Too much light for it to be a grue, it has to be pitch black for that.

There certainly wouldn’t be any regrets (because you would not have time to do so before death).

The way I perceived it, that’s exactly what it was. Yeas, the kids of stupid people are stupid but I don’t recall it being specified it was genetic. The sequence in the movie just made me think it was upbringing and lack of education.

Stupid people on average will have stupider kids, if their parents believe education to be a prissy intellectual thing for gay liberals and not for good decent hard working people like us.

Depends on what you mean by ringworld. The thing I think of is orders of magnitude more impossible than a Dyson sphere, which is already pretty impossible.

So she’s a midget stripper wearing 2 and a half foot heels?

Now show me where they’re paying attention to what they can’t do.

Like, how nobody can just access secure government systems without proper clearance, which the President can’t actually just give without procedure.

Or even more simply, the fact that Trump is not in fact currently eligible to be President in the first place due to his part in the events of Jan. 6.

I do not have confidence that they will be stopped by the fact that something is not permitted, because they aren’t being stopped by things that are not permitted, and if this continues for 4 years…there will be nothing left of the system that is supposed stop them.

To be fair, hasn’t made much difference cause one, he got caught, and two, nobody else has done it.

I don’t blame any particular person for it, of course. Hell, I share the blame myself. I haven’t killed any CEOs or politicians either.

But it’s not gonna work unless more of us gather up the courage Luigi had and take action.

Nationalize the companies involved in production and distribution and eliminate profit, making and selling everything at-cost also works.

The job of politicians shouldn’t be considered to be to make people feel represented. It should be to actually represent them.

If it was to make people feel represented, then I’m sorry to inform you that Donald Trump is the most successful President in my memory, perhaps the most successful ever, because that is his appeal - he makes the MAGAts feel represented, and he does so very very strongly.

I like this template so much better than the Spider-Man one that people constantly use backwards.

It’s sad that in a country of over 300 million people, only one of us is both marginally competent enough to take successful action against these people, and not a chicken shit coward unwilling to put themselves on the line. And yeah, at least for now, I too am among the chicken shit cowards.

Of course that’s what you see - those ideas have been planted. That’s exactly what they want, they want regulations to prevent just anyone from getting into it and making use of the technology.

OpenAI whining about not being able to make money if they can’t use the training data? That’s Brer Fox Rabbit crying “please don’t throw me into the briar patch, anything but that!” because if such regulations happen they’ll pay a fine or something and then…nobody new can compete with the established parties. They absolutely love to use regulations to pull the ladder up behind themselves so they can’t be competed with.

If anything I wonder if all the weird shit they’re pushing is just to stoke anti AI sentiment so they can get these regulations passed.

It’s deeper than that. It’s about defense of the Status Quo. No superhero looks around at the parts of society that we just accept without thinking about and says this needs to change.

Yeah, and we still haven’t learned the lesson. We have people today attacking AI technology rather than the way it’s being used to funnel wealth inequitably.

It actually helps the wealthy capitalists, because they can use that sentiment to promote regulations that will entrench their positions.

This is also why I can’t respond ‘good’ to how I am. If I am ‘good’ then it means I’m better than average or median. But if I say I am good too often, it becomes the average.

There is no guarantee that they will get paid. For that to happen, congress will have to pass a spending bill that not only authorized future spending but also explicitly gives back pay for the time they were working without paying after the shutdown.

So far this has always happened, but I do remember some noises about not doing it around the last shutdown.

So especially after those comments last time, there is no certainty that if you come in to work for the government during a shutdown you will be paid.

There’s a reason the country lost credit rating, and it’s because people are slightly less confident that it will actually pay its debts, including simple payroll.

I can’t imagine coming in to work if I’m not being paid on time. Indeed, if there’s even a whiff of maybe I won’t get paid, I’m not coming in unless I’m paid in advance.

Every government worker that is told they’re not getting paid should do that. Money in my account now, before I come in to work.

Primaries are only rigged in that yes, the rules and the entire framework is built to benefit those currently in power, but that is less rigged than the general is against a third party, which is to say, totally, absolutely, and unassailably rigged. Proclaiming it impossible because it’s rigged is silly when you’re advocating for instead competing in one that is far, far more rigged and has far more structure to prevent any upsets.

We have never actually won a primary and had them ignore it. They use their structural advantages as much as they can, but if we push hard enough to overcome those advantages, they don’t just nullify the election and go with their candidate. We do get people like Ocasio-Cortez in there from time to time, when people actually show up to the primaries enough to flip it to the more progressive candidate. If we got enough candidates like her in, not just in congress but state houses and such too, we’d actually start getting places.

Now the bribes and money on the corporate side, nothing we can do about that - we have to overcome it so that we can get officials in place that will do something about it.

Now lemme put it this way. I live in bumfuck Ohio where there’s no chance of a progressive candidate being elected. But I still vote in every primary. People who live in places where there is more of a chance of doing something need to be as diligent as I am, if not more, damnit.

No, a third party is non viable. But the right move would have been exactly what the crazy right wingers have done with the Republicans. Get organized and primary the fuck out of the people blocking things.

The “tea party” gave us the blueprint, but we’ve been too dumb and lazy to follow it. When they didn’t give us the public option with Obamacare, every primary since then should have been about cleaning house of the corporatist, establishment Democrats and replacing them with real progressives. But since we’re too lazy and dumb to vote in primaries in mass numbers, their establishment people keep sailing to victory.

That guy failed. It makes a big difference when they actually get killed.