I gotta say I’m feeling a little bit better about the election results. They’ve made it clear they don’t intend to do a single thing they talked about, and that it is, was, and always will be 100% about money. So I don’t think we really need to worry about WWIII, Gilead, mass deportations and arrests etc, because that would disrupt business and make the billionaires slightly - ever so slightly - less billionairish.

That’s ol’ Slippin Jimmy for you, ever hear about that time in Chicago with the sunroof? Good stuff

I guess I take issue with the fact that you can’t realistically opt out. Maybe if you are a wilderness survivalist type then maybe you can go do a Thoreau or Davy Crocket or whatever and just build a log cabin in the woods somewhere. But that’s very rare these days, and society is moving forward so fast that tens of millions of people are being left behind because they lack the technical skills to thrive in a modern economy, and the survival skills to thrive in an old school agrarian economy. When that many people are left behind, it becomes a major social problem that’ll come home to roost eventually.

This is the natural result of decades of sustained exponential growth. At roughly 10%/yr, markets will double every 7-8 years. That’s three doubling times in about 25 years, or 2^3 which is 8x. And that’s how you get a house that was like $100k-$200k in the year 2000 to turn into a house for like $800k-$1.2m in 2024. It’s only going to get worse.

He almost sold the occupation to me. Bajor, a fractured society, technologically stagnant, riddled with inefficiencies, gifted with order, infrastructure, and industrialization from the Cardassian People.

Fascism isn’t so bad right?

As we have learned over the last few years, laws are only as strong as their enforcement mechanism. If the institutions responsible for upholding the law fail to do that, or even enable violating the law even more, then the law is useless.

That’s basically my only hope. Incompetence, bickering, infighting, and just generally falling apart from within their own hate machine as these kinds of ideologies tend to do.

I hear you, but idk what to do. I can’t engage with someone who says out loud things like “I want trump to become a dictator” and “democracy is overrated” and “your body my choice” and don’t seem to care at all that mass deporting 10+million people WILL lead to mass murder. It’s impossible to have a discussion in good faith with these people. They’ve just demonstrated that the last 8-9 years is a feature, not a bug, and let the mask off about who they really are. They’ve alienated themselves by leaving the realm of reality.

The right to not be gaslighted with lies, stupidity, and disinformation.

There’s a little detail in the show that I always liked. They didn’t shove it in your face and I appreciate the subtlety.

The detail is that there were actually very few groceries in the grocery store. If you look closely, the produce is always very low quality, and there just wasn’t that much to choose from. It was a big deal when they got those navel oranges. Not much meats either, and they mostly got canned goods and such. It highlights how shitty their society is without going too overboard. “You might not have noticed, but your brain did.”

Mass deportation of our cheap labor supply will do way more to increase cost of groceries than Chinese tariffs ever will. The cold hard truth of it all is that our entire way of life depends on exploiting cheap migrant labor. Democrats don’t like to admit it because we don’t like that kind of exploitation, and republicans don’t like to admit it because they don’t like immigrants. But we depend on them as much as we do the laborers in chinese factories, the somewhat educated cheap labor in India, the children in sweatshops in Vietnam, and so on. Our entire economy is based on exploiting someone, somewhere, artifically reducing the cost of living for us.

You’re ok with little planes flying through hyperspace but draw the line at space hacking, lol

On the contrary, Luke Skywalker taking a lucky shot

Man that’s like the ONE THING that I totally give star wars a pass for. It wasn’t a lucky shot. The design flaw was there, yes, but the targeting computer was never going to work. Red leader had a lock and it still didn’t work. Wedge Antilles, the best non-Jedi starfighter pilot in the galaxy, expressed strong doubt at least two or three times. Luke had to use the force to destroy it, there was no other way. If you can suspend your disbelief to accept the existence of the force, it makes perfect sense in the context of the story. Fucking masterpiece!

Ever seen Primer? Equal and opposite to that, easily the most confusing movie I’ve ever seen and they don’t spoon feed you anything, lol

Related: outrunning explosions, ugh

That’s why I always have my criminal conspiracy meetings at Starbucks or Wendy’s.

The pseudo-realism in those batman movies and comic book movies in general is a huge part of why I detest them. It’s like an uncanny gap or something. Comic book characters are inherently ridiculous and absurd so I can’t take them seriously. They ask me to suspend too much disbelief.

One specific example from the batman movies is at the end of one of them, I forget which, I think a few hundred cops charge a bunch of guys with machine guns or something? And I remember thinking in the theater they are about to get mowed down World War I style. But somehow they win, they all live, and the streets aren’t flowing with a river of blood. You want me to take them seriously, while having absurd characters and situations, and then you put them in situations where they absolutely should be massacred…I just…I’m out…

Ctrl+F Hitler, ah, there it is. I feel like the xkcd comic missed an opportunity to have a 1932-1945 segment in there about the biggest cause of death for time travelers being OTHER time travelers killing them before they can successfully go back in time and kill Hitler, lol.

Re: conservation of reality, I feel like if I went back and shot Hitler, I would miss, or be stopped by security, or bad weather, or my gun would misfire, or even if I managed to actually do it, he’d be replaced by a look alike, and then it would turn out the guy we always thought was Hitler was actually just an actor, or something. Like if someone went back and killed baby Adolph when he was six months old, the parents would adopt another kid and name IT adolph, and there you go. Whatever happened happened and can’t be undone, not through magic resuscitation of a corpse, but through smooth and natural intervention of reality itself, if that makes sense…

I hear the universe is infinite, and no matter how far away from earth you go, there’s just infinitely more universe. So like if you are standing on earth looking twelve billion light years that way and then twelve billion light years the other way you are in a sphere of unimaginable size right? But if you actually went twelve billion light years that way once you get there you can still look this way or that way and see twelve billion more light years every which way. So from that perspective, pretty much anywhere in the universe is the center of the universe…from a certain point of view…

That’s such a great angle, calling all republican presidents DEI hires from the electoral college lol