OOTS #1186 - The Discussion Thread

[bunsen_h]

Correct. It's just Rich making fun of some of the game's assumptions.

Fun thought exercise: how big of a plutonium elemental would you need to summon before you have a bigger pile of Pu-239 than is in all the nuclear weapons on Earth?

Very, very briefly... I'm reminded of Asimov's The God's Themselves and the implications of finding a jar of plutonium-186.

When i was in the space center, with my bachelor, i saw more than once that i knew better than some engineer with a master and less than colleague with an associate degrees, or no degree.

Oh my goodness, yes. I've met any number of idiots who believed that their degree-of-whatever-kind in [X] granted them authority in completely unrelated fields. And several people with advanced degrees who were idiots even in their own fields of supposed expertise. My first real sign of the potential hollowness of academic advancement was the summer before I started my bachelor's degree, when I saw a doctoral student using a calculator to multiply 2-digit integers by 10 in his lab book.

To me that came across as kind a grumpy response to the crew member. Imagine your own boss replying to you in that manner if you brought something to them which should perhaps have gone to someone else.

Mm, I suppose. It depends somewhat on how busy the boss is, and how obvious it should be to me that I ought to be asking some other specific person. If I could reasonably be expected not to know who to ask (and to not have the info myself), the boss shouldn't react in that kind of way.