When reading headlines like this, I like to read “Ottawa” not as a placeholder for “the Canadian government,” but instead the actual municipal government of the City of Ottawa. 😆

It’s a bit of a pet peeve of mine when people are too lazy to even do a simple search for a definition. It’s fine to ask for detailed info. But it’s rude to ask a stranger to provide something you could instantly find on a search engine. I’m happy to provide detailed explanation, but I want to at least see the other person is willing to put in an iota of effort first. If they don’t care, why should I?

Charlie Kirk got exactly what he deserved.

What searches have you attempted?

But why bother? I’ve had numerous Endocrinologists say no to me because they were of the opinion, it’d make my ball shrink.

Obviously you should take large doses of estrogen to make them bigger!

I had a shitty doctor who wouldn’t give it for religious reasons.

I’m sure it was just someone that has sexual hangups, but I like the idea of someone that is objects to it for an entirely different religious reason. They’re religiously opposed to treating cancer. They’re bizarrely, ideologically, obsessively pro-life, and they consider it a damnable offense to harm anything that has human DNA. A cancer is just another form of human being! They take the “every cell is sacred” idea quite literally!

I can’t give you chemotherapy. That could hurt the cancer. And that’s a person!

How strange. I would have thought the death rate among cervical cancers would have approached 100%. This must be a very ineffective vaccine indeed. Not only did it not prevent cancer, it made the cancers immune to all treatment! /s

Maybe it’s not a hallucination at all. Maybe the mushroom is actually an anti-hallucinogen. It suppresses the hallucinations that normally prevent us from seeing the tiny people.

What do you think the mind is other than a physical thing directly molded by the environment around it?

I think the bigger issue is actually more on the positive side than the negative. In a social media world, it is hard to gain esteem from realistically achievable effort.

I’ll use my hobby, woodworking, as an example. I’m a hobbiest woodworker. I’m a far better woodworker than all of my family and all except maybe one or two of my friends. But then again, all the others don’t do it as a hobby. They have their own pursuits that I can’t begin to match their skill in. I can show my works to those in my immediate circle and receive genuine admiration and praise for a job well done. My work is legitimately impressive to those around me.

But on social media? Suddenly I’m comparing myself to people who have done this all day everyday for 30 years as their profession. Or I’m comparing myself to people who present a very curated version of their work. I can’t do this full time. I have a day job. I will never be as good at this as someone who spent decades doing this and nothing but this. And if I compare myself to people like that, then it will make my own work feel less valuable.

We weren’t meant to compare ourselves to the most skilled people on Earth at every single activity and craft. We’re meant to produce things and to make things and do things that are legitimately impressive to those around us, but are still achievable with realistic effort. You shouldn’t have to spend decades doing something before you can achieve even a modicum of social esteem. That’s not how humans are evolved to exist. We’re met to live in and seek to impress relatively small groups of people.

Your brain is one of the most artificial things in existence. How many years did you spend in formal education in one form or another? What is education other than a way of shaping a mind to a certain form?

This has nothing to do with the agrarian transition. These depopulating cities were created by the agrarian transition. They were where people went after they left the rural areas.

Two men were standing under a tree when it began to rain. One said to the other, “good thing this tree will keep us dry.”

“But what happens when the treek is soaked, and it can no longer keep us dry?” Asked the second.

“Don’t worry,” said the first, “we’re in a forest. We’ll just run to another tree.”

Perhaps because you can see mountains at the same scale that allows you to clearly see the object’s horizon/curvature. It would be like if Earth had mountains thousands of miles high. It’s a landscape that feels deeply unnatural.

Look, I get not being Euro centric, but you’re just looking for grievances. Performative wokism taken to the point of farce.

The scientific revolution was a new invention. There was philosophy and rationalism before, but it’s incredibly reductive to just collapse the entire scientific method to be no different than the methods of inquiry that came before. It clearly had vastly different and more dramatic real-world consequences than the eras that came before. The Islamic Golden Age did not produce a self-reinforcing series of technological advancements that completely altered the lives of every living human being. The life of a peasant living in an Islamic country was virtually unchanged from before the Islamic Golden Age to after the Islamic Golden Age. I get rejecting imperialism. But you’re being so performatively anti-imperialist that it’s clouding your judgment.

The scientific method was something that was invented in its modern form in a particular place and time. Yes, it had precursors, but so what? Humans evolved from creatures that are a fundamentally different species to ourselves. Every invention and discovery has precursors, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same thing. You have such an anti-West axe to grind that you can’t recognize a truly remarkable discovery, simply because it happened to be invented by Europeans.

It was not normal for a tiny peninsula on the edge of the Eurasian landmass to, in a few centuries, go from being a global backwater to dominating the world. It’s a historical aberration. To explain it, you have two choices;

1. Be a racist and conclude that there is something particularly different about European genetics that makes Europeans either particularly intelligent (positive racism) or particularly evil (negative racism) that allowed them to achieve this feat.

2. Recognize that it was an accident of history and that a uniquely powerful discovery/invention, the modern scientific method, happened to be invented in Europe.

Personally, I don’t like Eugenics-based explanations. Maybe you do. But I reject racism, even for the sake of anti-imperialism. Maybe you think Europeans are just genetically evil geniuses. But my default assumption is that everyone is the same, and Europe just happened to roll a natural 20 when it came to where the scientific revolution would happen.

Sure, you can pretend that it was no different from other methods of rational inquiry that came before. But then you have to explain why the modern scientific method produced a knowledge explosion while previous methods didn’t.

Your post reads as a vapid grievance-centered view of the world.

You pointed out an obvious and irrelevant fact but neglected my main point. This isn’t that complicated. If there are two countries with equal technology and education levels, the larger one will have a greater scientific output. All other things being equal, bigger countries should produce more science. And the things that prevent everything from being equal are largely historical aberrations that will decrease with time.

Obviously, there today isn’t a direct correlation between population and scientific output. But that’s not what I argued. My assertion is that all other things being equal, a larger country will be able to produce more science. This shouldn’t be controversial. More people. More resources. More ability to employ scientists to do science.

Yes, there isn’t a direct correlation today between population and scientific output, but different countries have radically different levels of development, wealth, and education. But these differences tend to average out over time as the world as a whole becomes more industrialized and developed. For most of human history, China was the leading scientific and technological power. And this was largely because they were simply had the largest population able to invent and discover things. For a time, small European countries had an advantage. But that’s just because Europe got lucky and happened to be where the scientific revolution happened to start. That was never a stable position that could be maintained forever. There is no timeline where tiny England continued to control the world forever.

My point is not that, today, there is a direct correlation between scientific output and population size. You pointed out this obvious fact, but you missed the entire point of my comment. My point is that China overtaking the US in scientific output is not unexpected at all. It’s exactly what we would expect to happen. It’s a returning to the historical norm, the end of an anomalous period of history. A regression to the mean.

The US federal government is a well armed pension fund.

I mean, in the long run, this should be inevitable. The scientific revolution was a lightning bolt that happened to strike in Europe. And all western countries inherited that head start. But in the long run, we would expect all the world to converge to a similar science, and wealth level. And if China has triple the population of the US, why wouldn’t you expect them to dominate the US in raw scientists output? That should be the default condition.

What are you on about? We don’t have the nuclear we’re talking about. This is about future plant construction. And new renewable capacity can be deployed in a fraction of the time that nuclear can.