This is MAGA-type thinking you’re demonstrating. Democrats massively fucked up the 2024 election. It is important that those lessons be studied, learned from, and not repeated. Yes, Trump is worse, but that’s completely irrelevant to the conversation at hand. We have another Trump term precisely because of the mistakes the DNC made during the election. Failing to listen to those mistakes doesn’t help Democrats, and it doesn’t help the country. Failing to learn from the mistakes of 2016 and 2020 are how we ended up with 2024 after all.

Do not for a second think Trump or some other MAGA candidate cannot win in 2028. Regardless of how bad Trump governs, even ignoring the potential for election shenanigans, it is entirely possible that Trump will win again in 2028. And every person that sticks their fingers in their ears and ignores all criticism of elected Democrats makes that event all the more likely.

Democrats ran on “we’re not Trump” in 2016, 2020, and 2024. That strategy lost them both 2016 and 2024, and it would have lost them 2020 if not for covid.

Yet here you are, still trying the same tired “we’re not Trump” strategy. You’re clearly insane, as you keep trying the same thing again and again, expecting a different result.

We need to abandon the Democratic Party at this point. Democrats are not capable of winning national elections. The Democratic Party is not run by serious people who actually intend on winning power and wielding it wisely. Those still telling folks to vote for Democrats are not politically serious people. The only future can be found in parties like the Working Families Party. Centrists will simply need to hold their nose, quit dividing the left, and vote for progressive candidates. Remember, a vote for a Democrat is a vote for a Republican. Democrats can’t win national elections. In a two party system, we can’t afford to throw our votes away on parties that are doomed to lose.

Imagine Yosemite National Park…with an HOA!

In February, he said the government could “monetize the US balance sheet for the American people.”

One way to do this would be to revalue America’s gold reserves.

The US still prices its gold reserves at $42.22 an ounce.

If revalued to the market price of around $2,900, it could create nearly $900 billion in new equity overnight.

This would give the government a new pool of capital without borrowing more money or printing dollars.

Other assets, including federal land, real estate, infrastructure, and even confiscated cryptocurrency, could also be used.

The logic is clear: the US owns trillions in untapped assets but still runs massive deficits.

They want to put federal land up as collateral for loans. Instead of just issuing debt in the government’s name, they want to get lower interest rates by putting up US land as collateral. And when they manage the government right into default, the bankers will take possession of all national parks and federal land. That’s what ‘monetize’ means. It means put up as collateral.

Seems likely. The most rigid materially known, (or at least theorized) is nuclear pasta.. Nuclear pasta only forms inside neutron stars, stellar objects that are the last stage of matter before matter gives up entirely and collapses into a black hole.

It would work, but only in the impossible world where you have a perfectly rigid unbreakable stick. But such an object cannot exist in this universe.

Pick up a solid rigid object near you. Anything will do, a coffee cup, a comb, a water bottle, anything. Pick it up from the top and lift it vertically. Observe it.

It seems as though the whole object moves instantaneously, does it not? It seems that the bottom of the object starts moving at the exact same instant as the top. But it is actually not the case. Every material has a certain elasticity to it. Everything deforms slightly under the tiniest of forces. Even a solid titanium rod deforms a little bit from the weight of a feather placed upon it. And this lack of perfect rigidity means that there is a very, very slight delay from when you start lifting the top of the object to when the bottom of it starts moving.

For small objects that you can manipulate with your hands, this delay is imperceptible to your senses. But if you observed an object being lifted with very precise scientific equipment, you could actually measure this delay. Motion can only transfer through objects at a finite speed. Specifically, it can only move at the speed of sound through the material. Your perfectly rigid object would have an infinite speed of sound within it. So yes, it would instantly transfer that motion. But with any real material, the delay wouldn’t just be noticeable, but comically large.

Imagine this stick were made of steel. The speed of sound in steel is about 5120 m/s. The distance to the Moon is about 400,000 km. Converting and dividing shows that it would actually take about 22 hours for a pulse like that to travel through a steel pole that long. (Ignoring how the steel pole would be supported.)

So in fact, you are both right and wrong. You are correct for the object you describe. A perfectly rigid object would be usable as a tool of FTL communication. But such an object simply cannot exist in this universe.

Yes. He has literally committed a capital offense. He could literally hang for this.

You will end up paying the share of taxes to your state government that you currently do to the federal government. If the federal government collapses, all 50 states are now de facto independent. Those states can now start forming a new country or new collection of countries as they will.

Even better, add emotions!

Season with salt until it tastes angry.

I prefer milligallons myself.

Microacres^(3/2)

https://archive.is/TikQW

Exactly. That’s what’s so callously ridiculous about it. That T level, 66 ng/dl, is quite achievable by trans women with the proper treatment. Puberty blockers or T-blockers and E? That’s quite doable. It would be a quite reasonable bar for most trans women to reach for.

Except, they then of course outlawed that treatment for minors.

