Believe it or not, glasses are cybernetics. Yes, that also means a peg leg or glass eye makes the user a cyborg. Cybernetics as a term is much newer than the practice of prosthetics, and cybernetics is simply defined (iirc) as technology for - and the design of the technology for - prosthetic use. Technically “cybernetic” and “prosthetic” are synonyms. The line drawn is implied to be intent: Medical prosthesis to replace what was lost, or cybernetic enhancement?
Don’t be a gonk an idiot, they’re prosthetics. I appreciate that if I lose my arms I can replace them, but who WANTS to get cybernetics if they can help it? Advertising to the public would be unethical even if it is open source, you want to advertise this to doctors, and even then only within the existing niche. Cybernetics as a commonplace thing were never meant to be more than a 1980s action sci-fi Hollywood fever dream.
I get it. To a degree, we’re living in a dystopia, a real one. It’s entirely sane to say “the rich did this” and want them to suffer. It’s sane to be bothered they’re currently getting away with it. Doesn’t mean people are stupid, it just means social Darwinism is no different than running civilization as if civilization never existed. The rich right now are generally competently evil, and unfortunately that is what capitalism enforces. “Market forces” and “supply and demand” are just a pretty way to describe “survival of the status quo” because the status quo has always been “ooh, babies are weak and delicious!” because that’s how things work in the wild.
This is not the wild. This is not how things should be, regardless if that’s “how it’s always been”. But this is a world where some stories come true. Miami 2017 was written and first sung long before 9/11, MegaMan Battle Network was right on the 00 Green, and Inception was onto something about dreams, if a story has already been written it isn’t somehow magically made falsehood.
If not, it’s still possible to enforce right to repair; most of these arms are able to have 3D-printed components, saw a YouTube video on that.
Don’t let this timeline become Cyberpunk 2077. Please, just don’t.
Welcome to the Genetic Age. Hopefully someone’s researching the Ecotopian or Digital Democracy civics, it’s almost Turn 2025 AD for Sid Meier’s sake!
Yes, but for reasons I don’t remember at the moment, “444” is considered joyful laughter, not danger. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
Anyone who loses a loved one to Dementia has my condolences. I count myself very lucky that it doesn’t run in either side of my family, the thought of my dad or mom being in mental anguish and confusion terrifies me.
Yes. Cute and it grows up to be fucking badass. Nice!
Yes, our honey-making insectoid foes! Use your worthy nemesishood to save these elephants from these barbaric warlords! Sting them!
In all seriousness, however they pulled this off, and partly due to my fear of bees and wasps, I approve. Elephants are not stupid, killing them for profit like these African warlords is cruel and said warlords don’t tend to care one bit about animals or people. Having something attack them that they can’t just shoot is going to be(e) a gamechanger.
I’m aware trophy hunting is a thing but I’m also aware they don’t just draw names from a hat. When African megafauna are chosen for trophy hunters, it’s almost always because they’re too aggressive to their other (endangered) peers to a lethal degree. Harvesting ivory enmasse to buy trafficked weapons is much, much more dark a shade of morality given they mostly tend to use the weapons on innocent people (usually impoverish natives) within Africa. Sadly, in Africa, being discriminated against for being dark-skinned does not seem to have always imparted the wisdom of “tolerance for everything but intolerance and causing harm”.
Too low density. Those buildings are mostly suburban one- or two-storey homes most likely, and much of what isn’t is not more than 4 floors and a lobby.
Not saying it’s a bad idea. I’m saying too much car-centric planning can permanently “lock-in” car-centric living by making it too expensive. Those assholes in the auto industry knew exactly what they were trapping society in.
Only because Trump and the GOP are in bed with the neo-liberals behind closed doors. This is one enemy: Rich assholes, regardless of their supposed political views.
