Yeah, Reagan was always talking about small government, and then he blew up the deficit with unchecked spending. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

All countries spy on each other.

I definitely agree about being more worried about the US spying than China though.

We got a bigger car than I would like because my stepdaughter decided that she wanted to be a hockey goalie. 🙈

I lived in Amsterdam for 10 years and only got a car when I married someone who lived in the suburbs. Well, actually I still don’t own a car but I can borrow one as needed!

AMA only attempts to solve half of the problem with medical care in the US. Before it access to medical care was gated through insurance and many people (especially children, who are worthless in the capitalist system) were uninsured and therefore had no access to medical care.

Providing access as Obamacare does kind of works, but only by making a Faustian bargain with insurance companies: they are given carte blanche to extract wealth from the population bad and only have to provide the barest fig leaf of medical care.

So…the ACA is bad, but better than what came before.

I found Delicious in Dungeon to be charming.

The universe includes everything. As such it would include the higher being.

Nature was perfectly fine with the earth having only single celled life for billions of years. Nature will stumble along with or without humans until the planet gets too hot for liquid water.

Sending humans to Mars is evil.

It is impossible to have people anywhere without gazillions of microbes. Once humans land on Mars we’ve at the very least corrupted any evidence of life, and possibly destroyed an independent genesis of life.

Since all life on earth comes from a single progenitor, this is both an incalculable loss of potential knowledge, and also a greater extinction than all earth extinctions combined.

I propose a moratorium for say 200 years or so, or at least until we’ve explored more than a few square kilometers in detail.

This is amazing. Thank you!

Well that’s disappointing to hear. Although it makes me glad that I am too cheap to buy one. 😅

I mean, there are Purism phones. Super expensive, but they keep selling out so I guess they are reasonable.

Keep in mind that the book is very old, published in 1931. DNA hadn’t been mapped, information technology was limited, and so on.

In the book, people are born in factories. Working class people are born in from split cells, as quintuples if I remember correctly. Your role in life is largely determined by your genes - workers don’t have the psychology for anything but labor.

In spite of that, it’s not an especially oppressive society. There is a “perfect” drug, soma, which is sort of like a non-addictive, non-physically harmful heroin that can be delivered by gas. When there is unrest, security forces come in and get everyone high until they chill the fuck out.

Sex is open and easy, but always completely voluntary by everyone involved. When people are turned down they are sometimes surprised but never upset or aggressive.

Entertainment is presented as vacuous, but the people seem to enjoy it. There are movies, TV, and so on. Sports are engineered to require people take trains out of town to stadiums, and require deliberately-complicated equipment to play, in order to create demand for production.

So… is that a dystopia? There is no discussion of environmental damage, but overall it seems sustainable, not predicated on infinite growth. People are stuck in the role they were born to, but it seems like there are no artificial barriers to advancement… just that not everyone can be good at everything.

Definitely. A world where people are happy and healthy and live basically fulfilling lives. There are a few fanatics who opt out, and they’re unhappy. Go figure.

I don’t find Brave New World to be especially dystopian. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Or ask your work to give you a phone?

My company insists on spyware for my phone, so I insist they give me a phone for work stuff. I leave it off in a drawer at home when I’m not on call.

They fled Britain and stayed in Holland a few years first.