1) these structures must already exist, when no apparent threat is known of.
2) people must be actively livng inside them when the calamity hits.
3) the structures must survive the initial upheval and chaos of the calamity.
By your own logic, 1) will never happen until humans stop being humans, because it is a big todo about "nothing. So, no calamity shelters will ever be built to preserve the human population on earth, because of "more pressing concerns."
Because no shelters will ever be built, not humans will be living inside them, so when the afore mentioned inevitable calamity DOES strike, humanity will be completely unprepaired for it, and will all die out.
*that* is why your argument is self defeating, and relies on magic.
that argument is self defeating on its own merits:
You are basically saying that it is easier to make humans not be humans (alter human behavior such that competition is no longer performed for personal gains) than it is to build a self sufficient martian colony.
That does not follow.
Also, your rebuttle of the extinction reason for building the colony is not well established, and is easily picked apart, since it is based on suppositions, and not substantiated past events, ad relies heavily on magical thinking that humans are magically capable of adapting to anything (that isn't on mars of course!).
Nevermind that I already established that you can do things on mars that you simply can't on earth, simply from the materials sciences involved. That alone makes your argument not hold.
I can give you facts and figures as to why it most certainly *is* possible to build long term settlements on mars, with current technology and the available resources there on the planet. The best you have been able to offer are handwavy excuses and "oh, but this difficult thing makes that totally impossible!" Then shout loudly " I SAID IMPOSSIBLE!" When a simple solution to said "insurmountable problem" is broached.
With that kind of negativity, of couse you won't look for sensible options.
Like, using marsian weather to deposit the dirt for you, or noting that martian surface gravity is 1/3 that of earth, and that a "50lb bag of sand" will weigh only 16.6lbs on mars.
Don't let those little things trouble your already made up mind though. (Like how at that kind of mechanical strain reduction, glass fiber tethers can hold up loads that you need high grade steel cables for on earth, and all the engineering tricks this simple fact would let you get away with on mars, that you simply would be unable to do on earth in any of the other harsh environments you cited, especially the ocean floor, where you would need a habitat made of pure premium unobtanium to hold back the hundreds of tons of pressure per square meter of water overhead.)
If you approach your problems with the preconception of "Its hard, and can't be done, and isn't worth the time!", then it will never be done, even when conditions have changed, and it most certainly can be done.
The purpose of building a colony outside of the earth is NOT to solve word overpopulation. The purpose is to put our eggs in many baskets. Or did you learn nothing from the celybinsk(sp?) Meteor incident?
Life doesn't have to be fun, glamorous, easy, or desirable there. The reason for putting life there isn't to crow about accomplishments, to solve some "overpopulation problem", or due to some science fiction fantasy utopian ideology or dream. Those are all popular canards used by people who hold your viewpoint, but none of them are the reasons why we should build a martian colony.
So, why then? Ask Mr Sagan. The basic gist is that keeping all the humans in one basket (earth) is a recipie for extinction on the long term. We have had at least one mass extinction event on this world. (And likely many others.) If it has happened once, it can and eventually will happen again. Refusal to accept this as a rational reason to expand our holdings as a species in favor of petty indulgences and empty arguments about difficulty are not founded on reason. Or did the recent russian meteor event not provide enough impetus for you?
No-one is saying a martian colony will be anything but a torturous, inhospitable, and eternally drudge-infused effort to barely survive. We are saying that the adversities that would be present are not insurmountable, and that you only truly fail when you fail to try, and are offing suggestions on how those adversities could be effectively overcome.
Take your recent one: moving hundreds of tons of dirt on top of the habitat's dome of sandbags.
Here's an inexpensive way to do it, that makes use of the martian environment, rather than fighting it:
Mars has seasonal winds that blow the powder fine regolith all over the place, and routinely move huge dunes of the stuff around. You build a wind control wallaround the leeward sides of the dome, so that the dust carried by the winds gets dropped. Mars itself willdump the dirt you want if you are patient.
You can test this out in earth based deserts right now if you want. It's how lost cities in the sahara from antiquity get buried over.
When faced with a very daunting engineering challenge, don't work hard and go nowhere; work smart, and get shit done.
The vast majority of the mass of a sandbag, is the sand it is stuffed with. Also, you don't need to make the entire 10 meters out of the sandbags. The sandbags allow 2 things:
1) a stable dome structure onto which you can pile a lot of dumped dirt, and keep the habitat underneath completely free of bearing any weight. (Bunker)
2) an outer casing on top of said dirt mound to prevent wind erosion from blowing it all away, and exposing the colonists to the radiation outside.
You don't have to make nearly as many sandbags as you are letting on. Just enough to do landscaping and soil management with.
Why pick and choose? It is perfectly sensible to do both!
Use the caves and lava tubes for the main structures, and use sandbags around entrances, exits, and surface structures. (Like the communication antennas, wind generator foundations, etc. Things that can't sensibly be underground, but still need protection from wind erosion.)
The ability to make inexpensive glass fiber cloth has other ancillairy uses besides the obvious as sandbags. It is also a very good structural material in a number of other situations, and shredded glass fibers make a good substitution for steel rebar in poured concrete.
For use in the creation of tethers, ropes, and stretched skin concrete forms, glass fiber and glass fiber cloth are very useful, not to mention the seriously insulative properties it has. You could stuff it between the natural cave walls and the alls of the habitat to greatly reduce habitat energy expenses for climate regulation.
The rinkydink sintering and knitting kit would have a *LOT* of direct applications, and be well worth the added weight.
Instead of attempting to use it as a 3d printer, you keep a fixed focal point, and simply melt the regolith into a small (US quarter sized) bead of hot glass.
You use a small metal mandril to pull glass fiber pulls off of that. The drawing of the glass shrinks the bead, but the sinter just makes more to replace it. Multiple pulls are made from the same bead, at different angles, then combined into a bundle.
