Thanks for the memories, and new info! I knew about the Kardashev scale (but re-read it for a refresher), and following a link in that, I read up on star lifting. Neat!

Even better, a few days ago I got an overlay ad when I clicked a Google News link to NYT, which told me that this was the first of my ten free articles for the month. Yeah, like I'm going to start paying them for what Reuters and AP (ad nauseum) put out for "free" (to me).

I see what you did there. I won't take this recumbent bike lying down!

Perhaps we should start. A spanner in the gears; "vote gridlock".

Exactly! In idle America, Judges vote for the singers.

I like to think of it in terms of the brain as a planning machine: it evaluates both positive and negative plans, and chooses accordingly. Thus, thinking about suicide is not a sign that you need therapy -- the sign is the thought, "that seems like a good idea" following a thought about ending it.

Which is something every parent should teach their children. I have an ultra-religious aunt who yelled at me to "stop playing my daughter that suicide music!" when I tried to introduce my cousin, who played flute, to the beautiful melodies in Jethro Tull's "Moths", which starts with the (innocent, I thought) lyrics "Oh the leaded window opened, to move the dancing candle flame, and the first moths of summer, suicidal came." It very neatly describes a pattern in nature, that of moths seeking light and being destroyed by their quest. This aunt also destroyed property, burning an audio tape that my sister had given her daughter. To me, this is horrific; she was terrorizing her child, instead of teaching her.

We should be prepared for all eventualities, or at least as many of them as we can adequately prepare for, given time and resources. Thinking about danger, and ways to mitigate the danger, seems like a good use of our societal time left to think. (Last four words from a They Might Be Giants song, "It's not My Birthday", "As I walk I think about a new way to walk, as I think I'm using up the time left to think.")

Government is made of people. People are corruptible. I would prefer not to allow corruptible people to have access to the size and scope of the assets of the citizens, as that tends to reduce the corruption. Sibling poster is accurate, in order to pay for the additional debt for next year we will need to dismantle basically everything -- and then we can't pay for the next year. See this Tony Robbins video regarding our debt.

The LCD advantage that I prefer? Not irradiating remaining eye.

Heh. I had some doubts about including that part, and here we are. :) I suppose I should have instead used different human tribes: climate forces various layer requirements. Tribes near the equator tend to wear less clothing, sometimes none; tribes closer to the poles tend to wear more clothing, and thus perhaps tend to have societal norms about wearing such clothing. (Not, perhaps, starting from prudishness, but for health -- "if you don't cover that up, you'll catch cold!" may have been the origin.)

The very nature of the loans is that they are designed to be unpayable. The Federal Reserve is the source of all money in circulation; the federal government creates bonds which the Federal Reserve buys in exchange for dollars, i.e., the Federal Reserve loans the government some money, to be paid back with interest. If the Federal Reserve is the only source of these dollars, how can the government ever pay back even the original loan? And it makes sense, as one can see from the historical chart of when America started the Federal Reserve, and the national debt growth since then. Two links: Tony Robbins saying basically "if we dismantle and sell every corporation and rich person to pay the tax increase, we are able to do it -- but then where will the production come from next year?" And another "How Money is Created"

I'm with you; not traveling until the apparatus is gone. Unless it's to leave. And then I'll fly out of Canada.

What I find odd is that our society has a hang-up over viewing members of our species' bodies unclothed. It really doesn't make sense; no other species has such an issue, and some do choose clothing (hermit crabs, etc).

I like to think that he was committing two types of protests here, and is even more of a hero.

There's a part of me that thinks that this behavior might be useful to the rulers: make us think we are "more robot, less nature" and we can be more easily led to kill. But, perhaps that's just analysis going overboard with the lizard fear reaction...

I used Walgreens until recently; the insurance that my company provides no longer allows prescriptions to be filled there. I wonder if the issues that you are experiencing are a result of this policy change? (I.e., perhaps other insurance carriers dropped them for similar reasons, and they can no longer adequately staff their pharmacies? Of course it's also possible that their lack of staff led to these cancellations -- I'm not privy to the root cause, just part of the data.)