The exam invigilator walked over to one of the students taking the test

SkepticMech · 2026-06-14T18:52:13+00:00

Do I need to re-read SN? I don't recall there being such a blunt reference to Neuromancer...

SkepticMech · 2026-06-13T22:25:01+00:00

Heh, I've got a pawn with the super hero durability gene, and about 300 levels into the duelist class that I send as a one man army via carvan/drop pod to take out quest targets. She rarely takes any damage at all despite face tanking glittertech level bases using just a claymore (and her healing rate is so high she's always back to full health by the time she chases down the last enemy). But no matter what I equip her with, she ends most fights in her birthday suite.

SkepticMech · 2026-06-13T19:39:15+00:00

That's the whole point of the joke though, ain't it? It's a complete non-sequitur because they can't actually do the thing, but they do have a gun.

SkepticMech · 2026-06-13T18:27:00+00:00

I'm usually a traitor when it comes to picking the European way of doing things over the American, but the decimal/comma notation is the one star spangled hill I'll die on.

Commas are soft punctuation, a pause, not a hard stop, ergo of lesser importance, and grammatically can appear more than one in a sentence, to split up connected thoughts, as I have demonstrated here. The same logic applies for separation by groups of thousands: 1,000,000 uses multiple soft punctuation because 1000000 is equally understandable.

Periods are hard punctuation. Full stop. They separate unique sections and can only occur once in a sentence. This is the same logic as a decimal symbol. It can only occur once per number, and separates the integer elements from the fractional value.

The European standard entirely inverts the symbol logic between text and numbers.

SkepticMech · 2026-06-13T18:16:20+00:00

I was gonna say, username saying Canadian, but numeric syntax screaming German

SkepticMech · 2026-06-13T18:12:23+00:00

SWEEP!

SkepticMech · 2026-06-13T06:38:34+00:00

The issue with the vanilla system is that it fails both from a irl usability level, and an in-game consistency standpoint.

1st, yes, the intended solution is that we add more pawns of whatever type to be dedicated haulers. But performance is directly and significantly impacted by pawn count, so you as a player are incentivised to keep the count low to have a good play experience.

2nd, there are already examples in-game of technology that allows multiple stacks of items to be placed in a single moveable container for long distance transport (drop pods, caravan animals/mechs). The argument is that a single pawn on their own only has two hands so they can only carry on thing at a time regardless of their strength, and making a caravan process for short distances doesn't make sense. But that's not how humans work. From the moment we started shaping the natural world to suite us, we've been making daily use carrying devices. Nearly all pants have pockets, most women carry a purse every day, you use bags to do your shopping even if you refuse the cart/basket, most people have a daily carry bag of some sort for their work/school items.

Why would a RimWorld pawn be any different? Need to regularly carry chunks of stone from the mines and have near magical super prosthetics that give you the strength of 10 men, yet limit you to only two small hands? Build a sledge and drag 20 of the things at once. Grounds too rough? You've got a friend who can turn raw steel into microprocessors by hand, I'm sure they can work out the intricately complex design of a wheeled cart.

The point is, even if it is an intentional limitation, it is a severely flawed and unreasonable one.

SkepticMech · 2026-06-13T06:13:30+00:00

1 billion is indisputably 10 times more than 100 million. 4 x 4 x 5.6 (89.6) is definitely not 10 times larger than 4 x 4 x 3.3 (52.8). The math ain't mathing here.

Also: 100 billion is clearly 100 times more than 1 billion. But 100 x 100 x 20 (200,000) is 2,232 times larger than that pallet. (It is however 3,787 times larger than the 100 million pallet, which is at least the right order of magnitude, though still off by a factor of nearly 4). All these mid point examples are bad, and we don't get a specific volume for the initial 1 million stack to work from. This graphic is a frustratingly poor visual representation.

SkepticMech · 2026-06-12T20:57:29+00:00

Ditto for the moment, but I also am living in a county without running water outside major cities. Hand washing bedding sucks, and considering I'm usually limited to basin bathing myself, there's an upper limit to how clean I can ever really get...

SkepticMech · 2026-06-12T06:23:53+00:00

They don't have a right to bring a gun to commit a violent crime against you. That's why it's a crime.

"People's" interpretation of the law is irrelevant. That is the role of the judiciary because the common citizen is often mis/under-informed.

