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.
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.
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.
Except at that point the Mafia are somehow supposedly the good guys?
??
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?
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.
If only there’d been a another, good MRI machine with a gun present.
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.
Well, it works well for some people.
Once you get used to it, it can be a dang powerful tool. For people doing a lot of config-wrangling on the CLI (i.e. admins working a lot ovet SSH), overcoming the learning curve will pay dividends.
If you’re working mostly locally and in a GUI environment environment, it’s probably not worth it - there’s a reason most devs use more specialized IDE’s.
Midnight Commander has been around for ages. It’s a straight ripoff/homage to the original Norton Commander, a full-fledged file manager and a godsend on week-kneed machines (like old netbooks).
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.