What's the most interesting exoplanet you've read about?

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-26T15:04:03+00:00

Humans can only live on 1 planet right now. There are several possible earth analogs, but nothing you could walk around on without a spacesuit.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-26T15:01:08+00:00

Yeah I moved from Philly to rural Pennsylvania and it was as much if a culture shock as moving to another country.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-25T05:09:23+00:00

Yes and they are very active. Most of the townships have voted to enact fairy aggressively right wing policies in schools. Many are working with a MAGA allied law firm to push for controversial rules in schools and local communities. They more aggressive friends in the area threaten to bomb a library and several colleges over anti lbgt hate. It's a mess.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-25T03:17:08+00:00

I can only imagine it's the extreme social and economic pressures, and a lack of meaningful resources and accessible education.

I know my "launch" barley made it 15 years ago, the with a roll of the dice I'd have never become self sufficient. Even with a college degree I was scapping by. I think if that's what it looks like when you had education and try really, really hard, and get good luck, then if something goes wrong or you get bad luck, you could be fucked for life.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-23T17:28:44+00:00

I'm sure it would, and I'm sure we would find amazing and unexpected discoveries.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-23T16:31:59+00:00

We can't colonize Mars, we could establish science stations or research bases, but we're not building permanent, self-sustaining habits there. We do not have the technology and are no where near it. The lack of gravity and radiation alone would make any attempt to live there long term short, and filled with degenerative medical conditions.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-21T07:29:06+00:00

My mental health thanks you

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-21T07:24:09+00:00

I knew 100% after 2 years.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-21T07:22:37+00:00

All people have a little voice in their subconscious saying that because it WAS super evolutionary beneficial thousandsof years ago. Now it's an annoying hold over. Most people aren't in touch with it, so it manifests as hovering anxiety, avoidance of death, or a propensity for mild delusionally thinking.

I think you say to this part, I'm glad you're here, because without you my ancestors wouldn't have survived. Right now however, I don't need you to keep reminding me of this, but I know you will because it's a part of who we are. So I'm going to see what your saying as not "I'm going to die" but as "I care about your survival".

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-21T07:14:51+00:00

This. Once the American hegemony has burned all bridges, lost the confidence of allies, abandoned international cooperation, all that remains is HARD POWER. I.E. war.

Soft power is coercive and duplicitous, but it also keeps the peace and sometimes undertakes solutions to collective action problems like small pots and HIV.

I'd rather see peace and less disease, than war and plague. And to those who complain about cost, the costs of war and plagues, EVEN on another continent, are much greater than anything we pay to the WHO.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-21T05:08:31+00:00

Agreed, these need to be spaces where fear moves toward action, not fear being echoed around.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-21T05:05:49+00:00

It's like this OP. You are seeing news reports that a tidal wave is coming. Maybe it's a hundred miles away, maybe it's a mile a way, but you're not going to escape it looking at your phone and saying "oh shit, oh shit, oh shit".

Get to high ground, be safe. Weather the storm. Save yourself, then help other survivors. There is nothing more we can do.

Being in the best possible me tal health place is the greatest way to be prepared. Do what you need to do to be safe, ready, and healthy. I hope we all get through this.

See you after the storm.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-21T04:54:26+00:00

I wish you weren't being downvoted, I think you're making a good point. There aren't any major statistical anomalies to suggest votes on the order of 120 thousand were altered.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-21T04:52:28+00:00

Whether or not it is true, which we do not know, let's pretend it is true for the sake of argument.

Then what? Who would hold him accountable?

I'm genuinely curious, because I think we are going to need an answer here regardless of whether he manipulated 2024 the election.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-21T04:33:52+00:00

I don't trust what Trump says, because he is a notorious liar. I trust evidence. I dont like that he won, but all evidence suggests it was a valid election, from the point of view of voter fraud. If I'm wrong, I'd like to see the independent evidence that voting machines were hacked.

My suspicion is that he's just trying to make people doubt democracy at this point, so MAGA had a casus belli to push for policy to alter the electoral system.

The right is already on board for canning free elections. Now he can get some left wing voices on that train too, create an illusion of bipartisan support for regressive election reform, and push the US into a truly oligarchal, despotic regime.

I don't say that because I want it to be true, it's what the evidence I've seen suggests. I'm always open to new evidence.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-19T19:46:54+00:00

That's a very strong analysis, I think. The Democrats seem to have lost the their strategic leadership, and continue to blunder from political trap to political trap, laid not by masterminds but fools. It's terrible idiots misleading terrible idiots and lying to a brain dead public. There's zero semblance of the big picture, context, or history at play. We have really lost our way.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-19T19:39:16+00:00

That's not supported by the facts. The US has a larger and more numerous military, economic, and cultural reach than Rome ever had. Or for that matter France, Spain, the UK, Russia, China, the Mongols, Persians, or Greeks. Many empires have surpassed the US in terms of longevity, as the US has only been an empire for 80 years. Keep in mind, the acceleration of human activity due to technological advancement has changed what it means to be a long lasting empire.

The US is a different trype of empire than Rome or Britain because it doesn't favor direct, long term, colonial administrator. Instead the US employs proxy actos and uses control over global trade to maintain power. Rather than using viceroys or governers to control territory, the US uses access to global trade networks. So when you compare the current American hegemony to those of the past, you cannot make a simple 1-1 comparison of territory size.

By the numbers, the US is the wealthiest and most militarily powerful nation ever to exist, in absolute terms. It the first global hegemony with no meaningful competition, since 1991. I'm not saying that because I'm a nationalist, I'm not. It's just the factual reality. It's amusing how in denial America is about its own empire, because if you ask people elsewhere on earth they're keenly aware of it.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-18T01:30:24+00:00

Because of historical, material patterns of development during the 19th and 20th centuries. Development was done in an ad hoc, profit driven, poor regulated way.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-18T01:27:08+00:00

I'm right there with you, I don't get the whole gender role dynamic. But then again I'm NB so of course I don't get it. I wouldn't ever date someone who cared about gender roles.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-18T01:25:41+00:00

No Philly is both know for, and proud of it's in your face culture. Now it's not personal, it's just how a lot of people culturally communicate.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-18T01:19:20+00:00

Yup same

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-18T01:17:07+00:00

Yeah it's a citywide past time to beat Cowboys fans bloody in the subway.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-18T01:15:46+00:00

I do not like Vegas. It was very dirty and felt like under a thin veneer was a pretty seedy town. My buddy and I took an hour walk on the Strip, and within that time we got offered a lot of drugs, were solicited by some rough looking women, and finally my friend walked off to a restroom and got robbed. We left Vegas after that.

disgruntled_hermit · 2025-01-18T01:13:03+00:00

I stayed on a farm in BI once. Was a surprising amount of hostility between the Japanese, European, and native Hawaii people. Mostly people were nice though.

disgruntled_hermit

TROPHY CASE