injecting people with disinfectant and shining UV light onto their inner organs. Maybe you were just being sarcastic when you brought up drinking alcohol and injecting vaccines in an attempt to show that Trump's imbecility is not imbecilic. If so I apologize. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 30 12:56:58 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 05:56:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> <006401d64e78$a43a8930$ecaf9b90$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <006101d64edd$f0b6f770$d224e650$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 8:54 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: > In answer to your question, what have I ever posted to make you think I have faith in anyone? Perhaps I made a mistake, maybe I misunderstood. Perhaps you were just kidding when you seemed to spring to Trump's defense when I criticized him for that infamous press conference where he advocated injecting people with disinfectant and shining UV light onto their inner organs. Maybe you were just being sarcastic when you brought up drinking alcohol and injecting vaccines in an attempt to show that Trump's imbecility is not imbecilic. If so I apologize. John K Clark John, presidents do not control disease. That isn?t their job. Alcohol is a disinfectant and works against covid in high enough concentrations, but it kills the patient long before that. If we find a disinfectant that works against covid and doesn?t kill the patient, I don?t see why not inject patients with that. Do you? Why? If we find that UV or a particular frequency of light kills covid, we can create a machine that is like dialysis: the blood could come out one artery, be pumped thru a transparent glass manifold where the light could destroy the virus, then the blood could be pushed back into a vein. This is all science stuff. I don?t see how the hell any of this can be used to promote your political fantasy world views. Do you? Covid is not an opportunity to campaign, it is a health crisis. Apology accepted, no worries, for I am not a political sort and don?t follow it much. I would like to see a libertarian elected, but I don?t think she has a very high chance of getting anywhere. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue Jun 30 13:21:52 2020 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 14:21:52 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: <006101d64edd$f0b6f770$d224e650$@rainier66.com> References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> <006401d64e78$a43a8930$ecaf9b90$@rainier66.com> <006101d64edd$f0b6f770$d224e650$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 30 Jun 2020 at 14:00, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > > If we find that UV or a particular frequency of light kills covid, we can create a machine that is like dialysis: the blood could come out one artery, be pumped thru a transparent glass manifold where the light could destroy the virus, then the blood could be pushed back into a vein. This is all science stuff. I don?t see how the hell any of this can be used to promote your political fantasy world views. Do you? Covid is not an opportunity to campaign, it is a health crisis. > There are now robots in use which use UV-C light to kill coronavirus and disinfect rooms and warehouses. Unfortunately humans dislike UV-C light so they have to wait outside. BillK From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 30 14:01:57 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 10:01:57 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: <006101d64edd$f0b6f770$d224e650$@rainier66.com> References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> <006401d64e78$a43a8930$ecaf9b90$@rainier66.com> <006101d64edd$f0b6f770$d224e650$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 9:00 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > *If we find that UV or a particular frequency of light kills covid* [...] I am quite certain some frequencies of UV light *WILL* kill the COVID-19 virus. I am quite certain concentrated sulfuric acid will too. Spike, do you really think that press conference is an example of Trump's wisdom? Does it make you proud to have a man like that is your president?! John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 30 14:43:27 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 07:43:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> <006401d64e78$a43a8930$ecaf9b90$@rainier66.com> <006101d64edd$f0b6f770$d224e650$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00a201d64eec$d1469300$73d3b900$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2020 7:02 AM To: ExI chat list Cc: John Clark Subject: Re: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 9:00 AM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: > If we find that UV or a particular frequency of light kills covid [...] I am quite certain some frequencies of UV light WILL kill the COVID-19 virus. I am quite certain concentrated sulfuric acid will too. Spike, do you really think that press conference is an example of Trump's wisdom? Does it make you proud to have a man like that is your president?! John K Clark John I don?t take pride in presidents. I haven?t since a long time ago. I don?t view the press conferences or the deep fake video. I am told there was a deep fake of whats-his-name suggesting injecting bleach, but I never found that. Did you? I have long thought injecting a disinfectant is great idea if we can discover one, but it isn?t clear that we will. That business of UV therapy, if a known frequency kills covid, I don?t know why we aren?t already using it. Do you? If presidents go on about these things at press conferences, I disagree with it. I think what they should be talking about is the huge drop in revenue in 2020 and the huge cuts that will be made in government needed immediately to cover the revenue shortfall. But I will ask: what cuts do you think will be needed immediately to cover that revenue shortfall? That?s a pretty important question at this point, ja? