Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[afloweroutofstone]

Jesus Christ

When talking about his death penalty sentence, Timothy McVeigh said that it wasn’t a victory for the government, because “[i]n the crudest terms: 168 to 1.”

[ranma-official]

fuck, he made a “still a good K/D ratio” joke before videogames started doing these

[mitigatedchaos]

Where does “harvest the blood of those who kill more than three people in order to force them to pay back their debt in lives to society whether they want to or not, and if not fit for this purpose, use them to test the safety of experimental drugs” fit on the political compass?

[ranma-official]

opinions that sound good at first glance but go really wrong gradually, so bottom right

let’s do organ repo as an example because Niven did this.

with regular sentencing, there’s “guy goes to jail if I say he’s guilty, guy goes free if I say he’s not”. with organ repo “guy gets disassembled for organs that go to sick people if I say he’s guilty, guy goes free and sick people are deprived of organs if I say he’s not”, which is a massive externality orthogonal to whether the guy is actually guilty or not and will inevitably pressure people towards harsher sentences and even disassembling the innocent.

[mitigatedchaos]

Honestly I know it’s not actually a good idea for any existing government, but this kind of thing pisses me off.  I want such crimes to ultimately be rendered futile, and if the new incentives lead all such persons to commit suicide during the criminal act that saves society the expense of a trial.

A more ideal state would be able to carry this out in such a way that it’s unclear if this is what is really occurring or if they’re life imprisoning them or just taking them out back and shooting them.  On top of that other evidence of whatever message they wanted to get out or fame they wanted to achieve would be erased or compromised by hoaxes.  The death of martyrdom.

Too bad there’s no government that can be trusted enough for that.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

licking-the-liquid-crystal asked:

Suicide? What happened to looking forward to the immortality singularity?

ranma-official answered:

Not possible.

Humans are always on the brink of discovering immortality, which is just beyond the cutting edge of current science. Now, with Big Data, it’s brain uploading. Recently it was the human genome project, earlier still, transplants, pharmaceutics. During the Conquista, with the Fountain of Youth, it was cartography.

100% of people who were born will die on this planet.

[mitigatedchaos]

Nah, it’s not brain uploading anymore, we’re back to biology again. Right now we’re mostly getting tech to make being old suck less.  It’s at the stage the robot arms controlled by monkeys in labs were 10-15 years ago, so it should actually arrive, just like nervous-system-controlled prosthetic limbs are now a real thing.  Clearing Alzheimer’s plaques in mice and the experiment with old and new blood from joined mice rejuvenating the old mouse are examples, as well as tissue engineering for growing new organs.  Getting stuff for humans out of CRISPR Cas9 will take a bit longer, probably another decade before it reaches that stage.

It’s unclear whether aging escape velocity will be reached within our lifetimes, but it’s still within the realm of probability, supposing the countries advancing the current technological edge don’t crash, and… they may not actually crash.  Renewable energy is still picking up even as subsidies end, and we have enough uranium to power industrial civilization for 3,000 years in the oceans, if we must resort to it.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[ranma-official]

I find it increasingly difficult to justify my own continued existence, really.

There are so many ~~inspirational~~ posts floating around and I’m reading through them thinking “well, that doesn’t apply either, actually”.

Somebody’s not a CEO but they help people save money on airplane tickets, and I am not even useful for that.

[ranma-official]

“but pets”.

I have a bird.

1) Someone else can take care of him. My mother, for example.

2) Or he’ll starve to death. So? Logically speaking, there are probably millions of budgies. They’re not going extinct or anything. It’d be awful, but I’m one of the sole people in the world who thinks he has any value, so it’s basically a net gain.

[ranma-official]

“but your blog”

Now you’re just lying.

[mitigatedchaos]

Well, technically, unfollowing you is as easy as clicking a button, so surely the people saying they like your blog are telling the truth about that, since otherwise who are they signalling to and why didn’t they just unfollow? If you mean it isn’t enough in the grand scheme of things then I suppose I can’t argue that, though I am left to wonder if there isn’t some high-risk activity you could take that you could use to push yourself into what you consider the positive, though perhaps you don’t have enough energy for that.