Wym? You mean you don't like typing out unsigned long long?

main =

This message was brought to you by the Haskell gang

let () =

This message was brought to you by the OCaml gang

This message was brought to you by the Python gang (only betas check __name__, assert your dominance and force every import to run your main routine /s)

As a cis man, I think very lowly of men-only groups. Usually (from my admittedly limited experience) if a group goes out of their way to identify as "men-only," the people there tend to be the kind of men who are very misogynistic and generally insufferable to be around, even for other men. Any group genuinely focused on the hobby or culture they claim to identify with wouldn't really care about your gender.

Women-only groups though, I tend to sympathize with and respect a lot more, and IMO they are the symptom of the West being a heavily male dominated society rather than an innate desire among women to be exclusionary. If the world didn't revolve around men and had genuine gender equality, there probably wouldn't be a need for many women only groups either, but that's unfortunately not the world we live in.

I can't really speak about trans/nonbinary exclusion though because I have no personal experience being on the business end of it. I try to only participate in groups where they don't care about your gender to begin with.

how was the transition phase between the current and former societies? I assume there were multiple huge wars to create it.

Unitist revolutions tend to be extremely violent and lead to the deaths of many, mostly because the individuals adamant on continuing to hunt prey tend not to have many moral qualms about killing members of their own taxa who are trying to get them to not hunt either. Unitist revolutionaries often start off with an idealist concept of "predator conversion" where you convince the remaining predator population in your carnivore species to plant based alternatives, but, in a real revolutionary war it generally very quickly turns into a "predator purge" where they try to kill you so you end up "having to" kill them in response. Helped (or not helped) by the fact that a carnivore species or taxon in a position to initiate a Unitist revolution tend to already have a well defined internal split where the scientists, engineers, and other intellectuals are generally on the Unitist side and the "brawn over brains" individuals tend to be on the Trophist side, so in an all out war the Unitists tend to have the technological advantage, even when they are physically much less experienced with paw to paw combat. Also, due to the fact that predators will fight tooth and claw against the banning of predation in their species/taxa, the revolutionary wars tend to only end when almost all the hardline predators are dead, hence a "predator purge." This is either convenient for the Unitists who won't have to deal with a lot of predators when setting up their multispecies society, or an utter betrayal of their pacifist ideals to form a Unitist society by killing all who disagree with it, or both, depending on how you think.

I also wonder if the animal life spans are longer now thanks to the technology.

Absolutely, and while I tend to keep the ages of the animals ambiguous, it is heavily implied that pretty much all species have at least human-scale lifespans and reproduction rates (mainly to make storytelling easier because really short lifespans aren't conducive to complex character development). Even for animals like small rodents where it's an orders of magnitude increase in lifespan and decrease in birth rate. It's also implied that this change is part of the reason that drove different species to Unitism, because the natural food web breaks down when your prey grow and reproduce at a similar rate as you.

They're talking about your commute on the highway to some office park in the middle of nowhere.

The Elon aspect has already been covered by other commenters, so purely against Starlink's technology as a primary method for internet, ignoring Musk:

It has an enormous carbon footprint. Launching stuff into space takes a ton of energy, and SpaceX rockets are entirely powered by fossil fuels. Most of the rocket body is just massive tanks of fossil fuels, and because they don't fly very far from Earth, most of that ends up in the atmosphere. The internet already has a significant carbon footprint, and adding this layer when we absolutely don't have to is stupid. We can build A LOT of terrestrial radio infrastructure for less environmental impact, covering pretty much all rural areas. Microwave dishes pointing to towers is superior for rural internet in pretty much every way, including latency which is Starlink's main selling point over older satellite internet systems, and wired internet is still the best option in every benchmark possible so using Starlink in urban places where you can effectively supply wired internet is stupid.

