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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Because the way to get rid of angry, desperate people is to kill them. A better way is to get rid of the desperation, which usually gives them something to lose, which gives them less desire to engage in actions that will lose them. That’s why the War on Terror ended in a withdrawal, and not a victory. Sure, education and economic improvement isn’t very fast, but some governments seem to be more than okay spending a couple decades doing something different.

    No, this won’t get rid of all of the terrorists, but how many of the wealthy, educated, married extremists with families are actually willing to risk their lives for their beliefs?



  • There are a handful of commercial sailing vessels for both cargo and cruises, although they are hard to find. Here is one I found that still seems to be in service. A fairly complete list of sailing vessels can be found here. Some that are listed as currently sailing actually aren’t, but it’s still a place to look. The Royal Clipper seems to do the occasional transatlantic cruise, so that could be relevant for the OP. I didn’t take price into consideration, they could be quite expensive.







  • In 1990, they started to sequence the human genome. About a decade later, the shotgun sequencing technique was advanced enough to be used on the human genome. A few years later, it was declared complete. In 2022, it was considered to be gapless, almost 2 decades later.

    All of this, plus some other discoveries, led to CRISPR and the ability to edit genes in fully formed beings rather than just a few cells. After decades of research in a number of fields.

    One of the things DNA does is make protein. (If you want to look at it a certain way, all it does is determine where and when to make protein.) Part of what makes protein do the thing it does is the shape it takes. (For instance, prions are misfolded proteins that cause other proteins to misfold, and then other weird things happen, like holes in your brain.)

    So we have this massively complicated process that makes slightly less complicated things that behave in a variety of ways depending on their shape, which is dependent on the myriad ways they can fold, at the molecular level. And you wonder why they haven’t done a lot when we’re still to a large degree in the data-collecting and validation portion of this massive undertaking. As for what it can lead to, I expect it will be no less revolutionary than CRISPR is and will be, but that could still be decades away.



  • Saying “religion is the problem” when the problem crops up in many different areas regardless of which religions are present in an area or if religion isn’t present at all makes it seem like you might be focusing on the wrong thing. Nationalism, religion, strong ideologies, groups with deep emotional bonds and a sense of insularity are all susceptible to the same things - charismatic leaders can easily direct their attention and they have a tendency towards directing their hostility towards groups that don’t fit into their group.

    So, tribalism. And if one tool won’t work, or is removed completely from access, those who wish to use tribalism to mobilize a large group to help them achieve their goals will just use the next one that is available to them. The tools are rarely what are important to them, but the results. So I don’t see how focusing on one tool, even a particularly well-suited tool, will solve the problem.


  • First, religions and the existence of God are two different things, just like the existence of the earth and the earth being flat are two different things. Likewise, the existence of religions is no guarantor of God’s existence, nor is there many flaws proof of his non-existence. And unknowns are facts we haven’t discovered or proven yet, much like germ theory, or fanciful ideas which haven’t been debunked, such as the idea that an imbalance of humors was the cause of disease.