Your answer to ‘can anyone provide actual evidence’ sounds like a very wordy ‘no’ and a transparent attempt to distract from that.

Is this meant to be sung to the cadence of one of Tom Bombadil’s songs? I dunno why that’s just what felt right when I read it.

Contingency plans. Yeah. Sure. I don’t think there are any that most of us can make. There aren’t any countries I could move to that would be any better I don’t think. I’m too old, I don’t have degrees, my only job qualifications aren’t particularly in demand because the training for them is fast, and the only family connection to citizenship elsewhere I had is insufficient because it’s too many generations removed from me.

I suspect the cast majority of people who would be even worse off than me under another Trump/Republican administration are in just as bad if not worse a position.

Some old Ubisoft game pissed me off like that I think, required their account and launcher and pissed me off. I think I left a bad review in that one because of it, unless I was too lazy to.

If I bought the game without realizing this, I would definitely give it a bad review because of it.

To be fair I’m not as smart as Data, so I doubt it would need that much to outwit me.

When the technology gets there, this will be amazing. I’ll be able to sit down at the computer and say “make me a mystery detective RPG in the style of Sherlock Holmes but set on a cyberpunk styled city on a space station like the Citadel from Mass Effect” and I’ll get just that, generated exclusively for me with a brand new story that fits the themes I asked for.

But that is gonna be a couple decades or more I expect. I dearly hope it happens quickly so I can live to see it, but it’s not going to be in the next ten years, that’s for damn sure.

It’s really just about what markets well. Come up with a catchy name and that name will stick.

The Democrats didn’t go far enough accepting the Obamacare name. Obama was all ‘sounds good to me, yes, I care’ or something along those lines when he was asked once, but the Democrats should have officially renamed the bill to Obamacare. Because there’s people who support the ACA but are against Obamacare and don’t realize they’re the same thing. If they’d changed the name there would only be Obamacare and a few of those people, a very slim amount, might realize that the bill thats helping them is Obamacare.

I forget the details because it’s been a long time since I saw the relevant episodes, but I had the impression that Lore was treated incredibly shittily by the colonists on that planet and he developed those personality traits because of how he was treated.

Norfolk has four carrier strike groups and the entire Atlantic submarine fleet. Even without the ability to repair or resupply, just with what they currently have as far as ordnance goes, that wins the war immediately.

You take a week at most to position submarines in the right spots and then eliminate Axis leadership in a single simultaneous strike.

There is a place for actual conservatives, people who want to change things slowly and make sure we aren’t breaking shit with our changes.

But what calls themselves conservatives these days would be more accurately referred to as reactionaries, who want to reverse many changes that have been made and go back to some old time they preferred.

I am not sure if the relabeling of reactionaries into conservatives was always a global phenomenon, I think in many countries, at least until recently, conservatives were really just conservative and not reactionary. But I can’t say for sure.

Counterpoint: toaster 1 looks like Hitler. Use toaster 1.

Moron is no longer enough. Republican voters at this point are malicious, not stupid, not poor gullible fools, they are malicious people who actively seek to harm others, no matter how ‘nice’ they may seem.

I am not interested in hearing about how someone knows a Republican who is such a nice pleasant person, willing to help just about anyone, kind, caring, etc. It is a mask, like that of…I forget the precise medical term, either psychopath or sociopath. But the irony is they are worse because they do have the capacity for empathy, but they choose not to.

And this is, and always has been, who they are. This is not new. This is exactly who they have always been, people who, if they lived in a different time, would happily own slaves, or watch someone tortured for the evening’s entertainment at the coliseum, or any number of such things.

That’s the people we’re dealing with, and they are a significant portion of the population as they always have been.

Every former president tends to be called president still quite often. If you look up news articles about most former presidents you’ll find a pretty solid split between just saying ‘President X’ and specifying ‘former President X’.

It might be related to a military rule where retired officers get to keep using their rank title unless discharged in negative ways. Or maybe it’s just sort of traditional.

25 years might actually be a potentially realistic timeframe for that. But I’d still bet on a little longer myself. I hope it happens within my lifetime.

They don’t say it, they don’t even acknowledge it themselves, but they view this in the same way a credulous middle ages individual would view making a deal with the fey. The right set of words, the right incantation, will grant you power over them whether they want to acknowledge it or not.

That’s the mental image they have. If you ask them how these secret laws are enforced and what actually obligates the judges, police, government, etc to follow the rules, they won’t admit the magical thinking, though they will babble and make up nonsense that sounds, to them, like genuine explanations but is in truth gibberish.

At the end, though, that’s what they’re doing…they’re chanting mystical incantations that will bind the Queen of the Faeries to their will and prevent the fae from doing harm upon them or impeding them.

But they don’t even take the cautionary parts of the tales to heart, for even if you should succeed on pulling one over on the Faeries, they are wily and patient, and someday they will trick you into giving up the protection you thought was unbreakable. Just as even if they actually managed to stumble upon the correct legal maneuver, it is likely the system will be back to get them one way or another.

If I had to choose between global high speed internet access, and ground based astronomy, I’d pick the Internet every time. I’d completely blot out the sky forever if that’s what it took.

We don’t need ground-based astronomy to learn about the universe, I’d rather encourage more space-based astronomy. Or build some observatories on the moon if you really want to build on a solid space body.

However, Starlink is a for profit company run by Elon Musk. I don’t really want them doing it, because they’re not going to provide unlimited global Internet to everyone. So as the guy said, the idea is good, but Starlink is bad, although it is currently the only such option.

First I even heard about this game was a comic talking about it’s unattractive characters. I looked it up out of curiosity to see if this was an exaggeration like it has been with some characters like Aloy, and…ehhh…mostly true.

One of the big draws of these types of games is cool character designs people want to play. This game definitely doesn’t have that for me. Overwatch quickly pulled me in with cool character designs, this one…does not.

That article reminded me of that politician who said women’s bodies would prevent pregnancy from rape. Clearly he had so little contact with women he confused them with ducks.

Roaming the earth means roaming all - or at least a very significant portion of - the earth, not some very isolated region. So I would say yes - if some tiny population of mammoths was still alive in some limited area at this time, they were not ‘roaming the earth’.