HelixDab2

Driverless cars would be worse; programming the kind of judgement calls into an expert system is... Not easy, and likely won't work. They will probably do well with routine driving, when everyone else is also using an expert system to drive, but in an emergency? How do you convince your car that it's an emergency? And what keeps someone from, say, lying? Like, I'm late to work because I overslept, so I need my car to drive 100mph, versus my home is on fire and I need to get there ten minutes ago to get my cats out?

The problem is that edge cases exist, and it's really, really hard, if not outright impossible, to plan for them with an expert system.

This kind of thing pops up repeatedly. There's some big, splashy news about a male contraceptive, and then it flames out, or ends up being vaporware.

The problem is that you need to stop a few million sperm with every single ejaculation; reducing that number by 99% means that you're still risking pregnancy. Severing the ductus deferens (a vasectomy) means no sperm get through; trying to clip or block them means that some can potentially get through. Hormonal BC has the same issue; while it significantly reduces sperm count, it may not eliminate it entirely. (And there can be some really significant negative side effects from eliminating endogenous testosterone production, since hormonal levels need to be pretty far out of whack before there's a really big cut in sperm production.)

OTOH, women have to stop two eggs per month, or stop them from being implanted in the uterine wall. A 99% reduction in fertility for women means that it's very, very unlikely that they're going to be able to get pregnant.

(Yes, women suffer from hormonal BC as well, but some women need it just to be able to live normal lives. It's overall less of a problem than it ends up being for men. And women have the option of an IUD as well.)

Personally, I'm in favor of vasectomy; it's allowed me to avoid having any children for 20-odd years now.

Also, that’s what ambulances are for.

Many people have died waiting for ambulances that didn't come, or took too long. Houses in my area have burned down because the fire department couldn't figure out where an address was because GPS gives them the wrong location.

If I slip while working with a chainsaw and cut my femoral artery, I'm not going to tell my wife to wait for an ambulance; I'm going to get a tourniquet on and have her drive me as fast as she can to the hospital, because that will save me 20 minutes--minimum, and that's if they're not already out on a call on the other side of the county--over waiting for an ambulance.

When it's your partner or child that's god an arterial bleed, you'll do it too.

You will bleed to death from a severed artery in under five minutes unless you can stop the bleeding. It's going to take at least that long for an ambulance to show up.

One of the things that was posited was that cars would look at the way you were driving, and if you were driving "erratically" it would shut off.

So what happens when you're trying to get someone to a hospital because they've been seriously injured and are bleeding to death in your car? No, it doesn't happen very often. But I can think of at least one case: Kentucky Ballistics, who had a rifle explode and blew shrapnel into his jugular. You will absolutely be driving erratically in those circumstances; exceeding the speed limit, weaving, honking, turning without signaling...

It... Depends.

There are some relationships where that's part of the T&Cs, and what both people want. I'm not into a lifestyle D/s kinda thing, but that's what some people want, because they don't want to be "responsible" for making life choices. I'm not convinced it's healthy, but it's still their choice.

It does scale, but it doesn't scale directly.

For the most part, people change based on relationships, not raw information. In general, you can't counter a belief simply by presenting overwhelming information. (This is one of the only areas where Trump is a savant; he's actively fostered a parasocial relationship with his cultists. They believe that they have a strong social relationship with him, so they're inoculated against information that's critical or negative of Trump.) What this means is that ideas can be contagious, and can spread through relationships. If you are able to use you relationship with your parents to help them understand why e.g. Trump is terrible for the country, then they can, in turn, spread that to their friends.

While I appreciate your desire to abolish capitalism, in the case of fascism, it's not money, but power that's at play. Even if you eliminated all profit motive, people would still shill for Trump because they think that they can get some kind of benefit that isn't necessarily monetary.

You can. But you need to engage them one on one, and you need to find out what's important to them, what frustrates them, and why. And then build on that. It takes empathy, and not faked empathy. It's not a short conversation, like asking someone to donate to Greenpeace on a sidewalk in Brooklyn. It's deep canvassing.

I do. Do you? Or do you think that 'spreading propaganda' is 'work'?

I assume that you aren't doing more because almost all of the people bitching about the Dems only aligning with 95% of their views and therefore don't vote for the Dems because they're just as bad are accelerationists; they just want to make the system function even less well than it already does so that the whole things crashes and burns. Or, worse, in the case of someone like Jill Stein, are actively working against the interests of the country. Best case scenario? They're speaking to an in-group to harden people in a position so that they're less likely to engage with political opponents.

If you really, truly want things to change, you gotta do that shit on a 1:1 basis, in person. If you're serious about changing people and fixing shit, I'd suggest looking at techniques of street epistemology and reading David McRaney's "How Minds Change".

So, here's a thought.

Instead of complaining, get active at a local level. Start doing shit, instead of complaining that other people should do shit. Be a local activist. Run for office. Work in person to persuade people. Get backing. Shake hands, kiss babies, meet people. And then? Vote for the best choices that you have.

If you want shit to change, you can't complain on-line, you have to get off your ass and do something.

This is fundamentally false.

While it is true that there was inexpensive housing available in the USSR, and that rents were quite reasonable compared to anything that currently exists in the US, and people couldn't readily be evicted if they lacked the ability to pay, it's a flat-out lie to say that that was the "solution" to homelessness, or that it eliminated the problem. Rather, the USSR criminalized being homeless and not being engaged in socially-productive labor; people that were homeless ended up in prisons and were labelled as parasites. The problem that we have now is that the official records simply didn't record the problem, in much the same way that Stalin had histories and photos revised to eliminate people that had become enemies of the state.