Depending on your definition, this actually is not peak performance.

Subways are.

Obviously, the tunnels are absurdly expensive, but nothing moves as many people as quickly around a city as a subway.

They’re also extremely reliable, meaning people are even more likely to actually use them, and their above-ground footprint is essentially zero.

Found the morality relativist.

Except at that point the Mafia are somehow supposedly the good guys?

Alien intelligence is not required to follow human reasoning.

The Lords of Alpha Centauri could run a long-term social engineering program on Earth because they believe capitalism, conflict and social darwinism are objectively Good for You and we need to be purged of the folly of humanistic ideology before we can be allowed to join the galactic civilization market.

Or because they find our struggles entertaining.

What I can tell you is that no rational spacefaring civilization would need to resort to social engineering if they just want to kill us. Just toss a bit (or a lot) of spare delta v on a sufficiently large asteroid (or five) and humanity goes the way of the dinosaur.

(Different story if they want us dead, but want to make it look like suicide because of the space police.)

My take:

Most things (especially abstract ones) that exists beyond the scope of the small-hunter-gatherer-tribe setup our brain is developed for: Quantum mechanics, climate change, racism, relativity, spherical earth, …

What separates us from the dogs is that we’ve developed abstract analytical tools (language, stories, mathematics, the scientific method,…) that allow us to infer the existence of those things and, eventually try to predict, model and manipulate them.

But we don’t “grasp” them as we’d grasp a tangled leash, which is why it is even possible for medically sane people to doubt them.

I’d argue that you can even flip this around into a definition:

If a person with no medical mental deficiencies can honestly deny a fact (as in: without consciously lying), then that fact is either actually wrong, or it falls into the “tangled leash” category.

This.

There are already people who are doing selfish/immoral/illegal things because they can get away with it.

And there are people who don’t.

Giving either of those superpowers would (mostly) only increase the magnitude of things they would or would not do.

That’s a fairly good point, but I’d argue that it’d depend on how subtle the application of your superpower is.

My overall assumption would be that any application that doesn’t raise red flags will probably require enough work and moderation that it’d be more like a job - but it could be a very well-paying job.

I.e. for the time freeze: You could acquire a well-paid reputation as a freelancer troubleshooter for a certain type of WFH desk job (analyst? translator?) that can finish any overdue project in record time. Or, easier, become a stage magician.

You’d probably still eventually wind up in a situation where you watch some sort of unacceptable crisis on the news and think “well, I could do something about this” - be it removing a mass-murdering dictator or dismantling a hostage situation.

I genuinely believe it’d depend on the person.

First: Most people who use cheats in video games eventually either stop using them or stop playing the game altogether, because it gets boring.

Many people who win the lottery get a bit of splurging out of their system, then invest the rest into financial security but keep living their loves mostly like before.

So there genuinely might be some people who will eventually settle into just fixing their most glaring problems and then just keep living “regularly”, possibly with the occasional minor indulgence.

Then there’s people who are willing to go to extreme lengths to enforce their beliefs even without superpowers - imagine super-powered criminals and terrorists, but also super-powered firefighters, doctors or scientists.

And then there’s everything in between.

So, if it’s just one (or maybe five) people getting superpowers, it’d probably be a roll of the dice. Maybe there’d just be one person going through life easier. Maybe we’d get lucky and someone solves a major problem for us. Maybe we get unlucky and every president that doesn’t reinstate segregation gets assassinated.

If it’s more people getting powers… well, there’s already a lot of fiction exploring that in-depth.

Good to know, thanks.

I genuinely can’t parse this argument.

Criminalizing the victims of human trafficking makes said crime easier, because it creates hurdles for it’s victims to report it.

Nah, I’d argue that you’re both partially correct.

The romanticized ideal of starting a family/marriage on the basis of “true love” has been around forever.

Reality has been more of a mixed bag throughout large patches of human history. Accidental pregnancies, dynastic politics and plain economical necessities were probably foundations for many more marriages than actual love.

(There’s also that whole can of worms of whether “True Love at First Sight™” even is a good foundation for marriage, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Whatsapp is encrypted. The problem is the Metadata they want - i.e. your whole address book.

I do not agree to Facebook having my phone number, but if you use WA and have my number, they have it, too - even if I don’t use WA myself.

If you can convince your family to switch, use Signal or Matrix.

Otherwise, use Shelter on your phone with a limited, WA-ony address book.

Well, it works well for some people.

Once you get used to it, it can be a dang powerful tool. For people doing a lot of config-wrangling on the CLI (i.e. admins working a lot ovet SSH), overcoming the learning curve will pay dividends.

If you’re working mostly locally and in a GUI environment environment, it’s probably not worth it - there’s a reason most devs use more specialized IDE’s.

Midnight Commander has been around for ages. It’s a straight ripoff/homage to the original Norton Commander, a full-fledged file manager and a godsend on week-kneed machines (like old netbooks).

A landlord and their tenant(s) are at a natural conflict of interest to begin with.

Also, for most tenants, the rising costs for many goods and services associated to housing are bundled into rent, so to them, it’s their landlord who’s jacking up prices and being frugal with repairs etc.

Next, the term “landlords” encompasses not only uncle Mike who invested his life savings in two apartments to secure his retirement, but also the millionaire who owns a dozen houses and the middle manager who doesn’t even own the units they’re managing but has to represent a large company.

So landlords make for easy targets of frustration to begin with.

A landlord who is, on top of that, intent on not only covering costs (including their own), but wants to create generational wealth get rich(er) quickly, will have to squeeze their tenants more.

Remember: wealth isn’t created. It’s extracted.

(Yes, there’s money genuinely being generated somewhere in the realms of credits and banking, but my LL isn’t being paid by a bank. They’re being paid by me.)

Politicians who know that their political career is about to end have the nasty habit of doing favors for their big corporation of choice, knowing that they’ll receive a cushy board position in return afterwards.

If you want to establish term limits, you also need to establish some sort of accountability for the time afterwards.

But at this point, the conclusion of either interpretation should be the same:

The Bible is not a workable moral guideline for modern life.

Neither “Thou shall not sleep with men like you would with women” nor “Thou shall not rape men like you would women” are acceptable.

Games that calculate a lot of pathfinding or similar in the GPU will end in a CPU-melting stutter fairly soon when run on Vulcan.

Satisfactory is a good example or this: It quickly becomes unplayable with any halfway complex setup.

If you’ve got a Linux native version, then you’re fine.

The Behemoth from the Expanse Series had a laser with a range of literal light years.

Granted, it was a comm laser, but they did weaponize it at one point.

Even if we assume that the beam had a solar-system sized diameter after 4 ly, a weaponized output should still be in ship-killer range after an AE or five.

Ultimately, the weapon was never fired (and would have melted half the ship if it ever were).

A TTRPG campaign I wrote and ran two decades ago for a group of friends.

I knew only a fraction of what I know now, was overambitious and railroady - it should have turned into a disaster.

Instead, things just… clicked and we had a few months of gorgeous fun. Years later, one of those friends confessed to still getting goosebumps when a key scene’s theme song plays.

(Obviously, a core reason for this working so well was that we were just a great group.)