But what about people who live in super remote areas where ground based infrastructure is unfeasible? Well, we've already had internet capable satellites for much longer, and Starlink is an inferior satellite technology in terms of efficiency compared to satellites that orbit much higher up. They fly so low that most of the time they're doing nothing because they're flying over the ocean or places no one is using the service. With geostationary satellites, each satellite can "see" a larger portion of the Earth, so not only do you need fewer satellites while still providing global coverage, each satellite is in use much more of the time even when they're flying over unpopulated areas because they cover so much more area, so say, ships and wildlife researchers in the jungle can stay connected to a single satellite instead of needing a dense web of satellites flying by overhead to deliver continuous coverage.

Flying so low also causes them to experience much more atmospheric drag, meaning they have a much shorter life. So you need more launches in total to replace satellites and maintain global coverage, massively increasing the carbon footprint. You also further pollute the atmosphere with vaporized satellites (which contain some nasty heavy metals BTW) when they run out of propellant and fall back to Earth. So not only do you need fewer satellites with geostationary orbit, each satellite also has a longer life.

The antenna you'd need on the ground is also much simpler, just a dish instead of an expensive, fragile, and power hungry phased array. Pretty important for truly off grid people.

It's also bad for national security (again, speaking on national security implications of the technology in general because as a Canadian I couldn't care less about US national security) to rely on it as a primary way of getting Internet because, as we've just learned, other countries can just shoot down your satellites when they fly over their territory. Not helped by the fact that they're so close to the ground. It would be a lot harder to attack infrastructure in a country's own territory. And if you're not the country operating it, you're also at the mercy of that country because they can just deny you access.

Why? Launching shit into space is hard as fuck and has an enormous carbon footprint. You can build A LOT of cellular infrastructure for the same cost and impact.

And building your internet infrastructure in your own territory instead of floating in space will make it a lot harder for China to shoot with their badass microwave canon.

And I'm just a common idiot, but I'd wager upgrading satellite infrastructure is going to be slightly more expensive than terrestrial infrastructure. There's a reason we're still using a lot of satellite infrastructure from the 1980s.

his Asperger’s

As an autistic person, don't you FUCKING DARE defend his use of that fucking card for the horrible way he acts.

Same applies to all social networks and MS Windows, right

YES

What about cars?

/c/fuckcars

Just wondering how far this govt coercion hatred extends into everyday life.

A lot

Which is also fucking horrible. Fuck the people using Starlink because HURR DURR FAST INTERNET. Yeah just further pollute the atmosphere with vaporized satellites why don't you.

Just one of the reasons removable batteries need to come back. Imagine if you could just choose between the lighter lithium ion and the more durable lithium iron phosphate for your use case.

Do they have their own inventions?

Absolutely! Dietary enzyme supplements are an entirely animal creation. Humans don't need them to go vegan but carnivores like cats, dogs, mustelids, etc do.

Quantum interfaces marked their surpassing of humanity in technological development. These are devices that can arbitrarily interact with and manipulate quantum systems and in theory can do literally anything.

They also developed ways of managing their ecosystem now that predation is off the table. Unitist ecosystems are prosperous and balanced because they take great care in managing it beyond just having predators to control prey population.

What happens to things like the meat industry?

They were destroyed in the various revolutions that led to species becoming Unitist. The path to unitism for former predators like cats, ironically, is filled with violence and bloodshed as the individuals still determined to continue hunting viciously fought back against the individuals trying to move their species/taxa beyond it.

Makes sense, I was wondering, wouldn’t the predator groups still be on top in this world due to their more ruthless and competitive nature? Do different groups have their own agendas and motivations for wanting to return to the food chain system of old?

They are on top of their various Trophist societies, but the Unitists are significantly ahead of them in terms of technology, so they can't really go on the offensive against them because they'll get their asses handed to them. Unitists are pacifist and don't go around looking to start wars, but they're fully prepared to show anyone who tries to hunt them their full technological prowess.

Trophism is largely comprised of former apex predatoes like wolves, bears, etc. Not to say there are no Unitist apex predators, though.

Part of the reason Unitism arose primarily in physically smaller was their need to develop technology to defend themselves from the larger predators. Working together allowed them to develop technology faster, which eventually led to the idea of Unitism.