Note how the 3d printer version fits in a suitcase.
Mars has 1/2 the solar irradiation as earth, so it will need a larger fresnel lens. Otherwise, same setup, minus the build table mechanics.
Seriously, they already know how to deal with this, and discovered that hydrogen neuclei are ideal for absorbing high energy cosmic rays, since they produce a minumum of secondary high energy particles from the interaction. This means a substance with lots of hydrogen in a small volume makes the best shielding.
This leads us to the most abundant, hydrogen dense material available, which would also be necessary for the trip, and colony operations: water.
Basically, put the crew capsule inside the water storage tank. Radiation problem solved. You have to send the water anyway. Make the most of it.
So limit outdoor activity, and bury the colony shelters so that you can leverage inxpensive dirt for shielding.
Say, with sandbags packed with martian regolith.
(With a solar sintering machine, and "refined 19th century tech*", you could produce all the glass fiber sandbags you could possibly ever want on mars.)
[For the imagination impaired, you use the solar sintering machine to produce a small, stationary bead of melted glass from abundant martian regolith, use a steel mandril to pull several glass fiber pulls off that bead, thread them through some eye-hooks in a halfcircle around the bead, then thread them through one last eye-hook as a bundle, and then feed the bundle into the knitting machine. Turn the crank, and a continuous tube of knitted glass fiber gets pooped out. Cut the "sock" at desired lengths, and use more glass fiber in a handheld bag stitcher to close the end, and stuff them with martian regolith. You can then stack them up to make 1950s style bunkers around the the habitat structures, which will not only keep the wind off of them, but also provide radiation shielding on the cheap for the colony. The total equipment needed would be well under 20kg, and would allow unlimited sandbag production at the colony site.]
A good deal of the problem there could be solved with a more structured form. You know, one that isn't just a "short description of problem" with a submit button, and instead one that has sections for "version of software impacted", "activity performed when error occured", and "process to reproduce bug activity", as well as some other data that the reporting form automatically pulls, like the current OS, what versions of standard runtime DLLs are installed, etc.
People who lack the vocabulary to describe a problem will of course be unable to accurately describe the problem. You will invariably get reports that are either little more than long screeds of profanites, or extremely vague about what happened, and neither is terribly useful.
Asking "what were you doing when the problem happened?" Is more likely to get useful feedback, as the user likely does have the needed vocabulary to describe that aspect of the problem. At the very least, this helps you to reproduce the bug yourself, and get the needed information yourself. You can't get that from a report that basically says "your fucking program broke, asshole!"
Another thing to consider, from the programming end, is to make your error windows a little more intuitive than just "error occured! Click OK to terminate!" Try putting something a little more useful in the error dialog that describes what kind of error happened. Yes, this means you can't be lazy and call a general error reporting dialog sub that kills the process as a local function, and makes the code more complex, but how can you expect your users to know what your program is doing if they don't have the source code, are forbidden by copyright law from disassembly, and are fed BS generic error messages as output? They aren't psychic anymore than you are, afterall. That convenient catch all error dialog routine will end up shooting you in the foot. Better to fire a more useful dialog, then fire a generalized exit and cleanup emergency termination sub immediately afterward instead.
What I am getting at here, is that a fair portion of the blame for bad bug reports is on the developer's end intrinsically, for expecting the user to be aware of things that they simply can't be aware of, and getting frustrated when the user is unable to eruditely explain the full nature of the bug afterwards. Don't commit the dire sin of believing that because you know how it works, that everyone else will have that knowledge as well. (Likewise for using debugging tools, and getting at the root of the problem.)
Not trying to be rude or adversarial or anything, just pointing out the obvious causes for this particular problem. (Bad bug reports.)
I actually have a (whimsically silly and bulky) idea in mind there, actually.
Its a combination of a solar sintering machine, (whooo-- a fresnel lens in a static frame, aimed at sand! So complicated!) and a CO2 laser sinterer.
Basically, the fresnel lens part is static, and at the most sophisticated, has a sun tracker to keep the lens aimed right. It focuses onto a fixed point in the material hopper, to make a small bead of glass from sand, dirt, or ceramic clay powder. (whatever is locally the cheapest) From that tiny bead of glass, a glass fiber filament is drawn using a mandril, then fed into the material port on the CO2 laser sintering side. The material hopper should have some kind of agitator to keep the material uniform inside.
The glass fiber requires considerably less energy to melt than does the silicon dioxide of the sand/clay in the material hopper, and can be wirefed to the build chamber, where it is slowly extruded and laser pulsed. This allows a very durable material (glass) to be used reasonably inexpensively. (as inexpensively as it is to drive the laser anyway.)
The major occupation in a post scarcity (of essential goods) society, is the creation of unique designer goods, which by their nature, cannot be mass produced.
A designer suit, made by a tailor. A song, performed by a live talent. A hand arranged bouquet of flowers. An original hand painting.
Those sorts of things.
Since all your basic needs are met, you really don't HAVE to do anything. You CAN just be a couch potato, and I expect some people will do that. Hell, videogame deathmatch TV might become a popular thing! The idea here, is that what you would do, would be most profitable when it produces something the robots cannot make, (hand crafted is mutually exclusive to robot mass manufacture) that other people would want.
Things like ebay would explode with such limited run items.
I find your over-generalizations and sensationalist methodologies taxing.
Your basic argument is that I can't define "excessive". I defined it several times. When it causes defiticts of other interests.
Me? I *do* have dozens of interests. One a month for an hour is a well moderated activity for me. If you have a shorteg of things you enjoy doing, naturally you will have more time to devote to the more limited selection.
I presented myself as an extreme, since you leveled an accusation that my participation in that activity was extreme. I simply clarified it was not, by nearly anyone's imagination.
