Two studies have found that at least 40% of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10% of families in the general population.

This means that even non-abusing good cops have (on average) a group of friends and coworkers comprised of 40%+ abusers in the home. 2 out of every 5. These are friends and coworkers that they would take a bullet for and defend with perjury if need be. These are the good cops.

But you know, I don't blame them? The role itself is insane. Why should humanity have the right to put all of our collective violent, physical, criminal, and tragic life events onto the shoulders of one small group of people? It's not sustainable. And it shows in the lives of those who attempt to assume that role.

Well, I guess we could always blame them for being cops. I mean, there are many other, much more effective ways to improve a culture and impact positive change. If that was their motivation for becoming a cop. That would be a positive take-away: Come up with alternate work programs to help cops stop being cops.

http://archive.is/4CVqH

10 year plan. Twice as effective as the USSR's 5 year plans

...Fully rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, restoring our natural ecosystems (needed), dramatically expanding renewable power generation (needed, but it also doesn't mean we should be throwing money away on stupid shit like solar roadways), overhauling our entire transportation system (regional flights, which sort of make up around 70% of total flights, would be targeted for elimination and massively expensive (slower) electrical trains would be put in their place), upgrading all our buildings (most businesses are already moving to green solutions) , jumpstarting US clean manufacturing (see highly expensive and non-competitive with cheaper overseas mfg), transforming US agriculture (forcing a move from cows/pigs/chickens to plant based proteins)...

While we are at it, might as well do the following:

A job with family-sustaining wages, family and medical leave, vacations, and retirement security (Nice, but you can't just make these jobs available. They are supply and demand.)

High-quality education, including higher education and trade schools (Needed)

High-quality health care (Needed)

Clean air and water (Needed)

Healthy food (Subjective, is meat considered healthy?)

Safe, affordable, adequate housing (because this works, ie Projects...)

An economic environment free of monopolies (Technically this exists already, except in countries outside of the USA and EU)

Economic security to all who are unable or unwilling to work (SWEET! SIGN ME UP FOR THAT CHECK!!!)

I get that his spiel is comedy based, but the GND is about half reality and half looney tunes.

What if my dream is a world populated at a sustainable level?

I wish we could just transfer some of the extreme wealth of the wealthy and put it into infrastructure, jobs, sustainable energy, free education, free healthcare, etc. Because fuck them, they have way too much money and I certainly haven't seen anything good come from the elites in this country having that much money while the working class has remained stagnant for the last 40 years.

All you mention are a far cry from sustained hypersonic powered atmospheric flight, which is what we're talking about here.

You mentioned a ramjet, but scramjet engines are hardly an incremental improvement, they're an entirely different class of jet engine. Ramjet engines only do around mach 2.5- 5, scramjets 4-8+ theoretically. What's needed for a viable weapon imo is the next iteration of dual mode ramjets that can do both with one engine, that's a long way off. Public scramjet engine tests have only been successful in a few short 5 second+- burns so far, launched with conventional solid rockets.

I want to know what sort of G force they are pulling in the turns? These machines are crazy.

Edit: Had to look it up, 4-6G sustained and up to 8G.

If there is one thing I have learned from cinematography, NEVER believe the lighting condition! it is insane how many night scenes are shot in the day and color corrected to night in the final.

I think the cgi-ness is our brains trying to associate what we see with what we have seen in the past. This vehical seems to be;

a) Super light weight hollow body
b) DC motor driven
c) all electric

It is literally a big boy version of modern RC helicopters which also exhibit weird looking physics because the motor totally overpowers the mass of the body.

Obviously most of the footage is of the only way this vehicle can hover, on its back. Being all electric and light, the flight time is likely only minutes.

We have seen many vehicles like this, the only puzzle piece no one is solving is a sustained source of power.

There is a generally held belief that consciousness is a mystery of science or a miracle of faith; that consciousness was attained instantly (or granted by god), and that one has either attained self awareness or has not.

I don't believe any of that. I believe like all things in biology, consciousness evolved to maximise a benefit, and occurred gradually, without any magic or mystery. The closest exurb1a gets to that is when he says at 6:28:

"Maybe evolution accidentally made some higher mammals on Earth self-aware because it's better for problem solving or something"

We need to know what other people are thinking and this is the problem that consciousness solves. If a neighbouring tribe enters your territory then predicting whether they come to trade, mate, steal or attack is beneficial to survival.