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 30 14:55:45 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 07:55:45 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> <006401d64e78$a43a8930$ecaf9b90$@rainier66.com> <006101d64edd$f0b6f770$d224e650$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00b001d64eee$88ebdc30$9ac39490$@rainier66.com> > On Behalf Of BillK via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? On Tue, 30 Jun 2020 at 14:00, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote: > >>... If we find that UV or a particular frequency of light kills covid, we can create a machine that is like dialysis: the blood could come out one artery, be pumped thru a transparent glass manifold where the light could destroy the virus, then the blood could be pushed back into a vein... >...There are now robots in use which use UV-C light to kill coronavirus and disinfect rooms and warehouses. Unfortunately humans dislike UV-C light so they have to wait outside. BillK _______________________________________________ Hi BillK, sure but why would they need to ever see it? If we did UV therapy rather than respirators (which we know causes a great deal of damage) why not do the UV machine dialysis style, have it be a temporary kidney as well if necessary, and I suppose they could add nutrients and minerals to the blood on the way past the UV source. Something like that might get a critically ill patient thru the worst of it, ja? Perhaps the medics among us can explain why that wouldn't work. Looks to me like it would. If UV wrecks blood cells, well we could add some back from donors. Tell ya: if we found something like this and the only thing holding us back was a shortage of blood, we could recruit blood donors like nobody's business. I have seen a local scout organize a blood drive: so many parents and others who never give blood showed up to support his eagle project. He packed the house. It was an amazing success. If it came down to something like UV therapy can save a covid patient assuming we have about 5 gallons of blood on hand, we can make that happen. I would canvas neighborhoods and explain to people why we need lots of blood donors. Hipsters, where are we on UV therapy for covid patients? I am surprised we don't hear more on that. spike From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 30 15:03:00 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 08:03:00 -0700 Subject: [ExI] marksmanship In-Reply-To: References: <024501d64e62$2cc751f0$8655f5d0$@rainier66.com> <001d01d64e6a$f5430b80$dfc92280$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00b101d64eef$8c216f40$a4644dc0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2020 12:19 AM To: ExI chat list Cc: William Flynn Wallace Subject: Re: [ExI] marksmanship I am pretty sure I saw something about an advance in microscopy, but I guess I didn't see what I thought I saw. You are pulling my leg a bit about replicating assemblers, eh? If they did what you say they do, why would anyone try to build one? bill w BillW, the notion of nanotech assemblers was quite the rage in the 80s and 90s. Reference K. Eric Drexler?s Engines of Creation. One of the common notions was an assembler that could assemble a copy of itself without actual instructions to do so, or perhaps just make one copy of itself then stop there. Then your collection of assemblers would increase linearly, ja? But that is too slow, so what if we have them make two copies? Then your collection of programmable assemblers increases exponentially, but no worries, you stop the process when you have enough. But what if you sneeze and some get loose? Then you can?t find them to tell them to stop making two copies of themselves, and pretty soon, the earth is covered in gray goo. This to me is an explanation for Fermi?s Paradox at least as plausible as malicious AI or nuclear holocaust. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 30 15:05:45 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 11:05:45 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: <00a201d64eec$d1469300$73d3b900$@rainier66.com> References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> <006401d64e78$a43a8930$ecaf9b90$@rainier66.com> <006101d64edd$f0b6f770$d224e650$@rainier66.com> <00a201d64eec$d1469300$73d3b900$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 10:46 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> That business of UV therapy, if a known frequency kills covid,* There's no "if" about it, UV light can kill anything because it can rip apart all the chemical bonds that are important for life. I don?t know why we aren?t already using it. Do you? Yes. *> I think what they should be talking about is the huge drop in revenue in > 2020 and the huge cuts that will be made in government needed immediately > to cover the revenue shortfall. But I will ask: what cuts do you think will > be needed immediately to cover that revenue shortfall? That?s a pretty > important question at this point, ja?