If you’re involved in any kind of protest, the phone number of a lawyer. Hell, generalize this. Make sure you memorize numbers of at least the first few of your emergency contacts. You never know when you will be separated from your phone.

Because I’ve personally met Jesus Christ. He’s a 10,000 year old former cave man.

No no no. You want WoodsScientist. I’m WoodScientist.

Some of those areas are really remote. He could have easily died, and his body was then torn apart and scattered by scavengers before anyone could find it.

People frequently get lost in remote areas, die, and never have their bodies found. All that has to happen is that the animals get to the body before search parties do.

Or he could have simply landed in a stream or river, and his body was devoured by fish as it tumbled its way into the sea.

There are plenty of ways for nature to destroy a corpse.

IDK. I’ve been unironically referring to LLMs as “the Devil’s machine” or simply “The Devil” lately. :D

I mean, if you use them, they do steal your soul, so it checks out.

In these situations, sometimes I go full Joker and perform a reverse pass maneuver.

What’s a reverse pass? There’s a tailgater behind you. You move to the passing lane or the opposite direction’s travel lane. Then you slam on your brakes. Then move back into the travel lane. Suddenly the tailgater is in front, and you’re the one riding their bumper! The look of confusion you get is absolutely wonderful.

the irony being if you tell the people who whine that their house they bought has to go down in value to improve society, they lose their shit at you.

The real irony is that we don’t even need to have houses go down in value. Condos? Sure. But single family homes? The land itself will be what has value. As an area densifies, the land a single family home occupies becomes more and more valuable. And there will always be some folks that will want to live in a SFH. As more and more infill happens, what SFHs do remain become very premium items. Imagine if somehow a single family home existed on a quarter acre lot in Manhattan. That home would sell for a fortune, even if the house itself were a mobile home on blocks.

Owners of SFHs have nothing to fear, in terms of loss of home value, from densification. Condo owners will not see as much appreciation if barriers to housing construction are removed, but SFH owners will continue to do quite well.

That would be a great item for a DND session. Could be sold by an incompetent or novice potion maker, or at some magic potion equivalent of a scratch and dent store. Or the dollar store version of a love potion.

Crazier idea: let’s abuse the hell of one and only one antibiotic. Select the antibiotic that has so many resistances that it’s practically useless in a clinical setting. Then prescribe THAT antibiotic to anyone who wants an antibiotic for the flu. The doc can truthfully tell them they’re being prescribed an antibiotic. They get their big fat placebo, and nothing of value is lost.

The way that particles interact with each other, the way bonds are formed, the way entropy is held off just long enough that a bag of 10^26ish atoms can examine itself and make cat memes… the laws of physics themselves suggest to me that something with some sort of a will or intellect set things in motion.

You are not independent of your observation. The probability that you live in a universe cable of supporting life is 100%. It would be impossible for you to observe any other kind of universe. Any universe incapable of supporting life will contain no observers.

For all we know there are an endless number of universes, mostly with laws of physics vastly different from our own. The universe itself seems to already be spatially infinite, why not also have infinite universes? There may be a vast ocean of universes out there, and the vast, vast, vast majority are completely uninhabited and uninhabitable. Realms containing only black holes. Universes where only light exists. Spaces where the universe is born as a cloud of hydrogen gas, and simply never gets beyond that. Maybe for every one universe capable of supporting life, then there are 10^(stupidly large number) of empty universes.

It may seem strange or unscientific to postulate other universes, but it’s a lot more scientific than postulating an intelligent, conscious creator that set the universe in motion. In the latter case, you’re simply assuming more of something that we already know can exist - a universe. You’re just assuming universes with different physical contants or laws. In the latter, you’re assuming the existence of an entity that has no other parallel examples. We don’t seem to live in the world of Greek myth where there’s multiple deities running around we can all openly observe. If you assume a creator, you’re assuming something that has no evidence for any entity of its kind existing. If you assume multiple universes, you’re simply assuming more of what we already know exists.

It is telling that we don’t live in a particularly habitable universe. Sure, we can tinker with the physical constants to make life impossible. But for a universe so “fine tuned” for life, an astonishingly insignificant fraction of the universe’s space is habitable by life. An astonishingly small amount of matter is living or even involved in sustaining life.

And the best the universe can seemingly do? In our solar system? A thin slime of life on a single wet rock, maybe some bacteria in some ice shell moons or deep subsurface bacteria on Mars? And the jewel of the system, Earth? That thin shell of life requires an entire planet to give it a surface to live on. And then the mass of an entire Sun is needed to keep Earth’s surface habitable. That’s the best environment for life the universe can naturally create. I’m sorry, but from an engineering perspective? If you are writing the very laws of physics and reality? You can certainly do better than what we have.

The universe is not fine-tuned for life. Such a universe would be one where the vast majority of space, matter, or both were habitable. It would be one that can efficiently support life, not requiring entire astronomical bodies to support rounding errors worth of living matter. If the universe was designed for life, it was designed by a shit designer. Maybe God’s an apprentice deity and we’re his practice project.

What we live in is a barely habitable universe. Look around you. The stars seem mostly dead. Our own solar system is dead rock after dead rock (with some possible exceptions.) We live in the type of universe that most observers would live in if there were a huge number of universes with randomly assigned physical constants. In such a setup, there may be some hyper-local optima where universes could be superhabitable, but their total number of inhabitants would likely be swamped by observers in universes that were just habitable enough to get life going.

The seemingly-logical need for a creator disappears if you simply postulate multiple universes. And our observable reality really does match well with us living in a barely habitable universe, which is what we would statistically expect if there were a large number of universes in existence.

There’s also superdeterminism.

I think of something like a compound bone fracture. Today, with modern medicine, that’s a routine and easily treatable injury. But at any point up til just a few centuries ago, a compound fracture was a death sentence. A clean single break could be reset, but multiple pieces require surgical intervention and alignment. And that just couldn’t be done safely. The physicians then just didn’t know how to prevent infections enough to make that surgery survivable. Plus they didn’t have x-rays to guide them, etc.

One day and you take a fall. Nothing extraordinary. You don’t fall off a giant cliff hundreds of feet to your death. You fall off a small 4’ high ledge. You land wrong, and you break your leg in a compound fracture. And that’s it. You’re now a dead man crawling. There’s nothing anyone on Earth can do to help you.

Are you asking leading questions?

If hammers were only useful for hurting people, yes, yes I would.

Not like this…

After rebuilding it, you drive your new 30k EV out of its refit garage. Pulling out into the road, you immediately get hit by someone using their cell phone, totalling your car.

The insurance company offers you $5k for your vehicle, as they value it as a twenty year old used car on a rebuilt title.

These things are never that simple.

Why, in the name of all that is good and holy, should we require someone whose dream it is to be a carpenter, to take calculus to graduate high school? In what universe will that requirement be doing any good in their life? What will it serve other than a potential completely arbitrary barrier to simply graduating from high school? And a carpenter is actually far more mathematically inclined than most career paths people pursue.

Yes, learning calculus can be a revelation in mathematical beauty. But the same is true for a thousand potential fields of study. In terms of practical use to most people, they would all be equally frivolous. A case could be made that a thousand fields of study are something that people simply must be exposed to. I’m more in favor of letting people choose their own path. We shouldn’t be piling on arbitrary barriers on to a diploma that is only meant to signify basic competence.

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I let fire do most of my digestion for me.