Let us know how you like them.

By the way, I post most of my notes in the Science Fiction community - both individually as I read them, and as an annual compendium - if that’s of interest.

Recently finished my 40th book of the year, and it’s pretty hard to pick a favorite. It probably has to be a reread of Gateway by Frederick Pohl. Such an amazing book. Here are my spoiler-free notes:

• In Earth’s future, tunnels are found on Venus that contain alien artifacts left behind hundreds of thousands of years ago. Later an asteroid is found that is riddled with tunnels and studded with nearly a thousand small ships, most of which are in working order. The ships will travel faster than light to a preset destination, and return automatically, but no one knows where the destination will be, and a significant percentage of ships either never return or return with the crew dead. Of those that do return, many return with alien technology or data on valuable locations, making the crew very wealthy. This has set off a sort of gold rush, with people spending everything they have to get to the “Gateway" asteroid and gamble their lives on the chance to get rich. The story is told through the eyes of one such man, who has gotten to Gateway, but then is too scared to take a mission. This is an amazing book. I read it originally in the 80s (it was written in the 70s), and I believe this was my first reread since then. I can’t recommend it strongly enough.

For a first read that wasn’t the latest book in a series, I might have to say Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell. Here are my spoiler -free notes for that one:

• It’s a love story, except the main character is a shape-shifting, man-eating monster, and she falls in love with a woman who helps her, thinking she’s an injured human. I really liked this book a lot. It’s clever, and it has a certain joy and goodness to it, even though there’s a lot of terrible things going on all through it.

I recently finished book 3. Fun series.

Why would you want to live beyond whatever age you are now? If tomorrow you were diagnosed with, say, arthritis, would you want to die?

I’m in my 60s. I’m enjoying life. Why would I want to die?

The only people I’ve know who wanted to die either had problems with depression or were suffering from painful, incurable diseases.

I live in the US, in Southern California, which is one of the more expensive parts of the country. $2k a month isn’t a lot in that it would be hard to live on it, but I made pretty decent money before I retired and it’s more than I could have comfortably given away.

Remember that anyone here talking about hourly wages is talking about gross income and not net income, and if you give money away it comes out of net income.

Let’s say someone was making $100 an hour, which is $200k a year, and fairly decent money. That’s $16.6k a month. But after taxes that’s more like $10k. Most people making that kind of money have a mortgage, car payments, home and car insurance. Also, employer sponsored medical usually only pays like two thirds of the insurance costs. And they likely have money coming out of their check into a retirement account. So the disposable income is going to be a lot less and $2k isn’t going to be a trivial percentage.

But if the person is making, say, twice that amount, then it’s starting to be more trivial. Not a ton of people are making $400k or more a year.

Fault has nothing to do with surviving. That’s like saying the pedestrian would be at fault if he lived.

I don’t believe they generally prosecute the dead folks, but it doesn’t mean they weren’t at fault.

It’s just people justifying their beliefs. As I said to someone else, I worked for decades with extremely smart people. A pretty good percentage of atheists, but lots of people who also believed whatever religion they were raised in. All of them made their peace with being scientists and being religious, one way or another.

trying to prove the existence of God

Which he couldn’t/didn’t do, giving credence to my position that you don’t come to belief in god through logic.

Look, I spent 40 years working with literal rocket scientists, I understand that smart people can be religious. Literally zero of them were raised without religion and came to it because of logical deduction. Smart people will either try to justify things they were raised to believe, or they’ll just say that their religious beliefs come from a faith that isn’t tied to logic. But rocket scientists who were raised Hindu will do the same with their pantheon as Christians do with their god.

I didn’t say it made him dumb, I implied that faith doesn’t flow from logic. Plus it’s a little problematic to say that our great minds were people of faith when, for much of our history, not being a person of faith could mean death. But it’s true, there were folks like Thomas Aquinas who were brilliant and more than average religious.

Certainly can’t disagree with him there

I’d say he must be very logical except, you know…

I have not. I was raised catholic and consumed a lot of catholic stuff in my early years. I’m an atheist now and just can’t get interested in any of it.

I like the idea of a technologically literate pope.

I can see it for something like a news community, but not something like Ask Lemmy. Half the ones from Reddit are people asking for advice for their situation - how does it help to answer it here? It’s dumb.

I wouldn’t mind a bot that scraped the top 10 posts from ask reddit every day and reposted them to ask lemmy

We actually had that for a while and I hated it. I’ll respond to an ask Lemmy post because I think the person asking actually wants answers. If the person asking isn’t even on this site, why would I reply? I blocked the bot account that was doing that.

I often rehearse conversations in my head, not so that I’m following some sort of script, but so I can think about what the person I’m going to be talking to is likely to say or think about what I’ve said. I’ve found it helps me listen to my own thoughts more through someone else’s ears, helps me think about ways to clarify what I’ve said, and helps me tailor my words to the specific person.

People have egg allergies and can’t get vaccines unfortunately. Then you have the nutters that won’t take vaxxes and then here we are.

The people with allergies are a tiny fraction of the population, and they’re one of the reasons why everyone else should get vaccinated. The other reason is that none of the vaccines are 100 percent effective. The tiny percentage of the population who can’t get vaccinated, and the people for whom the vaccine didn’t fully protect, are much safer if the other folks are vaccinated because the virus can’t get a foothold, so exposure the up being negligible. Say someone comes in from another country that has an active infection. If all the people who that person encounters are protected, then the virus stops with that person.

The problem is that the number of people buying into the anti vaccine garbage is now nontrivial, so that herd immunity is out the window, and these previously well controlled viruses are now able to spread.

And there are people who do it maliciously, but it’s also pretty common for well-meaning advocates to do it before they learn. That seems to be OPs case, at least on the surface of it.

They both used to raid the cat box if unsupervised.

The dog version of almond roca.

You know, I’m starting to get the impression that this Trump guy is kind of a jerk.