Highly addictive smartphone game, playable only when the phone detects (gps, accelerometer, Bluetooth beacons) that the player is on a train/bus/tram (Working title: Pokémon Shut The **** Up). Bonus: game becomes unplayable if phone can hear that people are talking. Bonus bonus: synergistic use of conversation detection alongside Bluetooth “exposure notification“.
greylag
Karma: 237
This is not the bidet I was expecting.
Thank you for the comprehensive answer!
Last Thursday, I realized that none of the people who ever hurt me did it because there was anything fundamentally wrong with me. I don’t mean that as in “realized intellectually”...
Huh.
Ok, maybe this is like reversing advice, but that seems like quite a thing to realise. Even on an intellectual level. Unless “fundamentally” is doing a lot of work. I mean, suppose I got into an argument with a family member where I said something abrasive which they took personally then said something hurtful to me. Is this not about me being abrasive? Is being abrasive not something (fundamentally?) wrong with me?
I think the easiest strategy is to look at those people and groups that are defamed and censored. If you know that establishment gatekeeping doesn’t want you looking a particular way then there’s bound to be something worth looking at there
That… doesn’t feel super-valuable. For a start, sampling the political opinions of people who regard “the establishment“ as the outgroup is going to disagree very strongly with such ideas as ”We live safe and comfortable lives in a world of great privilege and things are only getting better by the day”.
Other shunned things: alternative medicine? (Vitamin D supplementation is an obvious outlier here, may be very valuable, and is at least cheap and safe).
So if it isn’t ethical to allow the virus to spread, nor is it ethical to lock down your population to stop it, then it’s…
(epistemic status: assuming good faith)
… “test, trace, treat and isolate”?
I’m surprised at these EROI figures: that solar PV is producing energy at very low levalised cost but utterly pathetic EROEI fails the sniff test. A quick scoot through Wikipedia finds a methodological argument (comments on https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544213000492?via%3Dihub).
If you impose a large carbon tax, or other effective global policy of austerity that reduces fossil fuel use without replacing that energy somehow, you’re just making the whole world poor
For the case that our civilisation’s energy efficiency is substantially below optimal, see [Factor 4](https://sustainabilitydictionary.com/2006/02/17/factor-4/) (Lovins & Lovins, 1988)
Wearing a mask is vital to preventing Covid-19 infection
I’m wearing a mask because I think they are a reasonable intervention and in the hope that me wearing one encourages other people to wear one. (It sounds like they’re more effective at protecting everyone else than protecting the wearer). I‘m not sure which simulacra level this is (1.1, game theoretic axis?)
estimate the chance of being infected by an infected household member as 30%
Given how contagious this disease seems to be, why is this not higher? Am I misunderstanding what this is measuring? Given you are uninfected, and someone in your household is infected, you have a 1 in 3 chance of contracting Covid?
This may not be entry-level, but Axelrod’s The Evolution of Co-operation might be an enlightening deep/broad dive.
Not sure how relevant this is, but I think it was Lindsay Doe, of Sexplanations, who pointed out how desperately few role models/examples there are of being assertive in negotiating your sexual needs. In fiction it generally happens by authorial fiat. She praised Two Night Stand as a rare exception. You’d think the poly community would have something to say on this. I don’t recall The Ethical Slut having much to say about this.
Fantasy isn’t reality. I’ll happily watch Hugh Laurie playing House, M.D, but I’d like my actual doctor to be a better human (or at least to convincingly pretend to be one)
According to Harvard //www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/if-youve-been-exposed-to-the-coronavirus
We also don’t yet know at what point during the course of illness a test becomes positive… you will get a false negative test result [on a swab test] 100% of the time on the day you are exposed to the virus. (There are so few viral particles in your nose or saliva so soon after infection that the test cannot detect them.)… About 40% of the time if you are tested four days after exposure to the virus
So this sounds like, with a smear or swab or saliva test, you’d want to wait up to 4 days after potential exposure, and a false negative remains possible.
I believe I’ve seen elsewhere that the saliva test is comparable to a swab in accuracy, but is more foolproof (because you don’t have to take a sample from your throat).
I think he calls them ”Mediocristan” and “Extremistan” respectively
Verifying that the thing scrubs CO2 at the expected rate is definitely a good idea. Verifying the behavioural effects is much harder—you’d need to avoid unblinding, and ideally have several different people with varying levels of age, fitness etc, and then you’d get affected by weather, unless your house is very well sealed...
How portable can this scrubber be? If you’re somewhere cold and not getting enough air at night and it’s your house, you could install a heat recovery ventilator. There is evidently a big market for portable air conditioners, despite their inefficiency; the description of this thing (water, air, pumps out sludge) sounds a lot like a washing machine.
It’s possible that autonomy changes everything, but things somewhat like this have existed or been talked about:
“Modular cars” have been attempted
There have been various attempts at swapping the *battery* of an electric vehicle, including by Tesla. (As I understand it, obstacles include: the design advantages of making the battery a structural part of the car chassis; sophisticated battery management that involves “plumbing” the battery into the car’s HVAC system). Swapping the battery seems a major move in this direction because the battery is a large amount of the *value* of an electric vehicle. (Conversely: while the vehicle is parked, connect the battery to the electrical grid, and the battery can earn money by arbitraging Watt-hours over time)
Obviously, such things as RVs and Winnebagos and caravans exist
Cargo containers (and truck/tractors/semitrailers) are something a bit like this, but for cargo
In my view, one big disadvantage of a privately-owned car is that that car’s shape has to work for journeys in town, long road trips, vacations, etc, where actually you might prefer something small or shared in town (like a microcar, bicycle, or transit bus) and something roomier for a long journey (or bigger still if you’re travelling with friends & family).
Well, here are some ways robotaxis *could* contribute to solving urban mobility:
One limiting factor of cars? Congestion. Robot cars, communicating with each other, don’t need the safe headways for slow human reaction times, and can—potentially—co-ordinate themselves around gridlock.
Trying to travel around on a bicycle? Dumb meatbag drivers may run into you; will robots be better at that? We certainly *hope* so. Same for walking. Also...
Parking space! Robotaxis don’t have to park right next to the destination—so robotaxis are at least somewhat compatible with high density development, more so than private cars
If single-occupant cars aren’t providing adequate density, there’s nothing to stop the use of adequate-sized buses—something between the size of a minibus and a transit bus—at least out of downtown to “railheads” (the “last mile” concept alluded to).
How feasible is any of this? Hard to tell, too many hypotheticals. The “radical urbanist” article is only interested in scenarios in which robotaxis are completely ineffective (don’t work, too expensive) or completely disastrous (cause ultimate gridlock, which no government is capable of doing anything about).
There is a lot of commonality between this post and the idea of churnalism, which was coined by a journalist, and appears well substantiated. There may be a difference in emphasis or intent—churnalism isn’t about deliberately manipulating the reader, but PR is, and churnalism enables this.
Hm.
What if you read the story as if you were in the 1920s, and less accustomed to short stories peopled by irredeemable spherical bastards than we now are? (Especially in Real Literature, as opposed to, say, sci-fi or MLP fan fiction)
What if you read it using some sort of Christian ethics (souls, redemption) rather than modern consequentialist philosophy (harm to sentient beings)?
What if you read it as if you were a spectacular chauvinist and view the female characters‘ plight as unworthy of consideration?