{"id":11235,"date":"2008-06-14T13:06:40","date_gmt":"2008-06-14T20:06:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2008\/06\/14\/11235.html"},"modified":"2008-06-14T13:06:40","modified_gmt":"2008-06-14T20:06:40","slug":"what-would-you-do-if-you-could","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2008\/06\/14\/what-would-you-do-if-you-could\/","title":{"rendered":"What would you do if you could teleport?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Imagine that you could teleport.<\/p>\n<p>What would you do with that ability?<\/p>\n<p>There are a lot of different ways one could answer that question, but I'm most especially curious about one particular thing:<\/p>\n<p>What could you <em>ethically<\/em> do with the ability to teleport that would earn you enough money to live on?<\/p>\n<p>I have a feeling we've discussed the ethical issues with certain superpowers before, but I can't find that discussion offhand. For example, invisibility as a power has a lot of morally questionable uses, but not so many obvious uses that are morally sound.<\/p>\n<p>And I think teleportation is much the same. There's a <em>lot<\/em> of bad or gray-area stuff you could do with it. What could you do with it that you'd be proud of?<\/p>\n<p>When I brought this up in a face-to-face conversation after seeing the movie of <cite>Jumper<\/cite>, there was one particular career that several people immediately came up with; I'm not going to mention it yet 'cause I'm curious what y'all will come up with.<\/p>\n<p>If you want to make things harder, you can narrow the parameters a little by going with stuff specified in the book of <cite>Jumper<\/cite>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You can only teleport to a place that you've seen in person before and can visualize clearly.<\/li>\n<li>You can take people and things with you, but only if you can lift them off the ground.<\/li>\n<li>What if you're 17 years old and don't have ID? (And you have to financially support yourself.)<\/li>\n<li>What if you don't want to become publicly known, at least not under your real name? What if you don't want to come to the attention of the government?<\/li>\n<li>Given the above parameters, how would you deal with the IRS and paying taxes on your income?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>See also my earlier entries on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2006\/07\/09\/3602.html\">Super Rescue<\/a> (also featuring a 2006 comment from Dave S suggesting that we read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Superpowers-Novel-David-J-Schwartz\/dp\/0307394409\/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213473969&sr=8-1\">his book<\/a>, which we can now do!) and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2006\/08\/13\/3628.html\">Small superpowers<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Imagine that you could teleport. What would you do with that ability? There are a lot of different ways one&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}