FGD 135 - Wing attack Plan R NZTI 33702 NEPTUN 66522075 NZTI 82361 TIMUS 11625685 NZTI 70082 LISOPLAS 67930809 NZTI 62465 NUTOBAKS 78179271

Here is my take on free will. I hope I can explain it well enough that people understand. For a long time I have not seen the contradiction between a single fixed future and free will. The universe is four-dimensional, time being a dimension (though a very different kind of dimension from space). The future only unfolds in one way. Each decision you make leads to one future, it does not split the universe into multiple futures. You can only choose one future. Therefore only one timeline exists, the one that we all travel on into the shared future that we all experience. But we all have free will. We all make decisions that affect the present and those affects determine the future. Some people take the logical step that if the universe must unfold in the one fated way, then we do not have the freedom to take a different path. But this is incorrect. We do have the freedom to take a different path. We just don't do it. Because of who we are. Fate isn't something outside of you that you are a slave to with no free will. YOU are the fate that is making the one true future. Or rather, you are a part of that fate, and you have perfectly free will.

My dad used to work for the Air Force as a civil servant. And he had this joke about civil servants. Some psychologists did an experiment. They had a top mathematician, a top physicist, and a top civil servant. Each was confined to a small cubicle room with no windows and just the one door for 24 hours without food or water. They gave them each 3 steel balls (bearings) and came back 24 hours later to see what had transpired. In the mathematicans room they discovered that all three balls were perfectly balanced on top of each other in the middle of the room, and the mathematician was sitting against the wall pleased as punch. In the physicists room, to their amazement, the three balls were hovering in space, and the physicist was sitting in the corner mumbling about equasions. In the civil servants room they found that he had lost one, he broke one, and the third one was in his lunchbox as he intended to take it home with him.

I can take any system, and I can define the "set of all things" on that system. For example, I could consider my desk a system and define the set of all things on my desk. By making such a definition, do I change the system? No. The definition about the system doesn't affect the system. Then I could name this set. I could take the country of China as a system and the set of all people in China and I could call that set the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Now, by defining such a thing into existance, does that have any real world effect on the ground? No. It's just an abstraction. Of course the real CCP is not the set of all people in China. My point is that the longer single-party rules goes on in China, the larger that party grows, the closer it resembles a zero-party system. Rather than political debate happening between parties with firm stances, political debate happens between different political camps that all reside inside of the party, and eventually the party itself is meaningless when it includes everybody. I don't know if that will happen, but I have it on good authority that China is somewhere in between. Which makes it trickier to think about. There are 8 parties outside the CCP whose leaders are chosen by the CCP and whose roles are limited to making proposals to the CCP. This is scarcely different from being inside the CCP. I think this is China's path out.

As long as there is interesting content on nostr it makes sense for everybody to get on nostr so they can see it. This is true even if they don't spin up a keypair, don't post, and only follow one or two people. View quoted note →

The Next Big Idea in News Media People hate the news. Because not only do they get some small facts wrong, explanations even more wrong, but the normative context and word choices belie a belief system that huge numbers of people disagree with. News media tried to solve this problem by reporting "just the facts" without any contextualization, choosing the most neutral words they could. You might think that would be the perfect news that you would want to get your news from. But it is not. You will find it boring. The viewership numbers of that kind of thing plummet. It is far better to give the *wrong* context and infuriate you than to give no context. Well, what if you could give a personalized context to everybody? With A.I. now we can. We can have "just the facts" neutral news fed into a personalized (or group personalized) A.I. which contextualizes the news for you making it interesting again without infuriating you, and IMHO people will *trust* this news far more than what they currently get. What do you all think? Should we take this serious, fund it and set it afloat?

My bank website has a notice today: "We are no longer able to accept EUR denominated payments to Russia, Belarus or Ukraine. Please select USD for payments into these countries."

Most people crave mental peace. You can get mental peace by believing that you already understand everything, that you are always right, that your country is good and it is only other nations and cultures that are bad. And you can maintain this mental peace quite easily, indefinitely even, with just a few simple habits: 1. If anybody presents information that conflicts with your worldview, immediately categorize it as a lie. 2. If anybody challenges you do research the point, decide that you cannot be bothered. 3. Even easier, choose to disbelieve all authority. Now nothing can be researched, even in principle! Because every source is lying to you. So just make up whatever belief makes you happy! Mmmmm.... I feel so calm..... and stupid.

All you Americans need to start (or join and operate from) a Church organisation so you can be exempt from taxes.