I always assumed that it was supposed to be ambiguous between them for humor purposes

This is how the immortal snail gets you to let your guard down, nobody suspects that little thing

Does divorce by itself even lower the birthrate though? Intuitively, one might suspect that a couple that were no longer interested in eachother probably isn’t having many children, compared to if those people were to pair off again with new partners?

I mean, it was inarguably violence, and that violence seems to have a political motive (since changing or reforming the healthcare system is considered a political issue), and there is an element of using fear to further that end (since he would obviously have known that he cannot realistically change everything by himself or even just shoot every health insurance CEO, but shooting one while featuring a catchy phrase to make it clear the motive was being fed up with the health system, potentially makes all the other such CEOs and people in similar positions afraid that the next guy to try this might go after them next, and that more might be inspired seeing the shooting). Id argue that it does technically fit the term. People are just so used to that term being used alongside causes that they have no agreement with that they think it can never apply to a good one, or consider if it can ever be justified.

You can find plenty of weird furry fetish art on the fediverse too if you find the right instances, that’s just an internet thing.

I’ve never actually had alcohol, don’t even know what it tastes like. Not for age reasons (I’m 25), but the thought of having my faculties/inhibitions lower triggers my anxiety disorder a bit, and I don’t like being around drunk people, so I’ve always been something of a teetotaler.

Antimatter does not replicate the way microbes do to be fair. It’s dangerous to handle in large enough amounts obviously, be we don’t have the energy to produce enough to create a serious danger nor the technology to store that amount at once.

I’m beginning to wonder how society would change if we were to just do away with the concept of something being “obscene”

I mean, sure, its addictive and unhealthy. But, the people suffering from it are the people that take it in the first place, so, banning personal possession and use is effectively punishing the victims, adding more suffering which may drive some to seek more drugs to get through. And if you instead ban production and distribution, you simply create a perfect niche for organized crime to appear to do those things, which creates worse problems than the drugs themselves. If such drugs dont force those involved with them to hide, at least it is possible to put some regulations on them, and more easily monitor and intervene in their use.

Pff, car users dont need society to get around, everyone knows road and bridge and fuel infrastructure are natural parts of the word that are just there on their own already! /s

To be fair, while I seriously suspect Trump’s stance towards Gaza will probably be worse than Kamala’s would have been, He isnt exactly in office yet, so his fault in this is at most limited to Israel anticipating that he probably wont do anything when he is. Had Kamala won, what is happening today would likely be largely the same.

The whole “either you hate the Palestinians or you hate the Jews” narrative that pops up whenever Israel does something wrong is part of the problem. The government of Israel uses its demographics as something of a shield from criticism, by stating that it is the Jewish state, and thus that to accuse them of wrongdoing is to be antisemitic. But it is not so; not everyone who is Jewish agrees with or desires what Israel is doing, they cant, no matter how many they might bring on board, because it is an ethnic and religious identity that includes some, like children, who aren’t even able to understand and agree to it. The actions of Israel are not the actions of Jewish people as a whole, and they never will be, because ethnic groups simply do not work that way. If anyone is being antisemitic here, it is the Israeli state itself, for attempting to tie their very real atrocities to Jewish people in order to coerce people into ignoring them. Its like the rhetorical equivalent of a criminal taking a hostage in order to deter arrest.

To be fair, I’m not sure if “just arrest anyone convenient and frame them”, is entirely in the wealthy’s interest here. Making an example is one thing, sure, but if you do that and dont get the guy that actually did it, then you have a guy out there who has proven themselves willing to go out and assassinate CEOs, who may well decide to do it again. If you do have the means to catch that guy, then what motivation is there to not just send him through the court system rather than framing someone else? Less risk of a frame up being discovered and sparking even more resentment if you have at least some genuine evidence, after all.

I think that message was a sort of sarcastic way of getting around a “dont talk about jury nullification” rule, in that saying “we cant talk about x”, while making it very clear what x is, prompts people unfamiliar with x to go look it up

“Murder is murder” is a tautology that doesn’t actually mean anything useful

money is a proxy for resources, is the thing, having someone “own” everything includes owning all the money, at which point you end up with the same issue. Ownership is meaningless without a system to enforce that, because one person cant prevent everyone else from using “their” stuff on their own, and systems require buy in from a large fraction of the population to function, which requires giving enough people a reason to participate. Automation doesnt really solve this, it increases the total amount that can be produced, meaning you can hold a higher fraction of the total because the smaller fraction left can be “enough” to keep the system running, but some tasks exist that require a significant degree of intelligence and thinking to do, meaning you must either have humans do them, or have machines that are smart and self aware enough that them finding ways around restrictive programming becomes an issue.

I dont think Mars has anything to do with some plan by the rich to escape tbh. Early space colonies by nature would be cramped, form-follows function places to live, and the rich tend to like a lot of comforts. It seems to me more likely that they would send other people to colonize mars as a vanity project, or for resource extraction, or just because they personally like the concept and have enough money to push for it to be done, than that very many of them would personally go there. They might suggest that it could be a way to escape climate change or such in order to try to prompt others to buy in, but that notion falls flat on its face when one considers that even if we burned every scrap of coal in the ground, every drop of oil, and then fired off every nuclear weapon, it would still be easier to build a settlement on earth than one on mars. If you have the resources and the technology to build a mars colony, “the planet burning” is no longer much of a threat to your survival anyway.

EDIT: I guess I should clarify that Im not trying to say that I dont think wealth inequality is an issue, I think its one of the biggest issues we have, I just think this narrative I sometimes see of “The rich all have a long term plot to kill everyone and then fly off into space” looks to me like conspiratorial thinking that overestimates the rich and misunderstands their motives, which I feel is a negative thing, because it makes the solution seem less like “replace or transition the system into one that naturally tends to a more equitable distribution of resources” and more like “These specific guys are the villains, kill/imprison them and it’ll fix everything, and also mistrust automation and space development because they further their plans”. The second of those I think would even if successfully implemented, just result in a new generation of rich people naturally arising later on as wealth begets wealth, while neglecting technologies that I feel are vital for increasing the sum total of human prosperity.

Realistically, if a couple rich people ever obtain all the money, they no longer have any, because money only has the trait of being money and not merely some piece of metal or paper or information or whatever else when it is used as a medium of exchange, and if almost nobody actually has any, then exchanging it on a meaningful scale is no longer possible.

Under this scenario, one must imagine that people would eventually start growing food and making things on land that they do not “own” and trading it amongst themselves, until some new thing that people actually have access to becomes money. Even hiring security to prevent that ceases to be possible, because paying that security means giving some of that money to someone else, and even if you do that, if theyre the only people getting paid it, then no economic base exists to support things like grocery stores that accept that money anymore, making those security people gain nothing from accepting it and thus have no incentive to do that work for you anymore. For the rich to stay rich, they must leave at least enough money (and resources) in common circulation for the economic system that maintains their power to continue to have relevance.

If the holy wine (I forget the proper term for it) is supposed to be the blood of Jesus, does that imply that if you concentrate that wine and then run an engine off it, you have a Jesus fueled car?

Given that they all generally seem to get away with it, I wonder if it’s actually more of a frequently bent or broken guideline than a strictly enforced law. Do we know if non-protagonist federation starship captains act and get away with similar?

Forget that, what powers them? Something that can be read with a close by scanner makes some since since I figure you could induce a current in one, but the kind you sometimes see in movies that constantly sends out a signal that some satellite can clearly track anywhere in the world, and do so for days, weeks, months or longer, would need one heck of a battery I’d imagine? And in a very small space too