to be fair, if youre arguing about the effectiveness of agencies like the FDA, im not sure that this is really relevant. You can make greasy, sugary, carb laden food out of the safest, purest, most well researched ingredients without any additives and it will still be an unhealthy diet. The FDA cant reasonably mandate that people have to eat their vegetables after all, at least not and actually expect people will listen to them. Im not saying that the FDA actually does do its job better or worse, I dont know that, but I feel like food quality in the sense that an agency like that can control is more a “does this stuff contain toxic ingredients” rather than “does the culture of this area like a well rounded diet”.

looking it up, yeah, thats the one. I dont mind tube noodles, but I prefer smaller tubes that can actually hold their shape

I forget the name, but the one that’s kind like penne rigate, but a much wider diameter tube, with ends cut straight instead of angled. That one literally always falls apart and turns to kinda mushy strips when I’ve tried to cook it or had it cooked by someone else.

Honestly, Ive come to think that there is truly no such thing as sarcasm so blatant as for everyone to get that it is sarcasm without being told.

As someone who did 3 years of a physics degree and then ended up crashing and burning at the basic quantum stuff until I ultimately quit, I sympathize with this wholeheartedly. Like its fascinating and all, and its great that some people are able to get it, but like, if I have to deal with a Schrödinger equation again I think I might scream.

this is kinda like how objects in video games move isnt it?

Every year, I resolve to break my new years resolution

Those are the ideas I was referencing as taking decades tbh. Technically a few, especially the laser sail, can potentially get to high enough fractions of lightspeed to get that noticable time dilation effect, but given that makes something that already costs a huge amount of energy, much more expensive than it already is, I’m not sure if you’d actually want to go to those speeds very often.

Not necessarily, there can never be a last time if there is never a first time after all…

I mean, saying it would take half of forever with existing technology, when we do not have the technology to do it in the first place, seems a bit redundant. There are any number of hypothetical technologies for travel to relatively nearby stars that, while we don’t have them presently, at least do not violate physics and are more an issue of requiring a civilization of much larger scale than ours to afford to build them rather than one of if they’re physically possible.

An analogy I once saw was this: suppose you were to go back in time to meet a medieval blacksmith, and you show him the blueprints for a modern jetliner. You might, with a lot of explaining of the relevant physics and engineering behind all the parts, be able to convince the guy that the machine could work if constructed. But, he’d have no idea of the process for how many of the parts are made, or the materials they’re made from, and if you included all that information too, the whole process would be so expensive and the size of the economy back then so small that in all likelihood, not even the richest kingdom on earth in his day could possibly afford to actually build and operate one. However, if the blacksmith took all that information and concluded “this can never happen, it’s just too hard”, time would prove him wrong.

Terraforming would seem a bit unnecessary if you can send a crewed ship there. Manned interstellar travel, unless we’re wrong about the whole speed of light thing, is going to take decades at least to reach the very nearest stars (I’d imagine that it is more likely we’d go to those stars first, and only reach Trappist when people from those stars later launch their own ships, until eventually the outer edge of settled space reaches 40ly).

That implies that, if you can send some colony ship to another star, you necessarily have the technology to build a space habitat that can sustain large numbers of humans in sufficient comfort to run a small civilization and all relevant industry, self-sufficiently using only the materials available in space from asteroids and such as inputs. You have this tech first, because the colony ship is itself just one or more of these habitats, on top of some massive propulsion system.

As such, why even bother with terraforming planets? That’s a process that may potentially take millennia to truly finish, longer than it took your ship to even get there with some of the possible propulsion options, will only be viable on a fraction of worlds, and will still get you a place that probably does not have an earth like day or gravity or any number of other differences. You would then be back in the bottom of a gravity well, which requires a ton of energy expenditure to get back into space again. Why not instead, find some asteroids and comets in your target system, there’s probably going to be some around somewhere if our solar system is any indication, and build more of those habitats as needed.

I mean, it’s kinda early to say that elections are never happening when the previous government has only just fallen.

I used to be that way before getting into the habit of drinking water a couple years ago. I think a lot of it is just being used to drinking stuff with sugar, such that one’s tastes have long since adapted to that and then you notice and are disgusted by the lack of said sweetness in the water. I remember water seeming to have a sort of bitterness to it that went away after awhile when I stopped drinking sweet tea all the time and made myself drink water.

I was taking it to refer to just some amount of possessed cake regardless of its subdivisions, It doesnt strike me as odd to refer to food that way (same as how, if I made you a bunch of french fries, it wouldn’t be terribly unusual for me to ask “do you like it?” while referring to the meal, despite it being made up of many individual units).

I mean, you absolutely can, you just have to make two cakes

To be fair about that last bit, isnt having engaged in nuclear war at some point relatively common for species in the star trek verse? I seem to recall the Vulcans having done similar?

What about when you grow up being told you’re good, but your brain so overemphasizes negative experiences that it convinces itself that you’re bad despite everyone in your life trying to say otherwise?

The species of betta commonly associated with that name has been domesticated for centuries and refined by selective breeding into something quite different from the original form that best suits the role as ornamental fish that people intend them to fill. As such, they’re surely full-release fish by now.

None of the viable candidates on the ballot were people that completely represented my values in virtually any election I’ve voted in. Indeed, I suspect some of my values are a small enough minority of the country that they simply do not stand a chance at winning democratically without a major shift in the opinions of the general population.

“Vote blue no matter who” isn’t really literal, in the the sense that I wouldn’t vote for a republican if somehow one actually reflecting what I think was actually running. It’s a heuristic, reflecting the fact that the dems have throughout my lifetime consistently been closer to my views than the Rs however slightly and really only useful in cases like obscure downballot races where I am unable to locate much information about what the candidates actually want but must still try to determine which is preferable without real information about them.

That variety of Sardinian cheese that contains live maggots.