Found the morality relativist.

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?

C3 talks are available online for quite some time after the actual event, so you might still be able to watch it then.

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.

Good to know, thanks.

Whatsapp is encrypted. The problem is the Metadata they want - i.e. your whole address book.

I do not agree to Facebook having my phone number, but if you use WA and have my number, they have it, too - even if I don’t use WA myself.

If you can convince your family to switch, use Signal or Matrix.

Otherwise, use Shelter on your phone with a limited, WA-ony address book.

ps ax?

As long as people keep voting for deregulative capitalists and engaging in the consumer mill, megacorps with too much power are all but inevitable.

I am frustrated with human nature, but hating Google is just like hating a tornado because it might hurt you.

There is a plausible economic incentive to do this:

Reputation.

This happens less in markets with few, big sellers and lots of customers locked into long-term contracts (like ISPs), but it does happen occasionally in high competition markets where customers can take their business elsewhere easily.

Restaurants are a good example - where I live, a host might hand out a round of after-meal shots on the house to encourage a big table of uncomplicated guests to come again.

The Behemoth from the Expanse Series had a laser with a range of literal light years.

Granted, it was a comm laser, but they did weaponize it at one point.

Even if we assume that the beam had a solar-system sized diameter after 4 ly, a weaponized output should still be in ship-killer range after an AE or five.

Ultimately, the weapon was never fired (and would have melted half the ship if it ever were).

A TTRPG campaign I wrote and ran two decades ago for a group of friends.

I knew only a fraction of what I know now, was overambitious and railroady - it should have turned into a disaster.

Instead, things just… clicked and we had a few months of gorgeous fun. Years later, one of those friends confessed to still getting goosebumps when a key scene’s theme song plays.

(Obviously, a core reason for this working so well was that we were just a great group.)