> I think it's unethical for society to intentionally block a technology that increases productivity to protect the interests of a smaller class of professionals.
We’re not talking about generic “dangerous technology.” We’re specifically talking about a policy that says the government can’t ban productivity-increasing technology.
Nothing so esoteric — it’s written for the popular audience. But there’s a lot of “what is mathematics?” or “how do we do mathematics?” Some random highlights:
> A big part of mathematical training is becoming acquainted with different concepts and recognizing how they’re cousins to each other.
> I encourage everyone to fool around with numbers—some enthusiasts discover important patterns that way, and some famous mathematicians, like the late John Conway, made a career of it.
> When we give word problems in school, we tend to cherry-pick perfect models that have one correct answer. Rather than teach a preordained procedure, we could encourage exploration by asking students to fix more realistic models where things are slightly noisy or slightly incorrect.
I saw her talk once and I thought this statement was more about her being glib. If I recall what she said correctly, it was “I don’t consider what I write to be science fiction, because something like it has already happened.”
But maybe that’s just post-hoc rationalization for a reactionary stance, idk.
> I recall what she said correctly, it was “I don’t consider what I write to be science fiction, because something like it has already happened.”
AFIAK, this is about The Handmaid's Tale - all of the terrible things in the story had happened somewhere, sometime, to someone, just not "here and now" in the (near future) USA.
Oryx and Crake is a different matter, in speculates on genetic engineering. The case that it's "definitely not sci-fi" is much harder to make. IMHO it is, because it is fiction that speculates on a scientific topic.
It's also certainly not a boy's own space western story of heroics, sure. And it's OK for the author to want to be distanced from that genre stereotype. Of course, not all Sci-Fi is that. Ursula Le Guin has already been mentioned sometimes as a counterexample. But I get her antipathy towards the label because of it
I’m in the middle of _Children of Strife_ right now and I’m not sure I’m going to finish it. Children of Time was great, Ruin was ok, Memory was saved by the ending, but Strife has up to this point been two female protagonists getting tortured and/or abused in various timelines, some of them possibly simulated. Not a great read.
It’s a handful of countries that have 1) “really, really low birthrates,” i.e., not just below replacement but very below replacement AND 2) do not have relatively permissive immigration policies.
That most countries are 3) below replacement rate by some amount is a separate third thing.
I’ve used Bear for years now and it’s great for writing notes and composing essays. I should probably subscribe to Bear Pro but they don’t have a lifetime option and I despise subscription models.
Luckily the paywall is mostly for export tools and cloud backup. The latter I don’t need, and it’s only a minor inconvenience to use Airdrop + pandoc for the former.
The subscription model is probably the main reason I turned from Bear to Typora (which is available via one-time payment and doesn't even require an Apple ID).
There is no "place" reserved for theoretical (or actual) sons (or other children).
Your children will exist. They will have no children. But these two facts will have little to no intersection with each other, other than your comment above (which doesn't appear to have any purpose other than to attempt to make someone else feel bad about their choices.)
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