scratchee

For anyone who doesn’t know (as I didn’t), metapedia is pretty clear Nazi apologist crap, just to save you checking/ending up on a watchlist.

Pretty much, yeah. If you assume the number will be somewhere “in the middle”, then pick any number to be in the middle of 0 and infinity, you’ll always find you can double the number and still not be at infinity, so eventually you have to conclude that the halfway point is also infinity.

True enough, it would not be a wise economic or political move

I specifically didn’t ignore that. My entire point was that a driver that refuses to drive under anything except “ideal circumstances” is still a safer driver.

I am aware that if we banned driving at night to get the same benefit for everyone, it wouldn’t go very well, but that doesn’t really change the safety, only the practicality.

If you select a number “fairly” (ie every number equally likely, not skewed towards smaller numbers) and your scale goes to infinity, I’m pretty sure the number you get out will be infinitely long, almost always (sure, you could get the number 10, but infinity is… infinite, so any number that gets picked will tend to be beyond anything we ever experience or know how to write down)

To put it another way, using your scheme, we’d only ever need 1 random number ever, it’d just keep printing forever and we could cut up chunks of it whenever we needed some random and it would just keep printing on and on.

You’re not wrong, but arguably that doesn’t invalidate the point, they do drive better than humans because they’re so much better at judging their own limitations.

If human drivers refused to enter dangerous intersections, stopped every time things started yup look dangerous, and handed off to a specialist to handle problems, driving might not produce the mountain of corpses it does today.

That said, you’re of course correct that they still have a long way to go in technical driving ability and handling of adverse conditions, but it’s interesting to consider that simple policy effectively enforced is enough to cancel out all the advantages that human drivers currently still have.

Londoners looking at this article in utter confusion

Our society runs on our stomachs

It sort of still works if you imagine they’re talking about the descendants of the dinosaurs which form the primary meat of human society (chickens)

There’s been plenty of explanations already, but here’s a perspective I think can help:

Your original intuition is entirely correct for an object that appeared next to earth but which isn’t moving relative to the sun. It would fall straight in with very little trouble. If it’s moving a little sideways then it’d need to be nudged to make sure it didn’t miss the sun.

But the Earth is moving super fast sideways, so an object coming from Earth would need to be nudged a lot to not miss the sun.

Hell, you can take the logic a step further: this isn’t necessarily anti-Israel even.

People can show support for Palestine without making any claim against Israel’s right to exist too.