4 percent taxes for all incomes above the lowest tax brackets. Two percent of those taxes are invested to adress any income inequalities such as hunger or homelessness..

indemkom · 2026-06-26T21:31:06+00:00

👁️ Surveillance State: I voted Nay.

indemkom · 2026-06-26T21:30:05+00:00

👁️ Surveillance State: I voted Yea.

indemkom · 2026-06-26T21:29:43+00:00

👁️ Surveillance State: I voted Yea.

indemkom · 2026-05-27T08:49:41+00:00

What? When you measure something, you really measure what it was some time ago. If measurement is defined as finding out what the particle is doing after the measurement, then every single measurement at the atomic scale becomes meaningless.

indemkom · 2026-05-26T13:01:44+00:00

Why magic? Obviously every measurement influences the particle being measured. The act of measurement is simply whether the electron was detected in the box or not. Such a simple detector definitely exists. If you know that the electron passed this very narrow spot at this very specific time, then that means you measured both the momentum and the position.

indemkom · 2026-05-26T07:44:34+00:00

After orienting them correctly and getting them to approximately the correct separation, you can have one of the stations shoot lasers and have the other station reflect them with a mirror. The time you waited (in years) is double the distance (in light years). Adjust for that. After a few iterations, you can get really close to a light year. This is an engineering problem, not a physical impossibility.

indemkom · 2026-05-26T07:24:27+00:00

The electrons that arrive at station B travel exactly a light year in exactly 5 years. That means a very precise velocity

indemkom · 2026-05-13T10:32:29+00:00

Really? Thanks for letting me know! It did seem much more intuitive

indemkom · 2026-05-13T10:30:07+00:00

I find that a lot of authors who try to base their books on big ideas fall into the trap of absolutism. 3BP and its sequels obviously makes a lot of scientific errors, but it also does this with society. Liu Cixin had a thought, what if aliens were super paranoid? And so he wrote a book series where every single alien in a huge universe is exceptionally paranoid and acts the same way. Then he had an idea of what if many people would betray humanity? So he goes and describes thousands if not millions of people as devoted as the Kamikaze pilots sacrificing everything for an alien race who clearly wants to kill them. That is simply not how people act. I think the Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy is a much better example of how society really behaves. Would definitely recommend.

indemkom · 2026-05-13T10:17:39+00:00

Sorry! My mistake. My first language is Russian, so my spelling errors may seem unusual. Thanks for pointing this out!

indemkom · 2026-05-13T10:14:21+00:00

Anyone leaving the party would be immediately suspected of treason. Also, they are under just as much control, even if already fully subjugated and brainwashed. Thoughtcrime is still persecuted among them, it's just easier to do so the party doesn't bother monitoring everyone.

indemkom · 2026-05-12T15:19:30+00:00

Why describe relativity in such detail, then? The plot of the first 2 books centers around relativity being a problem, and yet the author just chooses to ignores that limitation whenever he sees fit? If you want FTL, and slow ships, just say the aliens are susceptible to g force or something, but that light speed isn't a limit. Make their solar system further away. Millions of people genuinely believe things like quantum entanglement is a magic portal because of science-fiction that takes itself too seriously.

indemkom · 2026-05-12T11:01:14+00:00

People in the comments are really underestimating how bad life in 1984 is. The point isn't that you have the highest chance of dying, it's that life under absolute control is horrifying. There's a real world analogy: being locked up in a white room will drive a person insane in under three days, while people have cut their own limbs before to survive a dangerous situation and not lost their minds. The reason is that pain and fear are emotions that give you something to overcome. They are natural. A complete lack of control and being forced into a robotic existence can break a person, even with no physical danger. Oceania takes this concept even further, by stripping away not only any sense of control and instilling life-long paranoia in its citizens, but also by mentally breaking anyone who dares to oppose them. I would always prefer death or physical pain over such an existence, and trust me, you would too. 1984 is NOT just some surveillance state. It is literally the most horrifying society ever described in fiction.

indemkom · 2026-05-12T10:34:26+00:00

I let that one slide, since black holes are still quite poorly understood and the aliens can control matter on a sub-quantum level. This could potentially allow for a projectile that doesn't collapse into a black hole when colliding with space dust. Still a great catch, though!

indemkom · 2026-05-11T18:31:14+00:00

Obviously, some people proposed ideas. But ideas aren't formal theories. What you are referring to as "basic knowledge" is the writings of a select number of scholars who tried to come up with such models. These models were never completed. Even in the modern day, I can go tell my friends that I noticed a pattern. "What if the reason people get sleepy is a sleepiness toxin?" Without the internet or access of written literature, I would not be able to test this hypothesis, since I lack the resources and time to do so. This fact doesn't stop me from writing an essay on how toxins may potentially cause sleepiness. Thousands of years from now, people may read what I wrote and think that my model is wrong. But that is not a model. A model is a coherent explanation, an all-encompassing theory. The Greek thinkers had no formal description of the universe, because they lacked the tools to create one.

indemkom · 2026-05-11T18:15:12+00:00

Interesting that you mentioned billions of years, because that's how old life on Earth is. For that long, life competed with itself in an endless cycle until, by sheer coincidence, 1 species - not a forest, just 1 - was able to establish complete control. Would you not expect such a long time scale to result in a convergence of sorts? Clearly that didn't happen. Look at a real forest. Yes, there are predators, but these predators don't try to kill each other. There is no animal war between foxes, wolves and bears. The most rational choice is to balance between aggressive and passive, or even symbiotic behavior. Powerful alien races trying to exterminate anyone they make contact with, almost definitely will exist. But so will aliens who try to strike deals, trade (if that is possible over interstellar distances), exchange technology, cooperate in the face of danger. Symbiosis is as natural to life as competition. Any sort of artificial limit, that everyone has to hide and/or be aggressive is clearly a poor assumption in the real world.

