Lady Sybil Ramkin lived quite comfortably from day to day by spending, Vimes estimated, about half as much as he did.

As the previous post points out, she obviously didn't.

It's quite possible he's serious. Just start off with a lot of OCD.

To truly figure out whether some practice is inefficient, you can't just decide that the alternative looks neater and puts things in a nice order. You have to actually figure out how much you'll gain from the change and you have to make a good faith effort to find reasons why the inefficient practice really isn't inefficient.

Things that appeal to OCD are just a special case of things which appeal to human biases, and like everything else in that category, we need to be really careful about accepting them.

As a toy example, if a bank will lend you money at a 2% interest rate, and the stock market will probably net you at least a 5% interest rate, you can borrow as much as the bank will allow, put in the stock market, and pocket the difference. ... In other words, the bank has to see you as a safe bet, for you to be able to borrow and profit.

If you are able to do this, the bank would put their money in the stock market themselves, and only lend out money at a rate higher than they could get from the stock market. The very fact that it works would prevent you from being able to do it.

You could only profit from borrowing if you actually have an advantage over the bank beyond just "I am rich".

But beyond mere disagreement, to characterize such a comment as offensive (because it criticizes people who don’t respond to questions), is something I find offensive.

The comment is offensive because it communicates things other than its literal words. Autistically taking it apart word by word and saying that it only offends because it is criticism ignores this implicit communication.

I think there’s something much more fundamental at stake here, which is that an intellectual forum that’s being held hostage to people’s feelings is intrinsically hampered and can’t be at the forefront of advancing the art of human rationality.

An intellectual forum that is not being "held hostage" to people's feelings will instead be overrun by hostile actors who either are in it just to hurt people's feelings, or who want to win through hurting people's feelings.

It’s just that, ultimately, I think that my sensitivity and vulnerability is my problem.

Some sensitivity is your problem. Some sensitivity is the "problem" of being human and not reacting like Spock. It is unreasonable to treat all sensitivity as being the problem of the sensitive person.

The interior surface of the shell is larger than the surface of the asteroid, reducing the density. I don't know if this completely compensates for that effect or if there's also something else involved, but you didn't even consider it. (And if you try to fix this by making the asteroid so big that it's more like a flat sheet, the flat sheet's escape velocity, at the scale where it behaves like a flat sheet, is infinite.)

Here’s why I believe a slight density increase near the shell is not only possible but statistically inevetable:

This sort of issue is what people invented numbers and equations for.

If you find yourself admitting that nothing will move you to change your mind, then it means you are not ready to take part in this debate.

Guess I'm not responding to those Holocaust deniers then. Or even to homeopaths or young earth creationists.

The beauty of “hot” is that it is a relative term. Hot for whom?

It's implicitly relative to the speaker and/or the listener. Claiming that because you didn't specify one of those it's from the perspective of an ice cube is just another example of the same thing: being "clever" by deliberately pretending that there's no such thing as conversational implicature.

Having your words be literally accurate is not the spark of genius you think it is.