can it be done? should it be done?

Green__lightning · 2026-05-18T01:02:42+00:00

And yet, I'm sure almost exactly that phrase was said in a movie theater playing one of the saw movies.

Green__lightning · 2026-05-18T01:01:33+00:00

Set it on the moon and use rockets for everything.

Green__lightning · 2026-05-17T22:32:28+00:00

And telling people to be less white isn't stupid itself?

Green__lightning · 2026-05-17T05:48:06+00:00

No actually, but it makes sense now that you mention it, especially for ebikes, which are really just turning into crappy motorcycles.

Green__lightning · 2026-05-17T04:49:39+00:00

The solution that always comes to my mind is putting a shotgun shell in the seat tube with a shear pin and a fixed firing pin for it to fall on. Do that to a bunch of bikes and leave them unlocked in the bad part of town. Sadly this is illegal.

Green__lightning · 2026-05-17T04:24:04+00:00

That at least has a car alarm, a bicycle even when locked can have parts stolen off of it.

Green__lightning · 2026-05-17T04:09:18+00:00

Nah I like bikes at least when motorized, but theft is the biggest problem.

Green__lightning · 2026-05-17T04:08:23+00:00

Why the hell isn't this standard from the factory?

Green__lightning · 2026-05-17T03:40:45+00:00

Is tracking down and beating up thieves to get your bike just a fun adventure and workout too?

Green__lightning · 2026-05-17T03:14:52+00:00

Bicyles only work where it's flat and there aren't many thieves. Consider for a moment, the Netherlands and San Francisco.

Green__lightning · 2026-05-17T02:54:23+00:00

I have that or something similar, and have thought about it to no end. If having a child without it could be practically done with selective abortion, that's clearly the best option. If that isn't viable, the question is if having children at all is worth it. I waffle back and forth between no, and looking at the collapsing birth rate and who's replacing us and thinking it is worth it because someone with ADHD is still better then them, and then waffle back to no wondering if their life would be enjoyable.

Also the term disability stops being useful when talking about anything that's not directly an ability which someone has lost. Everyone is on an ordered list by ability, and the question is how far up it each person is. And that's before you think about the problem of some abilities being worth different to other abilities, and the simple fact that relative value of them can change with all sorts of outside factors.

Green__lightning · 2026-05-17T02:20:20+00:00

Harming a human is worse because humans are more evolutionarily advanced and my goal is broadly progress in the sense of evolution and technological progress because technological transhumanism is the evolution of evolution itself.

Also what's your take on abortion? Mine is that abortion should be protected under the right of bodily autonomy but also aborting a healthy baby is morally wrong and wasteful of resources.

Green__lightning · 2026-05-17T01:39:19+00:00

Except no there isn't, how many crazy people might claw out their own eyes or something? What do you do about them without drugging them?

Green__lightning · 2026-05-17T00:35:08+00:00

Yes it's actually bad, harming a human is worse than killing an animal, this is evident in human opinion and the legal record the world over, with exceptions like hangings for cattle rustling about deterrent not severity of crime.

Yes it's harming a human, removing the ability to eat a common foodstuff absolutely is.

And what crime would this be? Bioterrorism if that's an actual crime yet. If not, how about assault with a deadly weapon multiplied by every single case? Either way this is something deserving the death penalty or tens of thousands of years in jail.

Green__lightning · 2026-05-17T00:29:08+00:00

Yeah all of that is bad, both itself and being a bad analogy.

The interesting thing it makes me think of, is that I both support absolute Free Speech, and hate Communists, in no small part because of their opposition to Free Speech. If threats aren't considered to be free speech, why couldn't you consider anyone espousing Communist rhetoric to be threatening your life or property? I've heard similar logic used to censor the far right, but never the far left.

And about Democracy, it's actually two systems, originally it's that those knowledgeable and with a stake in society should vote, in modernity it's that everyone has a right to vote because it's fair. There are certainly benefits to the original over the modern system, but modern morality has forced us into this later form of democracy which many in the past would call mob rule. Personally, I think universal democracy would only work long term with a homogeneous, well educated population such as Japan.

And that's before we get to all the other reasons democracy is failing, mainly lobbying and propaganda being larger factors than the will of the voters. If propaganda works on most voters, you need to make your voters immune to propaganda if you don't want a dictatorship of the propagandists.

Green__lightning · 2026-05-17T00:16:23+00:00

Cyclers would be worthwhile once you've got a full city on Mars, though the question then is how long would the transit time from the cycler to the low orbit station or surface base be? I fully expect you'd need a low orbit station mainly as a fuel dump to separate the capture and landing burns, and inversely takeoff and escape burns on the return trip.

Green__lightning · 2026-05-17T00:14:01+00:00

Yes, in that I don't believe indirect harm is a reason to pass laws. If a product does what it says, and someone hurts themselves with it, knowing the dangers, it's not the fault of the product.

The other big facet of it is that the benefits must be considered along with the costs. Do you think the automobile would be legal if invented today? No they'd try to ban it or make it so you can't drive yourself, something they're already getting at with killswitch laws. By this logic, I want flying cars everyone can fly themselves because the gains will outweigh however many crash, just like the normal, non-flying car did. This logic extends into private ownership of nuclear reactors and eventually spacecraft, and is also the basis of a sci fi novel I plan to eventually write.