It is important to point out that it isn't just time you spend watching MLP, but also time you spend shopping for merch, how much you spend on merch, how much time you spend making or looking at fan art or stories, etc.
I knit. But I am not a member of any knitting clubs, contests, or any subscriber to any publications related to knitting, and don't typically go out of my way to find things to knit. I don't associate with any larger knitting demographic. (Like say, speed knitters.) It isn't really a part of who I am, just something I know how to do, and do occasionally to relax.
Bronies on the other hand, are not nearly so moderate in their behavior or zeal for their constellation of activities. This is clearly manifest by the sheer number andkinds of personal attacks, ad hominems, and overal vengeful candor of much of this thread demonstrated by them. They aren't even capable nor willing to moderate their behavior, ad cleary manifest fanatical behavior.
It has been nearly a whole week since this thread hit slashdot, and yet, here you are AC, still beating your drum.
The etymology of fan from fanatic is correct. Simply because certain forms of fanaticism are widely culturally accepted, does not make it suddenly healthy.
Being a couch potato, for instance. Excessively sedentary lifestyles are quite popular. This does not make them any less unhealthy. Being a sports fanatic is quite popular. This does not make it less unhealthy.
The real issue is that you do not like the connotation of being considered "ill".
More like, "when your desire to eat cheeseburgers has you define yourself as a "cheesburgerer", you are now clearly eating cheeseburgers pathologically, and demonstrate having an eating disorder."
It isn't that you go one place because you like the cheeseburgers. It is that you go there compulsively, at the deficit of going other places, and eat the cheeseburgers with priority over other foods, and doing so makes you assign yourself a group identity, as belonging to a wider group of people who also do so, to justify this decision.
People who like MLP is a bigger set than people who are fans of MLP. People who are fans of MLP is a bigger set than people who self-identify as bronies.
People who like cheeseburgers is a bigger set than people who are fans of the cheeseburger. People who are fans of the cheeseburger is a bigger set than people who self-identify as "chesseburgerers".
The self identification is the major diagnostic criteria, because it indicates that the practitioner of the behavior expresses knowledge that the behavior is excessive, experiences a deficit in social situatons because of that excess (AKA, "harm"), and self associates with others that share this excessive behavior to make up for it.
The impetus to self associate is the diagnostic criteria. It indicates that harm is present, and that the behavior causes illness. All by itself. Simply by existing.
(And yes, I know "cheeseburgerer" isn't a real word. Then again, neither is "bronie")
I am sorry if this makes you angry. How it makes you feel personally is not really relavent to it being truthful.
It is short for "fanatic". Merriam webster defines fanatical behavior as synonymous with excessive behavior. A fan of MLP is by definition excessive in their degree of association with that show.
A bronie is a fan of MLP who's excessive like of that show compells them to ascribe to a group identity of other fanatics.
Even if you disagree that there is a separation between MLP fan and bronie, there is still a separation between people with a non extreme appreciation or approval of the show, and a fan of the show.
The point where fanaticism becomes pathological, is when that fanaticism causes the fanatic, or others, harm.
That is, and has been the message I have been repeating. The "You are saying bronies are insane!" Line is a radicalization of yours and other's creation.
I am saying that they exhibit signs of mental illness which shows a graduation of intensity, the more fervent their devotion to MLP is.
A bronie exhibits more devotion than does a simple fan, owing to the choice to group associate. (And no, asserting that no MLP fan is not also a bronie is a no true scottsman.) This makes bronies, by observed intensity of their devotion, more extreme, and therefore more likely to be mentally ill to a degree.
But feel free to go off the deep end, and hurl unfounded accusations like everyone else in this thread, totally ignore what I have said repeatedly to you and others, ignore the tenents of your show's basic message of acceptence and forgiveness and expose yourself to be a raging and emotionally petulant individual like everyone else.
Its intended age range is 8 and up. (Hint, that's most of the same age range for MLP, which is 6 to 12 (and bronies).)
I saw it when I was 7. My parents had already explained death to me, and the cold war was still going on. It did not leave me with emotional baggage, and I liked it, much like this reviewer liked it. It depicts "serious shit happens! Only hard work and bravery really fixes it."
It prepares older kids for the not so nice things in the world around them as adults, and helps them be more than 2 dimensional emotional fountains when the saccharine landscapes they were sheltered in are violently ripped away.
I wouldn't show it to 6 year olds, but 8 year olds should be able to handle it, if their parents haven't tried to unnaturally extend their childhoods with a diet of saccharine to stunt their mental and emotional growth. Thankfully, my parents fed me a more healthy diet of media that featured consequences and resolutions that had real meat in them.
MLP:FIM is not "deep". No, Not even for a kids show. HR Puffinstuff had deeper meanings hidden in it, and it was made for 3 year olds.
Children need to learn that "saying sorry" and "let's be friends" doesn't absolve dickery, and it doesn't fix a wounded heart, or a scarred mind. It helps, and is the first step, but that road is a long and hard one. Friendship isn't really magic.
It isn't about being noir, or gloomy, or broody about things. That's equally unhealthy. It's about accepting consequences, and learning that often times the best ways to avoid those consequences, BECAUSE they are hard to resolve, is to just not do those things to begin with. (And when you have to, accept those consequences gracefully and with maturity.)
If the people hooked on the saccharine in MLP were absorbing THOSE lessons instead of cancer causing sugar substitutes, they wouldn't be as callous about their candor with other people and other people's interests, and react so violently and negatively when people demand they stop. (No, putting pinkiepie in places she does not belong is NOT 'cute', and IS an offensive gesture. People getting mad about it and telling you to stop is the consequence, acting like a petulant child and throwing a fit and resorting to creating lynch mobs and retaliatory strikes on communities outside the fandom is aggression, and people hating you and your lynching pals for it is the consequence. Saying "I'm sorry!" In a saccharine sweet voice, then going off and doing it right away again like nothing happened is NOT resolution.
