glowing?

Actually, because of Caesar and Augustus adding months, the 25th month is only Vigintitrisember

This is my working assumption for all those teenage dystopias.

Hunger Games? World outside the US is fine. Better, now that the hegemon is more interested in watching it’s own population murder each other for television ratings.

Don’t want me making that assumption about your story? Maybe mention anywhere outside the continental US at least one [1] time. At least Handmaid’s Tale acknowledges Canada. And I guess heaven forbid Mexico ever get a mention.

I like this button layout. If one of the face buttons is gonna be used more than all the others, why shouldn’t it be bigger?

State terrorism is a contradiction in terms. Legally, terrorism is violence carried out by a group that is not recognized as a state internationally. States cannot do terrorism, the term exists to protect their monopoly on legal violence. George Washington was a terrorist until the British empire recognized and began doing business with the constitutional United States. We see a similar change occurring with Taliban members and the present government of Afghanistan.

More importantly, though. You claim liberal democracy is fundamentally incompatible with authoritarianism, yet if we dig into the present and recent past of the United States, we find policies that match the list you have provided.

The Lavender Scare and Hoover’s FBI, the Red Scare and COINTELPRO, the police response to Kent State anti-war protests in 1970, the police response Columbia’s anti-genocide protests last year, the ongoing existence of privately run labor camps and prison farms.

Valve is notably better (not good, but better) than the other companies you’ve listed.

That is, of course, an anomaly. A good monarchy lasts only as long as the monarch. A good company that exists for longer than the average human lifespan will quickly become no different from its peers.

AI has been used to refer to human like intelligence in fiction for at least half a century.

Unless I misunderstand, in China it’s illegal to distribute VPNs, but simply using one and accessing the wider net is fine. That implementation isn’t great, but it could also be a lot worse. Effectively it means anyone who’s tech savvy enough can leave the walled garden whenever they like with practically no consequence. Though, it still requires some group of people assume the legal risk of setting up and hosting the VPN infrastructure.

I feel like there must be some means of achieving the same effect without criminalizing people just for providing a service. Like, defaulting to a garden of public and private webpages that meat the standard, but still with some means of leaving that garden provided you pass a minor techincal barrier to entry.

Also forcing every social media site and glorified-website-app to default to chronological sort every time you close the browser tab or leave the app. It’s a simple change, but it would do a lot.

Thank you for the synopsis. However;

This is a clanker:

and this is software:

I wouldn’t say never, but certainly not this century. Probably not the next one, either.

And at this point we might as well refer to it as something like “Machine Consciousness”, because “AI” an any derivatives of it have been rendered garbage for actually talking about the sci-fi concept.

that did actually happen to a guy, over the password to his bitcoin account

https://abcnews.go.com/US/nyc-crypto-kidnapping-torture-case/story?id=122280419

I love having capital, now if only there weren’t all this pesky labor.

Any meritocratic system becomes an informal aristocracy after a generation or two. And aristocrats are so notoriously good at understanding the systems that facilitate and keep them in power…

More than that, most of the old testament is stories about how you don’t debate God, you don’t test God, and you definitely don’t force God’s hand.

Honestly, this Intel guy is cute compared to the Christian Zionists, who somehow think God wants and will be happy with their attempts to manufacture prophecy.

lol

the Sun does the same thing but also with a profit motive

You know Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, right? How early roman christians viewed and treated Jewish people is reasonable context to include in a conversation about the history.

When I was on facebook back then, I would see boomers making posts talking about the 1950s in the same way.

Life has a tendency to spread when new environments are available, yes.

But beyond this planet, there are no other environments. You might say the rest of the universe is antivironment. There is a wide range of possible conditions, of radiation and tempurature, gravity and molecular composition. Life requires a very very narrow and specific set of those conditions to continue.

Going from one continent to another, within the same atmosphere, with the same underlying set of conditions, is not all that much of a change. Actually leaving the planet? Permanently? And without just dying in the attempt? That would require a level of organization, long term planning (like, centuries long term), and resource management that we as a species have yet to demonstrate.

Settling mars is a centuries long undertaking. You basically have to nurture a whole ecosystem from scratch… that would be a brutally difficult and lengthy process in the best of conditions. But of course, these aren’t the best conditions. We aren’t doing particularly well with the ecosystem we’ve already got.

If you want a historical project, then look to balancing modern industry within the planet’s biosphere. It’s a prerequisite to anything happening on mars.