I've always wondered what a real-life X-men type situation would look like. Super strength is a cool party trick, but like... when is it useful in real life outside of helping your friends move? Would there be societal pressure not to like, get an office job or be a lawyer?
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It would save a lot of money to just hire someone to do a forklift driver's job without buying the forklift but I'm not sure how useful it is if you only have the one person
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Replying to @arthur_affect @KenzieLutece and
Most people who are extraordinarily physically gifted in our world directly make money from it as athletes Which brings up Dash's whole complaint in The Incredibles that for him to do this is somehow "unfair"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @KenzieLutece and
I mean yeah sure in real life if there were an "X-gene" they'd pretty quickly make rules barring you from competition if you had it It's just that the existence of purely natural "superhumans" demonstrates how arbitrary sports are in the first place
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Replying to @arthur_affect @KenzieLutece and
Cf. the book version of The Princess Bride going into Fezzik's sad traumatic backstory and how as he just keeps growing bigger he "graduates" from "athlete" to the much worse job of "circus freak"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @KenzieLutece and
Which leads to the comic book superhero/villain thing He's not a bad guy at heart but he takes a job with Vizzini because it's his first chance to use his powers for a real job that objectively requires them and not just to entertain a crowd of assholes (That job being crime)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @KenzieLutece and
Like yeah it does seem pretty plausible that the most profitable thing you could do with your abilities as an X-Men "mutant" would be to attack people and steal shit and therefore create jobs for other mutants to stop you doing it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @KenzieLutece and
i mean this is because the space of "useful but unexciting superpowers" is highly underexplored like, my superpower is that i can organize and extract information from large volumes of paper, that's it can i fight crime? well, yes, in the sense that i can detect tax fraud,
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Replying to @perdricof @arthur_affect and
on the other hand anyone who has any kind of portal powers could make an incredibly lucrative living in transportation and an even more incredibly lucrative living in smuggling
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Replying to @perdricof @arthur_affect and
forget about "moving conflict diamonds" or whatever bullshit. imagine the opportunities for large-scale arbitrage when you can buy/sell in two different commodity markets with near-zero transportation costs
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Charles Stross' Merchant Princes series
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