BubbleMonkey

To be fair, they are still around in a heck of a lot of places.

As old abandoned building husks slowly deteriorating in a very late-stage-dystopia sort of way.

Eye contact aversion isn’t necessarily poor body control, it’s been studied quite a bit from various angles and found that people with autism who avoid eye contact do so because they feel actual discomfort, which can be found with fmri in combination with eye tracking software. In milder cases, the aversion is like an inversion of normal social sensations (that is, NT people feel similarly uncomfortable avoiding gaze as ASD with mild aversion do meeting it). In worse cases, it appears to be an over activation of a facial recognition system that produces intense distress.

https://www.sciencealert.com/for-those-with-autism-eye-contact-isn-t-just-weird-it-s-distressing

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5645367/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71547-0

Personally I also hate driving, so I’m sort of with you on that (tho for me, unless it was a trip where stops are the point, I couldn’t see adding almost an entire day to a trip that’s barely over a day to begin with, but I also wouldn’t be doing that sort of trip solo, and driver swapping helps a ton), but I find people have 2 modes typically and neither one of them does all that well with the current rail infrastructure.

First mode is “get there as fast as we can so we can enjoy the accommodations/ locations we are traveling for”, which most people fly for, but many will drive for if they need to move a lot of people or equipment. You can do that on a train, assuming one stops anywhere near where you intend to go, but when you have multiple people to switch off driving and don’t stop, that extra time matters.

The other mode is the “journey is the destination” with frequent stops to get out of the car and do stuff… but then we typically just call those road trips. I’ve done several of those where most of the trip is traveling between stops. Trains don’t do well for that currently since they have so few stops and run so infrequently, so the journey isn’t particularly exciting. Busses are better for this sort of travel, with the present infrastructure, but not a very comfortable trip. Busses would also very likely take about the same time as a train, since they make a lot of extended stops.

Very few people seem to fall into the grey area between these two things, where they both don’t care to stop anywhere, and don’t care how fast they get there. And I think this is largely because most people don’t have time for leisurely travel. Most people get extended-weekend trips and maybe one week-long vacation a year, so 4 days round trip of just traveling but not being able to stop anywhere would ruin most plans for people, unless they just want to ride the train.

But if we invested in high-speed rail, you could both get there faster than driving -and- have a better experience than driving, which would get many people to switch right quick. It shouldn’t have to be a “pick one or the other” situation, when literally the only barrier is infrastructure spending which would be great for the economy, and it would be better for literally everyone to have it. Amtrak is a private entity, technically, but the US government is the majority shareholder, the board of directors is appointed mostly by the president of the US, they get a lot of funding from state and fed government, and thus govt has considerable power to make that happen.

It just really sucks that the only significant passenger rail options we have now are designed to be slow scenic trips, a gimmick where the whole point of them is the leisurely trip. They aren’t really meant for actual commute use, and that’s just super short-sighted and wasteful. And I think until they get faster, with more routes and stops along the routes, we aren’t going to see people adopting them in the numbers we need them to.

If we had high speed rail, I’d absolutely love to take a train to just go places, but cross country trains in the US take absolutely forever. If you aren’t in a hurry, sure, great option, cheap, but doesn’t really work well for vacations or emergencies or whatever when you have very limited time.

For example, Chicago to Seattle takes 46 hours by train but 30 hours by car. Even with stops for food, gas, and bathroom, even staying somewhere for the night, you aren’t adding 16 hours on.

https://www.amtrak.com/empire-builder-train

We really need to invest more in high speed rail.. like everywhere here. Until then, unfortunately, I doubt people will shift that way overall.

if you haven’t seen it, I think you might like the animated series Pantheon.

Your comment made me think of it, very much.

I think a better option might be to leave the meat industry alone entirely, and subsidize or otherwise drive down the prices of the plant based alternatives. Then it doesn’t hurt poor people, they can still buy it, and may even help them if they choose to switch.

If I could buy plant stuff for the same price as or less than meat, I absolutely would. But I simply can’t afford to pay the premium for plant products.

(I still don’t eat much meat, don’t get me wrong, maybe once a week on average. My stomach doesn’t like it. If I could replace it entirely I would, but sometimes you just need something that fits the meat texture/flavor profile)

It is definitely difficult to get rid of when it’s generated in the middle of intricate detail, which it often is.

I’m not saying it’s the same thing as actually poisoning, but it does negatively impact the resulting generations.

Right, what I mean is the Texas model of pre-surveying for places they would be a good fit with minor pushback, and then having the projects paid by everyone, rather than some investor who can just flake out.

Their grid is an absolute disaster, so I’m certainly not idolizing most of what they are doing, but the method they follow to get them at least done.. that part is good.

I’m aware. She chose not to go that route, and I can’t say I blame her really. She cared for both of her parents when they died of cancer, and having done that as well, yeah. I still wouldn’t go for highly toxic treatment either, even if it does have a better chance caught early. Screw that; I’m already full of medical issues, don’t need to feel worse.

I’ve already undergone genetic testing due to family cancer history. I’m clean for maladaptive genes, as far as they know for now (I have several unknown mutations, I get letters in the mail every few years when they figure one of them out). But the world is a lot more polluted than it used to be, and I haven’t always made the healthiest choices in life, so.. meh.

Like I said, if treatments change maybe, but I’m not injecting a toxic cocktail. And a lot of early-detection cancers they find and treat aren't ever going to kill a persons anyway because they are too slow growing. So even that early screening isn’t without risk.

I really hope we can figure out how to fix that issue quickly, but I don’t really see that happening.

The Texas model seems pretty good, like I’m willing to pay more for renewables. I actually already have elected to do so; when my utility was looking to add another hydro generator, I paid for “extra blocks of power” which were $15/mth. I got 2 for 2 years, so my electric is cleaner now than otherwise, not cheaper but cleaner. It was opt-in, but I’d be happy to have it as just a standard cost of upgrading, as well.

We are all in this together, let’s act like it.

A really fun side effect of stuff like this is when you generate something that looks like a pencil sketch or something, you’ll often get partial pencils in the middle or upper corner of the image because they are quite often photod with pencils on them to indicate the medium.

So even something that simple is sort of poisoning the models. And if they all have that obnoxious signature or QR code, the generators are going to start including those and that’s just gold.

My mom was an RN and spent time doing basically everything. She said her time in oncology, geriatrics, and hospice made her never want to treat cancer or undergo prolonging, because the chance of it extending the quality life was slim and quantity isn’t worth it when it’s miserable.

She died of cervical cancer when I was 23 (it was stage 3 by the time she went in for dx, so she knew something was wrong and chose not to do anything about it) and the only treatment she got was oxycodone and having me get weed for her for the intense nausea that comes from smoking cigarettes on oxycodone. She was in hospice though.

I, similarly, probably won’t undergo treatment if I am similarly afflicted, unless our treatments evolve from a toxic cocktail to something with more chance of working and fewer horrible side effects.