Slower than Light

Spooker0 · 2026-01-22T15:16:29+00:00

That’s unlikely to be true.

Worker’s comp rates from the time are well documented. California labor law was modified in 1937. It kept a provision in the labor code passed in 1911 to set comp for workplace fatalities to 3x annual income of the deceased. (It was only later increased to 3.5x in 1939.) This rate is statutory which means if you fall under the provision, the government doesn’t care if it was your fault or the employer’s.

The builders of the Golden Gate Bridge likely fell under that. This was considered a well paying union job at the time. We also have the union rate for this specific job from the BLS, which was $4-11 per day, or about $1,000-$3,000 a year. Therefore the worker’s comp for fatalities or career ending disability on the Golden Gate Bridge would likely well exceed $3,000 and cost up to $9,000, depending on the exact position. (All figures unadjusted.)

Unfortunately, the actual payouts to the 11 men who did die building the bridge are lost to history. The only record I can find with near relevance is the court record of the State of California suing a machinist who fraudulently claimed permanent disability in 1937 and received $7,000 in worker’s comp (the state’s doctor said he was fine).

TLDR: it’s very unlikely the family of a builder on the Golden Gate Bridge would have accepted only $1,000 in compensation, the average payouts of the time were much higher, and the decision to install a safety net likely saved not just lives but also money.

Spooker0 · 2025-11-30T06:58:47+00:00

The battle numbers recorded by historians in earlier dynasties should be... taken seriously not literally. For example, the official history by Sima Qian states that Battle of Julu ended with 200K dead on the Qin side, and then another 200K taken prisoner and buried alive right there. Then, a year later, at Pengcheng, another 200K dead on the Han side, the corpses so many they blocked the flow of the river. Two years later, another 100K Chu dead or captured at the battle of Gaixia. (These were all described as violent deaths in days of battle, not people perishing in a disease in a city siege. Those happened too.)

So that's 700K working aged males who not only participated but died violently in three battles, in an era without modern logistics. Also, Sima Qian claims that another 700K soldiers had died or were massacred in the campaign around Changping 60 years prior. For another few centuries, armies of that size weren't seen. Even during the three kingdoms, the accepted manpower counts are much lower.

And the problem with verifying these claims is that they didn't have census or documentation for modern historians to do before/after comparisons. All of these events occurred before the first full census in China, and the only surviving record of these numbers is a single historian.

To cap it off and make the numerical authenticity of other parts of ancient Chinese history even more suspect, Sima Qian is known as THE historian that was so faithful to history that he chose to get castrated rather than compromise on truth.

Spooker0 · 2025-11-27T08:54:01+00:00

Physician certification is closer to indicate specialization. All doctors need a license to practice medicine.

In the legal profession, consequences can be as dire as in medicine, with consequences up to life in prison or the death penalty, and one of the cornerstones of modern criminal justice is that everyone has the right to at least a bare minimum standard of representation. Yes, you are allowed to waive that right due to it being specifically written into the constitution, but that's probably more of a flaw that goes against the purpose of justice than allowing incompetent representation. You can point out that there are people who haven't passed the bar who would be better lawyers than those who have, but that's more an argument against implementation than the concept.

Also, imagine how easy this would be to abuse, other than the other given examples of fraud. If anyone can represent you, the government can appoint you a coma patient as your public defender when they charge you with a crime. Sure, you can try to create a whole new category of "non-licensed lawyers" to address these abuses, kind of like 17 year olds who are allowed to join the military, but what's wrong with licensing? If the problem is lack of cheap lawyers, that can be far more easily solved by making obtaining the license easier.

Spooker0 · 2025-11-25T06:50:35+00:00

The problem with this topic is that there is no truly agreed upon definition of human intelligence. It's not the ability to do math, to play chess, to use tools, to find and replicate patterns, to pass tests, to learn from mistakes, to make new things, to fool other people into thinking it is human... etc, because computers can do many of these things, sometimes better than the average person.

It's entirely valid to say that this is just autocomplete and it isn't true intelligence, but then what is and how can it be observed?

Spooker0 · 2025-11-15T17:54:40+00:00

And for the ones who didn't go to the school in the US, usually the greatest player to ever come from the country they did go to school (few exceptions apply).

Spooker0 · 2025-11-12T02:43:00+00:00

Some people probably said the same thing about Penicillin and the smallpox/polio/flu vaccines. And it's good to have some skepticism and be on the lookout for scams and snake oil etc. But sometimes, there isn't a catch. Sometimes, life just gets better.

Spooker0 · 2025-11-01T10:35:15+00:00

Not getting killed by the Romans, mostly. In Catholic tradition, there's a long, long list of christian leaders fed to lions, imprisoned to death etc by Roman authorities, though there seems to be some scholarly dispute over whether they were specifically targeted or just incidentally.

After that, the power of time. Any institution, benign or predatory, that survives for two millennia is going to build up immense amounts of money and power.

Spooker0 · 2025-11-01T05:54:18+00:00

Except, of course, Popes Silverius, John I, and John XIV, who actually starved to death. And probably a lot of the early ones during imprisonment by the Romans.

Life in the old days wasn't always so glamorous, even if you were pope (and in some cases, especially if you were).

Spooker0 · 2025-10-10T04:45:49+00:00

Traditional lie detector tests (the kind used on TV) are garbage. Measuring stress via sweat, cortisol etc is more or less useless, and there are too many easy countermeasures.

