This séance could have been an email.
fmtx
joined 5 months ago
'Unprecedented Mass Deployment' of Warplanes Across Atlantic Fuels Fears of US War on Iran | Common Dreams
There was a case in Canada where the judge ruled in favour of the plaintiff, where a chatbot had offered information that differed from Air Canada's written policy. The judge made them honor the guidance generated by the chatbot:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/air-canada-chatbot-lawsuit-1.7116416
Yes! Thank you. Lots of time travellers lost in the void or buried in solid objects.
Some possible ways of dealing with this:
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The time travel device does the complicated math to get the time and position correct, assuming the SF writer only wants to deal with 4 dimensions.
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Tunneling effect so that it's a straight point to point between the two timelines.
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Get Weird. Invoke quantum entanglement to rearrange the exact same atoms that make up the time travellers' bodies in the destination timeline, because mass/energy can never be created, only borrowed, and perhaps the universe has a conservation of mass/energy rules and can't add more mass/energy from a foreign timeline without tipping the balance from a "Big Rip" end of the universe event to a "Big Crunch" event.
The way that airline safety is positioned has always annoyed me. Back in the day they used to say, "Your odds of dying in a car crash are greater than dying in a plane crash." That statement never sat right with me because while the aggregate number of casualties is greater for car crashes than airline crashes, it doesn't address the survivability for the passengers of a single incident.
I forget the statistics, but depending on the type of car crash, passenger seat position mattered in a car, with higher mortality rates for the driver's side vs passenger side, and higher mortality for front seat vs back seat.
Now what about a single airplane crash? It doesn't matter if you are seated in first class, business class, economy, the flight deck, or in the cargo hold. Survivability rates for the entire plane are low for the entire plane in the event of a crash.
Yes, planes have less incidents compared to cars, but if a plane has a problem, it's going to be a big problem for everyone on board.
/rant
Suggestions for maximum chaos and discord:
- Split the Nordic peninsula into 3 countries, but borders run east-west. People in former Finland have to go through another country to get around the Gulf of Bothnia / Baltic Sea.
- Expand borders of Germany, you know, just so they can have some Lebensraum. There won't be any issues with that surely.
- Balkan superstate. Make sure everyone has a voice in its vibrant democracy, but gerrymander the hell out of it.
- Merge southern France, Spain and Italy so the merged country can have maximum Mediterranean beachfront. Just think of the tourism revenues!
- Leave Northern Ireland exactly as it is.
Respectfully disagree. The entire reason ethical research standards exist is to prevent new Milton or Tuskeegee experiments from ever occurring again.
Regarding behavioral change, there is no measureable way to determine if the participants came to any harm or not because they were never properly informed. See the problem?
As for astroturfing and mass surveillance, it doesn't matter that "everyone else is already doing it.". Research needs to be held to a higher standard. None of those people filled out an informed consent form or agreed to be part of the study. The vast amount of astroturfing and data collection is itself a questionable ethical issue that private companies have exempted themselves from, but research cannot.
People came to real harm due to Stanley Milgram's and the Tuskeegee experiments, and people may or may not come to harm because of this but there's no way to tell because no one even knew. In the 21st century on the Internet, it's not OK to discard the standard of ethics because technology allows. By ignoring ethical research standards, they are going down the slippery slope and inviting some new harm, as yet unknown.
Standards for ethical research have been established over many years of social and psychological research.
Two key concepts are "informed consent," and respect for enrolled and potential research subjects.
Informed consent means that the researchers inform people they are part of a study, what the parameters of the study are, and how the research will be used.
This "study" did nothing to attain informed consent. They profiled people based on their user data, and unleashed chat bots on them without their knowledge or consent. The lack of respect for people as subjects of social research is astounding.
Reddit and the University of Zurich should be sued in a class action lawsuit for this stunt.
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Ran (1985).
Great cinematography, slow burn rising action like the building of a storm, and Lady Kaede is quite possibly one of the most subtly unsettling characters I've ever seen portrayed in fiction.