If the choice is between genocide and genocide + fascism, and there is no viable option 3 without genocide, then the argument is still embrace the genocide or democracy ends. The alternative is embrace genocide and who really needs all this democracy anyway?

Nah, he doth protest too much. I don’t expect women are appearing in his “fantasies”. Definitely finding Christmas presents if you catch my drift.

Same here, and I am hoping that as battery density increases I may be able to extend the range on mine when the car gets old enough for a rebuild.

To be fair, any American at least 35 years old can run for president. Criminal status or history isn’t a block to that, to prevent pulling a Putin and jailing political rivals to clear the field. The media is also a cesspool of ragebait and train wrecks due to the 24 hour news cycle and “ratings”.

I don’t think those are inherently opposed, the whole point of libertarianism being about liberty. Power gained through free market principles is no different than any other power, and thus can and should be opposed through competing ideas/services. If I don’t like your service being provided, I or anyone should be free to provide a competing service that matches my needs/values.

Being a libertarian doesn’t require keeping Fountainhead as your Bible and worshipping at the feet of oligarchs instead of politicians/the State, and I would argue selling your soul to the company store is as antithetical to liberty as selling your soul to a centralized State. But as you’ve indirectly mentioned, there is a rather huge spectrum under the libertarian umbrella.

I won’t speak for other libertarians, as I know there are those that think do worship the oligarchy, and many of my views do probably put me on the left side of libertarianism. If I didn’t believe that government has a role is keeping free markets free and providing stability and peace for liberty to exist (most fiscally conservatively paid for by collapsing all social safety nets into an actual UBI requiring miniscule overhead, Universal Healthcare, and more Georgist tax codes), I’d probably be closer to the anarcho-capitalists maybe? Maybe some offshoot or flavor of Minarchist?

It only needs to be solved if the country is going to survive, so if that doesn’t matter then it doesn’t. There will be knock on results from that, because countries usually fall a grade or two when they fail, and with decreased affluence the number of children will increase again.

The reality is that if you do not have at least a replacement rate, retirement and social safety nets will fail as they become overwhelmed which leads to social unrest and upheaval. Immigration can help, but this comes with its own trade-offs. 8 billion people is also nowhere near an overstressor for the planet if fossil fuels and pollutants can be curbed, and even dropping the numbers of humans substantially will not help with unfettered greed continues to drive dirty industrialization

You are correct, as quality of life increases overall fertility rates decrease. That does need to be solved, and immigration is part of that solution. Unlimited/unregulated immigration is not.

Difficulty with legal immigration is generally the case for almost every first world country, the US is not abnormal or exclusive there. I do not meet qualifications to immigrate to Canada, or anywhere in Europe right now even as a tech sector worker, except possibly by having family history through my ancestors. I am not arguing that US immigration policy needs a lot of work, but it’s not fair how much the US gets singled out for it as if it’s the outlier here.

The invisible hand of the market is not all powerful, which is why regulation and safeguards are needed for a “free” market to function. Anti-monopoly laws, labor laws, etc. I lean libertarian, but do not embrace 100% laissez-faire economics. Immigration falls under this same framework.

The West has eliminated their manufacturing and blue collar base by outsourcing it overseas, which hurt large swaths of the working class. Outsourcing labor by importing labor from overseas to do the job cheaper here has similar results. See the agricultural sector in the US for this example. Everyone always says that the reason immigrants are needed is because Americans don’t want to do those jobs, but leave out “for the wages paid”.

Some regulation is needed, and we have had wholesale failure of meaningful regulation and complete regulatory capture by the oligarchy which started under Reagan and snowballed out of control since. Proper support networks and social safety nets have also failed, for the same reasons. Unrestricted immigration does not solve these issues, and with these holes in place does indeed hurt.

Things that aren’t a problem when everything is healthy and working as intended can definitely hurt when things aren’t healthy. Obviously the “health issues” need to be addressed to actually fix the problem, but ignoring symptoms while doing so doesn’t help.

This may only be within the range of human hearing, and you can and do still suffer damage from excessive amplitude by frequencies above and below what is human detectable. ANC is not a protective technology for this reason, it is a quality of life technology.

I’ve been wanting that since 1994. Jawsome!

No, but it’s equivalent to the $180-280 most of the current JNCOs are actually priced at. I think the $2000 comment was exaggerating for effect, because I can’t even find anything on their website over $300.

They were $80-100 jeans in '90s dollars back then, so about the same price with inflation really. They were always a niche corner of the market when compared to regular jeans, they were just a popular niche for a while.

That is because the “well regulated militia” part is neither the subject of the sentence, nor a qualifier for the rest of the sentence. It’s pretty straight forward English sentence structure. It explains a primary reason why the individual right to keep and bear arms “shall not be infringed” is important, and like a comment line in computer code it doesn’t “do” anything to the rest of the program.

The federalist papers and the militia acts back up that “originalist” interpretation.

America is a power bottom, and proud of it.

Yeah, let’s have a constitutional convention in this environment to update the entire Constitution, let’s see how quick the bill of rights gets tossed out for a complete police state and possibly a theocracy. The most fractious the country has ever been is a great time to remove and replace the foundation of a country. Or are you thinking more of a coup where only one political “side” makes the new constitution they want, and it just gets enforced on everybody else?

Since the entire union doesn’t work anymore and needs to be reworked from the ground up devaluing/depowering States, let’s be honest: there is no way the entire country re-forms whole under its existing borders. We will end up with at least 2 or 3 countries in what was once the contiguous 48.

I guess it’s been a while since there’s been a good civil war.

You seem to be confusing taking no action with taking positive action when compared to a negative action, conflating both to be the same thing under an “if you aren’t explicitly with me then you’re against me” view point. If the University we’re going out of its way to dump more money into new Israeli investments, then that would be the same belief but opposite. Not changing anything is by definition the only neutral action, and any change in any direction would be political. Not saying anything about what is ultimately “right”, just that there “is” an apolitical option and that is to do whatever would be done if this whole thing wasn’t happening.

Each Wyoming is worth one California in the Senate due to the fact that California and Wyoming are both single states. The messed up part is the missing like 140 representatives that should exist to balance population to representative for each state.

If Microsoft can’t figure out how to unlock the taskbar in Win11 so over/under monitor layouts can work (taskbar being bottom/bottom top/top), it will be for me. Drive me up a wall that the whole point of Win11 was a better UI, and basic fucking customization is dropped. I didn’t buy a Mac, don’t try and tell me how I am supposed to set up my desktops.

Game Theory is a hard mathematics concept and not an applied scientific theory, so you’re in the ballpark but slightly adjacent. The fact that so many people can graduate high school without the basic understanding of the scientific method and the differences between a hypothesis, a theory, and a scientific law is concerning, I grant you that, but the number of graduates who can’t read proficiently is even more concerning.

MatPat may not have been a Mr Wizard, Beakman, or Bill Nye, but he was not the worst Pop-science entertainment platform out there. Just like comic books didn’t corrupt the youth and kill reading for the generations since the Golden Age, I doubt the Game Theorists did much harm to the public’s knowledge of science. It is not the job of YouTube entertainers or ticktockers to teach science, and if a few people become interested in science because of channels or programs like these and go on to learn more or focus in STEM in school, then I think that’s probably a net positive.

Damn, only three drinks to slurred? Dad’s a cheap date.