I have this exact same USB drive, 4GB also bought around 15 years ago it still works like a charm

Everyone who claims this is a hypocrite, you absolutely have limits on the freedom of speech and expression, and no one can limit your thoughts with the current technology so that’s irrelevant to the discussion. You don’t believe me? Ok, in that case I think you should be okay with my freedom to express myself by dismembering you slowly while streaming it online, oh, I shouldn’t be allowed to legally do that? How DARE you limit my freedom of expression.

So, now that we’ve established freedom of expression is already limited by other laws we should focus on which laws should be allowed to surpass the freedom of expression, and the answer is essentially all of them, otherwise “I was expressing myself” would be a valid legal defense. The whole point of a law is to prevent people from expressing something, be it murder intent or unwillingness to pay taxes. We must watch our government so that laws are not oppressive and that they’re used to protect the people and not to abuse power. But laws against racism and homofobia are not abuse of power and serve to protect people from other people.

I think the question everyone is asking themselves is whether you want your inverted penis covered by health insurance?

Reference in case you don’t know where this is from: https://youtu.be/ibQ9r_C5UBc

Lots of answers touched the correct answer, which is that in reality things don’t follow parabolas on earth, a parabola is just close enough to the actual thing the object is doing to be indistinguishable. In reality everything follows elliptical orbits, but the top of an ellipsis with a Major axis of 6378 km and a few meters in the minor axis looks the same as a parabola, especially when you don’t see the full orbit because the object hits the ground. If you were to throw a rock and suddenly the entire earth besides that rock collapsed to a single point, your rock will orbit earth in an elliptical orbit.

Most of the internet in the 90s was either that or the complete opposite, i.e. a bare text with links. Tell me since you said you actually remember the internet back then, what did you used to do in it? What websites did you frequent?

As for the cars I never said they were worse than before, my point with the purely mechanical cars from the 60s or before is that people still keep them because they’re fully mechanic, but that cars from the 90s don’t have that appeal. Everything that made the cars from the 90s better than the ones from the 80s was improved upon since then, realistically today’s cars are much better in any metric you want to compare.

30 years ago we had a future to look to

You were less cynical, I remember people in the 90s saying the world was shit and getting worse, that there was no future.

the unshittified internet

Do you really remember the internet back then? Of course it wasn’t enshittified, there were only dozens of people online. And it really depends on what you mean with enshittified, the designs were horrible and polluted, sure it didn’t had ads, but realistically even a page with adds nowadays is more readable than most websites back then, with tiling images background, gifs everywhere and interesting font choices.

I’m sure that the vast majority of stuff you do online today wasn’t available in 95, so yeah, it might have become “enshittified” but it also became usable, and a shitty usable thing is better than a pure useless thing in my book.

great music

That is relative, I bet young people today feel 90s music was good and old people feel it was bad, because it depends on the age you had at the time. Generally we tend to think that the music that was popular in our group when we were around 14 to be good, so I bet that 14 YO today love today’s music, and telling them their music is bad sounds exactly the same as when old people used to tell us that the music was better in their times.

affordable land/housing

Was it though? Let’s pick a place, let’s say NY since it’s a well known city worldwide, minimum wage was apparently $4.25 and an apartment in NY costed $328 per sqft (as best as I can find out), this means that you had to work 30 years with all your money going into an apartment to afford it. So no, it wasn’t affordable, it’s become worse since then, but it wasn’t the wonderful past where everyone could buy a house that you seem to think it was.

affordable durable cars

Is it though? Most cars from the 90s are in dumpsters by now, they consumed so much gas that it simply wasn’t worth keeping them. And by the 90s cars had already started using electronics so they don’t even have the appeal that a purely mechanical car from the 60s brings to the table. Also again with the affordability probably wasn’t all that much better than now, where you can probably get a used car for very cheap.

people actually interacted in real life

People still interact in real life, go check meetups or other local events. In fact we have more opportunities to interact in real life today because we can look for stuff that interest you to check out, I. The 90s it was my experience you mostly always hanged up with that same people in the same place because you never knew what else was happening in the city.

no social media trash

No social media at all, social media is not 100% bad, you’re using one now

Now, we have billionaires

Those already existed back then, in fact they were mostly the same people. Also they had a lot more control over the media back then because without social media and internet there were no alternatives to mainstream media which is almost entirely controlled by billionaires. So long story short, the problem was already there, you just weren’t aware of it.

and LLMs.

What about LLMs? They’re great tools for brainstorming and getting unstuck, but beyond that they’re very limited and are a huge money sink that companies are desperately throwing money to try to get something out, but so far they haven’t delivered. Yes there are people getting fired because of LLMs, and it really sucks for them, and I wish they had a good social net to catch them during this time, but honestly I think we’re about to hit a turning point in the coming years where companies will understand that LLMs are all promise no pay (plus a few lawsuits from big companies getting their copyright infringed on will help) and will hire those people back.

I don’t see how anyone can possibly think times are better or going to improve.

