They got so much right on that one! Today, we actually have trucks and they use engines -- who could have possibly foreseen such wonders in the darkest ages of the late 1960s?! Surely, this is the result of witchcraft combined with technology and just a wee pinch of leaded gasoline and DDT.

Next week on "Our Amazing Future": an astounding device will wait until your wife is asleep and then deliver an unstoppable deluge of pornography directly to you from all over the world -- in COLOR!!

Military scientists are already hard at work on the "inter-net", by which the conveyance of rank smut into your bedroom will forever put to rest that embarrassing walk over to BIG TONY'S TIT-A-TORIUM for your weekly purchases of "Giant Goddamn Asses" and "Judy Hopps Confidential." Apparently you'll also be able to get news and culture and all that other who-cares bullshit, like anyone gives a fuck since there's gonna be way hella titties! And grey fur.

Can someone please recommend a good mental health specialist?

I remember reading that paper in the early 00s and loving it. The bombshell for me was that at about 4:47 in the video he says he thinks Ken actually did do what I assumed the paper was joking about, which I'll admit sent a little shiver down my spine.

The only limit would have been Ken's forward thinking on how complex the self-updating aspect would be. Once it passes a certain threshold , iirc, it's essentially unstoppable. Below a certain threshold it would probably already have been found.

One of my favourite heroes. Truly unstoppable.

It's like the doctors have given you second and third opinions and told you your liver is failing, you have to stop drinking or you'll die. You won't die the next time you have a beer, but every beer takes you farther over the edge. You can say the bartender who knows this is blameless for serving you, because others gave you the alcohol that destroyed your liver and it took longer than one night, or you can work from now and realize that he's intentionally killing you in hopes of a tip before you stumble outside and keel over.
Working from today, our planet's liver is failing, there no transplant, and Trump just reopened the bar and is serving everclear. Chances are he can't accelerate things so much that Florida submerges in the next 3 1/2 years, that doesn't mean he can't make things be far worse, beyond the point of possible mitigation.

You may hold that theory, but climatologists disagree. We are past, but still near the tipping point, and every ton of CO2 takes us farther from a survivable rise. It's ridiculous to think that we're already past holding at 3.5 degrees global rise (edit: the maximum assumed to be survivable by civilization), so we might as well make it 5 degrees.

Island nations, people who live South of New Orleans, and millions of others are already being displaced. It only takes one high tide (edit: or one extended drought) to wipe out low lying farmland permanently, and erosion has become an unstoppable force.

Trump is moving towards raising the level of multiple greenhouse gases we produce, Obama had us lowering those levels. Time can only tell what that actually means in tonnage, but 180 degree turnaround is awful enough. I agree, we also didn't do enough under Obama.

? Reversible means it can be reversed, not that it's easy. I don't know where you get that idea. Irreversible in this context means sending the temperature trend the other way before civilization becomes unsustainable. Eventually the planet should normalize unless we really follow Trump's lead wholeheartedly, then we might go full Venus. There WAS a magic bullet, being responsible with our atmosphere, but we argued over climate change until it was useless.

If, before it reverses (which it may not do at all, btw) the planet becomes inhospitable to humans, then for humans, it's irreversible. In 4 years we can do enough damage to 1) make the effects longer and harsher enough to make long term survivability impossible and or 2) go beyond the next tipping point where feedback loops reinforce each other, leading to a Venus like runaway greenhouse effect. We're damn close to massive methane releases (already happening) and if we don't avoid that, nothing will save civilization.
All that said, Clinton probably wouldn't do enough to avoid disaster either, but at least she accepted the science and agreed we should make efforts to mitigate the coming damages.

I'm definitely a pessimist, mostly because I understand the systems and human nature, and so I think we're totally hosed as a species.

HOW DID I MISS THIS???

I'm halfway through Popstar and could not stop LMFAHS at this song. The music video is even better.

Holy shit it's sooooooo damned unstoppably hilarious!!!

*QUALITY

I dunno about his comments on Trump making "sexist remarks" about Hillary.

Trump says that the only thing she has going for her (why she gets votes) is being a woman. Is that sexist? Yeah, probably. He says that her approval ratings are low, even among women. Is that hypocritical, considering his own numbers with women? Sure.

