[-] [email protected] 23 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

This from the same legal team that successfully argued that the president is above the law, including having the ability to assassinate his political opponents.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 18 hours ago

4x games tend to be functionally infinitely repayable, since a single game often takes an eternity and there are usually many factions to play.

I particularly like sword of the stars 1 & 2. Honestly don't remember which I preferred but I know I got an insane amount of time sunk into both of them.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 19 hours ago

Saving time by reusing the same headline week after week.

[-] [email protected] 107 points 1 day ago

They have 86 million people just giving them piles of money. They use that money to lend and invest and then reap all the profits. They incentivize those people to take loans from them and get credit cards through them, because when you already have millions of people entrusting you with their life savings, it's easy to upsell them.

And now, just because they have caps on their bullshit fees, they want to charge people for the privilege of handing over all that free money? Fucking genius right there. No way that will backfire.

Banks are awful, find a credit union, never deal with this kind of bullshit again (probably).

[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

There's only two routes to getting this undone. One is a constitutional amendment, the other is for the Court to get several justices who are eager to overturn this decision, and then bring a case to trial specifically to address this issue.

I can't think of an amendment that would likely have a broader appeal than one that says presidents aren't kings and aren't above the law. But even so, I can't see it getting passed any time soon, given the overwhelming bipartisan support it would need. Personally, I'd like to see this done anyway, if only so that we could also include a provision stating that a president can't pardon himself, and can't pardon crimes that he ordered.

By comparison, it seems a lot easier to change the balance on the court, since one way or another it will be changed over time. And assuming we reach a point where we can be confident that the majority is ready to completely erase this ruling, then you just need to bring a case against a former president.

One could wait for such a case to arise organically, but that's leaving a lot to chance. You need a former president to have allegedly committed a crime, you need a evidence enough to bring a case, you need to go through the appeals process, they need to try to use presidential immunity, and then it needs to be taken up by the Supreme Court. Any number of things could go wrong, and there could be political fallout. If there's a serious enough situation that requires this, by all means, go after them and make this an issue in the case so that it has to get appealed. Worst case scenario, they get away with something they would have gotten away with anyway.

Personally, if I were president and had shifted the balance of the court back to one that respects the rule of law, I'd probably tell the justice department to bring a case against me, appeal to the Supreme Court, ask that they expedite the appeal, and then they can completely reverse this insane precedent. It would all be contrived, but that's hardly anything new. I would make sure that anyone I appointed to the Court was down with a plan like this, If they won't do that much to safeguard the country, the constitution, and rule of law, they can't be trusted with the responsibility of being on the Supreme Court.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

No one's trying to put terraforming Venus into next year's budget. This is all theoretical talk about what would be possible to do some day.

The cost of terraforming Venus would be large, but the benefits of having a second habitable planet are also quite large. Even ignoring the benefits of having more land and resources, there's also the just the fact that being on two planets means we can potentially survive as a species if something happens to one of them.

It would also have to be heavily automated, and only really becomes realistic once you have machines that are essentially self-sufficient at which point the concept of "cost" becomes a lot fuzzier. It would mean dedicating resources, but you aren't paying an army of self-replicating robots.

However, the sheer scale of the task means that the benefits would only be seen many generations later. It would require extreme efficiency and long term planning with little tolerance for error. The kind of people who would make such an investment are unlikely to just hand the money over to the shadiest billionaire they can find. And it would be difficult to keep a scam going if they need to show continual progress decade after decade.

Maybe we'll never see enough progress to overcome the kind of greed and short term thinking that would doom a huge, world-altering endeavor like this. But if that's the case, it's more likely that we'd just never try. All the more reason to keep pointing out what could be instead of just accepting the shittiness that we see today.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

I'm on a keto diet right now, and while keto bread is an amazing innovation that's made it much easier than the last time I did this, I have to keep that shit in the freezer because it seems to get moldy a lot faster than normal bread, often well before the expiration date.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

Why not both?

Although Mars is still a terrible candidate for terraforming. It's at the outer edge of the goldilocks zone, and even if you can solve the temperature, radiation, and atmosphere issues to create a viable ecosystem, it's still going to cause problems for humans thanks to the low gravity.

Venus on the other hand could realistically function as a second earth if we clean up the atmosphere.

[-] [email protected] 78 points 4 days ago

Farscape is a very soft sci-fi, but it has a mostly consistent world that mostly follows its internal logic. It has muppet aliens and the supernatural along side more traditional TV space tropes, but the narrative makes sense as presented, and it doesn't do much to hurt your suspension of disbelief.

Doctor Who is the opposite of consistent. It makes shit up as it goes along and isn't even consistent in the kind of bullshit it's throwing at you. It can be tropey nonsense, comedy overriding reality, fairy tale reasoning that breaks down when you try to think about it to much, or whatever other idiocy it feels like being today. Instead of building a world that you can understand, it basically just says "don't worry about it, assume we already did the boring set up stuff, and just run with the fact that plastic can be alive and chasing after people because that's what we're doing this week."

[-] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago

Absolutely. We can't tolerate that kind shitty behavior and inappropriate language. Thanks for keeping it classy [email protected]

[-] [email protected] 66 points 4 days ago

I hope he gets on a private jet with 5 other justices and some of his billionaire buddies for a trip to some tropical resort only for the plane to ~~get shot down through a president's official act~~ suddenly go down, totally unexpectedly.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago

The ruling wasn't just that you can't charge the president with crimes related official acts. It also said that you can't use official acts as evidence. Since the case included evidence from the time when Trump was president, they want it thrown out because apparently that shouldn't be admissible because fuck you.

237
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

And don't get me started on modern conveniences.

16
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

It seems like all the other markdown stuff works, but we're missing ^superscript^ and ~subscript~ in connect. As a frequent user of footnotes,^1^ I would greatly appreciate support for these tags.


^1^ Great for citations, explanations, or really stupid tangents

85
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Amazing how one little letter can make such a big difference.

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Makeitstop

joined 1 year ago