Cars occasionally run onto the sidewalk and hurt someone. More often than planes cause injury around airports I expect. Putting sidewalks right beside roads seems like a terrible idea. Why not have at least a buffer zone? Say, a football field (choose your type) of buffer?

Same for airports. Airports do have buffers around them, especially at the ends of runways. Very, very occasionally it isn't enough.

I'm not really sure what your point is. You are correct that racers frequently sail through all sorts of weather without damage. They do sometimes take damage though, the vast majority of which is due to trying to sail through weather as fast as possible.

A cargo ship would presumably sail through storms as fast as it could without risking damage.

My, we are an aggressively stupid dipshit today.

You do seem to be yes. Maybe time to take a break?

Ships scale up pretty predictably. No, they didn't build THE BIGGEST CARGO SHIP EVAH for their prototype. That would be pretty dumb.

This thread is talking about the ship speed. And the speed of a displacement hull is intimately linked to the length. As is the capacity, incidentally.

But half the time, in particular in regattas where you race against time, you end up in 11s and 12s and you go through.

And that's when you're racing. Remove the incentive to go fast and you're even safer.

Length, which is the relevant metric when you're considering the speed of a pure displacement hull.

I thought of this as a counterargument but it does seem to track. The company decides how long it takes you to get to your desk. They may save money by making it slower (fewer and bigger buildings).

What about a company way down a corridor, with a slow lift? Do they need to pay for the time walking to the office? Why or why not? It seems like the same situation as the lengthy computer setup, if shorter.

This is not just for crazies. I think there's something deep in the human/animal psyche that wants to lash out when it feels trapped. Like a feline in a crate, I feel the impotent urge to claw my way out of Ikea mazes and shopping malls without clearly designated exits. If somebody blocked my path in one of those already antagonistically designed environments, the pressure to react would double.

Does that figure include amortized R&D, software development, and support costs? If not, the $500 price point is illusory.

Take your pick.

Would someone, please, think of the children?!

designed a chip with 41 vertical layers of semiconductors and insulating materials

I love, that it is a prime number!

"a decision and action appear to takes place milliseconds before the conscious mind is aware of it, but phenomenologically it feels like you made that decision before the event happened."

I certainly don't know, and I don't think the research answers that question yet.

But from what I've read its research that raises many more questions than it REALLY answers.

For example, what if the consciousness feedback loop is not "aware" of the decisions (its "output") until they've been dumped to memory and looped around and come back in as "inputs".

So that doesn't necessarily mean you don't consciously make decisions, it just means you aren't yourself aware you made it until after you made it.

In web programming terms, suppose "consciousness" is the local application state view, which is a reflection of the data on the server "memory" and has all your data labels and field contents showing (including the logs of its decisions). Imagine too that a "decision" is like activating a call to the server to make a an update to the back-end database.

So based on the data in the local state, and the running software, the local app "decides" to calls the server and make an update. Lets just say, it just does it -- in particular it doesn't feed that information back to the local state object, no UI is updated, no labels are changed. Yet.

The local state is not updated with even the record that it made the call until it gets the state update from the server a few milliseconds later.

Then, if you are a brain researcher monitoring the application state (aka consciousness), you'll discover it doesn't "know" it called the server, until after the server has been called and returned.

The point is: just because we don't know what we decided right away doesn't necessarily imply that we didn't decide. The brain is an organic system that evolved over millions of years, perhaps having consciousness run a few milliseconds behind is perfectly serviceable solution for the problems it evolved to solve.

Perhaps its even advantageous, waiting for the awareness of the decision to propagate through consciousness before emitting the decision to the rest of the body might cause enough action latency that we're polar bear or sabre tooth tiger food. Better to get the body acting act as soon as the information is there -- there's simply no survival advantage to waiting for it to get dumped back to memory and updated in the consciousness first.

Or maybe consciousness is an illusion, so we can watch a show that aleady happened with no impact on the world around us... but that seems relatively useless in a world with polar bears and sabre tooth tigers.

Yeah, you could say that. On the other hand you could say the rewrite was an investment in maintainability--sacrificing immediate stability for a future of lack of memory issues and reduced possibility of control flow mistakes or type errors.

I'm afraid I insist. To give the main argument, we have not yet found an effect that does not follow physical causes. Speech about consciousness is caused by the physical universe--particles, electrical states, etc. Some intuition pumps are: a rule-based chatbot that doesn't pass the Turing test could discuss consciousness. If the concept is even coherent, a zombie would discuss its consciousness exactly as you and I are, despite having none. If someone sleep-talked or spoke while under the influence, they could utter low quality statements about consciousness while their consciousness was somewhere else, in effect doing the same thing a zombie would. "Lying" is a concept that depends on consciousness, but there are any number of ways a system can discuss consciousness in a way that does not agree with the actual fact. In particular we never discuss the current consciousness. Meditation (mostly noting) leads one to believe that ironically, people don't seem to "experience" most of their experience--one assumes it's because bleeding edge conscious experience is typically not stored, even in working memory.