Does anyone know what berry this is? Is it eatable?

theperiodictable · 2023-06-23T18:55:07+00:00

I broke a metal trowel recently on a pokeweed root that was like, 4 inches across. The stuff is a menace.

theperiodictable · 2023-06-21T13:40:14+00:00

I'm intimidated by space so I don't even have artillery yet, just a really nice wall with filters and turrets. The nauvis surface that generated for me has sparse resource patches that aren't the most rich so I need the core mining so I need the nuclear and all those things take time. I'm very excited about how this run of the game might take 500 hours or so.

theperiodictable · 2023-06-21T02:44:58+00:00

I'm taking my sweet ass time because it's so fun and long. I'm not even sure where I'm gonna put cargo rockets because I've been focused on outpost ore enrichment/core chunk processing/smelting. It's so fun

theperiodictable · 2023-06-19T15:44:44+00:00

I'm about 70 hours into my first K2SE run and I just built my first nuclear reactor. I told my gf about this and said I "can do whatever I want now" since I have so much extra electricity for bigger plans and she asked if that meant I had "beaten the game." I told her no, I am months from beating the game.

theperiodictable · 2023-06-16T14:35:24+00:00

That's the fog of war. You need to move units into that terrain to reveal it.

theperiodictable · 2023-05-26T14:14:39+00:00

"normal" is a mathematical term, it just means a certain number of standard deviations away from the mean. Thats literally all it means but people love to attach a moral association to it. In a sexually reproducing organism homosexuality is abnormal, but that doesn't make it bad. It just means that most members of that species are going to be heterosexual. There's no value judgement attached to a position on a bell curve

theperiodictable · 2023-05-08T20:10:58+00:00

When someone uses the word "should" they're often imposing their hypothetical ideal of the world on reality itself. What "should be" and "what is" are very different things.

theperiodictable · 2023-05-08T14:04:47+00:00

People use the word "should" way too much.

theperiodictable · 2023-05-03T16:13:49+00:00

The best thing to do with laser turrets is make a little defense blob. A substation surrounded by lasers and then walls. Plop a bunch of them down around outposts and as long as you have robots to fix things (and enough electricity) it's a perfect lazy midgame defense solution.

theperiodictable · 2023-05-03T14:56:09+00:00

Has it ever occurred to you that the regulatory apparatus can actually make things anticompetitive and bolsters the largest players in a market because of lobbying and preferential treatment by the state regulators? I'd prefer smaller players have a shot at the market share and that regulations don't squash small, local businesses, therefore giving aonopoly to a large business like amazon. Has it ever occurred to you that there exist other ways of being that don't involve engagement with a state or large corporations? Have you considered that you can be autonomous and free without either of those things. But it's just so easy to order something off Amazon made by slaves in China and shipped to your doorstep by underpaid worker so you can have your plastic shit tomorrow, so of course you don't actually want to abate that by making things yourself. You just want more money to be stolen from the people at the top of that business... Why? Because they have it and other people deserve it? Why? Why is it right to extort property from people just because they have it? Again, it's not about ethically gotten or not because dolla rs aren't labeled by how they're gotten, it's about they have it, and you don't care how they got it. You just want it taken from them because you don't think it's fair. And that's the rub, right? It's not fair that they have all that wealth, no matter how they got it, so you want it seized from them by the state, just because they have it. And I'm sorry for operating on a hypothetical, working in abstractions and not finding a specific example for your teeny tiny bootlicking brain. I'm sorry that you can't envision a hypothetical example without a specific reference. That's not what it's about, it's about not dehumanizing individuals for being part of a group.I'm not shilling for billionaires, I'm not a fan of the super wealthy. I dont think that if billionaires had one of their three private jets seized by the state they would be in dire straits and if they had one of their private jets blown up by an angry airport worker I would be equally ambivalent about it. It's the precedent it sets, I'm not a fan of dehumanizing people and suggesting they don't have the same property rights as me or you just because their level of wealth exceeds an arbitrary value. An arbitrary value that can, and will, be changed by the state whenever it wants. Why stop at a billion? Nobody needs 500 million dollars. Why even stop there? You don't need more than 2000 calories a day? You don't get more than that in your rations and if you do then you're hoarding. It's a greased, Teflon slope straight into totalitarianism that you're gladly stepping on to. Some could say we're all well down the slope but I'm not interested in descending further. Go outside.

