And oxygen kills everyone who dies of old age.

There’s a war everywhere in the world and will be untill we die probably

This is defeatist thinking. Mankind had, in all its thousands of years, never gone to the Moon, but then came 1969 and we did it. Everything’s impossible until you actually do it. The past is useful data to extrapolate from, yes, but that doesn’t mean that everything that went before is an immutable fact of existence for all time.

We don’t lack the ability to end war, we only lack a plan.

I don’t want Hamas to conquer Israel but I would like the Palestinian people to stop getting genocided and/or ethnically cleansed. In other words, I would like for Israel and Palestine to reach a peace deal that allows BOTH of them to live in peace, along borders as close to the 1949 Green Line borders as possible (obviously a lot has changed since 1949 and some changes are unlikely to be ever willingly undone, but it should be possible to get close - certainly closer than they are now).

I also think that this is almost certainly going to be impossible as long as Netanyahu and Hamas are in charge. Palestinians need to get rid of Hamas and Israelis need to get rid of Netanyahu.

No, but the purpose of a shower is to get dirt off of your body. Dirt that got there before the shower, not during.

Yeah, this is something we can cheer for without even a hint of equivocation because it’s the destruction of weapons instead of the killing of people. Though I’m sure there were probably SOME human casualties, I’m comfortable with Ukraine targeting weapons and ordnance as much as they want.

No, I don’t have a bidet. They’re expensive and not very common. But if I had one, I would probably dry my ass with a small amount of toilet paper. Or maybe I’d use a towel, and just have a different one every day. I already change and wash my underpants every day. I assume you’re not soaping your ass every time you shit, so then by your logic your underpants are exposed to a gross ass and are therefore gross themselves every time you shit. So if you find it acceptable to simply change your underpants every day, then changing a little towel every day isn’t much extra burden.

Obviously it’s possible for me to get by perfectly fine without a bidet right now. But there have been times in my life when I’ve been injured (eg a dislocated shoulder) and reaching back to wipe was kind of difficult. It opened my eyes to the fact that someday I’m going to be elderly and when the day comes, I would much rather have a device for easily cleaning my ass than to be forced to rely on someone else to do it for me. In my opinion every home should have one, just because everybody eventually gets old. I’m certainly not suggesting they be added to public bathrooms.

So wait, do you not dry your ass after a shower? Or are you saying that you use something other than a towel to do so? Am I speaking to someone who’s never touched their ass with a towel? Do you just stand around in the nude while waiting for your ass to air dry?

How do you manage showering?

This is why the current political climate is so extremely dangerous. The world has spent so long developing the Global Nash Equilibrium that nobody believes that anybody is in a position to actually follow through on any of the threats they make. Everybody is fully willing to believe that all their opponents are bluffing, and fully willing to call those bluffs. But all the bluffing was part of the Nash Equilibrium, so actually calling those bluffs is destroying the Equilibrium. The only way we can go back to the balance is if the threats become credible again, and that can only happen if people start actually following through on some of their threats for a while. And that would make for an extremely rough decade.

Oi. None of that.

Israel threatened to do this is retaliation if several European followed through on plans to recognize Palestine. So if Israel’s doing it regardless…

In principle I agree. The problem is that there are countries which don’t care about respecting law and if you kill AI in the West, all that will happen is the West will get left behind.

Unfortunately only found liable, not convicted

Well, to be fair, how would he know?

Because this is custom contract work and the requirements-gathering phase of custom contract work is complex even when it’s human-to-human. A contractor doing requirements-gathering needs to understand the real-world context to a human level. Maybe “never” was an overstatement, but we’re still nowhere near developing an AI capable of navigating real-world context beyond extremely formalized systems such as road navigation. This isn’t like text generation where it happens in a second and the operation costs nothing more than what it costs to run the computer that does it so if the AI generates stupid text you can just rephrase the request and try again at minimal cost. Miscommunications in trade work result in waste of time and materials. We’re way off.

Performing a job like that would require so much context understanding that even if they made a robot capable of physically executing the vast array of required physical tasks, it would still require a human plumber to operate the thing, ie even if it was a matter of simply giving it instructions to carry out, a customer would not have the necessary knowledge to know what exact instructions to give. You’d still need a human with plumbing knowledge to give the proper instructions. We might need FEWER plumbers, but we’ll never need NONE.

You think an AI is gonna come to your house and unclog your toilet?

Note: “mo chara” is Irish for “my friend”

The only way in which shares can more-or-less translate to real money at their face value is if you use them as collateral on a loan. This is how rich people are rich: they use their shares to take out loans which provide them with spendable money. Money now is always more valuable than money in the future, due to inflation and opportunity cost, so most rich people are almost always in monumental amounts of debt, but because they were able to spend a bunch of money up-front, they’re able to invest in things that bring them even more money to pay the debt off. Example: if you had the money to buy a house and rent it out to tenants, the rent you receive will EASILY cover the mortgage - the trick is getting the collateral to get a mortgage to begin with.

The only danger is that banks and lenders write in a clause that if your share prices (ie the collateral the loan relies on) drops below a certain value, you are forced to sell the shares off and give them the proceeds, so that they can recoup at least some of the money they lost on your bad collateral before it devalues completely. This could, theoretically, happen to Musk if $TSLA drops below a certain threshold, which is what half the Internet seems to be hoping for.

Well it is, in the sense that rather than you becoming slightly better at things, everybody else becomes much worse, thereby you are still above average even though you have gotten worse.