That being said, there’s a big difference between “the bad president must die” and “kill all the rich people down to the last child”; nothing calls for a Holocaust, nothing. Please at least remember that when the concentration camps Trump is fucking preparing to make are ready, you CAN stop them from taking people by defending them, you CAN fight back, you CAN say “Fuck this, I will not let my country become Nazi Germany 2.0 when I have everything to lose.”
And tbh, I have nothing to lose and STILL would view that as all the more reason to die to protect everyone else from the Party for Leopards Eating People’s Faces because I didn’t want Trump back in and never would have voted for him (I’m not American though so I couldn’t) and even I didn’t think Project 2025 was real until the Repugnicans took their masks off surprisingly early. Nobody SHOULD have had to consider that info viable, it sounded like a ridiculous conspiracy theory and I cannot blame someone for voting for the Leopard party when the leopard party is named “free statehood party” instead and everyone they talk to believes that’s true.
Spreading false hope and “we should kill ourselves” are also very different. Guess which one people do when shitface gets elected? I’ll give you a hint: People need something to live for even if there is nothing to live for.
Well shit. That’s… That’s legit dangerous. Japan could honestly use an influx of elderly care workers, I hope they realize that before it’s too late. I know immigration isn’t any more popular in most countries than in the US, but that is scary.
I mean, I am terrified of wasps, but I recognize they’re a crucial part of the ecosystem and just don’t fuck with them. It’d be a phobia, except I don’t panic, I just gtfo if possible and freeze if I can’t. Wasps (at least here) don’t tend to chase things that react to them by increasing the distance between it and you.
That being said, big wasps in general are indeed jerks who will bite and sting you without mercy. Hornets? Yellowjackets? Tarantula Hawks? Ew. Small ones though? There’s these little guys I’ve seen all the time that I just assumed were small ants, turns out they’re (harmless) wasps that use their size to avoid detection and don’t even sting. Entomology is a lot like filling a Pokédex, the “common wisdom” (the descriptions) does not always match the in-the-field observations of scientific value (the actual creature that might help you).
Admittetly that’s the response I’d want to give too, just keep in mind wild animals tend to get very defensive around humans. I don’t doubt the wolf might take it the wrong way.
That being said, there was a news article about a successful rescue of a wolf stuck in river ice; they mistook it for a dog and brought it to a vet, honestly the wolf was (pun not intended) pretty chill since it knew it would have died there.
And of course, Canis lupus, Canis lupus familiaris. Can’t blame you for recognizing the fact that dogs are a subspecies of wolf. Orf, orf! :3
At least they didn’t elect their evil overlords, but I guess this isn’t the place for complaints about politics. At the very least, I’m not anti-democracy, just very scared that America has re-elected the worst decision they ever made.
Capitalism, on the other hand, has clearly proven a terrible choice of economy for long-term health of humanity, regardless of whether the government lived under is authoritarian or democratic. Some of my favorite things in life have been capitalist in origin, but they were not worth the direction we’re heading.
Self preservation isn’t selfish. Nobody sane wants to see somebody else die for no reason, and almost everyone has a family or a group of friends they care about, however limited or fake. Collapse helps nobody, look at what happened to Russia, and if society would collapse not even capitalism would survive. Too many executives can’t afford the price of assuring their own safety for them to just carry on into a cyberpunk or industrial-feudalist society.
I know, I don’t get why people are scared of them. Yes, a wild rat can be infested with all sorts of nasty parasites and diseases, but you wouldn’t try to pet a rabbid racoon either, that’s a wild animal.
Tame rats are adorable, don’t believe the stereotype. ^ _ ^
Never understood why the whole “mpox” word is really that offensive. It was NEVER calling Africans monkeys, the disease name started with non-human primates such as Chimpanzees and Gorillas, most other primates are surprisingly empathic and intelligent beings, and finally? While I am definitely not going to call anyone else a monkey, I am a human being; humans of all skin colors, even white, and all origins, as in the entire Homo genus (even our extinct relatives), are great apes. All great apes are old world monkeys, and all old world monkeys AND all new world monkeys (as in, the species that evolved in the Americas, not the human Mesoamerican cultures who are of course human but came to the Americas from elsewhere some time after humans evolved in Africa) are - in scientific classification of taxonomy - monkeys.
