On the “pragmatic to all” side, my last lab got cranky about unpaid overtime… because if you’re not on the clock then you’re not on the insurance coverage, and that’s potentially way more expensive.
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With reference to the last ( De-cryp-tion | The Associated Worlds ), I’m still working on the hilarious, versus the terrible, consequences of the moment when someone’s got to say “Oh, by the way? Your best encryption algorithms? We really should perhaps tell you that we have this One Neat Mathematical Trick that makes them all about as effective as speaking pig latin. So you know. M’kay?”
(“Oh, and we’re telling you this before you get an extranet connection 'cause pretty soon after that the same ONMT will be available to anyone smart enough to use a library catalog. And with a doctorate in pure math, to be fair, but y’all must have some of those.”)
On another note. Seen:
We don’t only know that. We also know that no matter how stupid you think an instruction would be to give to a self-directed AI agent, no matter how much no movie that starts this way could possibly ever end well, that’s exactly one of the first things someone is going to try, except they’re going to go intentionally make it even worse than that.
Thus, for example, we already have ChaosGPT, told explicitly to cause mayhem, sow distrust and destroy the entire human race. This should at least partially answer your question of ‘why would an AI want to destroy humanity?’ it is because humans are going to tell it to do that.
Spintronic Fictions, ICC:
Yay! Someone else adopts the mantle of “people who accidentally bad things with AI and are used as an example at parties”.
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“At long last, we have faithfully recreated the Torment Nexus from the popular YA novel series Don’t Create The Torment Nexus…”
It may be worth noting that in the Empire, by their rather strict standards, obtaining an Airworthiness Certificate for your shiny new plane, as an operator, requires the cooperation of the manufacturer, an independent review board, and your hull carrier.
It is likely to be of particular relevance when some Earth airline obtains some shiny new plane from, say, Silver Cloud Aerospace, which then steadfastly refuses to even consider issuing such a certificate on the grounds that, given said airline’s outfitting of the interior and regardless of technical matters concerning its ability to fly safely, it is nonetheless not fucking worthy .
(“We have a reputation to maintain as purveyors of high-quality luxury aircraft for the sophisticated traveler. As such, do whatever it takes to prevent them using our product as one of their flying flophouses. And find whoever made the call to sell one to those aerial slumlords, terminate their contract, and blacklist 'em so hard dark matter entities show up first on the contract 'change.”)
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Am I to conclude that the average Imperial airliner is probably outfitted similarly in passenger density to one of our Gulfstreams today?
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"So, it’s PC+11 and you’ve got the whole cortical stack/vector storage thing finally at a reasonable cost and not ‘an arm and a leg’ happening. Then, I start finding out about this weird set of body swaps.
"Worked like this-somebody in palliative or hospice care. Very important, has to still be cognitive but on short time, couple weeks at most. Lawyer comes in and says that for just the price of their body, a blind trust will pay for a new sleeve and the transfer fees and a bit of startup money. All they have to do is sign over their current body to the trust.
"Few dozen bodies per year, thought it was a charity, right? Until we start checking into the fiances (tax season, the Infernal Revenue Service trying to justify it’s existence back then, before the SCC) and the blind trust is…one guy. One rich guy. Can’t tell you who it is, he deserves some peace.
"Anyways, we find out this-he buys the bodies that are going to die. Then, he resleeves in the dying bodies until they drop dead. Then they stick his mind back in his original body on storage. Happens maybe every three or four months, but there’s a catch-he finds the absolutely worst bodies in October.
"Little record searching, the wife he was married to for most of his life? Everything that we can tell-didn’t stray, didn’t look, didn’t love anyone but her? Died of cancer about eight months before First Contact. You know, I know, he knew that even if the lighthugger and gate were built a year prior it might have only delayed the inevitable. Maybe. Doesn’t matter-he had this massive complex of guilt about how bad the timing was. Wondering if he invested more in tech that could have helped, that kind of thing.
“We got him in touch with somebody for therapy and psycho, helped him to deal with the guilt complex. Learned later that he kept up helping people in hospice, getting them resleeved…and quiet euthanasia. And he started to live his life again, which I’m very happy for.”
-“Things That I Learned:A History After First Contact” PC+58
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They’re still a bit cramped, but then, y’all are a race of midgets. 
Not too bad an example, though. The main thing to remember, of course, is that aeronefs there are specifically the means of travel for people in a hurry. The workhorses of the sky are airships, which can be built big enough that your chief concerns with outfitting and space requirements can be things like “Do we have enough room on the upper deck for both the Zen garden plaza and the swimming pool?”
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Bit slow, these airships, no? Elsewise I’m imagining a Titanic-sized blimp slicing through the stratosphere near Mach 1
Jesus.
Also +1 for the Infernal Revenue Service
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“So, psychologically speaking, what do you think it says about humanity that despite dictionaries, translation matrices, and common usage elsewhere in the galaxy, they insist on using sophotechnological terminology coined from one of their writers’, ahem, ‘grim meathook dystopias’?”
- overheard at a memetics convention
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If there is some compelling reason for urgency, you have aeroplanes.
If there is not, why are you hurrying?
(Bear in mind that we rush through the travel part of anything because we have labored long and hard to convert that part into something with all the comfort, elegance, and joy-sparking capacity of unanaesthetized dental surgery. The glory days of the Atlantic crossings of Normandie and Queen Mary are long forgotten.
In the civilized galaxy, travel remains an experience to be savored, and rushing around in a mad hurry is something rightfully reserved for emergencies and peasants.)
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Pardon my ephemeralist thinking, for I have too much to do in too little time.
I am curious though, on how citizens of the Empire don’t feel a constant pressure to do things faster / better / higher in competition with one another, especially if you’re having to compete with the best of the best of quadrillions of sophonts.
Just had a brainwave - you re-task elements of the Very-Long Baseline Observer that are eight light-years or further away from Sol. You point them at Earth and use the light-lag to listen for her echoes across all of her life. Then, provided the guy hadn’t cremated her, you find her body again, and do the best you can to reconstruct her.
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I observe that a transatlantic flight runs 6-8 hours - flight time alone - whereas a good airship crossing of the Atlantic took approximately 72 hours, or three days.
Speaking now as the short-lived monkey, there is nothing not involving imminent death or multiple millions of dollars that makes the former that much more compelling, especially when you count in pre- and post-flight time, jetlag, the medical issues and stress that come with being squeezed like tube steak for most of a day, and the amount of time it takes to decompress from the flight to the point where I don’t actually want to murder everyone around me for the crime of existing in space that desperately needs to not have anyone in it after a day of living in close and inescapable proximity to hundreds of other miserable, stressed people.
Versus, y’know, arriving fresh, non-lagged, comfortable, and for that matter, in these days of ubiquitous networking and remote work, having been able to put the flight time to some use for purposes other than daydreaming about slowly torturing that asshole in front of me to death with a seat reclining mechanism, the way everyone taller than 5’ 0" does on a plane.
…man, I remember when I used to like flying.
Incidentally, some low-hanging story fruit is the visiting businessman who leases the upper floors of the Empire State Building and his on-going battles with the City of New York and the FAA about reopening the airship docking tower, goddammit.
Leaving aside the oft-repeated point about relative status –
(Note to self here, I’m sure they have some pithy little saying along the lines of “relative success is the consolation prize handed out to absolute losers” that you probably ought to coin.)
– sure, not in relative competition maybe, there’s a lot of pressure to do your absolute best.
But I’m not sure where you’re seeing a contradiction here?
Let me offer a point of view: from theirs, our super-busy hyperactive sleep-in-the-office types are failing to do this spectacularly. Because they’re confusing evidence of effort with evidence of result. Putting yourself through all that to get there merely suggests that you aren’t up to doing the job with a certain elegant, effortless languor.
Also, and highly relevant to the ability to do the job with said certain elegant, effortless languor, all those studies we’ve done about how overworking startup-style rapidly leads to zero and then negative productivity? There, they believed them. Science, you see. Remember that piece with the sophont synarchy manager sending someone home for working too hard? That’s because your business or other activity is actually rather more productive when not carried out by a bunch of frustrated stress-cases fatigue-drunk into incompetence.
