I don’t have kids so I dunno if it’s still happening, but my dad had a brief and very awkward conversation with me to tell me that if I had sex to make sure to use a condom but if I ever did get a girl pregnant I could always tell him and it’d be OK, we’d figure it out, etc. Nothing fancy or anything; just the essentials to make sure I wasn’t a dumbass about sex.

Honestly, nowadays a part of the “birds and bees” talk should include an explanation of privacy settings and common Internet scams.

Absolutely not; I wish all kids argued their case using well-thought-out presentations

In principle I agree. The problem is that there are countries which don’t care about respecting law and if you kill AI in the West, all that will happen is the West will get left behind.

A large what?

The only way in which shares can more-or-less translate to real money at their face value is if you use them as collateral on a loan. This is how rich people are rich: they use their shares to take out loans which provide them with spendable money. Money now is always more valuable than money in the future, due to inflation and opportunity cost, so most rich people are almost always in monumental amounts of debt, but because they were able to spend a bunch of money up-front, they’re able to invest in things that bring them even more money to pay the debt off. Example: if you had the money to buy a house and rent it out to tenants, the rent you receive will EASILY cover the mortgage - the trick is getting the collateral to get a mortgage to begin with.

The only danger is that banks and lenders write in a clause that if your share prices (ie the collateral the loan relies on) drops below a certain value, you are forced to sell the shares off and give them the proceeds, so that they can recoup at least some of the money they lost on your bad collateral before it devalues completely. This could, theoretically, happen to Musk if $TSLA drops below a certain threshold, which is what half the Internet seems to be hoping for.

Well it is, in the sense that rather than you becoming slightly better at things, everybody else becomes much worse, thereby you are still above average even though you have gotten worse.

Yep this is “Trump’s Great Leap Forward” and we should start referring to it as such.

Well, yes. It’s no use just paying and not actually downloading it, for obvious reasons but also for the reasons I assume you mean, whereby once you have the files you’re no longer reliant on GOG to keep them available.

Just buy your games on GOG. No DRM

And he always proudly points out that he himself has never been personally bankrupt. Somehow, the fact that he always manages to bankrupt his investors instead of himself was seen as a good reason why America should become his next big investor.

I would say that:

-O’Brien keeps the machines running

-Bashir keeps O’Brien alive

-The black markwt keeps the economy running

-Quark keeps the black market running

-Rom and Leeta keep Quark’s running

-Odo keeps Quark in check

-Sisko’s reputation for DGAF ruthlessness keeps the Cardassians away

-Garak keeps an ear to the ground for the rare occasions when the Cardassians dare to plot fuckery

-Keiko keeps the kids from turning feral

-Kira keeps Bajor happy with the Federation setup

-Dax is also there

I would develop some city neighborhoods and set up some community land trusts to run them.

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That’s a rug pull, though. Both the American and EU states only agreed to join their respective unions in the first place on the promise that these systems of balances would give them this level of input on union policy. Without such assurances, what small nation would ever agree to become inevitably subordinate to the whims of a larger state? It would never happen, and the western world would remain fractured into small nation-states constantly warring with each other, failing to cooperate and probably getting picked off, one by one, by nations like China or Russia which have no such qualms about forcing a union through conquest.

No, these unions were negotiated in good faith and if we’re unhappy with them now, then the answer should be secession. Brexit proved that nobody is forced to remain in the EU if they don’t like the deal.

The EU has a similar system:

• Each EU member state gets ONE seat at the EU Council, regardless of population. This is comparable to the US Senate.
• Differences in population size are accounted for by EU Parliament, where the number of MEPs (Members of European Parliament) a member state gets is determined by population. This is comparable to the US House of Representatives.
• Finally there is the EU Commission which is the executive branch, comparable to the US president and cabinet.

The point of the EU Council/US Senate is to protect isolated regions from getting steamrolled by urban regions. Farmers are comparatively few relative to city industry workers, but any nation, union or federation is built on the back of farming. However, due to the distance and lack of interaction between city dwellers and rural dwellers, it’s easy for city dwellers to grow disconnected from the reality of just how important the rural dimension is, and vote for laws that only suit the city. It is utterly necessary to create a system which balances the two. Otherwise you’d have, like, three states (New York, California, Texas) making all the decisions, with the other 47 states having to like it or lump it.

I still maintain that as great as DS9 was, it started Trek on a self-destructive path of constantly trying to go even darker and edgier. Gene had utopian rules for a reason, and although some of them were probably too restrictive, the whole point of Star Trek, the unique selling point it possesses that no other franchise has, is that it offers us a vision of the future that isn’t a dystopian hellscape. A positive look at what the future could be for us if we follow our nobler instincts. DS9 eroded that by suggesting that it was all bullshit, that the Federation was just as unenlightened as we are today, and although it made for a great show in the short term, in the long term it hurt the franchise because darker and edgier yields ever diminishing returns.

In fairness I think the memetic virus was meant to stimulate individualism and perhaps general revolt in the Borg, and Picard and co didn’t think it would result in the collective simply purging entire cubes remotely just to keep the contagion contained. The memetic virus was meant to be the nonlethal option. It turned out to be lethal only because Picard and co underestimated just how ruthlessly it would be crushed. Of course, then again, perhaps I’m misremembering.

Put simply: if RCV had been in place for the US presidential race in 2024, the Gaza issue wouldn’t have split the Democratic vote.

Don’t blame me; I voted for Kodos