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Messages - Nephew Twiddleton

#46
Aneristic Illusions / Re: Pelosi vs AOC feud
July 12, 2019, 07:22:45 PM
Quote from: nullified on July 12, 2019, 06:07:50 PM
RWHN: with all due respect, you have lost your fucking mind.

The neoliberal half of the Dem Party has no spine and kowtows to the merest whim of people who would gun them down in public if they thought they could get away with it, all so they can look like the good guys and appeal to the centrists. "I want to get something done!" They scream, while ignoring that the only things they'll be allowed to do is continuing the inexorable painting of a swastika on the American Flag.

Newsflash, fuckface, Pelosi's geriatric, weak-sister groupies aren't going to get shit done either. The pushback is too strong and the opposition is playing the pigeon strategy. Schumer isn't going to throw the fuck down over basic human rights considering WE HAVE CHILDREN BEING SENT TO DIE IN CAGES and he has the skeletal strength of a deep sea fish after soaking in a vat of hydrazine for a fucking decade, STILL. What's he going to do when it turns to black people, or LGBT groups? "But that's illegal, mister supreme leader!"

If we don't get some steel-boned motherfuckers up there we'll continue to watch our "left wing" make weak gestures of opposition and mumbling statements of gratitude to goosestepping fascists until the day the camps open for political opposition.

Tiptoeing toward a better future doesn't work when you're faced with people who have no empathy, big boots, and a gun in hand. You fucking sprint for it and hope you make it to cover before you get a hole blown out of you. Same goddamn principle here.

Pay the fuck attention to what's going on. You don't placate a fucking genocidal sociopath! You don't make incremental moves when you're on a treadmill set to high speed, either. Pelosi doesn't have the goddamn RABIES necessary to make the right decisions here and if you can't see that, I have no fucking clue what the hell you learned from your time in these parts.

This, plus the fact that we're pretty much out of time for action on not having human civilization collapse due to climate change
#47
Aneristic Illusions / Re: Pelosi vs AOC feud
July 12, 2019, 07:19:48 PM
Quote from: Norman on July 12, 2019, 05:17:26 PM
At the same time, Congress is a numbers game. Which I think, like her or don't like her, is ultimately where Pelosi is coming from.  The Dems in the House can do shit if they are in the minority. With a majority, they may not be able to do what the liberal wing of the party wants done, but they can do more than zero. 

I think that is where the rub is.  Pelosi and establishment want to move the ball to see if they can smash their way to a first down, AOC et al want to get a touch down on first possession. 

Of course the reality is with an R Senate and White House, it's not like there's too much the D's can accomplish, but whatever possibilities there might be, it certainly isn't going to be with a red-meat liberal initiative.

So in other words, we have to accept a moderate centrist agenda to achieve the agenda we need a buck short and a day late.
#48
Like, I'll do it but it might be months if not years
#49
Quote from: nullified on July 12, 2019, 04:30:26 PM
Becoming "aliens to the aliens". The whole sequence is so well done that saying more would ruin it. Just read it, it's well, well worth it.

Egan handles the most out there ideas so casually and effortlessly that it makes me jealous. He does more with one seemingly off-the-cuff word than I can do with four paragraphs and a committee.

You say just read it like I don't have a backlog of pleasure reading and more importantly, required reading.
#50
Quote from: Juana on July 12, 2019, 03:52:36 PM
Quote from: Nephew Twiddleton on July 12, 2019, 01:35:45 PM
Quote from: Juana on July 11, 2019, 09:52:05 PM
I'll survive. I'm just poor and cheap, lmao

That reminds me. I'm probably going to have to shell out quite a bit for admissions applications to PhD programs this fall
Yeah, that shit ain't cheap from what I've heard.

On the one hand, I'm only going to apply to Boston area.

On the other hand, I'm applying to Boston area
#51
Aneristic Illusions / Re: Pelosi vs AOC feud
July 12, 2019, 03:28:23 PM
Yep. It's a bit mindboggling how out of touch establishment Dems are.
#52
Aneristic Illusions / Re: Pelosi vs AOC feud
July 12, 2019, 01:40:25 PM
Quote from: Cain on July 12, 2019, 08:56:31 AM
That Pelosi has the party base, whereas they do not and so with the very possible exception of AoC (who can use her national profile and twitter presence as a kind of soft power counter) they're all screwed.

But no surprises there. Pelosi is a hippie-puncher by nature and inclination.

Pelosi needs to go as much as McConnell.
#53
Quote from: nullified on July 11, 2019, 11:44:04 PM
Quote from: Nephew Twiddleton on July 11, 2019, 09:13:01 PM
Quote from: chaotic neutral observer on July 11, 2019, 12:21:57 AM
Quote from: Nephew Twiddleton on July 10, 2019, 04:00:33 PM
We can't really survive somewhere that we're not adapted to live in.
Actually, I already survive somewhere that humans are not biologically adapted to.  When I go outside during winter, I could die.  But I overcome this with technology.  When the temperature drops, I wear a coat.

