and meanwhile solar is simple and there are no doubts about it. probably much easier to do cleanly. nuclear people want us to hold out for this miracle reactor that cant melt down, but they are too impatient for a panel that doesnt have heavy metals?

and its not embarrassing, i just think solar edges out nuclear. im not dogmatically against nuclear.

that is the key. its all speculation. as long as there is some possibility of creating AI, we have to account for it in our collective decision-making. like many people before them, most people seem happy to write off the possibility of anything that hasnt happened already. fools.

nobody is saying children should be isolated. they should be isolated from things and people who will damage them regardless of what they do. a stove can harm a child, but a child can choose not to touch a stove. a viscous bully will target and track a child, and in modern schools there is no option to fight back. the child has to simply sit there and endure it. so for example, if you put a child into a good private school this would meet my criteria. almost invariably, bullies behave the way they do because they are abused at home. if you separate your kids from the wife-beating riff-raff then you have done your kids a huge favor without "isolating" them.

i would almost not care about this issue if we still had a sane culture that let kids behave naturally and fight each other from time to time. maybe you are a little older than me, but the way it works now is that kids are raised to believe that without school, their life will be over. worse, they will bring disgrace to themselves and their whole family if they dont do well in school. if you fight, you will jeopardize everything by getting in trouble, getting expelled. we are putting boys between and anvil and a hammer with no way out. if my kid has no way to overcome it, and it causes him intense psychological pain for years, then there is no use in subjecting him to it. i cant understand how anyone can not understand this blindingly simple fact.

the key to raising kids is to let them confront danger, adversity and challenges and to make sure they have some kind of agency to overcome what they are facing. school bullying is unambiguously outside of this category of things because fighting is not allowed. its basically no different than strapping the child down and torturing him. it will build just as much character.

there was never any bullying or heroin overdoses anywhere in my life except for my public school. there are all kinds of people, groups and activities. saying that all outside world interactions are the same is utter drooling nonsense.

palmer luckey and Billie Eilish are both homeschooled and they are doing a lot better than you are. not all homeschooling is the same. i could keep my kid in a cage and call it homeschooling.

i see that you endured intense trauma as a child and you enjoyed it. you would not do it any differently. a pamplet of your story should be given to victims of childhood trauma who have schizophrenia and other trauma-induced diseases. clearly they have an attitude problem. it is not the trauma that hurt them, it was their sour attitude about it. what a revolution you have brought.

im so sick of people offering this idiotic perspective because they never experienced being the target for more than a year. your opinion hurts people.

the school system as a whole wore away at the physical and psychological health of a massive number of kids because of the insane schedule that deprives them of sleep. this was scientifically proven a while ago.

american public schools are a disgrace. i would never enroll my kids into a public school. they are glorified daycare centers where the inmates run the asylum. and all you have to do is reflect on your interactions with average americans to understand the fact that these schools are more likely to damage a person intellectually than advance them.

the only thing that separates people who had a good experience vs people who didnt is their personality. if you are not on the spectrum then its just one big pleasant vacation. but if you are unhealthy, on the spectrum, have a troubled childhood or for whatever reason fall behind emotionally or socially, then public schools are worse than a death sentence. everyone involved should be ashamed.

meanwhile, solar is safe to set up, safe to operate, and there is no radioactive waste to manage. if flint michigan has a solar array, then the worst that can happen is that their lights go out. this is a small but critical advantage in my eyes.

and then look at the bigger picture. there hasnt been a nuclear reactor that is perfectly safe to operate. its still hypothetical. solar is growing every year, the battery market is growing every year. panels and packs never truly retire, just decline in capacity. solar wins.

i think its really interesting that elon musk has changed his public stance on bitcoin. originally, and for a long time, he described bitcoin as an alternative to cash but not an alternative to centralized banking because the primary purpose of money is to act as a database or tool for resource allocation. i had never thought of it that way and it intrigued me. overall he was basically dismissive of crypto. but then recently he has endorsed bitcoin, offered to buy out dogecoin investors and other things. and he hasnt elaborated on why he turned around, and joe rogan was too stupid to ask him when he came on the podcast recently.

