Some people are starting to shift their opinions on it, but jokes about men being raped (especially in prison) are weirdly accepted.

Schindler's List. Humans can be nasty, horrible, utterly evil. It's all too common. But some of us will work to do good. Some of us will push back and do what's right. There is evil in this world, but there is also goodness.

We started deploying malaria vaccines!

When that one aired I assumed they were going to genre-shift into dark comedy or slapstick, but they... really, really didn't.

Because I didn't want people arguing about current events and the end of the Cold War seemed as good a cutoff as any.

Liquid democracy is a proposed way to do a direct democracy in a large country. It's only been tried on very small scales (Google used it to decide which food to get for their cafeterias), so we don't really know if it would work, but I like the idea.

I'd point out that there are countries which don't have much corruption or governmental malfeasance. Nordic countries tend to score very well on the Corruption Perception Index, and also have good social safety nets and governments that (generally, for the most part) serve the people. They're all small countries, though -- I suspect that politics becomes an increasingly dirty business the more power a country has.

If you haven't already, you might want to look into selectorate theory. It essentially shows not only how the psychopaths at the top stay in power, but also why attempts to reform the system often result in a new crop of rulers who are just as bad or worse than those they replaced. (c.f. Cromwell's revolt, French Revolution, Russian Revolution). A proponent of selectorate theory would argue that the solution is not to remove the psychopaths -- it's to create a system where things in a politician's selfish interest happen to line up with things that benefit the people. It's excellently summed up by this video.

In terms of curtailing corporate power from the top down, studying the history of U.S. antitrust law would be a good place to start. Extra Credits has a good series about it.

One reform method that has worked before is unionization. The vast majority of worker protections came about because of labour action. Unions are a lot weaker than they used to be, but it doesn't have to stay that way. If you can, unionizing your workplace is probably the most impactful action you could take to improve the existing system.

If your tastes are more radical, you could also consider mutual aid societies. A robust one could conceivably Theseus its way into failing institutions, or evolve into a provisional government if everything collapses.

I tried to install Linux on my new laptop, trying multiple different distros.

• Many of them did not work with my 3840x2400 screen, with unreadably tiny UI
• The sound did not always work
• When the sound did work, I either couldn't change the volume, or figure out how to disable the speakers when I plug in headphones
• Sometimes screen brightness could not be changed

In short, driver problems. So many driver problems. I was sinking too much time into it, and I was basically unable to use my computer. So I gave up and switched back to Windows. Windows has its own annoyances, and I want to use Linux... but Windows mostly works, most of the time. Linux doesn't, and I have neither the time nor the technical skills to make it work.

I would suspect a correlation more with climate. If it's temperate, you don't shower as much as when you're hot and sweaty all the time.

Also, geothermal power exists.

I don't know where it's going. We're in the middle of a hype cycle. It could be anywhere from "mildly useful tool that reduces busywork and revolutionizes the clickbait industry" to "paradigm shift comparable to the printing press, radio, or Internet". Either way, I predict that the hype will wear off, and some time later the effects will be felt -- but I could be wrong.

Yeah. And it's perfectly acceptable to legally require people in government jobs to be respectful -- a teacher who used racist language would also be fired, and rightly so.

Maybe just because we don't understand it, but the ancient Sumerian bar joke:

A dog entered into a tavern and said, 'I cannot see anything. I shall open this one.'

The Romans were really, really good at making concrete. Like most "ancient secrets", it's been overblown by sensationalist pop-historians, but they were still really good at it. IIRC they figured out that if you mix volcanic ash in with your concrete, it becomes stronger when exposed to water, not weaker.

edit: exposed, not exposed

In terms of the trust problem, one easy way to solve it would be to just require real names. Instance admins (maybe also moderators) must post an address, a name, and a (redacted) ID. A registered corporation would also work. Then, they would provide escrow, taking the payment but only giving it to the seller once receipt has been confirmed. The concern would be fraud on the part of the purchaser. There's no foolproof way to fix that, but if both buyers and sellers have "reputation" scores it would be pretty easy to tell if someone's lying.

The admin could also skim 1-2% off every transaction, and then put that into a fund to pay buyers in the case of complaints. That way both the seller and buyer are satisfied, and reputation scores can be used to boot probable fraudsters.

Either way, the system would also allow buyers and sellers to arrange payment in-person, in which case there would be no guarantee needed and the admin wouldn't take a cut.

