Uriel238 [all pronouns]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Um no.

    A state can decide what it names itself or names a part of itself (e.g. Black Lives Matter Plaza). The story of Ukraine illustrates this.

    But geographers and cartographers don’t decide what to name a place or get orders from states by fiat (unless the mapper is a state agent working for a department) They name things based on what they’re called.

    The gulf is known to most of the world and the International Hydrographic Organization as Golfo de México or in English, Gulf of Mexico, and calling it the Gulf of America (say by Google Maps) is political allegiance signaling, that they are MAGA or MAGA collaborators.

    If you want to be spicy you can call it Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl or the House of Chalchiuhtlicue based on the South American deity of the sea. It has a nice ominous Siege of R’lyeh feel that reflects the tempestuous weather of the ocean expanse.



  • As I explained to Google (from Dan McClellan) _references do not assert from fiat what things are called. A dictionary definition is not an official definition but what a word means or what a thing is called at the moment.

    Most of the world calls it the Golfo de México or in English speaking regions, the Gulf of Mexico. Changing all the maps of the world won’t change this.

    Now granted, a state chooses what to call itself (such as the changing of The Ukraine to simply Ukraine but that is the incorporated entity that is the sovereign nation of Ukraine.

    As the US does not have sovereign control of the Gulf of Mexico, it doesn’t get to declare the name of a region of international waters.

    This whole thing just makes the GOP, MAGA, the Trump administration and by proxy the people of the United States xenophobic and barbaric as hell. It’s not a good look.


  • Oh they’ll come.

    The US will have to go to war to keep down unrest. Whether Trump makes good on Canada / Greenland / Poland, the world will have to form a coalition against us, and it’s likely China will take the lead.

    There will be Chinese bombers over Washington just as there were Russian and American bombers over Berlin. Not that we’ll be around to enjoy it, and those that remain will suffer as collaborators (whether they were or not).

    We really don’t want to let it get there. But then we really didn’t want it to get here, and we knew in the early aughts with George W. Bush’s administration this is where we were headed if someone didn’t chance course. Obama, who promised to change course, did not.





  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoScience Memes@mander.xyzMultiverse
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    27 days ago

    Aargh! Okay, I’m going to fix this and the fine tuned universe argument all at once.

    Nature does not care about your silly numbers and hypotheses. All of our scientific mechanics are models of the observed universe. The ones we call theories are just models good enough to be usefully predictive as to forecast outcomes, allowing us to safely land airplanes, build bridges, make safe pharmaceuticals (or super addictive ones, if we want), split atoms safely to produce power (or unsafely to level cities) and so on.

    We care about the math and the numbers because they give us results that are consistent with nature. But nature is doing what it’s doing because it’s behaving as a giant causal engine (ever-smaller forces that drive observable phenomena, at least until we get to Planck scale). So when it comes to the fine tuned hypothesis, to quote a Texas physicist whose name I can’t remember These numbers ain’t for fiddlin’

    If there are any storm gods at all, anywhere in the world, to the last, they are content to allow lightning to behave strictly according to static-electricity electrodynamics. And ball lightning happens whether or not we have a model that explains it. (Presently, we don’t.)

    If one or more of the many-worlds hypotheses are true, no given universe cares what its science-savvy inhabitants have determined and whether their mathematical models allow for models that are factual. Facts don’t care about your feelings. Facts don’t care about your science either. It’s more that the science does is best to describe what’s going on in the facts.

    Irreducible complexity is solved.

    PS: This also stabilizes the cosmic horror scenario of Azathoth’s dream, that Azathoth gibbers in the center of the universe dreaming its whole, and each and every one of us is a mere figment, who will vanish to oblivion when eventually he awakes: From what we can observe Azathoth has been dreaming consistently for thirteen billion years, and doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to wake up, and his dream is profoundly consistent so that the mathematics we use to send probes from planet to planet, eventually into the outer solar system always works. Azathoth has our back!


  • The history of advertising indicates otherwise, as does Das Kapital by Karl Marx. Capitalists will always push the limits, ever seeking to maximize profits.

    However upper management appears to want to hold royal court and subjugate their serves (the worker pool), since the goal of profit maximization set by shareholder primacy contraindicates common practices like micromanagement, over-surveillance of the workforce (keylogging, and prohibition of private use of the internet) and crunching, all which reduce workforce efficiency (by a lot) and yet are typical.

    In the 1980s, when Reagan deregulated children’s programming, a lot of shows that were essentially half-hour-long commercials (say, the entire Transformers franchise) were released and sold a lot of toys. The weird thing is when we oversaturate a generation with commercials, they develop a tolerance to them, and the marketing industry has been losing that battle since the 1950s, when an hour long show would have a thirty-second sponsor spot.




  • According to the Behind the Bastards on Peter Thiel, he is really scared of death (as in dying from old age) and really wants to stay alive or take it with him.

    So he may be the first private citizen to buy a DeepSouth supercomputer that has a capacity comparable to the human brain. All someone needs to do is convince him there’s software that can create an adequate simulation of him that he is essentially immortal.

    Of course, this thought experiment intersects with the transporter paradox, but that’s part of the deal.