Correct

Neuromancer is great and has a similar tech level, though it’s more abstract and a little harder to follow. Ready Player One is also in that vein but not as good as Snow Crash. The video game Cyberpunk 2077 was heavily influenced by Snow Crash and it’s sister anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is excellent. You don’t have to play or know anything about the game to watch the show

There’s a sweet spot in the corporate ladder. People at the bottom get the daily grunt work stuff that’s time consuming and repetitive. People at the top end up with competing responsibilities so they spending most of their time in meetings about other meetings and arguing about planning to make decisions. It’s right in the middle where you blend into the background and can spend half your work day in your underwear playing video games. And that’s exactly where I like to live

One of these is the monkey pet of a pirate leader and the other is an eldritch monster stronger than gods that consumes entire realities for no apparent reason. One of them people wanted banned for being too good, the other is entirely unplayable:

Can you guess which is which?

I have, I like Mogworld so I’ll have to add Jam to the list

I was excited for good was finally available as an ebook because I don’t really like audio books but it looks like I’ll have to borrow a friend’s kindle to read it because I can’t figure out how to load it onto my kobo

It’s good to know he keeps the quality up!

Have you seen the supreme court? They don’t care about equal enforcement of the law

Yeah, is every corporate office going to move out of Utah? Corporate VPNs are very common and important to their infrastructure. Most likely I assume it’s another law to be selectively enforced against people they dislike

Just finished:

All You Need is Kill - Of the 2 movies and this, this has by far the most compelling ending. I don’t really like how the time loop thing is handled but the mechanics aren’t the most important to the story

Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash - I love this series. If you’re looking for a modern day Douglas Adams this is pretty close

In progress:

Diaspora by Greg Eden - Woof, this starts dense and I don’t have the impression it’s going to get easier. I’m curious how challenging it will get. Still, it’s a fun start for the story

Hey! I’m one of the people who commented about Troopers. I don’t fault you for stopping it, there’s a whole chapter in the middle of it where they flashback to gradeschool and all of the kids agree with the teacher that corporal punishment for adults is really the only way to ensure a society doesn’t fall apart

Neuromancer is great though! If you ever feel like you don’t really understand what’s going on that’s pretty normal. It takes a couple of reads and even then a lot of the concepts are abstract rather than concrete

This is why green energy should be a right wing policy. If you are an anti-globalist and only care about your own country then green energy is the most independent way to facilitate the energy needs of a country. That way when some other crazy leader starts attacking global energy infrastructure your country is less impacted. Oh did I also mention that it opens up manufacturing and construction jobs in the countries that need to make the green energy?

Green energy does a lot of what right wing people want to do but because people have framed the conversation around helping the planet (which I personally cannot believe so few people care about) they decided wind/solar is hippie shit and they want to keep their oil

Airplanes are very time efficient but not very fuel efficient. A modern 737 cargo plane holds about 52,000 lbs of cargo. To transport 3 million barrels of oil (not even 20% of the total oil we’re talking about) by plane would take about 20,000 flights daily and there are only about 13,000 737s on the planet. So ignoring the astronomical cost it would take making the process impossible to profit from, you’d have to commandeer the world’s supply of planes to do so. Also I’m almost certain that the entire middle east couldn’t handle 20,000 fully loaded cargo flights every day. It’s simply too much for their airports to handle, even if humans stopped flying

Personally I’d go weed, candy, fuck, shots, rest of the food, blow for maximum enjoyment

So the important thing to remember is the sheer quantity of oil that needs to be moved and where it needs to be moved to. The Strait of Hormuz in 2024 had 20 million barrels of oil passing through it daily. That’s 840,000,000 gallons or 3,160,000 cubic meters, or ~1300 Olympic swimming pools each day that need to be moved. It also mostly is going to end up getting moved across oceans to be delivered to the people who need it

Moving that much liquid by means other than boats is very difficult. Building pipelines that can move that much liquid is difficult and prone to problems. Especially considering the very harsh climate surrounding the area and even if you do have a pipeline it’s likely still going to end up in a ship because it has to cross an ocean anyway. Moving it by truck is almost logistically impossible, and trains have more problems than pipelines

In order to have the ships big enough to move that liquid you need ports that are deep enough AND already have the infrastructure to handle ships of that size, of which all are already in the Strait. It also made sense because a lot of oil producing countries were in this area so having lots of ships in the area built efficiency

So a whole bunch of confounding factors led to the Strait being the optimal place to move a lot of oil by ship (which the oil needed to go into anyway), however a natural choke point makes this a strategic position for countries in the area. Oil ships are slow, easy targets, and most countries could pretty cheaply take them out. Which adds to the tension in the region

This Wendover Productions video does a good job explaining why so much oil had to go through the Strait

Turns out mom was wrong. Masturbating too much won’t give you hairy palms, it gives you a hairy lip!

Ah yes, war. My favorite apolitical pass time

[email protected] is exactly that. Just dudes talking about boring dude shit with each other

The whole idea of My Hero Academia is to exceed your limits. Their mottos are “plus ultra” and “go beyond”. Deku absolutely does not believe in giving 100%, he’s going to give even more than that

This specific instance was when he was flying to Namek right after beating Vegeta for the first time at the beginning of DBZ. Where he needed to go outside the ship while it was in transit. He’d never been to space and had no reason to think he’d be fine without a suit

By the beginning of Dragon Ball Super he does go into space to fight Beerus, but he’s not there for long. It seems he can go in space for a bit, but needs to come back to breathe. This also tracks because he’s had to learn to control his breathing in multiple different ways

With union negotiations around the corner hopefully this gives them more leverage to push back against AI. If the unions can get anti-ai provisions that’s the most likely way to keep it out of movies

I agree that he didn’t have a plan for 2 primary reasons: Saiyans as a whole are very bad at planning beyond the problem in front of them, and that Toriyama also planned very little of Dragon Ball ahead of time

In universe the explanation I’d give is that while Namek is bigger than Earth it still took Frieza “five minutes” for his blast to actually destroy Namek. Vegeta hadn’t even gone Super Saiyan yet. Even if his blast did connect and destroy the planet (unlikely) he would have had plenty of time to get to a space ship and fuck off