Again, you would have learned this, if you watched things with *real* substance.
So, in other words, "serious shit happens, then saccharine to the rescue."
(And yes, I did watch the episode.)
The "its a contrived plot to set up for the saccharine rainbow of friendship that solves everything because being lockeded up for years on end doesn't leave any kind of deep emotional scarring or sense of betrayal at all! M'Hm!, and friendship makes it all better like mommy's kisses!" Line is hardly what I would consider "real sincerity".
Instead, we have a ruler (celesta was it?) Who has a cult of personality around her, and a jealous sister. Celesta locks up her sister, rather than say, throw her a slumber party, or some other self-esteem boosting activity. If all the other ponies fall asleep, give them some coffee or something. If the real cause of her nerosis was that she was lonely, why didn't celesta listen to her then, and work something out THEN? Nope-- into the magic prison spell you go!
Holes like this in the story expose the series as just more saccharine, just sans the merchandising.
Again, refusal to acknowledge the existence of the riptide is pathological.
People who are excellent swimmers drown all the time when they get caught in one. For comparison, look at addiction. People who are addicts believe they are in control. They aren't. They react badly when people perform interventions, because they believe they are in control.
The same thing happened here.
Go talk to a recovering alcoholic about it sometime. It might be enlightening for you.
Its more like wading out into the ocean. Near the shore, the water is shallow. You are still walking out to sea, but the water is tractible. This can give the false illusion that all of the water is safe, and that you can handle it. Eventually, you are no longer standing in the water, you are swimming over your head, and if you keep going, will hit the tide, and go out to sea.
Where is the tide? When do you stop standing on the bottom? Different for each person.
I am not saying "you are out to sea." I am saying "walking away from the beach will lead you over your head, if you don't moderate your activity. When your overconfidence makes you want to drag people out with you who don't want to go, there is a problem."
Splashing around in the shallows is usually harmless, but not always. Some people do indeed drown there. Much more people drown out by the riptide. When somebody says you might consider swimming back, because it looks like you are by the riptide, it isn't a personal insult. Is an expression of concern for your well being.
Refusal to accept that the riptide is there, and can and will consume you if you keep going, is a pathology.
Again, where the shallows end and the deep water begins is different for each person. For convenience, I split "fans" from "bronies", based on the observed depth of water they seem to be treading. I was relentlessly booed and catcalled for this.
But at least the wiccans genuinely are interested and apologetic if their activities cause emotional harm to other people.
They take great efforts to be as non-offensive in their practices as possible, as a general rule. (There are always exceptions.) That is to say, they don't recite the rede outside a crowded church, dance naked at beltine around a flagpole in public, or scratch pentacles on people's floors.
That is clearly not being conserved here, where we have people giving each other "brohooves", verbally assaulting people who honestly suggest they may have a problem and should consider being more moderate, and generally refusing to acknowledge that their interest is undesirable to the wider majority, who would frankly rather not see it, but don't really care if those people watch ponies otherwise.
(Has seen one of the new MLP. Will dissect it cruelly now.)
In one episode, one of the ponies has the magical power to bring out sunshine, where her sister has the magical power to create nighttime.
The one that creates nighttime (nightmare, I believe is the name..) likes night time a LOT. I mean, *A LOT.* so much so in fact, that her desire for it to be night time is obcessive.
(Eerily poingant..)
Attempts at reasoning with her prove fruitless; she becomes ever more obstinant about her obcession. (Irony.) Threatens to make it night time forever.
Rather than do a real intervention, the daytime pony simply imprisons her sister magically, and does nothing to help her, and keeps her trapped for a VERY long time.
One of the less magical ponies discovers a prophecy about this event, that one day nightmare would escape, and realizes that the prophecy is coming true.
They spend the rest of the episode dealing with nightmare and her obcession.
Now, my cruel deconstruction:
If the sunshine pony loves her sister, why does she lock her up and forget about her 1800s sanitorium style? Why is this an acceptable solution, as opposed to supressing her powers, or transfering her powers to somebody else for awhile? How does this function as a role model?
Nightmare has an obcessive fixation on creating darkness. Her obcession causes others distress, but she does not care about that. She only cares about satisfying her fixation. She does not recognize that her fixation causes harm, and views all attempts to convince her that it does as a personal attack. Through the narrative, she recognizes that her obcession is unhealthy, and acts with moderation from then on.
That is the real story to take away from the episode.
It is also one totally lost on many of the people in this thread, who have the "Doing X is fun for me, and perfectly harmless! You are attacking me and are a bad person for insisting that I not be extreme about it!" Point of view.
When you are presented with such a message, and focus on trivial frivolaties like "Pinkie Pie is just so awesome!:3" instead, you really don't have a leg to stand on concerning the "new MLP actually has substance!" Line.
Slashdot Mirror
You are forgetting several very important things:
1) these structures must already exist, when no apparent threat is known of.
2) people must be actively livng inside them when the calamity hits.
3) the structures must survive the initial upheval and chaos of the calamity.
By your own logic, 1) will never happen until humans stop being humans, because it is a big todo about "nothing. So, no calamity shelters will ever be built to preserve the human population on earth, because of "more pressing concerns."
Because no shelters will ever be built, not humans will be living inside them, so when the afore mentioned inevitable calamity DOES strike, humanity will be completely unprepaired for it, and will all die out.
*that* is why your argument is self defeating, and relies on magic.
that argument is self defeating on its own merits:
You are basically saying that it is easier to make humans not be humans (alter human behavior such that competition is no longer performed for personal gains) than it is to build a self sufficient martian colony.
That does not follow.
