$ zramctl
NAME       ALGORITHM DISKSIZE  DATA COMPR   TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT
/dev/zram0 lzo-rle      62.6G  2.8G  972M 1011.4M         [SWAP]

Already did

I take offense to that. I’m a guy who hates cats but still doesn’t think they should be declawed.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/anything-4

I’m not sure what you mean by “crackly bubbles”. Many plants (possibly most of them) use electrochemical signaling, which at the very least resembles the hormonal system in animals. The simplest animals are definitely less complex, neural processing wise, than the most complex plants – consider for example sponges (literally no nervous system of any kind) vs. the venus flytrap (capable of rudimentary counting; the trap only closes when the hairs are triggered a certain number of times within a certain timeframe).

There’s also tons of animals whose nervous systems aren’t at all similar to that of humans. Insects and arthropods for example don’t really have a brain, just lumps of ganglia that do some rudimentary processing, and unsurprisingly most people don’t really consider insects to be capable of having any kind of meaningful sentient internal experience.

The “???” suggests they didn’t get the joke. Like come on, not even a sarcastic “very funny, 2/5”?

The online shop thing is just usual YouTube sponsor stuff (though it’s more self-promotion since he runs the store, it’s some charity thing), and he sometimes plays Connections at the end of vlog videos like this.

Can you believe that’s how sheep feel all the time?

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The PRC does employ censorship, but this is directed against that which undermines socialist construction, including liberal and pro-capitalist narratives.

So in other words not everybody in China can freely express their opinion on political and social topics. Glad we agree on this objective fact. Now what, except for people not answering polls honestly and/or being brainwashed, explains 86% of Chinese respondents responding that China has freedom of speech on political and social topics?

Not all states commit genocide forced re-education or run a draconian nation-wide internet censorship program.

In fact the latter point is a pretty good example of how these polls you’re using as a source are not reliable. The substack article you link says that

When given the statement “Everyone in my country can freely express their opinion on political and social topics”, only 18% of people in China disagreed (compared to 27% in the US).

China doing heavy censorship of public discourse is objective reality – a few years ago they heavily suppressed the social media trend of “laying flat” for example, because they were afraid of the public questioning the rat race.

It’s a well known phenomenon that people raised under authoritarian systems with heavy thoughts control will frequently answer the “socially acceptable” thing even on anonymous polls – this is what the state has trained them from birth to do. Another effect that explains the incongruity in e.g. a larger proportion of Chinese respondents thinking their system is democratic than French respondents is that words like democracy do not mean the same thing in China as they do in France.

dissidents in China are fighting against socialism.

Or just authoritarianism and all that entails.

That 5 days ago link is just a weekly discussion thread that was made 5 days ago. The gun image was posted in the thread after the shooting.

Lots of trees there. That place still looks pretty nice in the summer.

A quick web search had someone say it’s Yaroslavsky District, Moscow and while I’m not entirely convinced (having trouble matching the photo to a map), in the summer it will probably look similar to the photo of Yaroslavsky District on Wikipedia.

I’m not sure it did. These ghouls don’t care who’s in charge and whether or not they’re an insane fascist, as long as the economy keeps chugging on and the rich keep getting richer. Their “values” are exactly those of whoever is in charge. Scare quotes because the only thing they actually value is money.

Neoliberal greed supplanted so much of the 60s futuristic optimism.

Mostly no disagreement there, though I want to say that chimps do not go to war out of cruelty. Chimps go to war because they live in scarcity and it increases the war gene’s odds of survival.

In the past this was also the primary reason humans went to war. In modern times we have invented many new reasons, but usually even those do not boil down to simple cruelty (though there’s many cases in history where one could argue cruelty was the primary motivation). Usually war wields cruelty as an instrument, not the other way around.

On what grounds do you think that ants suck at farming?

For example on the metric of how much of their populace has to be farming to sustain the colony. For modern industrialized humans it’s some single-digit percentage, while for ants it’s probably something like 50%-80% (with the rest of the ants doing nursing).

And, intelligence or skill doesn’t make any animal species better than others. You are an animal, deal with it.

Having the intelligence and capability to rise above nature like humans have done is precisely what makes one animal species better than others. The fact that all current humans are animals was never in dispute – though as far as I’m concerned, being human is not contingent upon being an animal.

I presume, based on prior experience, that the fixation on humans not being better/more worthy/above other animals stems from some kind of anarchist opposition to any and all hierarchies, and so I feel like I need to clarify: being above the natural world does not absolve humans of responsibility to it nor is it a carte blanche to treat lower animals however we desire. Quite the contrary. A lion is incapable of considering the ethical implications of eating meat, so we can hardly fault it for running down a gazelle, forcing it down and then slowly killing it over several minutes before eating it. Humans are capable of that, so we can fault humans for factory farming meat.

You have a fairly unrealistic view of what an apocalyptic scenario would look like. Existing technology would not go bad overnight. A lot of stuff works without electricity (a relatively recent invention in the tech tree, all things considered), and electricity isn’t that difficult to get going “from scratch” to begin with. Not to even mention that a world-ending meteor is something humans can, from our lofty heights far above nature, detect and even divert before it hits Earth.

Actual hunter-gatherers would be among the first to die out in an apocalypse like that, because they’re wholly dependent on the ecosystem, and would lose their only source of food when prey animals go extinct. The survivors would be developed humans in whatever area happens to both not be hit particularly hard (so in the case of global ash/dust clouds, probably somewhere near the equator where farming will still be possible) and that manages to stay relatively cohesive societally.

So on an individual level survival would be down to mostly luck, but on a species-wide level it would not be.

What I think is plausible is one of those old natural self regulation that have played out over and over in the history of the planet When one exploitative species grows over beyond available resources they starve to death until a new equilibrium is reached.

This is another one of those strangely common romanticized views of nature, but it’s also incongruent with reality. By definition nothing about what humans are doing to the planet (i.e. climate change, anthropocenic extinctions, what have you) is natural, and as such the consequences aren’t a natural mechanism either. Humans just practically won’t be able to wipe ourselves out in the same way that e.g. island animal populations may go extinct if balance is thrown off.

We can shoot ourselves in the foot real bad, but making ourselves extinct probably just straight up isn’t something we’re capable of. Sure, there would absolutely be a certain kind of poetic irony in humans, in our hubris, making the planet inhospitable to modern civilization (and it’s possible, too), but this common metaphor of Mother Earth’s immune system working to restore a natural balance is, if you forgive my being crass, complete hippie nonsense.

Yeah and crows don’t have electric drills yet they are still capable of tool use. What is your point?