enkers

I didn’t even realize where we were until I read your comment.

What if Ralph exists independently of anyone acknowledging his concept? What if Ralph has always existed, and has just been waiting for a certain memer to discover him?

Pretty sure that was the original meaning; see also SMDH. The head shaking is the kid friendly version.

Edit: I was mistaken. :o

Why does this seem like the part of an exponential growth curve where it starts to go asymptotic? Like maybe I’m crazy, but this seems real real bad.

Good thing there weren’t any red lines in it’s way, or else they might have been crossed.

Maybe I’m just salty. After all, I am a British player on North American servers, so I will soon have the Mountain Dew exclusive rewards in front of my face with no way of earning them, while my American friends discuss how much Mountain Dew they need to buy to get cool items.

I know the relationship is a bit tangential, but this reminds me of one of my favourite things on the internet:

I was thinking about this in terms of limbs, and wondering, since pregnant women have more than 4 limbs, wouldn’t the average number of limbs be greater than 4?

There are probably considerably more pregnant women than people missing limbs, but then again, the women only have additional limbs for 9 months.

Maybe if we’re talking line fishing, but I’m pretty sure most commercial fishing is done with trawling nets, where everything above a certain size is caught.

For sure. That’s probably just a +1 on to the factors you already listed.

Crazy idea, but what about fishing-driven evolutionary pressure. If all the biggest fish are getting caught and killed, won’t that give smaller fish an evolutionary advantage?

Anyone under 36 wasn’t even eligible to vote the last time Palestine had parliamentary elections.

I’d be willing to wager that an unusually large portion of the population falls into that category as well. Anyone have any statistics about the demographics of Palestine? Oh, their annual census is out of date? You don’t say.

I think the inverse problem is more troubling. If you accept that nothing has inherent value, then isn’t everything morally permissible? Maybe it is an emotional decision, or perhaps a leap of faith, but I find that idea so repugnant, I couldn’t believe it and continue functioning as a person.

I think in terms of consciousnes, Occam’s razor leads me to suspect that it’s tied to brain function, and when that ceases, so does it. Of course, once again, things like this are very hard to prove. I do think, though, that science and philosophy will eventually unravel it. (Incidentally, there’s actually a book by Dan Dennett I’ve been meaning to read about this topic which was suggesting we’re quite a bit closer to figuring it out than most people think.)

One of the problems with philosophy is that there’s never any smallest part, beyond perhaps Descartes’s “cogito, ergo sum”. You can reduce any argument more and more and they all start to not make sense and eventually crumble. You can pick at their semantic foundation or the thousands of years of preceding thought until they unravel, then that nice sweater is now just a bunch of fibres. If you refuse to view philosophical arguments as a whole, then there’s nothing there to view.

It’s like an actual sweater. Does it even exist in the first place? After all, it’s just a bunch of stuff arranged in a particular way, and it’s called a sweater because it has some sort of human utility and we decided to give it a name. You could go about your life and believe that sweaters don’t exist, and it’d be quite hard to prove you wrong.

Or you can accept that it’s a useful human construct, so they do. Maybe you could even go further, and believe there’s some idealised concept of sweaterness that exists in some meta-reality, which all sweaters share a property of.

I think this is essentially the realist viewpoint.

And you could be right, maybe all our current moral theories do run into contradictions, so perhaps they’re all wrong.

Heck, we’re running into similar problems in astrophysics. When we learn more about our universe, and things stop adding up. But that just means we go back to the drawing board and find a better model until they make sense.

Same for philosophy. When you reach a contradiction, you go back and come up with better ideas. It’s a process of slowly uncovering the truth.

I think it’s rather self evident, but I’ll share a logical outline which resonates with me. To be sussinct: Most sentient beings kinda like being alive. Where possible, it’s morally preferable to let them continue in that state.

It’s basically an application of the golden rule. You can get in to game theory or utilitarianism for more thorough arguments to show that killing is generally wrong, but it then still has to come back to life having value which is quite hard, if not impossible, to logically prove.

So then you need to refer back to philosophy to find arguments that life has intrinsic value. I personally prefer using Camus’ acceptance of the absurd as a basis for intrinsic value, but there are lots of other potential arguments that lead to the same conclusion.

Ultimately, though, it’s impossible to even prove that other beings simply exist (e.g. solipsism) or have experiences, but at some point we mostly all look at the evidence and accept that they do.

My cup overfloweth with impractical and obscure yet mildly interesting tidbits. In any case, laws are made to be broken, so I think you’re all good. (:

However, in U.S. federal courts, updates to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 2015 have resulted in significant decline in spoliation sanctions.

Oof. Five bucks says this change was driven by concerted megacorp lobbying efforts.

A text-based adventure, perhaps? (:

I share your frustration, but YouTube offers you a choice: use honest titles and suffer at the hands of the algorithm, or use clickbait and get access to a much wider audience.

If the creator needs to use clickbait in order to have the funding to produce higher quality videos, I find it hard to hold them personally responsible for the systemic issues of the platform.

That’s an interesting idea. Maybe I’m misunderstanding your comment or perhaps I just have a poor conception of genres, but, IMO, one of the defining features of dungeon crawlers which seperates them from rpgs is that they’re, for the most part, randomly generated. It pains me to say it because it seems rather absurd, but I feel like RPG is actually closer.

Edit: I just finished watching the video. xD

Be the change you want to see. (: