It depends when vegans attack on ten-speed bikes.

There were photos comparing what Kamala Harris wore to Lisa Simpson and it kind of felt accurate.

Kamala laid out an ok plan and Biden pushed through legislation that helped working people, but it wasn’t enough to convince people to go to the polls. And I mention going to the polls because the turnout for 2024 was less than 2020. Both parties saw a reduction in absolute numbers, it just happened to be that Republicans saw a smaller drop.

Nope. The President is both king and prime minister.

Passenger rail is still mainly a national competency. There have been some attempts at harmonizing different countries’ rail networks, but it has been slow going.

New York to Los Angeles would be a lot easier logistically than London to Athens.

The American trip would only require one changeover in Chicago. The European trip would require a changeover in every country.

A 2:1 ratio on Social Security age limits wouldn’t affect a lot of his base, so I can see Trump pushing it.

Masks are a sign that things aren’t the normal of 5 years ago.

I expect that the EU is going to have to claim defence competencies to continue the Union’s defense. There are way too many small countries in NATO that can’t contribute meaningfully to a military beyond some basic battalions and the EU needs something more robust than France and Poland.

It is worse.

Trump started with either incompetent yes men who didn’t know how to govern or competent yes men who tried controlling the damage that the President caused.

You now have a group of coordinated people who see Trump as willing to agree with whatever as long as he looks good enough.

The line that Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line seems to have been a big part of this election.

A sizeable number of Biden voters weren’t motivated to vote for Harris for a variety of reasons. And I’ve seen a lot of complaints online, maybe some in bad faith, that this being the most important election since the last one has worn thin for a lot of people.

Some leftists are claiming vindication on their views, but socialist candidates performed poorly nationally as well.

The Vulcans likely gave humans more than starcharts. I wouldn’t be surprised if Vulcans also gave humans rather large databases of other languages. There are probably also algorithms for determining languages based on known samples.

For that one planet that Archer condemned a species to die while having an easily treatable disease with their technology, first contact likely started with the person getting them in a language that the universal translators could understand then running all verbal and text communication it could through Enterprise’s computers to come up with a rough translation.

We know that the Universal Translator isn’t perfect. ST:VI had the scene where Uhura had to speak in Klingon because the Universal Translator would be detected. TNG had the translator be worthless when a species spoke only in memes. DS9 also had the episode where the genetically augmented group gained insight by listening to Weyoun in Dominionese instead of translated to English.

Yeah. The tech industry is imploding as it switches from development to maintenance.

And this is a policy the actors’ union went on strike for.

A raw number across the whole federation would be useless. Different instances have their own cultures, making a unified number worthless. People could also goose their numbers by creating an instance that gives their account unlimited karma.

Instance karma could be useful, but it is a design decision not to show it. I suspect that will continue until there is a need to use karma for moderation, but I suspect that defederation would be the lower lying fruit for now.

Karma has become a part of a measure to determine if an account is a human non-troll.

The first step in ban evasion is to create a new account and continue doing what you’ve done before. By requiring an account to be a certain age along with a certain amount of karma, it makes sure the account is less likely to be a ban evader.

This movie has Tom Hanks. But there is now a trained AI model that can make a very old Tom Hanks look younger. That same model could probably make someone who looks and sounds similar to Tom Hanks look and sound exactly like Tom Hanks.

I thought they went on strike to make sure the next Tom Hanks movie actually has Tom Hanks.

I get that a lot of billionaires support Trump because he’s going to keep taxes low and kill regulations.

They are in San Francisco while working on their tech startups.

He came to be because he was allowed to take the lead and those with power wanted him there and kept him there.

That’s assuming one all-knowing and competent group in charge, but reality isn’t like that. Sometimes people in power don’t recognize events in having significance in the moment or they respond poorly to the situation.

It is clear that Trump’s election caught a lot of people by surprise in 2016, including Trump. It is also clear that a lot of conservative Republicans saw Trump as being willing to go along with their policies most of the time.

There isn’t a single cabal responsible for choosing Trump.