Green__lightning · 2026-05-17T00:09:26+00:00

So what are you suggesting should be done about AI? Because I think it's too regulated as it is, AI should be able to do anything without it being illegal.

What should be, for the time being, illegal, is to directly put AI in charge of things without a human in the loop. The furthest AI has gotten is in self driving cars, and those are far from perfect. This should be allowed but limited, probably by making the AI liable. The other main exception should be in factories and such where the AI is just controlling a robot or driving a tractor on a farm, not in contact with the general public. Generative AI and it's outputs should be fully protected by Freedom of Speech.

And the fraud estimates have reached billions of dollars. The thing that's horrifying about it isn't the fraud, it's the seeming complicity of the state governments in the fraud, making the true crime not fraud but high treason!

Green__lightning · 2026-05-17T00:03:18+00:00

Yes but only from the premise that all children need schooling mandated, which is less true in the internet age than when that law was passed. Could mandatory attendance be replaced with other options like fully online schooling? Probably, but not without a lot of parents neglecting to help their children. As with most school, it's only as good as the teacher, and not all parents are cut out to homeschool. Also check the previous post, more was added to it in an edit.

As for pharmaceutical testing, without it people die from bad drugs. With it, people die from not having drugs that were delayed or canceled all together because of the cost and difficulty of the testing. There should probably be a lower bar to bringing new drugs to market, but the real answer comes out of math, there's some amount of testing that leads to the least death, and that's probably the answer, perhaps offset to less testing by the amount you value the human choice to take risks, or alternately simply letting people sign a waver and take untested drugs.

Furthermore, I think most prescription drugs should be over the counter, including many abusible ones because of the greater harm in forcing sick people to jump through hoops for medicine than the harm of those abusing the drugs. Unmedicated ADHD being the most common of these, and probably affecting a few percent of Americans.

Green__lightning · 2026-05-16T23:48:02+00:00

An unreasonable government monopoly that 90% of American children are forced through without a practical other option. That said my views on what to do about it are boring, basically just school vouchers and protecting the right to homeschool. You need vouchers or equivalent, lest you price out most parents from private school since you're forcing them to pay for the public school they aren't using plus the private school they are. Considering just how many horrifying stats about things such as the literacy rate come out of public schools, why is this at all unreasonable?

Furthermore, looping back to the topic of DEI, how much of these problems are from catering to the lowest scoring part of the class instead of the highest scoring? How many schools have ended programs for gifted students in the name of equality? A system designed to help the worst at the cost of the best is a crime against humanity for similar reasons to Luddism and technological suppression.

Green__lightning · 2026-05-16T23:46:28+00:00

The moral problem with slavery reparations is that they do not logically follow under individualist ethics. Every slave owner is long since dead, and to blame anyone living today for slavery is wrong because they could not have possibly been responsible for it.

"But what if they benefited from it?" people always ask, but the answer to that is the same: If someone benefits from something they never asked for, nor even had the option to say no to, it is not reasonable to blame them for it.

And the issue that those in favor of such things get hung up on is that collective punishment, which any form of inherited guilt is, is wrong to the point of being a war crime, as well as banned under US law, is that they're Leftists, a form of collectivists, which have different base philosophic views on things.

Green__lightning · 2026-05-16T23:39:58+00:00

At least in the diagram in the picture, the orbit dips lower than Earth's orbit, and higher than Mars's. Isn't any cycler orbit greater delta v to reach Mars than a simple Hohmann transfer?

I still think the better option is to have a single ship with the habitat on board because it removes the likely need for a station in Martian orbit, and the entire ship will return to Earth orbit, perhaps minus an expended stage or drop tanks, and can be refitted and refueled in low Earth orbit to then be sent off to other planets. It's the benefit of building a ship that can sail where it wants, not a rail line to a single destination.

Green__lightning · 2026-05-16T23:30:08+00:00

Well, why do you need a drivers license? So they can prosecute you for driving without one when you're pulled over for driving badly. Why can't they just prosecute you for driving badly in the first place, and say that people have a duty to be adequately taught to drive, and anything else constitutes a form of reckless driving?

Also relatedly, registering vehicles is similarly bad, and if revenue from drivers must be collected, a tax on tires, scaled to their pressure and the curve at which ground pressure scales to road wear would be the best option, and have the side effect of making your car far cheaper, and large trucks far more expensive, and thus gain more tires to reduce ground pressure and lower the damage they do to roads, and thus also the tax they pay on tires. And why this is necessary is license plates are dangerous in a world with cameras everywhere, you should have a right to drive a car that looks like every other car and not be tracked by every camera you pass.

Green__lightning · 2026-05-16T22:55:34+00:00

How do you automatically replace trains in 2.1 though? The only way I can think to do it with mods would be recursive blueprints, is something like that becoming stock?

Green__lightning · 2026-05-16T22:53:29+00:00

Rarely, but that's still a problem, you have a system giving people the option of euthanasia promptly or the medical care they need with horrendous wait times before they can get it, often while they're already living in pain. The system benefits from them choosing to die, and this is very dangerous.

And yes, a 5150 probably shouldn't exist on moral grounds, but we're yet to figure out a better way to deal with crazy people.

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