Also, your rebuttle of the extinction reason for building the colony is not well established, and is easily picked apart, since it is based on suppositions, and not substantiated past events, ad relies heavily on magical thinking that humans are magically capable of adapting to anything (that isn't on mars of course!).
Nevermind that I already established that you can do things on mars that you simply can't on earth, simply from the materials sciences involved. That alone makes your argument not hold.
I can give you facts and figures as to why it most certainly *is* possible to build long term settlements on mars, with current technology and the available resources there on the planet. The best you have been able to offer are handwavy excuses and "oh, but this difficult thing makes that totally impossible!" Then shout loudly " I SAID IMPOSSIBLE!" When a simple solution to said "insurmountable problem" is broached.
One of us is being reasonable. The other is not.
With that kind of negativity, of couse you won't look for sensible options.
Like, using marsian weather to deposit the dirt for you, or noting that martian surface gravity is 1/3 that of earth, and that a "50lb bag of sand" will weigh only 16.6lbs on mars.
Don't let those little things trouble your already made up mind though. (Like how at that kind of mechanical strain reduction, glass fiber tethers can hold up loads that you need high grade steel cables for on earth, and all the engineering tricks this simple fact would let you get away with on mars, that you simply would be unable to do on earth in any of the other harsh environments you cited, especially the ocean floor, where you would need a habitat made of pure premium unobtanium to hold back the hundreds of tons of pressure per square meter of water overhead.)
If you approach your problems with the preconception of "Its hard, and can't be done, and isn't worth the time!", then it will never be done, even when conditions have changed, and it most certainly can be done.
The purpose of building a colony outside of the earth is NOT to solve word overpopulation. The purpose is to put our eggs in many baskets. Or did you learn nothing from the celybinsk(sp?) Meteor incident?
Life doesn't have to be fun, glamorous, easy, or desirable there. The reason for putting life there isn't to crow about accomplishments, to solve some "overpopulation problem", or due to some science fiction fantasy utopian ideology or dream. Those are all popular canards used by people who hold your viewpoint, but none of them are the reasons why we should build a martian colony.
So, why then? Ask Mr Sagan. The basic gist is that keeping all the humans in one basket (earth) is a recipie for extinction on the long term. We have had at least one mass extinction event on this world. (And likely many others.) If it has happened once, it can and eventually will happen again. Refusal to accept this as a rational reason to expand our holdings as a species in favor of petty indulgences and empty arguments about difficulty are not founded on reason. Or did the recent russian meteor event not provide enough impetus for you?
No-one is saying a martian colony will be anything but a torturous, inhospitable, and eternally drudge-infused effort to barely survive. We are saying that the adversities that would be present are not insurmountable, and that you only truly fail when you fail to try, and are offing suggestions on how those adversities could be effectively overcome.
Take your recent one: moving hundreds of tons of dirt on top of the habitat's dome of sandbags.
Here's an inexpensive way to do it, that makes use of the martian environment, rather than fighting it:
Mars has seasonal winds that blow the powder fine regolith all over the place, and routinely move huge dunes of the stuff around. You build a wind control wallaround the leeward sides of the dome, so that the dust carried by the winds gets dropped. Mars itself willdump the dirt you want if you are patient.
You can test this out in earth based deserts right now if you want. It's how lost cities in the sahara from antiquity get buried over.
When faced with a very daunting engineering challenge, don't work hard and go nowhere; work smart, and get shit done.
The vast majority of the mass of a sandbag, is the sand it is stuffed with. Also, you don't need to make the entire 10 meters out of the sandbags. The sandbags allow 2 things:
1) a stable dome structure onto which you can pile a lot of dumped dirt, and keep the habitat underneath completely free of bearing any weight. (Bunker)
2) an outer casing on top of said dirt mound to prevent wind erosion from blowing it all away, and exposing the colonists to the radiation outside.
You don't have to make nearly as many sandbags as you are letting on. Just enough to do landscaping and soil management with.
Why pick and choose? It is perfectly sensible to do both!
Use the caves and lava tubes for the main structures, and use sandbags around entrances, exits, and surface structures. (Like the communication antennas, wind generator foundations, etc. Things that can't sensibly be underground, but still need protection from wind erosion.)
The ability to make inexpensive glass fiber cloth has other ancillairy uses besides the obvious as sandbags. It is also a very good structural material in a number of other situations, and shredded glass fibers make a good substitution for steel rebar in poured concrete.
For use in the creation of tethers, ropes, and stretched skin concrete forms, glass fiber and glass fiber cloth are very useful, not to mention the seriously insulative properties it has. You could stuff it between the natural cave walls and the alls of the habitat to greatly reduce habitat energy expenses for climate regulation.
The rinkydink sintering and knitting kit would have a *LOT* of direct applications, and be well worth the added weight.
Solar sintering machine.
http://www.markuskayser.com/work/solarsinter/
Instead of attempting to use it as a 3d printer, you keep a fixed focal point, and simply melt the regolith into a small (US quarter sized) bead of hot glass.
You use a small metal mandril to pull glass fiber pulls off of that. The drawing of the glass shrinks the bead, but the sinter just makes more to replace it. Multiple pulls are made from the same bead, at different angles, then combined into a bundle.
Note how the 3d printer version fits in a suitcase.
Mars has 1/2 the solar irradiation as earth, so it will need a larger fresnel lens. Otherwise, same setup, minus the build table mechanics.
Seriously, they already know how to deal with this, and discovered that hydrogen neuclei are ideal for absorbing high energy cosmic rays, since they produce a minumum of secondary high energy particles from the interaction. This means a substance with lots of hydrogen in a small volume makes the best shielding.
This leads us to the most abundant, hydrogen dense material available, which would also be necessary for the trip, and colony operations: water.
