That reply is wrong in degree, of course, but, sadly, it's not wrong in kind. We've long tolerated insider trading by Congress, and a revolving door between regulators and the companies they regulate. The Supreme Court has allowed its justices to take veiled bribes, and even ruled that government officials can accept bribes as long as the payoff comes after the action. Prior to Trump, presidents and their staffs stayed out of this mud, but if others can do it, why not the president? The root of the problem is voter acceptance of corruption. Too many Americans just assume that all politicians are corrupt and there's nothing you can do. They're wrong on both points -- and in fact the US previously did have massive public corruption and then mostly shut it off, but Americans don't know their own history -- but until voters care enough to get Congress to act, this is the new normal.

So much this. Dems do themselves a disservice when they roll their eyes at the "both sides do it" responses. Because when Dems do it, it just enables Republicans to do it 100x worse with clean consciences. When Biden, for instance, gets turned down by Congress on student loan forgiveness, so instead goes looking for ways around Congress via executive power...how the hell do you think Trump got a similar idea?

Or look at reconciliation. When reconciliation was created, it had a specific budgetary role in 1974. It got co-opted in the 90s to grab more power by passing non-budgetary law that they didn't have the votes for via the normal process. Since then, it's just become the "normal" way of doing business. Now there's even talk of eliminating the filibuster, on both sides. It's just a slow ever-marching degradation of civics until in the end we'll have no checks and balances (if we even have any atm).

Here is data on government corruption. Louisiana is the worst with 1.05 convictions per year per 10k government employees. California is better than average with 0.25.

Rating corruption based on convictions? That's a terrible measure. I can assure you there's few convictions in Russia and China, for instance.

Also lots of fire departments

The purpose of the CS department is not to provide vocational training for programmers; it's to teach CS. In turn, CS is far, FAR more than mere programming, and thus requires an understanding of math in multiple areas

The problem is that there doesn't exist a degree that meets the characteristics of someone who wants to be a programmer (or non-research-related technical practitioner). I always hate when people trot out that the ivory tower of CS was meant for big thinkers and problem solvers, not programmers. That what grad school and doctorals are for.

When I went to school, I had to decide between CS, IT, or EE. IT was far too light on practical programming skills, seemingly geared more towards admin and managers, with things like OS management and Excel classes. EE was far too into robotics and building things, which was not a career I wanted either. I think they were building radios and cameras in their first semester. Neat, sure...not the career I wanted. Which left CS

At any rate, my point is that the path of most computer engineers go down CS because thats the most applicable path for what they'll be doing in life. However, the math portion is way overkill for something like 90+% of their future job roles.. I know personally they could have taught me big O notation and basic logic (state machines, functional programming, recursion, etc), and that would have covered the bulk of my needs. Personally, I would have loved more CS classes and less math...I would have been more well rounded and able to accept a different career role within computers instead of being pigeonholed into what I was able to take with only 25-50% of my semesters targeted at CS. The amount of time I had for classes taught me the basics of programming and the fundamentals of how a computer works. With less math and more CS, I could have also maybe squeezed in some cybersecurity, maybe some web programming, perhaps some NLP background, maybe even some bioinformatics (or today, AI). There's just so much more valuable possibilities that were left on the table because they needed to squeeze in another Calc 2 or Diffy Q, which to this day I never use.

Stop huffing trumps farts. If you want to know what bad policy looks like, it's the current administration. It's objectively awful. Project 2025 was awful before the election, and it still is awful, and it's what trump is doing. Runaway inflation? You mean like what we have now? And war? You're a fucking dipshit to even attempt to bring any of this up as if somehow Democrats are bad. What is happening how is the "this is fine" meme come to life, and you're the dog in that picture.

Why do you think I support anything this administration is doing? Why do you even assume I'm a Republican? I can assure you what Trump is doing is absolutely worse than what Biden did. I can also assure you that you didn't lose because your candidate had a vagina. Believe it or not, both can be true.

They lost their fucking minds because Democrats put up a woman to vote for (twice), and apparently America is very misogynistic.

Ah yes, this old chestnut. Any excuse to not accept any bad policy responsibility. That election result was stupid obvious. Biden was an unpopular president due to a number of bad policies (the most glaringly obvious being a failed border policy) + runaway inflation. Republicans jumped on it and Harris did nothing to distance herself from Biden, even when asked point blank what her policy differences were. Stop kidding yourself -- gender didn't matter at all, and you continue to keep thinking in these terms, you're going to lose again when you run another shitty candidate "of the correct gender" and wonder why you lost again.

Have you even seen the original series? Racism, bigotry, classism, human rights, ethics, not to mention nationalism, were all dealt with. TNG went further, particularly with Riker's penchant for rather open sexual interests, and of course DS9 dealt with everything from war crimes to the undermining of civil society. Voyager and Enterprise in their turn covered similar issues, though perhaps not always as ably as the first three series did.

