True artificial intelligence is on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, we just have to go get it!

Yup, all boils down to faith in the currency. For something like the dollar, it’s backed by faith in the US government. For something like Bitcoin, it’s backed by faith in the resilience of the blockchain and the value buyers place on it. Emperor Norton minted his own currency which was accepted all around San Francisco based purely on the fact that people accepted it.

I’m stuck at chapter IX, where flipping forward a bit I know I’m going to have to dedicate a serious reading session to, and I just cannot find the time.

Guilty, but now I’m considering switching to footnotes¹. They let you express a related thought without disrupting the flow².

¹I blame House of Leaves. Lotta footnotes in there, and they can go a long way before they really get out of hand.

² Sure there are cons, like the fact that the reader has to go to the bottom for context, but there’s also no real length limit.

Not really a true crime guy, but

I mean, everything is part of the universe, including our brains and the chemicals inside them that manifest experientially as happiness and sadness. You can certainly take more control over what causes those emotions in you, but you’re still part of the universe.

I’m convinced that if there’s a way to build a time machine, it’ll probably work like Primer.

I guess my water heater is just big enough that I’ve never had an issue. That’s a valid reason.

Why though? You’re dirty, the clothes are dirty. Might as well start the wash so it’s going while you shower. Then when you get out you have the additional easy productive task of moving everything to the dryer, and then you have an hour or so before another semi-optional simple productive task.

I genuinely can’t think of why showering before starting the laundry would be better in any way.

Minimum wage too. “Wait a minute, consumers and employees are the same people. If they’re broke how are they going to buy my stuff?”

Yes. I’m sick and tired of silent boycotts. Unless you’re boycotting because of something major currently in the news, you have to tell the company you’re boycotting why you’re doing it or it doesn’t work.

This is just patently false. I mean,

The problem they’ve discovered after 50 years of this system is that there just isn’t enough money in the universe to send to the top and allow enough of it to flow down to the bottom.

That couldn’t be less true. No one “discovered” anything. Economists knew this was true 50 years ago. They knew when trickle-down was being developed. It’s actually really obvious, especially if you have any relevant data whatsoever. The ones with scruples pointed it out many times, the ones without hopped on the gravy train.

Disco Elysium was so stress free for me, I didn’t really think the day counter did anything.

It didn’t bother me at all, because I felt like I did about everything I could every day.

I’m really not sure you understand the concept. Maybe think on it a bit?

I recommend reviewing the coastline paradox. It’s an interesting problem.

I am. How else would you measure a coastline? The exact line is constantly changing with waves and the tide, so to get any kind of answer requires that you decide where the coastline is and mark it somehow. Driving nails into the waterline at the same water level and adding up the distances between them isn’t really a bad approach.

Who is making those new brown clouds? Who is making those clouds these days?

I wanted to be a mechanical engineer growing up, I was always playing with Lego and building little mechanisms. Then I had a physics teacher who got into the subject of physics vs engineering. He told the class about his brother who was an engineer for some electric motor company, and how his team would spend 18 months fiddling with the parameters of a motor, and they’d throw a party if they increased efficiency by 0.5%. I couldn’t disagree with his assessment that that sounded boring and soul-draining.

It sounds like the perfect job for a certain kind of person, and I am not that kind of person.

Ooh, I wonder if this is just a goofy stock photo, a sincere attempt to measure the length of a coastline, or an illustration of the difficulty of that task.

They rest in the boxes they came in.