Basically, put the crew capsule inside the water storage tank. Radiation problem solved. You have to send the water anyway. Make the most of it.
So limit outdoor activity, and bury the colony shelters so that you can leverage inxpensive dirt for shielding.
Say, with sandbags packed with martian regolith.
(With a solar sintering machine, and "refined 19th century tech*", you could produce all the glass fiber sandbags you could possibly ever want on mars.)
* 19th century version
*refined modern and cheap consumer version
[For the imagination impaired, you use the solar sintering machine to produce a small, stationary bead of melted glass from abundant martian regolith, use a steel mandril to pull several glass fiber pulls off that bead, thread them through some eye-hooks in a halfcircle around the bead, then thread them through one last eye-hook as a bundle, and then feed the bundle into the knitting machine. Turn the crank, and a continuous tube of knitted glass fiber gets pooped out. Cut the "sock" at desired lengths, and use more glass fiber in a handheld bag stitcher to close the end, and stuff them with martian regolith. You can then stack them up to make 1950s style bunkers around the the habitat structures, which will not only keep the wind off of them, but also provide radiation shielding on the cheap for the colony. The total equipment needed would be well under 20kg, and would allow unlimited sandbag production at the colony site.]
Re: poor quality bug reports
A good deal of the problem there could be solved with a more structured form. You know, one that isn't just a "short description of problem" with a submit button, and instead one that has sections for "version of software impacted", "activity performed when error occured", and "process to reproduce bug activity", as well as some other data that the reporting form automatically pulls, like the current OS, what versions of standard runtime DLLs are installed, etc.
People who lack the vocabulary to describe a problem will of course be unable to accurately describe the problem. You will invariably get reports that are either little more than long screeds of profanites, or extremely vague about what happened, and neither is terribly useful.
Asking "what were you doing when the problem happened?" Is more likely to get useful feedback, as the user likely does have the needed vocabulary to describe that aspect of the problem. At the very least, this helps you to reproduce the bug yourself, and get the needed information yourself. You can't get that from a report that basically says "your fucking program broke, asshole!"
Another thing to consider, from the programming end, is to make your error windows a little more intuitive than just "error occured! Click OK to terminate!" Try putting something a little more useful in the error dialog that describes what kind of error happened. Yes, this means you can't be lazy and call a general error reporting dialog sub that kills the process as a local function, and makes the code more complex, but how can you expect your users to know what your program is doing if they don't have the source code, are forbidden by copyright law from disassembly, and are fed BS generic error messages as output? They aren't psychic anymore than you are, afterall. That convenient catch all error dialog routine will end up shooting you in the foot. Better to fire a more useful dialog, then fire a generalized exit and cleanup emergency termination sub immediately afterward instead.
What I am getting at here, is that a fair portion of the blame for bad bug reports is on the developer's end intrinsically, for expecting the user to be aware of things that they simply can't be aware of, and getting frustrated when the user is unable to eruditely explain the full nature of the bug afterwards. Don't commit the dire sin of believing that because you know how it works, that everyone else will have that knowledge as well. (Likewise for using debugging tools, and getting at the root of the problem.)
Not trying to be rude or adversarial or anything, just pointing out the obvious causes for this particular problem. (Bad bug reports.)
I actually have a (whimsically silly and bulky) idea in mind there, actually.
Its a combination of a solar sintering machine, (whooo-- a fresnel lens in a static frame, aimed at sand! So complicated!) and a CO2 laser sinterer.
Basically, the fresnel lens part is static, and at the most sophisticated, has a sun tracker to keep the lens aimed right. It focuses onto a fixed point in the material hopper, to make a small bead of glass from sand, dirt, or ceramic clay powder. (whatever is locally the cheapest) From that tiny bead of glass, a glass fiber filament is drawn using a mandril, then fed into the material port on the CO2 laser sintering side. The material hopper should have some kind of agitator to keep the material uniform inside.
The glass fiber requires considerably less energy to melt than does the silicon dioxide of the sand/clay in the material hopper, and can be wirefed to the build chamber, where it is slowly extruded and laser pulsed. This allows a very durable material (glass) to be used reasonably inexpensively. (as inexpensively as it is to drive the laser anyway.)
The major occupation in a post scarcity (of essential goods) society, is the creation of unique designer goods, which by their nature, cannot be mass produced.
A designer suit, made by a tailor.
A song, performed by a live talent.
A hand arranged bouquet of flowers.
An original hand painting.
Those sorts of things.
Since all your basic needs are met, you really don't HAVE to do anything. You CAN just be a couch potato, and I expect some people will do that. Hell, videogame deathmatch TV might become a popular thing! The idea here, is that what you would do, would be most profitable when it produces something the robots cannot make, (hand crafted is mutually exclusive to robot mass manufacture) that other people would want.
Things like ebay would explode with such limited run items.
Assuming that AIs with a rational personaity construct are in charge, everyone will have *needs* met, but not wants.
Fridge will have food, but not cobe beef.
People will have electricity, and running water, but not fancy recessed lighting nor a jaccuzzi.
This means that humans won't focus on making screws that get packaged with ikea furniture.
Instead, they will focus on making human comfort items for other humans to consume, to sate human desire.
Armani suits. Designer handbags. Novelty appliances. Etc.
The natural scarcity of something being hand made in a world of post scarcity commodity goods, will command high worth.
That is what people will do.
You are forgetting the internal moisture sensors that void the warrantee.
I find your over-generalizations and sensationalist methodologies taxing.
Your basic argument is that I can't define "excessive". I defined it several times. When it causes defiticts of other interests.
Me? I *do* have dozens of interests. One a month for an hour is a well moderated activity for me. If you have a shorteg of things you enjoy doing, naturally you will have more time to devote to the more limited selection.
I presented myself as an extreme, since you leveled an accusation that my participation in that activity was extreme. I simply clarified it was not, by nearly anyone's imagination.
