TheVat

One need look no further than recent photos of Depp to understand why his career might be on its downslope. He reminds of guys I've seen at riverboat casinos who aspire to be lounge lizards but their shallow charm is undermined by an overall sleaziness. His future as a character actor is secure, leading man not so much. I'm sure it felt good for him to lay the blame on a Washington Post column that didn't mention him. Gosh, I am not being very nice. This is why I avoid celebrity gossip stories. NM.

Like everyone who is not Amber Heard or Johnny Depp, I have no idea what really went down in their brief marriage. Which means there has already been way too much public discourse.

https://archive.ph/8IJzp Atlantic article (this is a PW free version) that explores the change in our awareness of our nuclear arsenals and whatever strategies they are supposedly guided by. I like that the writer asks if the US would do better to put all that nuke maintenance money into conventional defense, and what sort of changes that would involve (aside from the obvious requirement that other nuclear powers join us in disarmament). Here is a pull quote (which by no means sums up the article contents or would substitute for reading it): There was a time when citizens of the United States cared about nuclear weapons. The reality of nuclear war was constantly present in their lives; nuclear conflict took on apocalyptic meaning and entered the American consciousness not only through the news and politics, but through popular culture as well. Movie audiences in 1964 laughed while watching Peter Sellers play a president and his sinister adviser in Dr. Strangelove, bumbling their way to nuclear war; a few months later, they were horrified as Henry Fonda’s fictional president ordered the sacrificial immolation of New York City in Fail-Safe. Nuclear war and its terminology—overkill, first strike, fallout—were soon constant themes in every form of entertainment. We not only knew about nuclear war; we expected one. But during the Cold War there was also thoughtful engagement with the nuclear threat. Academics, politicians, and activists argued on television and in op-ed pages about whether we were safer with more or fewer nuclear weapons. The media presented analyses of complicated issues relating to nuclear weapons. CBS, for example, broadcast an unprecedented five-part documentary series on national defense in 1981. When ABC, in 1983, aired the movie The Day After—about the consequences of a global nuclear war for a small town in Kansas—it did so as much to perform a public service as to achieve a ratings bonanza. Even President Ronald Reagan watched the movie. (In his diary, he noted that The Day After was “very effective” and had left him “greatly depressed.”)

I would like to have dynamite be legal for me to buy, so I can use it legitimately to blow up a big tree stump. All the good people who want to use dynamite are being punished because of a few bad apples. So now only people with mining or demolition licenses can buy it. Aiiee! Legitimate use doesn't trump public safety. We understand this with explosives, many deadly poisons, fireworks, and other things where the misuse is clearly understood and there is not some hot button issue of patriotism and freedom. We accept limits on how we can clean aquariums or remove stumps, because it protects people. We can have rational conversations about regulating those dangerous things. But raise the same issues with guns and you would think it was about proposed legal castration, the way some people react.

I've got $8.05 for the highest gas price, at 901 N. Alameda in LA. The average in CA today, per AAA, is around $6. But CA has very high gasoline taxes, and they've had prices like this since early March, as the global market started responding to the war. Serg's photo has a mid March timestamp, in fact.

Aww.. My least favorite thread just reproduced. They're so cute and harmless looking when they're young. Pretty soon we'll have a mating pair and the transgender threads will overrun Australia. Maybe, with luck, they eat cane toads or rodents. Seriously, I think the thread title is a self-answering question. Let trans/NB kids play on whichever team is the best fit with their size, strength, and level of aggressive. And there are always some kids who won't fit anywhere in a given sport. I was never going to be a football (American def.) player, and I got over that easily. Children's psyches are not Fabergé egg shells, unless adults tell them they are all the time.

An alternative view is that he is calling out the myth that guns serve as effective means of self-defense, when in fact guns are mostly used for acts of aggression against oneself (suicide), family (domestic violence), or strangers. Stats bear out the latter view, ergo banning them protects people's right to live. Also "scoring political points" is spin, not argument. Politicians do what their constituents elected them to do, represent their interests. Unless they are bad, in which case they do what their donor base paid them to do and tell the electorate to GFYs.

A good place to remember Albert Camus and what he had to tell us about fealty to any ideology, and the pitfalls of seeing people as abstractions. https://www.vox.com/features/22989761/vox-conversations-albert-camus-the-philosophers

Education is pretty sedentary, unless you're in some alt-ed system like Montessori or Waldorf et al. I don't doubt there are alternatives that would result in more relaxed children who are concentrating better. More kinesthetic methods of learning would be one possible. More five minute breaks with vigorous running around and so on. Protective clothing, no. Bumps and scrapes are part of development, learning to deal with physics and biomechanics in everyday life, and they shouldn't be magnified into traumatic events. That said, I think there's also value in learning to sit quietly and be attentive to others. I see a need for balancing both the kinetic and the stationary, in order to function in any society.

