Minor Weirdnesses

General
41

The thing is, though, you didn’t. You’re buying power from the grid¹, and the generators are selling it to the grid². The contracts between the grid operator and the generators may be useful evidence that they can meet your requirements, but ultimately, those contracts are about what goes into the wires at the head end. You don’t care about that. You care about what comes out of the wires where they enter your panel.

And that is something that needs to go into your contract with the grid operator, for - among other reasons, but this is the big one - purposes of standing. Even if the contracts between other parties imply things to your satisfaction, you aren’t a party to those contracts. When there’s a contract between Party A and Party B, you, Party C, have no legal standing whatsoever to enforce that contract³, and if an A/B default bites you, C, in the ass, your total recourse is standing around with your thumb up it.

Ain’t no-one there going to happy with that situation. You don’t buy goods and services without a clear definition of what those goods and services actually are - “continuous <= 250A load at four nines reliability, otherwise per IOSS 3864” - 'cause that’s unenforceable crazy talk. If you’re paying real, defined money for a thing, it had better be a real, defined thing.

(I mean, on Earth, humans sign bizarrely ill-defined, open-ended contracts all the time, but humans aren’t very good at this sort of thing. A contract is supposed to reflect a meeting of the minds, and if you’re not specific about the details, then there’s a very good chance that you don’t have one.)

  1. Simplifying for the purposes of illustration the details of the ampere spot market and demand aggregators.

  2. Simplifying for the purposes of illustration the details of local generation feeding back to the grid.

  3. Leaving aside some specific language which deliberately creates enforceable rights for third-party beneficiaries, but that’s not relevant to this case.

42
  1. On the operational documentation for IL hostage rescue missions, you may see a curious ideograph next to the field for your collateral budget. It looks a little bit like a coin-shaped swirl with terminating in a hooked arrow pointing textwards. That ideograph was borrowed from the world of merchancy, and means, literally, “as much as the market offers”.

In context, it should be read as “shoot your way through whatever you need to in order to accomplish the mission, and if the dumb choss-fuckers who took the hostages try to run up the body count, that is officially Not Your Problem”.

(This extremely well publicized policy does wonders to reduce the frequency of ever having to execute on it.)

4 Likes
43

  1. Many standard fusion reactors in the Empire are stellarator designs. The reason for this is Doylist, not Watsonian: those freaky multi-curved toroids were just made for the SF aesthetic. I have spoken.

  2. Smoking was invented there, and never stopped being a thing because when you have an radioactive immortal’s immune system, it’s hard to even notice a health impact. Largely because any and all tar globules are instantly shivved to death by a pack of angry macrophages.

image

Cigarettes, however, were never invented due to the typical cultural reaction to things that are heavily processed and/or seem cheap. Cigars and pipes dominate methods of consumption, with water-pipes taking third position. No particular herb or blend owns the majority of market share, with a variety being available according to personal preference and mood.

(Stale smoke and stained surroundings were never really an issue because people are accustomed to courtesy and taking care of their surroundings, and thus the smoking jacket, the smoking room, and the smoking chair with built-in clockwork fan and smoke filter were all invented within weeks of the cigar.)

((Health scares mostly hinge around cigars exported from Paltraeth, which pose a health risk even for eldrae due to the heavy metal content being toxic to anyone who hasn’t invested in chelating lung mucus. If any ever make it to Earth, expect hazmat-style health warnings.))

1 Like
44

A space-elf lighting a bong is something I never knew I needed to see

1 Like
45

To which I am now very curious - what do the lighters thereabouts look like? I mean, it’s probably not very convenient to use psychokinetic electric arcs, so they’ve got to have some sort of device for lightning small fires, yes?

46

Plasma torch maybe? We’re kind of assuming there’s air if you’re going to be lighting off a pipe so I think it’s fair to use that as the heat-carrying medium.

47

For those who aren’t lucky enough to have that talent and are determined to show off, anyway.

Well, butane and naphtha were out, for obvious reasons. (At least until synthetic oil becomes common, and since you had to solve the problem before then, why change? While the overall lack of fossil fuels doesn’t mean none, the products of the seeps of Oil Springs Valley are far too valuable to be used for anything as mundane as firemaking.)

On the other hand, there’s methanol, which it’s really easy to make, even when you don’t want to. Given a certain preference for elegance, it’s easy enough to build a self-igniting lighter that doesn’t require fuel and ignition to be two steps: you simply have a lever that vents your methanol vapor over a platinum black catalyst, where enough of it will spontaneously oxidize to generate heat sufficient to ignite the rest.

