Alicornutopia

I'm going to take that as “please do not squint at the curtains”.

Fair enough.

Since it came up: what are modern and/or historic Eclipse wedding vows like? And the rest of a traditional wedding, for that matter, since I imagine it’s different.

I hate coming up with fictional wedding vows. Love honor obey turned up to eleven.

Concept: precog "life insurance."

You pay a (fairly high, but not out of the average person's means) fee to sign up, and in return you get permissions to send text messages to the official precog account, and your name put in the official database of People With Precog Life Insurance. You're supposed to do that only in case of life-or-death emergency, so there's a high per-text fee (on the order of "used car," probably).

Then, if you are suddenly killed/injured in a way that's clearly going to be fatal, someone can text the PLI company. Obviously this isn't usually going to be you; first responders and hospitals have access to the messaging system, and you get a shiny medic-alert bracelet, so the EMTs can see that you have PLI and message them with your ID number; you might also give your next of kin/someone you trust the information to access the messaging system (you'll get charged for any frivolous texts they send, of course, but hopefully you trust someone enough not to do that).

When you text the PLI, you send them a few words of information about what happened (e.g. "car wreck, route 22"). They have precogs taking shifts around the clock, with (say) an hour's range each, checking (say) every half-hour; if the precog who checks ahead sees that they're going to get a text in the next hour, they immediately text you back with the information you sent them, and then you have a half-hour of warning to get off the road/move away from that heavy machinery/turn the other way at that corner and not get mugged. (Obviously the more range they can get, the more helpful this is, especially since the EMTs might take a little while to get there. I'm not sure what the distribution of precog ability is like; if a range of three hours is not-particularly-rare, that might be a lot better.)

(You also, in the text, send them a password you've chosen and hashed in advance, and previously sent them the hash of. This part is to protect you from the PLI saying "oh, yeah, you totally messaged us ten times in the last week, but, you know, counterfactually; pay up." They'll send you the password, too, and then if it's not right you can go make a legal fuss, and if it is right and you try to make a legal fuss anyway they can point out that it matches the hash. Obviously anyone with access to your account should have a password picked too, and hospitals and EMTs have them established as a matter of course.)


Running the numbers for whether this is remotely practical: the US population is ~320 million; the number of psions should therefore be about 160 thousand; if 1% of those go through training instead of getting locked down, that's ~1600; if 10% of those pick up precog, that's about 160 precogs in the US.

Probably most deaths which are avertable by intervention on the scale of hours are accident/unintentional injuries, of which there are 136000 yearly in the US. That's 372 daily, or about 15 an hour; even if all of those were signed up for PLI, that's not a volume that's unreasonable for a single precog to handle on any given hour. So to cover round-the-clock and provide vacations and such, you'd need maybe half a dozen precogs, or like 4% of the total number in the US. Given the potential pay if everyone is signing up for the insurance, and the fact that it could put a huge dent in the number of accidental deaths, that doesn't seem like an unreasonable number to be able to recruit.

I think you have some of your Fermi estimate numbers wrong, but probably not enough to make a difference.

Is there a reason, from the point of a PLI subscriber, to only send texts in life-or-death situations instead of any time they would otherwise lose more than the cost-per-text? Should there be? You could always increase the price to match the demand, and then get a regular health insurance place to pay if they think the text was worth it.

No particular reason other than "doing a rough-and-ready estimate," no; I didn't have a good idea off the top of my head how often you could expect to have a non-fatal emergency that would cost you that kind of money but be readily averted with a little advance warning. Getting regular health insurance to cover health-related texts is definitely a thing that would make sense.

The example that came to mind was “I just crashed my new car; it’s totalled but I’m fine”. Obviously that costs more than a used car, so I’d want to avert it. No clue how often that happens, or whether a stable price point would actually land at “used car”.

Yeah, fair point. I picked "used car" as "probably would not mean complete financial ruin for the person using the service"; having more conventional health insurance cover the fees in applicable cases would probably mitigate that worry.

So what's the various religions' stances on sex? Like, given that sex is more acknowledged as a Thing are dogmas accordingly more okay with premarital sex and whatnot?