"Sledge designed the humanoids to help humanity and be invulnerable to human exploitation. However, he eventually realized that they had instead taken control of humanity, in the name of their Prime Directive, to make humans happy
...
No humans may engage in any behavior that might endanger them, and every human action is carefully scrutinized. Suicide is prohibited. Humans who resist the Prime Directive are taken away and lobotomized, so that they may live happily under the direction of the humanoids."
Presumably it was meant literally, but the term "charity shop collector" seems to have some other meanings as well which are interesting to me as a non-UKian speaker:
- A provider of "a charity shop back-end as a service", which disposes of donations
received by charity shops.
e.g. https://live.ctrgroup.co.uk/third-sector/textiles-collection/
- A person who collects things purchased from charity shops.
e.g. "Harding is an avid charity shop collector, especially of sad and neglected
ceramic animals".
Sorry. By 'charity shop' I meant a retail outlet operated by a charity. By 'collector' here I mean someone who collects monetary donations in such a shop.
PS Come to think of it, I have never seen a charity shop in any of the many countries I have visited outside UK. All the more remarkable given in the UK they are so frequent and often large.
Revenue is usually before expenses. But it's Reddit not Wikimedia--I imagine they're efficient enough to have the $3.4M without having to put up donation pleas.
I was thinking that Reddit would be much more fiscally responsible/efficient than WikiMedia, but of course I have no real data. In truth they are probably much more similar than they are different.
On the one hand, if they are incinerating millions of dollars every month, that's an argument that they could easily afford a few more - after all, they are getting cash from somewhere.
On the other hand, if they are losing money, in a certain sense they have not got even $1 to spare.
>It was a much better death than having a lot of futile last-minute interventions.
It's easy to say that sort of thing, so everyone does. It makes plenty of sense.
People don't want to die in the hospital or go through hell in their last days or weeks.
But nobody wants to die right now, ever. No matter what they said before or what papers they signed.
The standard picture, the logic, makes perfect crystalline sense up until there is a choice between going to the hospital right now and living an undefined amount of time, maybe only a day or a week, but longer than the next few minutes.
My mom (and my brothers and I) chose hospice (cancer) during COVID so she could be with her friends and family in her dying days.
She stopped eating and drinking because she knew it was time. That was a sort of last gift, not having to see her languish for weeks.(although I will never stop being bitter about being unable to have a proper funeral and memorial service).
Decades before I had to deal with my mom dying, I read "Grave Angels" by Richard Kearns, and I don't know what more you can say on the topic of accepting death.
> But nobody wants to die right now, ever. No matter what they said before or what papers they signed.
Plenty of people recognize when it's time. When my mom was diagnosed with glioblastoma, her surgeon said, "This is what you will die from." That's hard to hear, but people can definitely take it on board. To realize that it's not a choice of whether, just how. Take, Brittany Maynard, who had the same thing my mom did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittany_Maynard
I can go as far as agreeing that American culture has a lot of collective anxiety about death, and a consequent refusal to deal with is calmly. But there are plenty of other approaches to that. Like the European movement known as Death Cafe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Cafe
Many things in our lives can be scary. But we can shape our relationships to them. And given that death comes to all of us, I think it's worth taking the time to get on good terms with it.
All of the replies to my original comment have veered off from what I tried to express with the phrase "right now".
I was alluding to a situation with rapid terminal cancer much later than diagnosis, but earlier than morphine + the end of communication. The fentanyl or oxycontin stage, as I recall it.
I think most likely if you are ever so slightly insulated from such a situation, you might not realize it.
Having a parent die of cancer when you are ~7 may not prepare you for having a parent die of cancer when you are ~37. That is how I see it now.
This is completely false. You’ve clearly not been around dying people with really painful diseases.
I’ve witnessed two elderly people in my family with cancer in severe pain just ride a morphine drip waiting in anticipation for death. The only reason they didn’t euthanize is because it isn’t legal.
The "right now" whereof I spoke is basically any crisis during a quickly progressing terminal cancer after the oxycontin starts and before the morphine.
When a person can speak, and change their mind, and everyone involved in care isn't present at a particular instant or on the same page with what to do.
"Overtake" doesn't imply "becomes superior to in intelligence"...Maybe he does mean it that way, but still.
Was the Terminator superior to all humans in intelligence? Either in the original or the first sequel? It didn't seem like it to me. It was just good enough to infiltrate and destroy.
The Terminator was/will be superior in physical constitution. That's not an intelligence metric. It had sufficient social intelligence to not kill everyone.
You're kind of hinting that Musk's AI will be good enough to start terminating people by the end of the year...
>that requires capital - more than the average owner really has access too
It sounds odd to my ear to matter-of-factly state that the US is deprived due to being capital-poor.
I mean, I'm not disputing anything specific, but where do middle-class people have better access to consumer finance than the US?
If you'd asked me what single fact represents American homeowners to people interested in economics around the world, I would've guessed it's the access to 30-year fixed rate mortgages.
As far as I know this is a deliberate policy in the US, that has not been emulated by those envious of the American economy, but why I haven't a clue.
Insuring all those fixed rate mortgages is very expensive. The US has never actually had to do so, the closest being the 2008 Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac recapitalizations which cost $238B in loans that were finally paid off in 2022.
In Europe a lot of the government fiscal crises were a result of small countries having to backstop giant cross border banks that happened to be headquartered there, and there is little appetite for tighter fiscal union.
Or via non-paywalled links?
Thanks.