Ok, I really can’t understand the dynamics of this arrangement. Not with the info provided.

So you don’t actually build this product or service, you’re just a middle man? Why not just have the vendor include the missing piece?

I think crucial details are being lost in the vagaries.

Can this additional part be obtained from a third party?

Intellectual property is a lie. Pure propaganda. You can own physical things. You can’t own concepts.

Public domain is the default natural state of humanity. Copyrights, trademarks, and patents have only existed for a few centuries. For most of history, you could copy any song, work, or invention you wanted. Hell, for most of history, you claiming ownership of an idea would have been downright sacrilegious. God/The Gods/The Muses were the ones responsible for creative works; human creators were just the channelers of that divine will. In the Medieval era and earlier, artists didn’t even sign their works.

Again. This is the natural state of humanity. We naturally have the freedom to build and create whatever we want from whatever inspiration we want, including copying others. That is after all how humans learn anything. Everything you have ever done, every behavior more complex than simple biological functions is something you learned how to do. Someone figured out how to make even the most rudimentary objects in your life. No one patented the first bowl. Someone just figured it out and everyone copied from there. This is the natural state of human beings. Knowledge is meant to be shared.

At some point however we decided that in order to facilitate the arts, science, and invention, providing a limited time restriction on people’s rights was justified. We temporarily take away some of everyone’s freedom to creatively express themselves. In exchange, we encourage authors, inventors, songwriters, etc. to create high quality original works.

Over time, this purpose has been lost and the fundamental nature of the arrangement forgotten. Rights holders started spreading propaganda, using the term “intellectual property.” You are a victim of this propaganda. As if the ability to restrict the creativity of others is a natural right like the freedom of speech. Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are not rights. They are PRIVILEGES. They are a practical arrangement. To encourage you to create a thing, we restrict everyone else’s freedom to use that thing for some period of time. But it’s just a practical arrangement. It’s not something you’re entitled to as a creator by natural right.

Of course, the balance here has now all been thrown out of whack by corporations buying laws. Originally the term for copyright was just 7 years, renewable to 14. After that the temporary restriction on everyone’s freedom ended. That was still long enough for creatives to make a living off of their work. But now it’s been extended bit by bit, everyone’s freedom restricted more and more, longer and longer. Now copyrights take everyone’s rights away for generations.

There is a reason respect for copyrights is at an all time low.

Mississippi Pot Roast.

The AI summons an extremely attractive and buff version of Charles Grey. He is holding a cup of tea and wearing absolutely nothing.

Uploading your consciousness to a machine wouldn’t really extend your lifespan. Think of it like moving a file from one device to another; the file isn’t actually moved, you just get a copy on the second device. You and your digital clone will also begin to diverge immediately as the lived experience of being a new digital entity would be different from continuing life as a meat person.

But your mind already operates this way. Human consciousness is naturally discontinuous. Your consciousness is essentially a program that runs on the hardware of your mind. And your consciousness is not a continuous thing. If you’ve ever been sedated for a surgery, you’ll know that when you’re sedated, you are just gone. You don’t dream. You don’t drift. You just don’t exist for however long you are under. The experience of sedation is the experience of death.

And beyond that, your consciousness ceases every time you go to sleep. Yes, there are some periods of the sleep cycle, such as REM sleep, where your consciousness is active in an odd state. But there are others where again, no one is home. There are periods of every night where your conscious mind ceases to exist entirely.

“You,” a conscious mind experiencing the universe, exist for less than a day. Tomorrow a new version of you will be spun up to experience the world, including all of your memories. But the you of your current conscious self will cease to exist this very night.

If I go to sleep, and instead of a new copy of my consciousness springing up tomorrow in my body, a copy activates on a computer, is that still me? Really, I don’t see why not. Both would have my full memories. Both would have my personality. Neither would be a direct continuation of my conscious experience. Ultimately, they’re both copies of my current conscious self.

I will not live past today. I, you, and every other human consciousness exist but for a single day (in normal sleep conditions.) We exist in a chain of such iotas of life, the self of each day passing the torch to the self of the next. Each self is united only by shared memory. That is how every human consciousness experiences life.

Everyone wonders if uploading your mind to a machine will extend your lifespan. What they should be wondering is if waking up each morning does the same.

Try to make the most of each day. Remember, you only get one.

A cubic meter of the core of a neutron star would still count as matter. While it probably wouldn’t literally destroy the Earth, I wouldn’t want to be on the same…continent…when that thing went off.

It can’t be the energy. It has to be a matter rearranger, not something that makes matter from raw energy. Consider a cubic meter of water. It will have a mass of 1000 kg. By E=mc^2, that water has a mass energy of 9e19 Joules. New homes in the US are built with 200 amp panels, delivering power at 120V. The typical new home can draw up to 24,000 Watts from the grid.

At this max output, it would take a house 120 million years to draw enough electricity to create a cubic meter of water from nothing but pure electrical energy.