It is important to point out that it isn't just time you spend watching MLP, but also time you spend shopping for merch, how much you spend on merch, how much time you spend making or looking at fan art or stories, etc.
I knit. But I am not a member of any knitting clubs, contests, or any subscriber to any publications related to knitting, and don't typically go out of my way to find things to knit. I don't associate with any larger knitting demographic. (Like say, speed knitters.) It isn't really a part of who I am, just something I know how to do, and do occasionally to relax.
Bronies on the other hand, are not nearly so moderate in their behavior or zeal for their constellation of activities. This is clearly manifest by the sheer number andkinds of personal attacks, ad hominems, and overal vengeful candor of much of this thread demonstrated by them. They aren't even capable nor willing to moderate their behavior, ad cleary manifest fanatical behavior.
It has been nearly a whole week since this thread hit slashdot, and yet, here you are AC, still beating your drum.
Qed.
The etymology of fan from fanatic is correct. Simply because certain forms of fanaticism are widely culturally accepted, does not make it suddenly healthy.
Being a couch potato, for instance. Excessively sedentary lifestyles are quite popular. This does not make them any less unhealthy. Being a sports fanatic is quite popular. This does not make it less unhealthy.
The real issue is that you do not like the connotation of being considered "ill".
That's another matter entirely.
More like, "when your desire to eat cheeseburgers has you define yourself as a "cheesburgerer", you are now clearly eating cheeseburgers pathologically, and demonstrate having an eating disorder."
It isn't that you go one place because you like the cheeseburgers. It is that you go there compulsively, at the deficit of going other places, and eat the cheeseburgers with priority over other foods, and doing so makes you assign yourself a group identity, as belonging to a wider group of people who also do so, to justify this decision.
People who like MLP is a bigger set than people who are fans of MLP. People who are fans of MLP is a bigger set than people who self-identify as bronies.
People who like cheeseburgers is a bigger set than people who are fans of the cheeseburger. People who are fans of the cheeseburger is a bigger set than people who self-identify as "chesseburgerers".
The self identification is the major diagnostic criteria, because it indicates that the practitioner of the behavior expresses knowledge that the behavior is excessive, experiences a deficit in social situatons because of that excess (AKA, "harm"), and self associates with others that share this excessive behavior to make up for it.
The impetus to self associate is the diagnostic criteria. It indicates that harm is present, and that the behavior causes illness. All by itself. Simply by existing.
(And yes, I know "cheeseburgerer" isn't a real word. Then again, neither is "bronie")
I am sorry if this makes you angry. How it makes you feel personally is not really relavent to it being truthful.
Let me help you.
"Fan".
It is short for "fanatic". Merriam webster defines fanatical behavior as synonymous with excessive behavior. A fan of MLP is by definition excessive in their degree of association with that show.
A bronie is a fan of MLP who's excessive like of that show compells them to ascribe to a group identity of other fanatics.
Even if you disagree that there is a separation between MLP fan and bronie, there is still a separation between people with a non extreme appreciation or approval of the show, and a fan of the show.
The point where fanaticism becomes pathological, is when that fanaticism causes the fanatic, or others, harm.
That is, and has been the message I have been repeating. The "You are saying bronies are insane!" Line is a radicalization of yours and other's creation.
I am saying that they exhibit signs of mental illness which shows a graduation of intensity, the more fervent their devotion to MLP is.
A bronie exhibits more devotion than does a simple fan, owing to the choice to group associate. (And no, asserting that no MLP fan is not also a bronie is a no true scottsman.) This makes bronies, by observed intensity of their devotion, more extreme, and therefore more likely to be mentally ill to a degree.
But feel free to go off the deep end, and hurl unfounded accusations like everyone else in this thread, totally ignore what I have said repeatedly to you and others, ignore the tenents of your show's basic message of acceptence and forgiveness and expose yourself to be a raging and emotionally petulant individual like everyone else.
Apparently you seem to enjoy doing so.
I knit maybe once a month. Often less. Its for relaxation.
How often do you watch MLP?
If it's several times a week, you may have a problem.
It isn't about liking something odd. Its about liking it to excessive degrees.
But you clearly can't or won't accept that answer, and will instead resort to more adhominems.
No, "saccharine rainbow powers solve everything!" Isn't "deep". Not even for a show intended for children.
Want a show that really is?
watership down
Its intended age range is 8 and up. (Hint, that's most of the same age range for MLP, which is 6 to 12 (and bronies).)
I saw it when I was 7. My parents had already explained death to me, and the cold war was still going on. It did not leave me with emotional baggage, and I liked it, much like this reviewer liked it. It depicts "serious shit happens! Only hard work and bravery really fixes it."
It prepares older kids for the not so nice things in the world around them as adults, and helps them be more than 2 dimensional emotional fountains when the saccharine landscapes they were sheltered in are violently ripped away.
I wouldn't show it to 6 year olds, but 8 year olds should be able to handle it, if their parents haven't tried to unnaturally extend their childhoods with a diet of saccharine to stunt their mental and emotional growth. Thankfully, my parents fed me a more healthy diet of media that featured consequences and resolutions that had real meat in them.
MLP:FIM is not "deep". No, Not even for a kids show. HR Puffinstuff had deeper meanings hidden in it, and it was made for 3 year olds.
Children need to learn that "saying sorry" and "let's be friends" doesn't absolve dickery, and it doesn't fix a wounded heart, or a scarred mind. It helps, and is the first step, but that road is a long and hard one. Friendship isn't really magic.
It isn't about being noir, or gloomy, or broody about things. That's equally unhealthy. It's about accepting consequences, and learning that often times the best ways to avoid those consequences, BECAUSE they are hard to resolve, is to just not do those things to begin with. (And when you have to, accept those consequences gracefully and with maturity.)
