It depends on the story. Some genies were evil and imprisoned to stop dicking around, and would screw over anyone who they offered wishes to. Some were nice and imprisoned by nefarious folks to extort wishes from them. These ones would usually monkey paw assholes but not kind folks.

The hippocratic oath, in this case. Medicine is all about risk management, the worse the “disease,” the more tolerant we are of side effects for the cure. Pregnancy and birth are still pretty traumatic events that, while much safer than they used to be, are still dangerous. Female BC just has to be less risky than that. Male BC on the other hand, has to be as low the risk for a man impregnating a woman, which is to say, almost zero. Pretty much any negative side effect is worse than that, so it’s very difficult to pass. I would gladly take one with comparable side effects to female BC, but sometimes unflinching ethics are inconvenient. Better than the alternative, but still.

This is why we need to bring back yae and nay. We used to have two different yes and no words, one set was used in exactly this context. French still has it IIRC. I can’t remember which were which in English, I think yae and nay were for positive questions, and yes and no were for negative questions. Aha, quick Google shows that is right, neat.

That doesn’t really work either. Human brains are not great at computing unless you are looking for “good enough,” results, and only on some pretty narrow fields, facial/speech recognition, some physics interactions, etc. But worse than that… we’re kind of using them. If they wanted us to compute, the whole function of the Matrix is just taking up run cycles. And you can’t just coopt them during sleep, we need the rest periods ,or we literally die. Only one answer makes sense to me, it’s a nature preserve. They didn’t want to be responsible for destroying their creators, and the only other sapient species known to exist. So they build the Matrix to keep us docile. Then, the energy reclamation actually makes some sense. They’re never going to be net positive, but assuming they are having difficulty keeping their society powered, they would be incentivesed to reclaim every watt of power they could from us to reduce our burden on their grid.

Just started my Kagi trial, and it has been such a breath of fresh air. Will almost certainly subscribe as soon as the trial is up. Remember, if the service is free, you’re the product.

Nobody wants to deal with the short term issues it raises, aside from the moral police issue. Legalizing it actually increases trafficking in the legalized area, while reducing it in a larger area outside the legal one. This only happens because it’s an island of legality, if it was legal everywhere then trafficking would drop much more everywhere. But Nobody wants to invite the temporary increase by being the first. Germany, for example, has higher sex trafficking than most of Europe. It also ignore the difficulty of regulation, there’s a reason it is so prevalent, even where illegal. There is always going to be a strong pressure on vulnerable women, and enforcing the regulations can be incredibly difficult.

That’s not to say it shouldn’t be legalized. But these are the challenges it faces.

In addition to that, I’ve heard that a large portion of that R&D spending is on iterating drugs they already own so that when the patent runs out they can patent a new version and lobby the old one to be made obsolete so generics can’t be made.

Holy shit, some nice news from NH. Seems like it’s been a while since we were in the news for anything other than an embarrassment or the election.

There isn’t really much about eternal torture or damnation back when Satan was still an agent of God, and he certainly wasn’t in charge of Hell. All the talk of gnashing teeth and lakes of fire was originally metaphor for how much it sucked, not literal.

Hell isn’t a place, it’s a state of complete lack of Grace. The idea is that everyone has a 2 way connection to God, and all good feelings and emotions must come from it. People are free to reject that connection by committing mortal sin, but “the line stays open,” as long as someone lives. Honest repentance is accepting the connection back. If one dies before accepting grace again, God shrugs and accepts they aren’t interested, and cuts his side of the line. This leaves an existence with zero positive thoughts or feelings, best case scenario is eternal meh. Of course, it was hyped up to be awful to help convert and maintain control. And, ofcourse, Satan did do a bit of torture here and there, but it was generally all on living folk to test them.

My favorite is the gif of the skubbah diver with a lassear beam on their frickin head.

Lawful>chaotic isn’t about better>worse. If anything, using the gear that came with the product is the definition of lawful in this context. Lawful is more about following the expectations of society. That’s not the full meaning, but close enough for this post. If anything, I would swap true neutral and chaotic neutral.

Don’t forget they had previously been ordered several times to reduce the temperature and refused.

Toyota man. Shit never stops running if you even sort of take care of it. If you’re trying to stay with US built then most of their cars sold in US are made here. In 2017 their US sales were:

Built in America 56%
Built in Canada 25%
Built in Mexico 6%
Built outside N.A. 13% (Mostly Lexus Models)

The old idea isn’t wrong per se, lower lethality is a good survival trait. It just has to be weighed against the value of transmission, which would intuitively have a much higher value. In covid, the lethality rate is even less inpactful because it is contagious for a relatively long period before the host would suffer severe illness. But low lethality is still a good thing, and in such a widespread disease one would still expect that trait to become more pronounced eventually. That doesn’t mean it necessarily would, statistically likely doesn’t mean certain, especially if a particular mutation gave it a substantial bump to both traits it may never be selected out for example. But the current trend seems to be a result of this likelihood.

They were all celestial bodies. The rest just got more myth attached to them. The Norse names are all sort of kinda mostly the equivalents of the Roman counterparts, and those are famously where we get the names for the planets.

Sunday

Moonday

Mercuryday

Jupiterday

Venusday

Saturnday

Ther wasn’t a great Norse version of Saturn, so it just kept its name. Even as it is, some of those conversions are pretty flimsy.

Octopi is doubly wrong, it’s Greek, not Latin. If it wasn’t octopuses it should be octopodes, ock-TOP-oh(uh)-deez.

Kiss the sky.

They are called Mondegreens in English, after Sylvia Wright wrote an essay about how she misheard “laid him on the green,” as Lady Mondegreen.

Wait, Rocket? Where is Bradley Cooper, is he safe, is he alright?

Aha, exactly what I came to the comments looking for, I knew it seemed familiar. I suspected but good to know.