You might consider your family history of diseases. Heart disease, diabetes, and some types of mental illness among many others are passed down from generation to generation. If you’ve got parents or grandparents with any of those things that can be passed down, you might consider not donating. If you go to the NHS or a paid clinic they’ll 100% screen you for those things, but you might save yourself the trip if you know you’ve got them in your family tree.

The government paying for higher ed would be an absolute disaster. Right now the federal government is trying to withhold funding to pressure universities into spreading their ideological drek. If they also were paying tuition they would have even more power and influence to promote their poisonous world view.

The problem though will somewhat sort itself out in the not too distant future. Right now there aren’t enough jobs for graduates and the costs are astronomical. Theoretically that will lead to falling enrollment rates which should bring costs back down. That or drive them up further as universities try to maintain profits with fewer students and turn education into more of a class issue than it already is. In either case the way our economy/society is shifting from knowledge work to physical labor will devalue 4 year programs in favor of trade certifications and shorter degrees.

There are several ways that might look. One might be professional degrees that only require course work directly related to a field of study rather than the more holistic approach we have now. Certifications from testing might also become more prevalent in some fields, especially tech. Another possible outcome would be increased value in the Associate’s degree. It’s mostly worthless today outside of some niche fields, but there is no reason a four year degree is needed for 90% of office work.

Really it will depend on the employers. Right now a bachelor’s degree is the gold standard because most cognitive labor employers demand one. Without major reforms to how employers hire we’ll be stuck with what we have now. If anything, based on how high the unemployment rate is for recent grads and people with less than 10 years of experience is the trend for employers to demand more education will only get worse. Right now entry level and mid level jobs are in short supply and receive hundreds if not thousands of applicants, so employers are tightening their requirements to filter the results more.

And that doesn’t even touch on the problems AI creates. Students are using it to do course work, effectively nullifying the educational value of a degree. Employers are using it to filter applicants creating a cascading problem where applicants are filtered out by AI then use AI to massage their resume, which the employers AI then detects, and so on.

Breaking higher ed’s monopoly on job qualifications is a great idea, I fear the people who could make that happen, employers, hold all the cards for now and there is little incentive for them to change.

I couldn’t find any analysis of autonotion, but they link to a local TV station’s site KRIS TV which does have a decent reputation

I find myself watching Blade Runner every few years and each time I end up finding new details about the film I hadn’t noticed before. The last time through I took a bunch of screenshots and sketched them in oil pastel. Also for whatever reason watching it usually kicks off a months long obsession with the cyberpunk genre as a whole.

The legislature is the traditional check on the judicial system. Letting state supreme court judges overturn the federal supreme court would kind of break the system.

I don’t know if it would be a better solution but if we’re amending the constitution giving citizens the power to recall federal and state elected officials and dismiss appointed ones by petition and popular vote would force politicians to care more about the will of the people and do the job they were elected/appointed to do.

EZ Lynk is the name of the app for anyone too lazy/busy to read the article and want to know which app to uninstall.

I am too mercurial. I oscillate between time killing activities every couple of months or weeks, so I might use Lemmy for a month or two and not open it back up for another six. There also are exactly zero topics or interests where I could maintain the high level of interest and involvement needed for moderation. Moderating a community would become intolerably boring very quickly.

Probably the biggest reason I couldn’t or shouldn’t moderate a community is that I have a very rigid idea about how discussions should be moderated and a low tolerance for non-compliance. Guaranteed I would be on that power tripping mod community (Ye power tripping bastards or something) within a few weeks of taking over.

I’m happy to just be the slightly unhinged person in the comments.

I mean I kind of see what you’re saying but it doesn’t really pass the smell test.

Yelling in someone’s face is assault. Spreading harmful lies about specific individuals or businesses is lible. Speech that incites violence is not protected by the first amendment. And the rest: January 6th and the misinformation machine aren’t something that can really be legislated. Lies unfortunately are protected speech unless they incite imminent violence. As much as I would like to hang the raid on the capital on Trump I watched his speech (and Bannon’s) and he only ever implies violence. The crowd whipped themselves up into the violence frenzy we saw that day.

Words absolutely can cause harm in the right conditions, but the ones that do the most damage would definitely not be hate speech. Fox News ran a segment last year where one of the hosts said homeless people should be killed and within a few days there were three separate incidents where armed men walked into homeless encampments and opened fire. I think the death toll was 9 people across the three events. But fox news spreading lies about ivermectin and masking during covid killed potentially tens of thousands. In the case of the homeless what the host did was already illegal, but the lies can’t be legislated.

The more I think about it the less I’m concerned about hate speech. The things that need to be illegal, inciting violence, already are, and the things that aren’t are murky at best and a slippery slope at worst. Especially when you consider who would be determining what is or isn’t hate speech. Right now the powers that be would label your comment as hate speech because it’s critical of the gop.

