dreadgoat

The determining question for whether or not it’s the same is this: Are you the physical matter of your brain, or the electricity running through it? In the first case, sleep isn’t death. In the second case, it is. I would argue that you’re closer to the electricity than the brain matter, since an unpowered brain is how we define death.

But REALLY it ultimately doesn’t matter, if you think about it. An exact clone of you created after any kind of destruction of consciousness is no different than the original you had the destruction never occurred. We just intuitively really do not like that idea.

You don’t need a distant science fiction MacGuffin for this. Every night you lay down and “die” for 8 hours or so, then your consciousness turns back on and you simply trust that it wasn’t altered too much in the interim. We know very well that the way we think can change from one day to the other, so who’s to say you’re really the same person?

I agree that most species surviving mass extinction events were just lucky, but I think that also says something special about the ones that survived MULTIPLE events (ants), or those that effectively re evolved into existence after extinction events (crabs)

I think that’s been narrowed down to about 2 million years. But that got cut short by a mass extinction event, so it’s hard to say how long they would have lasted otherwise.

Also what’s the definition of “passing?” The dinos we are talking about are extinct, they didn’t “pass” for long. A+ creatures things like alligators, ants, and crabs. On average a given species survives around a million years before going extinct. How long do you have to exist before you’re considered a successful species?

Excuse me but you are interrupting my dopamine flow. Your response appears to be neither a meme, rage bait, justice boner, nor even a pun. I hope you learn from this experience and do better.

Disclaimer that I am completely talking out of my ass and speculating, but I have a personal theory.

COVID has been around long enough to have two interesting effects.

1. Almost everyone has gotten it by now. Some of us got it really bad, and/or acquired long-term secondary conditions. Some of this likely caused impaired cognitive function.
2. Kids had their school schedules totally fucked up for years, and those kids are now the young teens on the internet. Young teens on the internet are already by default a disruptive demographic, but now add the effect of years of desocialization and missed education.

One of my favorite Redditisms was picking out incredibly obvious sarcasm with massive downvotes. Bonus points if replied to with a huge angry essay.

And due to the voting patterns, I learned to be suspicious of my own comments that were highly upvoted. I started to see it as a bad smell. My best work was the controversial stuff.

I was going to say Worf and Alexander but then I realized that it’s really Worf becoming a dad that shows us the transformed Worf.

TNG in particular did a great job of stretching the characters by building them up to a definitive version and then showing us, in one way or another, a variant or situation that completely shatters that image. Data and Lore. Alternate Riker. Broken Picard. Troi and Lwaxana. Worf and also Worf but later.

used for things it wasn’t created for

I think Python gets a point here, as it is very good at doing what it was created for.
Javascript even sucks at its stated goal.

I think this one is pretty confined to my region (southwestern USA) but we use Otto as the moniker of a generic stupid person too, but probably for a different reason: Otto is Oblivious to the Obvious

1. Area 51 - a real USAF research facility where cutting edge aircraft were tested in the mid 20th century. People in the area truly did see Unidentified Flying Objects, in the sense that they saw aircraft the likes of which they had until then believed were impossible.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lazar who single-handedly reinvigorated the UFO conspiracy theories long after Area 51 had concluded most of its Cold War era secret tests.

Gandalf isn’t a superhero because he’s more like an angel. He played a part in the creation of the world, and is entirely inhuman. He’s a primordial spirit masquerading in a corporeal form.

Luke Skywalker is much closer to a superhero because he’s a mortal man who was inadvertently blessed with incredibly rare powers and chooses to use them for good.

The Johnston & Murphy XC4 line has become my go-to. They are not cheap, and the selection is limited, but the construction and versatility can’t be beat.

I’ve had my oldest pair for over 4 years, with no functional degradation at all, and minimal signs of wear (minor creasing in the leather, hardly worth mentioning). They’re casual and comfortable enough for everyday wear, and stylish enough for business events. Easily the best value in a shoe I’ve ever gotten.