51–60 of 161 posts
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Humans are far and away the most cruel species that has ever walked the face of the earth. No other species has the capacity to invent torture, using our analytical abilities to keep the victim alive indefinitely while inflicting the most vicious agonies possible (e.g. torturing the child in front of the parent).
You've not seen cats toying with their prey?
Have you ever visited a museum exhibit on torture? The engineering creativity that has gone into exploiting physiology and psychology to cause unendurable, unimaginable pain is astonishing. You'll want to look away. You'll want to forget, to believe once again that cats are worse... but cats are to a first order approximation indifferent to suffering, in contrast to humans hellbent on maximizing it.
JumpCrisscross is taking a techno-optimist's perspective, but while I personally believe that humans should voluntarily seek to serve as "ethical guardians" and to minimize "sentient suffering", I don't trust them to do it. Not as individuals, since empathy is a weak force compared with first-person pain. Not as cogs within societies where inflicting pain is often a means to gaining and maintaining power.
This happened on February the 9th - 10th This wikipedia article was marked for deletion, so just in case https://archive.ph/wip/7fvmI Other forums are mentioning conspiracy theories about political oponents sabotaging the current (new) government. No skin in that game
Of course it was all the monkeys fault, for being part of a geographic location, with poor energy planning, poor infrastructure support, in a third world country, all the things intervening primates need to shovel disinformation.
"The nationwide blackouts were attributed to a massive disruption caused by a monkey which had apparently intervened to trigger an irreparable damage which made it unable to restore the electricity in most parts of Sri Lanka immediately after the incident had unfolded." ( This from the Wikipedia article is not Artificial Intelligence, its shocked monkeys forced to type randomly type ).
Damn that damn monkey, and his triggering intervention of irreparable damage. Just what do they think AI will do with all this world salad? Was it written by AI or was it written by the monkey as a suicide note? or the place went to sh*t-hole Level 5 when Arthur C Clarke died?
Inquiring minds what to know, why third world problems require primate interventions?
This could have happened anywhere? Puerto Rico? New York in 1977? London 2003? Was it all the work of intervening primates?
When your premise is utterly absurd, you can drive the point anywhere: Shock the Monkey.
Related: just today came across this post on X.. "Sri Lanka will become next Bali as long as it gets fiber." https://x.com/strzibnyj/status/1890628037529727220
Outside of the few main hotspots, people don't hassle you in Bali. They are an incredibly friendly and polite people in spite of the tourism.
Of course, Bali isn't completely hassle free. But you can just walk down the street there, at least outside of the main hotspots. Taxi drivers will hail you, it's a bit annoying, but they're polite and will drive on when you say no thanks.
The monkey was a foreign nation state sponsored insider testing the nation's grid. Sri Lanka is in trouble, and authorities are mobilizing fast and expanding the surveillance state to thwart future threats before they are realized. They are deploying AI at scale.
This has the hallmarks of curious George
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I love how people compare places to Bali and Cancun and then lack everything that people like about those places. Having a beach is not enough. You can find beaches everywhere. Bali beaches aren't even that good.
I live on a small island in Thailand, and here, "becoming Bali" is a term that describes a place that has been over-constructed with bungalows and villas; it has become very crowded and very expensive. Most tropical islands started out as hippie places where all houses were cheap, rudimentary wooden bungalows, but then mass tourism and housing investors moved in and pushed the "original hippie population" out and rep…
It is hard to think about Sri Lanka without recalling [0] that this is the country which recently attempted to institute a fertiliser ban. My default assumptions about their general infrastructure management are unflattering. [0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fertiliser-ban-d...
The relatively recent genocide also points to a high level of dysfunction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_genocide
Though he was fighting for Tamils, paradoxically, Prabhakaran also became the big killer of Tamils. He annihilated all competing Tamil militant groups ...
... it all led to [Prabhakaran's] last apocalyptic decision to fight to the last day — and the last Tamil. Through Kumaran Pathmanathan, KP, the LTTE ‘foreign minister’, we offered to bring out all the combatants and civilians from the war zone. When KP went to finalise the deal, Prabhakaran refused. The rest is history.
Unfortunate for the Tamils how it all played out, with little intervention or pressure from other regional powers. The past violence and pogroms were already indicative of the State's intent; they didn't need a second invitation.
Unfortunately it's looks as if Cyber Squirrel 1* hasn't been updated since 2019. This disruption would be one of the more successful operations. * https://cybersquirrel1.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live on a small island in Thailand, and here, "becoming Bali" is a term that describes a place that has been over-constructed with bungalows and villas; it has become very crowded and very expensive. Most tropical islands started out as hippie places where all houses were cheap, rudimentary wooden bungalows, but then mass tourism and housing investors moved in and pushed the "original hippie population" out and rep…
I don't suppose you can recommend a place in Thailand that is not "becoming Bali" but still tourist friendly enough for non-locals to visit without feeling guilty about ruining the vibe?