https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/anything-4

I’m not sure what you mean by “crackly bubbles”. Many plants (possibly most of them) use electrochemical signaling, which at the very least resembles the hormonal system in animals. The simplest animals are definitely less complex, neural processing wise, than the most complex plants – consider for example sponges (literally no nervous system of any kind) vs. the venus flytrap (capable of rudimentary counting; the trap only closes when the hairs are triggered a certain number of times within a certain timeframe).

There’s also tons of animals whose nervous systems aren’t at all similar to that of humans. Insects and arthropods for example don’t really have a brain, just lumps of ganglia that do some rudimentary processing, and unsurprisingly most people don’t really consider insects to be capable of having any kind of meaningful sentient internal experience.

The “???” suggests they didn’t get the joke. Like come on, not even a sarcastic “very funny, 2/5”?

How do you force someone with no morals to resign?

Can you believe that’s how sheep feel all the time?

That 5 days ago link is just a weekly discussion thread that was made 5 days ago. The gun image was posted in the thread after the shooting.

Lots of trees there. That place still looks pretty nice in the summer.

A quick web search had someone say it’s Yaroslavsky District, Moscow and while I’m not entirely convinced (having trouble matching the photo to a map), in the summer it will probably look similar to the photo of Yaroslavsky District on Wikipedia.

Mostly no disagreement there, though I want to say that chimps do not go to war out of cruelty. Chimps go to war because they live in scarcity and it increases the war gene’s odds of survival.

In the past this was also the primary reason humans went to war. In modern times we have invented many new reasons, but usually even those do not boil down to simple cruelty (though there’s many cases in history where one could argue cruelty was the primary motivation). Usually war wields cruelty as an instrument, not the other way around.

On what grounds do you think that ants suck at farming?

For example on the metric of how much of their populace has to be farming to sustain the colony. For modern industrialized humans it’s some single-digit percentage, while for ants it’s probably something like 50%-80% (with the rest of the ants doing nursing).

And, intelligence or skill doesn’t make any animal species better than others. You are an animal, deal with it.

Having the intelligence and capability to rise above nature like humans have done is precisely what makes one animal species better than others. The fact that all current humans are animals was never in dispute – though as far as I’m concerned, being human is not contingent upon being an animal.

I presume, based on prior experience, that the fixation on humans not being better/more worthy/above other animals stems from some kind of anarchist opposition to any and all hierarchies, and so I feel like I need to clarify: being above the natural world does not absolve humans of responsibility to it nor is it a carte blanche to treat lower animals however we desire. Quite the contrary. A lion is incapable of considering the ethical implications of eating meat, so we can hardly fault it for running down a gazelle, forcing it down and then slowly killing it over several minutes before eating it. Humans are capable of that, so we can fault humans for factory farming meat.

You have a fairly unrealistic view of what an apocalyptic scenario would look like. Existing technology would not go bad overnight. A lot of stuff works without electricity (a relatively recent invention in the tech tree, all things considered), and electricity isn’t that difficult to get going “from scratch” to begin with. Not to even mention that a world-ending meteor is something humans can, from our lofty heights far above nature, detect and even divert before it hits Earth.

Actual hunter-gatherers would be among the first to die out in an apocalypse like that, because they’re wholly dependent on the ecosystem, and would lose their only source of food when prey animals go extinct. The survivors would be developed humans in whatever area happens to both not be hit particularly hard (so in the case of global ash/dust clouds, probably somewhere near the equator where farming will still be possible) and that manages to stay relatively cohesive societally.

So on an individual level survival would be down to mostly luck, but on a species-wide level it would not be.

What I think is plausible is one of those old natural self regulation that have played out over and over in the history of the planet When one exploitative species grows over beyond available resources they starve to death until a new equilibrium is reached.

This is another one of those strangely common romanticized views of nature, but it’s also incongruent with reality. By definition nothing about what humans are doing to the planet (i.e. climate change, anthropocenic extinctions, what have you) is natural, and as such the consequences aren’t a natural mechanism either. Humans just practically won’t be able to wipe ourselves out in the same way that e.g. island animal populations may go extinct if balance is thrown off.

We can shoot ourselves in the foot real bad, but making ourselves extinct probably just straight up isn’t something we’re capable of. Sure, there would absolutely be a certain kind of poetic irony in humans, in our hubris, making the planet inhospitable to modern civilization (and it’s possible, too), but this common metaphor of Mother Earth’s immune system working to restore a natural balance is, if you forgive my being crass, complete hippie nonsense.

