I find it interesting that this basically never happens. The security details of these guys basically never turn against them. Not just US guys but all the dictators and brutal warlords and such. And I get that it makes sense to be quite rare, but I genuinely know of zero instances of it.

Not that I’ve done deep historical dives, but…is there any instance of a ruler’s bodyguards/security murdering them for the harm they’re causing? Cause presumably these people have others they care about that may be being harmed by the things going on.

Depends on what you mean by ringworld. The thing I think of is orders of magnitude more impossible than a Dyson sphere, which is already pretty impossible.

Since at least the 1970s and probably much earlier, any and all non-heterosexual people have been painted as pedophiles by right wing / conservatives.

Indeed, a lot of the pedophile panic these days is driven by those people, because it is one of the few things they can get everyone to hate, and that hate often shuts down nuance and reason, and while real pedophiles are a problem, they want to expand that unthinking hate, that knee jerk ‘burn the heretic’ reaction to more people.

This is the reason we now see people attacking even completely fictional media, because they’re trying as hard as possible to slippery slope it.

It would mean that whatever the US might hope to gain from invading Canada would be dwarfed by what the US would lose in the conflict.

The problem is this is already the case. Nuclear weapons may make it even more lopsided, but the country is already losing more than it stands to gain from an invasion purely on the economic results.

“Every time we use a lever to lift a stone, we’re trading long term strength for short term productivity. We’re optimizing for today’s pyramid at the cost of tomorrow’s ability.”

Something I’ve been thinking a lot lately is that democracy is a process. It is a means by which we attempt to ensure a just and fair government for all. It’s not an end in itself; we don’t want democracy because democracy, at least not once people really think about it.

Which leads me to a saying. “The ends do not justify the means.” This is a commonly held statement. However, it also works the other way:

The means do not justify the ends.

That means it doesn’t matter if something was done by the rules, using the process, it doesn’t matter if we voted for it, it doesn’t matter what process was used to achieve it. If the ends are wrong, going “well, it’s what was decided democratically” isn’t an excuse.

If one person or a few people have a definition wrong, that’s a thing that can be corrected.

If the majority of people think that’s the definition, and it’s been that way for decades, then you have the definition wrong.

To be fair, hasn’t made much difference cause one, he got caught, and two, nobody else has done it.

I don’t blame any particular person for it, of course. Hell, I share the blame myself. I haven’t killed any CEOs or politicians either.

But it’s not gonna work unless more of us gather up the courage Luigi had and take action.

I like this template so much better than the Spider-Man one that people constantly use backwards.

There was in fact a Dragonlance movie in 2008, Dragons of Autumn Twilight. I have not seen it to know if it was even a little bit good, but hey…there was one!

Crystal Pepsi.

It’s sad that in a country of over 300 million people, only one of us is both marginally competent enough to take successful action against these people, and not a chicken shit coward unwilling to put themselves on the line. And yeah, at least for now, I too am among the chicken shit cowards.

It’s deeper than that. It’s about defense of the Status Quo. No superhero looks around at the parts of society that we just accept without thinking about and says this needs to change.

Well first, spend a long time practicing tiny handwriting. Like, let’s make the absolute most use out of this sheet as possible; it’s possible to get the size of handwritten characters down to about 3mm, but let’s say 4 with the assumption that I can’t get it down that low. That means I have about 74 lines vertically to write in, each line able to accommodate somewhere between 70 and 52 characters, depending on the width. Let’s average it to 60 characters per line, so 74x60 = 4,440 characters, times two for two sides of the page. Average number of characters per name is 7, so 14, plus two for spaces, and let’s add another two for a middle initial and another space. That’s 18 characters per name. This means I should be able to fit just under 500 names on the page if I use both sides as efficiently as possible.

I’ll get the list of the 500 richest people in the world, and start going down it from richest on down. But not all at once. First the top name. One week later, the next name. One week after that, the next name down, and so on. After a few weeks the pattern would become obvious and we see what happens. Sadly I have no magical knowledge of who is the richest person at any given moment, so I have to just go off the list I already possess (or any new information I decide to be sufficiently trustworthy). One every week for five hundred names is 3,500 days, or 9.5 years. That is long enough to make it quite apparent this is inevitable and make it seem like it’s going to continue forever, and it’s long enough for legislation and other things to be done in response. Let’s see how they freak out and what they try to do in response.

One timeline, actions can have an effect. But once you time travel you unmoor yourself from normal causality, so you could do things that should negate your existence and nothing will happen to you.

Indeed, if you time travel again you can’t affect your own actions anymore. Like, you travel back 20 minutes, do things for an hour, then jump back 5 minutes, when you go back the second time you can’t alter yourself. You could go later the you from before you ever time traveled though.

For me, given my age and all…five million.

Which kind of rich do you mean? The ‘this person is truly wealthy but it’s not unreasonable’ or ‘this person is unacceptably rich and should have their money taken away if not worse’?

The former can be somewhere around…$10,000,000 or so. Lower the older the person is really (cause I consider rich versus remaining expected lifespan), so maybe even as low as $6,000,000 for someone who’s currently 40.

The latter where it’s simply unacceptable for people to have that much I’d start the cutoff around $400,000,000 or so.

And slight sidenote on the unacceptable levels: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos both are so unacceptably wealthy that they could make one person a day wealthy by my $10,000,000 standard…every day…for 100 years…before running out (and that’s assuming they stopped accruing money at the beginning of this)…and still be unacceptably wealthy to a crazy degree.

Oh and all my numbers are assuming no additional income and definitely no interest or investment (but also assuming the money remains the same value it has today).

That guy failed. It makes a big difference when they actually get killed.

The time to do this would’ve been immediately after it was discovered that Trump took classified documents and had them in his home during visits from foreign agents.

The Republicans would’ve howled about it, but I think it could have been done, at that moment. Like, have the first news about it not be talking about the documents, but simply that former President Trump has been detained and will not be allowed to communicate with anyone but his legal representation, because of suspicion of potential coded communication to enemy agents.

Ice sinks to a certain point. If being attached to the shelf was holding that ice up higher than it would float, it’ll sink.

Don’t know if the movie shows it sinking further than that though, but the general assertion that ice doesn’t sink at all is definitely mistaken.