In TNG Wesley has a hard time getting into the academy and one of the other applicants is a genius in his own right.

I feel like there was some affirmative action going on.

True or not, I would argue.

Maybe Cambodia and Khmer Rouge? But not many.

Hey, I had been searching for a reasonably priced NC hosting for a while. I even considered a VPS from Hetzner but somehow didn’t find this. Thanks for pointing it out.

A more pertinent concern is having to work with the person whose behavior precipitated this reaction.

One person locking their milk makes them a weirdo. Three means someone else is.

Yea, I am not surprised given that the regular lane keep is still ghost braking when going under bridges.

Still, I am surprised how well they are doing, using only cameras.

I think this is actually one of the more clever points Banks makes, although not explicitly.

Fundamentally, the Culture believes that living things (and their definition in this regard is remarkably broad) have a moral right to exist. Therefore, as a society they are not expansionist. In order to remain non-expansionist, the population must be kept stable and this has implications either in childbearing or lifespans. The average Culture human mothers about one child but that means they can’t, on average live forever. Why they choose to have children at all perhaps also boils down to the future generation’s moral right to exist, but also because they recognize that a renewing population means a renewing culture and Culture.

In this light, I believe it’s easy to see immortality as a sort of childish self-aggrandizement comparable to wanting to become the ruler of some backwards planet. Skaffen-Amtiscaw (an artificial entity and citizen of the Culture) even remarks on Zakalwe’s immortality as childish in Use of Weapons.

The Culture never appeals to nature – how could they, they are ruled by their Minds!

(Mind is a sort of very powerful artificial intelligence).

There is a lot of similarities between the Culture and Trek, they are both visions of post-scarcity humanity made impossible by the simple fact that humans could never be that nice.

With the assumption I can choose who I am, I would argue that Banks’ Culture would be my choice. The Culture as a whole is much less vulnerable due to its size and scale and their technology is more advanced. Want cool space adventures? Join Contact or just go travel around in another civilization. Magic adventures? The sleep games and VR is like holodecks but on steroids. Want to live forever? No problem (although it’s frowned upon).

I get the sentiment but… When sun isn’t shining the negative prices cause problem for baseline power producers who need to turn off their power plants to avoid the zero to negative power prices.

This causes the power prices to become volatile, since the investments for the power plants that run during the night need to be covered during the night only.

Eventually though the higher price volatility will encourage investments into either demand side adjustability or energy storage systems. This will play out in energy only markets.

The other alternative is to implement a capacity market, which will divide the cost of the baseline production across different production hours by paying producers more for guaranteed production capacity.