Various interesting stuff

Sounds legit. In other news, unless something changes drastically we're all fucked.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/drewhansen/2016/02/09/unless-it-changes-capitalism-will-starve-humanity-by-2050/#2493160e4a36

Well, so the problem of overpopulation solves itself, no? Oh great...

The next article on human trafficking is also interesting, albeit sad. So, despite AI advances, we still need humans for something...

100 ways the world could end in 2017:

Asteroid
Gamma-ray burst
Black hole swallows us up like an Advil
Massive global inflation
Ice caps melt and flood the cities, causing the economy to collapse and everyone to starve
Trump triggers World War III with a tweet
Trump triggers World War III because he has low blood sugar
Trump triggers World War III because he is bored
Methane gas from sheep farts overheats the globe
The whole population decides, “Nah,” and spontaneously drops dead
A giant burp
Death Star shoots us with lasers
Death Star shoots us with gas that makes us very lazy and we starve
The oceans evaporate
Insects turn on us
Solar flares
Magnetic poles switch, making all our magnets break—even the important ones
Chemtrails suddenly real
God
Insanity
One person starts screaming, then another, then we all are
The dead rise up and challenge the living to a war, which we lose
Big hack
Apes gain the ability to organize and rise up against us
Fish gain the ability to organize and rise up against us
People forget penmanship and no one can sign credit card receipts anymore, causing us to starve
Bees all die
We all become gluten intolerant
A bunch of sinkholes at once
Galaxy-sized man slides into our area and punts us like a soccer ball
Ebola 2: More Ebola Than Ever
Apple products become sentient and go on a labor strike
CERN messes up a particle accelerator experiment and creates dark matter which eats us all up
Dog whistle, but for humans; drives us crazy
Jesus comes back and we are startled and nuke it all
Viola Davis gives us one of her searing looks
Aliens visit and kill us with space warfare
Aliens visit and it’s “Arrival” but the alternate ending where the Chinese got their way
Aliens visit and seduce us into being their slaves and then we are just shells of who we used to be (the world continues to exist but for what?)
Sex starts to feel weird and it never stops feeling like that
Melancholia bumps into us
Cicadas come back like usual but they don’t die... think about it
Nano-machines begin rapidly reproducing and turn the world to dust
Lack of content
Rise of the Whos
Weak ankles (even the animals)
First-borns die of feeling superior
Poison in drinking water
Poison in rain (acid rain, maybe)
Poison in rice
Poison in our hearts—the poison of corruption
Microscopic algae alters atmosphere so we can’t breathe
Dig up Three Mile Island and everyone gets cancer (even the plants)
Dig up Chernobyl and we all turn blue
Dig up Titanic (from the water) and we all die at once from being so moved
The internet gains sentience and teaches us a lesson for using it wrong
Computer that’s controlling our Matrix-like simulation crashes and we all wake up and then instantly die of shock
All the glasses stores close and everyone is blind (who will drive the ships)
Fatal fungus
Elon Musk makes several big mistakes
It’s actually a novel and someone turns a page and then its just the end of it
Leonardo DiCaprio has been storing up methane from the sheep and then one day he farts and the Earth instantly warms to 1000 degrees
Malevolent company takes control of all the televisions and forces us to watch nothing but The Big Bang Theory
Jupiter changes orbit and knocks into us
All the locks on all the zoo cages spontaneously break at once
Java stops working
Pestilence
Super-volcano eruption
Men become so woke they die; world nice for one last generation
Gravity reverses and we start floating
Emily Ratajkowski wins an Oscar
Lightning storm sets every meadow including Meadow Soprano on fire, and then there are no meadows; grazing animals die
Earth is actually a marble and it gets lost
Earth is a marble and it falls down a drain pipe
Earth is a marble and a child swallows it
The worst tweetstorm
Someone creates a child-kitten hybrid and we die of love
We all become hooked on a diet pill that is actually cyanide
Jonestown massacre, but bigger
Someone starts chemical warfare and then misplaces the antidote
Children all decide not to get older
A man snatches a lollipop from a baby and then: Butterfly effect
Everyone is depressed and misses one day of work, but it’s the same day
Comet collision
Dinosaurs come back
Star explodes nearby
Sun gets hotter
We are all Westworld hosts and the programmers die or quit
Get addicted to rollercoasters but supply can’t keep up with demand
Pave paradise and put up parking lot
Stop being able to tell facts from lies, all communication collapses
Someone snips all the underwater internet cables
God dutch-ovens us (global warming)
Sea level rises too much and we aren’t strong swimmers
Earth swings off axis and sends us into space
Everyone gets a bad haircut and then no one wants to do it anymore
Too much body odor
Too little body odor
Everyone simultaneously forgets their social security numbers (and international equivalents), bureaucratic gridlock
Bird revolution

Jad... Bro, what have you been smoking...?

