Someone please enlighten me why the fixation on those five words? The Soviet Union called itself a union of Republics. The republic of Yugoslavia was a hotbed of boiling ethnic hatred waiting for the death of a ruling strongman to fly apart at the seams.The Republic of the Congo was an autocratic dictatorship also ruled by a strongman. (for that matter so was most of Greece during the Classical Age when they invented the word} When so many different types of countries can identify as a "republic", it essentially means that it's a term about effectively nothing.

I remember a whole bunch of fresh-faced Republicans who campaigned on platforms of term limits. Guess where every one of them stood on the issue two years later when THEY became the incumbents.

Because that would mean more people voting, and if they're likely to vote for the party you oppose, that would not serve your interests. The two parties each have favored tactics when it comes to screwing the vote. Republicans prefer to use voter suppression in areas that are largely non-white. Democrats do their best to eliminate choices to the mediocre as they either 1) Chase progressives from the party and 2] Demonise third party progressives which might actually get the job done.

That would take a constitutional amendment at the very least, because the authors of the Constitution decided that States have the power to hold elections as they see fit, including Federal ones.

Then again given that most of the jobs he's done have taken the form of eliminating the jobs of others, it's not a great accomplishment.

Actually we ARE doing that with tidal power stations. It's basic physics really, that energy we gain from tidal power has to come from somewhere. Just like when we use Jupiter to slingshot our space probes, we're actually changing ITS orbit as well. But it's nowhere near the scale to actually have a measurable effect, so I'm not really advocating that we shut them down.

At some point you're going to have to trust someone who has expertise you do not posess, unless you're a greater polymath than Paul Robeson was. Or your decisions will be totally determined by your prejudices, and the bully beef you ate last night.

And any true economics and safety analysis would also acknowledge that the nuclear power issue still has costs which have not been fully determined because we still don't have an answer to what to with the nuclear waste that's piling up in storage in temporary facilities. Long-lived lethal waste that we can't just smile and grin as it leaches out into the environment, waste that will need management for thousands of years when we've never done anything near that long term in an increasingly short-sighted society.

Which also means that it could be nothing but made up fiction on the part of the "leakers".

It isn't possible NOW. It WILL happen at the latest, about a billion years in the future when the Sun's solar output is about 25 percent brighter than it is today and exceeds the limit for what our biosphere can compensate.

We're not likely to push things that far. Long before we get to that point, we'll either be extinct, or have collapsed our civilization by that point from climate change effects.

Post state? Now that's truly laughable. Past coinage had sone inherent value from being bits of precious or semi-precious metal. Bitcoin couldn't even EXIST outside of a state society network and the infrastructure it maintains.

It wouldn't have to be a sting operation. Since the US is monitoring the entire frigging Internet, including who reads this piece of drivel I'm writing, they can simply just flag any requests made to a site they label as "suspect". Which might still include Steve Jackson's Cyberpunk RPG game for all we know.

So you want to bring a sword to a gun fight?

White Christian Protestant Male. It was considered a rather important distinction at the time, given the heavy anti-Catholic bias of the English settlers.