Tell me you know nothing about statistics without telling me you know nothing about statistics.

Kamala responded to her own voters’ protestations about Palestine by dismissing them with “I’m speaking now…”

Well, in the end, it was the voters that spoke. And they sent her packing.

And the centrists who endlessly said, “Donald Trump will be even worse for Palestine!,” we seem to now have a cease fire, even before Trump takes office. It looks like this particular genocide will be one that was entirely on Biden’s watch.

Because it’s clearly being banned, not because of privacy violations, not because of the nefarious impact of a foreign government, but because of the content that is shared on it. It is the only major social media platform with a strong pro-Palestinian viewpoint on it. And the people in Congress have been caught on camera explicitly stating this is why they want to ban it.

I hate Tiktok. I don’t use it. Never have. But I still don’t want to see the US turn its internet into the Great Firewall of China 2.0.

The leaders in Congress cannot stand the idea of there being a social media platform that is popular in the US that isn’t hosted in the US. Why? The answer is simple - control. All the US social media platforms are heavily influenced by the US government. Hell, most of them openly contract with the NSA. Facebook is an NSA contractor. These platforms get a ton of money from the US government. And despite what conservatives bitch at in regards to “being censored,” the real censorship is against anything that doesn’t advance US power and influence. Outside of Tiktok, the major platforms heavily censor pro-Palestinian messages and stories. Go to r/worldnews and post anything other than “Palestinians deserve to be vaporized,” and you’ll be banned within 5 minutes. It’s literally that bad. Even when outright bans aren’t in place, the platforms will severely down shift any pro-Palestinian content and keep it out of peoples’ feeds.

“Beware of he would would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.”

Trump’s base don’t actually like the man on a personal level. Two of the biggest reasons people vote for him:

1. They’re conservative Christians who would vote for Satan himself if it meant appointing more Republican judges.

2. They view him as a giant middle finger to the establishment, elites, and existing party leaders.

Note, Trump being old as fuck doesn’t subtract from either of those core values.

And by that, I mean that Hollywood seems to place something related to lgbtq in nearly every show, and so “culture” here means tv/movies/games

LGBT people are something like 10-20% of the population. It would be insane for them to not be in a movie that has more than a handful of cast members. Why do you want your movies to show some weird unrealistic version of reality, one where queer people are just mysteriously absent? That’s pretty fucked up.

I mean, sure, I could maybe see the argument for a period piece. Maybe it’s not too realistic to have a bunch of out queer characters in a drama set in Elizabethan England. But in something modern? Again, one in ten to one in five people is queer to some degree or another. Statistically speaking, if you select a cast at random of anything other than a handful of people, you’re going to have some queer people in that sample.

Why do you want your movies/games to be less diverse than reality? Do you really need to live out some straight fetishistic fantasy that badly?

The reason studios put LGBT content in movies and games is that a lot of people in the real world, aka their customers, are LGBT. If a studio rarely if ever did so, they would quickly and rightfully be labeled as “that bigoted studio that likes to pretend queer people don’t exist.”

New Trump conspiracy just dropped:

It turns out Trump actually does have a superpower. He can Groundhog Day himself at will. He can create a save state of reality and load it at will. Or he can set up time loop of up to say, 6 months in length. He won the election because he literally ran that campaign hundreds, perhaps thousands or tens thouands of times before finally getting it right. He’s save scumming reality. Though, this is also the reason he talks so oddly and is all screwed up. Thousands of subjective years giving political speeches just fries your brain.

A third term really isn’t that much of a stretch. The 22nd Amendment was poorly drafted. Or perhaps more specifically, poorly drafted for our political era.

In order to approve a Trump third term, SCOTUS really wouldn’t need to come to an incredibly stretched conclusion. According to the letter of the Constitution, the requirements to be president such as term limits only apply to being elected president. Read from a strict literalist perspective, these requirements don’t apply to achieving the powers of Acting President through the line of succession.

So Trump could get a third term through being appointed Acting President through the line of presidential succession. He would have two flunkies run for President and Vice President. They run promising to immediately resign after being sworn in. MAGA arranges to have Trump appointed Speaker of the House. When the two flunkies resign, Trump would immediately become Acting President and serve the remainder of the flunky president’s term. In terms of actual powers, there is virtually no difference between being President or Acting President.

Again, it really wouldn’t require a super stretched interpretation of the Constitution for SCOTUS to rule this as a valid method. The writers of the 22nd Amendment wrote the amendment to say, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President…” They should have written it, “No person shall be elected to or hold the powers of the office of the President…” They didn’t consider that someone could try to deliberately become president in a way that doesn’t involve being elected president.

There’s never been case law on this, because no one has ever been vain enough to try and use this loophole to get a third term. But according to a strict reading of the Constitution, someone can absolutely serve a third term this way. Hell, this would also be a path for someone like Elon Musk, who is not a native-born citizen, to become president.