Rhaedas

He has trouble in his own rallies with his own speeches.

You might be thinking of the Fairness Doctrine, which has to do with the subject matter and not profits.

They analyzed how it would affect their numbers and determined it would turn off too many MAGA viewers and not attract enough other viewers to make up the difference. News for profit was always a bad idea.

Easy fix - “Are there any dead leaves to protect our eggs?”

So the comic is a lie to give us feelings.

But mulching leaves is so much better than raking and removal. All those nutrients, gone.

I am familiar with the problems that come with companies who put up traffic light cameras, fudging the parameters to make it catch much more than the blatant running of lights. We had them in our area and they were later removed for that very reason. We don’t have cameras for speeding though, so I’m not aware of problems if they’re set for speeders that are well over the limit (so you don’t trigger a ticket for 66 in a 65).

They wouldn’t be swing states if everyone could/did vote. Look at the typical voting percentage, it’s very sad.

The only plus from this approach is that it is using already extracted petroleum products to create energy instead of pulling out new carbon sources from the ground. But like others have said, burning plastics is nasty, and would require a huge proof of concept that the emissions are low and not dangerous. Which I guess they skipped over.

Correct, the differences make the analogy good enough to visualize the concept. It does however suffer from the same problem as the balloon one, in which someone can get the impression the expansion has a center. The wiki for the expansion of the universe goes through the various analogies and where they break down.

I would suggest Dr Becky’s Youtube channel for a number of excellent videos on the expansion as well as the current problem of getting an accurate measurement of the correct Hubble expansion rate. The James Webb telescope was hoped to solve that dilemma, but we still aren’t sure.

Once he gets past this election he’ll settle down and start doing some things for the public, like helping build houses or whatever.

At the cluster level it will depend on the velocities and distances. For example, using very rough numbers the current expansion rate means that space between us and the Andromeda galaxy is expanding at 55 km/s. Seems fast until you realize the distance needed to see the effect build to this level. For perspective I found someone’s calculation to reduce it to solar system level to end up with ~10 meters/AU/year. But of course at this distance gravity dominates so we can’t measure that directly and it may not even be large enough to consider.

A larger and slower moving galactic cluster would be more affected than a tighter one. I don’t know what our Local Group would be considered to be, but there are a hundred or so galaxies around us that appear blue shifted, so they are moving towards us even with the expansion.

Seems like the prayers didn’t work once again. Maybe next storm?

Good visualization but inaccurate. Space between galaxies in a cluster and even the stars in a galaxy is also growing. The difference is in scale. There’s so much distance between galactic clusters and the largest structures of the universe that added up that expansion amount is so much bigger. The balloon analogy with galaxies as dots on the surface is closer since the dots also do grow some, but the balloon would have to be huge to capture a good scale comparison.

Even a hypothetically true artificial general intelligence would still not be a moral agent

That’s a deep rabbit hole that can’t be stated as a known fact. It’s absolutely true right now with LLMs, but at some point the line could be crossed. If and when, how, and by what definition has been a long debate nowhere near resolved.

It’s highly possible that AGI/ASI could come about and be both super intelligent and self conscious and still have no sense of morality. But how can we at human levels even comprehend what’s possible? There’s the real danger, we have no idea what we could be heading towards.

That was the next layer, but they can’t get to that point if the voting isn’t close. I don’t disagree that elections is one of the many reasons why the court got stacked, but way before the SC there WILL be corruption attempts at the voting level. See Steve Bannon’s commentary on how they’ve put people in place in voting areas and have formulated a plan to question voter authenticity. They know they can’t win with a fair election, so they’re finding more and more ways to subtly cheat. Or maybe not even subtle now, since they keep saying everything out loud.

And the best way to counter this is drown the attempt in voter numbers, so that even if ballots are questioned or tossed or people turned away, the number still are high.

Looking that way. Vote anyway. Let’s see if we can break a record of voter turnout and margin of difference. No more of this stupid late night “still 50%/50% results, too close to call” because everyone thought it was a done deal and they didn’t need to show up. Amazing how when everyone thinks that, there aren’t enough votes…

Reminder of why the winner of the 2000 election didn’t become President () When you have both an electoral college and first past the post voting system, close races get ugly and questionable. If a higher percentage of people would vote, we wouldn’t see such a close race.

I don’t think that’s the problem. Here’s an example of the distribution of voting, and it’s sort of what you’d expect from the stereotype. Note that Gen-X is close to 50%, a bit more to the right. What affects things more (and mentioned in the article) is actual voting, or rather the lack of voting from the apathetic or oppressed or mislead. If more younger voters don’t vote, the results skew to the right.

Add to that how different the commitment to party is between left and right. Left has lots of differing opinions and the infighting between Democrat and farther left 3rd party voters often result in either spoiler or no votes at all (which is why ranked voting would be a huge change). Right on the other hand, we’ve all heard the line about party first, no matter what. Liars, rapists, felons, still voting for the candidate because that’s what a Republican does.

I don’t know if the latter can be easily fixed outside of better education both in voting information and in general. The right really aren’t in favor of any of that though, that would hurt their numbers. Trump even said it out loud, they love the poorly educated.

The first part though is powerful. I’ve heard it said to young crowds many times that if more of them show up they can hugely affect the results.

I’m not denying my generation (Gen-X, and why I felt I needed to reply) has its share of MAGAs. Long ago when I first joined Facebook and started adding friends I found from high school I thought it would be cool to reconnect. It was disappointing how quickly I found so many of them were not the same left-leaning radical free thinking people I thought I knew back then. But MAGA mania isn’t solely in one generation, it’s a problem shared that will stay around if we don’t change some things.

Vote anyway. Be part of a sweep.