Like you mentioned, civil rights are at an all time high, even with conservatives worldwide trying to revert the situation LGBTQ+ are well more accepted now than what they were in the 90s; Interracial couples is not a debatable topic anymore outside of the Klan; Smoking indoors has been banned and marijuana has been mostly legalized; Cars are lots more fuel efficient and that’s without mentioning EVs; Billionaires are still a problem, but as a society they’re now being criticized out in the open, whereas before they were not even discussed at all; Crime is at an all time low, and reporting percentage is better than ever (as in people didn’t used to report crimes), not to mention that we have a lot more crimes being recognized (Marital rape wasn’t even a crime until 93 in the US), and we have become a lot better at preventing innocents from being arrested and freeing the ones that had in the past; Life expectancy at an all time high, and medicine has become lots more affordable (although this might not be the case for the US, but it is worldwide) and better; Technology has not only advanced drastically, but it has become a lot more accessible both in terms of price and usability; Workers right have increased significantly, and work life balance is a lot better in general terms; etc, etc, etc, we tend to only remember the good things of the past and look at it with pink glasses, but in reality if you were to suddenly be transported back to 95 you would probably find it a worse time than today by most day-to-day metrics.

First of all this is not a paradox, unless you’re not explaining something, there are two yous past and future, if past self turns off the machine before seeing the numbers nothing happened, if he turns it off afterwards the information has already been transferred so nothing happens either.

I have a feeling you might have recently watched Primer and are thinking of a similar working tome machine, where the machine needs to be powered on from past until future. But if this situation happened in Primer it wouldn’t be a problem either because you’re not in the box after you leave it. It’s a bit weird, but if you imagine time as horizontal lines, the box allows you to travel diagonally, so you only exist inside the box in that timeline at the moment of exiting, before that you were in a different timeline, so if you exit the box, wait a while and turn it off you’re only preventing yourself from using the box again. In fact that’s one of the big reveals of the movie, except it’s said in passing by mentioning that the boxes are multi-use.

That reminds me of a few years back when Google removed it’s “Don’t be evil” slogan, someone commented that it was like the disturbed kid in class having a sign saying “Don’t kill everyone” quietly putting it away.

Your answer is intuitively correct, but unfortunately has a couple of flaws

Supercomputers once required large power plants to operate

They didn’t, not that much anyways, a Cray-1 used 115kW to produce 160 MFLOPS of calculations. And while 150kW is a LOT, it’s not in the “needs its own power plant to operate” category, since even a small coal power plant (the least efficient electricity generation method) would produce a couple of orders of magnitude more than that.

and now we carry around computing devices in out pockets that are more powerful than those supercomputers.

Indeed, our phones are in the Teraflops range for just a couple of watts.

There’s plenty of room to further shrink the computers,

Unfortunately there isn’t, we’ve reached the end of Moore’s law, processors can’t get any smaller because they require to block electrons from passing on given conditions, and if we built transistors smaller than the current ones electrons would be able to quantum leap across them making them useless.

There might be a revolution in computing by using light instead of electricity (which would completely and utterly revolutionize computers as we know them), but until that happens computers are as small as they’re going to get, or more specifically they’re as space efficient as they’re going to get, i.e. to have more processing power you will need more space.

Tell me you’re from the US without telling me you’re from the US.

Let’s have a hypothetical scenario, imagine there was a machine that could be used to murder people easily, even if that wasn’t their main purpose anyone could use it in a fit of rage to kill someone, in fact anyone could kill someone by accident with this machine. You would want this machine to be regulated, have people evaluated psychologically, and have them take classes and perform an exam to ensure they won’t kill anyone by accident.

Did you think guns? I meant cars. And asking if no one or only cops should have guns is like asking if no one or only bus drivers should be able to drive. There’s a midterm that most of the world has already reached, where we require people to go through some process to prove they can operate the death machine safely.

Yes, you shouldn’t drink hot water from the tap. I have a water dispenser, as in an equipment where you put a 20L mineral water bottle and you can pour either cold or hot water.

I don’t, my water dispenser has a tap for hot water. If I’m out of water in the dispenser I usually boil it in a pan. That being said heating water in the microwave is not an issue for me, as long as it’s just the water before adding the tea.

Just remap it to something more useful, Colemak remaps it to backspace.

As a US citizen you have right to work in most of those countries.

No you don’t, you need a visa to be able to work here, depending on your area of expertise companies might sponsor your visa.

I’ve lived in multiple places, so I’ll talk about all of them.

Brazil

I lived in two places there, essentially you can choose between public or private systems.

Under the private system you would book an appointment with whatever doctor you wanted, usually one or two weeks in advance, pay them (which is relatively expensive depending on the doctor), have the consultation, they might ask for some exams (some of which are paid, others included), possibly get a prescription (that you would have to pay for yourself), possibly go back for a follow up appointment (included in the price you already paid).

On the public system you book an appointment, wait some time (months in some places, days in others), have your consultation (if the doctor is in that day), possibly get a prescription (that you would likely get for free), possibly go back for a follow up appointment.