Share some, would you?

A friend of mine made Tears of Phoenix.

Anyway, doomsaying is a popular way to keep population in check.

How exactly is "what we're doing now is going to destroy us so we need to make big changes" going to help with controlling the population and keeping it pacified? If anything that calls for a revolution.

And historically we have several cases of cultures that collapsed due to environmental destruction (classical Mayas, Easter Islanders, Anasazi). the difference is that those cultures only operated on a small part of the world so when they collapsed people elsewhere were still doing fine. Our civilization on the other hand is global. If we fuck up the enviroment enough to trigger a collapse, we trigger a collapse for the entire world.

Take into account that the civilization should have been wiped out by Y2K, and many more times after that. That threats are made and nothing is done about it but making someone richer.
It all comes back to the corruption, to break the circle we need to cut off the head of Ouroboros. Revolution? Oh yes. Who will make the rules then?

On one hand, we have the leaders making no actuall change for the better. On the other hand, you might be right and it's another nail into their coffin. It's making me dizzy thinking about it, and the post must look like it.

I don't want a violent revolution. I'm just saying the prediction does not support the status quo and it's not reasonable to believe it's in any way intended to keep the population in check.

Y2K was bullshit and if you asked any serious computer expert at the time they'd tell you that exact same thing. the emdia just ran with it because it made a good "story".

And on that note I'm sceptical about anything pushed by mainstream media. Until it is examined by independent party without big brother dictating results, the "hockey graph" is not forgotten.

I have my doubts about non violent revolution. Look what the "velvet" brought us.
Anyway, change, yes.

Dragatus wrote:

How exactly is "what we're doing now is going to destroy us so we need to make big changes" going to help with controlling the population and keeping it pacified? If anything that calls for a revolution.

And historically we have several cases of cultures that collapsed due to environmental destruction (classical Mayas, Easter Islanders, Anasazi). the difference is that those cultures only operated on a small part of the world so when they collapsed people elsewhere were still doing fine. Our civilization on the other hand is global. If we fuck up the enviroment enough to trigger a collapse, we trigger a collapse for the entire world.

Not necessarily...

Global warming? Russia and Canada benefit from longer summers, more arable land and opening access to mineral resources of the North already. As Jared Diamond put it, what we could do is dictated by our environment. That one is not constant, on the contrary, it varies greatly. Rising sea level? Dutch are totally screwed, UK, France, Germany and others quite screwed, Spain, Albania, Slovenia, Hungary Romania hardly screwed, Swiss could keep rolling their candy in tinfoil. North Africa could actually benefit from resulting higher rainfall, save from Egypt due to flooding of Nile Valley and general doom. Israel could be freed from Gaza Strip problem (I am an asshole, I know). It is never uniform.

As for the leadership: yes, it is a serious problem. Lack therof namely. I do not believe that our current leaders are capable to look past their petty schemes to get elected again and suck it to the big corporations and banks, let alone institute a system wide change.

As for revolutions: as in the communist one; you exchange a sate oligarchy for a hungry one that has to steal afresh to get sate. Not a great deal. I am for evolution and civilized change, as in British parliamentary model. Sans behedings of current rulers, that is.

Take this, modafocas


https://ryanholiday.net/reading-list/

https://www.startgainingmomentum.com/23-excellent-books-read/

Get a job.

Thanks for good reads Philo! I even downloaded Meditations.pdf of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Now I only need to quit my job...

In Mother Russia, they steal your balls:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2969992/Married-TV-actor-wakes-testicles-STOLEN-drugged-Russian-bar-attractive-blonde-working-organ-traffickers.html

I am bummed...

ololololol. Can they actually be transplanted? If so, they would still produce the original donor's offspring, right? Right?

They could, and they will. That what scares me... But they produce testosterone too, so if you are a well off Russian and lost yours because of cancer, accident, angry natives of Caucasus or anything...

I got a PhD working on living tissues...

Wait, they blurred his face, but gave him real name and listed him as a soap actor . . .

Wat?

http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/27/technology/spacex-moon-tourism/index.html

But why? Where is the gain for science?

@Malak: Media for you...

It's a step on the way to sending people to Mars. Space-X is developing their technology and sending people around the moon is a sort of test of their progress.

And they pay to be guinea pigs!?

Well, perhaps "test" was not the best word and "proof" would be better. I expect they'll send several unmanned spacecraft around the moon first.

And if space tourism funds space exploration, then so be it.

In other news: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/biologists-propose-sequence-dna-all-life-earth

I hope they actually do get funding for the project.