Why is wearing protective gear (space suits, encounter suits, whatever) a showstopper for alien visitors?  For that matter, why couldn't they alter their biology to match the environment?  We are much closer to modifying humans than to visiting the stars (some Chinese researchers are already trying to create HIV-resistant babies.)  Being able to modify one's biology significantly may even be a prerequisite to surviving interstellar travel.

There is also the possibility that the alien visitors are so alien, that our microbes wouldn't affect them at all.  If they were all robots, for example.

...yeah.  Actually, forget everything I just said, and let's go with that.  The aliens are all robots.

Aliens are all robots is the most feasible.

And yeah, I'm well aware of the Chinese CRISPR babies. Thing is that comes with a lot of ethical problems for a reason. Not the least of which being that straight Mendelian genetics is just scratching the surface and altering one gene could disrupt multiple gene networks. I'm not a computer programmer, but I'm sure a computer programmer can easily spot an analogy here. It of course depends on exactly what's being done in genetic modification, but if you're so heavily modifying a genome to be able to handle alien worlds, those aliens might be aliens to the aliens that point

Please see Greg Egan's Diaspora. There is a character who does something along these lines just to communicate. It's fiction, but Egan is about as hard as science fiction can get.

Does what to communicate, robots or gene editing?
#54
Quote from: Juana on July 11, 2019, 09:52:05 PM
I'll survive. I'm just poor and cheap, lmao

That reminds me. I'm probably going to have to shell out quite a bit for admissions applications to PhD programs this fall
#55
Quote from: Juana on July 11, 2019, 06:10:41 AM
I really, really, REALLY do not want to take the qualifying tests to teach English but ☹️ social science teachers are about a quarter of a dozen and there's always a need for English. Ugh. That's another $300.

:sad:
#56
Quote from: chaotic neutral observer on July 11, 2019, 12:21:57 AM
Quote from: Nephew Twiddleton on July 10, 2019, 04:00:33 PM
We can't really survive somewhere that we're not adapted to live in.
Actually, I already survive somewhere that humans are not biologically adapted to.  When I go outside during winter, I could die.  But I overcome this with technology.  When the temperature drops, I wear a coat.

Why is wearing protective gear (space suits, encounter suits, whatever) a showstopper for alien visitors?  For that matter, why couldn't they alter their biology to match the environment?  We are much closer to modifying humans than to visiting the stars (some Chinese researchers are already trying to create HIV-resistant babies.)  Being able to modify one's biology significantly may even be a prerequisite to surviving interstellar travel.

There is also the possibility that the alien visitors are so alien, that our microbes wouldn't affect them at all.  If they were all robots, for example.

...yeah.  Actually, forget everything I just said, and let's go with that.  The aliens are all robots.

Aliens are all robots is the most feasible.

And yeah, I'm well aware of the Chinese CRISPR babies. Thing is that comes with a lot of ethical problems for a reason. Not the least of which being that straight Mendelian genetics is just scratching the surface and altering one gene could disrupt multiple gene networks. I'm not a computer programmer, but I'm sure a computer programmer can easily spot an analogy here. It of course depends on exactly what's being done in genetic modification, but if you're so heavily modifying a genome to be able to handle alien worlds, those aliens might be aliens to the aliens that point
#57
Cain brings up good points about political consequences.

But re: Moon germs, and the like. We have to wear spacesuits whenever we go somewhere not Earthlike. Hell we have to basically wear the equivalent of spacesuits if we go to certain parts of our planet. We can't really survive somewhere that we're not adapted to live in. Neither can microbes. Microbes have limitations too.

We can't even culture most of the microbial species on Earth, for a variety of reasons, but a nontrivial part of that is that some species only thrive in multispecies consortia. We ourselves get pretty sickly if our microbiomes are out of whack. So among the challenges that an alien invader is going to face: bacteria that they're not evolved to handle, assuming that their environmental parameters match up with any bacteria from Earth, (or if their internal conditions are suitable) and that their offspring are probably not going to have the microbiomes they're supposed to
#58
Microbiology, specifically, but with a side of evolution
#59
Quote from: chaotic neutral observer on July 10, 2019, 04:10:45 AM
Quote from: Nephew Twiddleton on July 10, 2019, 03:36:52 AM
Again: aliens who come here are probably committing suicide by horrible, tortuous means. What's the harm in a phone call?

I always thought the conclusion of "War of the Worlds" was nonsense.  How the hell could the aliens be advanced enough to build interplanetary spaceships and beam weaponry, but be ignorant of pathogens?

We barely had the technology to make it to the moon, but we still knew enough to be worried about the unknown, and put the first astronauts in quarantine when they got back.

Astronauts that went to the Moon didn't expect life there and they went in space suits because they were temporarily in an environment that they didn't evolve in.

I also know a thing or two about biology.
#60
Quote from: Doktor Howl on July 10, 2019, 12:16:50 AM
Quote from: Nephew Twiddleton on July 08, 2019, 04:37:12 PM
Nevertheless, if an alien civilization contacts us, why not give it a go?

Because I hate aliens.  :crankey:

This at least it's a proper answer