I won’t deny it would be insulting to refer to someone with dark skin a monkey. I just feel denying our one universal shared trait when mentioning a disease that most primates can get is anything but respectful to ourselves as a species and to many species who we should not be thinking of as brutish or stupid, such as Gorillas or Bonobos. Monkeypox/“mpox” does not make you less human, to imply calling it monkeypox is insulting purely due to political correctness is like saying we shouldn’t take vaccines because the word “vaccine” comes from cowpox and that “cow” is offensive to female bovines because human women don’t like the term. Calling a woman a cow is insulting AND inaccurate, and calling someone a monkey a loaded word, but calling a human a victim of monkeypox is not the same as saying getting monkeypox makes you less human. The former is someone to care about, the latter is insulting AND inaccurate. Being a victim of monkeypox, if anything, should prove a person’s humanity.
Besides, while it’s a disease and has painful and awful symptoms, it can be treated. To say “monkeypox” is an insulting word is missing the point; it’s “pox”, a skin lesion caused by a more internal infection. Cowpox does the same to cows. As for the really scary one, smallpox? “Monkeys”, US, huamity, have nearly eradicated it. Nothing capable of perceiving a way to kill a viral disease is anything short of a species worthy of note, and no matter what, you cannot tell me that there haven’t been African or African-descendant persons who contributed to eliminating smallpox. They saved people with a medical procedure that neither Europeans nor Native Americans knew of: https://www.history.com/news/smallpox-vaccine-onesimus-slave-cotton-mather
I understand this is a topic with lethal and cruel historical baggage. Moving past something is not easy. Further, racism is still around. The issue is, giving a word that describes us all a taboo-ish reputation is a dangerous and, yes, racist precedent to set. What if it was COVID-19 people said was racist against Chinese people and we had to call it “VID-19”? Fact is, the CO goes with the V and has nothing to do with China in and of itself, it’s short for “Coronavirus” or “Crown-like-spiked Virus”, and yet YouTube banned that too. Hell, the Human Rhinovirus (common cold) is technically a non-issue coronavirus. So I just hope by this point people realize the only real dividing factor here is the one they choose to support by making ordinary words into taboo. You could probably find some “racist undertone” to just the word “taboo” if that’s all you look for, but as someone trying to stop himself from keeping making an assumption that everyone hates him, I think maybe the reason I needed to realize that is because we’re all far too guilty of it and my anger convinced me to stop taking the high road.
tl;dr: As a member of the human species, I take “offense” to the implication that I am NOT a monkey, because that implies I’m not taxonomically human.
Actually, in all seriousness I hope the cat is okay now. They’re far more affectionate animals than we give them credit for, apparently treating us like giant kittens. And we all know cats are scared of water at the best of times.
Oof, that’s got a whole litterbox of unfortunate implications. ;P
Fair enough. I guess I mixed you up with whoever was being a defeatist “only the rich will afford it” about something that has not yet become true. Believing something will come true because “that’s how everything works” just hastens that type of world, because if enough people act like that’s how it works then it becomes the norm. I’m only a pessimist because I like to be pleasantly surprised, but that level of cynicism is… grating, to say the least.
If it shouldn’t be true, refuse to support the mindset needed to survive in such a world. Otherwise your mindset is already exactly who wealthy assholes want you to be, a wage slave who sells their morals to whoever scares them more. Better to die believing in not hurting people for personal gain, a hero, than to live believing that someone successfully stabbing you in the back is a fate worse than death.
In short, strength is a weakness if you live only to stay alive, too many people online say they think there is no hope whatsoever, but I confused you with one of them and sorry about that.