But is either of those statements actually *wrong*? I think that is much less clear cut.

McCain chose Palin as his running mate in 2008 for precisely one reason: she was a woman, and he and the GOP at large were terrified that Hillary (who seemed unstoppable at the time) would get the Democratic nod and then women would vote for her en masse due to some sort of "vagina solidarity" effect. In other words, the only thing Palin had going for her was being a woman. Is it sexist to say that? Maybe, but it doesn't make it any less true.

Hillary is admittedly a vastly more legitimate candidate than Palin was, but I think there is a certain degree of truth to the suggestion that being female is a pretty significant part of why she's getting the push from Democrat elites. And it is just as insulting for the Democratic elites to think that Hillary can benefit from "vagina solidarity" as it was for the GOP to think that about Palin.

Brother, do you feel depressed today?

No? Then take a look at this short piece by Ian Welsh and/or this long(!) piece by Matt Taibbi.

New, just released ocean temperature data has shown a dramatic increase in temperatures in the Northern Pacific, and a dramatic decrease in surface temperatures in the Northern Atlantic. As I understand it, those readings are not consistent with normal 'El Nino' patterns. Could this be the beginning of the end of thermohaline circulation? If that happens we'll be facing unavoidable, unpredictable, worldwide, disastrous climate change in short order.
Without the current created by the thermohaline circulations, the oceans die. Equatorial waters become much hotter...fast...and arctic and Antarctic waters become much colder...fast. Ocean organisms can't live through that kind of change, not in any sizeable way anyway. Without the oceans, the entire food web dissolves and we die.
On top of that, without the currents bringing oxygen to the lower oceans, they become anoxic. The bacteria that live in those deep waters will feed on the dead sea life and create toxic gases (hydrogen sulfide) which have, in the past, completed the extinction events by wiping out nearly all life. Once that starts, it's unstoppable and is the end. Let's hope these readings are just an over active El Nino.

What we do today has little to no effect for 50-100 years. That makes us at least 50 years too late to solve this problem, and we are still exacerbating it rather than solving it to this day.
We're hosed.
If you plan on having children in this climate, you are a child abuser IMO, and are adding to the problem with that one action more than almost any other action normal people perform. Your children will most likely not survive to old age, and absolutely won't experience the same quality of life you have.

I can (and do) do that in my bronco or jeep. In first gear low range, they idle along at an unstoppable 1/2-1 mph. I can walk slowly around them in circles without even walking fast. If you count low range, my cars each have 8 gears + 2 reverse (4 speed transmission + high and low range in the transfer case).
I would imagine these trucks have far more than that, and they usually have a high and low range splitter too, so if they have a 7 speed transmission, they've got 14 forward gears. I know that's not an answer, but it's something.

Odd. Do you know who made the motors in 1970 through 87 there? Still "Jeep"?
That wasn't the case in America, where Jeep was never it's own company.
Here in America, that (70-87) was the AMC years, coming after Kaiser (in 1953, first called Kaiser-Fraiser, then Willies, then Kaiser-Jeep), which all came after the Willies Overland company, who essentially copied the Bantom design for the military in early WW2, then made civilian Jeeps for years under the Willies name.
In my opinion, any Jeep made after they switched to rectangular headlights and plastic (early 80's) isn't worth having.
I have a 73 CJ-5 that came stock with a 304 AMC V-8 (and now has a 360 AMC V-8 from a donor Wagoneer). It's an unstoppable trail monster, but too hard on my back for me to drive any more.

I hope you guys get a decent lemon law out of this. He wrote a good campaign song for the bill right here.

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Foolish humans... foolish, foolish humans...

http://mimeticscanada.tumblr.com/post/48817880742/beware-the-unstoppable-cyborg-turtle

Madison is my favorite American girl's name (already before this video), history wise.

That name comes from the 1984 movie Splash, before that it was hardly ever used as a girls name. Here is that very beginning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8CRERCoC10

In this video the name Madison has an 'info bubble' at 3:26, but it's really fun to watch the rise and rise of that name starting at around 3:10 (so the movie started it in 1984, but it really needed about 10 year to become an unstoppable powerhouse name).