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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I personally support this plan. Smoking in the UK has already plummeted. A lot of smokers have moved to vaping. Unfortunately, those left are often the ruder ones. Limiting where they cam smoke, or reduce expire for everyone else is a big dead for me.

    Additionally, it’s not banning nicotine, it’s banning cigarettes. Vapes have changes the balance on that one. They are less damaging, and cause far less issues with passive smoking. This acts as a pressure relief valve, rather than a blanket nicotine ban. Also, at no point will an existing (legal) smoker go from legal to illegal.

    The vape issue definitely needs fixing. A number have found advertising to younger users is a good money maker. Limiting the options here l, without an outright ban would help reduce the harm to children. It wouldn’t significantly affect ex smokers who moved to vaping.















  • Spacetime (you can’t talk about time only) or at least its substrate does get in knots, best we can tell. We call them fundimental particles. String theory/membrane theory are still very much theoretical physics right now, however, so it could be completely wrong.

    The other alternative is a closed timelike curve. According to relativity, there are valid solutions that create such a curve. Theoretically, you could fly into one, traverse it, and exit before you entered at the start. This does require several black holes, moving at stupid speeds, orbiting each other, however. It’s also theoretical. While the equations allow it, we know they are incomplete. Physics seems to have blocks on anything that can mess with causality. It’s likely something, currently unknown, kicks in to stop the closed timelike curve from forming.


  • That requires the symptoms to be entered correctly, and significant effort from (already overworked) doctors. A fuzzy logic system that can process standard medical notes, as well as medical research papers would be far more useful.

    Basically, a quick click, and the paperwork is scanned. If it’s a match for the “bongo dancing virus” or something else obscure, it can flag it up. The doctor can now invest some effort into looking up “bongo dancing virus” to see if it’s a viable match.

    It could also do it’s own pattern matching. E.g. if a particular set of symptoms is often followed 18-24 hours later by a sudden cardiac arrest. Flagging this up could be completely false. However, it could key doctors in on something more serious happening, before it gets critical.

    An 80% false positive is still quite useful, so long as the 20% helps and the rest is easy for a human to filter.


  • Ironically, that is possibly one of the few legit uses.

    Doctors can’t learn about every obscure condition and illness. This means they can miss the symptoms of them for a long time. An AI that can check for potential matches to the symptoms involved could be extremely useful.

    The provisio is that it is NOT a replacement for a doctor. It’s a supplement that they can be trained to make efficient use of.