To be fair on them (not that there’s much reason to give them that courtesy), most of the Trump supporters I encounter at my work and such seem to truly believe that a sizable majority of people in the country agrees with them and that everyone else is either some kind of hostile elite or a crazy fringe. If they really do believe something like that, then this is kinda self-consistent of them, since they would therefore believe that they cant lose a fair election, and therefore that them losing is evidence of cheating even if they don’t have clear evidence of how, but them winning would be evidence that, if there is any, it at least isn’t enough to change the outcome.

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.

Rigid (as in using a solid frame to keep shape instead of gas pressure) airships? Unless there’s an earlier example of that than the ones Zeppelin made that I’m not thinking of

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

and by realism, they mean “Everyone is white and all women meet their standards of what is attractive”, because of course, white men and supermodels are the vast majority of the human population in real life /s

And if I refuse?

I don’t think I’ve personally encountered anything too weird, but a family member of mine apparently once had a coworker named “Orangello”, who had a sibling named “Lemongello”

This makes me wonder what happens if a person with dual citizenship that includes one country that makes name changes hard and one that does not, legally changes their name in the easier one. Do the two countries end up disagreeing over what that person’s name is, or is there some kind of international agreement on recognizing the same names to prevent confusion for law enforcement and such?

I’ve actually heard a story from a family member once about briefly encountering a kid with that name and pronunciation. So either funny coincidence to meet the same kid, or there’s more than one set of parents out there that thought that was a clever name idea somehow.

To be fair, you dont actually have to terraform a planet to colonize it, theres nothing physics defying with having a civilization of people living in airtight buildings with controlled climate inside indefinitely. It still isnt a solution to climate change for any number of obvious reasons, but I dont know that anyone that seriously wants to see a mars colony start in their lifetime actually intends to terraform the place first. Terraforming gets thrown around casually in science fiction, but to actually reshape the entire surface and climate of a planet that way, even if we had the requisite technology and infrastructure right now, would be a process that would probably take millennia at best and be incredibly destructive to any infrastructure existing on the surface during that time. If you want to build a mars colony now, rather than at some point where we’re ancient history after human civilization has finished what would be to them the largest and longest construction project ever, then you pretty much have to accept Mars’s climate conditions for what they are and build around them rather than try to change them.

Does cutting fabric not dull the blades? It seems like a lot of fabrics should be tougher to cut through than paper?

thats not-a-lie (maybe that works better spoken than written)

tbf there are some pretty weird looking creatures in the ocean even now. Like, would the giant deep sea Isopods really look that out of place next to stuff like Anomalocaris? We still have plenty of spiky worm shaped things living on the bottom of the ocean. And for the softer side of animals, would things like siphonophores really look that out of place in a lineup of Cambrian fauna, if placed there and shown to someone who wouldnt have the knowledge to recognize what they actually were?

Given how things have been going with the republicans recently, I’m not entirely convinced that “kompromat” would even be garunteed to work on them anymore. If they can seemingly get away without serious consequences for virtually anything, what kind of threat does releasing incriminating information even become?