I slept for 12 hours today. 1am to 1pm. Asleep for most of that time but rolled over and peaked at the clock 2 or 3 times. It was glorious.

I just watched season 2 episode 2 of Star Trek TNG and this seems relevant and also I want to tell people about it cause of how cool I thought it was.

DATA: I have a question, sir. PICARD: Yes, Data. What is it? DATA: What is death? PICARD: Oh, is that all? Well, Data, you’re asking probably the most difticult of all questions. Some see it as a changing into an indestructible form, forever unchanging. They believe that the purpose of the entire universe is to then maintain that form in an Earth-like garden which will give delight and pleasure through all eternity. On the other hand, there are those who hold to the idea of our blinking into nothingness, with all our experiences, hopes and dreams merely a delusion. DATA: Which do you believe, sir? PICARD: Considering the marvellous complexity of our universe, its clockwork perfection, its balances of this against that, matter energy, gravitation, time, dimension, I believe that our existence must be more than either of these philosophies. That what we are goes beyond Euclidian and other practical measuring systems and that our existence is part of a reality beyond what we understand now as reality.

They were probably projecting and expressing their disappointments in not becoming their own ideal self. Anyways! My answer was going to be taking in all the wonderful art and creations people like you would have the freedom to create.

I was very upset with her in the previous episode when she was demanding trust from Salvor with the obvious problem being she is not trusting Salvor or her hunch and about the boats history being erased.

I have this fear that the leader of the mentalics is in fact the mule in her whatevereth iteration.

Put your handheld valuables or nice trinkets away anytime a friend is bringing over someone you don’t know. I miss my PSP :(

I think I see your point, awareness alone might be just as you asked, but for some she also gave the courage to act on that awareness, to commit themselves to take steps towards progress and away from practices that harm an entire planet while benefiting very few, by supporting public policies focusing on such and raising more awareness. I’ve certainly benefited from having a personal vehicle and modern industry but those that profit immensely from them should be held responsible with proper regulation and responsibility to cleaning up messes and compensating the lives and environments ruined as a result. Too many weak and corrupt individuals have again and again taken the attractive “deal with the devil” to look the other way in order to secure something they desire. We are all capable of corruption and we are all capable of integrity. I have hope for the future because of people inspiring me like, civil rights leaders; MLK and Bernie Sanders, abolitionists; Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, and finally who I see as everyday people like; Greta Thunberg and Daryl Davis.

Lots of information, lots of important stuff, but this is the end bit.

Finally, and perhaps most important of all, Kulturkampf attacks on universities are both definitional, in the sense of the leader’s brand, and diversionary. If a leader were serious about addressing the resentments of an excluded voter base, he wouldn’t focus on universities at all. Instead, he’d take a hard look at the power of corporations, their tax rates and tax avoidance, and their offshoring of jobs, not to mention their overwhelming control of the digital public sphere. That leader would look at the incomes of the richest citizens and see what could be done to transfer some of that wealth to improve schools, hospitals, clinics, and other public goods that give people, especially those without a college education, a fair start in life. But it’s so much easier to target universities and their supposedly cosseted liberal professors than to tackle the perquisites and power of the corporate-donor class that funds his campaigns. Orbán is a master of such diversionary politics, happily courting liberals’ denunciations for his attacks on academic freedom while patiently getting on with his core business—which is to use state power to enrich his supporters. He once confessed to a friend of mine, a banker, that he had a lot of mouths to feed: He knows, as do other autocrats such as Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, that feeding friends is how authoritarians hold on to power. Six years after Viktor Orbán started his campaign against the CEU, the conservatives who imitate him have grasped how convenient it is to make universities your enemy. These attacks on university autonomy and academic freedom—in U.S. states, in Narendra Modi’s India, and in Erdoğan’s Turkey—are principally about one thing: systematically weakening any institution that may act as an obstacle to authoritarian power. Although American conservatives, no less than their autocratic counterparts abroad, consistently portray their attacks on universities in pseudo-democratic terms—as attempts to protect the silent majority from the ideological hectoring of the liberal elite—their real agenda is to weaken democratic checks and balances. Universities are not usually understood, and even more rarely defended, as guardrail institutions that keep a democracy from succumbing to the tyranny of the majority, but that is one of their roles: to test, criticize, and validate the knowledge that citizens use to make decisions about who should rule them. Because this is the universities’ democratic rationale, the message for those who want to defend them should be clear. So long as academic freedom is considered a privilege of a liberal elite, it has no constituency beyond academia. Liberals should defend academic freedom not as the privilege of a profession, nor to preserve universities as bastions of progressive opinion, but because universities—like courts, a free press, and independent regulatory bodies—are essential restraints on majoritarian rule that keep us all free. That was precisely what the citizens of Budapest understood when they marched past the CEU’s doors, chanting, “Free country, free university.”

That was hilarious. Thanks for sharing the link on SALAMI. I definitely had some bias and misunderstandings when thinking about AI.