You misunderstand, I am not saying “make sure he spends it responsibly”. Nobody has has “made” him do this at all, and I didn’t advocate for a policy of doing so. What I’m saying is that I don’t think this particular use is worthy of condemnation the way his other actions are, because in the long run I think that this specific thing will end up benefiting people other than him no matter if he intends for that to happen or not (even if the American healthcare system prevents access, which I’m not confident it will do completely, not every country has that system, and it’s statistically improbable that the US will have it forever, and research results are both durable and cross borders). That sentiment isn’t saying that it excuses his wealth, just that I think people are seeing only the negatives in this merely because of the association with Altman’s name and ignoring the potential benefits out of cynicism. The concept is just as valid with him funding it as it would be had he been condemning it instead.

The response to something beneficial being only available to the rich shouldn’t be to avoid developing that thing, it should be to make it available to everyone. The failures of the US healthcare and economic systems don’t suddenly make developing new medical techniques a bad thing. Human augmentation is another issue from curing genetic disease, though I’d personally argue that wouldn’t be a bad cause either, with the same caveat about it availability. It at least has more potential to improve somebody’s life somewhere down the line than just buying a yacht with his ill gotten gains or some other useless rich person toy would.

I’m not sure I get the universal negativity to this. Like sure, Altman sucks as a person, and an individual having enough money to significantly bankroll research like this is a sign of an economic failure, but surely curing or preventing genetic disease is just about the most uncontroversial use human genetic modification could have?

Microbes are still made of chemicals, it’s just different chemicals

At some point the smear campaigns go from frustrating to somehow funny.

“Ah yes, the “working people need to be able to afford housing and food and transportation” guy. He’s the literal reincarnation of the entire Soviet Union. Don’t ask us to explain how, something something socialism.”

and not to mention, the tools required to create it (maybe not the best examples, but still) are already in the possession of virtually everybody.

The majority of humans that have seen nipples have died. Clearly an extreme infohazard /s

Shouldn’t Spanish have the same problem? I’ve seen them abbreviate it to EEUU though, which I assume must help prevent confusion?

I once found a random food court bathroom that has hand dryers that work amazingly well, and I was genuinely surprised by that when I stumbled on it. I’m guessing it probably is just more expensive or uses more power or something and places cheap out on them.

This is why, for all that getting up at 5 in the morning sucks, I’m glad my job has an early schedule. Having a closing shift effectively erases all the free time that exists that day

As someone pretty new to linux, what’s wrong with snaps? I’ve seen a lot of memes dunking on them but haven’t run into any issues with the couple that ive tried (even had a problem with a flatpack version of a program that the snap version fixed, though I think it may have been related to an intentional feature of flatpacks rather than a bug).

Saying that the lesser evil is less evil has nothing to do with liberalism or any other ideology, it’s a tautology, it simply must be true by definition but doesn’t actually add any new meaning. The trouble in the scenario presented isn’t a voter’s attempt to take the least bad option (since taking the other would just get you to the same place but faster), it’s having a system that creates only two viable options in the first place, such that “not evil” either isn’t even on the ballot or may as well not be.

Hmm, that is fair. I would suggest making votes not federate at all in that case, except doing that would make single person or very small instances effectively be limited to sorting by new

thats fair I suppose, though in practice id assume that making a whole bunch of individual instances is probably more difficult than making a much of accounts on one instance that you control, and thus vote manipulation in this manner should have a higher barrier to entry?

If one wanted to ensure that external content is still easily visible, one could always have things set up so that posts on local communities only appears in local and subscribed, and only posts from outside appear in all (though it might need to be renamed to better fit such a layout I suppose)

Honestly, I’ve begun to think the upvote/downvote model is a bad fit for the fediverse in general:

*Different instances have different rules around it, and in some cases (for example, an instance disabling downvoting) this might give a modest advantage in the sorting for content on that instance

*Instances have to trust votes by other instances, and while an obvious manipulation could be defederated, that has to be noticed first

*Votes are more publicly visible than on a place like reddit, potentially leading to something like a downvote being a catalyst for incivility towards the downvoter by whoever posted something

Honestly what I would do with Lemmy voting is just make vote counts mostly not federate. Have instances send a single up, down, or neither vote depending on if the net number on their insurance passes a certain up or downvote threshold, just so people on private instances have something to sort by, and have the score of a post or comment otherwise just go off of whatever the users within an instance vote. Then, an individual instance could have whatever rules or restrictions on voting it wanted, without worry over if that gets its votes drowned out by the wider network or seen as vote manipulation.

Carlson at least makes some sense I think. He makes his living talking about political stuff on TV. A crackdown on other people that do that, could one day spread to him if at some point he ended up on the administration’s bad side somehow.

I don’t think it’s performative to want the bigots to become people that aren’t bigots rather than wanting them dead. I mean I’ll take dead over spreading the sort of hate he was in a case like that I guess, and I get that the later is something other people have much more control over than the former, but still.

Most of the solid bodies in the solar system are literally a bunch of airless, irradiated, toxic rocks, with either no life at all or potentially some rare bacteria-like stuff hidden somewhere we haven’t been able to conclusively examine yet. They already are in a more “fucked up” state than even the most polluted wasteland we’ve created on earth. What could we possibly do to them to mess them up further?

Depends on the time frame. In the period immediately following such a venture, sure, but if you actually properly establish settlement off earth, the total resource base and thus carrying capacity of civilization as a whole increases and continues to increase until we either hit the limits of that part of the universe one can theoretically reach (which is so big as to make the entire earth less than a speck of dust by comparison), you decide to just stop space colonization (which gets more difficult the further on you go, because the number of potential polities to launch a new mission increases the more space is populated), or you find yourself boxed in by alien civilizations in all directions (since we haven’t seen any, they’re most likely far enough apart on average for this to still leave an extremely vast chunk of space). A hypothetical spacefairing civilization should be able to reach sizes so vast that it would be physically impossible to create enough jobs on just one planet to equal it, even with just this solar system even.

Job creation by itself is not exactly the best motivation to pursue this though, since the jobs created will after the initial period be generally far away and therefore not likely to be worked by anyone except the people that end up in those colonies, who wouldn’t even exist otherwise.