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The problem with trying to change history by targeting individuals is that it requires you to subscribe to 'Great Man' historical theories which ignore the social conditions that enable big, history shaping figures to emerge. Kill Hitler and some other ambitious German/Austrian leader will use the resentment of the people as a springboard to power. Kill Columbus and any number of his contemporaries will lay waste to the Americas instead. Kill Attila the Hun and Rome will fall to some other force of migrating horsemen. Kill Caesar and Pompey starts the empire. In order to make an appreciable dent on history you have to kill so many people that you become the evil dictator you were gunning for in the first place.
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Apr 1, 2015 09:39
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McSpanky posted:I tried to follow his line of reasoning to put a single face to Western exploitation of other continents for the express purpose of chattel slavery, and my offhand answer was "kill Christopher Columbus", so I guess he's got a point. Oh man, this just reminded me of an absolutely terrible book I read when I was younger.
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Apr 1, 2015 09:54
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If you first act upon gaining access to a time machine isn't looking up a list of lost classics I don't even know what you're doing with your life 
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Apr 1, 2015 09:56
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reignonyourparade posted:If you first act upon gaining access to a time machine isn't looking up a list of lost classics I don't even know what you're doing with your life I'm going to be too busy watching the original Star Wars in theaters opening night. EDIT: Jaws, Alien and Raiders, too.
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Apr 1, 2015 09:59
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Soonmot posted:I'm going to be too busy watching the original Star Wars in theaters opening night. show up 2 hours before the premier of empire strikes back and tell everyone who lukes father is
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Apr 1, 2015 10:02
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I'm self serving, not evil!
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Apr 1, 2015 10:05
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I'd troll the poo poo out of the Doctor Who thread re: the lost episodes.
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Apr 1, 2015 10:16
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Soonmot posted:I'm going to be too busy watching the original Star Wars in theaters opening night. I'd insert subliminal Dickbutts in all these movies.
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Apr 1, 2015 10:27
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jsoh posted:show up 2 hours before the premier of empire strikes back and tell everyone who lukes father is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neuMyI8M5fc
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Apr 1, 2015 11:09
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thatbastardken posted:The problem with trying to change history by targeting individuals is that it requires you to subscribe to 'Great Man' historical theories which ignore the social conditions that enable big, history shaping figures to emerge. Kill Hitler and some other ambitious German/Austrian leader will use the resentment of the people as a springboard to power. Kill Columbus and any number of his contemporaries will lay waste to the Americas instead. Kill Attila the Hun and Rome will fall to some other force of migrating horsemen. Kill Caesar and Pompey starts the empire. I don't know. A bomb killing Hitler plus most of the Nazi leadership in 1932 would very likely put the final nail in the coffin of German fascism. There would then most likely either have been a right-wing conservative (but not fascist) dictatorship, which may or may not start a war of aggression to regain lost lands, or a communist revolution. The criticism of Great Man history also likes to ignore the fact that these social conditions come about by the acts of individuals, including the people who write the laws and implement them. You can't understand Nazi Germany by looking solely at Hitler, but you also can't understand it by ignoring him.
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Apr 1, 2015 11:23
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The best way to go about changing history: Travel back to a set point in time, let's say 10 000 years ago. Find a safe place, wait for a few hours to see if you show up. Go to the time where you actually want to change history. Go back to the present, see if you like the results. If you like the results, go back 10 000 years ago and tell yourself to go ahead. If you didn't show up 10 000 years ago to give yourself the go-ahead, think of a better plan or scrap time travel all together.
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Apr 1, 2015 11:30
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Captain Bravo posted:Oh man, this just reminded me of an absolutely terrible book I read when I was younger. Was this terrible book by Orson Scott Card
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Apr 1, 2015 15:42
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The only real way to use time travel was laid out in the documentary Chrono Trigger.