for most of my life i never really thought much about how dreams work. i shared the same notion with most people, that they are a kind of sloppy simulation of real life. but it always stuck in my mind that this didnt make any sense: the physics of life are too complicated for the brain to simulate in real time in a way that recreates sensory inputs. and why would the brain have hardware that was dedicated to performing dream simulations? wouldnt that be rather a lot of hardware and energy for no apparent reason? but i always chalked it up as one of the great mysteries of our time and didnt dwell on it. and then the answer came to me.

it is well known that it is possible to "lucid dream." i have experienced this, and it is what precipitated my effort to understand dreams.

the answer is that the brain works with abstractions, it stores everything in the world, physical objects as well as feelings and concepts, as a kind of model that can be recalled. as you experience more things, the library of abstractions grows larger.

you are a small part of your brain. there is a part of the brain that holds a "simulation." this is your consciousness, you live inside this simulation, everything you experience is inside this simulation. it is a simulation of the physical world, but it contains much more than physical objects. it contains mental "primitives" that inform your emotions, your identity and your feelings about the world and your place in it. the non-physical aspect of the simulation might be called the "ego" and people who experience so-called ego-death are actually experiencing the simulation with these things taken out of it. at the core of the simulation is some kind of atomic, immutable "self" that is discreet and separate from all experiences, traumas and emotions. so to make it short, your being lives inside a simulation where the physical world is simulated as well as you as a person.

there are other parts of your brain that manage the simulation. some parts of the brain create new abstractions from sensory data. other parts of your brain monitor sensory data looking for things that it recognizes, looking for abstractions that have already been created. and another part of your brain is responsible for placing those abstractions into your simulation when they have been found in the environment. when the abstraction is placed into the simulation, you experience it. your brain is constantly monitoring reality through sensory data and recreating it in your brain-simulation using "assets" that already exist, assuming there is nothing too new in your environment. it is possible for this machinery to break, which is what we call a hallucination. a hallucination is not the creation of something that doesnt exist, it is the mistaken placing of a pre-existing asset into the simulation. objects are a composite of many different abstractions, and this is why hallucinations can have strange, ethereal or other-worldly qualities. a human figure can be placed into your simulation without the concept of humanity accompanying it, or the presence of a person can be placed without a physical manifestation. all kinds of weird things are possible. the takeaway is that the simulated world that is created for you by your brain is very sophisticated, hard to get right, and the symphony of neural mechanisms to make it all work is probably breathtakingly complex.

why? its an optimization. experiencing raw sensory data is too inefficient. the scope within which you make decisions must be narrowed. and this leads into the answer to dreams: there are other optimizations at play. there is yet another part of your brain that actually looks inward at the simulation and the assets that have been placed within it. it will then guess what other assets should be in the simulation based on experience, and place those assets into the simulation. these guesses assets are the same as any other assets, of course. their presence in the simulation is the same as anything else. they are just as real, in every way, in your experience, as anything else. this optimization probably saves time and energy, saving the brain from going through the long process of interpreting every bit of sensory data and matching it to pre-existing assets. instead, your brain translates the big things and your brain guesses everything else.

when you take this entire system into account, and you take away all sensory input, what do you get?

you get a dream.

what happens when you keep certain parts of the cortex active during sleep? you get a lucid dream.

what happens when you consider the situation where a little sensory input leaks into the brain during sleep? you get a simulation loosely guided by sensory data, just as we all have experienced.

dreams are in reality not simulations but a demonstration of the awesome power of the guessing machinery of the brain. it is not a sloppy simulation, but incredibly good guessing.

the reality you experience in a lucid dream is exactly the same reality you experience when you are awake. dreams are reality with sensory decoupling.

most of the things you experience in your life are guesses. most of the things that you are aware of at any given moment are just guesses. the guessing is so good that it has gone unnoticed.

because the brain uses a fundamental model of abstraction, many parts of life are consolidated, in part, into an abstraction and therefore are very localized in space in the brain. the amount of accuracy and control we will have over matters of the mind with simple electrodes ala neuralink will be much higher than anyone understands.