Ashelyn
Cyberpunk is considered a sub genre of sci-fi because a bunch of people got together and said that’s what it is. Doesn’t make it a 100% hard set rule. You just like putting things in boxes. A piece of creative work is what it contains, not whatever categories you shove it into.
I accept that the intersubjective framework of literary genres exists, but have my disagreements with it. You can do that. It doesn’t make you wrong, just unpopular.
Advertising is like the Kudzu vine: neat and potentially useful if maintained responsibly, but beyond capable of growing out of control and strangling the very landscape if you don’t constantly keep it in check. I think, for instance, that a podcast or over-the-air show running an ad-read with an affiliate link is fine for the most part, as long as it’s relatively unobtrusive and doesn’t put limitations on what the content would otherwise go over.
The problem is that there needs to be a reset of advertiser expectations. Right now, they expect the return on investment that comes from hyper-specific and invasive data, and I don’t think you can get that same level of effectiveness without it. The current advertising model is entrenched, and the parasitic roots have eroded the foundation. Those roots will always be parasitic because that’s the nature of advertising, and the profit motive in general when unchecked.
You’re being prescriptive and not descriptive with the definitions. Superficially it is the case, and people have created a neat little categorical hierarchy you can keep pointing back to, but I’m telling you that a lot of cyberpunk creative work is sci-fi in the same way that people say Star Wars is sci-fi (it’s a space opera, at least the movies are)
Science fiction usually carries with it a desire to rationalize and explain the technology it’s built upon, to try and paint a world plausible from a scientific standpoint. You see this a lot with the technobabble in Star Trek.
Cyberpunk has a lot of overlap with science fiction, but usually dives more into the social commentary on society and capitalism, using the technology within as a vehicle to amplify those criticisms. Some cyberpunk works seek to explain their technology and make it seem grounded in the same way sci-fi does, but that is usually secondary to the social and political themes.
Does anyone know what happened in the early 1960’s that led to that smaller, but still noticeable diversion?
Here’s an article with a graph. Given that the figures are measured per 100,000 live births, one would need to find how many births occurred in the state of Texas in the years graphed. I was able to find that exact figure for 2022 in a document from the CDC (on page 8) which comes out to 389,533. Since the overall Texas maternal mortality rate was about 28.5 per 100k births for that year (per the news article), the total number of mortalities would have been about 110.
If you want I could go find the figure for earlier years as well, but this should serve as a general ballpark the numbers are in. Keep in mind that the maternal mortality rate only factors in live births, so does not include any pregnancy complications involving an unviable fetus.
That would be fine and dandy if most speed limits (in the US at least) were assigned intelligently and not just according to the 85th percentile, which just measures how fast people actually drive down the road, and assumes anything in the top 15% is unsafe and should therefore be illegal
