If you have an anvil hanging over your head, the potential energy that would kill you already exists. Slowly lowering the anvil makes sense. Damaging the rope holding the anvil doesn't.
I think the real problem is that you don't know whether it's a good analogy in your situation. You don't know whether you're lowering the anvil or just fraying the rope. It depends on a lot of hard-to-measure things about your whole geologic situation.
It makes sense to me, if you consider that a "damaged rope" is a bit more elastic, so it stretches more, and allows the anvil to come to rest at a marginally lower position above your head. But only marginally.
In other words, it'd probably a terrible tradeoff to reduce the impact of some disaster by 0.0001% at the expense of making it 0.1% more likely/frequent to occur.
If you have an ~~anvil hanging over your head~~ ton of compressed rock under you, the potential energy that would kill you already exists. Slowly lowering the ~~anvil~~ potential energy of the rock makes sense. Damaging the ~~rope holding the anvil~~ rock containing the energy doesn't.
Yeah, I mean, I understand the words you wrote. I don't think it's a good analogy.
It is entirely feasible that the same amount of potential energy, delivered either in small, successive amounts, but spaced out, proves to be tolerable, while a single large amount would be fatal.
But setting off small earthquakes doesn't just damage the rope, it also lowers the anvil. Also the anvil in our analogy is constantly getting heavier, so the chances of our rope holding forever are very low
It can take years for the damn thing to fail even after the key support stops entirely. In that time you and your colleagues will suffer, and the people responsible will jump ship long before the full impact has been felt, learning nothing from the experience and likely blaming it on the person they leave holding the bag. You can try to get a job elsewhere but things which aren't appreciated at one company often times aren't appreciated at most. Doing a good job is often in your personal best interest regardless of what an out of touch middle manager thinks is more important.
The difference is when you imagine things normally you are aware that you are imagining them and you have full control over them. I can picture an elephant in the room with me, I can change its size or color, I can give it a top hat, and critically I can make it go away at will. If you're hallucinating, it's just there, however it happens to be, and while you might be able to reason that it's more likely a hallucination than reality, that doesn't make it feel any less real, nor give you control over it.
I say "doing a lot of heavy lifting" all the time. I have heard people use load-bearing though it's less common. Other than habit I don't see any real advantage to the version I use over load-bearing.
Admittedly, peer review originally referred to the fact that the journal being published was read ("reviewed") by your peers, and thus there would be the opportunity for them to provide rebuttals after publication. The process the term now refers to in academia only emerged in the 50's and 60's (Nature for example wasn't "peer reviewed" until 1967). It was literally a marketing ploy to make journals sound more prestigious which got legitimized when certain grant agencies and regulatory bodies started including it in their requirements. All the best science is published in journals that describe themselves as peer reviewed, the government says science not published in such journals isn't up to snuff, and taken literally it seems useful. It's no wonder the public thinks it's an important and long established part of the scientific process.
No it isn't. Guidance systems are perfectly legal. The FAA has some common sense restrictions like "you can't fly it at an airplane" or "you can't fly it over a crowd" or "you can't attach an explosive charge" but the only point to point flight profile that is illegal is that you can't launch into another country's territory. And of course these restrictions are on the flights themselves, not on the capabilities of the rocket.
Selling rocket guidance systems internationally is going to get you in trouble with ITAR, but that's a whole different can of worms.
Yes it is. Building something explicitly designed as a guided ground-to-ground weapon (even with no payload) is an NFA destructive device. Without proper clearance, that's a felony, up to 10 year prison sentence, and up to $250k fine.
> The term “destructive device” shall not include any device which is neither designed nor redesigned for use as a weapon
Adding a guidance system to a rocket does not mean it is explicitly designed as a ground-to-ground weapon. For the exact same reason it's legal to design and possess drones with guidance systems, it's legal to do so for rockets.
Did those dumb bombs tossed out of biplanes lack software because the software was difficult to write or because there was no hardware in the world capable of running software? Given that missile guidance systems predate the very notion of software, and the moment better hardware exists there is software ready to take advantage of it, methinks software was not the hard part.
Well if we found current or fossil life with a common ancestor on other bodies it would certainly demonstrate that it arrived via debris; whereas if we find life with no common ancestor or find no evidence of life at all that would reject the hypothesis. It wouldn't necessarily answer which body was the original birthplace, but for the purposes of modelling, whether life happened to start here is a much less impactful question than whether life had to start here. If all life here started here, then life had to develop quickly; if we could potentially descend from stuff in the pre-solar system debris field that could add billions of years to the clock, and makes interstellar panspermia highly plausible.
> I think the intellectual position "it should be illegal for institutions transmitting money between two parties to identify either of those parties" might require some kind of logical argument behind it.
This is both a straw man position and begs the question. KYC laws aren't the option to identify either party, it's the requirement to identify both. The default throughout pretty much the whole of human history across cultures has been not having KYC laws. A logical and compelling argument must be made for implementing and unholding such laws.
> Are you saying all financial transactions should be anonmyous by law?
The anti-KYC position is that it should be possible for some financial transactions to be anonymous by law.
> How would banks function if they were required to be blind to their customers?
While they would not be required to be blind, most have been and by default would like to be. Maintaining identity records reliably tying people to transactions is a significant burden for banks for exactly the same reason it would be an incredible burden on you to keep track of which atm/cashier/couch cushion every dollar in your wallet came from.
Some banks may nevertheless consider the option a net positive, and require their customers to provide identification. People would be able to choose if they want to use those banks or not. If the benefits get passed along to the consumer, many likely would choose to.
> How would the government prosecute money laundering if all cash-trails went cold after the first time they passed a bank?
Presumably by going after the criminal infrastructure handling the money before it passed a bank. Giving up privacy rights tends to make law enforcement easier, but it is a common and reasonable opinion that we should not be trying to maximize the ease of law enforcement at the expense of privacy.
That's not what KYC being illegal means. It means it should be illegal to impose KYC laws. Just like state religion or warrantless searches are illegal.
reply