“Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?” -Andrew Ryan, a very smart man who went to live under the sea and I am sure nothing bad ever happened to.

But what are they filtering for?

Sick of covering for your arse all the time.

Committing forces to someone elses operation is risky, especially if you don’t have contact with whoever is already on site. In the Shadowrun world there is a real risk that the force attacking the platform is not ideologically allied and is in fact one of MCT’s competitors, or even MTC itself trying to manufacture an excuse to strike ecoterrorist assets.

If you want them involved however involve them. They don’t have to be perfectly paranoid, or unwilling to exploit the situation, maybe sending another spirit ahead to make contact. They could even have had their own op already past the go point, storming the platform from the sea faster than the HTR could have got there, then bring in the HTR via the air to make things more interesting.

There is always self improvement. Read, exercise, meditate. So much philosophy is public domain, if you have internet access and a device to read ebooks on then you can read most of the famous texts. https://www.gutenberg.org/ is great. If you have access to a local library then use that as well. You can access almost anything with a library card.

So you are at about an A1 and want to get up to around a B1? I don’t like saying impossible but a month is not long at all. If you can already read it you might do better, just focus on the reading and writing skills, get some sample papers if you can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages?wprov=sfla1

You are probably going to want a tutor that offers an intensive class, that can be done in a month, but you are still going to be looking at 50+ hours.

Do you know what level the exam is expecting?

Good on you for checking in with all those people, it must have taken a while.

Lifting the whole world off of fossil fuels is going to be hard, especially if we want to do it quickly. This isn’t however a problem the capitalist and nation-state models are well equipped to solve. It should not be a question of can a given people afford the technology or if someone can turn a profit on it.

We need to do this as a species, for the species. It should be given not as charity, not because wealthy countries owe it to poor ones, but because it is right that everyone should benefit from this.

The difficulty is how to convince the politicians and their masters of this, and I don’t think throwing paint on things is going to be sufficient.

Generally I find the wait times aren’t really longer. The perceived time maybe, as I can ring ahead and then go pick it up, but for me it’s just the usual calculus of what could I alternatively spend the time doing and is it worth the added cost. It’s the same as do I call a tradesperson or fix something myself. Replace a washer on a tap? Sure I will do that. Install a new toilet? Nah, get a plumber.

If money is tight and I’ve got the time then I’m going to cook myself. If both are tight then there’s always ramen.

A plastic ice scraper will help get the bulk off, then you can get a variety of solvents for removing any residue. If it is metal then it should be fine with most solvents but check the instructions and do a test patch somewhere discreet to be sure.

The specifics can be argued, (and have been, and will be). The Buddha said that evil action is rooted in greed, hatred, and delusion. He said he understood this when he saw the true nature of reality.

Kant said “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” And says this is evident if you reason through things.

Moses had a great big list of rules that he said the creator of the universe told to him.

Governments establish laws based on the interests of those in power, they say to obey the law is right and to disobey is wrong and they will use violence to punish those that disobey.

These are just some examples, there are loads more including utilitarianism, virtue ethics, various other religions and customary systems.

To maximise staying under the radar, probably fabricate. You’d not be amazingly rich, but you could establish a decent living with a lot of free time. If you want to be amazingly rich and you squint hard enough at fabricate and what tool proficiency count mean in the modern world you can probably make some bank with a bit of study of chemistry or engineering. Being able to magically create complex drugs or something is going to draw attention though.

If you do it randomly they will all understand that the problem is ‘world leaders’ if you do it based on a ranking system you will have ones who think they are one of the ‘good ones’ and so safe.

I think I the difference is that I find ‘human’ to be too narrow a term, I want to extend basic rights to all things that can experience suffering. I worry that such an experience is part and parcel with general intelligence and that we will end up hurting something that can feel because we consider it a tool rather than a being. Furthermore I think the onus must be on the creators to show that their AGI is actually a p-zombie. I appreciate that this might be an impossible standard, after all, you can only really take it on faith that I am not one myself, but I think I’d rather see a p-zombie go free than accidently cause undue suffering to something that can feel it.

Hypotheticals are pretty important right now I think. This kind of tech is very rapidly going from science fiction to real and I think we should try and stay ahead of it conceptually.

I’m not sure that AGI is necessary to achieve post-labour, a suite of narrow-ai empowered tools would be preferable.

By way of analogy, you could take a human child and fit them with electrodes to trigger certain pleasure responses and connect that to a machine that sends the reward signal when they perfectly pick an Amazon order. I think we would both find this pretty horrific. The question is, is it only wrong because the child is human? And if so, what is special about humans?

I think it is short sighted not to at least investigate if we should.

If an AGI is operating on a human level, and we have reason to believe it is a sentient entity which experiences reality then we should. I also think it is in our interest to treat them well, and I worry that we are going to create a sentient lifeform and do a lot of evil to it before we realise that we have.

As others have mentioned, we are already kind of there. I can fully understand how someone could fall in love with such an entity, plenty of people have fallen in love with people in chat rooms after all, and not all of those people have been real.

As for how I feel about it, it is going to depend on the nature of the AI. A childish AI or an especially subservient one is going to be creepy. One that can present as an adult of sufficient intelligence, less of a problem. Probably the equivalent of paid for dates? Not ideal but I can understand why someone might choose to do it. Therapy would likely be a better use of their time and money.

If we get actual human scale AGI then I think the point is moot, unless the AI is somehow compelled to face the relationship. At that point however we are talking about things like slavery.

You can achieve the appearance of motion at lower frame rates, but when things are moving quickly the distance they move between frames can get quite high. You can cover this up with motion blur effects but it’s just not quite the same, and not so easy a process as when you are capturing real video.

Think of the difference between when a camera does a fast pan and when you turn your head quickly. I think if you really focus in on what you are seeing you will be able to notice some difference.

There is also a bit of that audiophile effect where lo-fi is good enough until you have got used to something better.

The problem is that money is permited to generate money. So the more you have beyond the threshold to sustain yourself the more you can generate without labour. The business with no interest loans accelerates things but it isn’t the problem. It is that the system rewards idle investors at the expense of those whose labour actually generates value.

Capitalism wasn’t fine until someone broke it. The core concepts behind it are flawed.

The stuffing is the worst part of an Oreo.