I love the guy. My hopes are with him that everything is okay. Snark off for now.
Regarding the eighth point, about the hype:
Would there be an explosion if Lin and Donald Glover touched?
How about little throwing stars?
So, stop making cents?
Within a year, every soda machine would charge two dollars instead of one.
Well, we have mastery of electricity, and we got the tools to do so via evolution, so in a way I guess we do need it, in that it increases our advantage over other species.
I'll grant that it is not needed, though, if you will grant that we don't need penguin feet.
I didn't say that evolution would perfect us. I said that it will give us everything that we really should have. That is the way that evolution works: if you lose something (like chimp strength) or never gain it (like Himalayan duck lungs), but you also don't go extinct, you have what you need.
And defense, entitlements, the postal service etc. are just hobbies?
Nahh. I just have a lot of wasted IQ points that I apply to crap like this.
I would take out Social Security, since reducing spending there doesn't increase the general fund. I mean that social security taxes pay social security and would not necessarily still be collected at all if it disappeared tomorrow.
Yeah, cut everything except the thing that I like! The thing that I like is the most important thing, and only a fool would cut it! The things that other people like are inefficient/immoral/stupid and the things that I like are great in every way.
Mind you, I could stand to have us kill fewer strangers and spend more money on ourselves, and I love the space program, but don't just squawk about your own individual enthusiasms. Join with others who want to reduce defense spending, increase taxes etc... If they win, you win.
Capital gains taxes are capped much, much lower than income taxes.
Since we don't even know how memories are stored or consciousness works, any such estimates are pulled from the air. That is, if you intend to actually improve the human race rather than replace it with androids programmed to act like we do (or think that we do).
Alt history is the most believable if the story takes place within a couple of generations after the changed event. "What would Robert E. Lee have been doing if the South had machine guns" is a more valid topic than "What would Robert E. Lee have been doing if the the Roman Empire never split/fell and he was the Senator from Virgina?"
Not that either one couldn't be fun. One just explores a more plausible world than does the other.
I don't see how you can argue with the butterfly effect. Sure, some super-small things may dampen out but a ton of them will not.
The easiest thing to cause a huge change would, to me, be the survival and procreation of almost anyone who "should" have died or the death of anyone who passed their genes along in the real world. If one New Yorker 300 years ago either had kids when they didn't in our timeline or failed to have kids when they did in our timeline, then almost every native New Yorker would be a different person than the ones we see today. Now push that timeline back to ancient Greece, and basically everyone in the whole world, excepting geographically isolated groups, is a different person than the ones who are now alive.
To put it another way: Go back 1300 years or so and kill some European peasant, any peasant whose genes survived, and absolutely nobody of European descent who is alive today will be the same person who is there now. Now do it in the time of Confucius, and nobody in the world, except for those isolated by geography for millenia, will be the same person. Not only will there be a few different genes floating around, but the history of our sperm and egg combinations will be completely changed, so that the sperm and egg that made Robert E. Lee never existed, let alone produced the same guy.
Evolution will give us everything that we really should have. Anything that we don't have, mostly, would use up more resources than it is worth or cause problems that we can't deal with (like smashing our own bones with chimp-strength). Our brain, posture and manipulative dexterity take up a ton of our resources for a reason: they are the most effective survival organs of any large fauna in the world. Heck, we have trouble keeping those other species alive when we like them.
No Kristen Bell? Seriously? She had a huge part in a major game franchise and she isn't even on the list, but people with much smaller roles did?
Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's General Mills' Frankenberry.