It's been awhile, so all I can say is that while still asserting that a traditional programmer-coded computer, uncomprehendingly manipulating symbols on the basis of syntax, not meaning, would never be conscious, he somewhat softened on his bio-chauvinism (where he had formerly been insistent that only biology can have intentionality) and allowed that a neural net with self-plasticity and so on, could perhaps be conscious. I think he tried to preserve his earlier position by saying that if you have to mimick biological structures and dynamics so much to engineer a truly sentient machine, then you have admitted that purely syntactical processing never will. I find it all a bit circular: if I can define machine intelligence narrowly enough, I can demonstrate it is not conscious. Searle, in the final analysis, only proves the limits of his own definition of AI. He liked to say that water doesn't gush from a computer simulating a rainstorm, which was superficially clever, but that always seemed to require us to ignore that computers really can move information around, so if we simulate something that moves information around, like a brain, that's a rather different thing than simulating raindrops. Your smartphone calculator doesn't simulate doing math. It actually does math. An AI doesn't have to simulate wet and squishy just because brains are wet and squishy. It has only to think, and think with meanings and intentions. Like a brain. I guess one could take a Penrose stance and posit that consciousness must be non algorithmic, can intuitively overcome Godelian incompleteness, and self-reference via some quantum states of superposition unique to wetware brains. But why unique to biology? For me Penrose's non algorithmic processes simply beg the question of why a quantum computer couldn't step up and fill those intuition shoes with its massive states of superposition. To simply perceive the ambiguity of a myriad of superposed states, why are we certain this perceptive process could not be engineered?

This is the obvious problem that prompted my satirical post earlier. Any business that starts segregating people on any aspect of their physical appearance (aside from being a child) would soon be filing chapter 7 bankruptcy. The exception would be locker room assignment in fitness clubs, on the basis of sex. And possibly some amusement park rides, where an unusually high body mass could involve real risk for the rider. (though there's usually a lot of engineering redundancy and overbuilding required on such devices).

Almost 400 million guns here in the United States of Insanity. How can I sum up the problem in one word: CRAIGSLIST. Maybe this is why so many developed countries simply ban all weapons other than hunting rifles. And then follow up with buybacks and other legal tools to remove assault weapons (defined as all rapidfire high capacity rifles) from the public arsenal and make private sales a felony. What might help is for liberal politicians to stop pretending they care about the second amendment. They don't. Neither do I. If more of them were willing to talk about revising (a la John Paul Stevens famously suggested five word alteration) or rescinding it, then the more moderate positions would start to look more MOTR and achievable. As it is now, almost every moderate position on guns causes the conservatives to emit shrill cries of horror and flood their PACs with donations to annihilate any reasonable compromise. Why not just be honest and say "the 1790 constitutional law is antiquated bullshit," and then that would make the moderates look good when all they want is banned assault weapons and longer waiting periods with stringent background checks and no Craigslist loopholery.

I object to fat people being on airplanes at all. Get too many fatties on a flight and you never take off. You get out and it's like F*** me I'm still in Denver and all we did was taxi around a bit! I also think they should be charged more at buffet style restaurants, because they drive up the fixed price for modest eaters like me. Ideally we'd just make restaurant doors really narrow and only people who really need a meal can get in - everyone benefits! Also, those theaters that charge more because they tore out all their old seats and replaced them with new ones that accommodate giant American asses, they need to offer discounts to the slim-butted like me who can still fit easily in a Wrigley Field seat circa 1952. Give us our own special seating area where we are served free diet soda and wholegrain snacks.

Impressive bibliography. As someone whose work involved some AI, for a while in the late eighties, I have to say many of us moved away from Searle's chinese room because it was more based on older computer architectures - linear, user-coded, nonparallel systems that had more relation to Searle's imagined room than do cutting edge neural networks with plasticity, massive parallellism, self-modifying and code creation, analog-digital integrations, etc. Modern AI has looked at brains and is learning more how they work and what functions transcend substrate. There is more openness to strong emergentism in architectures that reveal novel features not deducible from the composite. As there should be. The simplest argument I can offer you is: the emergence of artificial consciousness is possible because the consciousness we all know intimately has in fact emerged from matter, molecules which evolved the ability to both represent and to create information. Searle's model (which he himself has somewhat recanted in recent years) is based on simple linear machines that only represent information -- neural nets have the potential to do more than simply execute code. We don't process the world, we actively create it (a bit of metaphor there, no worries) by creating the information that informs our models.

