But it can be removed as a possibility by circumstance, which is what this comic is getting at.
zalack
joined 1 year ago
Because by limiting access to those resources, they can't be used in ways you wouldn't expect.
Sure, you might invest in cancer research. But did you back the right horse? Soon enough? What about the person who would have engineered earlier detection if they had gone to grad school, but the resources that could have been used to provide that are tied up in your net worth?
No concentrated approach will ever have the same results as letting millions of extra people work on their millions of ideas. The chances of someone hitting on something that sticks increase dramatically with the number of people throwing shit against the wall.
This is why, in my opinion, billionaires are incredibly stupid.
By hoarding wealth and forcing people to live paycheck-to-paycheck, with little-to-no time for self improvement or leisure. With few resources to devote towards education or career-building, you are strangling the pool of people who could make your life better. Who could find the cure for whatever illness finally gets you. Who could invent something you'd never have thought of that will improve your quality of life.
Before the pace of modern technology I can kind of get the impulse, but modern billionaires are operating on rules of 'how to win' from 100 years ago. They are -- by any metric -- not only socially backwards, but fundamentally stupid. They are too dumb to even get being greedy right.
Lol. The knee-jerk contrarianism online really gets under my skin, especially when it's towards experts.
Like yeah, sometimes experts are wrong or systems don't behave as expected. But framing that as some sort of erudite insight really bugs me.
"I hope the recovery system works!" doesn't need to be rewritten as "Mmm yes. But what these engineers haven't considered is the possibility that they are wrong".
This is one of those things that sounds meaningful, but can be said about literally any problem in any system. Not all knowledge requires the same level of precision for confidence.
If the engineers at NASA who are familiar with the system say this is a known error state that will be fixed the next time the system designed to correct it fires on its set schedule, there's not a whole lot added by saying sure, but what if they're wrong?
It's just restating the table stakes of existence.
Ah, but you have seen of him.
They're tak-ing. myyy. gills.
Honestly sometimes just making a show of it not getting to you can get people like that to leave you be. Just start looking get dead in the eye and saying "thanks for the tip. I'll take it under advisement", every time she starts doing that to you. Every time. Same inflection. Even if you have to do it 20 times in a row. Even if she gets angry. Don't say anything else to her unless it's required to do your job.
Eventually she'll get annoyed or bored enough to leave you alone and try to bother someone else she can get a reaction out of.
Can't believe Hot Fuzz hasn't been mentioned yet.
If you're looking for genuine space opera, I quite enjoyed the Final Architecture series by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Precision for what? Knowing their cron job will fire? Knowing what was wrong with the commands they sent? Neither of those are crazy precise or ambiguous statements?
The only highly precise thing that needs to happen is the alignment of the antenna but that system has been working for decades already and has been thoroughly tested.
NASA tends to be pretty straightforward when talking about risks, and if they feel like all the systems are in working order and there's a good chance we'll be back in contact with it, I think it's worth talking them at their word.
Like yeah, it's impressive they can aim an antenna that precisely, but using stars to orient an object is a very very well understood geometry problem. NASA has been using that technique at least as far back as Apollo