Yes. I have! Though I have heard the idea before.

Sorry, everyone who knows how to make khlav kalash has been deported.

The leader has issues a new memorandum. You will only be allowed to drink flat, room-temperature, caffeine free Diet Mt. Dew.

Seriously. There are far better inflation hedges. There’s inflation-indexed treasury bonds, land, bonds, stocks, gold, etc.

I propose the opposite. Specifically, I propose we use the Burns omni-net. It sweeps the sea clean!

Nah, see it’s a good thing. Like a teflon cooking pan, having PFAS in your drinking water just helps lubricate your organs! This means as you move around, your internal organs won’t grind past each other, wearing themselves down. Drink PFAS, keep your organs properly lubricated.

This message brought to you by the American PFAS manufacturers association of America.

deleted by creator

Honestly, I am opposed to sending humans to Mars, period. We shouldn’t do it. It’s unethical, a tremendous lapse of moral judgment just to stroke our collective egos.

There could be life on Mars NOW. There are bacteria that we know of on Earth, that if you transported them to certain locations deep under the Martian surface, would thrive. There are microbes that live in subterranean saline aquifers on Earth, and there are microbes that live in solid rock miles beneath the Earth’s surface. There is no reason that these bacteria couldn’t thrive equally well on Mars.

We know of Earth bacteria that could thrive under Mars’s surface. Which means it is entirely reasonable to speculate that there may already be bacteria there filling that Martian ecological niche. But if we send people there…we risk contaminating it. We struggle to sterilize our rovers, but we do a pretty good job. But forget trying to sterilize a ship full of dozens of people. Our very gut bacteria are a contamination risk.

No, I think we should leave Mars the hell alone. And really, I think we have a very reasonable path forward for still producing very meaningful and important exploration of Mars. Look at how well robotics is advancing. Look at the recent Tesla event where they had all those robots wandering around, each remotely piloted by a human operator. THAT is the real future of Mars exploration.

I think we should simply wait on Mars until we’ve let remote presence robotic tech advance a few more decades. Then, you build such a robot that is durable enough to survive in an autoclave. You do send human to Mars, but they stay in orbit. The humans stay on a craft in orbit, and they remotely pilot humanoid robots on the surface to do the actual science work. This way, you can have exploration that has all the dexterity and flexibility of humans, as humans are able to pilot the robots in real time from orbit. And as an added bonus, your exploratory vehicles can be a lot simpler as you don’t need to bring any crew or samples back from the Martian surface.

I think we could still exploit Mars as well. If we find that there is no surface life, well then setting up mining activities on the surface isn’t a problem. If humans want to colonize Mars, we can build big orbital habitats from materials we mine on the surface. If, after a long period of study, we conclusively rule out the existence of Martian life? Well at that point we can start surface colonization by humans. Or, perhaps we discover a Martian deep-rock biosphere and fully catalogue it. Then maybe we discover that pretty much every terrestrial body has such a biosphere if conditions are appropriate. At that point, humans might decide that colonizing the surface with humans is worth the risk.

Anyway, I really do not support sending humans to Mars. We could potentially wipe out an entire biosphere, a biosphere that if it exists, could tell us remarkable things about how life arises and how common it is in the universe. We’re only a few decades out from being able to do really good remote presence robotics. Let’s just hold off on things until we can send humans that can get the full experience of being on the Mars surface, without actually being on the Mars surface.

Because of your lack of patriotism for our national beverage, the leadership has decreed that you will now only be able to drink caffeine-free Diet Mt. Dew.

In our techo utopian future, the only caffeinated beverage will be Diet Mt. Dew.

You know what’s even more precise? A bullet from an AK-47 wielded by a Hamas fighter. These bombs are of similar precision to Hamas on October 7th. The Hamas militants charged across the border and started shooting every soldier they could find. A bullet is directly directed by an individual person, so they are intrinsically more precise than any guided bomb.

Did a lot of innocent Israeli civilians get caught in the crossfire? Sure. There were civilian casualties, and those increased by an order of magnitude once Israel started shooting into crowds of its own civilians. But I’m glad you recognize that Hamas does such a great job of protecting civilians. If you find the Israeli pager bombings a work of superior precision combat, you should similarly admire the work of Hamas on October 7. They are works of similar precision.

These were pagers handed out to Hezbollah operatives. How do you get more precise?

