People also forget that most campaigns want to be able to claim they are ahead in the polls. Strong poll numbers can lead to the bandwagon effect, while trailing poll numbers can cause people to give up.

Too many people remember Hillary losing in 2016 but fail to consider the specific context of her being an unpopular candidate. Believing that your side is going to win isn’t normally a reason to stay home, unless you have some objection to the turd sandwich your side nominated.

So be encouraged by good polls, don’t be discouraged by bad polls, and then get off your and vote no matter what the polls say.

For the billionaires talking about future settlements on Mars and the like, there isn’t a short term benefit to actually doing it. That’s why they aren’t investing heavily in realistic plans to colonize the solar system. They are investing in space, but in a much more limited capacity that mostly involves satellites, government contracts and maybe a little space tourism for rich people.

All the talk of taking humanity to other worlds is good PR, inflates stock prices, and feeds into their own egos. It’s a way of projecting the image of being a visionary and being able to claim that they’re building a brighter future for humanity, and taking credit for making sci-fi pipe dreams a reality.

There are potentially massive benefits to spreading out in the solar system. We currently have access to a single planet’s resources, and Earth didn’t vacuum up all the useful materials in the solar system when it formed. There are also resources which are more abundant in space like helium-3.

But that’s all long term stuff. We may eventually build a moon base that refuels ships which support asteroid mining operations, send robots to build industrial complexes on Mars, and even start the long process of terraforming Venus so that one day we can have a second habitable planet. But first we have to get to the point where just getting into space isn’t so monstrously expensive.

And even if we had a working space elevator tomorrow, there would still be a ton of technical hurdles to overcome before we could accomplish something new that actually helps pay for all of this stuff. There’s speculation and research, but don’t expect massive investments until we’re almost there. Once independent researchers and unrelated technological advances have solved 90% of the problems and it looks like there will soon be trillions of dollars to be made by whoever capitalizes on it first, then you can expect the irrational gold rush moment like the one we see with AI now. Until then, it’s all satellites and stock manipulation.

Had my wife look for this exact comment. Was going to have her post this if no one else had.

^{He thinks he’s so clever. A Stormlight Archive reference, how original.}

Obviously this is bad, but I’m still skeptical about how much effect they will be able to have. I think the much more potent political message will be the one displayed on every gas station sign and grocery store shelf, and that shit’s only getting worse between now and election day.

Closest thing I can think of is The Never Ending Story. The protagonist enters a book that is essentially a gateway to the world of all imagination.

The next best thing I can think of is something like Dungeon Crawler Carl where the setting is essentially a deadly reality TV show that takes the form of fictional worlds. Or things like Discworld with it’s narrative causality. Or Orconomics which makes fantasy tropes and rpg conventions explicit in the setting through satire, in which financial institutions are inflating the adventuring bubble through loot backed securities.

Of course. They would much rather see poor people with expensive needs die off. Your life has no value to these fascist ghouls. Not unless they can extract something of value from you.

The whole idea of a work requirement for medicaid is insane. You can’t mooch off healthcare to support yourself, it isn’t a replacement for income. If anything, this will only cause more people to become unable to work because they lose access to the care that helps keep them in the workforce.

It’s completely backwards. They want you to be outraged because some poor person might get government funded healthcare without having a job. The real outrage is that employers can pay workers a low enough wage that they need government assistance to make up the difference.

Seems like what’s needed is the ability to load an alternate profile or some kind of demo mode based on the pin. Something that looks normal but doesn’t have any info you don’t want others to see, without actually deleting anything.

You can point to those civilizations because their collapse was not the end, life continued on. We haven’t been hit by a gamma ray burst or any other complex life ending disaster since we are here to discuss the scenario. But that’s no guarantee that we won’t be.

The odds of anything happening to render Earth totally uninhabitable are very small… in our lifetimes. But as long as we keep existing, the time frame will keep growing, the opportunities for disaster will keep accumulating and the odds will keep multiplying. The basic math looks very different when you multiply by infinity. Even the sun won’t last forever.

Obviously, this is no reason to neglect Earth and rush to other planets. But it is reason enough to reject the idea that we should never spread to other worlds because Earth will always be enough.

Cast them out how? There is no central organization overseeing all Christian groups. You can literally start your own church tomorrow if you want and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop you, or keep others from associating with you.

It’s not so different from the fediverse. You can ban people, but you can’t stop them from going somewhere else. And if they start their own instance, you can defederate from it but you can’t actually shut them down or stop others from joining them.

Great, now I’m picturing Odo with boobs.

Any war powers resolution passed by the Senate would need to be approved by the House and signed by Trump to have the force of law.

The president is expected to veto any resolution to restrict his power as commander in chief and there are not enough votes in either chamber to override such an action.

While they should be doing anything they can to stop this shit, this whole vote is purely symbolic. Unless they can get support from the house and a supermajority in the senate, no standalone bill will do anything.

The only real leverage they have is a potential government shut down at the end of the month. Given how unpopular a repeat of Iraq and Afghanistan would be, I want to say that it should be fairly easy to find bipartisan support for a deal that would pull any forces out of Venezuala and potentially put some road blocks in place to dissuade further military interventions. You’d just need some competent leadership and a little bit of backbone.

[Exasperated Sigh]

I would have been way more excited for a Cursed Halo remake. Think of the nonsense they could unleash when actually building the game from scratch for it.

Luke is also a skilled pilot and an excellent shot. And the movie never establishes how experienced his squadmates are, nor can we just assume they are all highly trained since they are part of a cobbled together resistance and not a traditional military. And the only thing he does better than the others is hit the target. His survival wasn’t because he was better, it was because he was the last one left to make the suicide run, and because he was rescued at the last minute.

Oh, and let’s not forget that he never could have done it without the wise old mentor. You know, the guy from a previous generation that fought in a great war. The guy who passes on ancient wisdom and who is the only reason look was able to make the shot. Not exactly something that fits the “Our generation is the awesomest” picture the post is trying to paint.

Also, Star Wars came out in 1977, not 1970.