Frankly, these are really bad laws. It is a good thing that he appears not to be inclined to even try to take advantage, but those laws explicitly encourage remaining at war in order to maintain power, so a worse person would definitely be trying to maintain a forever war situation.

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

Frankly I find bikes stupid as a proposed method of transportation.

I would love to see cities designed around everything needed being in walking distance, with a supply of inexpensive rentable cars for the things that aren’t, like meeting friends that live elsewhere, so we can travel between walkable locations, but at no time do bikes seem a reasonable option.

They have so many inconveniences and problems attached, and don’t provide enough transportation utility to make up for it.

A car provides shelter, climate control, a comfortable and relaxing ride, and enough cargo space to transport most things we could need to transport on any sort of regular basis.

A bike meanwhile provides no shelter from the elements or outdoor temperature, an uncomfortable ride that digs into your ass, requires you to exert yourself significantly, and has between zero and very little cargo space; certainly not enough to do something like shopping for groceries.

Pushing for using bikes as primary transport is ridiculous; there’s a small number of people for which that would work, but for most it doesn’t and never will. For most people, things are either in walking distance, or you need a car, so it’d be a lot better to restructure our living spaces around walking.

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

It would mean that whatever the US might hope to gain from invading Canada would be dwarfed by what the US would lose in the conflict.

The problem is this is already the case. Nuclear weapons may make it even more lopsided, but the country is already losing more than it stands to gain from an invasion purely on the economic results.

“Every time we use a lever to lift a stone, we’re trading long term strength for short term productivity. We’re optimizing for today’s pyramid at the cost of tomorrow’s ability.”

Hey, hey. Elon Musk purchased the US fair and square, we’ve known that for like 3 months now, no need to go acting all surprised!

Remember when people were posting articles on how stupid and ridiculous DOGE is because it wouldn’t have the authority to do anything?

Well, in essence and at its purest level the difference in thinking between Leftwing and Rightwing is the difference between “I want people to have a better life” and “I want to have a better life”.

Not even that. The difference is between “I want people to have a better life (objectively speaking).” and “I want to have a better life (as compared to those people).” As long as their lives are better when compared to those people, the conservatives are satisfied. Even if everyone’s lives, including their own, get objectively worse.

Something I’ve been thinking a lot lately is that democracy is a process. It is a means by which we attempt to ensure a just and fair government for all. It’s not an end in itself; we don’t want democracy because democracy, at least not once people really think about it.

Which leads me to a saying. “The ends do not justify the means.” This is a commonly held statement. However, it also works the other way:

The means do not justify the ends.

That means it doesn’t matter if something was done by the rules, using the process, it doesn’t matter if we voted for it, it doesn’t matter what process was used to achieve it. If the ends are wrong, going “well, it’s what was decided democratically” isn’t an excuse.

If one person or a few people have a definition wrong, that’s a thing that can be corrected.

If the majority of people think that’s the definition, and it’s been that way for decades, then you have the definition wrong.

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.

That is how it works as long as no one does anything to stop it.

Same as how Trump is not eligible to be President by the constitution, but that didn’t stop him.

There was in fact a Dragonlance movie in 2008, Dragons of Autumn Twilight. I have not seen it to know if it was even a little bit good, but hey…there was one!

Not even that, it’s just a matter of what’s really important. They threw out the filibuster on supreme Court appointments the instant it might’ve blocked them from appointing those who would give them more power.

So as soon as something comes up that they consider genuinely important rather than performative, it’s gone.

Crystal Pepsi.

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.

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.

Well first, spend a long time practicing tiny handwriting. Like, let’s make the absolute most use out of this sheet as possible; it’s possible to get the size of handwritten characters down to about 3mm, but let’s say 4 with the assumption that I can’t get it down that low. That means I have about 74 lines vertically to write in, each line able to accommodate somewhere between 70 and 52 characters, depending on the width. Let’s average it to 60 characters per line, so 74x60 = 4,440 characters, times two for two sides of the page. Average number of characters per name is 7, so 14, plus two for spaces, and let’s add another two for a middle initial and another space. That’s 18 characters per name. This means I should be able to fit just under 500 names on the page if I use both sides as efficiently as possible.

I’ll get the list of the 500 richest people in the world, and start going down it from richest on down. But not all at once. First the top name. One week later, the next name. One week after that, the next name down, and so on. After a few weeks the pattern would become obvious and we see what happens. Sadly I have no magical knowledge of who is the richest person at any given moment, so I have to just go off the list I already possess (or any new information I decide to be sufficiently trustworthy). One every week for five hundred names is 3,500 days, or 9.5 years. That is long enough to make it quite apparent this is inevitable and make it seem like it’s going to continue forever, and it’s long enough for legislation and other things to be done in response. Let’s see how they freak out and what they try to do in response.

One timeline, actions can have an effect. But once you time travel you unmoor yourself from normal causality, so you could do things that should negate your existence and nothing will happen to you.

Indeed, if you time travel again you can’t affect your own actions anymore. Like, you travel back 20 minutes, do things for an hour, then jump back 5 minutes, when you go back the second time you can’t alter yourself. You could go later the you from before you ever time traveled though.