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Dock Braun:
--- Quote from: sitnspin on 19 Jan 2021, 07:12 ---To be fair, a hamburger is considered more valuable than a human in a capitalist society.
--- End quote ---
To say that it's more valuable, lacks necessary nuance. The hamburger, to the consumer, has a more direct value, than the stranger bringing it to the consumer. Strangers, though, often have a greater value to the consumer, than any one hamburger, less directly. The stranger's presence aids the bringing of the hamburger, and more---of whatever other service---to the consumer. One stranger likely contributes more than one hamburgers' worth.
And then, of course, to whom? To one consumer, perhaps, some stranger is lower valued than a hamburger. To another, maybe too. Maybe to each consumer. To all consumers? A hamburger is valuable to one consumer. The value of the stranger, is to many. In sum, the stranger may be worth more.
Upon a closer inspection of the hamburger, one may find many strangers participating in the added value. In sum, to the consumer, those strangers' value is exactly the value of the burger. Those strangers, though, bring more benefit, to the consumer, than by that one burger. They bring another burger, to another consumer, who thereby better brings value to other consumers, etc.
Perhaps it is a bit shallow, to consider the value of a person, to another, in terms of how much they contribute to the bringing of hamburgers, or whatever other service; nonetheless, to any consumer, that is where the ultimate value is. Rather, the value is exclusively in the consumer; others may only bring the hamburger so far, before it's more efficient for the consumer to complete their own value, ingesting, enjoying.
Wombat:
--- Quote from: Gyrre on 25 Jan 2021, 00:53 ---There's a TNG manga.
--- End quote ---
My brain converted the acronym correctly, but also assumed it referred to Degrassi: The Next Generation, and now I want that manga.
Morituri:
Sometime in the 19th century, pneumatic tubes were constructed under Manhattan for the delivery of mail. They were sealed tubes that were installed mostly through existing underground infrastructure such as sewers and steam tunnels. Letters and small packages, pushed along by forced air moving at 35 mph, ran to and from post offices and, where traffic (and expensive fees) justified it, to offices in high-rise buildings in the financial district. These were used up until 1935, after which a couple of post offices moved, and a couple of new ones had been constructed, and it just wasn't worth anybody's time and money to extend the system. Mail is now distributed via more conventional methods.
The Urban Legend:
These tubes still exist underground, and various shifts and ruptures have opened connections to them from the sewers, steam tunnels, etc. in which they were originally built. In the course of remodeling, several unscrupulous architects have taken advantage of these abandoned tubes as drains through which rain can be diverted into the infrastructure below where it will be "somebody else's problem" and the upper ends now open in gutters and on slopes many stories high in the buildings that were once served with pneumatic mail. But, because the buildings are heated, these long stretches of the tube that run up through the building are held at temperatures much warmer than the outside air resulting, on cold winter days, in a powerful draft from those places deep in the earth that comes whistling out of these tubes at high speed. And every so often, a hapless cat, hunting rats deep in the underground, wanders too close to one of the air intakes and gets sucked up, through a twisting, turning, terrifying maze of tubing that batters the poor beast until finally it is launched, terrified, yowling, and often injured, out into the void thirty stories above ground. In certain offices these creatures are occasionally heard as they are launched nearby; in certain apartments which happen to be situated downrange, a cat, sometimes badly injured, occasionally lands on the balcony and, as soon as it recovers its consciousness and/or composure, demands to be let in. In other places cats are not so lucky and there is nowhere to land....
The Truth:
The guy who built this system back in eighteen-seventy-whatever, for reasons unknown, chose to test its suitability for 'fragile' packages by sending a cat, in a box, between stations to see whether it arrived at the destination with injuries. Why he chose this bizarre method of testing, as opposed to getting a bunch of tableware - plates, cups, glasses, etc - from a thrift store is unknown, and has led to some speculation about whether he just personally hated that particular cat. But ever since then people have been talking about cats getting into the tubes and 'accidentally' delivered to one of the destination stations. "High rise" buildings, in the context of eighteen-seventy-whatever, were no more than seven stories tall, and anyway the pneumatic delivery systems were all situated on the ground floor.
hedgie:
A cat in a box can actually be in one of three determinate states: alive, dead, and bloody furious.
cesium133:
--- Quote from: hedgie on 16 Mar 2021, 10:25 ---A cat in a box can actually be in one of three determinate states: alive, dead, and bloody furious.
--- End quote ---
That’s not an orthonormal basis set. The cat can be both alive and bloody furious. Given it’s a cat, it is probably capable of being both dead and bloody furious, too.
Edit— I suppose it could be a valid basis if the cat is capable of being dead and bloody furious. Also, if the cat is not normalized, in which case making the cat more furious causes it to become less alive.
I haven’t been sleeping well this week, so I’m sure none of this makes any sense at all.
Edit 2– I may be thinking of this wrong. I’m picturing it as a three dimensional system— aliveness, deadness, and furiousness. But aliveness and deadness are linked— unless we allow the cat to be neither alive nor dead. In which case it’s actually only a two dimensional system, an alive-dead axis and a furiousness axis. I have no idea where I’m going with this.
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