And… vented that area into space?

"Can't we just drop him off in 2016?"
"No, he'd go after our families for some reason."
"Oh… so, 2046 then? He seemed to like it there."
"Um…"

In the books it definitely came off more like the way a normal school would treat finals. In the show it seems more like there's some kind of fight to the death among the students every two weeks or so in the first year. You'd think people would be more freaked out about that, but apparently not.

I think they'll have to. I don't know how that's going to make much sense, but maybe they're just going to pretend that Brakebill's is a one year program that somehow (magically!) teaches you something really, really complicated and multiple languages and so on within a vanishingly small period of time?

His… underhanded wing?

Part of the oddness of it is BOOKSBOOKSBOOKS that in the books there was a lot more time between these various events. I was assuming that the show was just kind of quietly letting time pass between things, but then two episodes(?) or so ago someone made some comment about how they'd been there for basically a…

I'm still having trouble making sense of the time frames in which things are happening in the show. In the same episode, in parallel stories, we saw two people build a magical contraption and one of them gets a new boyfriend while planning for a party they were going to go to. So that looks like, maybe, a week and a…

It's also worth remembering that their social system is one that was built following a near apocalyptic war and in the middle of encountering a whole bunch of literal aliens. So dramatic differences wouldn't actually be too weird, and even ones happening really quickly. (And it wouldn't need to be quick because it's…

Well, suddenly yeah. But there's nothing impossible about a general shift in that direction.

I think you're probably underestimating the extent to which academia is very, very hierarchical (in everything but, usually, rhetoric). Academics are not remotely egalitarian in practice. And also it's worth noting that the prestige the academics care about, and fight tooth and nail for is not the kind anyone…

Well… eventually.

"It's powered by a forsaken child!?"
"Might be, kind of - I mean I didn't use the whole thing!"

It was an idea in somewhat common currency around the time: it was becoming increasingly clear (with economic reforms and industrialization and, the fairly recent, and at that point still a source of some hope, rise of the USSR) that there was something of a choice being made regarding how things worked. And more…

'Richer per capita' ignores distribution though, which is sort of the point when it comes to the difference between Britain and America. Britain doesn't have an Alabama, and at that time Alabama was barely a third world country for most of the people living there (and not most in the sense of 51%).

Bertrand Russell wasn't talking about the American lifestyle, though, any more than he was talking about the Sudanese one.

How certain are we of that?

Yeah but this is one of those weird lifestyle things (and also life expectancy has relatively little to do with how old people get, so…*).

Yeah, but remember that they can't replicate people outside of specific strange situations WHICH WE MUST NEVER MENTION AGAIN. The whole thing depends on a massive memory buffer that can only hold so much data at any given time (quite a lot I assume, but..). Having a computer big enough to hold that much data for…

Mainly. Or it makes people think it's reasonable to just send eight hundred of the things instead of thinking through things and only sending two.

You can hammer it insanely thing and then use it as a corrosion proof seal for stuff? I have no idea, but you can actually hammer it down hilariously thin and still be able to work with it.