Chaotic good is fine if you don’t launch it too hard. It’s enjoyable to put barely enough force in so that it just slides into the cart in front of it.

It’s like bowling.

Just don’t launch it from far away, otherwise it could veer into someone’s car. Which would be caught on camera, incidentally.

How about a space station? Lot easier to keep things livable if you just contain everything. Would probably end up being easier to build a station and fly it out there than try to terraform something that distant.

Even when I see Elrond in LotR, that’s actually just Agent Smith in a funny costume.

It could even be a far right racist propaganda bot.

Alternate challenge: Find a line of more than just a few words from Holy Grail that won’t be recognized.

Wouldn’t we also be under enough pressure to begin fusing some of that hydrogen into helium at that point?

The purpose of a legal system is to provide stability to a society, so that a person can safely pursue long term goals over their lifetime in a predictable environment.

The most effective way to accomplish this is to make a system where laws originate from a process where people are allowed to have some say in the creation of the laws that will apply to them, and the laws are then applied uniformly, consistently and fairly to all people regardless of background.

Our system partially fulfils this.

Wow. Honestly kinda surprised they were that vulnerable. Doesn’t Russia have any sort of CWIS systems to defend their ground based nuclear bombers and advanced radar command and control aircraft? Seems kinda important, don’t you think?

Maybe, but we also got Reaganomics and the beginning of that cultural shift towards greed being good. I suppose you could make a case that we also had HW Bush, the last repub afaik to actually raise taxes on the wealthy, helping Clinton balance the budget in the 90s.

Also had the Satanic Panic, though that seems to come back around every so often no matter what.

Yea, that was the funniest part about all this to me. People watched too much Maury Povich or something.

I like to set my tent up in the lowest elevation spot I can find too.

GDP is basically a measure of how much work is getting done. So, if you save your money, you’re not contributing to it. The moment you spend some, that spent money goes into the calculation.

Whether this constitutes any kind of real “growth” or not in your economy is a different topic. There are already debates on how useful GDP is as a useable measurement.

Spending lots of the money you have saved up in your sovereign wealth fund is a good way to keep your economy afloat. Can also just do what the WW1-2 powers did and just borrow a lot if necessary, assuming there are people you can borrow from.

Not off the top of my head. Cooking is frequently a recreational hobby though, it’s essentially an art form. So I think it’s about equally likely that dancing, painting or making music fade away.

It’s theoretically possible, sure, but the nice, pretty spiral arms that our Milky Way has indicates it probably hasn’t crashed into any other big galaxies recently. So we probably don’t have any rogue supermassives, just rogue normal ones which are much harder to detect.

Most generally useful single ability? Probably the Flash’s speedforce. Being able to get whatever you want done in a fraction of the time has broad utility. Plus you’re well equipped for any supervillain attacks.

There’s a reason so many poker players wear sunglasses.

Anyway, try to preempt your emotional reaction. There’s always many different flavors of reactions we can have to something really negative, which normally depends heavily on mood. By default, this all just runs unconsciously, but it doesn’t have to. Of the many potential options, like anger, sadness, condescending disdain, arrogant bemusement or surprise, you can try to consciously pick one and channel your feelings towards it instead of just letting your feelings run wild.

Or you can just practice a proper poker face, but that can be really hard. Doable though, just takes a lot of practice. Playing poker would be an effective way to get that practice.

You know getting a progressive President wouldn’t have gotten us any closer to abortion rights? Unlike Trump, we actually follow our separation of powers principles, which means the Pres has limited authority. You expect us to just ignore court orders and the legislature like Trump does or something?

A law enshrining abortion rights would require a filibuster-proof Senate majority and control of the House.

I’m all for being critical of the DNC, but we should be clear-eyed on how governing actually works. Also, pretty hard to say Harris was less progressive than Obama, her Senate voting record was pretty damn progressive.

Once an authoritarian state reaches a certain degree of power, they’re no longer vulnerable to their own populations. They just have too much control over the information, domestic security, economy, etc. Hypothetically you can imagine: if everyone who stands up gets their head cut off, and that goes on for 500 years, this will create a very different sort of population than we are accustomed to.

At that point they can only really be toppled by a foreign power or an uprising from their own elites. The peasants are simply no longer a factor.

A peace plan was always a foolish promise, the two sides remain too far apart in what they are willing to accept. There is no amount of pressure that Trump is willing to exert on the two parties combined that will overcome all the hurdles to some sort of compromise, unless we want to get directly involved with our own troops.

Ukraine requires a hard security guarantee, something with more teeth than the Budapest Memorandum. (which specified no actual actions from the signatories, just a vague promise) That is non-negotiable for them, not getting one leaves them in pretty much the same position they were in when the war started, except with less land–not good prospects for future survival. Trump has been unwilling to promise this, though, because it could pull the US actively into a war in the future with no benefit for him. This, of course, is exactly what would be so appealing about one to the Ukrainians, it would be a formidable security arrangement.

Putin requires a significant victory he can bring home, not something half-assed. His support among his fellow elites, who have made sacrifices for this war, hinges on making that worth something. He needs more of the land, at very least the 4 Oblasts he has formally annexed into the Russian Federation. Otherwise he is literally leaving what they now see as formal parts of Russia in enemy hands and saying “ok I guess we’re done now”. If he can’t secure them (he has around half currently), it means all these losses were basically for nothing, and that is a dire threat to an authoritarian leader. This would put him in an absolutely horrible, nigh-suicidal position where he would have to stay away from windows for the rest of his life.

So, it’s basically existential for both sides. They also both retain possible routes to victory, it’s not out of the question for either of them. Ukraine could try to outlast the Russian war economy, war economies are not sustainable forever. Russia could try to continue their slow progress on the ground, they still have more troops. It’s not easy to bridge these two sides, no amount of money or resources or soft pressure could bribe them away from their primary objectives.