Nah, it will be worse. Tesla will start selling a hybrid model with a generator onboard that can charge the battery as you go. That generator will be designed to be fueled by ground-up burning tires, unrecycleable plastic, and human hair. .
Sure. But those many works have affected the discipline of AI development. There's an entire field of study on AI ethics and alignment. But those are affected by the combined effects of many works and authors. Planet of the Apes really is unique in that it is really the sole example anyone would bring up of why you shouldn't experiment on apes to try to make them more intelligent.
And to my knowledge, no one has attempted to engineer apes to be more intelligent. Obviously there is simply less economic drive to do so; it's easier to be concerned about ethics when there's not a ready path to profitability. But if some geneticist tomorrow puts out a paper proposing that we tinker with chimp DNA to make smarter chimps, I can guarantee you every single headline will reference Planet of the Apes. It's similar to how you can't right an article about resurrecting the woolly mammoth without throwing in a reference to Jurassic Park. Some singular works of fiction really do have a substantial effect on how the public understands an entire field of research.
To my knowledge, no one has ever actually tried to engineer smarter chimps, though I assume there might actually be a lot to be gained in terms of scientific knowledge by doing so. We could probably learn quite a lot about the evolution of language and human evolution in general by trying to experiment with engineering smarter apes. But to my knowledge, no one has ever done so. The lack of profit is obviously a big factor, but I guarantee you, accidentally creating Planet of the Apes would be on the mind of anyone seriously contemplating that sort of scientific endeavor.
That's why it's c/showerthoughts on c/academiccriticcalhistoricalanalyses
The Planet of the Apes film franchise has single-handedly shaped entire fields of biological research. As long as it remains in the public consciousness, no biologist or geneticist will ever experiment with trying to engineer chimps and other apes to be more intelligent. Any research proposal remotely related to the topic will be immediately shot down by someone simply stating, "do you want Planet of the Apes? Because this is how you get Planet of the Apes!"
Between the fire and the ice, that is where you may find home.
There are places on the planet Mercury that, if you were to find a lava tube of sufficient depth, would be the perfect temperature for human habitation. Some of the craters on Mercury's poles are never exposed to sunlight and actually have ice in them. Most of the planet is of course boiling hot when the Sun is overhead. But there should be some choice areas where you could skirt the balance of the two, and find lava tubes that, with proper sealing, would be quite comfortable for humans to occupy.
On balance, I think it’s within the realm of possibility that these laws do more harm than good. Honestly, just tax plastic producers and see how quickly producers using plastic to package their products magically fine innovative new alternatives.
Seriously. The way to solve this is to simply put a tax on all plastic packaging. Use those funds to subsidize plastic recycling. Set the tax at whatever level is necessary to make recycling viable. And if the most viable 'recycling' method is to just burn the plastic in an incinerator, so be it. Yeah, it's expensive to build an industrial incinerator that can properly scrub and filter out all the nasty fumes plastic gives off when it's burned. But it can be done. It's more expensive than just stuffing the plastic in a landfill, but by burning it, we solve our plastic problem in the here and now, rather than letting it slowly leach out into the environment for future generations to deal with.
Recycling plastic will always be difficult, and it may never be practical for some cases. But all plastics burn. And if you have the right incinerator, they can be burned without releasing toxic fumes into the air. Tax plastic packaging, all of it. Tax it, and use the funds to subsidize plastic waste incineration. Plastic is made from oil, and it still can be used as a fuel. Burn it and be done with it.
Meanwhile in Alabama, things are so backwards there they haven't even figured out shoes yet! It's not like they prefer sandals or they're too poor to afford shoes. They all go around barefoot, because the idea of shoes just has never occured to any of them. Most buildings instead have special brush ledges so you can scrape the dirt and blood off your feet before you walk in. Again, they're just a hopelessly backwards people. So backwards, they haven't even figured out shoes yet. Their cousins over in Mississippi are a bit further along. MSU currently has a study going where they're experimenting with wrapping feet in ziplock bags, secured with rubber bands.
What if the person breaking into Kamala's house is Clarence Thomas?
The bigger problem is that people who buy guns for home defense are acting emotionally, not logically. The cold hard statistical truth is that if you own a firearm, it is most likely to be used by yourself or one of your family members to commit suicide, or to be the cause of a fatal accident, than it is to be used in self defense.
People have this deeply flawed belief about suicide that if someone wants to do it, they'll find a way. But that isn't how suicide actually works. Most actual suicides are spur-of-the moment things. And giving someone access, in their, home, to a quick and usually painless method of ending their own life serves to massively increase the risk of suicide. Everyone has bad days. Everyone who lives long enough and isn't a psychopath will experience deep sorrow. In a drunken sorrow on the night after a bad breakup or the death of a close relative? It doesn't take much for people to be vulnerable to the call of the void.
Yes, break-ins are scary. But the truth is, most thieves try NOT to break in when someone is home. And home invasions for rape, murder, or kidnapping are even rarer. There are a lot of scary things in this world, but you shouldn't let that fear control your behavior. Rabies is a damn terrible thing, but it would be incredibly irrational to avoid going on a hike just due the risk of encountering a rabid wild animal.
In the US at least, if you own a gun, it is far, far likelier that that weapon will be used to end your life or life of one of your family members than it will end be used in self defense.
This is why I do not own a firearm. Yes, home invasions are terrifying. But if you own a weapon for the sake of home defense, you are letting your emotions and fear control your life. The simple statistical fact is that, on the net, buying a gun lowers your average expected lifespan.
As long as you only drive it on your own ranch, fine. But when you take your vehicle off your property, it becomes everyone else's business.
It's scientific data, and considering the context, the rightful property of all mankind. Give it universally to any an all.