* > No. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Tue Jun 30 15:46:00 2020 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 11:46:00 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: <00b001d64eee$88ebdc30$9ac39490$@rainier66.com> References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> <006401d64e78$a43a8930$ecaf9b90$@rainier66.com> <006101d64edd$f0b6f770$d224e650$@rainier66.com> <00b001d64eee$88ebdc30$9ac39490$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 10:57 AM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > Hipsters, where are we on UV therapy for covid patients? I am surprised > we don't hear more on that. > https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/30/fact-check-uv-light-not-accepted-medical-treatment-infection/3047010001/ "While ultraviolet blood irradiation exists, it is unproven as an effective treatment in killing infections and is not widely used. There have been studies on ultraviolet blood irradiation in the past, but experts say such treatments need proven clinical trials to gain acceptance among the wider medical community. There is also not research proving UBI as a treatment for the coronavirus." It's unproven. It may be possible but a lot of research needs to be done. Are we funding this research? -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 30 16:11:07 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 09:11:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> <006401d64e78$a43a8930$ecaf9b90$@rainier66.com> <006101d64edd$f0b6f770$d224e650$@rainier66.com> <00b001d64eee$88ebdc30$9ac39490$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <00f101d64ef9$1076c250$316446f0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dave Sill via extropy-chat Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2020 8:46 AM To: ExI chat list Cc: Dave Sill Subject: Re: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 10:57 AM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: Hipsters, where are we on UV therapy for covid patients? I am surprised we don't hear more on that. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/30/fact-check-uv-light-not-accepted-medical-treatment-infection/3047010001/ >?"While ultraviolet blood irradiation exists, it is unproven as an effective treatment in killing infections and is not widely used. >?There have been studies on ultraviolet blood irradiation in the past, but experts say such treatments need proven clinical trials to gain acceptance among the wider medical community. There is also not research proving UBI as a treatment for the coronavirus." >?It's unproven. It may be possible but a lot of research needs to be done. Are we funding this research? -Dave Hi Dave, the Gates Foundation is pouring tons of money into vaccines. This UV business looks promising to me, a great way for philanthropists to invest in a possible solution to a known problem. Vaccines are made by isolating a bunch of some pathogen, weakening it somehow so it can?t reproduce, inject the weakened and slain pathogen, the immune system reacts by producing antibodies, even if the pathogen is too weak to spawn. OK, suppose this UV wrecks covid but the treatment doesn?t actually remove the destroyed viruses, it only damages them beyond their ability to spawn. Then the damaged viruses are still in the bloodstream, alerting the immune system but not replicating. My best guess on why this isn?t being done more is that we don?t have enough machines yet. This one doesn?t look like it would be all that hard to build. Another guess would be the frequency that wrecks covid also destroys something else, such as the leucocytes or the RBCs. We could add those back from donors, while leaving the destroyed C-19 in the existing blood to stim the immune system. I am not a doctor, but this looks like a reasonable engineering approach. The research would be just using it on a bunch of patients then comparing their recovery rates and immune system reactions. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 30 19:20:58 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 15:20:58 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: <00f101d64ef9$1076c250$316446f0$@rainier66.com> References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> <006401d64e78$a43a8930$ecaf9b90$@rainier66.com> <006101d64edd$f0b6f770$d224e650$@rainier66.com> <00b001d64eee$88ebdc30$9ac39490$@rainier66.com> <00f101d64ef9$1076c250$316446f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 12:14 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> Vaccines are made by isolating a bunch of some pathogen, weakening it > somehow so it can?t reproduce, inject the weakened and slain pathogen, the > immune system reacts by producing antibodies, even if the pathogen is too > weak