Many wireless and ethernet connections could ultimately network with just a few Starlink user dishes in population centers. I think the base station could be located in neighboring countries. It might be plausible if you have a bunch of young people who are disconnected for too long.
The benzene is the money-saving opportunity. Per GP it's added to avoid a costly drying process. The cost of removing the trace benzene would nullify those savings.
Though 96% ethanol via cheap distillation is fine for hand sanitizer, so the only real explanation is they're leveraging existing supply chains (as described) or have made a mistake.
UBI is here (perhaps temporarily), and unevenly distributed in terms of fiscal and monetary allocation.
AI is here, and in the hands of a few tax-evasive global corporations. So far AI has been good for: addictive attention farming, polarization, and social control.
I'm a fellow techno-optimist, but the solutions Sam brings up don't feel effective, or at least sufficient. Our direction is ugly, and Sam isn't calling out the big players to change their course.
Perhaps we need Universal Basic Compute: any corporation beyond a certain compute capacity (in FLOP/s) must allocate 50% to public utility. From there, individuals can vote to determine how they algorithmically represent themselves.
It seems sufficient to acknowledge that virality is a property of ideas. We can then continue using a single term to reference the notion of an 'idea'.
The field of virology doesn't draw a line in the sand excluding certain viruses with low transmission rates.
Viruses that are more transmissible simply draw the attention of the field.
Presumably, a scientific study of ideas would observe ideas commonly transmitted in the wild.
>The field of virology doesn't draw a line in the sand excluding certain viruses with low transmission rates. Viruses that are more transmissible simply draw the attention of the field.
The field of meme-ology however does. So there's that.
Maybe a cannula would be attached at a certain point? I think the real difficulty would be producing nutrients and mixing them into the blood. I am clearly a nonexpert.
I brought this up thinking about the broader "chicken and egg" ethics & scaling problem of tissue growth. Currently the biotissue alternative meats are dependent on fetal bovine serum to get started. A vegan might object to these meats.
I don't personally support these methods, and am just spitballing ideas on the tech side of the aforementioned problem.
This article discusses how transcendental meditation has induced nihilism and reality disconnect upon some of its vulnerable practitioners.
In my ears, this lends cautionary support for Nietzsche's criticism of stoics and Buddhists. I'm not very knowledgeable here, but roughly his argument is that the avoidance of life's suffering is nothing but an escape from life itself. If one engages with the world, one must deal with pain and joy as a consequence.
On more practical terms, it's always good to measure how your inner model corresponds with reality.
I tried Stoicism earnestly for some time, reading Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. What I found was actually a "nonchalance" enveloping me, where I lost any willpower or determination or urgency to do anything. It sure felt good. But activities and deadlines were slipping. I had to literally talk myself back into caring. I wonder if anyone else had similar experiences. Whenever I raise this point, some one says I did not really get it. Perhaps. But I did try it as per my understanding. It increased equanimity, but decreased my motivation and drive.
(As an aside, "sloth", which is one of the seven deadly sins, was originally "acedia", is a feeling of a lack of concern. [1])
"You can pass your life in an equable flow of happiness, if you can go by the right way, and think and act in the right way."
The "think in the right way" takes just a little practice. The "act in the right way" is the hard part, and the whole thing falls apart, in exactly the way you've noticed, without both. I've yet to achieve both, personally, though simply having "think the right way", with a little moderating wisdom from age, isn't nothing.
I think a trap in general with systems like Stoicism, or Zen Buddhism, or similar, is believing that thinking or knowing is anything more than one maybe-necessary-but-certainly-not-sufficient step.
(frankly, I'm not even sure what "go by the right way" means, yet, and would have to return to the original Greek to figure out whether it's just a summation of the two following ideas, or something separate—however, as I'm still working on "acting", I'll leave that for another day)
[EDIT] For those reading this without having read Meditations, it's heavy on duty and obligation, which is deep in the "doing" side of the above dichotomy. The "think the right way" is largely about ignoring that which one cannot control, but the trouble is that anything in the immediate past becomes "beyond one's control", which is where the parent's slipped-deadlines and such become easy to brush off without the duty-and-obligation and act-the-right-way habits balancing it out. Can absofuckinglutely confirm that if you get very good at the "think the right way" side, and only that side, it gets dangerously easy to not be bothered by failure or inaction.
I don't want to respond with "you were doing it wrong" since I don't know enough about what you did/thought to evaluate that, but my view of Stoicism is that the "nonchalance" should be applied to things that are outside of our control, while we should do everything we can to be virtuous with the things that are inside of our control. E.g If it's raining we shouldn't be tearing our hair out in panic and cursing the weather, but rather deal with it in the ways we can by taking an umbrella with us. I do agree that some Stoic practices (such as the 'view from above') could bring about an attitude of "eh, does it even matter?"
I think it's possible to gain a large deal of motivation and drive from the concepts of virtues and doing everything we can to live virtuously and improve the world accordingly.
Maybe you should have quit your job instead of talking yourself into being motivated again.
Meditations helped teach me how to ignore pain and temporary things in pursuit of the immortal virtuous life of purpose. One that creates long lasting works of art, beautiful memories and a solid reliable character that those I care about can count on.
Stoicism is like a filter. You shake out all the bullshit out of your life and theoretically find the thing that you cannot shake out. That is your true drive.
If you shook the bullshit out of your life and found nothing was left, then perhaps you should consider what is out there that you are attracted to.
