atmavatar
Before the 2020 election Trump primed his base by claiming over and over again that he could only lose if the election was rigged. Then, immediately after the 2020 election results were tallied, he and every right-wing media outlet spent the bulk of their airtime announcing that the election was stolen. It comes as no surprise that a significant fraction of the Republican voter base started to believe it was true, despite multiple investigations and dozens of court challenges about fraudulent votes failing to produce any evidence.
It's also not surprising that a significant fraction of the Republican base believes election fraud in general is rampant, which conveniently allowed Republican legislatures to make sweeping changes to how future elections would be held... like their standard voter suppression fare of closing polling locations, removing large blocks of voter registrations without notice, slowing processing of mail-in ballots and changing the rules regarding postmarks and late ballots, adding ID requirements, and, in some cases, revoking the validity of existing IDs.
All while the reality is that only around 1:10^6 votes are ever substantiated as fraudulent (e.g., Arizona has proven 36 cases of voter fraud among 42 million votes cast over the last 25 years).
See: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-electio...
Sadly, though, the story left a lot wanting. It felt like multiple writers had inserted their own incomplete story lines, so by the end of the game, you're left with unresolved plot threads regarding the Remnant, the Scourge, and the Kett, among other things. The only somewhat resolved plot thread is colonization via ending up inside the Remnant dyson sphere, but that basically renders all the effort you just spent terraforming planets throughout the game moot.
At least with the original trilogy, you're defeating Sovereign in the first game and the collectors in the second game, giving you some form of resolution, even if it was always clear the trilogy was going to lead to a full reaper invasion in the third game. And across all of them, your singular focus was on the reapers and not spread across multiple threats.
Ironically, were the monitoring system competently made, not only would it have been unable to cause this problem, but it would have also been able to alert about it in time to prevent significant loss.
Despite LaForge and Riker trying to get Barclay transferred off the Enterprise, Picard ultimately directs LaForge to put in the effort to turn him into a better officer. Despite his shortcomings, we get to see Barclay grow into a competent and even key member within the engineering team across the handful of later episodes in which he's cast.
An important thing to keep in mind is that 10% in which AI destroys humanity is a scenario in which the AI goes rogue and decides to destroy humanity of its own volition.
I think if we're being more realistic, there's a much larger chance that AI destroys humanity at the instruction of its masters. Once AI can automate enough industry, silently distribute IFFs among the Epstein class, then send out drones to kill any humans without.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/14/southern-sta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
Because supposedly, the new tooling (in this case, AI) allows them to produce the same or greater output despite doing less work. Workers are under the perennial illusion that they'll ever benefit from productivity gains, but that hasn't been the case since the 1970s.
It's arguable that "illegal alien" is itself dehumanizing, implying that a person can be legal or illegal merely by existing, when in reality, it's the actions they perform which are legal or illegal. In this case, the action is entering the country without following proper procedure, which is more like trespassing, except at a country-level rather than individual property level.
Shortening the label to "illegal" removes the last vestige of reference to the target as a person and further cements the idea that a person's existence can be good or bad.
It's arguable how much of Facebook's current size is a result of natural growth versus what it's gained through said mergers and acquisitions. I'm far more concerned about the fact it's a trillion-dollar company and how large a proportion of people exclusively get their news and other facts from Facebook.
The company is in desperate need of splitting up.
Ahh, the childhood trauma of downloading Doom 2, getting about halfway after 7 hours, only to have the whole download screwed up because one of my parents picked up the phone.
One of the bigger failings of the US government over the last half century is allowing corporations to grow and merge their way to become as large as many have. Stronger enforcement of anti-trust would have both significantly reduced wealth inequality in this country as well as siphoned off much of the growing political power corporations have relative to regular citizens.
In reality, Trump is deliberately exacerbating existing problems and creating new ones, perhaps as a smokescreen for all he's doing to enrich himself and his buddies at the expense of the rest of us.
See: https://www.floridabar.org/public/consumer/pamphlet008/
At a glance, it looks like Chapter 7 bankruptcy is what I was remembering. There are significant exemptions for property, and the more recent amendments to the law to protect against abuse by wealthy individuals are laughably based on income.
It looks pretty easy to buy up a bunch of property in Florida, live there for two years to become eligible for the property exemptions, then declare Chapter 7 to wipe away outstanding debts with minimal-to-no losses.