The seemingly straightforward solution is that SpaceX needs to be legally required to get into the radio astronomy business. As part of being allowed to launch such noisy satellites. If they are going to wreck radio astronomy on Earth's surface, they should have to launch orbital radio telescopes of such quality and quantity that SpaceX is actually a vast net boon on radio astronomy. This should simply be a legally required cost of doing business if they want to launch so many noisy satellites. Yes, these orbital telescopes would have a finite lifespan and need to be regularly replaced to be updated, but thankfully the greatest rocket company on Earth will be legally required to launch them regularly.
I agree. There are of course a lot more ways that one can SA someone else than simply PIV. But again, we're dealing with a lot of deep cultural memory here. Up until a few decades ago, in most areas only PIV intercourse even counted as rape. Legally in many countries, it isn't even possible for a woman to commit rape against another woman. A lot of historical anti-rape law wasn't even really about sexual assault. It was a more patriarchal thing. When you raped a woman you took the most valuable thing she had - her virginity. It was almost more of a property crime than a violation of personhood and bodily autonomy. We've mostly left these extremely outdated legal traditions behind, but a lot of the cultural memory persists. There are still plenty of people out there who don't even consider cis lesbian sex to BE sex. There's a lot of backwards beliefs out there.
And yeah, asking people with such archaic beliefs about sex to understand the subtleties of anatomy changes on HRT? Well good luck with that! Obviously I know from experience things change a ton, but most cis people don't even know what trans HRT is. Most just assume everything trans people do is from surgeries of various sorts. If you polled random cis people about the effects of trans HRT on genitalia, less than 5 percent would probably be able to accurately answer questions on it. If cis people do have any exposure to trans bits, it's mostly through trans porn. And the actresses that do that all usually have to go off HRT for a period to do those shots. Most cis people are just hopelessly ignorant about all things trans.
I mean, what exactly do you want? OP specifically asked how people actually go about hiring a hitman. I assume OP is not a mobster. Unless you have those kind of connections, there is zero chance you're going to find some person you don't already know who will be willing to kill for you in exchange for money. OP specifically asked about hiring a hitman. And that fundamentally implies that there are people out there that offer this kind of service that you can just purchase if you have the cash. And the truth is that no, that business fundamentally just does not exist. Just because some people in certain very specific contexts have killed another person for money does not mean that there is a way for the average person to find a killer-for-hire. That simply isn't a service that you can go out and buy.
I had SRS, and it was great for me, but it's obviously a very personal thing. And it's certainly not cheap, easy, or without the risk of complications. People latch onto it because many people just fundamentally believe that genitals=sex=gender. And genital configuration is the traditional definition of "sex." Some contexts still work this way. In most of the US, prisons operate based on genitalia, not personal identity, secondary sex characteristics, or legal sex. In most of the US, if you were to end up in jail, you would be sent to a men's prison.
It's just a deeply, deeply rooted cultural thing. Genetics and chromosomes weren't even discovered until the mid 20th century, and even chromosomes aren't really all there is to a person's sex. But for centuries prior, your sex was simply your genitals, your gender was your sex, and you genitals were unchangeable. That centuries of cultural inertia is what is being resisted when someone with typically-male genitalia adopts a female gender. Even if you are on HRT and gain female secondary sex characteristics, you still have the primary sex characteristics that were traditionally one-and-the-same with the male gender. It obviously isn't that simple, but for centuries of western history, it was.
Among some, both cis and trans, there's also a sense of needing to prove that a person "really is" trans. Most of the effects of hormones are reversible. Genital surgery isn't. Some people will always be more comfortable accepting someone's gender identity if they "really commit to it." And permanently turning a penis into a vulva is a pretty obvious sign of commitment. Some women just invariably see "penis=threat," and some men see "penis=competitor." There's a lot of cis women who would be more comfortable accepting and treating a trans woman as valid if they know she couldn't force herself on them even if she wanted to. (At least in terms of penetration.)
I know this isn't how things should be. I don't think you need to have bottom surgery to valid in your gender. But genital configuration is something that is burned into the very core of the psyche of how most people interact with each other. It's a fundamental component of standard cis-hetero gender relations. And it's just always going to be a much greater reach for a lot of people to accept a trans person as valid with their original equipment than without their original equipment.
Hell, gender is assigned at birth almost 100% based on genitalia. You were (I assume) assigned male at birth, and unless you were born with ambiguous genitalia, it's extremely unlikely anyone ever tested your karyotype. And for 99% of cis people out there, they've simply stuck with the gender they were assigned at birth, have put zero thought into it, and were simply assigned that gender based on their genitals. The vast majority don't even know their own karyotype; they just assume it. For most people, their gender, their sex, and their genitalia are all indistinguishable. And it's really hard for a lot of people to get past that.
Worse still, their MO is incredibly transparent. They want to establish a "buffer zone" in southern Lebanon, but Israel's "buffer zones" are just a way of slowly expanding their borders. The problem is that a buffer zone like the DMZ only works as a buffer zone if you keep your own civilian population from moving in to that buffer zone! Israel lets it's 'settlers' move into what are supposed to be buffer zones like the DMZ. After awhile, the settlements are retroactively recognized and made legal. Now you have civilians in ordinary communities living in what was supposed to be a buffer zone. And since they're right on the border again, they're now in range of attack from the angry people whose former land they are now living on.
"Buffer zones" only work if you arrest and/or shoot any of your own people who try and move into them. Otherwise, they're just a slow-motion conquest via bureaucracy. The same thing has happened in the West Bank. Israel takes Palestinian land around Israeli settlements, declaring them to be security buffer zones. Then they let their settlers move in there. Suddenly they have vulnerable civilians within easy reach of angry Palestinians, so they need to establish a new buffer zone. Rinse and repeat.
It's slow-motion ethnic cleansing via zoning code and bureaucracy.