To save time, we (as in the world of English speakers) are not on the same page regarding woke.

People were lying to get laid long before photography was ever invented.

The only thing that will save you is how expensive it is. If you have enough money to burn making attempts you can keep trying until you get ones that can fool you.

If the ‘life’ chunk doesn’t act as support for the mental health chunk, it’s not life, it’s just more work.

Is it just me or is ‘emo’ just ‘goth who can’t/doesn’t want to put in the time, money, and effort to fit the goth aesthetic?’

Though, as a nation born from distrust of authority, it’s hard to imagine at any point in history Americans would have trusted congress to touch it.

That’s not how monkey’s paw twists work.

I think one of the most interesting questions that underlies this would be whether there is a material with correct properties to handle the mechanical forces necessary to perform mechanical computation to allow something like CNC and whether that system could then be complex/simple enough to assemble itself. It might be possible, but I don’t know enough about mechanical computing to even have a hunch.

That’s less a lie and more ‘teaching the ideal.’ The problem isn’t learning how the system is supposed to work. That’s how you learn to be a mechanic. You learn how an engine is supposed to work so you can spot where it’s gone wrong. The issue is more one of there are millions of people and they get 10 minutes on how it’s supposed to work and then only 3 of them go into politics and learn how it actually works/doesn’t work. Democracy requires more than a one week chapter on civics, once a year. We all have to be mechanics, or at least be prepared to try.

There is a drive to escape suffering that can lead one to seek a way out, even at the expense of other goals. One cause of suffering is loss of social status. Young people, especially teens, can feel this suffering so acutely they kill themselves in an attempt to escape it. The human brain is not a reasonable, well-designed system. It can and will break in ways that don’t make sense to other brains because a brain cannot fully comprehend a brain.

There is no line dividing the two states. They are parts of a spectrum. We all have a need for novelty and predictability in different ratios. Find the point where your need for novelty is met, keeping you from boredom, and where your need for predictability is met, preventing burnout.

If your definition of ‘device’ includes biological machines, that’s us and basically everything else we call ‘living.’

If you mean purely mechanically, as in with just cogs, levers, etc? Maybe hypothetically? But probably not really. If you ignore a lot of elements it might be conceivable to design a factory that uses mechanical computing to produce and manipulate stock materials being fed into it, but mechanical things are notoriously finicky when it comes to tolerances, so it’d probably take on too much entropy somewhere and wouldn’t be able to repair itself.

If you allow electronic computers and actuators, it gets easier, but it’s still extremely difficult to the point of practical impossibility to build any system capable of self-maintenance and self-calibration, let alone one that can fully produce every part of itself.

The lawn for those people is a signifier of wealth. ‘I’m so wealthy I can afford to spend absurd amounts of money on maintaining land at the level it would take to harvest a crop from it, but I do not harvest a crop from it.’ Idiots imitating boomer age idiots who were imitating mid-century idiots, who were imitating old-world, old-money assholes.

I have a sense this came from someone who had a pretty good childhood and now has a child who is probably not that old. Anyone who had an even slightly troublesome childhood would know parents frequently lose the ‘hero’ status, and many times become villains. Anyone who deals with kids over a certain age is very likely to have been told ‘I hate you,’ for some stupid reason. You will not ‘always be a hero.’

I’d call those pop ballads.

If you want suggestions, check out Moddi, Farao, Lindy-Fay Hella, Madrugada, Finnegan Tui, Brandon Perry

And then you befriend a stranger on the internet. You are nervous at first but you can’t see them, so you can imagine their number is zero. You hit it off. They’re amazing. Funny. Sweet. Kind. Hardworking. The relationship turns into a distant romance. Then you finally meet. You had no idea the number could go that high.

If they do, it won’t be because of the 0.0 limit.

Their greatest insecurity, maybe? I could compliment cool people on it to make them feel better and use it to lampoon assholes.

Monkey paw’s finger curls: You can see them. They’re EVERYWHERE. People you thought you knew and loved have numbers greater than zero over their head. Despite your horror, you try to make use of the power to try to bring them to justice. No one believes you. You have the Cassandra’s curse of the status quo. ‘Steve? What are you talking about? He’d never do anything like that. Butter wouldn’t melt. You should probably shut your mouth before we get offended about what you said about our friend and kick the shit out of you. Know what I mean?’ You watch the news and see everyone who has a position of power over you and your loved ones has a non-zero number. You try to escape into fictional media but your favorite actors are non-zeroes, the author pictures in your favorite books show non-zeroes, the album sleeves of your favorite bands show non-zeroes.

Knowledge can be a burden.