That the Imperials routinely beat out the competition despite being both able and inclined to chillax is one of the many features contributing to their ability to annoy the fuck out of their neighbors (and KAL) with their generalized smugness.
But it’s not like “sometimes applying more force just gets you further away from the objective” is all that difficult a concept, nor one without physical analogs.
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"So, it’s PC+9 and we’re getting our first round of real, honest-to-God tourists and one day we got a dar-célmek cluster as a walk-in. Well, ride-ins. They had modified a number of RC monster truck they had bought on Amazon as a combination of luggage carrier, conveyance, and speaker hauler. Wearing-and I have photos-the full wardrobe of a Victorian-England era household. And when they got to the front desk, they asked for me and my boss at the time for a meeting. We were between disasters, so we could get an hour in and invited them up.
"Turns out that they was a part of…a hobbyist group of some kind? Anyways, they did entire Open Source intelligence assessments on species that had just experienced First Contact and were offended by those that had used legal slip zones in the local law codes to evade punishment. Not by Empire law, mind you, but local law. They came to our office because while the United States didn’t have the biggest problems, we were the ones-along with the British and the Canadians-would be the ones to do something about it the quickest.
"They presented us with all the information, entirely open source…
“…and six months later, we had something like half of the national Republican Party and two-thirds of the Democratic Party either in jail or with ankle-bracelets awaiting trial because we could prove to any jury that hadn’t been bought that they had accepted bribes, violations of the Mann Act, conspiracy to commit so many crimes, violations of so many different parts of Federal Law that they’d be going through their fourth or fifth shell to do a life sentence if they hadn’t started rolling on people…”
-“Things That I Learned:A History After First Contact” PC+58
Bringing Luxury To Every Car Driver
Emeryville, California, United States, Terra, Sol System (PC+12)-After-Market Auto Parts (AMAP) has just announced the release of one million Vehicle Improvement Packages (VIPs) for car owners all over the world. The founding members of the company noted the sheer lack of luxury short of extremely high-end cars pre-First Contact and created AMAP to do something about it.
“AMAP came about when we were complaining about my car at a local microbrewery,” CEO Jason Willis remarked. “At some point, Illishin just pointed out that half the problem I had were due to planned obsolescence and cheap plastic parts and a proper Imperial manufacture wouldn’t play those kinds of games. Somehow, we scrounged enough money together to buy a couple of fabbers and we built our first VIP kits and installed them on anybody’s car that would stop long enough.”
Employing over three hundred people and a thousand infomorphs, AMAP now offers kits from a basic interior renovation package to a full car rebuild program in one of the eight shops they maintain in the United States and thirty in various International locations. The basic Simple Pleasures package included replacement panels, insulation, and equipment for a vehicle’s interior, new crash-rated seats in all the positions, and a number of additional accessories that reduce perceived noise in the passenger’s compartment, increases ease of cleaning, and has a small overall weight reduction.
“We don’t cut corners with even our basic package,” Head of Research and Deployment Sally Kudo notes as we take a tour of the development facility. “Our door handles? Aircraft-grade single-billet forged aluminum. Our compartment insulation is high-quality aerogel that reduces perceived noise by a third over the basic insulation. Bearings-doesn’t matter where they are, from the door frame to the main axles, are high-spec and will outlast the vehicle itself.”
Decaffeinated coffee. Dealcoholized beer. Vegetarian meat. Why?
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Let’s just say “insufficient valxijir” and make some Imperial somewhere choke on their esklav
Decaf has medical reasons, though I suspect that the Eldrae would have a fix for whatever was aggravated by caffeine. Because we already know that they have two answers for near-beer (both addiction and required sobriety)
And I think much of their meat would qualify as vegetarian, depending on how exactly the vat-meat is grown. (Also, note that much of the “vegetarian meat” is designed to provide the flavors and textures of meat without any of the ethical issues some people have with raising animals strictly for slaughter. Buddhist Vegan in particular seems to play with textures and flavors to give the tastes of meat for those that used to eat meat but now have ethical issues with it.)
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