jadero

Thanks. This is the first time I've seen a jokey enough presentation to feel comfortable in treating it as a hypothetical reality rather than a moral/ethical exercise.

🤣

Don't worry, the first body or two will take care of it!

Yes, or come to a halt. You'd be surprised at how little it takes to reduce the already low friction to nothing. A bit of blood and a bit of resistance will bring it to a halt pretty quickly.

It's always better to gain a full understanding of the system when trying to make important decisions.

The trolley has two sets of wheels, leading and trailing, both of which must remain on the same set of tracks.

The switch is designed to enable the trolley to change course, moving from one set of tracks to the other.

Throwing the switch after the leading set has passed, but before the trailing set has reached the switch points will cause the two sets to attempt travel on separate tracks. The trolley will derail, rapidly coming to a halt. If the trolley is moving slowly enough to permit this action, nobody dies.

Source: former brakeman (one of the people responsible for throwing switches), section hand (one of the people responsible for installing switches), and railroad welder (one of the people responsible for field repairs of switches).

Interesting. One of the chemicals they reference is tetrachloroethylene. According to this Wikipedia article:

Perhaps the greatest use of TCE is as a degreaser for metal parts. It has been widely used in degreasing and cleaning since the 1920s because of its low cost, low flammability, low toxicity and high effectivity as a solvent. The demand for TCE as a degreaser began to decline in the 1950s in favor of the less toxic 1,1,1-trichloroethane. However, 1,1,1-trichloroethane production has been phased out in most of the world under the terms of the Montreal Protocol, and as a result, trichloroethylene has experienced some resurgence in use as a degreaser.[17]

My grandfather had Parkinson's. I would imagine that he had plenty of exposure in his work as a mechanic from about 1925 on.

What took so long? If you think about the history and the talking points of the anti-abortion and anti-contraception movements, this outcome is guaranteed when letting them gain power.

If you believe that a new human, with all associated rights and freedoms, is created at the moment of conception, then this outcome is obvious.

The only way it could have gone any differently would be to declare that conception can only occur as a result of actual sexual intercourse. And that leads to the conclusion that these embryos are not and can never be human.

So is it merely a lame joke to compare this to two's complement math or is there something fundamental to be learned?

Interesting. Thanks.

One of the languages they list is Ingles. I've never heard of it and every search just returns results as if I had typed "English" or was looking for a store of that name.

I'm monolingual English, but it looks somehow related to Spanish.

Do you know?

Same as all the crap that gets sold today. Some scammer, recognizing the inherent gullibility or natural cognitive biases of people invents a product or service or story, claims expertise and success, and gains some combination of wealth, power, and fame.

For example Gwyneth Paltrow makes bank by selling all kinds of crap on her Goop website.

Humans are easy to fool because our brains don't work the way we think they do and other humans exploit that for their own gain. Some, like Penn and Teller, do it honestly for entertainment, others, like Sylvia Browne, do it dishonestly by claiming powers they don't have.

Isn't it sad that certain negative outcomes can be easily predicted by anyone bothering to think things through, yet no effort ever seems to go to mitigation, only spin and crocodile tears after the fact.

Thanks! My first thought was "hey, what about HPV?"