True, their impact on daily life isn’t necessarily obvious if you’re living in a superpower protected by its nuclear umbrella (someone in Ukraine might feel differently).
Is nuclear deterrence actually still a thing at all? Has any conflict in the past quarter century or so played out any differently than would have if on 1 January 2000 aliens had permanently taken away humanity's ability to use nuclear weapons?
> Imprisoning someone for one year in the USA costs in the order of 100,000 dollars
There surely must be some way to decrease that by *at least* a factor of 4 or so, possibly by an order of magnitude, if we wanted to? (The poverty line for a 8-person household in the contiguous US in 2025 is $54,150.) Surely that might involve treating prisoners in rather questionable ways, but still way less questionable than f---ing killing them, IMO.
Another objection I have is that [waaay too many things are considered crimes that shouldn't be](https://archive.org/details/threefeloniesday0000silv) -- what fraction of people in prison are there for reasons comparable to any of your examples?
And then some people felt like they still wanted to do research on what the original ambition of AI had been, and wanted a term that'd distinguish them from all the other people who said they were doing "AI".
And then at some point all the latter people switched to saying "machine learning" instead.
(not necessarily -- glycerol, glycine and many fats are achiral, so the nutritional value of non-mirror food to mirror heterotrophs wouldn't be quite zero)
And molds are heterotrophic too -- mirror molds would starve to death unless they found mirror carbs or mirror proteins to eat, right?
BTW FWIW mirror viruses wouldn't be all that harmful to humans, as they cannot replicate or do much of anything else except if they infect mirror cells
some kind of magical ritual, like signs against the evil eye or something
What's wrong with those? FWIW the only reason I didn't perform my country's favorite apotropaic gesture upon reading this story is that it didn't occurr to me
200-person scam center
The content of the article at the other end of that link is the kind of stuff I would dislike in a work of fiction for being too on the nose
Well, it is extremely unlikely to actually help, but it's not like it will hurt either, and it doesn't cost anything, so why not? Even if it's just the literary analog of knocking on wood or whatever, what's wrong with that? At least, unlike literally knocking on wood, this does have at least a notional action mechanism...
(well, I guess knocking on wood must have had a notional action mechanism at first, but I can't be bothered to look that up)
The LLM analog of in vino veritas