(We had those here, too, btw, if you go digging.)

Later, of course, saw the electrical hot-wire lighter (basically a stiff filament that you run power from a microcell through to make it glow yellow-hot), and later still you could ignite your cigar with a quick zap from a laser pencil, a handy tool that just about everyone has in their pocketses.

Bit too powerful. I mean, there undoubtedly are people who consider a plasma torch/hand flamer just right for lighting their smokes, but these are the same people who consider an assault flamer the greatest gift the Bloody Sages ever gave to barbeque.

1 Like
49

I’m imagining the other uses of that are more in line with laser welding and cutting than firestarting?

Also, they carry around a laser pencil in their pockets? How many do they have? (No, really - what’s the “standard” count of pockets? Like the modal on-the-street human has four - two front pockets and two rear pockets from pants.)

50

I was considering laser lighters at first, similar to Nivenesque flashlight-lasers, but realistically no matter how much you short-focus the beam it’s still going to be an optical hazard/nuisance to the people around you, especially with the dazzling effect you get from a laser in a smoke source. And considering how even baseliners have an expanded optical frequency range, it didn’t seem feasible.

51

It’s not really designed for sustained high-power use (like a laser torch is): a laser pencil is designed as a general-purpose low-power laser, with a bunch of presets, tuning rings for frequency and emission mode, adjustable lenses, and a couple of safety switches in case you might be doing something dangerous.

So, you know, you can use them as actual writing implements (on light-sensitive screens or photoreactive crystal paper), or short-range laser communicators, or flashlights (with the diffuser in place), or a laser pointer, or a laser rangefinder, or a break/motion sensor, or if you turn it up a bit and hold down one safety switch, a laser cleaner, or a disinfector, or a lighter, or part of an analysis tool, or a tool for very light cutting or drilling, or even a laser scalpel, and if you hold down both safety switches you could turn it into a blinding weapon or something to deliver a nasty burn.

But, y’know, it’s not really any more dangerous than a pocketknife, or any other light tool people might carry around with them. Some safety glasses are recommended if you’re going to get into usages of the higher-power modes that might cause scatter, but pressing it against the end of a cigar and flash-igniting it generally isn’t one of those.

Sure. It’s a handy tool to have, just like a pocketknife. (Hell, it’s probably right next to a pocketknife in the pocket.) And the culture likes gadgets. There’s likely to be a bunch of 'em rattling around in anyone’s pocket.

Hrm.

Leaving aside the cultural inhomogenity of clothing and thus the difficulty of answering this at all without picking, say, Old Empires fashion of a recent era and ignoring that that’s not what they’re wearing in Kyo Súmíré at all…

Minimum of five when dressed casually, seven in formal wear. (That’s two trouser pockets - they don’t put any in the back, because pockets you have to sit on are less than useful - two waistcoat pockets although one’s usually mostly occupied by a watch, and a shirt pocket.)

Formal wear adds a pair or more of inner pockets to one’s jacket or formal robe, but those usually don’t bother with outer pockets. The traditional double-breasted laboratory coat or leather work-jacket, on the other hand, usually adds several external pockets, the latter throwing some clips, and loops into the mixture, too.

(And, of course, one can always attach some extra space to one’s belt. That’s what it’s there for, not just for holding Messrs. Shooty and Stabby.)

1 Like
52

yay to ‘cargo pants’, although yes I get you’re speaking to a higher-class version of same

53

More cargo jacket (although the traditional work-jacket is cut to trench coat length) than cargo pants, but yeah, pretty much.

This is a reflection of my own annoyance with cargo pants, namely that pockets are much more useful when you can reach 'em conveniently without having to bend down, and as such anything lower than a tool-belt is annoying.

1 Like
54
  1. There are no laws against insider trading.

To clarify that - well, do you know how insider trading is defined in the US, for example?

First, you must be an insider: a director, an executive, or someone who holds more than 10% of any class of share in the company.

Second, you must, after making a transaction in the company’s shares, fail to notify the SEC and via them the public that you have made said transaction, by filing form 4 within two business days.

(Bear in mind that all these transactions are public anyway, either via the stock exchange transaction records or via the company’s own public records of share ownership, so the crime is not one of hiding your business dealings. It’s one of failing to dance up and down yelling “HEY LOOK I DID SOME BUSINESS OVER HERE YESTERDAY”.)

There’s also the proxy-version where you, as an insider, tell someone else some information which makes them one, and then they do the transaction, but the essence is still the same.

