Yes, let’s go back to the company who’d sack me and loads of my colleagues on the whim that an untested notion of a tool might work.

I’m sure they’ll value me this time

I often recommend Spain for US emigrants, quality of life and cultural norms are similar, and Spanish is easier to pick up when you’ve heard it as much as you do from US media.

Netherlands and Scandies have a great reputation, but there’s significant culture shock and you risk feeling more alienated for longer.

Sexuality is often treated as more complex a topic than emotions, but I found a similar meta-study The role of conditioning, learning and dopamine in sexual behavior: A narrative review of animal and human studies, 2014 concluding that conditioning and associative learning does occur around sexuality and can be used as basis for treatment.

From other sources I’ve read, there’s so many influences going into sexuality that it’s impossible to see how it develops, but from a layman’s perspective I’d agree that not reinforcing child abuse probably makes it more rare.

My remaining issue is that with such a simplistic view, any non-normative sexuality can/should be conditioned away. We already have the abusive gay conversion camps, should we go back to do the same with polygamy, bdsm, porn? How much should fashion dictate what sexuality is allowed?

(Roman style orgies seem to have faded in popularity, but tantra and swinging seems to have risen lately, which should we be conditioning away? Who decides?)

Nuanced take coming, take a breath:

I agree that Child Sexual Abuse is a horrible practice along with all other violence and oppression, sexual or not. But the attraction de facto exists and has done for thousands of years, even through intense taboos. It seems our current strategy of shaming and ignoring it has been ineffective. The definition of insanity being repeating the same thing expecting different results and all that.

Short of eugenics (and from previous trials maybe not even then) we might not be able to get rid of it.

So when do we try other ways of dealing with it?

I’m not saying generative AI is the solution, but I’m pretty sure denying harder isn’t it.

This worked, thank you.

Article only says doubly efficient, and H2 to He3 reaction.

To get to .9c we still need a couple million kg of fuel.

Even .1c needs about 40 000 kg of fuel, which is doable, but probably unfeasible.

Still blocked, but thank you

Article is capped at 18 views/day so can’t see numbers.

But theoretical cap of energy would be something like E_kin = (\gamma -1)mc². Without knowing anything about the mission or engine, a 50 kg probe at a velocity of .9 c means an energy requirement of about 1,0e19 J.

Fusion of H2 to H3 yields about 340e9 J/g meaning we need about 3 million kg of fuel at 100% conversion rate, or a third if we manage He3 reaction.

Realistically heating, engine efficiency, deceleration, vibrational damping and such would probably lower efficiency to at most 40% and we end up at 8 million kg of fuel to propel a 50 kg payload (not counting the fuel mass).

Seems unfeasible.

Edit as @i_have_no_enemies@lemmy.world kindly provided an alternative link.

Article only says doubly efficient, and H2 to He3 reaction.

To get to .9c we still need a couple million kg of fuel.

Even .1c needs about 40 000 kg of fuel, which is doable, but probably unfeasible.

0,05c should be in kgs range, and is probably plenty (100 km/s).

deleted by creator

Observing groups is a very useful skill, in minutes you can tell who’s where in the hierarchy, what the cliques are, how well they coordinate, how information flows, and where influence springs from.

This let’s you not only insert yourself at the right moment, peg, and place for maximum efficacy, but also informs you of barriers, challenges to overcome, and next steps for the group to act better together.

Hobby/skill/interest in Group dynamics, useful for coaching, creating community, project organisation, and group coaching.

Wow you read a lot more into the religious theme than I did. I found it an exploration of the engineering behind almost every SciFi trope rather than playing god.

And as an atheist I found the religious characterisation entirely adequate, it is a minor part of the characters personality, and it’s only in the obnoxious ones that it becomes dominating. Which is quite close to how it is in my daily life.

But yes, the whole series is made within and to serve nerd culture, it is a long long stream of references and in-jokes at multiple levels, including the main premise. It just happens to also be intelligently written.

I recently found the Bobiverse to be a light-hearted read in this category.

Engineer becomes von Neumann probe and has to solve quite a lot of interesting issues while bootstrapping and dealing with settling in the galactic neighbourhood

Science fiction is in it’s essence the exploration of a situation when all the confounding factors have been magicked/scienced away.