Of course, respondents are free to correct me if I've misinterpreted something. My initial thought was based on hearsay, and my interpretation was based off quick skimming :)
It serves no purpose in preventing future crimes. First, because you've already caught the criminal, the proposed alternate sentence of life imprisonment without chance for parole already handles preventing that individual from committing further offenses. And second, it's been proven repeatedly that ratcheting up punishment as some sort of deterrent doesn't work because most people committing crimes either believe they're going to get away with it or aren't in a frame of mind to care about any penalties (e.g., crimes of passion).
It also fails to be an efficient way of dealing with a caught criminal. The combination of incarceration time, resources spent on appeals, and the cost of the actual execution methods makes death row inmates more expensive than lifers. We actually pay more to put people to death than we would jailing them for the rest of their lives.
Instead, people fight so hard to keep capital punishment around because it scratches the itch for vengeance.
Alas, the Roberts court effectively ruled that it's not really a bribe if it falls short of the third party saying they want the government official to vote/rule a particular way for a particular price, the government official does as asked, and he/she sends the third party a written invoice for services rendered.
Even should that happen, I'm pretty sure Justice Thomas would find the larger offense is that the invoice failed to include sales tax.
Remember our Supreme Court's recent bribery scandal wasn't that a number of justices were accepting gifts but rather that they hasn't disclosed them properly. We're perfectly OK with third parties bribing the judges on our highest court so long as the judges fill out the correct paperwork.
The only major game in recent history I'm aware was labeled as particularly woke is Dragon Age: Veilguard, mostly due to a particularly cringy (and presumably self-insert) scene where Taash lectures their parent. The character was made even more irritating by regularly refusing to address Emmerich by his name in dialogue.
However, what turned me off from the game and roused most of the discontent I saw had to do with the removal of one of the bigger RP elements the prior games had: the ability to get into significant arguments with companions and even dismiss them entirely or cause them to leave on their own.
The wealth inequality we see now is largely a function of every Republican administration in the last half century passing tax cuts for the wealthy while simultaneously dismantling unions and failing to enforce anti-trust, allowing market consolidation the likes of which we haven't seen since the gilded age.
The result is that wage growth completely disconnected from productivity growth to the extent that subsequent generations are now poorer than their parents' generations.
None of that happened naturally - it was the result of repeated policy changes by the government.
It's probably more correct to just say instituting. While Trump has certainly turned the rule of law on its head, it's a not-so-secret secret that the law has never really applied to the rich and powerful. If we're already going to be making fixes, we should make a real effort to honor the rule of law.
That would necessarily include things like reforming bail and fines so they scale properly with ability to pay, especially in the case of corporate fines.
The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, then whispers in the ear of the blue-collar worker "Hey, I think he wants your cookie."
We must negate the machines-that-think. Humans must set their own guidelines. This is not something machines can do. Reasoning depends upon programming, not on hardware, and we are the ultimate program! Our Jihad is a "dump program." We dump the things which destroy us as humans!Caveat: that same tiny group is employed by the AI vendors, meaning it's in their financial best interest to make it sound like the curve is going vertical.
I expect if you dig around, you'll find a number of wealthy individuals who frequently do the same, given that the wealthiest of us are largely immune from the consequences of doing so. You may also notice that these types of stories also nearly always involve small mom-and-pop operations or other, small businesses whose continued existence relies on the large contracts they hold with the perpetrator.
Given its recent behavior, my prediction is that the Roberts court would drag out hearing any challenge against Trump's 2028 candidacy until such time that they can confidently announce that it's too close to the election to remove him from the ballot, much like they did with his criminal case regarding classified documents leading up to the 2024 election.
Such structures would have better latency due to locality, they wouldn't be subject to transmission interference from weather, they'd be far more accessible for replacements/upgrades, and being underground naturally aids in cooling and noise suppression.
While it would be resource intensive to dig out the underground structure, I'd be surprised if it even came close to the resource expenditure required to launch all your computer hardware into stable orbit, not even accounting for the fact that the former is a one-time, up-front cost, while the latter would have to be re-done every time you replace hardware.
Mass surveillance apparatus like flock cameras and their ilk have a huge surface area for abuse, meaning there must be at least as large a positive impact to even be worth considering.
Unfortunately, we already have plenty of historical evidence from areas that deployed cameras all over - e.g., London, where there was a near-zero drop in crime afterward, and multiple cities in the US, where police immediately began abusing the systems.
There is no baby to throw out, and the bathwater is toxic.