To be fair I had a guy who was 18 or 19 in my grade 4 class. In addition to being non vocal he also had some bone disorder leaving him wheelchair bound.
The end result left him as a large sloth like creature that most of the class found unsettling, rather than anything that would be dangerous to the children.
So situations like that are possible.
Perhaps, but there are also people who are "chemically different" enough that they honestly believe that they need limbs amputated to be their true self, or that the government is is implanting radios in their teeth. Perhaps the correct solution is not to indulge in a vain attempt to chase physical impossibilities.
Growing wheat on the moon and space tourism are jest facts of life, but CGI? Basically witchcraft.
Also underlined in this segment is that though you can build a powder keg, you can't always control what sets it off. Ominous considering the state of the world today.
Yeah, it seems like Man's supposed to have a thick psuedo-russian accent I think, which is a result of the USSR's influence on space colonization in the setting.
The consistency with which pronouns are dropped clued me in that it's just the way he talks rather than a transcription error.
The bits with a bunch of dialogue are sometimes a bit confusing, but when he's just narrating events it's understandable enough.
Sounds like you've already read the whole book. I'm only basing my judgment on the first four chapters, so if the chain marriage gets into more detail later on, I can't make any judgment on that.
From what I gathered it was the second most senior she slept with instead, and only because she was biologically related to the most senior husband.
Otherwise everything you've said seems relatively reasonable.
I've read Door To Summer, Space cadet, Red Planet, Farmer in the sky, and Between Planets, which i gather were aimed at a younger audience and thus avoid sexual discussions.
I feel like basically any social structure will inevitably degenerate into either a tournament or pair bonding scenario. There'd have to be some outside force keeping the structure in place I think.
Or just go with nonhuman characters.
This reminds me a bit of a short story I read where a city gets a computer to make all the decisions for them, but it all starts going poorly, when the computer cucks a guy by assigning his wife to another man and they realize the computer is terrible at emotional logic and worthless at anything that can't be boiled down to an equation. Can't remember the name unfortunately. This appears to be taking a different tack, but may explore similar themes.
Socialists, don't know what they want, how to accomplish it, and if they got it everything would be a mess. It's not exactly subtle commentary...
The idea of a memory bank of 100megabytes is quaint. To big for management at the sector level, but too small to make sense as a discrete device. Maybe in another 50 years I'll be wrong and we will have multi exabyte disks with 100 units of some sort, but I doubt it.
Also quaint is New Leningrad. Easy to mock in hindsight I guess, but it is a reminder of how ephemeral things can be in history that seem so permeant today.
The chain marriage was almost interesting, as I first thought it was structured that each member would have two sexual partners, the one older and the one younger, hence the requirement of alternation, but then it turned out just to be an excuse to talk about a girl getting impregnated by a man old enough to be her grandfather. With just the two partners each, it was almost semi-plausable as an alternative social structure, as it is it's far less interesting, and less believable as anything other than some old dude's harem with extra steps.
Actually, there sure is a lot of pregnancy talk, isn't there.
The idea of this autistic computer being more convincing as a female is a little suspect... But the change does highlight the tendancy to project human traits onto things based on assumptions that may have no grounding in reality, and the vast psychological difference between interacting with someone of the opposite sex vs the same sex. (Is this setting up for robot waifus later on?)
It's so weird. Canada is right next door, and it's not nearly as common, but still fairly high for a western country. Sure you some people are, but it's seen as a bit odd, and mostly a religious or cultural thing.
Canada is at 30% and falling last I checked. USA is now upwards of 80% which puts it alongside backwater third world shitholes (and South Korea for some reason)
It's still easily 10:1 men to women, and even greater if you count those that take it seriously enough to achieve a coloured belt, but I've rolled with enough women who are built up from playing hockey to know that at white or blue belt, only most heavily conditioned women have a chance against me, a computer geek who's never taken Athletics seriously.
https://boysvswomen.com/#/world-record
In most athletic respects, women are effectively 14 year old boys.
BJJ is a sport that allows for genius, and I know historically the occasional brilliant woman has made her mark against men, but like most sports of this nature, how big and strong you are matters most critically when you make a mistake. If you do make a mistake you either have to be fast enough to prevent an effective punish, or strong enough to eat the loss of position.
Little guys are fast, big guys are strong. Women have neither. And as such will be flattened at their first wrong move. In the lower belts, being nearly perfect is sometimes enough, but by brown belt, basically everyone will be nearly perfect. In a lot of cases by that point in their career, chronic injuries and the art of playing around them have begun to appear, which also counts against women because of their frankly shit durability.
I'm not very talented, but I still slow way down when I roll with them. It really is like being against a 13 year old kid. Only real consideration is that some girls have thin boney forearms that are more difficult to defend your neck against, but some skinny boys are like that too. And if your forearms are that thin, chances are you don't have great grip strength.
The kind of doctors who gravitate to this sort of surgery tend to be the ones that just like cutting things up and stitching them back together rather than being driven by any sense of ethics or helping people.
They also tend to be the kind that aren't talented enough for reconstructive surgery or boobjobs or nosejobs or the other high end cosmetic surgeries.
Hence, the result seen here is not particularly unexpected.
Seems like the lesson should be "Update Intel regularly and be ready to change plans in accordance with new information"
I'm so far past the "don't make assumptions about people" thing now. Sorry, but I'm going to assume that just about everyone is a mouth breathing retard who only got whatever job they have through nepotism until they prove me otherwise. Even then, it's more likely that someone is a sperg with one or two specific talents than anyone actually worth interacting with.
The misuse of "they" makes this incredibly difficult for me to parse. Like I can understand it if I read it over, but it's like reading a foreign language I only sort of speak.
Flow is important, writing is an art, but as we know, beauty is destroyed by the woke horde.
I made the mistake of ordering something labeled tea there once. Probably more corn syrup in it than anything that could be accurately called tea. I'll stick to the he iced chocolate if I ever end up there again. At least then I know I'm getting a chocolate milkshake.
Almost the equivalent of the SRS surgeons for virology.
"Look at all these people who are giving us all this money to try weird experimental shit on them, and will thank us for doing so."
And because of how society is. Any successes are shouted loudly and paraded about, no matter how few, and anyone who suspects they may have been conned is handwaved away.
That's the thing about lobotomies that people forget. There were enough success stories to point to to sell it to the mainstream. But when you can pick a handful from thousands...