Pat @Pat@qoto.org

@icedquinn

>"if its illegal to profit from stolen goods why isn't it illegal to receive laundered campaign donations"

Because the politicians who get the donations make the laws and they write the laws so that they do what they want.

@icedquinn

A crime requires mens rea, so no, a person is not guilty of a crime for receiving stolen property if they don't know that it is stolen.

Although, the rightful owner can take back that stolen property from the purchaser and the guy who bought it is out the money and would need to try to recover damages from the person they bought it from.

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Fuck YouTube.

Anybody know of a PeerTube instance (or any other video site) that actually works, has no heavy-handed algorithms and has enough content so that a search will bring up a least a few high quality videos on a topic?

(and doesn't require registration or have an unbearable portion of advertising)

@lupyuen

It seems that most of their acquisitions end up getting buried (they're just to eliminate competition for themselves or for one of their advertisers). I wonder if that's the case with this one?

#satire #fusion #energy #nuclear #plant #NIF #LLNL #DOE

NIF, the facility that just produced the first positive-gain fusion reaction, was completed in 2009 at a cost of about $4.2B. It costs about $300M/year to run. So total cost to date is about $8.1B. The experiment that produced the fusion reaction had a net gain of about 1.1MJ energy.

That works out to about $19.44B per kilowatthour.

They plan to reduce the cost per kWh before they go into production. 😂

Quote from Wikipedia article on TAPPIST-1...

"...the probability of TRAPPIST-1e – the planet most likely to harbour life – to be actually inhabited is considerably less than that of Earth."

Since Earth's probability of being inhabited is 100%, this almost makes sense.

I reposted this with a clip that has better video. The subtitles on the clip are in Spanish, but there's too much to easily transcribe it to English. Sorry.

#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #film #movie #drugs #addiction #WilliamHurt #limbo #Chayefsky #HumanPotential #LSD #dream #psychedelic #SensoryDeprivation #mushrooms #MindControl

Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

Altered States (1980)

You’ll immediately recognize Chayefsky’s style in this dialogue-heavy story. The characters and dialogue feel very much like Network (1976) or The Hospital (1971). The target audience was well-educated baby-boomers from the 60’s counter culture, sometimes referred to as “yuppies” (young urban professionals, formerly hippies). However, it has a lot of special effects and enough action to appeal to a wider audience.

This period in American popular history marked the transition from the drug culture of the 1960s and the fascination with ESP in the 1970s, to the human potential movement of the 80s and 90s. Drug dealers were looking for more affluent customers for their products and clandestine operators were looking for paths to apply chemical-based mind control and recruitment tactics to more influential targets. This film provided a more intellectual rational for taking drugs, which would attract those who would normally be smart enough to avoid them.

Although there was fierce conflict on the set between Chayefsky and the director, Ken Russell, about the script, Chayefsky maintained creative control (although he pulled his name from the screenplay credit because he was not satisfied with the final product). Despite the script conflicts and Russell’s direction, I think the film turned out great. It has brilliant performances from William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban and Charles Haid, all of whom delivered Chayefsky’s difficult dialogue in a convincing manner.

There are no CG effects in this film because they weren’t yet available; everything is done with practical FX and film techniques, reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Also, you’ll notice the use of deep brass horns in the score, borrowed from Close Encounters of a Third Kind (1977) and used ever since in scifi projects such as Epoch (2001), Inception (2010), Arrival (2016) and many others.

@notthatkaren @freemo @stux

On most Mastodon instances if a Mastodonian was tooting out tracking information about another Mastodonian, everywhere they went, I'd call that harassment and I'd expect the offending account to get warned and suspended if necessary to protect the privacy of users. I think even if the one being tracked is a public figure, that's still harassment.

@icedquinn

Yeah, that attack is used in primaries sometimes.

I think if the sortition picks only a few candidates from a pool of all registered voters for the ranked choice election, there wouldn't be a problem. Or maybe randomly pick candidates from a pool of registered voters and allow voters to opt out if they don't want to serve.

#fusion #breakthrough #ignition #LLNL #NIF #DOE #energy #nuclear #nuke

Here's the press conference by DOE and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories about the historic first fusion reaction to produce a positive gain factor.

https://video.qoto.org/videos/watch/d97ad047-49d1-45dc-9bfc-5b050bc80c4a

Just an old joke made into a poem.

@tanweerdar@mstdn.social

https://qoto.org/@Pat/109510776870707857

#SmallPoems #Poetry #MicroFiction #SmallStories #neutral

Quantum Attitude

The neutron’s Milquetoast existence
never ever asserting insistence
never ever taking a side,
never picking a lane on its ride.

But wondering about those who polarize
what’s in their hearts, what’s in their eyes
So Mr. Neutral asks one day
to see what his neighbor would say.

Mr. Proton, what’s the attraction?
Why try to make a stand
Do you think it can create traction?
You’re not even the tiniest grain of sand.

“Although you go more places, Mr. N, see more things
I stir more and get stirred more, to see what it brings.”

Yes, the neutron says, that’s a different way to be
But please tell me, does it really make you happy?
Mr. P is deep and responsive.
The proton responds, “I’m positive.”

#SmallPoems #Poetry #MicroFiction #SmallStories #neurtal

@icedquinn

A sortition to pick the candidates. Yeah, that's better, I think. The voters should be able to filter out the really incompetent ones.

@icedquinn

Fedi keeps feeding shit but I'm in dark all the time regardless, so I might as well be a mushroom.

@icedquinn

Sometimes I think that just picking representative via sortition from the pool of eligible voters would yield better results than what we got now.

@icedquinn

I don't think it works that way. I think it's based on how much of the proceeds of the crime that the launderer is able to funnel to the sentencing judge.

@Deglassco

21st-Century Heratio Alger.

@mc

I don't understand this. I looked up Haldane and found several scientist by that name but could figure out which one this refers to. Search for "Consolation of Haldane" returns nothing. I looked up transfinite arithmetic but it was way beyond my understanding.

Is there a nutshell explanation of this available without reading Sagan's book and learning advanced set theory?

It sounds interesting, but I really have no ideas what it is.