I've never seen TOS, but I've seen all the rest. And in the end, it's an issue of subtlety and focus (which all comes down to writing). It's something the modern day PC/woke generation seems to woefully not understand (or just not care about...there's writers on record out there as going out of their way to put these issues centerstage, which wasn't the original Star Trek focus, which was telling a good story while sprinkling in progressivism). The perfect analogue of this is the "do better" speech from the Captain America TV show, where he basically rants at the audience -- that kind of thing didn't exist in 90s star trek. Like I've seen people try to compare the fact a biracial kiss exists in less than a minute of an hour long episode that had nothing to do with race be comparable to full modern day episodes that sledge you over the head with messaging for like 70% of the episode. And there's really no comparison. Modern day Star Trek writing has become so obvious, it's drifted into somewhere between "cringe" and "annoying". It'd be like if a liberal could actually read Atlas Shrugged (which is actually a great book) without getting an "ick" factor from Rand's political soapboxing (particularly in the final chapter). I don't blame them if they can't -- Rand only knows how to sledgehammer.

Your argument all rests on absolute average wages ($7 vs $30) and ignores that the overall purchasing power for Americans hasn't increased for decades (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/).

You'll note that all the articles making this claim come from 2018. Things have changed alot since then: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se...

Wage inflation is also currently still outpacing nominal inflation, and has been since mid 2023: https://usafacts.org/answers/a...

the screenwriters really tone down his campy dialog and cut out the slow parts perfectly.

Toned down? If anything, they added camp. Like turning Rocky into some kind of overly excited dog. And the ludicrously long and stupid posing scene in the airlock? Was that even in the book? A lot of the science in the book got chopped out as well. The movie felt dumbed down. I preferred the book.

This is an incredibly superficial view of graphical fidelity. Most games do not just push for realism in the sense that it looks just like real life. Instead they pursue artistic realism

I'd be careful throwing the word "most" around there, because personally I think it's highly genre dependent. In a horror game, I'd likely agree with you, particularly in regard to something like lighting. But in something like an FPS, I guarantee realism is likely higher on their list. The "can it run Crysis?" meme didn't come from nowhere...that whole genre was all-in on pushing the edge of photorealism while maintaining frames per second.

WW2 was already won by the time the USA officially joined in.

What? WW2 started in September 1939 and ended in September 1945. The US was already assisting the Allies with cash and carry purchases as early as November 1939 and joined the war December of 1941. For a war that was "already won", why did it last 4 more years? Also, this timelapse doesn't show the Allies making any real counter-gains until mid-November 1942 in North Africa. Most importantly, the reason history says the US was critical to the war effort is because they not only opened up a second front with Japan (If that wasn't present, Germany and Japan together could have taken Russia), but also supplied critical materiel for the war effort via the Lend-Lease Act. The US spent about as much as all the other allies combined, paying for nearly half the war.

You're deluded if you don't think the US had a critical role in ending that war.

The only one of your responses that applies specifically to blue states, is "Ideological and political reasons." The other hinderances apply equally to red states. So what is it about blue-state ideology and politics, that hinders expansion of green energy? They *say* they want it and that it's important, so why is it not happening? Texas, by contrast, has a governor who is openly against green energy. And yet, Texas has *3x* more wind power than *any* other state, and is #1 in solar and soon, #1 in battery storage. What gives?

I mean it's not rocket science...it's not politics. Red states have the most wind. And the most sun.

https://www.google.com/search?...

https://www.google.com/search?...

It's almost as if there's an invisible hand at work...

Last I looked, about a third of Americans weren't working.

Where did you get that number? It's nowhere near that. Are you included the ~25+% of the country that's retired and wouldn't return to work no matter what the jobs are paying?

different configurations of bacteria extract different levels of energy from the same food?

Yes, different people have slightly different numbers for "calories in" for the same food

You do know that metabolic response can dramatically alter how the body conserves and expends energy, right?

Yes, different people have different metabolic burn rates

Nothing in what you said alters the laws of thermodynamics, and you should stop pretending it does. If you know your body's burn rate and your body's general caloric intake from the food you eat, you can 100% with absolute certainty use calories in/calories out to guarantee the direction of your weight gain/loss. I will literally never understand you people that latch onto very niche biological processes and use them to try to make insane claims about energy conservation. I'll tell you right now...ANY human that limits themselves to say ~1000 calories a day will lose weight. I don't care what your "gut biome" is or your genetics, or whatever. Just because people are slightly different doesn't make the physical laws of reality stop. Yes, it sucks that one person can eat an extra piece of cake than you and still lose weight easier. Maybe your body makes you feel hungrier than the next person with a smaller caloric deficit. Make you're dealing with insulin resistance that another person doesn't deal with. NONE of that means you're "doomed to be a fattie" because minor biological differences are "impossible to overcome". It's always a matter of willpower.

I was riding as a passenger in my friend's Tesla (forget which model). And it apparently had a feature where it ran the high beams all the time unless the car detected a vehicle a certain distance in front of it. However, whatever that distance is/was is wayyyyyy too short. Because I kept saying: "dude, that guy on the highway a quarter mile away is totally getting blinded by you right now". And he was all "nah, the car knows best". To say nothing of opposing traffic in other lanes the car likely can't even see.