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grotsnot

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And voila, you are now walking the surface of another world couple light years away from your destination

No I'm not, my clone is. My consciousness is right where it started, making this an extremely limited form of "travel"

"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."

Truly one election not going your way is proof we should go back to serfdom. The proles must learn their place!

Generally, you don't just sit and listen. You do it while doing something else that is non-audio, like commuting or exercising or cleaning or cooking or...

If millions of people each like Oprah enough to give her a dollar, she makes millions.

(pardon the napkin math) If you live in a town of, say, 25k people and your town has 10 garbage collectors (napkin math: each pair covers 1000 people's trash every weekday) each earning minimum wage 15k/year (if it takes 1min to pick up trash for an average household of 2, we get just over the standard 2k work-hour year. To me this sounds like fast operation and low house size. But the low end of the trash costs demonstrates the point), then each person in town is paying $6 to their garbage collectors. Even more considering benefits and non-labor costs. If healthcare, garbage truck maintenance and, I dunno, landfill fees (are those a thing?) cost the city a mere 100k/year, every person is paying $10 for garbage collection.

So in the napkin scenario, for each individual, garbage collectors are valued at 10x what Oprah is. And that's with all my napkin math assumptions choosing the lowest costs. Plausible scenarios could go as high as 100x individual value for garbage collection over Oprah mic talking. But Oprah can do her less-individually-important job for 1000x more people. It's an issue of reach.

IANAE but it sounds like when imports get cheaper, importers pocket as much of the the difference for as long as they can get away with it. When imports get more expensive, they pass on as much as they can to consumers as quickly as they can get away with it. Not terribly surprising for profit-driven behavior.

Would the war have actually ended early if Germany had taken Paris? With the British and Russians still unmolested on their own turf, wouldn't the French have tried to retake the city instead of surrendering? Or at least their allies keep fighting? (I realize this perception is colored by how it played out in WWII so I'm curious whether it would also apply to WWI)

That seems a bit harsh. One could just as easily claim that Trump's opponents can't fathom him doing anything well and give him even less credibility than he deserves. While both assertions give that nice truthiness rush, neither is mature or productive.

Like any other human being, Trump is allowed to be right about some things, wrong about some things, and somewhere in the middle on the rest. People can support specific actions or areas of action without implicitly supporting all actions. The GP didn't even come across as all that Trump-apologist or even -supportive to me, just stating that the status quo has not crumbled despite the doomsayers claiming otherwise.

Let's all try and dial back on the polarization, please?

Welcome, ACLU 9 years ago

A more neutral way to put it would be that the ACLU is in favor of abortion rights and many conservatives are in favor of fetal rights.

That's... not entirely accurate: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Alpha_Centauri#P... (2nd one for Peacekeepers)

    I loved my chosen. How then to face the day when she left me? So I took from her body a single cell, perhaps to love her again.
        Commissioner Pravin Lal, "Time of Bereavement"

I didn't consider until now that it might be a little ambiguous, but I'm pretty sure the implication is not that Lal's chosen broke up with him, but that she died.

To be fair, the guy is in his 50s. 40someodd years ago was a different world and he's just describing the attitudes of the time. Boys played with boys and girls played with girls. I interpreted as Lanza merely walking us through the thought process boys from the 70s had, not as saying it's an attitude boys today should have. It's easy to picture that smile as indicating self-awareness of the outdatedness of the attitude.

That same first amendment also contains the ostensible provision for businesses to bar African Americans via freedom of association. But as country we (rightly) decided that that's bullshit and enacted laws to stop that practice. It's not inherently unreasonable for someone to suggest that we need to similarly rein in platforms acting against the intellectual discourse values this country was founded upon.