Doesn't Dune take place in ~22k AD? Wiki says "the Butlerian Jihad is a conflict taking place over 11,000 years in the future (and over 10,000 years before the events of Dune)." [0]
How many of them believe that copyright infringement and job loss are "major harms"? How many believe that data centers put a Great Lake through their cooling system daily? Polls like this are meaningless.
If it's a question of fairness, the guy you're replying to has a point. If it's a question of civilization... well, toll roads are kind of inextricable from civilized society.
From multiple personal experiences, including both of my parents, dementia is a slow, horrible death where you are robbed of your dignity and end up dragging all of your relatives through a very long, very torturous hell. You will be drooling, pissing, and shitting yourself, all while slowly reverting back to a low IQ childhood mentality where you're very likely to have outbursts and verbally or physically attack the people around you. Your loved ones will be tormented, and if you don't have loved ones then if you're lucky you'll be tossed into a room and forgotten about by underpaid, overworked staff at some run-down nursing home. If you're not lucky you'll be laying in a gutter on the street until you die.
Interestingly my wife helped a friend whose father had the disease during the pandemic.
He had worked as a professor and after retirement had suffered with AD for years but had stayed "independent" because his wife was high functioning mentally but low functioning physically and formed a good team.
He'd bought long term care insurance so he had the resources to afford both a room at a care home but also personal help from home aides, including my wife. He didn't really know what was going on most of the time but he never got angry or flustered and was always pleasant to deal with.
We had trouble with certain homes having a way they want to do things or requiring things that weren't really necessary, one insisted that he get a pacemaker because he had bradycardia. When he lived with his son between homes probably the most difficult thing was that he got up in the night to use the bathroom and would end up urinating in the wrong place. He got much better care than many residents because people were always coming around to see him and the staff knew that we cared and would advocate for him.
He passed away at 92 and outlived many of the people who knew him at work so he had just a small memorial ceremony. I saw it as an example of healthy aging and talked about it a lot with my wife -- and it made me think about myself and my own fear that my ability to compensate for my schizotaxia may degrade when my brain degrades and I can picture myself becoming really nasty and it gives me all the more incentive to rewrite my habits while I still can.
Sadly, cancer isn’t one singular disease. Types of cancer can be excruciatingly painful for many years, which is also tormenting to everyone around you. I wouldn’t wish either on anyone.
Cancer. The worst types of it have the advantage of killing quickly. Alzheimer's destroys the self, and you survive a long time with it, leading to much more suffering, both to you (to the extent you continue to exist) and to your family.
I have a different perspective. The worst types of cancer kill slowly and cause agonizing suffering.
Alzheimer's leads to negative outcomes for your caregivers, but by many accounts many affected individuals do not suffer all that much, if at all, due to their lack of awareness.
If I were diagnosed with Alzheimer's, I would seek out assisted suicide. But I think it's more complicated than that: its existence incentivizes pushing people toward assisted suicide. The government finds a way to help with bloated medical care budgets; unscrupulous family members guilt trip the sick to choose the option to keep the inheritance intact.
The best solution allows it for severe cases, while still investing money in research and spending money for palliative care so it remains an option and not a demand. But that's a tricky line to maintain.
My grandmother's case ended up bankrupting my grandfather and seriously straining the rest of the family. Which ultimately put my grandfather in a pennyless position when he was in his 90's, and poor state care when he was declining - not what he or my grandmother worked their entire lives for. Our family couldn't replace what was lost in the years of care for my grandmother's body, long after she herself was gone.
Never something she would have wanted, but you don't really have a choice and dignified death is never given as an option.
Its the slippery slope proved real by places like my home country of canada keeping other people from having it. I am a huge supporter of assisted suicide but what my country has gone way too far. find a way credibly Keep it to impending death with lots of pain and alzeimers like disease and you would have strong majority acceptance.
There are plenty of services that will accept a PDF and turn it into a letter. There's other services that can do the reverse. Those combined means you can interact with entities expecting physical documents without ever having to actually handle physical paper.
I live in Sweden, and I can confidently say... Once.
As in, literally as long as I've lived here (11 years now) I mailed one thing by post and it was, somewhat ironically, a self-assessment form for an ADHD diagnosis from a company called Modigo.
I have received a lot of mail though, from the government also, so I'm not sure how that is gonna fly.
If someone drinks a cup of coffee, there is one less cup of coffee in the world. The money that other people get is just a piece of paper, it is not useful for anything. Wasteful consumption of real resources is not 'stimulus', it is just waste.
It appears to me that comrade LeGuin is being rather willfully ignorant here. The detailed implementation of the algorithm is not public, but the basic concept - download every webpage, index by keywords, rank by number of links - is well known and had been well known for some time even in 2010. LeGuin could have, well, googled it. But then she wouldn't have gotten an anti-capitalist essay out of her ignorance.
I'm having some trouble with this part of the explanation:
> From the figure, one can easily see that the triangles ABC and BDE are congruent.
I must confess I do not easily see this. It's been a long time since I did any geometry, could someone help me out? I'm probably forgetting some trivial fact about triangles.
So, the line BE is just the line CB extended. It's the same line. And we know that the angles of a triangle add up to 180. And we know that the line BD is defined as perpendicular to AB.
That means the angle ABC and angle DBE must add up to 90. But that's also true of the angles ABC and angle CAB. That means that angle DBE and angle CAB must be the same. Both triangles ABC and BDE are both right triangles, so that means angles ABC and BDE are the same. So they're similar triangles: They have all the same angles.
Additionally, the point D is just at a point so that the length of line segment BD and the length of line segment AB are both the same: c. Since we know that the hypotenuse of triangle ABC is c, and the hypotenuse of triangle BDE is also c, and we know they're both similar triangles, then these triangles must be congruent as well.
Thank you! Rephrasing for my own understanding: The point of attack that I was missing was that angles BDE and ABC are equal, and now we have two equal angles (which immediately gives us the third) and one equal side, so we're good to go.
We know angle EBD equals BAC, since the sum of triangle ABC's interior angles is 180 degrees and the sum of the 3 angles at B are also 180 degrees. We also know angle DEB is 90 degrees since DE was constructed to be perpendicular to CB. Finally, D was placed at a distance c from B. The two triangles have the same angles and the same side lengths opposite the right angles, so they must be congruent.
It wasn't obvious to me either. But we know the angles ABC, ABD, and DBE equal 180 degrees, as do the interior angles of triangle ABC. From that we can deduce that angle BAC = angle DBE, from which it follows that angle ABC = angle BDE.
reply