Most things I’ve done were from changing the environment around me. Most things became trivially easier when I made more… So no fault there
I’d consider HARD goals, not just SMART ones
Heartfelt - core/passion
Animated - inspires/energizes you
Required - needed for a larger objective
Difficult - effort but also confidence creating
Is it something you can sustainably do, with your support system and environment and schedule, that breaths life into you even though it’s a challenge?
Are you working in that 80% max effort space (or whatever it is for gym nerds, you get the point)
I think that line of reasoning will quickly become a ouroboros situation when you think about the details of cause, effect and desire.
I suppose the best outcome is the one where you’ve destroyed yourself and are replaced with a nearly identical person sans the reason you changed time and the butterfly effect of everything that stemmed from that.
At worst you’ve duplicated yourself and have a wonderful opportunity to observe yourself blissfully unaware of the reason you changed time.
But depending on which flavor of time travel used. I suspect the most likely outcome is you’ll continue doing this again and again. Something always misaligning with your goals potentially unaware that anything has already happened. Never seemingly perfect or that time becomes this window of experience looping, endless eight style.
Seven years ago on New Year’s Day my little sister unexpectedly passed away, and just a few days ago my stepmom (a mother of little girls 7 and 9) passed.
I would have taken 100 Christmas’s of coal over this. It will be hard to not go into the holidays bracing myself for the next disaster.
When minimum wage was increased to $7.25/hour (although it should be increased again).
Affordable Care Act
Funding for covid tests and vaccines
Don’t know if these count, since they only come from SCOTUS decisions however Congress has not written a law stripping these rights. Right to have a same-sex relationship (2003) Right to marry a same-sex partner (2015) Right to employment while LGBT (2020)
There were also Cash for Clubker programs (although that could’ve just been state level) that gave people money to buy a newer car with better gas milage to help the environment and keep people from using as much gas.
Stimulus checks at the end of Bush presidency and during covid. As far as I know, those were the first, creating a precedent that the government could sometimes provide financial relief directly to citizens.
We had something similar to get people to by electric cars where I live. It was removed some years ago, and what I remember most from that is a woman on the news talking about how she just spontaneously bought a new car before the benefit went away, just because why not the benefit is going away soon might as well just buy a new car.
Affordable Care Act is a mixed bag. It brings insurance to the masses, but insurance is a rip off for the most part. ACA is very half baked without providing a Medicare plan buy in (public option) or forcing everyone to purchase their insurance from the exchange to increase benefits and drive prices down.
Personally I wish we just had universal healthcare/Medicare for all in the US. Hopefully I live long enough to see it.
The ACA isn’t the end goal for sure, but it’s better than where we were before. Hopefully as people get used to it, we will be more likely to pass a universal healthcare system.
The problem with the ACA was that it had to make a lot of compromises to get it through with support by Republicans. While the ACA was initially very unpopular, it’s become more popular in time (if you discount rebranding efforts like Kentucky Connect being the name of the ACA marketplace there… Then Kentucky politicians calling ACA broken but Connect good causing Connect to be popular but ACA not in that state).
It was a good effort at getting the foot in the door for universal Healthcare one day, imo.
Here in Sweden you can just google a phone number or a name and get the address, a map of the area, an guide to find the right apartment, the persons gender, how many lives in the home, how many vehicles the person owns, the person’s age and birthday, the size of their aprtment, the aproximate value of their home, and more without any cost.
This is normal here, and since everyone is listed we don’t really think about it.
That being said, I would be quite annoyed if the press did an article on me where they published my home address…
Well, la-deee-daa! Look at you, with all your safety and security and lack of fear. I bet you even think you’re European or something snooty like that.
100%. I’m still going to TRY making homemade for a challenge eventually, but when Costco sells perfectly good ones… Why would I make them other than as a project?
Super speed. So… Let’s say you can move at light speed, and let’s just hand-wave away the problems like turning everything in front of you into an exploding ball of superhot plasma or shattering the Earth’s crust with every step. We’ll just take as a given that you can actually use this power.
Would you want to?
Let’s be clear… This isn’t teleportation, this is being able to move at super speed. That means you still experience all the motion between point A and point B. That could go one of two ways:
Your mind can also operate at super speed. Great! You’re running across the United States? You get to experience every single footstep. You get to experience the subjective time it takes to walk or run ~3000 miles - five to seven months. Depending on how much control over your subjective experience of time you have, maybe you can make it feel like you’re going at the speed of a car on a highway or something, but you’re still looking at a week or so of subjective time. Hope you like time alone, because you’re going to have millions of years of it, from your perspective, if you use your power a lot. But that’s still better than the alternative…
Your mind operates at normal speed. You are now the most dangerous thing on the planet. Every time you use your super speed, the landscape blurs around you and you have no idea where you are, how far you’ve gone, or how many people you’ve exploded into red mists without even realizing they’re there along the way. You could easily plow through a line of buses filled with orphans and puppies, and never even notice the trail of carnage behind you, because they were in New Jersey, and you stopped in San Diego.