Initially this may be done through simulation - imagining the future based on past experience. A flood approaching your cave is bad news. Being surrounded by lions is not good. Surrounding a lone bison is dinner. Being charged by a screaming tribe is an upcoming fight.

We could only simulate another person's actions, but we had no experience that allows us to simulate another person's thoughts. You may predict that giving your hungry neighbour a meal may suppress their urge to raid your supplies but you still can't simply open their head and see what they are thinking.

Then for the benefit of cooperation and coordination, we started to talk, and everything changed.

Communication not only allows us to speak our mind, but allows us to model the minds of others. We can gain an understanding of another person's motivations long before they act upon them. The need to simulate another person's thoughts becomes more nuanced and complex. Do they want to trade, or do they want to cheat?

Yet still we cannot look into the minds of others and verify our models of them. If we had access to an actual working brain we could gradually strengthen that model with reference to how an actual brain works, and we happen to have access to such a brain, our own!

If we monitored ourselves then we could validate a general model of thought against real urges, real experiences, real problem solving and real motivations. Once we apply our own selves to a model of thought we become much better at modelling the thoughts of others.

And what better way to render that model than with speech itself? To use all of our existing cognitive skills and simply simulate others sharing their thoughts with us.

At 3:15 exurb1a referenced a famous experiment that showed that we make decisions before we become aware of them. This lends evidence to suppose that our consciousness is not the driver of our thoughts, but a monitor - an interpretation of our subconscious that feeds our model of how people think.

Not everybody is the same. We all have different temperaments. Some of us are less predictable than others, and we tend to avoid such people. Some are more amenable to co-operation, others are stubborn. To understand the temperament of one we must compare them to another. If we are to compare the model of another's mind to our own, and we simulate their mind as speech, then we must also simulate our own mind as speech. Then not only are we conscious, we are self-aware.

Add in a feedback loop of social norms, etiquette, acceptable behaviour, expected behaviour, cooperation and co-dependence, game theory and sustainable societies and this conscious model eventually becomes a lot more nuanced than it first started - allowing for abstract concepts such as empathy, shame, guilt, remorse, resentment, contempt, kinship, friendship, nurture, pride, and love.

Consciousness is magical, but not magic.

Would this really be fatal? As I understand it, it takes a couple sustained minutes before damage from hypoxia starts and a few minutes after that before you'd actually die. This is assuming it's the sustained G-LOC that kills you, which may not be a correct assumption.

EIther way. I wouldn't ride it. Well, maybe with a g-suit and medics on hand. I'd probably black out in the first loop and not remember the rest of it, though.

So this is the Obama economy?

http://www.aei.org/publication/team-obama-sorry-america-the-new-normal-may-be-here-to-stay/

The lackluster Obama economy was stated as being the "new" norm running about 2.2%US GDP growth rate. This was to run for decades at this rate.

Under Trump it has been running growth at a 3 percent or better pace for three quarters in a row.

Granted Most American feel better and leads to a better economy along with cutting Obama era and other stagnating regulations.

With tax cuts and new rates this should sustain.

Either way things are far better under Trump.

Dude is seriously lucky that's all the damage he sustained (in the description). That boulder was big enough to probably crush his head.

By the way, what is that black mat looking thing that falls over when he comes down? Looks like one of those foam sit-up mats but can't be, right? No reasonably sane person would think that'd protect you in a fall ... RIGHT?!

Devil's advocate:

First up, If we're looking for "something we can't imagine", by definition we are unable to search for it.

Second, there's every possibility that aliens ARE very similar to us. There's a principle known as the Mediocrity Principle that states that if you pick a thing at random from a set, it's more likely to common than unusual. In this case, we are picking from the (hypothetical) set of life-sustaining planets, and using the only example we're aware of: Earth.

It's not unreasonable to assume that Earth is typical of life-sustaining planets. There doesn't appear to be anything particularly special about it.... it's a rocky planet in the "Goldilocks zone" where water is liquid. We've found plenty of those.

So there's actually a good possibility that life on other planets could face the same evolutionary pressures and arrive at the same solutions.

Aliens might not be that different at all.

Goddamn, my nuts retracted just from the sound that kick made.

Had a friend in high school who skateboarded and messed up a rail slide. Landed square on the rail on his nuts and blew out one of his testicles. Before the doctors removed it, it had swollen to the size of a grapefruit. I imagine the guy here probably sustained a similar injury and had to have at least one testicle removed.

Good news is you can still have kids with only one testicle--my friend has two daughters. But damn, if that isn't one of the most painful things to experience I don't know what is.