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mojosam56 karma

One of the most horrific aspects of many of the police shootings caught on video is that the police fail to render any first aid to the shooting victims, and may actively prevent the victims (through handcuffing a shooting victim) or others from rendering first aid. Essentially, police seem content to allow shooting victims to bleed out in the street.

To me, this seems like it has to be a civil rights violation, but I've heard very little discussion of it. I would think that all people have a right to prompt life-saving medical care, and that the police have a responsibility to render such care until EMTs arrive. What is the ACLU's take on this?

mojosam55 karma

So I guess I wish the doctor would have asked if hurt to pee before sending me off,

Was this the same family doctor that missed the diagnosis of your testicular cancer?

It's always good to remember that, for every doctor who graduates at the top of their class, there's a doctor out there practicing medicine who graduated at the bottom.

mojosam0 karma

I guess you could consider compact fusion drives as less exotic than nanofabricators or antigravity tech, in that at least we know fusion is possible and have made some progress toward building reactors, but I think it's not known if they could be realistically scaled down for use in launch vehicles.

mojosam0 karma

Would you agree with the following assessment?

Given the high cost of launching materials from Earth — even with large reusable rockets like the SpaceX Starship — any significant human habitation beyond the Earth (Mars or Moon colonies, O'Neil cylinders, generation ships) will require the development of one of the following two exotic technologies:

  • Nanofabricators (e.g. Diamond Age) to allow flexibly processing raw materials (asteroids, lunar regolith, Mars resources) into the huge variety of materials needed for extraterrestrial habitation, or for the creation of a space elevator

  • Antigravity tech (e.g. Interstellar) to allow terrestrial resources to be easily and inexpensively placed in orbit and beyond; this could allow creation of traditional large-scale factories in space without nanofabricators

in other words, while it is certainly possible for us to create small scale space stations and lunar bases — even a Mars base — if there is sufficient will to do so, such efforts will always be very limited in scope without one of these exotic technologies, which are necessary to allow large-scale manufacturing outside of the Earth, and which may well be centuries away if they are possible at all.