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Apr 1, 2015 16:59
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reignonyourparade posted:If you first act upon gaining access to a time machine isn't looking up a list of lost classics I don't even know what you're doing with your life
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Apr 1, 2015 19:36
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AnonSpore posted:Was this terrible book by Orson Scott Card Yyyyyep. I read Ender's Game, thought "That book was awesome!" and so I grabbed the next book I could find by Card and...  Even better, I managed to convince myself it must have been a fluke, and wasted time/money reading the stupid sequels and prequels to Ender's Game too. 
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Apr 2, 2015 02:40
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Captain Bravo posted:Yyyyyep. I read Ender's Game, thought "That book was awesome!" and so I grabbed the next book I could find by Card and...
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Apr 2, 2015 02:45
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Poison Mushroom posted:Hey! Speaker for the Dead was passable, and Xenocide... I never read Xenocide, but I've heard it's not all bad. You heard wrong.
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Apr 2, 2015 02:57
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And Ender's Game is only good because it shamelessly panders to the Sad Nerd Who Wants To Feel Special demographic.
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Apr 2, 2015 03:10
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MikeJF posted:I mean if I were to get a time machine and determined to change the timeline to better humanity I'd admit I don't know anywhere near enough and employ a large team of historians. The trick is you don't change the past to improve the present. You change the future to improve the present. And you do that by sending messages, not by going there and doing anything. See, if you can go back, so can a sheet of paper. Or more usefully, an electrical signal. You take the time machine and hook it up to a computer. The results of any process it does can then be sent back into the past, or basically now, no matter how long it would take to model and calculate the results. They talk about "It would take all the supercomputers running for a thousand years to solve this problem!", well now you have that without needing to have the computers or thousand years. You basically gain perfect precognition - even if it can't be modeled, you can see how things play out and send the message back. Every mystery of math and science becomes instantly known. The economy is basically forced to convert away from its current track- high frequency trading is now defunct, markets are unnecessary (they are a way to handle an NP insufficient information problem, which is now solved), and digital commerce is now all unprotected anyways. The base structure of capitalism just evaporated because all the economic costs are now gone - labor cost is no more because you can send the finished product back, avoidable costs are now avoided, opportunity costs took flight with the 2nd law of thermodynamics, resource cost are gone along with scarcity because you know where it is and can send it back, transport costs are gone because a time machine is a ftl device... you basically get dumped into functional utopian communism by default as unique self actualized services are the only thing the time machine doesn't provide for. Even if you want to put it down that you can't use it as a way to instantly make any good, then just call forward 50 years and ask for the detailed plans to build a robot, and your labor costs are still gone. Hook a time machine up to a computer and you get an oracle, and with it shatter every underlying, baked in assumption that makes the current status quo.
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Apr 2, 2015 04:06
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Man these past people are lazy assholes. Let's stop taking their calls.
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Apr 2, 2015 04:32
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reignonyourparade posted:If you first act upon gaining access to a time machine isn't looking up a list of lost classics I don't even know what you're doing with your life Not everyone can be Zinyak.
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Apr 3, 2015 01:49
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Patrick your host body will not live long enough to see your great works completed! Better research immortality first!
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Apr 3, 2015 13:06
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Maybe that's why he's looking into time travel! He could arrange for the world to be taken over in the past and come back to a future where he's already in charge. I'm still waiting for the page that just has "Supervillain" as the caption. Maybe that's coming soon.
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Apr 3, 2015 13:29
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Oh, Patrick. 
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Apr 3, 2015 13:43
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Ugh, that's Patrick's solution for EVERYTHING. 
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Apr 3, 2015 15:19
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i'm on board with this hypothetical venture
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Apr 3, 2015 15:27
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Glad to see his heel-face turn was in fact a long con to turn Alison to the Dark Side.
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Apr 3, 2015 17:52
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Hello, I still read the comic but I stopped reading this thread a while ago because of the awful bickering people would start at the slightest provocation. Has it gotten better?