Not uncommonly it explores the requirements of the technical solution, what would the machine need to do for this to work out? And/or What happens if it doesn’t?

Take for example “Do androids dream of electric sheep” by Philip K Dick, it’s about finding androids advanced enough not to know they’re artificial and how to identify and relate to them when the only diagnostic is slow, clumsy, and suspect. It’s more an exploration of what makes a person than it’s around the marvels of The Machine™.

During the 1900s the vehicle for science to magick with had been machines, computers and AI. Remember that space travel, fission power, psychology, modern medicine were all new, hope inducing breakthroughs just this same period.

There’s also the issue that the definition of the genre came after it becoming large enough to matter. The edges between scifi, punk/cyberpunk, speculative fiction, isekai and even to fantasy are all made after the fact, meaning modern machines go into scifi, old machines go into steam-/diesel-/etc-punk. The main difference between Science, Magick, and Eldritch horror is how detailed the mechanics of the solution are described, and speak to different people.

But on the topic of the story not being centered around a machine: try the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons.

Or go the entirely other way with Ring World by Larry Niven. There’s plenty of machines-did-it in the fringes, but the central theme is to figure out what would be needed for a Ring World to exist, what would happen on it, and how would it be managed. It’s an exploration of physics more than anything - more “what is the machine” than “machines-did-it”.

And the Foundation series (Asimov) famously explore the premise “what if sociology works”, and the other details solved by throwing machines at them.

You also have The Culture (Iain Banks) series that center on/around post-scarcity society and explore that.

A conceivable way could be to disrupt the nuclear force of the target atoms, maybe like an anti-Pion/Gluon ray that self-propagates the reaction through the released energy.

(As we might remember, splitting the atom yields a bunch of energy, and uncontrolled such reactions go Hiroshima)

It might be controlled by sub-particle lensing, probably some kind of magnetic field, to be active at a specific distance.

For the reaction to be contained, either there’s a radially limiting component (air is not particle dense enough to propagate the reaction, or atoms not energy dense enough) or it’s a cascade triggered by the beam which stops when the beam stops (or the reaction gets too far away from it)

As I believe Pions and Gluons are their own anti-particles, I don’t know how we would go about doing this, but hey, that’s for Science!™ to solve.

But price increases of cereals ( bread, pasta, grains, etc.) increased by about 7,5 % last year alone, which is more than the inflation, and more than the increase after inflation.

That’s where people might complain. They still can’t afford food, as food prices increase faster than overall inflation

I appreciate a data supported argument, and love that you actually linked sources.

One thing that I feel is missing in most of the linked analyses is that inflation has also hit unevenly, and the price of basic goods has increased significantly more than overall inflation. Which would explain why households still have less disposable income, also the mean debt burden is much higher leading to loan costs being more common.

Or brought up by a neurodivergent parent, or sibling, or have an ND partner

Ah, but you’re just saying that as a professional troll.

Now compare that to: I think you’re mistaken, intent matters, and I believe extending trust that both parties want to convey something, rather than just dismiss others, is necessary for a discussion, and also for a communal discourse. If we’re just shouting into the void, no trust is needed, but for interactions and building a sense of community, we will need both trust and norms of collaboration.

Baselessly ascribing malicious intent is moreso a way to sow distrust and kill off discussion.

And besides, unless local regulations expressly forbid it, the income statements of those companies are after any fines and after any profit reducing measures (e.g. Amazon famously use investment schemes to reduce taxation), they do make the money to cover them in the shorter interval, or even shorter.

Oh no, with Amazon only having a 3,5 % margin (after fines), it would take them all of 48 hours to make up the losses.

The point still stands: the fines are ridiculously low for these companies, and they have no incentive to change based on current fines.

Also quite useful for places short on water, or daylight, or clement weather, or low-value ecosystems, or where transportation is unfeasible due to accessibility, environmental conditions, market access.

Also quite good to alleviate food deserts, securing strategic supply chains, and supporting urbanisation for greenification, food supply, lowering transport and food security (with growing food also having positive mental and psychosocial effects).