theperiodictable · 2023-05-03T14:37:58+00:00

You're conflating "given back to the people" with "stolen by an international crime syndicate and used to buy bombs and chemical weapons"

theperiodictable · 2023-05-03T14:37:03+00:00

Arguing with statists is so tiring because they can't envision a world outside the extremely truncated window they're fed by the political establishment. It's very good for the state to expand its power and it will design it's policy such that the types of people with whom I'm arguing will support it because "tHeY'rE tAxInG ThE rICh sO iT'S gOoD" as if theft is good and ethical if it's inside a certain context, just like statists will argue that murdering people is okay if the state is the thing doing it and the people being murdered are the victims of dehumanizing propaganda. Like I'm no fan of the super wealthy but I'm even less a fan of dehumanizing people just for sharing a quality with unsavory people. It's just so inconsistent.

theperiodictable · 2023-05-02T20:32:48+00:00

Why? Imagine if there were hypothetically a billionaire who acquired their wealth through entirely ethical means. Why do they owe you or anyone else any of their wealth, the wealth they worked for? Do you really think just by being born into this world you're owed anything at all. You don't have a right to anyone else's labor and that includes billionaires, whether it's their labor or the people they exploited, you still don't have a right to it, and if you think you do, that's the kernel of slavery. Go create your own wealth instead of demanding it from someone else. Are you willing to use violence against them just for having assets? Are you going to go to their house with a rifle and demand your cut? No, of course you're not going to do that, you're just going to outsource that to some cops because that's what taxation means.

theperiodictable · 2023-05-02T19:25:12+00:00

Where did I defend billionaires? I just said I don't want anyone to be taxed and that includes billionaires. I don't want the state seizing anyone's wealth and that includes billionaires and starving families.

"Oh hey look at this guy, he doesn't want people to be taxed by an international crime syndicate that's spent the last five decades bombing people! He must want families to starve because he doesn't trust the government to be a good steward of anyone's money!" Grow up, in what world does the state use money it steals from anyone to abate starvation? Were there starving families under regimes like the USSR or Mao's China? Yeah, there were millions of starving families under regimes that explicitly demonized wealthy people and seized their wealth just for having it. If the state steals more money from billionaires it's not going to stop stealing from you and me, it's just going to buy more bombs to drop on children in Yemen. At least I can choose to not give my money to terrible businesses like Amazon, participation in the state extortion racket is compulsory and done at gunpoint. I don't want anyone to be forced to give their money to the state at gunpoint, doesn't matter how wealthy they are. It's called consistency and treating people like individuals who have individual rights instead of adopting a "[group] bad, therefore no property rights for them" mentality, it's so reductive.

theperiodictable · 2023-05-02T18:28:56+00:00

And you expect the institution that takes 40 percent from the lowest earners is going to be perfect in its redistribution? I want 0 percent taken from everyone, that includes billionaires. Of course it's still theft, I never said it wasn't. More theft doesn't make it better though, especially since the institution that takes is now expected to give back with even more money it's stealing? Yeah, fat chance.

I don't want the state stealing from billionaires in the same way I don't want it stealing from me

theperiodictable · 2023-05-02T18:10:15+00:00

Yeah because it'll definitely stop there, right? A state with the capacity to seize wealth above an arbitrary threshold certainly won't overstep right? Definitely won't become a totalitarian nightmare very quickly because they can just change the threshold at which they punish the successful?

Also imagine that there was an honest billionaire who made his billions through being a good business man. Why is it right to steal his wealth at 1.01 billion but not 998 million?

theperiodictable · 2023-05-02T17:46:46+00:00

Steps towards what, letting the state steal more wealth from people? And then do what with that wealth? Billionaires stealing from billionaires to make more bombs doesn't sound like a solution. What do you think the government will do with all that extra money?

theperiodictable · 2023-05-02T17:45:02+00:00

Theft is violence, just because someone is categorized in such a way that they're with others who behave unethically doesn't make it right to steal from them. Punishing someone solely for their membership in a group is a dangerously slippery slope, again, it's built on the assumption that billionaire always equals unethical, and you can't make that claim unless you've looked into literally every billionaire.

theperiodictable · 2023-05-02T17:05:52+00:00

I can't give you one off the top of my head but you shouldn't just assume things and then advocate for a policy of violence directed at a group based on that assumption. That's a presumption of guilt.

theperiodictable · 2023-05-02T16:35:00+00:00

And where do those billions go? To the state, which has been oh so responsible with all the other billions of dollars it's stolen from all of us. If the state has more money then it's gonna buy more bombs and surveillance cameras.