You were incorrect. They were handed to Hezbollah military and civilian officials. Hezbollah is effectively the government in that area; the civilian state is degraded due to decades of Israeli military strikes and incursions. There are tons of people who are “Hezbollah” but work the kinds of jobs the people down at your local city hall work. They’re the people operating the water systems, trash collection, etc. Realize also that this pager system WAS the local emergency response system. Think of the radios carried by police, EMS, and fire departments. There were doubtlessly police officers blown up by these bombs.

And worse still, these pagers have been in circulation FOR YEARS. They didn’t just send them out and immediately pop them. How many years do you keep a phone? How many of the people who had these devices later found their way to others hands?

You’re a member of Hezbollah, working in the civilian branch. One day you get a walkie talkie and carry it around with you. Another day you decide to be done with Hezbollah, so you get work somewhere else and you take the old walkie talkie to a pawn shop. The next day someone else, completely unaffiliated with Hezbollah, buys a set of those walkie talkies to talk with people around town.

So if Hezbollah launches a campaign to mail anthrax to leading Israeli military and civilian leaders, will you call that well-targeted as well?

Ultimately, the only hope of the Lebanese retaining any kind of country long-term is to violently resist Israeli expansion. All of Lebanon is part of Israel’s long-term territorial ambitions. So yes, honestly, violence is necessary to resist Israeli expansion. Israel’s plan is that 100 years from now, Lebanon and Jordan will not exist. See Greater Israel.

Remember, these terms are identical:

“God’s Chosen People” = Übermensch

“God’s Promised Land” = Lebensraum

The Germans in WW2 believed they were a special people chosen by God. This gave them the natural right to take over the lands of racially inferior peoples and to drive the existing inhabitants out through intimidation and violence. The modern Israeli right shares the same beliefs. They are indistinguishable; they just use different marketing.

One key note is that Israel is worse at protecting civilians than Hamas is. By their own numbers, the IDF kills more civilians for every enemy soldier they kill than Hamas does. Hamas is actually a far more ethical army, in terms of civilian casualty ratios, than the IDF is.

The harsh truth is that the only reason we call Hamas a “terrorist group” and the IDF “an army” is classism. The IDF kills 10 civilians to destroy one Hamas fighter with a laser-guided bomb? That’s just collateral damage. Hamas kills 10 civilians to kill one IDF soldier with a truck bomb? That’s terrorism.

The definition of terrorism should be amended:

terrorism (n): violence committed by a group representing one demographic group against a wealthier demographic group.

That is how YOU vote. A lot of people do not view it as a practical matter. They view their vote as an endorsement.

I don’t know where you are going with the utilitarianism and Hitler example. This is a massive stretch bordering on being rather insulting.

It really isn’t when we’re discussing fascists coming to power in the US. Godwin’s Law is dead. It is not a stretch when the reason Kamala lost is for literally supporting a genocide.

Kamala’s message was, “yes, I support a genocide overseas. But, my opponent supports it even more, and he will support crimes against humanity at home, while I will only support them overseas.”

Yup. And she let him play her like a fiddle. And there are like, 3 anti-Israel voters in the US. Harris lost because of anti-genocide voters, not because of anti-Israeli voters. You seem to be implying that anti-genocide = anti-Israeli.

If you believe that the only way a person can be an Israeli is if they support the massacre of innocent civilians, then you are racist anti-Semitic trash that doesn’t deserve to live. If that is the case, please chain yourself to a large rock, and throw the rock in the ocean.

You are ignoring how people actually think and live. You view voting as a utilitarian choice. Utilitarianism is not the only ethical system in existence. In fact, utilitarianism is exactly how histories worst autocrats justified their atrocities. Hitler himself ran on a platform of doing painful things that, he at least claimed, simply had to be done. The Holocaust itself was justified entirely from a “lesser of two evils” perspective. Hitler just had to convince the broader German populace that killing all the Jews was a necessary evil. Kill all the Jews or have the world taken over by godless Communists. That was Hitler’s central “lesser of two evils” message.

This is the fatal flaw of appeals to the lesser of two evils approaches. Yes, you “achieve more” by picking the lesser evil. But from many ethical perspectives, if both choices are objectively evil, and you can’t stop either, your only ethical choice is to not support either side. You’re still supporting evil, even if it’s the lesser evil.

I voted for Kamala, ya dingus. I just have enough self-reflection to note that her messaging was shit and that there was little difference between the two of them when it came to Palestine. I voted for her because of domestic policy, not foreign policy.

There are lessons to be learned here. And sticking our heads in the sand will not help us learn those lessons. And one of those lessons should absolutely be that, “vote for me. I support genocide, but my opponent supports it EVEN MORE!” is a shit campaign message. Whoever thought of that strategy should be shot.