Friday, December 29, 2017

imponderables

I don't listen to podcasts - and someday I may tell you why - but I did enjoy reading the list of imponderable questions asked on Slate's recent one. To which I have my own comments:

Would you rather put clean clothes on your dirty body or dirty clothes on your clean body?
I've done both. The former feels marginally less disgusting.

Your cellphone somehow connects to cell towers in 2025. You don't know how long you have to stay connected. What do you do?
This one I genuinely had trouble figuring out. Why wouldn't it connect to cell towers in 2025? Will they no longer exist by then?
But this is 2017.
I know this is 2017. But in 2025, it will be 2025.
It means that your phone today connects to towers in the future.
Oh. Then why didn't it say so? How would you know that it had?

Would you rather work for a great boss who's a terrible person OR work for a person who's terrible at his job but a great person?
Define how a terrible person could be a great boss.

Would you rather stop aging at 30 and live for 30 more years OR stop aging at 70 and live for 70 more years?
For this to be a conundrum requires a couple assumptions I'm not sure are warranted. First, that life at 70 is significantly worse than life at 30. There are some things about being 30 I'm glad to be rid of. Second, that you'd want to live for 70 more years. If I were 70 in 1947 - so I'd have been born in 1877, about the time the telephone was introduced, and long before the airplane, radio, or automobiles utterly transformed society, not to mention the atomic bomb - I don't think I'd want to live until today, even without further aging. Too much further transformation of society that I wouldn't be able to digest, not to mention global warming and Donald Trump.

What would you do if you found out William Shakespeare behaved like Harvey Weinstein?
Nothing. What do we do because Richard Wagner behaved like Richard Wagner? In Israel they (unofficially) ban his music, but that strikes most people as a little excessive.

Is it insulting to get someone the gift of a cleaning service?
Probably. When I was a boy, my grandmother decided that the gift I needed was an etiquette book.

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