There have been several people, men and women who run a marathon every day for months or even years on end. In that sense there is no upper limit, but those people almost certainly all have a genetic mutation which most people don’t that prevents lactic acid buildup.

Most marathon runners have a lower body fat than is considered medically healthy and their toe nails pop off during the race, so we are already 2/3 of the way there.

That set is inclusive of every official marathon ever ran, so no it is not a single sample. We see consistently that the women’s record always is slower than the men’s record.

Longer stride length also equals a heavier body weight to move. I’m sure there’s some sort of graph where the vertex represents the most efficient combination of those factors.

That is definitely impressive stamina. An Olympic marathoner can average 12mph for around 2 hours and an “average” marathoner does 8mph, but that is on a road or track. Savannah is one of the few terrains where you could approach those speeds. I would believe they could go 50 miles on a hunt. Trying to run far in sand or snow, through heavy vegetation, or up and down mountains drastically increases the energy it takes (and the max distance and speed you are capable of). That’s a whole other thing.

Right. Even with persistence hunting, I doubt our ancestors were going 50+ miles chasing prey.

How does it not? Running 26 miles takes endurance and running it fast takes even more endurance.

I absolutely agree with the thesis that both men and women hunted, but I think the claims of women’s superior endurance are not represented in reality. The fastest marathon time for men is 2 hours 1 minute and for women it is 2 hours 14 minutes. These were in 2023 and 2019 respectively, so it’s not like it was years ago with drastically different treatment of the sexes. Both runners were Kenyans too, so that limits non-sex based biological differences.

I don’t buy that it is socialization. For one thing, the difference disappears in sports like shooting and horseback riding where physicality is not the determining factor. On top of that, when children compete at sports there are negligible performance differences until after puberty. The article mentions the record a woman holds for swimming across the English Channel. I think that women’s higher body fat provides buoyancy that massively reduces the energy required to stay afloat for a prolonged time. We don’t see the same supposed superiority in other endurance events.

This link touches on many of the same topics as the main article and adds some more info.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240731-the-sports-where-women-outperform-men

Such an alert would mean someone forgot to clock out before a couple days off 99.9% of the time, not that they were dead at their desk.

Or do the opposite. Voting enters you into a lottery where the prize is you never have to pay taxes again.

Now you can judge someone’s social status by whether they drive a luxury car, if they live in a mansion, or how many employees work for them. In a post-scarcity society, people who want high status have to earn it. By going down to unexplored planets themselves, the bridge crew get to claim any new discoveries as their own. People all over the galaxy will hear about who made first contact with a new civilization.

Remember that in a post-scarcity society, the currency is glory and prestige.

The catch is the courts say what is official and unofficial. A president could then remove Supreme Court members and replace them with ones who agree that such a removal is official and therefore legal.

You could, but who is worried a bear will use their computer?

One of my favorite examples of the difficulty in idiot-proofing things comes from a national park ranger talking about the difficulty of designing a bear-proof garbage can. He said “There is considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.”

The Dollop episode about him was fantastic.

These engineers need to watch more BattleBots. You always build in a self-righting mechanism.

“Man, don’t you know? The law ain’t made to help earthy cats like us. Here on our planet, back in the old days - back in the real old days - it was just every man for himself, scrooblin’ and scrat-scroblin’ for the good stuff, the greenest valleys. And the strongest, meanest men got the best stuff. They got the green valleys and were like ‘The rest of you, y’all scrats get sand.’ And that’s when they made the laws, you see? Once the strong guys got it how they liked it, they said ‘This is fair now, this is the law.’ Once they were winning, they changed the rules up.” —Jake the Dog, Adventure Time, “Ocarina”

I remember hearing about US soldiers burning C4 to heat up meals.

To be fair, the same is true in capitalism. It just manifests in different ways.