Forgive my ignorance, but how can words infringe on the rights of others? As a member of a minority class with several hateful and hurtful slurs (that were on their way to becoming hate speech prior to the second Trump administration) I understand that some folks can get very upset but I don’t think anyone has the right to not be upset. I could be misunderstanding something though.

The Expanse

I don’t know. One of the significant perks of meshtastic is the pseudo anonymity. Having a device locator function would break that. It wouldn’t be long after the network broke more widely than it has that a state level actor would abuse the location service.

It’s not an app, but I use a kids erasable tablet thing I picked up on clearance. I have used MyFitnessPal and Fat Secret in the past but this time around I realized that apps don’t really provide much value (for me at least). I don’t need to keep a history of my caloric intake and I certainly don’t want that data feeding some insurance company or AI model. For my needs at least, the only thing that matters is if I hit my calorie goal or not, the rest is just noise.

Having the calorie values of most food in the app is nice, but searching is just as fast.

9th amendment violations because you have to get really creative.

Absolutely not. No one wins an argument and it’s the least likely form of communication to result in any part changing their mind. Even formal debate with rules and timers doesn’t lead to changed minds often.

I personally strive to be factually and logically correct about anything I might discuss (that can be validated by facts or logic). Despite spending large portions of my time reading and researching so that I understand the world I live in better, I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve been able to change someone’s mind.

The truth is it’s very hard, bordering on impossible to change someone’s mind who isn’t open to it and most people are not. It’s easier to make a snap judgement and never reconsider it or let someone else form one’s opinion of something than to do the work to understand a topic enough to warrant having an opinion at all.

The extreme polarization of opinion and the politicization of basically everything makes it so that it’s rapidly becoming functionally impossible to interact with people of different ideologies as they now encompass most of one’s life.

I’d say less than 10%? The vast majority of my problems result from my own irrational actions and poor choices. I’ve had problematic idiots in professional and social settings but again the main issue in those cases are largely because I cannot stand willfully ignorant people. If I were more chill about morons, it’d be 0%. But that’s just me personally and I’m usually an outlier.

This is kind of a hot take, but I don’t think we should try to measure and assess IQ and EQ at all. The IQ test in use today tests very specific, very narrow types of intelligence and is not a meaningful measure. In a practical sense intelligence is mostly a matter of speed. Someone with a low or average IQ can solve any problem a high IQ person could, it would just take longer. At every step of thier journey a low IQ person spends more time. Learning the requisite knowledge, understanding the concepts, breaking down the problem, and crafting a solution. Most folks in that situation opt not to continue at some point along the way, but they would eventually get there with enough time and knowledge.

With EQ that’s learned behavior. Some people have a natural knack for it, but outside some types of mental illness, emotional intelligence can be taught.

Realistically, the world is too complex and too large to even remotely be able to predict the outcome of making everyone 50% smarter.

My best guess though is that it wouldn’t change much. If everyone is smarter, no one is smarter. High intelligence doesn’t automatically mean Mr. Spock. I used to be involved with Mensa and many of the people I met were nuts, lacked critical thinking skills, or were so full of themselves for testing well they were blind to external information. I myself am highly intelligent on paper, but if you looked at my life you would see a lifelong series of dumb choices and in many cases choosing the worst possible option even knowing it was.

What I mean is being smart isn’t as valuable a skill to have as one might think. Especially at the top end of intelligence, smarter basically equates to faster at solving problems. Raw processing power does play into it for sure but the difference between someone with an IQ of 130 and an IQ of 160 is how fast they finished the test.

The best way to make the world a better place would be to teach everyone critical thinking and emotional intelligence skills.

Subscribe only to niche/fan multimedia based subs (plus /r/creepypasta), never read the comments, and limit my usage to the minimum the person forcing me to use it requires.

Not books, but there have been a few creepypastas that had me on edge for weeks after reading them. There was one about a murderous doppelganger that disguised itself as a household pet that had me nervous around one of my cats.

I saw her napping in my living room and then a few seconds later sitting patiently by the bathroom. She must have slipped by me without me noticing, but I was a bit afraid of her for a while after.

Nope. All it really does is make the fight against perfectionism easier.

Good. I enjoy network security as a hobby and at one time a profession but even still I don’t envy your threat model. A state level actor as your adversary is next to impossible to foil. Tech-wise if it exists, they can crack it or recover it. Even a (software) shredded drive can be restored, it would just be very costly and time consuming for them. Heck it’s even possible to recover a physically smashed drive. On physical security, no amount of guns or prep can evade them. You’d basically need to hit the road in a car made before 2010 registered to someone else and use only cash to pay for things for the rest of your life. And even that’s not a sure thing thanks to the growing surveillance state.

Honestly there is little that could be done to protect one’s self in your situation. If going to prison isn’t an option for you, Hunter S Thompson always carried a revolver on his person in case he needed a way out, which he eventually felt he did.