Supplying people with basic life necessities should not need to garner a profit.

This goes for food, water, shelter, but also electricity, healthcare, public transportation, and internet.

(Coincidentally, most of these are basic human rights.)

Society as a whole experiences net benefit (even am economic one) from those, so society as a whole should fund them.

Yes, this requires taxes.

I’d still disagree.

The core premise is that average worker productivity on eclipse day will dip by 1/24th (assuming 20 mins of “eclipse break” on a 8 hour workday).

And that’s BS on several fronts.

For one, many people have taken days off (PTL or similar) or move their break to the eclipse, which is already accounted for in the averaged productivity statistic.

Second, people in positions they can’t just leave (factory workers on an assembly line, cashiers etc.) will often have to skip on the eclipse.

And people who can leave (I’m thinking of white collar desk jobs here), are often spending a similar amount of worktime off-desk on other days, too, for a myriad of only indirectly productive reasons (networking, thinking on a thorny problem over a smoke…).

The formula assumes

• that all of the American workforce spends every minute of their 8 hour day actively working on their desk/station/etc.
• that every minute they don’t, is “lost”, work-wise.
• that all of that workforce is on the job during eclipse time, but will take a paid break during the actual eclipse

All of which are questionable at best.

I actually don’t think their logic is that implausible.

Obviously, it’s not about giving people more time for baby making.

But (just as an arbitrary example) if you’re spending two hours per day driving to and from work, slashing that down to a single hour can massively reduce a family’s overall stress level.

And “Less stressed people have more room in their lives for bigger families” is an equation that doesn’t sound that dumb.

Obviously, there might be better ways to go about this. Or there actually might not.

There’s definitely more impactful ways to improve people’s work-life balance, but most of those aren’t as easily implemented.

In an ideal world, they might have done extensive studies into why people don’t have more babies, and then selected an efficient parameter to tune.

(As a rule, investing into public transportation will usually pay socio-economic dividends either way, as long as it’s done at least halfway decently.)

In a less ideal world, massive lobbying by the very people profiting off this investment first might have been involved.

Overall, this whole affair has decent odds of becoming some sort of net benefit overall.

OK, I’ll bite:

You appreciate civilization because you’ve lived in nature.

What’s the most danger you’ve lived in

People die of starvation in a world that literally has enough food for everyone - because speculating with food is more profitable than feeding them.

People die of diseases that have known cures with low production cost - because the market will only finance medical research if the resulting drug comes with a net gain price tag.

There are literal wars being fought and people being shot for economic gains.

Humanity doesn’t have a resource problem. It has a distribution problem.

And the current method of deciding distribution of goods is capitalism.

that you think getting rich is equivalent to predation?

Genuine question: Where do you believe a millionaire’s millions ultimately come from?

There is only so much net economic gain one can create with their own two hands. Everything beyond that is created by other people’s hands.

The genre is usually divided into “soft” and “hard” fantasy.

Cyberpunk is generally considered hard fantasy, as is stuff like The Expanse or Interstellar.

Star Wars is unabashedly soft SciFi, it’s a straight Fantasy story in space.

Star Trek is a half-breed - it pays some lip service to scientific “plausibility”, but much of it stretches that envelope beyond the breaking point. Scientific accuracy was never the point of the series to begin with.

The problem isn’t straight-out corruption.

It’s wonky incentivation.

Judges that are not measured by how many people they send to jail will always be, on average, less trigger-happy than cops who are.

Depending on your definition, this actually is not peak performance.

Subways are.

Obviously, the tunnels are absurdly expensive, but nothing moves as many people as quickly around a city as a subway.

They’re also extremely reliable, meaning people are even more likely to actually use them, and their above-ground footprint is essentially zero.

This isn’t about guys’n’gals.

This is simpky about how people work:

If your peers (friends, colleagues, family) have an opinion (any opinion), their default expectation is that you share that opinion - this is what being a peer is mostly about.

You can demonstrate solidarity by agreeing - this is virtually always the safe option.

You can demonstrate backbone by disagreeing - this can generate respect or animosity.

You can refuse to weigh in - this is mostly a middle ground between the two above.

How it actual shakes out in reality will depend on a myriad of factors, many of which you’re not even consciously aware of.

Thus, this random internet stranger can give you only three pieces of advice:

• Trust your instincts on how to handle this. Your subconscious is very well wired to navigate social situations as best as possible.

• If you ever change your opinion or “change your opinion”, announce it clearly and give/make up a reason. People disrespect people who are inconsistent, but they respect people who can admit to mistakes / learn.