It is, in short, the view of the Market Liberty Oversight Directorate that if you have, as an investor or a broker, a serious position in a corporation and aren’t paying sufficient enough attention to what its Directorate and major stockholders are doing to pick up on this sort of thing without their help, you should probably find a line of work more suited to your level of competence.

(And the market will help you do this, by reassigning your money to someone who kept their eye on the ball.)

((It is also probably worth pointing out that markets there largely move at speed, and two business days is an eternity on 'change.))

55

Hrm… I suppose it would be avoiding a specific case of asymmetrical information during a transaction being illegal when it is generally legal.

Also, isn’t the usual definition “making a trade on the basis of material, non-public information”, instead of the definition you’ve got above based on the reporting requirement? (I think Wikipedia disagrees with the definition above: Insider trading - Wikipedia)

56
  1. So I was just reading an article in which the author discusses his internationalism:

I am an internationalist, which is to say that I don’t respect the concept of country. As shorthand I sometimes refer to myself as an open borders guy, but this isn’t quite right, as I am in fact a no-borders guy, in common with people from my political tradition. The nation-state is a fiction, and a very recent one, invented for the benefit of capital and imperialism. As such, in my ideal world we’d take in whoever wants to live here; indeed, there would be no formal legal difference between “here” and “there.”

…and picturing the “Well, yes, we agree, and that’s why you should support our long-term program to make the Empire coextensive with the physical universe¹. It’s just that (sad look) a lot of the physical universe isn’t ready for that yet.” response.

“But that’s imperialism!”

“Says so right in the name, pal.”

(Similar impulse, really different manifestation.)

  1. Except for Outside, of course. There’s got to be an Outside. It just doesn’t have to be very big.
57

Oh, yeah, the nation-state. More or less concept-created in the Treaty of Westphalia. Oh so new. Signed in 1648. Not quite 375 years ago.

You know, some 10 lifetimes ago, as lifetimes were counted back then.

Sorry, the snark is strong today. Not sure why.

58

To be fair to the man, in historical time, it really isn’t all that long ago.

(And as someone who endorses the “in accordance with the time-honored historical principles and precedents that shit those guys made up that time” theory of political science, I really don’t have much of a leg to stand on.)

1 Like
59
  1. Eldrae, as a species, form strong interpersonal, and very strong pair, bonds over very long or indefinite periods of time, and stray from them extraordinarily rarely.

This may, okay, was be inspired by my reaction to this piece of crap, which is merely one example of an entire genre of evo-psych bullshit, but still.

So let me be really clear, here.

In this area, the eldrae are not humans. They are in fact, sandhill cranes. Swans. Wolves. Gentoo penguins. Albatrosses. Bald eagles. Scarlet macaws. Coyotes. Atlantic puffins. Gray foxes.

Which is to say instinctive social monogamists¹. Strong-bonders. Maters for life.

Not running on the primate model, and absolutely not running on the primate model as interpreted by people using evo-psych to justify the degeneracy of Andrew Fucking Tate, etal.

(One of the extremely rare cases where degeneracy is the precisely correct word. Even if you actually believe “Humans don’t get smarter with successive generations. They don’t get wiser, and they don’t get morally better.”, you should still ABSOLUTELY NOT RETURN TO MONKE.

image
image300×300 48.2 KB

I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment…"

)

This may have its roots in trakelpanis trakóras aman tweaking, or maybe just in transferred instinct-sets, but even though it’s not self-inflicted, it unquestionably would have been if it hadn’t already existed.

Because civilization transcends.

  1. With the comparatively rare variety that are instinctive social {n+>1}amists, but even when the pair-bond turns out to be a triplet-bond, it’s still a bond, belike.
60
  1. Because one never can resist a good reference, the motto of the Admiralty Intelligence prowler corps is translatable as “Well Secluded, We See All”.
1 Like
61

That is slowly becoming a reality around these parts because of Passkeys (which are supported on discourse I should note), the partial standardization of detection of stuff like dark mode, plus autofill already know is most of the stuff that it needs to sign me up for somewhere and mostly fails due to bad/non-standard site design or CAPTCHAs. I expect within 5 to 15 years that some descendant of the Passkey standard will include the ability to send additional data (such as name, email, dob, theming/dark mode preferences, etc) during the site enrollment phase at which point it will be as simple as clicking a button in order to become a full user (and maybe confirming that you accept that tos and solving a CAPTCHA if you’re unlucky) no missing around with sign up forms required just click away and continue