uriel238

The opening scene to Apollo 13 (1995) features a party in Houston with NASA dudes as they gather around the television and Walter Cronkite announces as Neil Armstrong takes his first step on the moon. ( On YouTube )

I was not at that party, but I was at a party in Houston with NASA dudes as we watched the very first moon landing. My dad was a mission control guy with the black horn-rimmed glasses, white shirt and black tie, but not Apollo 12, not 11 (Neil Armstrong) or 13 (the one that blew up and barely made it home).

I couldn't walk yet, and I got that the space man on the screen was super important, but at the time I was missing a whole lot of context. The blanks would fill in with time, since the US was super proud of that moment. It's my very first memory.

I totally do this to my cat and I don't have to be drunk or wear lipstick.

Can't say you're wrong, however the forseeable future is less than two centuries, and our failure to navigate our way out of capitalism towards something more mutualistic figures largely into our imminent doom.

I personally am down for this punch-up between Alphabet and Sony. Microsoft v. Disney.

🍿

🤓 In the 1915 air war the Allies didn't yet have their own version of the mechanical interruptor gear, which fueled the Fokker scourge. Early allied planes used metal deflectors on their props, though the Airco DH2 solved the problem being driven by a push prop behind the pilot and the guns.

Synchronization of the guns was solved by the deployment of the Nieuport 17 and Airco DH5, both biplanes that brought an end to the Eindekker scourge. /🤓

PS: You are right, that the mechanical synchronizers weren't perfect, and there was like some periods of both used on the same plane. Eventually, props were made that spun at consistent rates and the synchronizer was electric and worked very well.

Well, it depends on whether you believe everyone is, to borrow from the US Declaration of Independence, endowed with inalienable rights.

Here in the States there's actually a legal defense, Necessity . This is the same category under which self defense lies, that if a crime committed is necessary to preserve life and well being it may be justified or exculpable.

Usually the justifying life and limb cannot exceed the harm done by the crime. So in the case of cannibalism (which was mentioned elsewhere in this thread) one isn't justified to kill someone else to preserve their own life, but if they happen to be dead already, it's justified to eat their remains to live (as per the Donner Party incident -- though in that case, they decided to eat their fallen after considerable deliberation)

It gets weird when, say, a mother breaks into a pharmacy and steals very expensive medicines in order to keep her kids alive because the price of the medications raises questions as to the value of a human life.

Now in the US, the courts are terribly corrupt, and thanks to prior incidents exculpation based on circumstances (e.g. Dan White's twinkie defense) federal and state courts in the US are less likely to actually consider circumstances without some top lawyer guns making a big stink (usually hiring expert witnesses to painstakingly explain why those circumstances make a difference). So if you're poor enough that you need to steal bread to live, you're probably not going to benefit from a necessity defense, even when it should be valid.

Licenses are a wrongdoing against the state, and behaviors are licensed by the state allegedly in protection of the interests of the public. Licensed driving is to assure one is qualified to drive, so the wrongdoing against the community doesn't happen until the driver is involved in an incident that brings harm to others (or to other public interests, such as the environment -- driving into a lake would count).

But where this goes under necessity is that her occupation, and thus her survival may depend on her capacity to drive, and if the state is going to strip her of license, it has to take that into consideration, or deal with the consequences of motivating more crime.

Rail works at the inter-county scale, but not in local distribution, and self-driving AI is not limited just to trucks, but also extends to couriers that can follow pedestrians (at least to include ramps and elevators. I'd be interesting if little dogs -- the robots -- are used for couriers.) So it's not just truckers but all mail and delivery occupations that are threatened in the coming decade.

For now, the pinch seems to be getting autonomous cars to interact with human-driven automotive traffic, as we already have clerical robots that can be tolerably not-annoying to fellow pedestrians and clerks in a work environment.

If we were actually striving for post-scarcity communism, this would be a major step in letting common workers become artists (with the free time they have after partitioning out jobs that cannot yet be automated) but instead our ownership class is looking for a blast furnace by which to direct the workers they no longer need for their vanity projects.

Have you thought about why public transit is poorly funded and developed?

Because the automotive industry actively dismantled it in the early twentieth century and then lobbied ever since to redirect funding to highway maintenance? The largest single government project in existence in the US National Highway System.

Some people, when given a choice between cannibalism and dying of starvation will choose the former. The ones that do may choose to regret it, but they are alive to have the capacity to regret.

At the point that you are struggling to survive, any society that does not immediately render aid is no society at all (not to you), and is either an enemy, taking resources you need, or prey.

I find it unfathomable that people imagine that poor people and untermenschen should just resign themselves to dying off. It explains why the working class might resort to terror attacks to assert their right to exist.

Getting a job takes months on average. And the way our current system works, you have to lie about experience to get your first job, and then upgrade a couple of times to get a living wage with survival benefits. That takes years.

You have to eat and sleep today. If you have ongoing medical requirements, your healthcare can't wait for a job.

Nor should you!

When La Résistance started organizing in occupied Paris, it was because the German garrison picked that fight. The Germans couldn't help themselves (despite orders to police gently) but be brutal and abusive against the French, and individuals in the public felt compelled to misbehave in small acts of resistance (slashing tires, defacing propaganda posters, cutting phone lines). Things escalated from there.

Since the publishers are also trying to suppress out-of-print media, abandonware and public domain material (also fair use) and the courts are favoring the publishers over the good of the public, we know it's no longer about promoting science and useful arts or building a robust public domain.

The companies and courts alike are breaking the social contract, hence the trmporary monopolies enstated by the agencies of the same state are invalid. Piracy is no longer a valid crime since the state licenses are no longer valid.

(They will still enforce the will of the state — ICE does a lot of raids to enforce commercial interests when it's not massacring refugees— but that doesn't legitimize the will of the state. It only shows they are willing tyrants glad to use violence to oppress.)

We have nothing to lose but our chains!