Benj1B

The context is important here - Australia had a continuous indigenous population for over 60,000 years before white settlement. White Australia never had an agreement with indigenous peoples at large, and through relentless expansion of colonies, spreading diseases like smallpox, introducing alcohol and drugs, forcibly abducting and schooling children, heavy incarceration and a slew of other typical British colonial shit ended up leaving them disenfranchised, alienated, and excluded. Indigenous Australians prior to colonisation had a deep affinity with the land and tended it like custodians, but because they didn't build towns or farm like Europeans, they were just swept aside without ever really being acknowledged or addressed.

The Voice was asked for as a product of the Uluru Statement of the Heart - not long, worth a read- https://ulurustatement.org/the-statement/view-the-statement/

It was really first and foremost about having an acknowledgement that maybe, just maybe, the settlers cocked things up and that it'd better to fix things together. It's not asking for anything "more" or extra, it's about correctly telling history and reframing our national dialogue to be coming from a place of partnership, instead of colonialism, so we could fix some of the very real issues modern Australians face as a result of hundreds of years of callous racism. It was a chance for white Australia and government to really listen and maybe find better ways of doing things.

But now instead we get to try to explain to our kids why 60% of the country don't think representation or inclusion matters while indigenous Australians will continue to struggle without a government that can listen to them.

Theres a lot of research going into carbon sequestration through soil and plant technologies - basically accelerating what would happen naturally by a few orders of magnitude.

Rapidly filling artifical peat bogs (through things like algae/weeds that are genetically modified to absorb more CO2) would allow for semi-permanent carbon capture as long as no one digs it up again. Similar projects with seaweed are under research as well.

Personally I think anything to do with carbon capture is a bandaid at best, and failing massive global cooperation and societal change, we're going to end up needing to geoengineer our way out of the problem. Things that block or impede solar heat absorption to cool the planet - atmospheric aerosols, artificial cloud generation, solar shades out in a lagrange point, basically manipulating conditions to influence how much energy is going into the system. There's a nonzero chance we fuck it all up but as we hurtle through temperature records and tipping points, the idea of net zero emissions actually having an impact in our lifetimes seems more and more unlikely. There's too much inertia in the system.

I strongly, strongly suggest you revisit some of the preconceptions that led you here. I was going to instinctually retort, but instead took 5 minutes to read the relevant Wikipedia article on the topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa#West_Africa. It is clear that the topic is more nuanced than I originally thought, so thank you for bringing that to my attention, but it's a crude and broad brush to imply that most slaves already existed in slavery prior to the Atlantic trade. There is also a significant difference between slaves in Africa who were exchanged between local groups in a wholly African context, versus slaves chained up and flung across the Atlantic with a 12% mortality rate and forced under a European slavery conception.

I suspect your response has rubbed others the wrong way, as it did myself, so consider this an attempt to find a common ground for dialogue - whatever the history of Africs prior to the Atlantic Slave Trade, I think we can agree that what happened was utterly grotesque and an atrocity upon the history of our common humanity.

The sad thing is that there is no political incentive to have a paid rural fire fighting service - there's not enough votes out there to buy. We'll face more and worse summers of fires but it's not until a major town is threatened that anything will actually change.

I find it interesting that DALL-E still doesn't understand text - look at all the random Daschuund spelling in the generated images. It knows what the word should look like, but has no framework to interpret or distinguish text from the other elements of the image. It looks like trying to spell in a dream.

Network security is a pretty big ask though - just look at how many unsecured cameras are around now. And once an attacker is in anything generated on that network becomes suspect - how do you know the security camera feed wasn't intercepted, manipulated, or replaced altogether?

I envisage a world where your browsing Netflix, and based on past preferences some of the title cards are generated on the fly for you. Then based on what you click, the AI engine warms us and generates the film for you in real-time. Essentially indistinguishable from the majority of Hollywood regurgitation.

And because the script is just a series of autogenerated prompts, its like a choose your own adventure book, you can steer the narrative the way you want if you elect to. Otherwise it'll be good enough to keep most monkey brains happy and you won't even be able to tell the difference most of the time.

I guess the logical response is that this presupposes the inevitable existence of a post-scarcity environment, when such a state is arguably not a certainty, or even a likelihood. We've been hovering at a kind of societal tipping point since the Cold War where a few different decisions could have effectively hit the reset button on society - and there's no guarantee that any survivors in the aftermath would have sufficient access to coal, iron ore, fossil fuels etc. to rebuild even our current level of society, let alone a utopian one.

So I think given our awareness of the relative fragility of human society, taking steps to secure it's stability and growth is a rational choice to secure the possibility for the post-scarcity world to exist. Then it's a question of certainty - if were 80% sure that our distant descendants will live in bliss, we could calibrate our personal sacrifices accordingly and justify more consumerist behaviour in the present.

Through this lens the excessive consumerism of previous generations can be forgiven, as what they lacked was awareness of the consequences of their actions - they didn't act immorally, just ignorantly. But now that we "know better" there's a moral responsibility to do better. As much as that sucks.

I see the most likely outcome being legislated electric charging at petrol stations(like Germany has just done), possibly with subsidies, while the bulk of hydrogen infrastructure is private investment.

Once a bean counter finds it more valuable to retrofit a truck fleet with hydrogen and set up their own refuelling stations at distribution centres - i.e. for journeys that can be completed in one tank load - you bet the hydrogen will start to flow. From there it'll be up to the service station network to figure out if it's worthwhile to put infrastructure in at certain larger truck stops.

By the time we get there, the trucks will be mostly autonomous and the driver probably just an emergency role - so they'll run as close to 24/7 as possible and the reduced refuelling time will have a substantial impact. It'll either be that, or some sort of massive battery bank transfer system the truck can pull into to have it's battery swapped - but batteries are heavy, and automating that would be inordinately expensive. Hydrogen seems more feasible a fossil fuel replacement when trip length/refueling time are your main concerns

It is too easy for most unions to become corrupted by self interested parties. It's the same with any human endeavour. Relax the boundaries enough and people with less scruples than you will worm their way in.

There's needs to be legislative framework that protects the rights of every worker, every industry, everywhere as a baseline. Then construct sensible unions for various industries from there. Otherwise they become fragile, susceptible to personal influence - who's going to run against a 10 year incumbent union president?- it needs an iron core underlying it to protect workers rights.

Between Sabines training montage with a "blast shield down" helmet, and firing off anticipatory shots from a swivel gun, this episode was a love letter to A New Hope and I am totally here for it. Filoni manage to make the movies better every single time he touches the material.

The training scene in particular was a choreographical masterpiece when you consider the last time we saw something similar in live action - a young Luke able to instinctually repel training droid blaster shots as a mere novice. The scene with Sabine helps to show just how unlikely and exceptional that is. I also love the implication that Mandalorians in general have trouble surrendering to the will of the Force, as a warrior people it makes perfect sense that they would generally rail against anything else controlling or manipulating them.

Even little things like powering the ship and droid down to avoid detectoon, much like 3PO and the Falcon in Episode 5, just help to reinforce this idea that people do shit for reasons in this universe and I LOVE it. They even found time to give Ahsoka a stupid Anakin badass moment cutting a freaking starship in half with a lightsaber. I have had a giddy grin on my face for every episode of Ahsoka and hope they keep on with it.