If the people hooked on the saccharine in MLP were absorbing THOSE lessons instead of cancer causing sugar substitutes, they wouldn't be as callous about their candor with other people and other people's interests, and react so violently and negatively when people demand they stop. (No, putting pinkiepie in places she does not belong is NOT 'cute', and IS an offensive gesture. People getting mad about it and telling you to stop is the consequence, acting like a petulant child and throwing a fit and resorting to creating lynch mobs and retaliatory strikes on communities outside the fandom is aggression, and people hating you and your lynching pals for it is the consequence. Saying "I'm sorry!" In a saccharine sweet voice, then going off and doing it right away again like nothing happened is NOT resolution.
Again, you would have learned this, if you watched things with *real* substance.
MLP is not such a food item.
So, in other words, "serious shit happens, then saccharine to the rescue."
(And yes, I did watch the episode.)
The "its a contrived plot to set up for the saccharine rainbow of friendship that solves everything because being lockeded up for years on end doesn't leave any kind of deep emotional scarring or sense of betrayal at all! M'Hm!, and friendship makes it all better like mommy's kisses!" Line is hardly what I would consider "real sincerity".
Instead, we have a ruler (celesta was it?) Who has a cult of personality around her, and a jealous sister. Celesta locks up her sister, rather than say, throw her a slumber party, or some other self-esteem boosting activity. If all the other ponies fall asleep, give them some coffee or something. If the real cause of her nerosis was that she was lonely, why didn't celesta listen to her then, and work something out THEN? Nope-- into the magic prison spell you go!
Holes like this in the story expose the series as just more saccharine, just sans the merchandising.
Again, refusal to acknowledge the existence of the riptide is pathological.
People who are excellent swimmers drown all the time when they get caught in one. For comparison, look at addiction. People who are addicts believe they are in control. They aren't. They react badly when people perform interventions, because they believe they are in control.
The same thing happened here.
Go talk to a recovering alcoholic about it sometime. It might be enlightening for you.
"Fan" is short for "fanatic".
merriam webster on "fanatic"
Since "sports fan" is short for "sports fanatic", then sports fans are by DEFINITION, excessive.
So, no, not absurd at all.
That's because it isn't a precipice.
Its more like wading out into the ocean. Near the shore, the water is shallow. You are still walking out to sea, but the water is tractible. This can give the false illusion that all of the water is safe, and that you can handle it. Eventually, you are no longer standing in the water, you are swimming over your head, and if you keep going, will hit the tide, and go out to sea.
Where is the tide? When do you stop standing on the bottom? Different for each person.
I am not saying "you are out to sea." I am saying "walking away from the beach will lead you over your head, if you don't moderate your activity. When your overconfidence makes you want to drag people out with you who don't want to go, there is a problem."
Splashing around in the shallows is usually harmless, but not always. Some people do indeed drown there. Much more people drown out by the riptide. When somebody says you might consider swimming back, because it looks like you are by the riptide, it isn't a personal insult. Is an expression of concern for your well being.
Refusal to accept that the riptide is there, and can and will consume you if you keep going, is a pathology.
Again, where the shallows end and the deep water begins is different for each person. For convenience, I split "fans" from "bronies", based on the observed depth of water they seem to be treading. I was relentlessly booed and catcalled for this.
That's about the complete summation here.
But at least the wiccans genuinely are interested and apologetic if their activities cause emotional harm to other people.
They take great efforts to be as non-offensive in their practices as possible, as a general rule. (There are always exceptions.) That is to say, they don't recite the rede outside a crowded church, dance naked at beltine around a flagpole in public, or scratch pentacles on people's floors.
That is clearly not being conserved here, where we have people giving each other "brohooves", verbally assaulting people who honestly suggest they may have a problem and should consider being more moderate, and generally refusing to acknowledge that their interest is undesirable to the wider majority, who would frankly rather not see it, but don't really care if those people watch ponies otherwise.
The wiccans have the highground here.
(Has seen one of the new MLP. Will dissect it cruelly now.)
In one episode, one of the ponies has the magical power to bring out sunshine, where her sister has the magical power to create nighttime.
The one that creates nighttime (nightmare, I believe is the name..) likes night time a LOT. I mean, *A LOT.* so much so in fact, that her desire for it to be night time is obcessive.
(Eerily poingant..)
Attempts at reasoning with her prove fruitless; she becomes ever more obstinant about her obcession. (Irony.) Threatens to make it night time forever.
Rather than do a real intervention, the daytime pony simply imprisons her sister magically, and does nothing to help her, and keeps her trapped for a VERY long time.
One of the less magical ponies discovers a prophecy about this event, that one day nightmare would escape, and realizes that the prophecy is coming true.
They spend the rest of the episode dealing with nightmare and her obcession.
Now, my cruel deconstruction:
If the sunshine pony loves her sister, why does she lock her up and forget about her 1800s sanitorium style? Why is this an acceptable solution, as opposed to supressing her powers, or transfering her powers to somebody else for awhile? How does this function as a role model?
Nightmare has an obcessive fixation on creating darkness. Her obcession causes others distress, but she does not care about that. She only cares about satisfying her fixation. She does not recognize that her fixation causes harm, and views all attempts to convince her that it does as a personal attack. Through the narrative, she recognizes that her obcession is unhealthy, and acts with moderation from then on.
That is the real story to take away from the episode.
It is also one totally lost on many of the people in this thread, who have the "Doing X is fun for me, and perfectly harmless! You are attacking me and are a bad person for insisting that I not be extreme about it!" Point of view.
When you are presented with such a message, and focus on trivial frivolaties like "Pinkie Pie is just so awesome! :3" instead, you really don't have a leg to stand on concerning the "new MLP actually has substance!" Line.