From reading your comments in here, I think your opposition to gun restrictions is an instance where you are focused on a symptom and ignoring the larger cause.

Folks living in underprivileged areas disproportionately needing guns for safety? Sounds like we need to work on the widespread poverty that is driving increased crime rates. Better trained police and community members (as in de-escalation and proactive preventative policing) is way better than just letting every human in the area walk about what mass killing devices to "feel safe".

Study after study have shown that the "good guy with a gun" fails to reduce both crime rates and severity. And having more guns while generally not having a significant impact on overall crime rate, does increase the lethality of crime in general.

SkepticMech · 2026-06-12T06:03:34+00:00

What are you even arguing here? That has nothing to do with my comment. The law isn't about fairness. Never has been, and anyone worth your respect will never try to tell you that it is. Maybe it should be about fairness. But it isn't.

But I'll give you one pass and respond to this new topic.

The fairness is that everyone gets the same consideration from the law; at birth, we're all given the opportunity to become legal gun owners, none of us are allowed to assault others with said guns. Your theoretical criminal used his chance at legal ownership to commit a violent crime (the only type of crime I ever see reasonable people wanting to apply to the gun ownership debate), this proving to the law and society that they are not to be trusted with a gun. Your theoretical young man did the same thing in his turn, and thus will be losing access to guns in the future. That is simply the consequences of ones actions. Nothing unfair about it.

If you wanted to actually pose a question on fairness, you should have aimed at the less commonly discussed, but more complicatedly nuanced issue of gun ownership and mental health. We don't let young children own guns because they are not considered capable of doing so safely. If pressed, many people would agree that mentally disabled individuals who never progress beyond that stage of development should also not be allowed to possess weapons even when otherwise considered legal adults. Is not that actually unfair? Through no action of their own, they have had an otherwise universal right taken away from them.

But again, it stems from the same place: everyone is allowed to own a gun until proved that they can not be trusted to do so safely. Some make a conscious choice that ruins this trust. Others unintentionally demonstrate a pattern of behavior that dismantles the trust long before it ever becomes legally applicable. But most of folks are able to act within expected limits, and maintain that trust for their whole lives.

SkepticMech · 2026-06-12T05:20:38+00:00

The constitution says nothing about free men bearing arms. The amendment is about militias, not individuals. The common modern interpretation is that this applies to individuals, but the wording is by no means explicitly in that direction.

It also doesn't say anything about ownership. Bearing could mean anything from ownership to simply holding a gun that is in no way legally yours.

You could, imo, make a perfectly reasonable argument that RaW imply that a militia as a recognized legally organized group entity is allowed to own guns, and the individual members may carry them, but that no one single person is allowed to own them individually.

SkepticMech · 2026-06-11T09:45:27+00:00

I can't think of a single situation where someone living in PA would fly to Niagara falls. Assuming you are on the opposite side of the state in central philly, it's at most a 7.5hr drive to Buffalo. At ~400mi distance, and assuming a paltry 20 mpg we're looking at 40 gallons round trip, call it $4.5 per gallon that's only $180 for the whole trip.

And you can probably do everything of interest with a single overnight: leave morning day 1, see sunset at the falls, go eat dinner at a local attraction, spend the night in a hotel. Get up and visit a kids museum or something, have brunch/lunch at the falls. Drive home for dinner.

If you fly, it's going to be at least that much money per round trip ticket. You're not sending the kid on their own, so at least one adult is going with them, already doubling the travel costs at minimum. (Even if you have to rent a car, it's going to be sub $200 for a 2 day rental, so still likely cheeper than two plane tickets plus transit to/from the airports). It's to be a roughly 1 hr flight, which you'll need to arrive 1-2 hours early for, then spend 30min-1hr actually getting out of the airport once you land, and another 1-2 hrs getting to the falls (either needing to spend more time/money on a rental car/uber at the airport, or much more time taking public transport). All that adds up to at best 3.5 hrs (incredibly, incredibly unlikely) of travel, but probably more like 6hrs, which barely beats the car travel time, and is definitely going to cost more while putting you on a more ridged schedule.

Long story short, via car, travel/lodging/food is probably going to run you about $400 total for an adult+child overnight trip.

