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Comment Re:Kinda pointless due to cell damage (Score 1) 80

The fact is, most hospitals will fight cryonics companies tooth and nail until ischemia has caused irreversible (data loss) brain damage. Doctors fear and hate perceived quackery and don't like being told someone else might help this individual they're calling dead. But when cryonics is done right the body is taken at the point of heart stoppage, an artery is opened to remove blood and another one to pump in the fluid, and chemicals are pumped through the body at gradually reducing temperatures to prevent instant freezing within cells, to try and avoid ice formation by pulling water out of cells before freezing, and to gel-freeze the body all at once. I'm not sure about the blood-brain barrier problem.

Cryonics companies come in various forms of being serious and capable. Doctors imagine someone promising to take your loved one's head 3 days after death and dropping it in some LN and calling it good but most companies make a serious effort to get to the body as soon as possible and freeze it as safely as possible.

Comment cryonics (Score 2) 80

Most people who understand how cryonics are done and still oppose it do so for one of two reasons. They think technology CANNOT improve to a point it can restore a body, or sour grapes. Or some combination thereof. The first objection comes from a strange confidence that today's limitations are permanent. The second camp are people who recoil from the idea not because it is unworkable, but because they find it emotionally distasteful: the prospect of others escaping death strikes them as unfair or hubristic. Medical intervention is all well and good to these people, but only to the point it can be done immediately and doesn't depend on technologies that haven't yet been developed.

Many hold a hybrid position: publicly insisting that cryopreservation is quackery, while privately wrestling with a discomforting suspicion that it might succeed, and that rejecting it is more comfortable than confronting what that would imply. It is an oddly revealing topic. When one examines the arguments in detail, opposition to cryonics rarely hinges on the engineering challenges themselves. Rather, it hinges on one's temperament: whether one sees the future as a realm of continual possibility, or as a wall at which a human must politely stop and expire. Cryonics forces a person to declare which of those visions he actually holds.

Comment Prices (Score 1, Offtopic) 60

Whether it is fast food, rent, prices at the pump, or this evolving patchwork of hotel cancellation rules, it ultimately reduces to the same underlying force: pricing power shifting toward the seller whenever consumers have limited alternatives or information asymmetry tilts the playing field. As soon as hotels realised third-party services were exploiting flexible cancellations to arbitrage room rates, they recalibrated their pricing structure to insulate revenue precisely the same way landlords adjust lease terms in tight housing markets, or fuel companies adjust margins when crude prices swing.

Consumers experience these adjustments as policy changes, but businesses experience them as price corrections to protect yield. The mechanisms differ. Non-refundable rates instead of cancellation windows, variable menu pricing instead of dollar menus, etc. but the logic is identical: once a loophole or inefficiency threatens revenue, the industry retools the rules so that the cost lands with the customer rather than the operator. On top of that you have the rising prices, often folded into the new policy because the higher price is thereby disguised. In that sense, the story here is not really about cancellation policies at all; it is about how every sector continually reshuffles the fine print to defend its margins.

I personally used the Hilton system recently and I can say they know they can charge more and be less flexible without losing customers. I'm guessing it's the same for other chains. But it may be that hotels will be more willing to allow late cancellations if a human took the time to make the reservation. i.e. they know for that person 20 different hotels aren't lined up for all but the least expensive to be cancelled.

Comment Re:What about top speed? (Score 3, Insightful) 92

Then these people shouldn't be driving. If they are unable to put their foot on the correct pedal, what else aren't they doing?

"These people" are just anyone on a bad day. People make random mistakes when they do anything enough times.

I've had it happen. I was sitting weird and my foot just missed. You do these motions millions of times without thinking about it, so in that one-in-a-million case where something doesn't line up right, you get a very disorienting "why won't it slow down" feeling, and it's easy to panic. Your muscle memory instinctively pushes the "brake" harder to compensate, but it's actually the accelerator. It takes a moment for your brain to diagnose the situation and correct.

No harm done in my case: average car, open road, healthy and alert so I figured it out within a second. If I was in a Tesla Plaid, in a congested area, tired and distracted, I would have put it through a store window.

It was an eye-opening experience.

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