to spawn. OK, suppose this UV wrecks covid but the treatment doesn?t > actually remove the destroyed viruses, it only damages them beyond their > ability to spawn. Then the damaged viruses are still in the bloodstream, > alerting the immune system but not replicating. My best guess on why this > isn?t being done more is that we don?t have enough machines yet. * You're talking about a live virus vaccine and that's the oldest type of vaccine technology, and it's the riskiest because there's always the chance that you have not weakened the virus enough and will end up actually giving the disease to somebody instead of preventing it. With a good live vaccine this chance can be made to be quite small but it takes a long time to test it to make sure. A safer approach is to use a killed virus, but it's hard and slow to grow and kill and purify the virus so it would take a long time to make billions of doses and it's very expensive. A even safer approach would be to not use the entire dead virus but just the protein spikes sticking out of it because that's with the immune system uses for recognition, but that sort of virus vaccine takes even longer to purify. The newest approach, that is so new it has never been used for a human vaccine before, is to use genetic engineering and not inject any part of the virus at all into the person but Instead inject DNA or RNA that codes, not for the entire virus but, just for the virus protein spikes into the person. The vantage is there's no way it could cause a person to get the disease and very little genetic material is needed and it's easy to mass produce, so if it works it would be cheap and quick to make huge numbers of doses. One vaccine that uses this method entered phase 3 clinical trials about a month ago and another one is going to start in about a week. Let's hope for the best. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 30 19:52:28 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 12:52:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> <006401d64e78$a43a8930$ecaf9b90$@rainier66.com> <006101d64edd$f0b6f770$d224e650$@rainier66.com> <00b001d64eee$88ebdc30$9ac39490$@rainier66.com> <00f101d64ef9$1076c250$316446f0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <015f01d64f17$fc7c3950$f574abf0$@rainier66.com> >? On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Subject: Re: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 12:14 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: > Vaccines are made by isolating a bunch of some pathogen, weakening it somehow so it can?t reproduce, inject the weakened and slain pathogen, the immune system reacts by producing antibodies, even if the pathogen is too weak to spawn. OK, suppose this UV wrecks covid but the treatment doesn?t actually remove the destroyed viruses, it only damages them beyond their ability to spawn. Then the damaged viruses are still in the bloodstream, alerting the immune system but not replicating. My best guess on why this isn?t being done more is that we don?t have enough machines yet. >?You're talking about a live virus vaccine and that's the oldest type of vaccine technology, and it's the riskiest because there's always the chance that you have not weakened the virus enough and will end up actually giving the disease to somebody instead of preventing it? Of course. In this case, if the UV doesn?t actually kill the virus, then it is a breakeven. If it does, then the destroyed virus helps trigger the immune system. That looks like a win/draw situation for each virus which comes into contact with the UV. It really surprises me this is so controversial. We already know how to take blood from a patient, do something to it (such as dialysis) then put it back in. Seems like we could even modify an existing dialysis machine with something as simple as a UV source around a glass tube somewhere within. Then we get to see if the covid dialysis patients recover better on those machines retrofitted with UV recover better than those whose machines do not have that retrofit. This wouldn?t cost much, wouldn?t risk any lives at all as far as I can tell, and might point the way. >.... Let's hope for the best. John K Clark As always. If kidney patients help us discover the cure to covid, this is a good thing indeed. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Jun 30 20:19:30 2020 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 13:19:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> <006401d64e78$a43a8930$ecaf9b90$@rainier66.com> <006101d64edd$f0b6f770$d224e650$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 7:04 AM John Clark via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > I am quite certain some frequencies of UV light *WILL* kill the COVID-19 > virus. I am quite certain concentrated sulfuric acid will too. > This got me thinking. Take one of those airborne lasers the DOD's been testing out. Aim it at the ground to decontaminate the most damaging sources of coronavirus spreading. As they operate on non-visible spectra of light, anyone not looking for said spectra won't see the beam, just the effects. This would of course be massively illegal, but that does not seem to be an issue for much of the current administration - not just Trump. If the reports that Trump is considering withdrawing from the election race if polls keep going down are remotely true (as opposed to the wishful thinking they probably are), this might be Pence's only hope of promotion, and he might just have enough people in the right military departments, who would do such a thing if asked and cover it up, to pull it off. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Jun 30 22:48:35 2020 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 18:48:35 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: <015f01d64f17$fc7c3950$f574abf0$@rainier66.com> References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> <006401d64e78$a43a8930$ecaf9b90$@rainier66.com> <006101d64edd$f0b6f770$d224e650$@rainier66.com> <00b001d64eee$88ebdc30$9ac39490$@rainier66.com> <00f101d64ef9$1076c250$316446f0$@rainier66.com> <015f01d64f17$fc7c3950$f574abf0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 3:55 PM spike jones via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: *> It really surprises me this is so controversial. * > It does?!! > > We already know how to take blood from a patient, do something to it > (such as dialysis) then put it back in. Seems like we could even modify an > existing dialysis machine with something as simple as a UV source around a > glass tube somewhere within. Then we get to see if the covid dialysis > patients recover better on those machines retrofitted with UV recover > better than those whose machines do not have that retrofit. > For goodness sake Spike, if the UV light is intense enough to kill a virus it's more than intense enough to scramble the genetic code inside human blood cells that, unlike skin cells, never evolved pigment to protect them from UV because they were never exposed to them before. To put it more simply, doing what you suggest would be carcinogenic. Killing the COVID-19 virus is super easy and so is killing cancer cells, the hard part is to kill them without also killing or mutating human cells. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 30 23:10:40 2020 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 16:10:40 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? In-Reply-To: References: <019f01d64e50$84a62700$8df27500$@rainier66.com> <01e201d64e59$2c665c50$853314f0$@rainier66.com> <021701d64e60$baeeafc0$30cc0f40$@rainier66.com> <005801d64e77$caa516e0$5fef44a0$@rainier66.com> <006401d64e78$a43a8930$ecaf9b90$@rainier66.com> <006101d64edd$f0b6f770$d224e650$@rainier66.com> <00b001d64eee$88ebdc30$9ac39490$@rainier66.com> <00f101d64ef9$1076c250$316446f0$@rainier66.com> <015f01d64f17$fc7c3950$f574abf0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <01d301d64f33$ad076e00$07164a00$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2020 3:49 PM To: ExI chat list Cc: John Clark Subject: Re: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases? On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 3:55 PM spike jones via extropy-chat > wrote: > It really surprises me this is so controversial. It does?!! > We already know how to take blood from a patient, do something to it (such as dialysis) then put it back in. Seems like we could even modify an existing dialysis machine with something as simple as a UV source around a glass tube somewhere within. Then we get to see if the covid dialysis patients recover better on those machines retrofitted with UV recover better than those whose machines do not have that retrofit. For goodness sake Spike, if the UV light is intense enough to kill a virus it's more than intense enough to scramble the genetic code inside human blood cells that, unlike skin cells, never evolved pigment to protect them from UV because they were never exposed to them before. To put it more simply, doing what you suggest would be carcinogenic. Killing the COVID-19 virus is super easy and so is killing cancer cells, the hard part is to kill them without also killing or mutating human cells. John K Clark OK so here we go, no worries (or rather low worries): red blood cells have no nucleus, so DNA damage doesn?t apply to them. Leucocytes are produced in bone marrow, so those are renewable. Lymphocytes cannot divide enough times such that a weird DNA damaging UV dose would matter. In any case, granulocytes, monocytes and lymphocytes depend on bone marrow to renew their numbers. So we UV the covid at a low enough dose to destroy them, let their wrecked remains trigger the immune response in the remaining intact system. In any case, that approach sounds promising to me. The bone marrow will not know or care if there are DNA damaged white blood cells floating around in there. In blood recipients there are already leucocytes from someone else, but that doesn?t cause cancer as far as I know. Considering we perform those Hail Mary plays with the respirators, I would think it would be worth the risk to try to UV irradiate blood in dialysis patients, and it doesn?t really cost them anything: they already hafta come in there a coupla times a week anyway. Low risk, low cost, high potential payoff if it works. Then if it does work, we already know what to do for the non-dialysis covid patients. That scenario isn?t a no-worries, but rather a low-worries, lower than the danger of covid, and it might work. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: