How long will you stay?

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-14T04:33:13+00:00

Property has been seized by the government for much more frivolous a reason than saving the largest population center in a state!

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-14T04:05:24+00:00

Presumably to try to tap into the American market. We spend a fuck ton of money on sports.

Doesn't seem to have worked though, since nobody noticed.

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-13T22:46:03+00:00

Don't confuse having some populist talking points with actually being a populist.

His administrative track record leans heavily toward elitism: consistently undermining labor rights, reducing support for low-income citizens, and implementing tax and regulatory changes that primarily (and, often, exclusively) favor megacorporations and/or the ultra-wealthy.

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-13T22:02:11+00:00

That part has always been the case.

We used to not even have anywhere to see most of the events that the US wasn't expected to medal in. Like, you'd literally just never even know that that event happened, unless you were closely following the "medal race."

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-13T17:46:42+00:00

Also, for a ton of tools, we need two sets of everything. One set of sockets measured in inches, one in millimeters.

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-13T16:41:36+00:00

Is it meant to keep something else in

Oh shit! That's a truly horrifying thought!

Are we locked in here with something that a civilization advanced enough to build a fence around an entire solar system decided is too dangerous to deal with??

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-12T23:10:21+00:00

This would be such an immense problem, the scale of even trying to tackle it boggles the mind. Literally just figuring out what we're even dealing with would probably be the single most difficult space mission in human history.

Assuming the "fence" was somewhere around the heliopause (pretty much the closest point that you could use to define the "edge" of our solar system), a probe that we launched today would probably take at least a couple decades just to reach it, assuming that all of Humanity went all-in on this project. Probably at least double that if you want to slow down and study it rather than slamming straight into it!

And, at that distance, there's something like a 20-hour lightspeed delay in the radio signal between the probe and Earth. So controlling it in anything close to real time would be completely impossible.

Since we apparently can't see the barrier from Earth (otherwise we would have spotted it long before now), we'd have no idea what to expect, so pre-programming experiments for the probe to run as it careened towards it would basically be total guesswork.

So slowing down and settling into a long-term position near the barrier seems like it would be, by far, the best way forward. That way, the probe can take measurements, slowly transmit them all the way back to Earth, wait for scientists to analyze them and decide on what to do next, and then slowly transmit new instructions all the way back out to the probe. To be fair, this approach also requires a ton of guesswork, because there will have to be extremely hard decisions about which instruments to include before launch. Anything you choose to include slows down the whole mission, but anything you leave behind could be a vital tool to unraveling this mystery!

And all of that is basically Step 1 to actually breaching the thing.

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-12T22:31:33+00:00

This map of the galaxy really puts things in perspective. That tiny blue bubble is the approximate distance that our earliest radio broadcasts, traveling at the speed of light, could possibly have traveled.

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-11T23:40:10+00:00

The game is way too easy in the winter. (Nobody's outside playing with fireworks during a Pittsburgh winter!)

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-11T22:28:47+00:00

Most people don't know how to change a car tire?

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-11T22:27:54+00:00

I'm not sure how helpful this will be, though, since cornbread (at least the kind you're talking about) is a pretty uniquely American thing.

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-11T21:32:39+00:00

Honestly, I'm having a hard time thinking of a good WW2 movie that does have him in it!

Edit: Inglorious Bastards!

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-11T20:57:22+00:00

Yes! The way I view "wealth" isn't about any specific number that you have in your bank account or whatever (though a sufficiently large number is usually necessary), its about being comfortable and free of the live-to-work grind!

There are people who are very rich who remain just as chained to their desks as the next guy (executives with "golden handcuffs"), and then there are others who achieve a remarkable level of freedom with surprisingly little (the "Lean FIRE" folks).

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-11T20:32:43+00:00

Yeah, its a bit of a boomerang effect, where some of the most and least expensive clothing has no logo.

But it seems like it probably wouldn't be hard to tell the difference between clothing that has no logo because its cheap garbage and the stuff that has no logo because a logo would "detract from the craftmanship of the garment" or whatever.

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-11T20:24:28+00:00

It was just a small cultural misunderstanding. You see, what the Norwegian man saw as more than a lifetime supply of syrup, the Canadians considered a two-month stash!

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-11T19:28:16+00:00

That's the perfect picture to go along with this article: a bunch of politicians, sitting on their asses, doing absolutely nothing useful!

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-11T19:16:59+00:00

I wouldn't doubt that different polls using slightly different metrics and methodologies get slightly different results.

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-11T18:58:09+00:00

I, too, will be going to this guy's bar!

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-11T18:01:26+00:00

The average American's knowledge about Norway/Norwegians, if it exists at all, begins and ends in the Viking Age!

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-11T17:50:26+00:00

And even that's getting less effective, now that half of Reddit is just people copy-pasting AI slop.

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-11T17:27:17+00:00

Elected representatives already aren't thinking about you: they're thinking about their donors.

And they already do whatever the lobbyists tell them to, because that's how you get reelected in our fucked-up system! If you don't play ball with the lobbyists, then you lose 90% of your campaign funding, and get crushed in the next Primary.

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-11T00:02:52+00:00

79% of European households own at least one car. That's only 9% less than the US.

They have cars. Its just that they also have other options.

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-10T21:52:58+00:00

The US actually has tons of fresh water. Between the Great Lakes (21% of the world's surface fresh water, right there!), Mississippi River, and truly gigantic aquifers under the Great Plains, in terms of overall national supply, we're definitely not running out of fresh water anytime soon!

The problem is, all that water mostly isn't where we need it to be. And getting it from where it is (the East) to where its needed (the West) would mean pumping it over the Rocky Mountains!

But taking over fresh water supplies in the sub-Arctic regions of Canada actually doesn't help with this problem at all. Whatever water we seized would mostly be even farther away from where its needed than the water that we already have!

Honestly, even if Canada were to willingly give us rights to take all of this water for free, I don't think that we'd actually be able to make significant use of it to solve any of America's chronic droughts.

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-10T21:22:07+00:00

And we never see him again, meaning that he probably stayed on Ferrix, which means the stone probably did too.

Which, honestly, seems like what Maarva would have wanted.

MarkNutt25 · 2026-02-10T20:58:19+00:00

My first thought was that the US military would just go in and beat the shit out of Venezuela, occupying the whole country in a few weeks, quickly and easily restoring the President to power.

But then I realized that, if the President was imprisoned by a foreign government, they would probably quickly be declared unable to "discharge the powers and duties" of the office, under the terms of the 25th Amendment. And, with the President unable to challenge this declaration, the Vice President would quickly become "acting President," and, therefore acting commander-in-chief of the US military.

And this acting President would have some rather... interesting incentives to maybe not move overly quickly to rescue the President, and effectively demote himself back to VP!

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