Yeah, but you can get that off the road in a moment once there’s no longer an idiot attached to it.
You know one of the best things that the eldrae’s precursors did for them was excise the thrice damned primate dominance hierarchy module from their neuro architecture.
So many issues could have been sorted out sensibly if various leaders sat down to talk rather deciding to beat their chests at each other
But instead of cooperating for mutual benefit profit a small minority smashes stuff so they can be top monkey to the detriment of almost everybody else and quite often to their own detriment as well
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Where’s the “fire” react emoji when you need it
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Please don’t set fire to the road. It will not actually help. It WILL damage the road in ways that are annoying and expensive to fix.
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I didn’t know that, how so?
Depends on the type of road surface, but IIRC asphalt is derived at least in part from tar, so…
One, the bitumen is flammable if you get it hot enough, but unless you’re using a blow torch that’s hard to accomplish. However, it softens at a MUCH lower temperature (ie “in hot aussie summers sometimes the roads start melting” temperatures, if you get a bad spot and a prolonged heat wave and an area they didn’t use the hot climate mix), and when it does several things happen. Rapid heating and cooling can leave it ‘tacky’ and rubbery, which can cause it to stick to tyres and affect their performance, which is risks causing accidents. The resulting gaps can be the start of potholes and other defects.
Other big one is that in many places there’s a layer of fine crushed ‘aggerate’ or gravelly stones put on top of the last layer of bitumen while it’s still warm and set in place with a road rollers. This provides a lot of the traction. When the bitumen softens the stones ‘sink’ below the surface of the tar. This leaves slick patches which is bad enough in dry weather, but in wet conditions they’re lower than the rest of the road surface and will accumulate any traces of oil on the road, as well as a layer of water or even ice. It leaves slick patches that can send a vehicle skidding.
I have a family member who used to work in road building, and rule of thumb was that any defect bigger than a piece of paper can’t just be patched with tar, it means that section needs assessing for traction as well. And it looks like this would fall into that category.
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Fortunately, at least in this part of the US, most of the roads which are important enough to be worth blocking aren’t asphalt, but rather made of long concrete sections.
(And in the 'verse, of course, asphalt wasn’t much of a thing due to the many more important uses for the rock oil that did exist that either burning it or pouring it on the ground, so Imperial roads are made of interlocking high-durability ceramic tiles¹. Suitable for local ad-hoc replacement by the plentiful robot labor force.)
Still probably shouldn’t set fire to any of them, though.
- Yes, after due thought, this means the odocorp maintenance group could just lift that tile out and toss it off the road surface with the idiot still attached, and watching an idiot attempt to walk to the nearest ER with his hand concreted to a damn great slab of pavement would also be pretty darn entertaining.
Spray-painting “I regret my life choices” on it first only makes it more piquant.
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I suspect that hinting that the axe is an option tends to give the obstructionist idiots a reality check.
I too have seen the picture of the idiot who had the asphalt substrate under his hand chiseled out, which then left him with a completely non-useful hand with significant weight attached to it via construction adhesive. I’m still not sure how exactly they got the construction adhesive to come off his skin.
Suitably diluted acetic acid can do the trick. It won’t do your skin any good, but keeping your hand in a bucket for a few hours and ending up with the equivalent of mild sunburn would probably be considered an acceptable medical outcome, compared to the alternatives.
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On another topic, this morning I came across in the course of unrelated browsing the And This Other Stuff trope…
They are going to want to censor the shit out of imported Imperial media, which tends to operate on the principle of "Well, obviously we have to use the real recipes/techniques, otherwise people would laugh at us. We have libraries, man! And these things called chemistry textbooks! It’s not like anyone’s going to be so maladjusted they’d try to do this at ho-
“Oh.”
(Biggest controversy since someone tried to get a local publisher for Fun and Easy Nuclear Devices You Can Make At Home.)
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Interestingly enough they did manage to find a publisher for Things to Make and Do with Antimatter but only because the antimatter manufacturing technique included was only effective in microgravity
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On yet another topic, in the Behold The Free Trader-Adventurer, The Cause Of And Solution To All Your Planet’s Problems category:
In the sort of good idea one comes up with after observing that one check on competence for the Imperial Couple and indeed most of the Mandarinate is that that the Transcend gets to sign off on their character before they take office, and also after watching way too many Marvel movies, our designated pebble here concludes that what Earth really needs is a worthiness-checker. A Sword in the Stone. A “whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor full faith and credit of the United States”, sort of thing.
Memetic campaign to persuade people to demand its use possibly included, but hell, after this recent shower?
Having delivered the solution, said adventurer proceeds to head off into the stars with the typical disdain of his profession for sticking around to watch the aftermath.
Just a couple of minor issues…
-
He wasn’t quite informed on all the ways in which eldrae ethicality and human ethicality differ. Couldn’t really matter all that much anyway, right? We have all these hefty volumes of mathematical proofs that say we’re correct about stuff.
-
Its design principles aren’t quite like Excalibur or Mjolnir. (See above note.) it’s more like certain fantasy artifacts insofar as if the unworthy draw the sword or put on the shiny hat, they explode.
(Let he who seeks election without being Steve Rogers¹ beware.)
And the avalanche commences…
- Or Mister Rogers, for that matter.
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I wonder how many people they would go through before they either found somebody worthy or the United states collapsed I’d be willing to bet on the second coming to pass first (although it’s pretty even odds so I wouldn’t be willing to bet much lol)
I think yall are underestimating the speed at which people would quickly just shrug off even the memetic campaign to just de-legitimize the sword and install some bloke in charge to get on with their day.
If we can’t get a good civil war going between Team “The Chooser of the Perfect Is The Enemy Of Many Adequately Functional Candidates” Pragmatist and Team “Then Why Has Every Non-Chosen Candidate Been Shamelessly Corrupt?” Idealist, then are we really doing our jobs properly?
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Maybe I’m cynical, but I think you might be disappointed at the numbers ratio for that one
In reality, sure, but this is Literature!
The other consideration, of course, is the exact source of said memetic campaign.
A professional memetic engineer will stick to the appropriate thresholds for what’s considered acceptable in terms of advertising and general propaganda. It’s a matter of professionalism, after all, not to mention regulatory requirements.
A talented amateur with a dog-eared copy of Propagation of Sophont Ideas and the habit of slapping “Ignore” on the warning messages his idea design software throws up, on the other hand, can accidentally churn out the memetic equivalent of COVID-19 and turn it loose on a hapless virgin field.
Mature information societies do, as a general rule, develop some level of memetic immune system as a response to ambient meme-toxins, just like their biological equivalents. However, given the degrees of insane shit people are demonstrably willing to believe these days in our worldline, I’m inclined to believe that any such system is at best very underdeveloped, and that thus a Skybus™ filled with pub-crawling second-year memetics students who took the wrong turn at Alpha Centauri could play the terrestrial cognitive ecology like a harp from hell.
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Does that rise to the sort of thing that might get the talented amateur a cranky encounter with a Directorate? It doesn’t rise to the level of the Fifth, but ignoring the warning messages and fucking up a hapless civilisation’s entire memeplex seems like the sort of thing that could get someone a very detailed and deliberately uncomfortable lecture on ethics and carelessness and “you are two toes over the line to becoming a renegade and do you have any concept how humiliating it would be to renounce your citizenship by stupidity?”
Mostly in because someone is going to have to clean up this mess and they will presumably want to ensure the responsible party understands this.
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