Tiresia

John Brown was a based terrorist. The British Suffragette movement had a bunch of based terrorists. Mother Jones was based, and as much of a terrorist as most of Al Qaeda (i.e. not personally involved in terrorist attacks, but supporting movements that did engage in terrorism).

All you need is a sufficiently abhorrent status quo and terrorists who are otherwise decent human beings.

Alice says that the fear response is dangerous because it can get people to get drawn in by reactionaries, but fear is often legitimate. It's a visceral signal to remove yourself from the dangerous situation (such as social media), into a position where you can evaluate your options safely.

Fear becomes dangerous if you are unable to escape it for a long time, if you hold on to it, or if it is misdirected so you end up trying to remove the wrong things. If you are posting about social media about how bad social media is, fear is detrimental, but if you find yourself unable to cut down on social media even though you want to, fear is valid and proportional.

... yeah, it is horrifying how I'm on here spending limited introverted energy speaking with strangers through text, and then don't have the energy to organize stuff with friends offline. I'm gonna go now.

5 years later: "Why did nobody warn us social media consumers that social media was bad?"

"Good news, after decades of searching we have finally been able to imagine one (1) possible future world that is worse off than we will be."

I need a drink.

If you let a sabretooth tiger loose into a playground full of unsuspecting children in order to catch the rats that are eating all the shrubs, does it fail catastrophically? Or was it just catastrophic to begin with?

In the struggle against human-caused climate change, this is a completely new avenue for humans to change the climate.

Yes.

Technically that's not a public health issue. And you can reliably store hydrogen for a day or two without too much leaking out, which does make it economical and reliable in rocketry and maybe aviation.

Maybe they're going for something similar to RDJ's Sherlock Holmes. A veneer of propriety over a ruthless and savage intelligence.

it becomes the first nation on earth to avoid civil war by allowing its military to rape prisoners

If this is true, it is only because usually the rapists got their way before enough people heard about it for it to become a civil war. Soldiers threatening mutiny unless they were allowed to rape people is a pretty common phenomenon in war.

Incidents like this almost certainly took place during the US American occupation of Okinawa, there just weren't smartphones to relay the information to the general public, other soldiers, and the government so they could take positions. Maybe the prisoners will be tried at a later date, like the US did with some rapists in the US armed forces.

It's an interesting open question what we would want to replace intellectual property with.

My brain is so used to capitalism that I would be inclined to preserve things like artists having a contractual obligation to turn their work into a finished product if they got paid for it by someone that wanted a finished product. But if you look at some of the great renaissance artists, many of them were infamous for just skipping town and leaving unfinished works left and right when they got bored of making them. So maybe it's better to just accept that many great works are never finished so that other, greater works can get made instead.

One thing that does seem very important is crediting the actual artists and people that made it possible. Not to deny the right to copy or distribute, but to make it so people just know who is responsible and who they want to support or praise or communicate with. You would need infrastructure for that to make it easy to check, to remove duplicates, and to make sure entries give credit correctly.

Another important thing is the location, maintenance, and integrity of physical pieces. Hoarding seems bad, especially behind closed doors and especially without the permission of the creator or their (cultural) descendants. Letting artpieces decay seems bad, especially if others would pay to maintain them. Defiling artpieces seems bad, perhaps even with the creator's consent. But how do we decide which measures, if any, are okay to address these issues? I honestly don't know.

I don't know if it's necessary to do anything beyond these two that is specific to art. As long as there is a digital currency and wealth is already fairly distributed, voluntary patronage and donations (using the crediting infrastructure to make sure it ends up at the right places) may just be the best system for deciding which artists get what budget and how much of the world's resources and labor go to art. If wealth weren't fairly distributed, poor people would have less say in what gets made than everyone else, but the solution to that is to redistribute the wealth, not to patch that up with special rules for art. If there is no digital currency, then it's inconvenient to pay artists remotely.

A good reason would be to get ahead of the bad press and control the narrative. Even something as minor as a bad turn of phrase in an internal e-mail could force them to make a press release early, in that case becaues of the risk of it being stripped of context and leaked to the press by corporate spies or well-meaning whistleblowers in a way that looks way worse than a promise to get around to it later.

Not sure how likely this is compared to it being a fig leaf over cancelling the target altogether.

Whether or not we strive to go back to climate not seen for the past 50 million or even 500 million years, we might end up getting there regardless. Even if we decided today to put all our industry together, we'll still hit double the amount of warming we're experiencing today. If that is extreme enough for a catastrophic feedback loop like the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, permafrost outgassing, catastrophic ecosystems collapse in a subcontinent, or all the plankton dying at once because the oceans got too acidic, then even our best efforts can not save us from that reality.

And once we are in that reality, those of us that survive deserve a chance. Even if Antarctica melts and 90% of all human structures ever built are flooded, even if the forests die and global dust swarms blanket the planet until even the tropics are buried in snow, even if no living thing can exist outside a purified climate-controlled space. We, here and now, owe the people living through that our best effort. And that means looking at those futures unflinchingly, determining which are more or less likely and trying to prepare for all those eventualities as best we can.

The time to throw up our hands and say "all of these options are terrible, we should just stop climate change as hard as we can" was twenty years ago. Barring a technological miracle like the Silicon Valley AI God actually saving us from perdition, a billion human deaths would be us getting off easy. We need to prepare for the inevitable catastrophe, because even if a billion humans die, the next billion matter just as much, and the billion after that, and after that, and after that and after that and after that, and after that.

(That said, obviously research shouldn't be used as a smokescreen for delaying carbon emission reduction. It's crystal clear what our politics and our economy need to do if we want to raise the average life expectancy of children born today above 50).