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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • Checks and balances only work if the branches fundamentally care about their job and the country rather than their party. We just have a completely disfunctional parliamentary system where sometimes, just for funsies, the prime minister and cabinet are the minority party so nothing gets done. Oh and also we have a critical part of our legislature elected just from arbitrary lines.



  • I think we’d all love to. The constitution is fundamentally broken and should be completely rewritten. It’s founded on ideas that just aren’t true now, if they ever were. The idea that the states are more like countries than counties is the biggest one. The idea that we can and should protect ourselves from the tyrrany of the majority by having independent branches of government and countless ways to stop and stall things is another huge one.

    But here’s the biggest problem, not enough of the country agrees that the system is broken, and even smaller portion of those who do can agree on how it’s broken or what changes to make. So no, we can’t just abolish it. We can either (1) fix it enough to get to the point that we may be able to have the stability it would require to safely transition to a new constitution or (2) see things get so bad that enough of the country is on board for revolution. Both options suck, but option (2) has a pretty bad record compared to option (1) in my view.









  • hobovision@lemm.eetoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comBorders
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    12 days ago

    Just not true

    About 1.7 million people commute to work across a European border each day, and in some regions these people constitute up to a third of the workforce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area?wprov=sfla1

    Schengen zone, and to a lesser extent USA, show that capitalism can continue to function with a free movement of labor within relatively large and varied economic zones. This would continue to be the case worldwide, I believe. There remains significant barriers to movement even without borders: time, money, separation from family and cultural support systems, and more. There are people in the US and EU who want to “escape” their current state/country due to local laws but cannot do so despite it being perfectly legal to do so.



  • I think they mean the “superheavy” (somehow a more stupid name than starship) booster rocket is the most powerful. I’m pretty sure by thrust metrics it is. It’s just that the superheavy-starship system can’t put much up in LEO because the starship is huge and heavy on its own.

    If you put an expendable second stage on top of the superheavy booster instead of a starship it could put a lot more up to LEO.


  • I agree with you, what we’ve been doing hasn’t worked. Allowing Reagan and Bush and Bush and Trump to get elected hasn’t helped anyone. You could argue Nader got GWB elected but cheating and the Supreme Court were a big part of that too. How different would our current politics be if we had a term or two of Gore instead of Bush? Hard to say. Maybe primary voters wouldn’t have felt like they needed to pick a “safe” neolib over a demsoc in 2016 if they could believe he’d be viable.



  • Posting memes on lemmy won’t change Kamala’s positions or strategies, but convincing “both sides” lemmy users how important it is to pick the better of two options could change things. Every time the left-leaning party loses due to lack of turnout (aka punishing them for not being left enough) they move right instead of left. The only way to move the country left is to do whatever you can to get the most left-leaning viable candidate elected. Over time this pushes the whole electorate left.


  • I mostly agree with you, especially point (1), but what are you talking about with “Hamas did genocide on Isreal last year”? They did a terror attack for sure, but that’s not genocide. Wiping out significant percentage of a population because of their ethnicity or culture is genocide (see what Isreal is doing in Gaza) and it takes months to years.


  • hobovision@lemm.eetoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldPiss™
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    29 days ago

    Fr tho the hydration obsession is marketing wank you get you to buy Gatorade, fancy water, water bottles, etc. If you’re thirsty, drink water. If you are doing exercise, drink extra water. If you’re drinking alcohol, too bad, you’re getting a hangover even if you drink a shitload of water because you’re in your 30s now.


  • I’d argue that it wasn’t really “net-positive”. Certainly it was a positive energy gain, but it took way more energy to create the fusion than just the input energy. There is a ton of efficiency losses to create the input energy, which is defined by the energy in the laser beam that triggers the fusion. A lot of energy is also used to maintain confinement during the reaction.

    I would like the term net positive to be more inclusive of all of the recurring energy used to support the fusion. It’s fair to not include the energy used to construct the machines, but anything that would need to be put in to a fusion plant each reaction to get out energy should be considered.