Underlegislation leads to a bloated, extortionate upper crust that weilds disproportionate power over those who rely on said financial system. There is a balance, and the problem you outline is the lesser of the two extremes.

Well, when IQ was invented, it was assumed that well-adjusted people generally had higher IQs, and since there -are- people with incredably inhibited mental capability, and those people -are- considered neurodivergent by definition, it was assumed that high functioning neurodivergent people must also be “mentally deficient” if they can’t function properly in society, with some exceptions to savants who were recognized as being so highly capable in their field that it compensated for their “stupidity” in common matters. It’s also noteworthy that public understanding of mental health disorders pre-80’s boiled down to “r****d” and “schizo.”

Religious makeup

That’s a smoke screen. Another is the “liberal brainwashing machine” school system scare. What they fear is the statistic that higher educated individuals trend towards populism and progressivism. They see higher education of youths as a threat to their political base, which turns into “spineless parents sending kids to liberul brainwashing camps funded by the gubmnt.”

The ghost of Reagan?

Hey OP, that site has enough trackers on it to give me cancer. Can you link an alt from a more consumer friendly source?

Clippy never had a voice and tbh the one that comes to mind for him is not very easy on the ears. Like downpitched spongebob.

Ahoy should host

Yet language and abstraction are the core of intelligence. You cannot have intelligence without 2 way communication, and if anything, your brain contains exactly that dictionary you describe. Ask any verbal autistic person, and 90% of their conversations are scripted to a fault. However, there’s another component to intelligence that the Turing Test just scrapes against. I’m not philosophical enough to identify it, but it seems like the turing test is looking for lightning by listening for rumbling that might mean thunder.

Me hearing a whisper in the wind through my kitchen window: “You’re letting all of the bought air ouuuuutttt…”

The book also claims that music is extraordinarily rare, with most species finding rhythm and melody indestinguishable from noise. I think the point is that the galactic consciousness that runs it all universally translates for purposes of intercommunication. What is heard or understood is more the concept of what was said than the phonetic content therein. It wasn’t that such and such syllables made up the word “human,” it was that the concept of human needed a universal concept to tie to the thing itself. For example, a matriarchal insectoid species who canabalizes any mate is known by the concept of “widow” as a species. Not the word, the idea that the galactic mind would push as a conceptual thought in whatever manner of communication a species might communicate in, which itself might or might not be verbal or phonetic.

Thw books, obviously! Been decades tho

In the book, the word you give is the translation into galactic standard, which is one uniform language. Earth would be translated into the same word as soil and dirt, and perhaps a few synnonyms could be pulled before the concept itself was milked dry.

Su Cuy’Gar, Mando’an!

If you haven’t read The Last Human by Zack Jordan, I highly recommend it. In between chapters, the reader is treated to excerpts from an Asmovian encyclopedia that explains the rules of the intergalactic society that the sole remaining human, the main character, has to navigate.

As part of joining the trillion-species-strong network, a species must fill out a form to dictate the nouns and adjectives for your species, home star, homeworld, sexual divisions (where applicable), and so on. It’s noted in the book that since there are so many species already assigned values in the database, the encyclopedia warns that names like Earth, dirt, mud, moon, star, sol, and home are already taken, and are constantly rejected in proposals.

This. Learn how the site search works and search for tage before posting to make sure you’ll be in the same feed.

“Surely the weight of a few more gallons will push it th-- ah, fuck!”

Is this a joke or the craziest thing I’ve never heard. Is that like the brown note or something?

The purpose of life (imo) is to discover humanity in yourself and what “the best human” means to you. People get their ideas on “the best human” from many inspired examples. The Buddha, Mohammed the Prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, Julius Caesar, or Jimmy Buffet. Some people need no such idols and can form their own understanding of what it means to be human, but all of these scale.

Your humanity plays into the identity of your family, plays into the identity of your city/town, plays into the identity of your region, plays into the identity of your nation, and at the top is the true meaning of life: the culmination of every dream and desire, the moral fabric of our species, and the embodiment of the only such entity in existence to our knowledge. The purpose of life is to find that, reconcile with it, and use the wisdom you gain in doing so to help shape our species into a happy, healthy, and mature civilization, or die trying.

Chinese government overreach? Surely hell has frozen over /s