AIUI there's nothing wrong from a Stoic perspective with "talking yourself into caring" about stuff, especially as it seems you were just getting into the ideas. Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus did it a lot, and it seems to have worked well for them.
"Nihilism" and "reality disconnect" is just a phase in one's progress through insight meditation; it's not the end goal. Meditation does not teach "avoidance" or even "escape" from suffering; on the contrary, it does teach deep engagement and insight. What looks from some perspectives like an 'escape' from suffering or even from life itself is more properly thought of as a reframing of one's perceptions, that gradually becomes better aligned with their proper nature and therefore less prone to fruitless attachment and craving.
Daniel M. Ingram is especially clear on these issues BTW, and his writings in general are a good introduction to insight meditation as it's actually practiced by those who seek some form of stream entry.
Interesting. I will check this out when I have a chance. I struggled mightily between something like Nietzsche-and-Buddhism as a kid in my 20s. Had to simply put it down one day, but it’s always been on the back burner.
“Mastering the core teachings of Buddha” may be next on my audible... we shall see
FWIW, I don't think MCTB works well in audiobook form. The book is extremely dense and needs to be read in depth, even unpacking the meaning of a single paragraph can take some effort. It's something that you really want to have in written form if at all possible.
Oh good point to know, thanks. Kind of disappointed(and kind of happy to hear it’s worthy of such study) as I have to many textbooks to unpack already. The back burner is going to be burning for a while!
If you're willing to entertain another recommendation, in a different narrative style, look into Dreams of Light by Andrew Holecek.
I've mentioned it so many times in this thread that people will think I get a commission :D But I find it incredibly well written by someone with a very clear mind and a knack for wordplay.
As a Buddhist myself, that's a poor description of Buddhism. The "suffering" the Buddha spoke about is not general pain, it's a more specific ailment. The word he used was "dukkha" which a lot of modern Buddhists argue more directly translated to "unsatisfactoriness", or as I think of it, "wishing that things were different than the way they are."
That's the specific pain the Buddha teaches about and tries to help with—it's not about becoming numb to the world at all. It's simply overcoming the desire for things to be different than the way they actually are. The method, by the way, is to become more aware of the world and your feelings—not less so.
Disclaimer: I'm just a lay student of Buddhism and far from a teacher myself. This is just my understanding from years of reading about it. Not all Buddhists agree with this perspective, but I believe it's the vast majority amongst Theravadans at least.
Your description of dukkha reminds me of a concept in Stoicism. Early Stoics formalized "pneuma" as something of a "natural order" or "holy ghost". The teachings were that one could avoid self-destructive behavior by not fighting an intrinsic flow to the universe.
To frame this with what I saying about Nietzsche- his criticism might have encouraged one to wrestle with natural order. Or perhaps stated that passivity with regard to the state of things is undesirable.
There are also the factors that the person stopped taking her meds and didn't sleep for a long time before the mental break down.
When I was a kid, I thought about nihilism a lot, but I don't think thinking about it brought any adverse effect on my mental development or day-to-day behavior. "What is one life compared to the vast cosmos" I would ask myself such questions and feel very lost, but when lunch time comes, I knew I was hungry and I went to eat.
I suspect that the physiological factors contributes more to such psychosis as described in the article, than the idea of nihilism or Buddhism. The underlying mental condition, sleep deprivation, the vicissitude of her life, the exhaustion from sitting still, the sudden brake on taking meds... One of those would drive some people crazy, and she had them all.
> avoidance of life's suffering is nothing but an escape from life itself
Neither stoicism nor buddhism is avoidance of suffering, but inuring one's self to suffering. Buddhism (particularly the therevada teachings of Goenka) explicitly warns against aversion and craving to sensations (that of suffering/desire/etc.), but encourages a mind of equanimity in the face of either. Stoicism has this similar goal to temper reaction, but lacks an effective practice to reach it.
Given the terrible health consequences of deficiency, I think assuming racial difference in healthy vitamin D levels is a more dangerous claim that requires a burden of proof.
Melanin absorbs the UV light our bodies use to produce vitamin D.
It is an important public health issue for people with darker skin living in temperate or polar areas to get enough vitamin D.
Lack of vitamin D for people with darker skin is the inverse of paler people being at risk of burns in sunny areas.
After referencing that paper and a couple others, the new work says "... practically all the galactic rotation models so far are based on potential theory and the circular orbit concept in the Newtonian framework"
"In the present article a new model for the rotation curve of galaxies is developed including the effects associated with mass currents...
... It is shown that the inclusion of the gravitomagnetic field clarifies some inconsistencies of the standard potential theory."
That's the wrong paragraph to cite. The parts relevant to Cooperstock's (and similar) work is this:
> Although filled with controversy, the studies of the galactic rotation via general relativity [16,17,18] reach the same basic conclusion of the present paper. Namely, the dragging effect of a gravitomagnetic component (time-space component of the metric) explains the flat rotation curve at large distances, without the recourse to dark matter. The main problem with the general relativistic models is the very limited number of exact solutions of the Einstein field equations [...]
> The calculated motion in the general relativistic approach corresponds to the free-fall of test particles in the assumed metric, without consistently considering the effect of the large galactic mass density distribution on the metric. Actually, this is the same objection that can be made to the classical approach [...]
> Fluid models, as used in the present paper, consider the mean motion of particles in the Vlasov-like collective gravitational field. The gravitoelectromagnetic weak field approximation to general relativity, used in the present paper, leads to a tractable self-consistent solution of the galactic rotation problem.
