Someone made this. I don't just mean someone stood in front of a camera. I mean that someone operated those cameras. Someone set up the stage. Someone carefully positioned microphones. Someone hung the lights. And someone cut it all together, then watched what they had, and said... "Yeah. This." And then went home feeling satisfied and accomplished. Why were they all so delusional? Consequence of technology. The entire twentieth century was shaped by the fact that its major communication tech was one-to-many. Transmit, but no receive. This allowed a small number of wealthy people to manipulate masses by creating an illusion of consensus, yes.... But it also isolated everyone on the "transmit" end of the process from feedback. How could it be otherwise? Television has no "receive". So all the television personalities, all the talking heads, all the Jon Stewarts of the world, existed in a sort of bubble where the only feedback they ever witnessed came from, or through, their compatriots. Here we see the end result of that process — a man entirely out of touch with the world he speaks to as his one and only profession. A man who imagines his opinions and feelings to be so important that he will record a tantrum vaguely set to music, with no other message than "Jon Stewart is upset", and expect to be taken seriously. Jon Stewart has most likely gone through his life entirely unaware of how his career, his opinions, and even his very personality are all direct and deterministic consequences of how the technology of a cathode ray tube and a broadcast signal work. Jon Stewart thinks the opinions of Jon Stewart matter, because people listen to him. He is unaware that he is simply a man who was selected to occupy a chair in front of a camera, and read lines written for him, or least approved, by the men who own the one-to-many infrastructure. Jon Stewart, in other words, was a corporate product, designed, packaged, and sold by an enterprise, to serve its financial and political goals. So how could he possibly be expected to have an accurate view of the world when he does not even understand the forces that have shaped his own life? The winds of cultural consensus have shifted, and a hominid Jon Stewart stands, semi-upright, on the savanna, waving a zebra-femur club at the sky, and cursing the gods for blowing his grass hut away. He is angry that his clique's fame, fortune and influence is being taken away, because he does not understand that these things were never truly theirs. They were merely lent, by others, because it served their purposes to do so.

Working on chapter 8 yesterday and today. In order to write chapter 8, I had to design: - An atmospheric extraction process for gas giant planets. - A space station, with spin gravity, designed to support this process. - A method for spacecraft to dock with toroids which have no central hub. - A feasible broad-strokes plan for terraforming Mars. ... then I was able to get *started*. I swear, if I get through this, my next book series will be fantasy. Where everything happens by magic. And I don't have to explain shit. Because it's magic.

People with IQs of 110-115 are even more dangerous in large groups. They come up with utopian schemes that are incompatible with human instinct, or the principles of economics, or even the laws of thermodynamics. And then they try to proselytize them, talking about how great it would be everyone would just... But everyone will not just. And often, it would be a disaster if they did. Midwits are smart enough to come up with grand plans, but too dumb to ever gain a full appreciation of just how complicated and unpredictable large-scale systems are. They fail to approach them with the proper caution, and never seem willing to test their ideas on a small scale before trying to implement them on a large one. They are college-aged English and Theater majors who have grandiose opinions about how all of human societies, in all of human history, have been wrong, but they are unwilling to test their new theory by using it to run, say, a small sandwich shop, before voting for Bernie Sanders to implement it across the richest and most powerful nation on Earth.

There is no point in arguing about that which can be resolved by experiment. Therefore, I have a suggestion. This will not only test whether WNBA teams actually play at elite levels, it will also draw massive publicity, and test whether, given a viewing, they can gain a dedicated audience. The test is simply this. Play a "championship" type exhibition match, consisting of seven games, or whatever they typically play in basketball... against this year's state champion high school varsity boys' team, selecting a populous state such as California, Texas, or Florida. A match of this type will be the subject of heated debate on social media... and that means free publicity. It's a proven formula. The tennis people did this several times, back in the 70s, and it was always a big draw. So I see no impediment to testing your allegations. If the WNBA are elite athletes, as you say, they should trounce a bunch of high-school age amateurs, even state champions, with little difficulty. If they are unjustly overlooked, as you say, they will be able to exhibit their skills and exciting play in front of a huge audience, and have no trouble gaining fans. Which will then direct marketing dollars their way, because the NBA, like any other savvy business, is inclined to invest in departments that bring in revenue. You want them to have their shot at the fame and fortune you believe they deserve? This is how they get it. As an engineer, I believe in test-driven development. As a science fiction author, I believe in showing, rather than telling. So let's have a test, and let the ladies show us what they are capable of.

There is no point in arguing about that which can be resolved by experiment. Therefore, I have a suggestion. This will not only test whether WNBA teams actually play at elite levels, it will also draw massive publicity, and test whether, given a viewing, they can gain a dedicated audience. The test is simply this. Play a "championship" type exhibition match, consisting of seven games, or whatever they typically play in basketball... against this year's state champion high school varsity boys' team, selecting a populous state such as California, Texas, or Florida. A match of this type will be the subject of heated debate on social media... and that means free publicity. It's a proven formula. The tennis people did this several times, back in the 70s, and it was always a big draw. So I see no impediment to testing your allegations. If the WNBA are elite athletes, as you say, they should trounced a bunch of high-school age amateurs, even state champions, with little difficulty. If they are unjustly overlooked, as you say, they will be able to exhibit their skills and exciting play in front of a huge audience, and have no trouble gaining fans. Which will then direct marketing dollars their way, because the NBA, like any other savvy business, is inclined to invest in departments that bring in revenue. You want them to have their shot at the fame and fortune you believe they deserve? This is how they get it. As an engineer, I believe in test-driven development. As a science fiction author, I believe in showing, rather than telling. So let's have a test, and let the ladies show us what they are capable of.

Yes. Because I studied engineering. But every non-engineering class, and this includes mathematics courses, was a complete waste of my time.

Every leftist argument boils down to "We can't do this thing that's necessary for civilization because it might make a handful of people sad."

Something that a lot of people don't realize is that dead ends have value. It is only when you start building that you know how workable something is, how efficient. In order to build only the best possible thing, we would need precognitive abilities that violate casual relationships. So we have to actually do the math. When a project fails because some other project worked better, they are both part of the same overarching project, carried out by the whole civilization, to investigate multiple possibilities. And one was found to be better. We're going to have a lot more dead ends on our road to the stars, immortality, and the tech singularity. We have to learn not to regard that money and time as wasted, so long as we are willing to change course when the dead end becomes obvious. Research is, ultimately, search.

This matrix is what's known as a cooperation game. When people trust one another, they both get a reward of 3. When neither of them trust one another, they get a reward of 1. When one trusts the other and gets betrayed, they get nothing while the defector gets 5.