• Sometimes, you can’t win. Sometimes, someone will be pissed off, no matter what you do. It’s no fault of yours, some situations are just not salvageable to begin with.

Suburbs can’t be a ponzi scheme

Genuine question: Why not?

While the article indeed barely touched on its headline, the way I’ve seen the “suburb infrastructure upkeep problem” described seems indeed reminiscent of a ponzi scheme.

The way I understand it:

Suburbs have a relatively low initial cost (for the city) compared to the taxes they generate. However, their maintenance cost is relatively high because Suburbs are huge.

Thus, US cities have long had a policy of paying the rising cost of their older Suburbs by creating new Suburbs - which is pretty analogous to a Ponzi scheme.

I usually just copy paste historical (flawed) stuff I find interesting.

While I like goofing around with stuff like “modeling functioning government”, I believe it distracts from the PC’s stories (and leads to ideological discussions at the table.)

The ability to extrapolate what something would taste/feel like from mere looks is a learned one.

Toddlers don’t have it yet, which is why they’re stuffing everything into their mouths.

You might not consciously remember licking a carpet, but the part of you that’s holding up the “dusty”, “textured” and “CRUMBS!!” signs does.

To clarify:

Even if an unambiguous majority of Texas would say “we’d like to turn Texas into an independent country”, you’d rather force them to stay by force of arms?

C3 talks are available online for quite some time after the actual event, so you might still be able to watch it then.

Anyone who hits enter on a dd command without triple-checking it gets exactly what they deserve.

Alien intelligence is not required to follow human reasoning.

The Lords of Alpha Centauri could run a long-term social engineering program on Earth because they believe capitalism, conflict and social darwinism are objectively Good for You and we need to be purged of the folly of humanistic ideology before we can be allowed to join the galactic civilization market.

Or because they find our struggles entertaining.

What I can tell you is that no rational spacefaring civilization would need to resort to social engineering if they just want to kill us. Just toss a bit (or a lot) of spare delta v on a sufficiently large asteroid (or five) and humanity goes the way of the dinosaur.

(Different story if they want us dead, but want to make it look like suicide because of the space police.)

My take:

Most things (especially abstract ones) that exists beyond the scope of the small-hunter-gatherer-tribe setup our brain is developed for: Quantum mechanics, climate change, racism, relativity, spherical earth, …

What separates us from the dogs is that we’ve developed abstract analytical tools (language, stories, mathematics, the scientific method,…) that allow us to infer the existence of those things and, eventually try to predict, model and manipulate them.

But we don’t “grasp” them as we’d grasp a tangled leash, which is why it is even possible for medically sane people to doubt them.

I’d argue that you can even flip this around into a definition:

If a person with no medical mental deficiencies can honestly deny a fact (as in: without consciously lying), then that fact is either actually wrong, or it falls into the “tangled leash” category.

This.

There are already people who are doing selfish/immoral/illegal things because they can get away with it.

And there are people who don’t.

Giving either of those superpowers would (mostly) only increase the magnitude of things they would or would not do.

That’s a fairly good point, but I’d argue that it’d depend on how subtle the application of your superpower is.

My overall assumption would be that any application that doesn’t raise red flags will probably require enough work and moderation that it’d be more like a job - but it could be a very well-paying job.

I.e. for the time freeze: You could acquire a well-paid reputation as a freelancer troubleshooter for a certain type of WFH desk job (analyst? translator?) that can finish any overdue project in record time. Or, easier, become a stage magician.

You’d probably still eventually wind up in a situation where you watch some sort of unacceptable crisis on the news and think “well, I could do something about this” - be it removing a mass-murdering dictator or dismantling a hostage situation.

I genuinely believe it’d depend on the person.

First: Most people who use cheats in video games eventually either stop using them or stop playing the game altogether, because it gets boring.

Many people who win the lottery get a bit of splurging out of their system, then invest the rest into financial security but keep living their loves mostly like before.

So there genuinely might be some people who will eventually settle into just fixing their most glaring problems and then just keep living “regularly”, possibly with the occasional minor indulgence.

Then there’s people who are willing to go to extreme lengths to enforce their beliefs even without superpowers - imagine super-powered criminals and terrorists, but also super-powered firefighters, doctors or scientists.

And then there’s everything in between.

So, if it’s just one (or maybe five) people getting superpowers, it’d probably be a roll of the dice. Maybe there’d just be one person going through life easier. Maybe we’d get lucky and someone solves a major problem for us. Maybe we get unlucky and every president that doesn’t reinstate segregation gets assassinated.

If it’s more people getting powers… well, there’s already a lot of fiction exploring that in-depth.

Good to know, thanks.