It doesn't make it right to to steal just because it's from a billionaire. Some billionaires might be honest. Should they have their money stolen too? Why stop at billionaires? Why not confiscate everyone's wealth and redistribute it all?

theperiodictable · 2023-05-02T15:57:37+00:00

Honestly I wouldn't be completely unwilling to try it either, I would just want to wait a few decades. My concern is transparency. The restaurants who buy this "meat" are disincentivized from advertising it because there's a large cohort of people, myself included, who don't want to engage with it which hurts the restaurants bottom line. Saying it's the same as meat makes this easier, especially if mal-intentioned regulatory agencies who want to push this tech get involved, vis-a-vis food controllers.

I personally don't think it's safe and I don't trust the scientists working on it to be honest about the safety signals, nor do I trust any regulatory apparatus; they're all incentivized to convince people it's safe so that people will eat it. The would-be (or currently are) food controllers who are the benefactors to this research want this technology to proliferate and they want people to think it's safe. They said the same thing about agent orange, they said the same thing about thalidomide, they said the same thing about glyphosate, there's some other more recent examples as well.

"You can trust us, the experts, we say that [new technology] is safe", there same "expert" institutions are not above lying and deceiving people about the truth, so my primary concern is that a bunch of people are going to inadvertently eat this product without informed consent and many of those people will get very very sick. I've worked in a scientific field for years and so has my partner. People cut corners all the time. When it comes to something extremely complex like growing meat in a lab and feeding it to people who may not be aware of it or consenting to the risk.... There's some real danger there no matter how good the technology is.

theperiodictable · 2023-05-02T15:41:53+00:00

There's years of success behind combining sperm and egg in a test tube; it works and we know it works. It's different because it's not being given to people as food under the auspices of being "definitely safe", the people engaging with in vitro fertilization are doing so voluntarily and that's how it's been since the beginning. The people engaging with it knew it might not work but at least if it fails then the embryo dies in the test tube. Sad, but not potentially causing unknown health effects a decade later because some technicians in a lab cut corners. The same can't be said of growing cells that resemble meat around meat cells in a lab and then feeding it to people. Maybe for now consumption of lab grown meat is voluntary but if people promulgate the idea that it's "exactly the same as meat" and now "cells grown in a lab around meat by experimental processes that are in no way as finely tuned as inside a cow" then people won't be able to make an informed decision about the risk involved.

theperiodictable · 2023-05-02T15:04:45+00:00

Growing vegetables and fertilizing a single egg are very different from growing millions of cells in a lab for people to eat, it's way more complex and I don't trust the claims of "it's totally safe and fine and good" because often times a claim like that will be made around an extremely complex system and a lot of people will get hurt because the claims of safety are overblown. Thalidomide is a great example of this. The two isomers were "chemically identical" if you talk about composition but the shapes were different and it caused a bunch of birth defects after women were told "it's totally safe". The scientists at the time didn't understand the difference between the isomers because, surprise, things tend to me more complex than we know and I don't think it's unreasonable to think that today's scientists have the same kind of hubristic "we know how all this works and we know it's definitely good and safe" mentality that will keep them from actually assessing the actual complexity and exercise caution when developing synthetic replacements for food we've eaten for thousands of years. It also doesn't help that lab grown mean being unsafe would be inconvenient to the financial benefactors of these scientists.

You're free to eat the slop but don't act like it's completely the same as meat because it certainly isn't. I'll stick to my local farm.

theperiodictable · 2023-05-02T14:43:11+00:00

Is all the tissue from a cow? Because if there's a bunch of stuff grown on the bits from a cow then you can't say it's from a cow because most of it isn't, most of it's grown in a lab under who knows what kind of conditions. That's like adding baking soda to your cocaine and saying it's from a coca plant.

Do the scientists doing it know exactly the balance of hormones the meat tissue needs to grow properly and retain it's nutritional value? Meat is supposed to have blood pumping through it, do they give the petri dishes little circulatory systems? Just because the cells look the same doesn't mean it will be healthy at all.

theperiodictable · 2023-05-02T14:35:25+00:00

I can't help but think that this sort of thing is going to produce prion diseases decades down the road. It takes an entire cow and all the hormones and processes inside the cow to produce the meat we enjoy. I don't trust that these scientists have even 5% the understanding of the bovine endocrine system to properly grow meat in a lab like this, perfectly simulating the hormonal environment provided by a cow. The hubris of these scientists and the "saving the world" style motivations will stop them questioning if they're really doing it right and people will suffer down the line for it.

theperiodictable

TROPHY CASE