FaceDeer

Think of all the future effort it’ll save, though.

Depending on your child’s age and your bond you could also simply get rid of the child.

Some years ago now, a bunch of bike lanes got added to the streets in my city. The city did a big project of adding them and afterwards proudly declared that X number of kilometers of bike lanes had been made.

When an investigation was done into how the decision process had gone for where to add them it turned out that the only consideration had been “how cheap is it to add bike lanes in these locations?” Not “would bike lanes actually be used in these locations?” They were solely trying to maximize the kilometers-of-lane-per-dollar-spent so that they could put out that headline with as big a number as possible.

Subsequent studies showed that a lot of those lanes weren’t being used by bikes in any significant number. Bike lanes had been added on streets that ran alongside sidewalks that were already designated bike paths. I’m a bike rider myself, some lanes were added in my neighborhood but they somehow managed to put them everywhere except the routes I usually took. The city wound up spending a bunch more money to remove a bunch of the bike lanes that were doing nothing but increasing congestion.

It may be that this was a similar situation, where someone wanted to proudly show off headlines of how they’d pushed for bike access and got X numbers of kilometers installed and those were the only real metrics that mattered.

I can’t say anything about your math, but I can say that you didn’t read the article.

Yeah. I consider Trump the “blow everything up” candidate, he got a lot of support from people who were just so generically desperate that they wanted to vote for whoever seemed like they were going to majorly change something, somehow. It almost didn’t matter what Trump did as long as he smashed the existing order while doing it.

I’m not trying to argue for or against this position. As I said all I’m doing is explaining a misrepresentation of the position that people are holding, namely that “a machine that can’t think straight will do it for us.”

I don’t see what it’s going to conclude that we haven’t already.

Well, that’s the point of trying to build ASI. To have it think of things that we haven’t been able to think of.

I really, really, can’t picture a scenario where we actually listen.

Of course not, you’re not an ASI.

That’s fine, I’m just correcting the misrepresentation of the view that was in the headline.

Nobody’s expecting a “machine that can’t think straight” to do it. Some people are hoping that a more competent machine will be developed.

Geoengineering is a field dedicated to exactly that - mitigating climate change by modifying solar input and so forth.

Basically, the Republicans have been shooting the environment and now want to ban tourniquets and sutures.

Maybe this is because China just said they needed Russia to win? Trump’s got an obsession with opposing China.

Or maybe it’s just the way the mush inside Trump’s skull happened to flow this particular day.

Next headline up: Taliban sends troops to Kursk to support Russian defenders there.

This timeline just keeps getting weirder.

Now make the exact same meme but substitute “AI training” for “piracy” and watch the downvotes flow in.

If you asked “what do Holocaust deniers believe” I would expect answers like this.

Israel: “Hang on, we’re not done killing everyone first.”

Okay, but not sure what that has to do with my point. It still supports the notion that giving weapons and similar supplies to a party fighting a war involves you in that war.

Iron, aluminium, titanium, oxygen, silicon, phosphorus, potassium, I could go on listing elements at great length. There are plenty of resources out there. Celestial bodies are made of resources. You name it, you can find it out there in various abundances.

Helium-3 is just one of the few things you can find out there that is basically unavailable on Earth. It’s myopic to focus solely on that.

I don’t care about what international law says, this is what world war means as I understand it. I said that to begin with. International law is often even more nebulous and open to interpretation than most national law given there isn’t really a universal framework for adjudicating it.

I’d be curious for a citation, though. I looked for some and found way more instances where international courts and laws held that supplying weapons counted as being involved in a war than the contrary. For example:

• The law of neutrality (Hague V & XIII of 1907) prohibits neutral states from furnishing “supplies of war” to any belligerent. Violating that duty strips a state of its neutral status and exposes it to lawful countermeasures by the aggrieved party.
• Under state-responsibility rules (ILC Articles on State Responsibility, Art. 16), a state “aid[ing] or assist[ing]” another in committing an internationally wrongful act—armed force included—is complicit, provided it does so with knowledge of the circumstances.

I think you’ve got an overly narrow view of “direct involvement.” If I’m in a war with someone and a country tells me “here, take these weapons” and I say “you know I’m going to use these weapons to kill soldiers of the country I’m at war with” and they say “yes, we know. We actually have some specific conditions about how and where you can use these to kill them, and some satellite photos to help you target them” then I’d call that direct involvement. Flesh-and-blood soldiers are only one small part of a nation’s military these days and not every part of a military needs to be involved for the military overall to be involved.

I think we’re already in it. A world war, as I understand it, is basically just a situation where a variety of alliances and tensions build up until when a war erupts in one spot it rapidly spreads around to involve a large number of countries world-wide. That seems to be the case already, you can easily build a Pepe Silvia wall-of-crazy showing all the connections between Russia and China and Iran and Syria and Israel and Hungary and Ukraine and Belarus and the United States and Taiwan and on and on. The actual shooting pew pew warfare is still relatively confined (though bear in mind that literally a million Russian casualties have happened over a thousands-of-kilometers-long front line riddled with trenches and minefields, which is pretty significant) but all these countries are throwing their weight in on those fights and it’s easy to imagine them branching out quite quickly when conditions change.