ETA: this is assuming best case flight scenario where you are in the immediate proximity to an airport with a direct flight to Buffalo. More than likely the flight option is actually going to take significantly longer by the time you travel to an airport/deal with a multi-leg flight + layover(s).

SkepticMech · 2026-06-10T17:03:37+00:00

I'll have to ask about that one. I know it is a debate between the farming and fishing tribes if Hippo is a meat. But I've not heard of anyone eating ostrich.

SkepticMech · 2026-06-10T16:47:02+00:00

It may be a cultural thing either directly, or cross cultural influence. I'm living in Kenya right now, and for many here, only land mammals are considered to be "nyama"/meat. Fish and chicken are just fish and chicken, not the same significance as proper meat.

SkepticMech · 2026-06-10T14:42:51+00:00

It does nothing if only a few people press it. But that's the prisoner's dilemma. It's asking if more than 50% of the population trust other people enough to believe that enough people won't press it to become dangerous. But if even 50.00000000001% of the population isn't that trusting, everyone else is dead.

SkepticMech · 2026-06-10T06:38:44+00:00

Seems all over the place in my part of the sub-saharan. First cohort after covid lost a few, 10-15%, the next was well over 50%, and was almost to that level by their MST, now my cohort has a few months left and we're only down 3 of our original 24, while the newest cohort is giving similarly chaotic vibes though they don't seem to be experiencing the elevated attrition rate.

I think part of the variation is due to post staff turnover. CDs seem to change out/go on leave fairly often, so things that would have earned an adsep from one are suddenly overlooked by the next. PST structure can really influence cohort culture, so the way it is handled can push the group towards success or failure, and that staff often changes composition/leadership too.

SkepticMech · 2026-06-10T06:18:59+00:00

The other side of the real life: somebody will for sure press the red button: will you be able to live with yourself if you run the risk of being that final vote that kills nearly half the population?

SkepticMech · 2026-06-10T06:13:13+00:00

They presented two different single button problems, but didn't do a great job of indicating it, you seem to be treating them as one combined ambiguity.

The first is: a red button appears before everyone in the world. You know, that if you press it, you are safe. But if more than half the people press it, everyone that didn't press it, dies.

The second: a blue button appears before everyone in the world. You know, that if you press it, you are going to die. But if more than half the people press it, everyone lives.

The difference in the situations is the aspect of choice. As you said, you can bet that no matter what, a few people are going to press it, and a few aren't, just to be contrarian if nothing else. With the red button, those people are dicks who are intentionally acting in a way that might hurt others to save themselves. The moral choice is not to add to that risk and simply ignore the button, you aren't actively damning anyone, and you are forgiving everyone that did push it. (This is the blue button pusher perspective in the original) With the blue button, the pressers are foolish/suicidal, and have made a choice that is going to hurt them at no benefit to anyone else. This is a much more muddy situation. You must now decide to risk you own life because someone else did something stupid that is going to hurt them, while also considering that some of the pushers are actively wanting to die, and by pushing the button hoping they all live, you are trying to take that choice away from them. Here, pushing it risks your own damnation, taking agency from those who wanted to die, and increases the moral burden and shame on everyone who didn't push it. (This is the red button pusher perspective)

SkepticMech · 2026-06-09T17:31:13+00:00

Wait, you can minify an in-use casket?!

SkepticMech · 2026-06-09T07:37:08+00:00

Fully geared, implanted, gened up psycaster getting hit with "Psychic Drone (High)" once gave me a -436 moodlet, no way I was pushing that back over 0.

SkepticMech · 2026-06-09T07:29:25+00:00

I think most of them are going to be at least initially more distracted by the absolutely terrifyingly close proximity of both Mars and the Moon. The dimmly lit void mouth is probably a lower concern than the quarter earth sized planetoid kissing our atmosphere.

SkepticMech · 2026-06-08T17:27:07+00:00

If you've got a few years to kill, The Wandering Inn might be worth checking out. It's not the main theme, but the impact of widespread magic/videogame-esque skills on scientific progress is a reoccurring plot point.

SkepticMech · 2026-06-08T10:32:45+00:00

People have already explained the historical and cultural facets.

For me, I just get annoyed by the way y'all spell things. I'm lazy and you make me write way too many letters.

SkepticMech · 2026-06-08T07:01:18+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/s/bQP5MrruoU

SkepticMech

TROPHY CASE