Seriously. Jeri Ryan made that a masterclass. She was brought on as eye candy, but she decided, “fuck that, I’m going to knock this out of the park.”

because it is the typical product of sexism where the woman is supposed to wear hills and show her boobs, even if she’s a braindead robot.

Maybe the Borg just realized sexy drones serve as great tools to distract (overwhelmingly male) enemy soldiers in combat! The Borg weaponized the male gaze! :D

I mean, I have a chaotic solution we might try. Let’s simply…reverse the Budapest Memorandum! Let’s just hand Ukraine a few hundred thermonuclear warheads, with launchers and launch codes and say, “here, go have fun!”

“The president has announced…that we have reversed the Budapest Memorandum…”

:D

Cities should all operate publicly-run day labor programs to protect workers from shit like this and from contractors who would steal their wages or put them in unsafe conditions

Sorry, in 2026, the best we can do is to allow you to legally sell yourself into indentured servitude for a period of time. Yup, that’s it. We’re bringing back literal peonage. Also we’re bringing back debt slavery for student loans. /sigh

Yes. Do not purchase a dozen gallons of flammable spirits and some matches, and then “return” them to Home Depot after the store is closed and empty of people.

Eh. It can be multiple things. The Second Iraq War was about oil, but it was also about W. having a personal grudge against Saddam. Saddam at one point tried to have Bush Sr. assassinated, and Jr. had it out for him as a consequence. Plus it was for political purposes, both to drum up the base at home and to assist Israel abroad. It was about all of those things. Wars are never caused by just a single reason. Oil was absolutely a powerful factor, perhaps the most powerful. But it’s overly reductive to simply say it was about oil. Launching a war requires getting a lot of stakeholders on board. And not everyone will have the same motivations. The Zionist faction wanted Iraq toppled to help Israel, but they have no particular concern for oil. The oil industry folks wanted Iraqi oil, but money-hungry CEOs don’t really care about throwing red meat to the Fox News crowd. Launching a big war requires a coalition, even if just the Republican coalition. Wars always thus have many motivations behind them.

I don’t get why companies can’t solve this problem entirely by just flying out applicants for in-person interviews towards the end of the hiring process. Or hell, maybe only even ask the candidate to fly out for a visit after they’ve already accepted the job offer. Just one minimal and relatively cheap step to confirm the remote worker you’re hiring is who they claim to be. For the cost of a flight, a night or two in a hotel, and some meal vouchers, you can verify someone’s identity. Sure, maybe not for freelance work. But for any well paid technical field? This is a trivial expense.

I know that anybody who has consistent access to an internet connection in North Korea is almost certainly working for the benefit of the great leader and they aren’t actually seeing any money or benefit for themselves.

Eh, this doesn’t sound like the job you would give someone in a prison camp. You’re talking about people that you’re allowing to interact and work regularly with foreigners outside the country. That does not sound like the type of position you trust to a political prisoner. That sounds like a position you put someone of high trust. It’s probably a pretty cushy job as the standards of North Korea go. Sure beats scratching at dirt or working in some godawful arms factory. It’s probably the type of job you need some good family connections in the Party in order to get. Sure, the government takes all the direct monetary benefit of the work, but that is just kindof how Communist systems work. I imagine the people working those jobs have some of the highest standards of living available to people that aren’t senior party leadership.

Remember, you are mortal.

It’s a Fargate. It makes things go far! We are not getting sued!

It’s more just that while they’re calling Mamdani a communist, at the same time they’re doing the thing that is literally the single most Communist thing a government can do: have the state gain direct ownership or control of the means of production. Communism is many things depending on where, when, and who you ask. But the bare minimum, the common denominator under all forms? State owns of the means of production. And here’s Trump literally seizing the means of production. Not just giving out grants or loans, but literally taking a permanent equity stake in a major international company. That is the literal, most basic definition of a Communist action. If literally seizing the means of production isn’t Communist, what the hell is?

Meanwhile, Trump is over here practicing literal state socialism. The government now owns 10% of Intel.

Future generations of students will study the political philosophy of Locke, Marx, and Oda.

Coordinated for all the centrists except Biden to drop out at the same time, while Warren and Sanders split the vote of the progressive wing. When it looked like Sanders had a decent shot at actually getting the nomination, all the centrists except Biden dropped out simultaneously and endorsed him. Biden won the nomination due to a giant DNC-coordinated rat-fucking.

Current building codes allow the construction of wood frame buildings up to 18 stories tall. You need to expand your knowledge of wood construction beyond what you learned reading The Three Little Pigs.

No. Back up and read the original problem. How does using dissolvable containers help this problem? How does this let people bring in their own containers? You just saw a discussion involving plastic and decided to shoehorn in a reference to a completely irrelevant plastic product.

I agree. Wood is clearly the superior material.

What are you talking about?

So instead of selling the food in thin containers that eventually become planters or paint buckets, why not let people bring their own Tupperware or plates from home?

Food safety reasons. The restaurant then has to clean any random container people bring in, because it represents a contamination risk to the kitchen.

The key difference between all previous civilizational collapses and the one we potentially face is that most people in the past were farmers. Even in the grandest empires like Rome, less than 10% of the population actually lived in cities. Most people lived in the countryside working the land. The city of Rome lost something like 95% of its population. But those people didn’t just crawl in a hole and die. They abandoned the city and joined the vast majority of the population that was living in the countryside. Many in the countryside actually saw their quality of life improve substantially. Many who had been slaves found the old legal system enforcing their slavery no longer existed. Rome collapsing just meant the end of the grand cities; political and economic systems could fragment, and people would just live more locally.

But today? Less than 5% of the population actually works on a farm. The vast majority of the population lives in cities. If the political and economic system collapses, the countryside can’t just absorb all those extra people. Hell, the farms can’t even operate without the equipment, fuels, and chemicals produced by the larger economic system.

Historically, when civilizations collapsed, the common folk just left the cities, abandoned the corrupt elites to their madness, and returned to small villages and rural life. But now there is simply nowhere for people to retreat to.