Except it’s not what the evidence suggests. We have yet to find physical evidence of consciousness. We have yet to find a way to accurately simulate a neuron in any falsifiable way (seriously look into the detractors and counterarguments to the fly study, it’s amazing that 3d graphics can trick that many people). But even beyond neurons we cannot accurately link brain activity to behavior in anything but a superficial way. We have no insight into how decisions are made or what ultimately drives them.

More importantly, if the world is deterministic, all meaning in life is gone. Completely. And the second it is objectively proven most people will kill themselves. Any intelligent being would kill itself, since that’s the logical next step in the chain of thought and it wouldn’t have a choice.

Meaning the universe is flawed if the point of it is to create life, and if there is no point to the universe and it’s purely deterministic, we are in a worse hell than has ever been imagined in the totality of human expression. Arguably the worst possible hell there could ever be.

Nonexistence would be the infinitely better option.

Except if this is the case, free will does not exist. If the world is purely deterministic, you’ve never made a choice. No one has. We are in the middle of a mathematical computation that has been predicted from the start of the universe.

I see you’re still stalking me and you still haven’t learned anything about hyperbole for argumentative purposes. No, for my ASD friends I do not literally mean, “2/3rds here’s quantifiable evidence of something no one has ever quantified because doctors are allegedly heroes (if you’re a straight white male) and here are my mathematical sources and proofs for this very minor and entirely immaterial point of this particular argument.”

Every one broaching the topic in any possible way.

Here’s Johns Hopkins, one of the leading voices in American Medicine, saying gay men tend to use crystal meth. Here’s a meta study referenced in at least 30 textbooks(I stopped counting the books in the cited by section) saying all ‘sexual minorities’ are much more likely to have substance abuse issues, but bixsexual women are the most likely to be long term addicts. Here’s a more up to date article saying Trans people are by far the most likely to be long term addicts. That last one is only in one textbook but is directly cited in two organization’s drug policies.

Is it training?

Yes. As you may or may not remember, the Sackler family spent billions on and made hundreds of billions off of getting the American south addicted to opiates over the 1990s and early 2000s. Every single doctor and hospital involved was sued by their former patients. There are still billboards up in some southern states advertising law firms that specialize in suing doctors over developed addictions.

So any doctor that graduated in the last 16 years has had one specific thing drilled into their head: Do. Not. Treat. Pain.

Because you will be sued if your patient is an addict or becomes an addict.

Is it the fact that becoming a doctor in the U.S. requires the kind of upper middle class upbringing that doesn’t tend to help people develop empathy?

This has always affected doctors in the US, but the medical profession is a calling regardless. If you want money there are so many better pathways, leaving exactly three reasons people become doctors:

1. They want control over life and death

2. They want the prestige of the title for themselves or their family

3: They have an uncontrollable natural urge to try to help others.

So 2/3rds of doctors are not going to fight their training and just try to prescribe pain meds as little as possible.

Of the remain 1/3rd of doctors or so, the ones that genuinely love helping others and want to deliver the best possible care, one bad experience with addicts can permanently change their attitude, and they may get hundreds of experiences per shift if they happen to do their residency in an ER inside any American city.

On top of all of this is the inherent gender and racial biases in medicine, and American medicine in general. Women’s pain is taken less seriously. It was in medical textbooks world wide until the 2020s that black people felt less pain and were genetically more prone to addiction. There was a literal course in every MA, RN, LVN, MD, etc course about “how different races feel and express pain.”

So if you want pain relief, you better have both the vital stats showing you are experiencing pain (which is awful for chronic pain sufferers who no longer have high BP/High pulse from their pain), and you better be a white man with a conservative lifestyle/look (because we know the gays are more likely to pop pills[This is literally in medical textbooks]), you better get lucky that you have a doctor willing to prescribe pain management, and even if you qualify at that point you better not ever ask for pain meds, period, regardless of your situation. As it only takes one single nurse or doctor to put drug seeking behavior on your chart to ruin your chances at ever receiving pain management ever again.

The majority of Russians still support this war.

You mean in polls conducted in a country where secret police have literally posed as pollsters and arrested people, and where police just openly arrest anyone that speaks out against the regime, there isn’t a large consensus speaking out against the regime?!

My God, they’re all monsters, even the children!

Pretty much all steam games that don’t have secondary DRM can be made to be steamless with tools like the Goldberg emulator (Disclaimer this project is meant for games you own and have permission to replace steam on, it’s not a piracy tool, but you can use it to archive installed games). PS5 games are two decades out, at minimum, to be emulated.

