The ISS is primarily designed to research the effects of microgravity and other space environment issues. Hard to study zero g manufacturing when your station has artificial gravity.

Diesel still catches fire. It’s not as bad as gasoline, but it’s still flammable.

I’m hoping he bungles the negotiations so much that it’s like the plot of a Sitcom. In the end the only way to make it work is for JD Vance to personally convert to Shia Islam.

I remember reading this when it came out. It’s truly a gem. My favorite is probably the studio apartment with a pool in it.

Why are act utilitarians so insufferably smug?

Some voters vote for the future. Some for accountability for past actions. You don’t get to tell people the right way to vote.

In many ways, you’re advocating an inferior strategy. Politicians lie all the time, and their campaign promises are mostly wishful thinking. But holding a party accountable for their past actions actually has real data to go off of.

You’re just stirring the pot. Why do you want Trump to win?

Well, you just going to sit there complaining? Or are we going to do something? Grab a shovel and a plasma cutter, we have buildings to move!

Why do you need a separate registration step to do any of that? You already know how many eligible voters live in each precinct. Voter registration made sense before state-issued photo ids were a thing. But they’re now just a tool of voter suppression.

What can you do with voter registration rolls that you can’t do with a database of names, addresses, and citizenship status?

Voter registration is still complety pointless. Why do you even need to register to vote? Sure, it’s location-based, but you should just be able to show up to the polls with your drivers license which lists your address.

Why does it need to be a completely separate thing? This is just a method to suppress the vote.

Oh go masturbate with your hammer and sickle.

When I lived in Texas, I lived in Houston, a large and racially diverse city. I found the best way to get drivers license services timely was to drive out of the cities to a primarily white rural town. Suddenly there were no more giant lines.

Jim Crow never died. He just chilled out a bit and got better marketing.

Why do you assume these all need to be new careers? Why do you assume that we can’t expand existing careers? It’s happened in the past, it can happen again. Agriculture went from employing the majority of the populace to 2%. We found jobs for everyone.

There are many professions that have immense latent demand that people simply cannot afford. Really any industry that involves a lot of human labor. People want more education than they can afford. People want more healthcare than they can afford. People want more childcare, private tutoring, home cleaning, personal trainers, life coaches, financial advisors, and on and on. Think of the retinue of assistants and employees the wealthy employ. Now imagine the number of people who can afford those services drastically expanding. We don’t even need to necessarily invent new careers. There’s plenty of latent demand already. Those masses of displaced agricultural workers? Most of them found jobs in fields that already existed.

Over the last 70 years (in the USA for ex) unemployment has been trending up.

This is false. I’ll ignore the employment rate and focus on labor force participation rate, as unemployment doesn’t count people who are long-term unemployed and have given up working. Labor force participation is a better metric here.

Labor force participation has gone up and down, corresponding with changes in demographics. Despite generations of technological change and automation, we’ve always found ways to employ the excess labor. Human labor is always the ultimate bottleneck. There’s probably enough latent demand for human labor to employ many multiples of our current population.

It made sense precisely because she wasn’t ever going to win a primary on her own. Biden acted like Trump here. Trump surrounds himself with people who have zero future without him. His cabinet is filled with profoundly unqualified people whose only real qualification is unwavering loyalty to Trump. This is a classic move of authoritarian leaders, as their advisors then become completely dependent on them. Once Trump is out of office, Hegseth is never going to have a role in government again. (Unless some other authoritarian president is seeking a loyal lackey.)

Biden did a less extreme version of this with Kamala. Kamala certainly wasn’t objectively unqualified for her job like Hegseth is, but she also could never had obtained a leadership position in the White House via her own merits.

You can still buy those expensive appliances. The brands exist. Just be prepared to pay the prices your grandparents paid.

Eh. It made more sense hundreds of years ago for people to build houses that lasted for centuries. That kind of construction makes sense in periods of slow technological and social change.

But think of how differently people live now vs just a hundred years ago. Imagine buying a house without running water, electric wiring, or insulation. Sure, old homes can be renovated to have these. But that requires tearing the thing down to the bare stone or wood walls and starting from scratch. You have to gut the entire building. The only thing that remains is the shell, a shell which represents only 20% of the cost of the building, if that. Most of the cost of a building is not in the structure itself, yet that’s the only part that gets saved in a complete gutting and renovation.

If you build a house today that lasts centuries, the only way that house will still be occupied 300 years from now is if it’s been gutted down to the studs multiple times over the generations. And at that point, why build an ultra-durable house in the first place? Why not build something lighter that requires fewer resources up front, and can simply be torn down and recycled once it’s become obsolete?

Why would a US attack on Iran under Kamala be farfetched?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Prosperity_Guardian

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US–UK_airstrikes_on_Yemen

Trump didn’t start this war. He ramped it up, but he’s fighting the same proxy war with Iran that Biden was.

Here’s a blacksmith starting their fire with a hammer.

That’s why they have radiators.

I approve of this.