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.
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.
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.
Except at that point the Mafia are somehow supposedly the good guys?
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.
I had something vaguely similar happen to me.
We got called out of the line for a manual luggage inspection because, as a surprisingly bored security agent informed us, X-ray showed a knife of about a foot length in our luggage.
We had no idea what they were talking about.
We were half-way through unpacking the whole pack when my SO lit up and asked “could it be my ice skates?”
Agent took a look at the X-ray, nods, and lets us pack it back up without any further checking.
Overall, turned out harmlessly, but the sheer confusion of where that supposed knife had come from, combined with how blasé that security person was about the whole affair from start to finish stuck in my mind.
C3 talks are available online for quite some time after the actual event, so you might still be able to watch it then.
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.)
Good to know, thanks.
Whatsapp is encrypted. The problem is the Metadata they want - i.e. your whole address book.
I do not agree to Facebook having my phone number, but if you use WA and have my number, they have it, too - even if I don’t use WA myself.
If you can convince your family to switch, use Signal or Matrix.
Otherwise, use Shelter on your phone with a limited, WA-ony address book.
I’m fairly certain that’s the same area where wild hogs no longer find enough food in the wild and are currently enthusiastically reclaiming said golf courses.
I, for one, am rooting for the four-legged pigs on this one.
I’m aware.
I just didn’t want to go into detail with this particular can of worms.
There is a plausible economic incentive to do this:
Reputation.
This happens less in markets with few, big sellers and lots of customers locked into long-term contracts (like ISPs), but it does happen occasionally in high competition markets where customers can take their business elsewhere easily.
Restaurants are a good example - where I live, a host might hand out a round of after-meal shots on the house to encourage a big table of uncomplicated guests to come again.
Hypothesis: what matters here is a social toolbox for engaging with “attractive”/compatible women in a non-romantic/sexual way.
I.e. someone who, even as a teenager, had lots of female friends, is likely to have a learned how to deal with them as persons, beyond “I’d like to hit that”.
(Paradoxically, such a person is more likely to find a romantic partner, because they might have lots of M-F acquaintances/friendships that can potentially become something more.)
Someone who never learned that, can only interact with (to them) attractive women through the lens of “I’d like to hit that”, which has a much higher risk of ending in failure.
If someone in the second category was always raised on the values of romantic success being a requirement for a non-failed life, and possibly with a touch of chauvinism/misogyny, they might wind up caught up in a frustrating loop of failure.
This is how incels can happen.
A landlord and their tenant(s) are at a natural conflict of interest to begin with.
Also, for most tenants, the rising costs for many goods and services associated to housing are bundled into rent, so to them, it’s their landlord who’s jacking up prices and being frugal with repairs etc.
Next, the term “landlords” encompasses not only uncle Mike who invested his life savings in two apartments to secure his retirement, but also the millionaire who owns a dozen houses and the middle manager who doesn’t even own the units they’re managing but has to represent a large company.
So landlords make for easy targets of frustration to begin with.
A landlord who is, on top of that, intent on not only covering costs (including their own), but wants to create generational wealth get rich(er) quickly, will have to squeeze their tenants more.
Remember: wealth isn’t created. It’s extracted.
(Yes, there’s money genuinely being generated somewhere in the realms of credits and banking, but my LL isn’t being paid by a bank. They’re being paid by me.)
Arguably, that’s actually plausible
No one claimed the Alliance were free from casual racism. They may be trying, but their personal culture was formed by decades of imperial rule.
Those medals are for “command staff” only. Han is the captain of the MF and Luke is the acting squad leader of Red Squad (you might notice that the veteran, who missed his shot but survived, doesn’t get a medal, either.)
OK, I’ll bite:
You appreciate civilization because you’ve lived in nature.
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.
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.