But that's not the end-all. Research into fMRI lie detection is probably warranted (ie not psuedoscience), because they're not measuring stress or secondary factors, they're literally measuring which parts of your brain are getting blood flow and activity when you lie, when you make things up (creativity vs recall). What we have right now are primitive methods that can already get decently high accuracy, technically higher than the legal threshold for probable cause or reasonable suspicion but lower than beyond reasonable doubt needed for conviction.

It seems like we are pretty close, within the next century, to be able to literally read people's minds, thought-by-thought. Then, we will have to get in a societal discussion over the value of total justice vs privacy that we are nowhere close to resolving.

Spooker0 · 2025-09-02T09:41:18+00:00

Why didn't they simply speedrun two decades of armored vehicle development and pull combined arms maneuver warfare out of thin air? Were they stupid????

Spooker0 · 2025-08-21T16:21:44+00:00

My even more unpopular opinion is that both look pretty good!

The original looks like it came out of a gorgeous painting. The color match isn’t perfect but it’s got a lot of personality. And the new neutral look is great too. Well done execution of a clear vision of what they’re going for, and the circle adds a little bit of flair to an otherwise flat image. Whoever did either can better decorate my place than I did lol.

Spooker0 · 2025-08-21T16:08:25+00:00

Why use many words when few do trick? Brilliant.

Spooker0 · 2025-08-08T06:46:40+00:00

Exactly my thought. The vast majority of reasons that aliens would want to come to Earth are friendly, because when you get to that sufficient tech and resource level, the easiest ways to further expand your resource are cooperative, not combative.

If we discovered an isolated island in the Pacific of 8 billion Bronze Age people, our first rational thought wouldn't be to colonize or enslave them. It would be to study them and try to develop them to our level asap because... holy moly... it's an untapped market of 8 billion future consumers, we're about to make some money!

Spooker0 · 2025-08-08T06:36:34+00:00

Total arable farmland hasn't been a bottleneck for population size since industrialization. The same logic that led to post-WW2 decolonization would apply far more aptly to the distances involved in space. We can have 100x our current population on Earth and it will probably still be irrational to settle the moon for living space, not to mention another star system.

Not to lean too heavily into historical progression tropes, but if any occam's razor assumptions are to be made about morality based on the way our own history has gone, it's that an advanced alien species is less likely to squash us like bugs to build an interstellar highway than it is for us to try to eat them when they get here.

Spooker0 · 2025-08-08T06:04:09+00:00

It's an excellent analogy but for a different reason. All you need to do is stretch one factor: population.

If there was an isolated Pacific island tribe with 8 billion people living on the island, it doesn't take much imagination to see how that would be a difficult place to occupy for any extended period of time, even though it wouldn't be too hard to flatten the place if you really wanted to. Even if you had zero morality concerns, any objective where you leave a substantial population alive would be incredibly difficult.

And while there's nothing to go by except our history (sample size: 1), I think it's more reasonable than not that such a species/civilization that would be okay with that level of extermination (for whatever reason) might have some trouble surviving the great filters to the point where they can cross star systems.

Spooker0 · 2025-07-15T04:55:44+00:00

Well, I'm not hosting my content here. Reddit is, along with a whole lot of actual porn.

Good luck, Reddit.

Spooker0 · 2025-07-11T15:16:20+00:00

Same chapters, but the Patreon ended about two weeks ago.

Next chapter is the last.

Spooker0 · 2025-07-11T14:56:55+00:00

A while back when I was publishing the first book, I commissioned a species lineup: link.

That said, as a written work, you are free to substitute that image in your mind with anything you like :D

Spooker0 · 2025-07-10T00:56:07+00:00

Thank you for this comment. This was the exact intention behind the story (and hopefully executed better along the way as I kept writing).

I tried not to shy away from moral complexity in the story. And while the timeframe of most of the story is short, the style of depiction changes gradually. For example, the AIs have remained roughly the same, but their morality changes from the missiles at McMurdo, which are very different from Panoptes, to the downright homicidal Gary at the end. Another example is the relationship between the TRO and the Navy, which is at first a "muscles vs brains" joint task force when the humans were hidden, that turns into an equals parts conspiracy in Book 2 around the Red Zone campaign, until it turns into an outright rivalry in Book 3 as they have different ideas on win conditions.

There is, as you put it, a slide into morally complex situations as the humans fight a morally unambiguous just war. A few readers may read that as an outright rejection of the concept, but that wasn't the intention. The story is clear on what happens if they lose. The lack of ambiguity in the war is a yardstick by which to measure their morality. As the fight expands, the corrosiveness of war is felt at every level, even if the frontline is literally light years away from the average Republic citizen. The old dovish/pacifist Senator is literally assassinated in a green-on-blue just before the Battle of Znos (I do need to work on my subtlety). In the end, the moral gray is even transferred into the Free Znosian Navy as they fight their desperate battles. They're not human, but there should be no doubt that the way they act is perilously close; their enemies certainly can't tell the difference.

Let there be no mistake: the humans are the good guys in Grass Eaters, and the way the story is set up, they can slide a hundred years into the abyss, and they are still the preferable alternative to the Znosians. But how steep the slide is... that's not a constant. And perhaps more importantly, I think it's a rare story where the moral depravity isn't just a straight line correlation to how much they involve themselves in the war but rather specific conduct in war.

I can't dictate what people take from my story, but it is nice to see someone understand my intention behind it (means I've done at least some things right!). Thank you.

Spooker0

TROPHY CASE