“Entering Space: Creating a Spacefairing Civilization” by Robert Zubrin. My mother’s work when I was growing up had a “free book shelf” that someone had put it on and she’d brought it home because I liked sciency stuff, and I’ve been extremely interested in space development and futurism ever since.

Because our elections system is fundamentally broken in such a way that creating or promoting something other than the existing two makes the side you like least more likely to win. As such, unless you can get literally the entire base of one of the major parties to switch to you in the span of a single election cycle, “asking for something more than the lesser of two evils” has mostly the same practical consequences as “asking for the greater evil”.

This largely breaks the premise of democracy, of course, because the two main parties don’t have to follow “the will of the people”, they just have to look slightly better in the eyes of their base than the other party. The way to fix it would be to greatly reform our election system, but that’s difficult to do (admittedly not entirely for bad reasons, it probably would not be ideal for authoritarians to make changes to that for example), and made worse by the fact that both parties benefit from the current system vs one where even more competition can exist.

That latter point means that what it would really take, is first usurping control of one of the existing parties from those that currently run it, and then getting those newcomers into enough power at a national level to get election reform done. That’s not a terribly likely path to work out, I’m afraid, but it’s probably all we’ve got short of an actual violent revolution (which have a high risk of failing or getting co-opted by authoritarians, and in any event are a lot harder to start than some people on the internet seem to think they are). This is probably why the establishment democrats hate this guy so much, despite him only running for mayor (of a large city admittedly, but still, not exactly president or anything). Popular candidates from outside their established group are exactly the kind of thing that you would need to start this process, and if successful that group would lose much of their power.

I’ve heard the name but don’t know what it is, other than that I think it’s something fermented?

Either he’s vomiting beans into that can or those beans have been congealed into a single semisolid mass that sticks together.

I mean, it could technically be valid, if someone had a medical emergency involving it, though it might not be the best phrasing.

With the caveat that this was about a month before I quit, so I can’t say for sure that the kid didn’t eventually get fired, just that if he did it took longer than that: I was working in a grocery store on a closing shift, and one of the high school kids that worked there after school brings in one of those “illegal” (I think they’re only illegal to sell and not to own or something like that, but you can get them on Amazon easily anyway) extra bright green laser pointers, and starts randomly waving the thing around, to include right next to my face as I was stocking shelves and around corners a customer could walk around without warning.

Only time I’ve ever had to make a complaint about someone to my supervisor, I’m not someone to complain about people easily but to my understanding you can blind people with those things. I even mentioned that to the kid and he just laughed and told me “duh that’s the point”.

All I heard about the complaint later was “Oh yeah he’s been told not to bring it in again”. This was right in the middle of that point around COVID where it was hard to find retail workers and you got all those memes of “nobody wants to work anymore”, so my suspicion is they might have just been worried about replacing him.

About a week later, he also waited till the supervisor was away from the front of store for awhile and connected his phone to this tv display that normally was for the in-store bank displaying ads, to make it play ytp videos at high volume (or whatever the modern term for that kind of thing is, I’m not sure if they’re still called that).

Doc Hopper’s ice cream business looks even more dubious than his restaurant.

The whole two party system thing in general isn’t really a rule per se, you’re allowed to run as part of some other party or independent of one, for any office that I know of. In smaller local elections like town councils and such you can even be competitive that way. It’s just that the way we do voting, most of the time, means that for any election in which a reasonable number of voters participate, only two parties can be competitive and any more would actually make their side less likely to win. It’s a not originally intended side effect of the rules we use, that now serves to keep the existing parties’ monopoly on most higher offices.

Surprise her by placing a live frog on her head when she least expects it?

My brain somehow managed to interpret this as part of a medical x-ray image visible right behind the window for a moment.

He isn’t the only winner of that prize to be involved in war crimes, to be fair.

I wonder if he actually got their representatives to try to negotiate anything, or if he literally just said there would be a cease fire in the hopes that the two sides would feel obligated to follow through once it was publicly announced.

I mean, wouldn’t physical activity (and cooperative group based physical activity at that) during one’s formative years make one more likely to make a useful soldier, not less?

It’s not laid out like Lemmy is, because Lemmy is basically the fediverse version of Reddit, while Mastodon is more the fediverse version of Twitter. I’m not very good at using that format myself so I can’t offer much advice, but from what I’ve seen, what your feed is like depends a lot on what instance you join, to a much larger extent than on Lemmy (it’s a much bigger userbase than lemmy as well to my knowledge). I dont know of any equivalent to communities per se, you have to join an instance that is good for the kinds of things you’re looking for, and follow users that post or interact with that content. I think a favorite is more like a like, and reblogging is more like reposting for one’s followers and imstance to see too.

They do technically have orbital launch capability, which implies they in theory have the capacity to construct an ICBM, even if not with a nuclear warhead necessarily. Granted, the results of such a strike almost certainly would not be worth the costs to them so I’ve no expectation they’ll do such a thing, but they probably could if they wanted to badly enough.

If that were true, Disney and a number of other large companies would not exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown#China_syndrome

That’s not how these things work, if anything, the more serious an event is, the more that thing is going to be what people make jokes and memes about, to dampen the stress of the situation if nothing else. I’m not sure there’s actually such a thing as an event so serious that nobody makes jokes about it.

3rd? Surely there’s been more than 2 before?

I mean, I dont see how it isnt a war already, this kind of thing is an act of war after all, and the other side doesnt have to be capable of equal retaliation for the term to apply.