So this thing must actually work as a matter rearranger. You provide it a supply of pure elements and it synthesizes from there. Or, if it’s fancy, it creates elements by rearranging nuclei. But it can’t be something that truly creates matter ex nihilo.

Day 2: create a cubic meter of food (also probably enough for a month)

Now I’m just imagining a cubic meter of spam.

It’s likely most of your problem. Alcohol helps you get to sleep, but you wake up after a few hours of restless sleep.

You probably need to work on your sleep hygiene. Have you heard of the 10-3-2-1 rule?

Do you have caffeine after Noon? Do you have alcohol at night?

We should rename the bird to türkiye.

There’s a flock of türkiyes over there!

How do I safely drill holes in 1/4" acrylic paneling without cracking it?

If your religion leads you to hate, you are not worshiping God. You are worshiping the Devil. God made all sorts because God wants all sorts. If you hate someone, including “hate the sin love the sinner” bullshit, then you are not a real Christian. A good portion of the self-described Christians in the US are Devil worshipers.

Republicans lie. As any fascist party, they don’t have any consistent ideology beyond hurting people. They’ll invent whatever reasoning and justification they need to justify their bullying, and they’ll immediately abandon that reason for another convenient excuse when necessary.

Republicans lie. They knew damn well what Project 2025 was, and they were in favor of all of it. When they said Trump had nothing to do with it, they were lying. Republicans ultimately don’t care what happens to society, or even themselves personally. They would gladly vote to lower the quality of their own lives, as long as the undesirables were hurt in equal measure.

It’s not always getting worse. It’s that things only get better if you have consistent pressure from the left to force Democrats to get better. The pressure to cave to corporate centrism is always there. You have to have some correcting mechanism, otherwise the party will just drift further right. This mechanism has existed for decades and it has served, and continues to serve, to keep the Democrats from decaying further towards conservatism.

Yes, obviously Project 2025 exists. There’s no need to gleefully trot out all the horrible things Trump is doing. Obviously he’s doing bad things. The problem with Democrats is they think that because Republicans are going to do awful things, that gives them a blank check to do anything they want. They can do any evil they want, just as long as they’re a little bit better than the Republican.

And you mention LGBT rights. The same centrist Dems who cited LGBT rights as a reason to throw Palestinians under the bus are now advocating for throwing trans people under the bus. It turns out, when you’re willing to sacrifice one minority group to the fire, then you’ll be willing to do it again. They justified letting the Palestinians burn in order to protect the queer and trans people. Now they’re justifying letting trans people burn, because in the name of the greater good, we have to make sure to protect everyone else.

Centrist Dems are the “first they came for…” poem in human form.

That IS the banality of evil that poem warns about. At every stage of fascist empowerment, a lesser of two evils argument can be made for letting one minority group or another have its rights taken away. Pretty soon all the minority groups are dead, because at every stage you thought sacrificing them made sense for the greater good.

People voting lesser of two evils is precisely what has gotten us here. You just want to pretend the universe began in 2024.

Where is your personal red line? Do you even have one?

Seriously. I’m asking you. What is your personal red line? What would a Democrat have to do to not get your vote, assuming the Republican running against them was a little worse?

Do you have one? Is there ANY behavior you won’t accept, so long as a Democrat is a little bit better than the opposing Republican?

Or would you happily endorse a literal Holocaust as long as it was a bipartisan affair?

What you call “practical reality” is utilitarian thinking. They’re one and the same. Picking a candidate based on lesser of two evils is utilitarian thinking. This is literally undergraduate 100-level ethics.

If you never studied ethics, there are two main branches that ethical systems are often classified by:

1. Utilitarian - greatest good for the greatest many, ends justifies the means.

2. Respect for persons - there are some principles you won’t violate, full stop.

People have different ethics systems, and you fail to realize that. Then you stamp your feet when someone dares to have a different ethical system from your own.

Some people simply have red lines they will not cross. And it’s a damn good thing such people exist. There has to be some people willing to punish Democrats for drifting too far to the right. Otherwise they’ll just keep drifting, and you’ll end up with an election that’s the KKK vs the Aryan Brotherhood. Or the Democrats will be running Mussolini to the Republican’s Hitler.

On the other hand, you need some people to vote utilitarian as well. Too many people voting on strict red lines means winning becomes impossible.

It’s almost like we live in a diverse society where many viewpoints and backgrounds are beneficial and needed. The Democrats drifted too far to the right, and they were punished by voters who simply would not vote for any pro-genocide candidate. In the values of those voters, you can’t excuse your own crimes because your opponent will probably commit worse ones. And that’s not some fringe theory; that’s how our legal system works. You can’t kill someone and claim innocence because the ends justify the means.

You can disagree, it’s a free country. I just wish you would demonstrate a little belief in Democracy. Democracy starts with acknowledging we have different opinions and different ethical systems. It doesn’t start with stamping your feet and insisting your value system is the only one with any merit. That is the way to dictatorship. That’s MAGA thinking.

Your kind of thinking is extremely dangerous. Strict utilitarian thinking leads to gas chambers. You can excuse a whole lot of evil in the name of the greater good.