Glass is not a true solid.

My grandma was a sign and letter painter back in the day. She made a good living doing it up until about the 80s or 90s. It’s one of those professions that just sort of faded into nonexistence.

I’m a little confused about what’s confusing you. Unless you are just unfamiliar with the idea that the United States federal government was intended to be an experimental hybrid between national and federal interests. The original fear being that a purely federal system would give too much power to too few and allow the creation of a single party state. Not that that seems to be happening right now or anything…

You seem to be mostly pointing out the same thing that I was trying to point out except my point was more if we uncapped the house it would take some of that undo power away from the smaller states and states in general. Also fulfilling the obligation from over 100 years ago to give Indian nations voting members of Congress would also expand the electoral college.

My overall point was simply saying killing the electoral college wouldn’t do anything to remove federal power or create a more democratic nation. Because of the reasons you outlined, we need to do more, either to reinforce the hybridization or do away with the federalization altogether if the goal is direct democracy.

I was trying to make a joke. But, you aren’t wrong, the sentence is clunky. I read it as “I was helping my husband trim his beard when my dog came up behind me…“

So are you just shaming people based on where they live or what?

I appreciate your apology, and I agree that banal implies far too much apathy on the part of the populace. Honestly, I’m not sure I can agree with normalized either.

The sad reality here is, as with a great many things, far more complicated. At least 2/3rds of us are horrified but powerless and awash in a sea of horrors each deserving or their own cause. The rest have allied themselves with the billionaire class, who own the media and are responsible for the lack of coverage, and have somehow managed to mental gymnastics themselves into thinking that these shootings are “the cost of freedom“.

My own grandfather would count themselves among them if he was still alive (and did when he was), he was a truck driver during the Rush Limbaugh days. Very much the poster child for the impoverished and undereducated who don’t understand that they are voting against their own self interest. But, like a lot of the younger kids who came of age during the pandemic listening to Joe Rogan and voted for Trump this time around my grandpa lived in a world where he spent all day every day in a box by himself listening to conservative talk radio.

Those of us who have watched family members literally go senile over this shit really hate being painted with a wide brush. It feels like being blamed because they wouldn’t stop smoking or something when smoking and smoking ads are everywhere. We get it, but these people aren’t under our control and it’s really hard to fight the dopamine hits that come from being told what you want to hear (hence the problem with LLMs currently as well).

Not if your particular opinion Is that the United States federal government should be a direct democracy, In my experience, most of the people championing the end of the electoral college have that opinion.

Personally, I kind of feel like we need a bigger reforms than that, but that’s just me.

As opposed to what? The number of places that have a store that sells Pepto-Bismol is far higher than the number of places that can afford public transit.

I see this sentiment a lot. And, as a Native American especially, I really hate to be put in the position of having to defend the electoral college. But the problem isn’t the electoral college itself. It’s that the United States is not a country, It’s a federal system. From the very beginning the idea was that the states were the democracy and the United States government was a federal system of states not people. The whole point is that states elect the president and not people.

In fact, the skewing away from the hybridization of national and federal elements of our government, that was the big experiment, is a part of the problem. Right now the house has been capped. Thus the federal side of the government has more power than the national side. Which is part of what makes the electoral college feel like it has more power. Right off the bat for instance there are dozens of Indian nations that are supposed to have voting members of Congress that don’t.

Well, beard is slang for somebody you married to conceal the fact that you are gay. So my guess is this is a closeted lesbian. Or it could just be a typo, but that seems unlikely.

I hate to break it to you, but nobody asked me what I wanted.

In the 60s, they thought they could make atoms turn into specific things, like a shaving cream atom. In the 70s ESP was still being studied. God like powers were definitely within the realm of scientific theory at that time. This was during the time when people were very much misinterpreting that whole we only use 10% of our brains quote. They didn’t even know Jupiter had rings yet.

More importantly, though, I definitely have to disagree with the idea that technobabble was invented for Star Trek. I enjoy really old sci-fi. Which yes can be cheesy, but is often still the best they could do then too. Technobabble was very much a thing back in the Flash Gordon days and even in old radio show dramas. None of this is to say that I don’t feel like Star Wars has its place. I just like my science fiction and science fantasy to be separate.

Admittedly, it’s been a bit since I’ve watched through Enterprise. So I may just have forgotten if they touched on that.

People already pay that much just as a subscription. Given that that $350 came with like 10 years of support; Yes I honestly think that people would pay a couple hundred dollars for a game like RuneScape or something that came with a 10 year guarantee.

Fuck you. Just because the people in charge don’t care doesn’t mean we don’t.

and thus is as meaningful a plot device as any other throwaway storyline from a particular episode

Regardless of how much you diminish it, it’s still my least favorite of whatever category you want to put it in.

Mostly, it has to do with that each series of Star Trek, at least from the 60s to the 2000s, were vastly rooted in the best science that day could offer. These are shows of science fiction not science fantasy. One might even go as far as to call them speculative fiction, though that can be debated. But then out of nowhere, we’re throwing in the facial hair evil twin universe in the story line. Even with DS9 trying to dress it up a bit still left me with a bad taste in my mouth. They, to my memory, never tried to explain it like somehow our universe was split Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde style or even some Q fuckery. Which could’ve actually made it a bit more interesting and helped it fit in with contemporary theories and other storylines regarding multiple universes. So all of the mirror universe episodes ended up coming across a bit like Voyager’s Threshold to me, and making that an integral part of the ongoing plot of Discovery is a large part of what ruined that series for me. That and the similar ludicrousness of the mushroom drive.

Thank you!

What is that from? I tried searching Spaceship Orion but all I could find were articles about Artemis II and some failed TV show from 2023 that was definitely not in black and white.

I’m pretty sure it’s the rest of us who are cursed.

I think the point is more that when they decide they don’t want to run the servers anymore they should have to release the server code or in some other way allow the server to be run locally so that the game isn’t useless.

Also, until about 15 years ago, it was completely expected that you would buy a software once and they would still run their servers. That’s why windows used to cost like $350 in mid 2000s dollars, you could still reasonably expect to get online updates for it years later.

I get what you are saying, but the Saturn V was never intended to be an ICBM. Depending on what numbers you look at too, they weren’t actually that well funded. Some of the largest estimates that I’ve seen place NASA’s inflation adjusted budget between 1960 and 1973 at just under $600 billion. Or roughly half of what we’re spending in one year on the military currently.

To put it another way, at its absolute peak budget NASA received roughly 4.6% of the current military budget.