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Apr 3, 2015 19:36
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Pavlov posted:Hello, I still read the comic but I stopped reading this thread a while ago because of the awful bickering people would start at the slightest provocation. Has it gotten better? Not even a chance.
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Apr 3, 2015 19:52
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No one in this thread is talking about the most important aspect of Alison meeting Patrick. Page 94, page 96: Alison is wearing tights Page 98: OR IS SHE!? Page 101: nah she is Page 102: nah she isn't Most likely explanation is that Mary is in the room and her invisibility aura thing is distorting whether Alison's tights are visible, closely followed by artist error. edit: tights are now a constant the conspiracy is real Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Apr 6, 2015 |
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Apr 3, 2015 19:58
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Trast posted:Not even a chance. Ok I guess I'll try again next year.
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Apr 3, 2015 21:01
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I remain convinced that he's trying to lead her into a thought process he wants. Every time she asks him something, he seems to deflect and then move on to another subject. Like he's trying to funnel her into a direction he wants. I really think he's either dodging questions in advance, or he's trying to lead her into agreeing to help him with something terrible by figuring out the best way to handle it. Find out what she'd do with these loaded questions, then figure out the best way to ask for help with something she'd never help. Or poo poo maybe he's trying to pull a SMBC and have Alison power an energy source for as long as she can without exhaustion.
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Apr 3, 2015 21:46
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Vanilla Bison posted:No one in this thread is talking about the most important aspect of Alison meeting Patrick. You forgot, "Patrick has already started messing with time and subtle variations in the space-time continuum vibration cause her tights to appear and disappear depending on the page thanks to the ripple effects."
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Apr 3, 2015 22:16
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None of those plans are very actionable for NORMAL people sure, but Allison could probably singlehandedly overthrow capitalism.
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Apr 6, 2015 06:38
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Patrick's key failure here is thinking you need to kill every bad person, rather than just killing enough that the remainder are sufficiently terrified into acting morally. Like the Racist Tree parable but with more backbreakers.
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Apr 6, 2015 12:46
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Well at least things have seemingly moved in a interesting direction.
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Apr 6, 2015 21:19
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mr. stefan posted:Patrick's key failure here is thinking you need to kill every bad person, rather than just killing enough that the remainder are sufficiently terrified into acting morally. Like the Racist Tree parable but with more backbreakers. As shown by the murder rate in the US, which is a solid 0 because of the death penalty.
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Apr 6, 2015 22:40
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ArchangeI posted:As shown by the murder rate in the US, which is a solid 0 because of the death penalty. There's two factors to deterrence: 1. Likelihood of getting caught 2. Severity of the punishment Death penalty is pretty much thee most severe punishment you can have (without going into cruel and unusual territory at least), but if you figure you're going to get away with your crimes anyway it doesn't matter. But if you have a near-certainty of getting caught, then even a relatively mild sentence like three years of jail or a big fine can be enough. So basically do the teleport+mindread thing, but only do it for crime suspects. That'll reduce your workload by a lot and you could theoretically keep up with it if you limit yourself to a small state/country instead of trying to cover the entire world.
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Apr 6, 2015 23:21
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People do poo poo regardless of the punishments for a lot of reasons. If there's even a chance that you might not get caught, a lot of people will do it because the human mind is exceptionally bad at understanding, weighing, and processing statistics. And given the fact that it would take our intrepid trio loving 1000 years to hit everyone on earth, there's a pretty loving high chance that you can do whatever the hell you want and not get caught, or get caught decades later which is basically the same thing to an impulsive, young person. Even if he limits himself to criminal suspects, which just opens up an enormous goddamn can of worms in of itself. tl;dr: Your idea is bad, and you should feel bad. 
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Apr 7, 2015 02:11
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Well, you just need to increase his powers to the point where he can just read everyone's thoughts at once. Also kill them with thoughts for convenience.
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Apr 7, 2015 02:42
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