This concept is just as dangerous as the right wing claiming LHC will open black holes. There’s an implication here that just as soon as LHC was turned on it suddenly gathered information about every unknown Force, particle, and energy in the universe.

The Large hadron collider took 4 years to confirm the higgs boson; as of today it is only on its third data collection run. LHC is hardly a silver bullet.

It is absolutely the way it works on Reddit. Go into any subreddit and say something factual but unpopular and watch what happens to the vote count.

Not understanding that upvotes are popularity driven might be the first error.

Make your posts, ask your questions, and move on. If people are interested it’ll get traction. If they’re not, expect apathy or downvotes. Just the way it works.

Talking heads and a failing education system.

This is the practical outcome in a system where voters are forced to vote for the least problematic candidate out of a pool of two preselected politicians. Nothing will change, administration after administration, until the people are allowed to select their own candidates and the media promotes more candidates than just the big two.

Side note: a lot of people right now will be knee-jerking and wanting to respond to me that that’s what the primary system is for. Wilding v. DNC Services Corp and the Democratic primaries that caused it should disabuse anyone of that notion. And trust me, if the Democrats are dirty dealing so are the Republicans.

I built a kit car, painted a penguin on the side, and forgot to include the telemetry module. Oops.

I think I’ll travel somewhere else.

Garbage. I’m over 50 and I’m not worried.

I know for a fact I’ll be working till the day I die.

I have no doubt that they would, but that’s not one of the variables I’m trying to control. As far as I can tell, time and volume are the only two things that I can play with. They have a 30-minute timer, and cannot take the load-bearing walls down. That means there’s a volume constraint, no matter how many people they have available they can only fit so many in one space. That limits the amount of time they have to actually search, assuming they empty the dwelling. If they don’t empty the dwelling, it sharply limits the number of people they can have searching at any one time. Heavy equipment like an x-ray machine also limits that volume.

With respect to the Britannica, if you’re familiar with them you know they are massive and this one just happened to be my primary research source in high school. I cannot understate the number of flags and paper clips simply destroying those bindings right now. If someone does notice it, I’m relying on running out the clock with them checking every one they see first.

Straighten the paper clip and slip it inside the binding of an old copy of Britannica I have. I got it second hand from a public library, so it has quite a few of the old style anti-theft tags hidden throughout; it also contains quite a few paper clips of many colors I once used as bookmarks.

I use the remaining time to clean the house, making sure to go into the bathroom more than once, moving the toilet tank lid and opening and shutting all of the cabinets every time. If I’m very lucky I’ll be just shutting the medicine cabinet audibly when the investigators walk in. (For those not familiar, many houses built in the mid 20th century in the US had slots in the back of the medicine cabinet where you were supposed to dispose of used razor blades.)

Buck Rogers would be a cool one to reboot; plus it already has the " we’re going to trash the world " backstory.

Not really, but since I’m not going to find any solutions here and people have it worse, I’ll leave it at that.

The least amount? 20k US would halve my credit card debt and give me a leg up on getting the rest paid off. 40k would give me a jump start on finally rebuilding. Given I’m in my 50s though and with the state of the world, I’m likely to be making credit card payments until the day I die.