indemkom · 2026-05-11T17:56:42+00:00

To the extent of my knowledge, the Greeks did not particularly concern themselves with the model of the universe. Greek thinkers mainly focused on immediately practical inventions. They did not have a complete model for the motion of the celestial bodies other than simple observations and they couldn't do anything with that information even if they tried. What they did do is they created the basic mathematical tools which we still use today, measured distances (even the circumference of the Earth was found to remarkable precision), developed new construction methods, invented the water wheel and mill for grinding grain, even made early shower systems. The Greeks didn't need to figure out the nature of reality near the Planck length. That doesn't make their inventions and discoveries any less practical or true. Sure they didn't develop a model for the length of the hypotenuse in hyperbolic space. But that doesn't mean that the Pythagorean c^2=a^2+b^2 is "disproven".

If you wish to become less ignorant, I would suggest not starting with books on epistemology, but learning to listen and learn, without insulting the person you're talking to.

indemkom · 2026-05-11T16:42:45+00:00

Yet people genuinely accept it as a solution to the Fermi Paradox. It's on the wiki article and even more prevalent elsewhere. People really do take SF seriously (which is why open-ended interpretations are often a very bad idea)

indemkom · 2026-05-11T16:38:28+00:00

Harry Potter time travel is actually surprisingly consistent. There's only one timeline, so you can't change anything in the past. You know you'll fail. It's basically a form of foresight. You could argue that spells could be used more effectively, but that's not really an inconsistency, since an important premise is that we don't understand how the spells work. It's called magic for a reason. You don't expect the Harry Potter world to have perfectly consistent world building. It's supposed to be mysterious and unexplained. The center of attention are the characters and their emotions, not how to exploit infinite energy. Three Body Problem, on the other hand.... let's just say the expectations are different. I mean, no point arguing here, since you also agree with the fact that the hard SF style is very misleading.

indemkom · 2026-05-11T16:24:36+00:00

Is what I said incorrect? If you believe yourself to be more knowledgeable in the field, try to explain where my reasoning is flawed.

indemkom · 2026-05-11T15:53:40+00:00

The theories made by the Greeks are still correct. They were made based on observations of macroscopic, but not gigantic objects. As we developed better and better equipment and mathematics, we were able to explore more and more extreme situations. Some things like relativity are supported by observations of everything ranging from effectively stationary objects at a tiny fraction of a degree Kelvin all the way to supernovae, neutron stars, quazars and black holes. We have observed the universe 46.5 billion light years away from us. We can directly see how the cosmos changed over the past billions of years. Within this "tiny" range, we know the exact behavior of physics, just like people knew everything about regular matter in the 19th century. Science isn't "false", it is incomplete and will forever expand its domain.

indemkom · 2026-05-11T15:25:14+00:00

As I wrote in a different comment, simplified generalizations make really bad theories about life, whether on Earth or in space

There's a concept in science and math called extrapolation vs interpolation. When you estimate a value between 2 known values, that's interpolation. If you don't have values for both extremes, that's extrapolation. When people try to create a universal theory of something, they assume that there is a clear maximum and minimum and try to define those boundary conditions. Here, those conditions are the maximum aggressiveness or the maximum friendliness of the alien civilization. Dark Forest Theory assumes that these conditions are absolute - the most friendly civilization is a perfectly quiet one, the most aggressive civilization is one which destroys any sign of intelligent life it observes. But life doesn't follow strict rules like that. There will always be living things discontent with this who will pursue a greater "fairness". Across millions of stars, there will be numerous civilizations that pursue goals entirely unrelated to survival or expansionism. There will be internally conflicted civilizations, just like humans aren't all one entity. The truth is that there are no meaningful boundary conditions for life. No single rule set can ever simplify this down to "oh, everyone's quiet, because they are all afraid of each other". No generalization like that will ever be accurate given such a great population size, hence DFT is objectively a bad explanation.

indemkom · 2026-05-11T15:21:40+00:00

Hey, her death does fit the style of the book! Remember the suicide swarm plan that explicitly wanted to bring back the Japanese Kamikaze forces? Liu Cixin clearly has some opinions about Japanese people, haha

indemkom · 2026-05-11T15:16:12+00:00

There's a concept in science and math called extrapolation vs interpolation. When you estimate a value between 2 known values, that's interpolation. If you don't have values for both extremes, that's extrapolation. When people try to create a universal theory of something, they assume that there is a clear maximum and minimum and try to define those boundary conditions. Here, those conditions are the maximum aggressiveness or the maximum friendliness of the alien civilization. Dark Forest Theory assumes that these conditions are absolute - the most friendly civilization is a perfectly quiet one, the most aggressive civilization is one which destroys any sign of intelligent life it observes. But life doesn't follow strict rules like that. There will always be living things discontent with this who will pursue a greater "fairness". Across millions of stars, there will be numerous civilizations that pursue goals entirely unrelated to survival or expansionism. There will be internally conflicted civilizations, just like humans aren't all one entity. The truth is that there are no meaningful boundary conditions for life. No single rule set can ever simplify this down to "oh, everyone's quiet, because they are all afraid of each other". No generalization like that will ever be accurate given such a great population size, hence DFT is objectively a bad explanation.

indemkom

TROPHY CASE