We've hosted a bunch of European exchange kids over the years, and they tell us that it already feels like the EU is realigning with China away from the US.
Trying to find it and not having a lot of luck because I don't remember the exact quote, and variations of "Trump Schumer Poll Strategy" just leads to a dump truck of results about Schumer's own (worse than Trump) embarrassingly bad poll numbers and articles about how pissed off democrats are with their own party. IIRC, it was on the Daily Show. I'll update if I do find it.
I read somewhere that none of Trump's talk of mass, indiscriminate deportation was translated, like in their Spanish language ads. All of the Spanish language ads were supposedly geared towards "nooooo lmao we're only going to deport violent criminals and drug lords!"
I think this has a very high chance of being exactly the case, out of all the comments in this post.
Edit: actually, IIRC, Schumer has more or less stated that it's his plan to just let Trump off the leash, not be an opposition party at all, and let Americans get what they voted for. Basically, instead of seeing that they lost to motherfucking Trump a second time and wondering if maybe they're the problem, they've decided on punishing all of the US, including their own constituents who did elect them, for not choosing the democrats.
We did get a primary, I voted for Dean Phillips. It was a bullshit primary because they lied about and covered up Biden's condition until it was too late to do anything about it, but we did have one.
This shit haunts me sometimes. I remember hearing somewhere that the Taliban actually offered to deliver OBL to the US if they would promise not to invade and we were like "get fucked, idiot". How many people's lives did we needlessly destroy, regardless of nationality, both in Iraq and Afghanistan? What else could have been bought besides misery with the nearly four trillion between those two wars?
Little known fact that the Nazis were at last turned back at Stalingrad by the wittiest picket sign made in the Soviet Union. The sign, which used a mock spelling of Hitler's name, simply read "A doof, Hitler". Many historians believe that the German military never fully recovered from this humiliation.
I want you to know that you nerd sniped me with this comment and I started doing the math. To raise the apparent size of Betelgeuse to the apparent size of Jupiter (at its largest to the naked eye), you'd need a minimum 20 inch aperture telescope to pull the required 1000x magnification. Mind you:
20 inches is not a mass produced telescope size, but there ARE custom makers who produce reflectors at and well beyond this size. There are certainly terrestrial telescopes that can achieve what we need.
you're still not resolving any details at that size, it's just raising Betelgeuse to the same apparent size as Jupiter at its naked eye largest.
most places on earth are not conducive to magnifications over 300x. You can certainly do it, and sometimes the atmospheric conditions are ridiculously clear and you can pull off stupid levels of magnification, but there's a reason why observatories get built up on mountains a lot. 1000x is... Well, good luck. Especially since Orion and Betelgeuse never get too close to the zenith, meaning there's always a substantial amount of atmosphere to deal with.
Edit: let's go with raising it to the same apparent size as the full moon, which occupies about 30 arcminutes or 1800 arc seconds. Jupiter is 50 arc seconds at the largest, and Betelgeuse is 0.05 arc s. To figure out how much we need to magnify Betelgeuse by, we take the apparent size of the moon and divide it by the apparent size of Betelgeuse, yielding 36,000x. Assuming a spherical cow, telescope aperture is what limits the maximum useful magnification, and the equation to derive that is roughly 50x aperture. So, if we divide 36,000 by 50, we'll get our minimum required aperture of 720 inches, or fifty feet. IIRC, we have at least one terrestrial telescope that's at least that large, down in Chile, though I'm almost certain there are more and larger ones, too.
Isn't this functionally true for objects on the infinite focal plane? I.e. a star? Betelgeuse might actually be huge in absolute terms, but from earth, and even in a large telescope, it's still a pinpoint whose circumference is not meaningfully distinct from its diameter.
Agreed. I think a lot of people in light red and purple areas probably had my same experience of being really surprised at the amount of support there was. The occupy protest in my city was like three dudes in two tents. The No Kings protests stretched for three city blocks and we got a ton of enthusiastic responses (and only, like, three counter protests that I saw) from people driving through. I never ever would have imagined that kind of turnout and support in this town, and I found myself feeling really encouraged that there's a lot more local support for resisting this bullshit than I estimated.
So, I attended my local protest. 9/10 experience, had a blast and also realized that being anti-Trump and keeping our republic is a waaaaaaaay more popular position (even in my light red area) than I thought it was. The local police department has its priorities straight and they didn't show up to the protest at all, so there were zero problems with law enforcement. The only thing keeping it from being a 10/10 was what I didn't see:
Clear demands. This was what happened with Occupy. It generated a lot of buzz and got tons of attention, and when they finally asked the protestors "what are your demands?", the answer was basically "idk, everything sucks. Make it stop sucking". We need some clear, hard, attainable demands or we're just going to repeat Occupy.
Organizing. There was almost no organizing happening, no outreach or recruiting for or between political, advocacy, or support groups. People showed up and left with no additional contacts, commitments, or follow ups. That is a wasted opportunity.
I mean, if you can reasonably bridge the gulf between stars, scientific advancement is basically all that's left, unless it's just your culture to be slaving, warmongering dickheads. Your home solar system probably has all the raw materials and energy you could ever ask for.
For me, it's more like it just gets wrecked by a new hyperfixation until they both plateau just in time for a new one to come charging in. I've got at least seven topics that I can basically turn into a human Wikipedia page on.
The criticality of any given service is inversely proportional to how recently released was the technology that it runs on.
This, if you see some ancient machine sitting there humming, don't even make eye contact with that mf, don't even think about it. In fact, try to minimize your time in the same room so when it eventually goes tits up, you don't get blamed.
We've hosted a bunch of European exchange kids over the years, and they tell us that it already feels like the EU is realigning with China away from the US.