“very better”? Anyway…

It won’t last. Right now it’s new, but ultimately it will become an actual initiation ritual to knock it down, or perhaps a harder version to steal something out from under its nose. It doesn’t know who you are if you wear a mask (or stay out of its line or sight) and don’t carry something broadcasting your IP.

This looks like just security theater.

Meanwhile, aren’t cameras cheap? If let’s say hundreds of those were sprinkled around, maybe behind an opaque substance so you could also put up 10-100x more of them but 9/10ths being fake, and you swap them around occasionally, that might not be perfect either but could work better than a robot offering a nice, easy, fun target to play with, just like in video games. (Nobody ever enjoys video games these days though, do they?)

It would be extremely juvenile of either of us to presume that only purist extremes are allowed to exist, with literally nothing else capable of doing so i.e. in the middle.

However, irl is the precise opposite: there is absolutely nothing that exists that conforms to those particular purely theoretical terms - i.e. you cannot point to any irl so-called “socialist” nation that actually conforms to the pure theoretical principles of socialism, nor btw is the USA purely capitalist, and it is especially not purely a democracy either (yes we go through the farce of voting, but then regardless of who wins we do not get what we want - e.g. school shootings continue - and instead monied interests control all, a better term would be a plutocracy, though we are not “purely” that either).

If you didn’t know, then now you do. While if you were trolling, please block me and move on. I know what I said, and I know what I meant, and those words you tried to put into my mouth are neither of those.

Think about it: obviously I don’t mean in relation to actual socialist countries today, but rather “fairly socialist” = more along the scale of socialism than the USA is currently. For instance even before there were 50 United States that joined together, the postal service allowed people to send mail to one another across vast distances of thousands of miles, from east to west coast and back again.

While today… well technically it still exists, but it’s slower and less reliable than ever before, and conservatives are talking about dropping a lot of “last-mile” delivery options, in states such as Idaho where population density is much lower. This is funded by taxpayer dollars, where the government completely owns and operates the means of production of this enterprise (though capitalist alternatives such as FedEx also exist beside it). Or at least used to in the past, but this is becoming increasingly less so over time, in a variety of ways.

Or we could look at public schools, which especially with No Child Left Behind and the like, is beholden to capitalist interests that provide e.g. the standardized testing services that suck off the teat of taxpayer dollars, siphoning away much-needed funds for such things as food (nobody can learn who is hungry, most especially children - not that conservatives care about that, either the “learning”, or taking care of living humans once we leave the womb, very much in direct opposition to the name of the program that I just said).

Back then, more American services were owned and operated by the government, as compared to today. So yeah, in relative terms, we were “fairly socialist” by our own internal metric. Moreover, my point was that we were so socialist (how socialist were we?:-) we were so socialist, that it rose to a degree that many Americans would consider to be outright shocking. If they could read that is (or rather, they can, they just won’t).

I’d take back those words that have hurt you

A choice to be? (If only it were that simple.)

And on top of all of that, one person wants to actively make it worse, just bc he gets to skim a bit from the top. We deserve our fate I suppose, when we refuse to see something even after it is painstakingly pointed out to us, but damned if I’m not still sad about it.:-(

By deregulation of what is allowed to be called “news”, yeah. Though if we were that fragile to begin with… I wouldn’t put all the blame onto him.

Reconstructionism in the American South also played a role, in papering over some of the differences that lead up to the war, rather than dealing with them in a forthright manner, see e.g. Nuremberg trials.

And ofc before that, people outright owned people as slaves, and even today the number of people who simply don’t care in the slightest is extremely high.

i.e., we aren’t so much suffering from something like cancer as we are something more akin to a genetic defect, which even predated the Constitution. That is not to say this was inevitable - we’ve had so very many opportunities to turn back from where we’ve been headed… But neither we, nor the Russian disinformation campaigns directed at us, seem to want that to happen.

I was going to mention some of that… but then I remembered that facts don’t actually matter to them in the slightest so…

And that’s the rub. One side is sending death threats and attempting kidnapping of the other, plus the whole storm the capitol thing, plus actively rooting to support not only Russia but Israel (tbf the other side is doing that too, at least the politicians even if not the voters) and even somehow North Fucking Korea, oh yeah and wanting to become fascist, while the other side… doesn’t do most of those, at least to the same degree.

In WWII we fought fascism, but it went underground (cough Fox News cough) and now it’s back all over again, and this time it looks to be winning. Both globally, and almost if not quite at home (it may not have “won” yet, but at best things seem to be tied, and remember that SCOTUS ruling that nobody seems to be talking about anymore…? yeah that’s not exactly a resounding defeat of fascism or at least authoritarianism there, when you can kill your political opponents at will).

True… except she spake it, so…

The number of people who do not know that the America in the Golden Era (50-60s), for white people especially men, was fairly socialist, is extremely high.

Aminal says:

Can’t we “promote” that guy… what’s-his-name - somewhere, like could waste recycling use another helping hand?

Sir, I’m still on the call.

Let that sink in: THE transporter room… THE… THE!?

Too high or… just right?

Waka-waka!

It’s like those choose-your-own adventure stories. Except in this one the only choice was to have glanced at it or not, cause after that it’s out of your control. And the title is:

Omg that cracks me up 🤣

Unless she’s one of those… other Janeways, but we don’t talk about them, no we don’t Bruno…

Please clarify: is there coffee inside the Zerg?

Oh hell, we all know the outcome of this match: if there’s no coffee then Janeway just slaughters them all out of spite. Either way, this Zerg rush is over before it began (presumably with her endless supply of, what was it, something like negative 100 proton torpedos?:-P).

Edit: plot armor, the most destructive thing in the universe bar none:-D.

No… only men are that dumb.

I’m kidding - of course it depends on the person, regardless of gender! :-P