I’m not qualified to make arcane decisions about my health coverage, any more than I am to determine which food preservatives are safe and which should be kept far away from human consumption. There are some people qualified to make such distinctions, but we generally want them employed at a level where they determine what works, and then ban the preservatives that cause flipper babies, and the coverage plans that will leave you dead or bankrupt or both at once.

Everyone should have the healthcare they need, and nobody outside of a very few particular cases should ever have to think about it.

And They Might Be Giants recorded a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse theme song.

It feels like there should be a different category for that and “Females.”

Like, “I don’t like to talk politics” or “I only believe in traditional medicine” are red flags.

“Females” and “I’m not racist, but…” are howling, screaming, nuclear meltdown sirens.

Minutes, actually, due to the flying piranhas.

The designers wanted it to be comfortable

I think it’s funny when people criticize the D for looking like a luxury hotel in space. You’ve got crew deployed on this ship potentially for years at a time. Of course you’re going to put some wood paneling, beige and pastel colors, and potted plants in there. Would you want to spend every waking hour looking at gunmetal grey deck plating? Spruce the place up a bit! Saves money time and effort on dealing with all the mental breakdowns.

AI is not sufficient for tasks involving creativity like art and music. It doesn’t capture that human aspect yet (It could in the future).

There’s a dismissive take on AI creating art that “AI can never create a truly great work of art or tell a truly compelling story.” I worry less about that, since those are really subjective stances to take on a given work; one person’s La Dolce Vita is another’s Dude, Where’s My Car? and vice versa.

What I want us to worry about is: What are we going to do to protect human dignity, even if there’s no profit motive in it? Sure, maybe an AI screenwriter could someday write a movie that people would want to see, but why should that mean that human screenwriters should have to starve even more than they currently do? If we can automate a large percentage of all human labor, does that mean that we’re just going to render most humans unemployable and not change anything else, because that’s what the invisible hand demands? Or are we going to have a serious conversation about how human dignity has value, in and of itself, and totally separate from our ability to increase GDP?

Pedagogy of the Oppressed and all that.

ONE OF US. ONE OF US.

Let me guess: ignore Congress, let billionaires do whatever the fuck they want, rule by executive order, and hope that the other two branches of government don’t grow a spine and do something about it. So, basically the same thing they’ve been doing all along?

The Fountain

Or this:

I broke down the overlap of various dystopias a while back. IIRC, the vertical dichotomy is between order and chaos, and the horizontal is starvation vs. abundance.

Went Trick or Treating in a new hometown with my family, had a great night, came home and put some candy in this uranium glass dish:

The former Berlin businessman I referred to earlier told me that he blamed his own group, people with the time and the money and the opportunity to know better, for what happened to Germany. “We ignored Hitler,” he said. “We considered him an unimportant fellow, not quite a gentleman, not of our own class. We considered it just a little bit vulgar to bother with him, to bother with politics at all.”

They thought of the government as “They.” The only possible route to a clear conscience in politics is to accept political responsibility, either as an active member of the party in power or as an equally active member of the loyal opposition.

Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

Mr. Spock: A Vulcan would face such a loss without tears.

Young Spock: How?

Mr. Spock: By understanding every life comes to an end when time demands it. Loss of life is to be mourned, but only if the life was wasted.

–Star Trek: TAS, Yesteryear

I was only a few days ago old when I found out that the Borg Queen cybernetic torso insert from First Contact was a practical effect.

Pornography is either fraud (nobody looks like that, nobody fucks like that, etc.) or gambling (you’re looking at something hot and sexy until, catastrophically, you aren’t).

Rule 34 of Boo is a dark, twisted place.