Ireland

There’s a public system, but you have to be below a certain income level to use it, otherwise you have to go through the private system. You have to register with your GP (most of which don’t have available spots), for anything you first need to contact your GP (which usually takes a week), and pay €60, explain your problem and if they choose to forward you to and specialist (even if you go and say I need to see a cardiologist they might say “no, you do not”, although that’s unlikely), then they send an email to the specialist who only then accepts that you book with them (usually for a week or so later), then you have to pay the specialist (which is usually >€300), they might ask for some exams (which you have to book and pay on your own, some blood work I did was €700), they might give you a prescription (which is paid but there’s a €80 cap on medicine per house per month, which is the only nice part of the whole system), and if you need a follow up it’s usually €150. If you have health insurance (or at least mine was like this) they give you back 50% of all your expenses up to a certain limit.

Spain

I’m not too familiar with the options here because I have private insurance through my work and as you’ll see I’ve had no reason to look elsewhere, but I’ve been told the public system is fairly similar. Whenever I need an appointment I open my insurance app or call a doctor office and ask if they take my insurance, book an appointment (usually for a week or two in advance), go there, show my id and insurance card, go to the appointment, if they ask for some exams I do them, if they give me a prescription I take it to a pharmacy and pay it out of pocket (this is the only part I know public system exists and is somewhat better because you get the drugs for free, but since I don’t take any recurring prescriptions I haven’t bothered to check), if I need a follow up I book it and go back. Never had to pay one cent for anything other than medicine. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop and getting billed for all of the Dr appointments, but so far it hasn’t happened hahaha

I’m currently learning Catalan, doing Duolingo until I find some class (which there should be one in a couple of months). It’s relatively easy for me since I already speak fluent Spanish and Portuguese and understand almost everything in Italian.

Nope, just extra dimensional cause for creation, no higher purpose required, for all we know whenever two rocks collide in that scenario they create a universe.

Also no, you’re completely missing the point, if God is omnipotent he could have made humans to never suffer and still be free, in theory most Christians believe that Heaven is free of suffering, do you cease being yourself when you go to heaven then? Just because you or I can’t imagine a world where humans are free but can’t hurt one another doesn’t mean that’s beyond the realm of possibilities, and if your counter argument will be that then we wouldn’t really be free, I tell you that humans can’t explode someone by looking at them, so he already imposed some limitations on the amount of harm we could cause to each other, yet you don’t see this as less freedom because you just accepted that’s the natural state, I propose there could be a natural state where humans can’t cause harm to each other and are still free.

Yup, eventually believers reach the same stopping point but instead of saying “I don’t know” they go “God did it”, until science explains how that happened, so believers go to the next thing and say “well I don’t know how this happened, therefore God”. That is called “the God of the gaps” and it’s a terrible argument, it’s okay to admit we don’t know something.

And no, I’m not talking about Abraham, I’m talking about Jesus, the whole reason why Jesus is crucified is so that his blood can clean the sin of mankind. The basics of Christianism are the following tenets:

1. God can’t (or doesn’t want to) coexist with Sin
2. God requires blood sacrifices, usually animals, to purify Sin
3. God offered a loophole, by sacrificing an innocent person anyone can point at that sacrifice and say “I’m using this sacrifice to purify my sins”.
4. Because there are no Sinless humans he had to come down in human form to sacrifice himself so that he could charge the innocent blood price for the Sins of mankind

Otherwise why would God need to offer himself as sacrifice to purify sins? Couldn’t he just say “all sins are gone”? However you look at it he asks for a blood sacrifice, however he allows you to cash in his own blood sacrifice in its place, and if you don’t he sends you to Hell, very loving fellow.

No, you’re not, you cheated that’s the most fundamental thing not to do, that’s like saying “I’m a great cook, I would argue better than the majority of cooks, I only put rat poison in my food once!”, would you eat in the same restaurant where a cook intentionally put rat poison in your food once already?

I rarely get into these sorts of debaters because they’re almost always pointless, however a few of the things you said made me want to answer this.

You’re completely missing the point for the first argument, people can’t choose to fly or kill each other by staring, so if humans were created by God then any flaws in humanity, including but not limited to ability to suffer and cause suffering, is part of God’s design that he could have removed. In other words, if God gave people the option to cause harm knowing they would (omniscience, remember) then he’s directly responsible for everything bad that happens, it’s like a father that gives a sharp knife to a kid and tells him to go run and play with his friends. God could have prevented suffering to begin with, therefore the fact that it exists proves that suffering is part of his plan. If that’s the case then yes, you being bullied and your bully being in an abusive home is all done by design, which is very twisted if you think about it.

As for the second argument you admit that things exist outside our universe that can affect it, if that’s the case you don’t need God to create the Universe, we could be the result of a collision between two extra dimensional rocks. And that’s sort of the point of that argument, i.e. that you don’t need God to explain the beginning of the Universe because whatever question you have about the origin of the Universe can also be directed at God (e.g. and what caused that) and whatever answer you give using God can also be used for a non-God answer (e.g. extra dimensional causes)