This system centralizes power in a small number of people who can be sued. Everyone else stays anonymous, and if they're bad actors the admins deal with them. If an admin is a bad actor, their name and address is posted publicly for the world to see. Obvious problem here is that fewer people would want to be admins, but maybe it would be possible to set up a corporate structure where the owner's identity is revealed only if they're being sued -- I'm not a lawyer and you'd have to talk to one. Maybe there could also be a way for them to post records of every transaction in a verifiable yet anonymous fashion, to prove they aren't skimming anything off the top (beyond whatever they say they're taking for server fees).

Rimworld is awesome. But I guess I was thinking in terms of "all crops" being one type of food source. In Rimworld, you can't get multi-year droughts that make growing anything almost impossible. In real life, you can.

We actually got more energy out than we put in recently, but that was in a research reactor and it will take some time to make it actually large-scale feasible. Fission would be completely sufficient on its own if not for the politics. Greenpeace has more blood on their hands than the captain of the Exxon Valdez.

Deathists I guess?

Does it actually annoy people? Wow, that makes it even funnier.

I just fell off the couch.

Although...

MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?

NEO: Anyone who's made it past one science class in high school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics!

MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo?

(Pause.)

NEO: ...in the Matrix.

MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.

(Pause.)

NEO (in a small voice): Could I please have a real physics textbook?

MORPHEUS: There is no such thing, Neo. The universe doesn't run on math.

Yeah, I like the idea of using humans for computing. Or that they don't want us dead. I just thought that the idea that all of Matrix-physics is a lie to be such a mind screw that I had to include it.

"Interesting! Tell us, where are these aliens with terrible cybersecurity? We were thinking of conquering you, but now it's pretty clear that there's an easier and wealthier target."

It's so long, especially if you get turned around. Which is easy to do, since it violates one of the core rules of combat level design: have a clear path forward. And it's interspersed with "puzzles" that are really just exercises in frustration.

There's a specific command to skip the ocean house, but I didn't mind that. I wish I could skip the damned sewers.

Wesnoth's very fun too!

3 hours from whose perspective? Time limits are rather complicated when you have time travel.

(assuming the time traveller cooperates)

Then it depends on whether the future is mutable, or if we're forced into stable time loops. If time is stable, I'd get some friends. I would never speak to the time traveller directly, but I would text back-and-forth with my friends as they talk to the time traveller. When 3 hours are up, the traveller goes back in time to talk to a different friend in the same three-hour window. (If they're tired, they can travel back 12 hours and catch some sleep before the next meeting.) It would be an interestingly acausal conversation, but Objective 1 would be finding a more permanent way to bypass the three-hour limit, maybe setting up an AI that will ask good questions of the time traveller. (If they can bring a USB stick with some good AI on it, for instance). We'd also want the future version of Wikipedia, and detailed plans for whatever useful technology gets invented in the future. As well as enough almanac knowledge to get seed money for a future-tech company, and useful news items. I wouldn't ask about mounting crises like global warming, though, so that my company can do something about it -- if I base my actions on knowledge of the future, the future is set. I think.

If the future is truly mutable, though, I just resolve to send a detailed summary of our conversation back in time to a week before I schedule the traveller to come. I get a conversation summary, use it to make the conversation more productive, and then send the new summary back. Repeat until I can take over the world, build a time machine, send a large expedition back to 12,000 BC to do an industrial revolution, and then send an even larger expedition back to the early Universe. When entropy starts to become annoying, go another century before the previous expedition and just accept them as citizens. Repeat until godhood achieved.

Typically it does flow better, but I have a little mental stumble every time someone uses "woman" or "women" as an adjective. I know why they're doing it and I can't really fault them, it just... feels off.

Mallory Chipman is wonderful.

Habits can be adaptive, but addictions are more about external drugs hacking the brain. And highly refined and addictive drugs didn't really exist in the ancestral environment. (Alcohol was first refined ~9000 years ago, which isn't enough time to evolve an anti-addiction mechanism.)

I don't see it as obvious. If anything it makes it harder for vested interests to have an outsized influence, since there are no traditional politicians to bribe. What flaws do you see that I'm missing?

Interesting! I didn't know that, but it makes sense.

That may be true, and I'm glad that improvements are being made, but it's not the display. It's not the sound. It's not my keyboard backlight (which got locked on maximum brightness). It's that with Linux, getting anything working requires hours of troubleshooting. Probably if I understood the system better it would only take minutes of troubleshooting, but developing those skills would take months to years. I don't want to invest that sort of effort just to write papers, check my email, take notes, do CAD, and play games.