Frisbeetarianism - the doctrine that when you die your soul flies up onto the roof and gets stick there Boron - a boring moron Plato - the reflection of a lump of Play-doh on a cave wall (to be continued another day, maybe with a couple of my favorite Ambrose Bierce definitions)

Me, too. But I married a packrat (a hoarder, if that English slang is not familiar) - what can I do? Perhaps we will have a thread on keeping houses as empty as possible. In any case, welcome!

To your first line - excellent choice. The days I've waded through parts of this thread actually left my thinking more clouded than it was before. To the next line - trans kids are a tiny percent of kids. Hard to have a trans team at Podunk High, composed of one or two kids. And how would kids feel about being off in some "special" category, and how would that foster acceptance by all those cis-kids? Childhood, as some of may recall, involves being pretty tribal, forming in-groups and out-groups.

Do we not already have two largish threads on this topic?? All packed with opinions from people who tell us they've never studied philosophy, don't know the relevant branches of philosophy, then post lengthy opinions based on a few quotes they've read. Urgh.

I think in these chats "illegal" is often used loosely/broadly. While it is true that per FOPA 1986, you can (with a great deal of paperwork and being fingerprinted at your nearest FBI office, and then a LOT of waiting) purchase an older machine gun, manufactured before May 1986, you cannot legally own or transfer any machine gun manufactured after that date or be involved in the import or sale of foreign-made weapons. I think this is why some refer to such weapons as illegal, when they mean that you cannot go out and buy a new one as you might an ordinary rifle or handgun. I really don't mind if someone uses terms like illegal or banned in that way, when you do have laws that effectively block all but collectors. I suppose it's just barely conceivable that some incredibly coldblooded and longterm planning mass shooter could go through the enormous trouble to obtain a pre- 1986 machine gun, if they had no prior criminal offenses or other red flags. (and you would also need to live in one of the 30-some states that do not have outright bans that would override the FOPA 1986 bill)

This mischaracterizes the ban proposals out there, which generally are category bans and not just the AR-15. Four of the five worst mass shootings were done with assault style weapons. Not really an ocean "drop." Even reducing such weapons and the high capacity magazines that are popular with mass shooters would save lives and would not cramp the style of any hunter I've met (and I live deep in Red State country, with many hunters). Australia took this approach, and also removed many already purchased weapons through buyback programs. Its mass shootings dropped to zero for many years (the zero broken only by a family murder/suicide that technically qualified). And yet, somehow, Australia still has a well-regulated military and has not been overrun by radical commies. As the oft-reprinted Onion headline put it: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens As for longterm solutions, sure, maybe we can fix youthful alienation, isolation, paranoia, violent acting out, impulsivity, and the entire dark side of human nature. While we're waiting, we could pass those long centuries having reasonable restrictions of citizen ownership of killing machines. And perhaps do so based on reason and evidence, not on what seemed applicable in 1787. Amendments can be rescinded, as the 18th was, they are not holy writ. And they are constantly being interpreted for the express purpose of applying them to the RW of the 21st century. That's why the Framers set up the possibilities of doing so. Also worth noting that mental health solutions tend to hinge on troubled persons seeking help. It appears, from the hundreds of cases now available to us for study, that rage-filled loners don't seek out help of that type. Seems likely we'd have to drill down to deeper socioeconomic causes that generate neglectful and/or abusive parents and resulting rage-filled loners in the first place. And I'm guessing that might be expensive. And usually we reserve high-budget expenditures for keeping Afghanistan safe for the Taliban or rooting out imaginary yellow cake uranium in Iraq or maintaining nuclear arsenals that cannot ever be used because all life on Earth would be annihilated.

Damn. I just went to the wrong high school!

Yes. And it's kind of interesting that these average people never seem to ponder what would happen if citizens (non-military/non-LEOs) lost guns totally. (Never mind that 70% already don't have guns). Our culture has defined the scenario as unthinkable and not to be discussed. The Second Amendment zealots couldn't give a crap about vast tracts of the Constitution and would probably repeal a whole slew of amendments if they thought it would help their narrow ideological goals.

Am mostly here because this is not the transgender athlete thread. Phew. But also wanted to share this.... https://www.dailykos.com/story/2022/5/25/2100317/-Guns-will-be-banned-for-Trump-s-upcoming-speech-at-NRA-convention

If anyone abducts an alpha particle, let me know.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/paul-gosar-texas-shooter_n_628db1f5e4b0edd2d01c8ef7 We don't just let mentally ill people have guns, we also elect them to the United States Congress. More disappointing was the Oscar-winning actor Matthew McConaughey, who is a native of that town (Uvalde, TX), who tweeted some vague philosophizing but never said one word about gun control.