clone is impossible

It’s possible in the sense that you can get near identical genetic replicas of the parent organism.

But the side effect of this process is in line with historical experiments of inbreeding. Most notably, you get a high instance of progeria, which is the opposite of what you want when aiming for life extension.

You are acting as if it is an unsolvable problem.

It is an unsolved problem. Whether it is solveable (either theoretically or practically) is an unanswered question.

But there’s a real possibility that “anti-aging” is, at its heart, a war against entropy that we can’t win.

The best we can do may be to archive the information of a subject and pass it on to an inheritor. And we’ve already got a good handle on that, by way of schools and libraries and making babies.

Or maybe not. Maybe there’s a trick to indefinite cellular repair and replacement. It’s just not anywhere on the horizon. If it exists, the closest we’ve come so far is hypothesis. Nothing we’ve tried has successfully undone aging, even at a single cell level.

The best time to stop taking Altman seriously was ten years ago.

The second best time is now.

If you want a bit of a deeper dive, Sean Carroll’s Mindscape gets into the science of aging and known workable remedies/treatments.

The good news is that Billionaires will not be living forever any time soon.

The bad news is that we’ve got a cellularly defined terminal limit and there’s nothing we can do to simply reset the clock. “Cloned Bodies” for animals are dysfunctional bordering on nightmarish. The human brain’s plasticity isn’t something you can renew with a pill or a potion. Blood Boys don’t work. There aren’t trivially replaceable components in the human body.

Great for Coding 101 in a language I’m rusty with or otherwise unfamiliar.

Absolutely useless when it comes time to optimize a complex series of functions or upgrade to a new version of the .NET library. All the “AI” you need is typically baked into Intellisense or some equivalent anyway. We’ve had code-assist/advice features for over a decade and its always been mid. All that’s changed is the branding.

That’s an incredibly curious reading of the Cold War. I’m going to run off and assume you thought the world economy was doing great in the 1980s except in the Soviet Bloc?

Ublock does such a good job at blocking the old janky torrent sites, especially compared to the increasingly aggressive and intrusive new shit.

Unfortunately, the US is perfectly fine with police and military officers killing its citizens

who continue to have better voter turnout rates than Millennials

One of the biggest determining factors of enfranchisement is home ownership. Boomers got to plunder the real estate that prior generations had extracted from the First Nations. That land was commoditized and collateralized such that subsequent generations had to pay an enormous premium to get access to it.

Subsequently, home ownership rates after the Boomer generation plunged. More and more property is monopolized by business conglomerates and simply rented out rather than sold. People move more often, chasing lower housing costs and higher wages. So they never develop a local identity, join a local political party, or invest in the long term interest of the community where they reside.

They don’t know who their politicians are or why they should vote for any of them. So they don’t participate. And then they leave an area rather than fight to defend it if the political leadership starts fucking the place up, because they don’t own any of that land anyway.

Show up and vote, god dammit.

The Boomers vote with their ballots.

The Zoomers vote with their feet.

When, I think of “socialism,” I think of modern day Scandinavian health care, not Soviet-era Russia.

One of the upshots of the Great Patriotic War producing so many invalids and disabled veterans was a Soviet state dedicated to providing top quality public services for its veterans. An entire municipality - Rusinovo - was built to cater to the blind, in order to accommodate the number of Soviets who had lost their sight to chemical weapons and other injuries. It became a model for a host of disability-friendly improvements to cities the world over, and you can still find them if you know where to look. The Tokyo subway adopted the Rusinovo model for raised, guided pathways, for instance. And audible signals at crosswalks and in city metros are common mass transit features globally.

After the fall of the USSR, much of the country was privatized and subsequently looted by the Yeltsin-friendly oligarchs who endorsed the coup against Gorbachev. Rusinovo was one such target for looting. The school for the blind was defunded. Factories specifically geared to allow blind workers to participate in the manufacturing center were shuttered and stripped for parts. The transit network was gutted.

Who do these pants -wetting idiots think they’re scaring?

Post-Soviet Eastern Europe is regularly held up as the consequence of Soviet Economics taken to their logical conclusion. So you’ll routinely see Western politicians point to states like Estonia or Solvakia or the shattered remnants of the Yugoslavian Republic as proof of the Failed Socialist Experiment.

What you don’t typically hear is the rapid deterioration that occurred after the USSR was dismantled and partitioned off under Yeltsin. Or how much of the Soviet Era wealth was stolen by mafiosos and corrupt agents operating on behalf of western business interests and rival espionage agencies nce the Iron Curtain was torn down.

In some sense, its a lie. “Look at how awful it is now! That’s because of the socialism they did back then.”

In some sense, its a threat. “Try socialism again, and you’re next.”

To generate profit.

make russian lives as bad as possible

Wasn’t that the Shock Doctrine strategy from back in 1996? Anyone remember what followed?

Because then Russians would stop buying their phones.

Quite a few of the mods are severing alternative interests. The partisan subs are run by literal party staffers and think tanks. Lots of the big brand subs are run by marketing agencies. Reddit’s financial model is to sell these spaces. You don’t just have some random mega-fan running /r/Marvel. That’s a Disney staffer.

None of these guys are going anywhere.

I protested, they said, nope

Protesting on a site that’s fully automated their administration just means getting told “fuck you” twice.

There’s no real bureaucracy under the hood. It’s just “friend computer says you’re guilty” followed by “friend computer says you’re still guilty plus you had the gall to doubt friend computer’s immaculate wisdom”.

Reddit vacillates between operating as a clearing house for the most ugly, racist, reactionary propaganda currently in circulation and doing pogroms against the six subreddits that got popular posting current events about a new kind of genocide we invented.

I’m glad I left, but it’s hard not to look over my shoulder and notice they’re doing the same fascist bucket carrying from 2020 and 2016 and 2012 and 2008 and…

It’s not a Dem/Rep issue nearly so much as it is an Insider/Outsider issue.

“Cross us and your constituents will get a leak of your AI generated nudes” style intimidation. Great for getting rid of pesky populists and regulators and people who give a shit about climate change.

they stopped and asked themselves if people want and need a foldable?

Who wants a thin phone with a large screen? Nobody.

Tankie Phone

Neither Facebook nor Twitter claimed 6.5B unique users.

Empty Internet Theory is a clever joke, but it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.