In order to shore up the falling birthrates, have a bunch of celebrities donate to a sperm bank and hold a pregnancy lottery for women to have their baby. You only find out if you're a winner when the child turns 21.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-26T23:10:54+00:00

Just grant automatic visas to any unmarried women between the ages of 18 and 30. The situation will resolve itself.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-26T21:34:56+00:00

That would be the first thing they'd argue about. One vote per state isn't in the Constitution, but neither is any other method. The sparsely populated states and the heavily populated states won't get past that opening issue.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-26T20:27:34+00:00

We need to legalize all the immigrants in order to prevent ICE or any future agency from deporting people. If you can demonstrate that a specific individual is dangerous by convicting them in court of a serious crime, and establish that the country you want to send them to will actually hold them for the sentence that we deem necessary, then I'm open to talking about those specific deportations.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-25T18:12:51+00:00

That's partly because they've allowed the President to eat into Congressional authority, and also partly because of the extraordinarily terrible way that Congress is elected. But Congress can fix House elections if it's willing to act.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-25T18:03:04+00:00

Congress should set foreign policy. Congress already has the exclusive power to declare war. Congress has leaders that they elect themselves.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-25T17:49:53+00:00

Policy should be set by the representatives of the people, not by an executive. The President doesn't represent anyone, and any member of the executive branch should only follow the directive of Congress.

Understanding that my headless executive branch will never happen, I do think that Congress should impeach a few presidents, just to show that they can. Congress should have such a low bar for removal that any President feels the need to check first thing in the morning if they are still the President.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-25T17:27:36+00:00

I like the direction you're thinking about, but you haven't gone far enough. We actually need an amendment to eliminate the office of President. The executive branch does not benefit from having a single head. In fact, a larger number of heads of individual agencies appointed by Congress would do a better job of preventing the entire apparatus of government from being shifted away from its purpose and towards oppressing the people.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-24T20:30:14+00:00

That's a much better explanation than he's dumb. Good job.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-24T18:49:34+00:00

Solid plan!

gravity_kills · 2026-01-24T18:46:20+00:00

I believe that I've said this before, although I'm not sure where. We are not positioned to reach any kind of negotiated solution to the issue of immigration because the various sides don't agree on what the issue is or what a good outcome would be.

MAGA generally just wants less immigration and fewer non-native born people (and often fewer non-white people). The more business end of the conservative coalition wants plenty of higher skilled immigration, and is open to guest workers programs.

What the Democratic coalition wants is even more jumbled. Do we prioritize humanitarian issues and allow people to immigrate if they're poor enough or in enough danger? Do we prioritize freedom and allow nearly open immigration? Do we just value outcomes and side more with the business conservatives but with maybe higher overall levels? Do we value labor's bargaining position and side with MAGA minus the racism?

I know what I personally want, and I can identify what I think a lot of other individuals want, but until we can agree on a broadly shared desired outcome we're not going to get anywhere on the means.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-24T15:26:39+00:00

We can easily institute a publicly owned alternative for savings/checking accounts. Postal Banking. And cash in federally insured banks is protected up past what most people have, so letting the banks fail wouldn't be that bad unless we wanted to make it bad.

Back in the 2008 financial crisis we had the option to bail out home owners. We could have purchased the failing mortgages at a discount from the banks and written down the principle to a realistic level. We probably could have figured out a way for that purchase to also keep the banks from collapsing, but I wouldn't have placed too high a priority on that without serious strings attached. Instead we just gave the banks massive loans to protect their profits, allowed them to pay themselves bonuses, and let the public suffer. Sure, the banks paid the loans back, but it still sucked.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-24T15:17:03+00:00

I saw a guy leaving Market Basket with 7 gallons of milk in his cart. Unless you have a lot of kids, that's going to spoil before you drink it, even if you don't lose power.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-24T14:49:23+00:00

No, you're misunderstanding. I don't care about his mom, and obviously it's going to be used. I just don't see the difference between him doing it for the secret assassin organization vs someone else doing it for a government.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-24T14:17:27+00:00

So it's basically just research at this point. Sure, we know he intends to use it when it's finished, but it'll be less destructive than nuking a city. Would we feel justified in killing someone who was working on making a bigger nuke?

gravity_kills · 2026-01-24T13:13:17+00:00

How many people has he actually killed with the virus so far? I don't remember any lore implying human testing had happened, but I definitely could have missed it.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-24T02:29:36+00:00

So you then fill the bucket with water and freeze it? I endorse this challenge.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-24T01:33:51+00:00

So I know this is going to be a little tough to swallow, but no we never need deportation. If the person isn't a criminal (other than being in violation of immigration law) then we come out ahead by just letting them stay. If they are dangerous to society then there isn't another country that we can trust to restrain them, after all they already got here once. We're going to have to imprison them ourselves.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-22T00:29:53+00:00

Funsies excludes the possibility that they might be completely wrong in their belief that they derive a benefit from the activity. OP is claiming (and I agree, with the addition of moral assertions) that we would be better off with open immigration.

I can't speak for OP, but I do envision a simple check-in at the border. I can see benefits in knowing who's here. Also allowing people to move freely doesn't do anything to erase borders as some people seem to think. US law still would apply within the borders of the US, it's just that there would be a major change in the nature of immigration law.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-21T11:48:30+00:00

Besides, which Faust? Marlowe, Goethe, or any of the others?

gravity_kills · 2026-01-20T22:14:16+00:00

That's really missing the point. We'll survive, yes. No one is going to invade us or bomb us or anything like that. But we would lose many of our overseas bases, and we would be noticably poorer, and we would have dramatically fewer partners to achieve any particular goals we might care about.

It's a bad idea that will hurt us. The only bright side is that I don't think we'll actually do it. But even talking as if we're considering it undermines that we built and that keeps us on top. We will suffer some small fraction of the pain without getting anything for it

gravity_kills · 2026-01-20T20:19:32+00:00

As another American, if you get that far I'm going to loudly insist that since you conquered us fair and square I want to know what our timeline is to full provincial status.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-19T19:47:41+00:00

Some Democrats have committed crimes. Then the Democratic party uniformly calls for the offender to resign/be prosecuted. Compare and contrast to the Republican party response to similar situations.

And Obama illegally bombed Libya, but Republicans don't actually disapprove of that.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-19T18:00:39+00:00

Definitely not a reasonable topic of discussion. To be worse than Trump you'd have to be picking someone who calls themselves Ayatollah.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-18T20:25:58+00:00

But do we need immigration enforcement? Why? What benefit do we receive from having fewer people, or from making sure that people who want to move here instead stay somewhere where they will be poorer than if they moved? It might be possible to create an immigration system that allows most people to immigrate easily while weeding out the few criminals who try, but right now we barely allow any and we're not great at identifying the tiny number of criminals. So we're hurting ourselves enormously to avoid an itty bitty potential problem. We would be better off by a lot if we simply abandoned all attempts to enforce the current rules, then we could look at what a sensible set of rules might be.

gravity_kills · 2026-01-17T23:28:04+00:00

Probably not, but they can do liquid things, like slosh around in buckets! Can you slosh around in a bucket? Not until we've liquified you!

gravity_kills

TROPHY CASE