That’s why the comics always gloss over what it’s like to have super speed. The dark side of it is that for it to be anything but terrifyingly destructive to the entire planet, you have to have control. And in order for you to have control, you have to be capable of seeing where you’re going and reacting to obstacles. That means sped up perceptions, and thus the subjective hell of experiencing every single step you take at super speed.
I would guess that you have seen the first episode of “The Boys”?
Anyway, option 1 is very clearly superior, even if incredibly boring, because it includes not becoming tired or hungry during the trip. You kinda would get to zone out for months at a time, like a super long scenic vacation.
Option 1 also isn't necessarily as bad as they make it seem. If you suddenly gained super speed and your perception of time altered over night then, yes, you're suddenly going be spending a lot more time in your own head relative to before and it's going to take some adjustment as best, a lot of therapy at worst. But if you're born like that, surely it'd just be normal for you and you wouldn't necessarily know anything different?
The other option that wasn't mentioned is that you can "turn on" your powers and the world feels like it goes into slow motion around you, and then you turn them off again afterwards and it's all back to normal.
Your second point is how most comic speedsters operate. They can raise and lower their reaction speed at will.
In fact the only speedster I know of that can’t change reaction speed at will is Red Rush from Invincible. He’s permanently stuck at high speed so to him a simple conversation feels like hours.
Also even if you are protected from the repercussions of moving at super speed, anything you move isn’t. If you carry your friend across the street, your friend is now pulverized and probably burnt to a crisp. If you move your water bottle, congrats on delivering a pressure vessel of steam to wherever you just went. Acceleration that fast and impacts at that speed would destroy basically everything you touch while moving at super speed.
If you have the power of super speed you can control when it’s active. Likewise you can adjust the speed your mind processes things to always ensure you’re 1:1 with your frame of reference.
Being 1:1 with your frame of reference is actually one of the problems.
Say you’re Barry Allen and you’re running from Los Angeles to New York city. Given the nature of your powers, you arrive there basically instantly as far as anyone else is concerned.
But for you? You experience every single footstep you took along the way. You arrive bored out of your mind and possibly going insane after running across the continental United States in, for you, months of being absolutely alone in a world of utterly still statues and an unmoving sun.
I’ve seen an explanation somewhere that I likes which is super speed and super reflexes are like tensing two different muscles.
You can make your body move at 10x speed to run across town (even 2-3 speed makes you faster than the fastest humans and 5* is like a car going quickly), then you use your reflexes 3 times faster to make that superspeed feel like only 3 times your natural speed. You can also seperate them in other ways like buying yourself time in an exam by speeding up your thinking without actually increasing your muscle movement.
Your mental and physical speed being like tensing muscles also means you can have them kick in like a withdrawal reflex. As the air pressure changes before an explosion or bullet hits you, you involuntarily crank your limit to 50x speed (or whatever is required) to dodge.
It also has the obvious weakness of being exhaustable. It’s worth mentioning that 10x speed is absolutely enough to do most superhuman abilities, and 3x speed makes you basically better than most humans, not just at running but also dodging and punching, and it’s absolutely up to the storyteller to decide if such a low speed multiplier exhausts said speedster or if they can maintain that indefinitely like the muscles we use to stand.
Christmas morning my phone broke (shutoff at >50% and wouldn’t turn on at all). The day before a flight. When all of the stores to get a quick replacement were closed. And the only way I could get any info about my flight was by having my email’s 2FA keys, which were on my broken phone, and the only backup was on my desktop, which was 500km+ away.
Had to walk our catsitter through sending me the backup, and then rush to a retailer this morning to buy a replacement before my flight. Was not a fun experience, or a fun way to spend all of my Christmas money 😅
That 2fa is proper garbage when your phone breaks. My wife’s phone broke, and I couldn’t get her authorized on the new phone bc 2fa. I logged into a desktop that she was logged in on, got the code and everything, but that apparently wasn’t good enough. Needed to be able to respond to a text on the phone that didn’t work, or wait 48 hours before customer service could do anything.
Same thing with find my device. Usually, when you want to find your device, you’re not going to have your device on you. If you lose your phone in a public place now, you’re fucked until you can get back to another device you’re logged in on. Wife also lost her phone on a trip. Here, use mine to log into your account and track it. Nope, need 2fa to get into find my. Like, I’m low-key tempted to just turn it off and be less secure after having 2 shit experiences as a result of it. I won’t because security and all, but damn.
Google used to have an app called Trusted Contact where you could designate someone as a “trusted contact” and they could request your location. You’d get a notification for the request and if you don’t respond in 5 minutes, the location is automatically shared. This way you weren’t always sharing your location with someone and would know if they are trying to see your location. This helped me a few times finding my phone from my SO phone, without needing to log into account with 2FA
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