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.

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.

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.

Thanks, that’s helpful.

Telekinesis. It’s not even a context

Telekinesis (especially at the “multiple tons” level) is an extremely flexible tool, a weapon, and a defense. There’s an endless amount of creative stuff you can do with it.

It can also still be used somewhat discreetly which is important.

Flight would probably be the most fun, though.

Question from someone outside the US who’s genuinely curious about why law-abiding citizens feel the need to carry guns to begin with:

If you’re aware of this, how often are you carrying a gun in the first place? When/Why?

Following what you say, there’s obviously the scenario where you have to defend your life (not your property).

On the other hand, as I see it, the victim in the article would not have benefited from a gun in the car and the odds of a shell-shocked BF turning the whole thing into an actual shootout would’ve been >0.

I’m not trying to argue crime statistics or morals here, I’m genuinely interested in a gun owner’s perspective.

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.

A subjective perspective from outside the US:

If I follow your argument that illegal firearms are the problem, I still believe that the amount of illegal firearms in circulation is a direct function of the legal arms market’s size.

And as long as the threshold for acquiring a firearm is low, so is the threshold for injuring someone with one.

This goes for a criminal using an illegal one in a robbery, a frustrated teenager emptying their uncle’s poorly secured gun locker for a school schooting or even for suicides: An abundance of guns makes these things easier, so they happen more often.

Mandating stricter controls, safety training or weapon-lockup procedures can alleviate this some, but any process that relies on a lot of not strictly organized individuals to be applied will be fallible and permeable by nature.

Selling more weapons to private citizens will always lead to more gun-related deaths and injuries.

The only way to reliably reduce the amount of weapons in circulation is to sell less of them (and keep removing illegal ones).

Naturally, this is unpopular with an industry that relies on selling as many as possible.

(I’m also aware that something like this would have to be a very slow process. Even if the pool of legal weapons were drained overnight, all those illegal guns would still be around.)

Right.

Neither is bigger. Even “∞ x ∞” is not bigger than “∞”. Classical mathematics sort of break down in the realm of infinity.

In particular I really like the episodes that deal with interacting with other civilizations, diplomacy, and exploration more-so than say, an anomaly episode.

In light of this, and since you were able to work through the not-so-stellar episodes of ST, I’d strongly argue that Babylon 5 should be your next stop.

It has a slow start, some more mixed episodes, dated special effects and both main characters (they switched after season 1) are plain “heroic American leader” types, but virtually everything else is top tier even today. An excellent political plot, humor, great characters with genuine growth.

Just be aware that it is different from DS9 (personally, I like both).

Battlestar Galactica (the new one) and The Expanse are probably worth pointing out, too. To me, they’re the best high-production-value sci-fi shows that didn’t sacrifice their plot. Nevertheless, both are far more grim than the shows you’ve mentioned and overall “feel” different.

I genuinely like this idea, because it would allow to reach both goals.

The problem I see is that this would probably go down the same as the bodycam idea, with inconvenient recordings vanishing due to “technical issues”.

You’d need an independent third party doing life recording and delayed release. Subjectively, the US don’t have a great track record with these.

Easier idea: Just publish last week’s encryption key. Probably won’t happen because some tech supplier will lobby for a more expensive solution.

Found the morality relativist.

Except at that point the Mafia are somehow supposedly the good guys?

(Warning: Might be coded by German extremism culture)

Right-wing extremists burn immigrants. Left-wing extremists burn cars. The latter is worse, because it could be my car while I don’t own any immigrants.

(from the Cangaroo Chronicles)

??

I’m no expert on the technical side of the protocol, but my BT devices only ever connect to sources they’ve been paired with.

Why would this be more difficult for hearing aids than for headphones?

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?

Scientists are human and fallible.

“Professional Science” is just as vulnerable to “eh, I know what I’m doing”, bias, politics, funding, feuds, ignoring details-that-dont-fit and shortcuts, as the rest of the human experience.

That’s why we see “breakthrough discoveries” falling apart to scrutiny on a regular basis and new facts/theories are only gradually accepted into the “body of accepted knowledge” after lots of peer reviewing, reproduction, general chewing-it-over and when the old “that can’t be true” generation has retired/died.

On the other hand, quick and dirty gut-check experiments and goofing around with a new idea are a valuable way to easily check for falsification and narrow down what actual, rigorous tests might have to look like. They’re also a major source of lab accidents.

In the context of the Manhattan Project, the demon core is a perfect example of this.