Yeah, this has been dominating the news around here. One giant clusterfuck.The Oroville Dam, the tallest dam in the US (yes, taller even than the Hoover Dam), has been in dire straits for days now. Until today, though, the main problem was thought to be a sinkhole that had developed under its primary spillway and had caused a massive hole to open in it... but today despite the damaged spillway having been open anyway, the water level has risen so much that the "emergency spillway," a generous euphemism for "part of the hill lower than the rest that will get overflowed first" started having water come over it.
And now in the last hour or two, despite previous hopes that this would be sufficient, the call to evacuate Oroville has gone out as it was believed that the emergency spillway has been eroded too much by all the water and will "fail within the hour."
I used to have family in Oroville, distant relations, granted. Last year they sold their house and moved to New Zealand. Just in time, it seems.
Yup. Government tends to be very short-sighted and reactionary any more. There's almost no forward-looking any longer on either side of the aisle.
This quote right here kills a lot of any potential sympathy I have for his family.
Because it lessens each label into a quality
The beer itself is actually not very good! Unexpectedly strong metallic taste, and the rest of the flavors didn't impress. Only had one can though, so we'll see.
I did type SEEM, but yeah point disproven.
While there have been lots of improvements in can technology (yeah, you wouldn't guess so, but really), a lot of Belgian brewers still don't like using cans instead of dark bottles because of the possibility of metallic taste getting into the beer. Strictly speaking, good cans are the best way to store beer, but glass has less potential side-effects. I hope the other beers go better
I was wondering if this was going to include Shimmer & Shine. Then had Barbara Eden voicing the head genie, so bonus points for that.
Wish #1 should always be:
Are mind-reading and empathy expected of the genie? Are you sure you want to rely on its understanding of your "best possible outcome," "core desire," and "negative consequences"? Maybe he's a paperclip maximizer at heart. The best possible outcome for you is to shorten the span of time between the present state (not paperclips) and the best future (is paperclips). Your core desire (obviously to be part of the paperclipping) is taken into account. None of your useful-in-paperclip-manufacture atoms will undergo fission or fusion so as to not negatively affect them, tho.Wish #1 should always be:
"I wish that all of my wishes, including this one, will be interpreted in such a way as to have the best possible outcome for me, taking into account my core desire in making the wish, and minimizing all negative consequences, avoiding them completely if possible."
If you can't get enough satisfaction out of your two remaining wishes, you got problems.
As a professional geologist, I can tell you you can remove the "any more" part of that sentence. When I was in the environmental field before I switched to the dark side, the running joke was calling them the Army Corpse of Engineers. Here's a typical conversation between the gov't/Corps and consulting geologists:
The X-Files with the genie had Mulder try something like this, and the genie read it over and said it still probably wouldn't work. She seemed to be indicating that jerking around the wish was something that just happened, and it wasn't in her control.Wish #1 should always be:
"I wish that all of my wishes, including this one, will be interpreted in such a way as to have the best possible outcome for me, taking into account my core desire in making the wish, and minimizing all negative consequences, avoiding them completely if possible."
If you can't get enough satisfaction out of your two remaining wishes, you got problems.
Why not? It's magic. If it can make time travel possible, create matter, rewind cause-and-effect for the entire universe to change a specific outcome or situation, I see no problem with that same magic of the first wish incorporating my desires in that and all future wishes.
Of course...it doesn't make a good story if the protagonist just gets everything they want. If I were writing a standard genie story, I wouldn't probably wouldn't allow it either.
The first wish is your scaffolding/foundation for the rest, you're necessarily building that on some sort of ground (the genie's base state). If you don't account for it, any number of things may be off. It's magic, and I see no problem with that same magic pouring through any available loophole like a torrent of poop.
"...including this one..."
That doesn't make the genie any more understanding of your values, AFAICT. At the end of the day, wishes aren't magic (Lesser Wish and Wish are), they're requests made to a genie that executes them to the letter of the word (with an added dash of fuckery based on the traits given to this genie, usually). Nothing about your initial wish will fix core issues in the genie's utility function, if it's warped in ways not accounted for. Like pushing unknown foodstuffs through a simple extruder and expecting reliable results. Universal tools/processes are complicated, and a universal "bootstrap a safe genie from a genie" seems like a hell of a complicated thing.
