I go to sci fi cons and telegram has become the de facto method of coordination for everything. Party, meal, event we all want to attend, any kind of meetup we create a channel for it to be used ephemerally and invite everyone who’s going. It’s a million times better than any event invite functionality of social networks, absolutely frictionless and without all the frankly stupid stuff social networks add.
Not trying to be a mindless skeptic but your “why is it so hard” question seems bizarre to me. It seems quite understandable that it’s hard for people to believe there’s a particle responsible for a significant percentage of all matter in the universe that we have no direct evidence of and the only reason it’s believed to exist at all is because a lot of otherwise well-understood equations and observations require it to exist.
If people understood that the last 200 years of science has shown that we are still utterly ignorant about the underpinnings of the universe, they might accept it better.
But we are not very well educated so yeah, they will doubt it for no good reason other than "it doesn't feel right"
"If people understood that the last 200 years of science has shown that we are still utterly ignorant about the underpinnings of the universe"
That's a bit of an exaggeration, don't you think?
"But we are not very well educated so yeah, they will doubt it for no good reason other than "it doesn't feel right"
That's also an exaggeration. Laypersons are under no more obligation to understand the details of the scientific professions than scientists are to understand the details of, say, the legal profession. A healthy skepticism within the general public is harmless and even helpful if it maintains an interest in science. I would just gently urge people not to veer from skepticism into dogmatism.
"the only reason it’s believed to exist at all is because a lot of otherwise well-understood equations and observations require it to exist."
I mean...those are pretty good reasons. If a particular theory successfully predicts more out of "a lot" of observations than any other competing theory does, and is a smaller departure from "a lot" of existing theory than any other competing theory is, would you choose to spend your career researching those competing theories?
This is a pet peeve of mine: yes there are unskilled jobs. Lots of them. The term is maybe slightly misleading, but there absolutely is a class of jobs that any able-bodied person could perform given at most a few hours or a few days of training, and they are qualitatively distinct from jobs that require education, specialized training, and/or months or years of experience to be considered proficient and productive in them.
That doesn’t mean people who work jobs in the former category deserve ridicule or disrespect. But the distinction is important because finding workers to fill an unskilled role is just a matter of finding said able-bodied person, while for the latter you need some kind of system of education, training and/or apprenticeship (either explicitly or effectively) to be set up and functioning to even have an industry that depends on those jobs.
Not everything is some silly game of political fighting through language. Some things we actually need terms distinguishing “this” from “that” so we can have real world conversations about them.
Income inequality is perforce a problem from a socialist worldview. So yes, for the sort of people who abhor capitalism, all income inequality (and class inequality) is bad.
You’re essentially just claiming price gouging without saying as much because otherwise the economies of scale would not exist (which anyone with any knowledge of how the economy works knows does in fact exist). “Smaller number of larger players with greater buying leverage as well as lower marginal costs leads to higher prices for consumers” is just using a lot of words to say “evil corporations are price gouging”, which is not true.
As I’ve gotten older and more moderate in my political leanings I’ve unsurprisingly revisited some of my earlier absolute positions (usually but not always very liberal) in light of real world considerations.
Encryption and communications privacy is a position I’ve actually gotten more “extreme” on. No, I don’t think the government should get to see anyone’s communication if they don’t want it to. Yes, I know that will allow criminals of the worst kinds to communicate secretly. I’m okay with that. The alternatives are all worse.
The thing I think a lot of people don't want to acknowledge is that unlike so many issues with grey areas and middle ground, this one is binary: either criminals can have secure communication, or nobody can.
I don't want a world in which nobody can have secure communications, so I must accept that criminals will have it, and police will have to work a little harder to catch them.
It gets worse though. More sophisticated criminals will find ways to do it even if it's illegal, so a law mandating backdoors will hurt the general population and stupid criminals, but not the smart, dangerous ones.
I’m not sure how many people realize the number of great sci-fi stories that started as anthologies in these magazines. It’s a foundation of the entire genre that often goes entirely unappreciated.
I find interesting that the slow fading of physical media is one thing sci fi has gotten wrong for the last hundred years or so. Even the most futuristic visions involved some kind of physical media and/or connection.
The presented story has to make sense to the audience, and showing two characters interacting with an isolinear chip, data crystal or whatever hints at "she just gave him a futuristic floppy disc with the plans for Chekhov's Gun" more than claiming to have sent a sharing link via IM.
I don’t understand why people act like checking bags is a huge time sink. It’s maybe fifteen minutes at most on a bad day for the bag drop, and I can’t remember the last time I had to wait more than 20 minutes for them to show up on the carousel at my destination (and 20 minutes is super slow, it’s usually more like 10). The only times I’ve really had problems with checking bags is connecting flights when my flight is delayed or canceled and such, and even then while there was some stress over it my bags always got to my destination either when I did or sooner. On the last point the last time I flew international I had a baggage attendant at Heathrow actually call my phone personally to reassure me they had my bag and told me where to go to pick it up when I got to baggage claim.
I’m sure there’s horror stories out there of course, there always is, but 99.99% of the time checking a bag is only marginally less convenient than trying to fit everything in my carryon.
I’ve had a vastly different experience. Several trips in the last year with 30 minutes+ to drop a bag and a couple closer to an hour. That’s enough to move the needle on when I feel like I can show up to the airport.
Baggage claim is usually pretty quick but even 5-10 minutes sucks after flying.
I’ve also had 2 bags fail to make it with my plane meaning I had to wait 24 hours for a courier to deliver them. It also makes connecting or flight changes much more dicey.
I definitely think I’ve been unlucky recently but the fact that I could be unlucky is why I avoid it as much as possible
There are times when I know I have to check a, usually, pretty small bag. But especially because of the delayed baggage issue or because of last minute changes to flights because of weather or whatever, I probably carry-on (with a light load) 9 times out of 10. Especially with dress being more casual these days I usually don't really need more than carry-on unless I'm activities requiring some amount of gear.
The thing that kind of sucks is that picking up your bags is before customs, where another line can develop, so that 15-minute delay can lead to an hour+ in line if a bunch of airplanes unloaded all at once.
Not criticizing you but it will never not be funny to me that crazy people have tried to legitimize seeing alien spaceships by renaming them from UFOs to UAPs. It’s like the conspiracy theorist version of unhoused.
The problem is you need a term for "flying thing we saw but weren't able to identify and/or categorize" (which is certainly a legitimate need) but every time you start using it this will increasingly change meaning to "aliens and such are zooming around and <some power> doesn't want you to know" (completely regardless if it's factually true or not - nobody is going to want to use an alternative term someone sets aside for "crackpots" in either case) until it gets to the point people don't even associate the term with what it was created for again.
In fairness, I get what you’re saying, but I think there is some legitimacy to it.
First, I believe that this term has been introduced by the us government, so it’s not the crackpots laundering the conspiracy themselves by using a new term.
Second, I believe the reason UAP was introduced is to describe properly recorded and credibly witnessed and described phenomena (tic-tac, etc) that are not explained by any publically known craft, engineering, or science, but aren’t likely aliens either; and that is well described by UAP which doesn’t directly imply aliens that ufo does.
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