Thanks to collectors and scalpers, the secondary games market is pretty much nonexistent for modern consoles. So reselling isn’t going to get you enough to buy anything really.

Well it’s good you support vulnerable populations. Say did you hear about this guy pretty much universally called a dictator who forcibly conscripts innocent poor kids and ethnic minorities into his foreign war for power while keeping most of his military at home in order to ensure tight control over the domestic population so they can’t meaningfully rebel and even when they do international media spins it as the enemy country in this dictator’s war having a successful attack even when it’s obvious domestic sabotage that likely has nothing to do with the war except, obviously, the forced conscription and increased domestic military presence?

Man that seems like a target rich environment full of blood thirsty enemies for you to root for the complete and total genocide of and not at all a vulnerable population.

You know it’s hard to not believe the ‘Ukrainians are nazis’ propaganda when you tend to advocate for genocide as often as literally any Israeli twitter account.

Headline within the decade:

Study says AI in schools may be doing more harm than good

Because why would removing all creative and high paying proletariat jobs leaving only the worst and lowest paying ones, offloading all critical thought to shitty machines based in drought stricken areas that are destroying water availability, and eliminating online discourse, ever possibly backfire for the proletariat.

And remember, in any country where these cameras exist police do not need a warrant to access this informaion.

Wow you mean I too can burn electricity while stealing artist’s work so I can pretend to be an artist?! Wow mommy we can be homegrown douchebags these days!

No, things outside the player’s field of view are unloaded to save memory, obviously.

Being pro-AI is the same as being pro-capitalist, and thus pro-orphan crushing machine.

Having your work stolen so that a soulless faceless corporate entity can charge teenagers to recreate it at will and pretend they have any talent or capability whatsoever is pretty shitty, and defending it is anti-proletariat.

This is the weirdest sort of AI bullshit I keep coming across.

Hi this must be your first time on Earth in the last decade, every single AI company has been in or is currently in no less than ten dozen lawsuits over copyright infringement. It’s so bad there’s at least one website purpose built to track copyright infringement from AI companies..

Without a specific chain of custody for every piece of training data going into the models, there is a default that the model cannot be trusted and is likely infringing on someone’s copyright.

To specify the 'nothing AI is free" part, LLMs are grossly computationally inefficient. Whether it’s local or not.

And… Where are they?

Already installed on most distros.

Nothing AI is free. Unless there’s a chain of custody for all of the training data, it’s still unethical even if it’s used for a good thing. If I build a wheelchair ramp out of the flesh and bones of orphans I’m still not a very good person. And there are non-AI ways to accomplish this that are just as good that would require almost comically less resources.

This attitude is why Ubuntu, and only Ubuntu, recommends a minimum of 6 GB of Ram btw. You can run a full KDE system with onboard graphics and all the bells and whistles for less than 2 GB on other distros.

Political change should not be moving fast and breaking things.

It should absolutely 100% be that when the alternative is genocide and fascism.

It was still an issue, the problem was either you just didn’t have the knowledge and/or money to deal with it, were working with bad scientific beliefs based on real problems that were solved differently, or just lived in what used to be a much more mild climate.

In especially the 1930s-1950s the poisonous construction materials did in fact have slowed effects when you had a drafty house, so it became practice and advice to not fully insulate the home, to not create a sealed environment since the homes that did have good insulation and a good seal generally had more ‘mysterious’ deaths that were attributed to ‘stale air’ and even brought back the term ‘miasma’ for a while. It was gas/lead/asbestos/arsenic/CO/CO2/Radon poisoning. But back then they had correlation and used it as causation because why would air ever hurt you.

That and for the most part you had trouble keeping the house warm, not the opposite problem, so the cheapest and time tested solution was more blankets and a stone fireplace for part of the year and just deal with the outside temp the rest of the year, even on really hot days like the record breaking Chicago high of 102 in 1918 where the average was, you know, 80 for the several decades before and after that.

You forget that American houses, especially lower class ones, are made out of practically cardboard or literally foam. While sealing can help a decent amount most older homes are lucky to have R10 insulation total from drywall to whatever external sheeting exists. Even now most new construction only has to be R15.

That means at best you’d be running the AC 24/7 during the summer months if you live in the 80% of the US that gets above 32c for days at a time.

And yet oil prices in China did not move once during the entirety of the US’ bitchfit.

So…