WDYM? I can be a railroad mogul one day, or an oil baron, an automotive entrepreneur, a sugar plantation owner, or even a privateer, if I hustle hard enough, right?
And the show blew me away with how it showed exactly how Londo would die in the first season, and his death was both exactly, and nothing at all, like it was foretold.
Children and sex. Recently on local social media, there was a discussion on our topless laws. Of course, there were the predictable comments about women not going topless where children might see.
Well, why not, Karen? It's utterly ridiculous when you consider what breasts are for, and what children are meant to do with them. Yes, it's true the children shouldn't be engaging in sex acts, and the details of adult sexual behavior should be kept from them, since they're not equipped to understand, e.g. BDSM and power play, yet. But if kids see a pair of boobs, if kids see naked people, or even if kids know the basic functions of body parts, they'll be fine. Lots of kids throughout human history lived in small dwellings and heard, or even saw, parents and other members of their community having sex, and they all survived the experience.
Communicable disease? Now there's something that we should be protecting children from...
I have a cargo van. It's impossible to see any traffic coming from the passenger's side when backing up, and there's a big blind spot even on the driver's side. It's a larger vehicle, and it's much easier to maneuver into tight spaces in reverse. (It's why we learn to parallel park in reverse. Try it in forward once, and see.) Also, backing into a parking spot can be accomplished with just a steady gaze at one of the wing mirrors. (Driver's or passenger's side depends on which way you're turning.)
That last point will also be important someday when I'm older and don't have as much flexibility to turn and look backwards. (I was appalled once at a city transportation committee discussion about back-in parking stalls when a city alderperson said that he doesn't look behind his car when backing out, because he can't twist his body. If you can't drive safely, you shouldn't be driving!)
Best that I can think of would be to create an endowed institute of political scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, et cetera, dedicated to studying and developing ways to counter right-wing populism, and de-program people who fall under its sway.
My niece has been getting heavily into skincare. As long as we're being honest, most of a typical "skincare routine" is placebo, and some of it is actively counter-productive. I know a few women who have a laissez-faire approach to skincare, and their results are almost as good. I believe that the routine is more about the ritual, and psychic need to try to gain some measure of control in a crazy society, than results.
It seems to be that it depends entirely on the intent of the simulation: an experiment to find out what happens after setting the clockwork in motion, or a carefully stage-managed zoo. I say that because the partial simulation would require complete understanding of and integration with consciousness a priori, intent to mess around with conscious minds, and the Great Makers giving a shit whether we knew it was a simulation or not. That is, some sort of cosmic fishbowl for minds.
More research is always good, as it can deepen our understanding, but the basic outline of what's going on is already known. A lot of people just don't want to believe it, because we're all stuck on the metaphor that we're all captains of the ship inside our own heads. You see it in this thread; people want to blame non-voters, as if millions of people all had perfect information and all made decisions based upon it through conscious reasoning. Because they're just—I dunno—bad people? (Which is a completely bonkers belief when you start to dig into it.)
Actually, neuroscience tells us that consciousness doesn't really exist, except as an emergent phenomenon of sensory experience. Brain scans show that thoughts, feelings, and decisions occur before we're consciously aware of them; the conscious mind is basically a rationalization machine, inventing narratives about why we did a thing or felt a certain way, only after the fact. And, it's notoriously bad at it. (The Misattribution of Arousal is one of the classic examples.) So, if you can affect the way that somebody's brain works, you can in many ways control what the they think and feel.
WDYM? I can be a railroad mogul one day, or an oil baron, an automotive entrepreneur, a sugar plantation owner, or even a privateer, if I hustle hard enough, right?