Yeah and crows don’t have electric drills yet they are still capable of tool use. What is your point?

Fire was invented – just because it existed before humans harnessed does not mean harnessing it was not an invention, just like how hammer-shaped rocks existing doesn’t invalidate the invention of hammers, or the Sun doing nuclear fusion doesn’t invalidate the invention of the fusion reactor. Ants and bees absolutely suck at farming compared to humans. Both me and you are way above and better than every animal, and you should acknowledge that.

I invite you to present actual arguments instead of what are basically just tired catchphrases.

This is an overly pessimistic (though sadly all too common) view that disregards all the good parts of humanity in favour of dooming and glooming over all the bad parts. On the whole humans are doing pretty damn well, and we’re constantly improving.

As for making it though some apocalypse - so will fish and flies rats and microbes. Are they too above nature? Damn we evolved from the shrew-like proto-mammals that survived the dinosaur apocalypse. I guess being above nature is in the entire mammal ancestry then.

The difference is that such creatures will survive by pure chance, while humans will survive by the thing that elevates us above nature: technology. In a purely natural environment large animals like humans would be the first to go extinct in a major extinction event.

I’d argue that once humans are no longer controlled by primal urges and not dependent on carbon based nutrition for the microbial flora that consists our entire being, then we can start talking about being above nature. But are we then even human any more?

Humans are not controlled by their primal urges, so we’re already halfway clear. As for nutrition, almost none of what the typical human eats comes from nature. Instead it comes from crops grown and engineered by humans.

Nature isn’t about being carbon-based, it’s about whether the ship is adrift on the whims of natural selection or steered deliberately by an intelligent actor, and the entire story of the human species has been about increasing our control of the ship.

This is just semantics, but I mean… nature isn’t good. Nature is really terrible, actually. It’s an endless cycle of violence, death and entropy that has killed literally all of our ancestors and will kill us just as quickly if we give it the chance (to paraphrase one of my favourite games, The Talos Principle II). Being better than nature is an ideal anyone who isn’t some kind of insane social darwinist should strive for.

While I’m pretty sure I wholly agree with the sentiment of the majority of people saying it, I resent this “man is part of nature” argument because at face value it romanticizes suffering. Nature is dying by 40 if you’re lucky, and by 5 if you’re not. It’s your entire tribe starving to death because a volcano you didn’t even know about erupted on the other side of the world. It’s being killed or enslaved by another tribe’s raiding party because they want something you have (you may argue that this is human action, not nature, but chimps go to war and chimps are animals in nature, ergo war is part of nature). I am glad to be above a lot of that, and I hope future humans can be even further removed from it.

Of course what most people mean when they say that humans aren’t (or shouldn’t be) above nature is just that they think we should stop destroying the planet in the various completely unnecessary ways we do, and that if we don’t it’ll bite us in the ass, and I fully agree with that. I just don’t vibe with the way it’s phrased.

We’re above nature in a far more profound way than the ant-eater, because for the most part humans don’t rely on nature replenishing itself – we have agriculture. None of the problems facing us really have to do with replenishment so much as they do with unchecked consumption. For example with climate change the problem isn’t that we’re burning fossil fuels faster than they replenish, but rather the fact that we’re burning them at all.

People making this point probably usually think of climate change destroying humanity, but the truth is that even completely unchecked climate change will not make humans go extinct. It may destroy our global society, lead to the death of a large chunk of our population and set us back hundreds of years, but it almost certainly won’t kill us all. That, I think, goes to show just how far above nature we are, for better and for worse.

Humans are above nature in many very real and very tangible ways, and have been since the invention of fire or clothing or farming or any number of other things. It is not a mistake to believe that.

The mistake is in believing that the foundation doesn’t matter because you’re above it.

The reason I’m asking is that separate wineprefixes will look like a “different wine instance” to a layman, but they’re not the same thing as a sandbox. Wine mounts the host filesystem under the Z: drive, and even beyond that there are probably ways to escape the Wine environment. For true sandboxing some additional layers will be required.

Is Bottles actually containerized in any meaningful way? Last I checked it just managed wineprefixes, and Wine is not a sandbox.

Around here they do calibrate the theaters but the spec says they can still be insanely loud, as long as they’re not loud all the time. The peaks are well over 100 dB.

The way they do dynamic range in movie theaters sucks too. I have to wear earplugs because it’s so loud.