That or the alien will simply scour all life from the planet and then strip mine it for resources. They don’t even have to be more intelligent than us. Suppose they were roughly equivalent to human intelligence but had an insect-like eusocial behaviour with a billion year old culture. They could be far more advanced than us simply due to the availability of time.
Thank you. I would even argue that Return of the Jedi wasn’t great either. I mean sure, it was beautiful and the Moon of Endor with its giant trees looked amazing, but the plot was mostly a rehash of the original (another Death Star? Really?) plus silly Ewok shenanigans that made the empire into a total joke.
The complexity of the world is spiraling upward at an exponential rate. A 6th grade reading level was just fine and normal when my grandfather was a young man. Today, if you’re struggling that much then you’re lucky if you can keep a roof over your head.
A lot of people now say this is proof that we need universal basic income, free education, health care, public housing for all. I live in Canada where we have some of these things. One of our biggest ongoing political fights is over the issue of how to pay for these things. Tons of people fight against pay raises for teachers and blame teachers for all our problems. Teachers are actually pretty well paid here in Canada, compared to the US.
The other issue is immigration. The more services you get provided by the government, the more of a strain you put on the immigration system because everyone wants to move to your country so they can take advantage of those benefits. On the other hand, the way the US used to be (prior to the 20th century), there were no real social benefits to speak of and so everyone who immigrated had to work and benefit the economy. The US had no restrictions on immigration back then.
The thing I fear most with what has been called The Great Decoupling and the rise of a basic income state is this: the resource curse. Some of the most regressive, brutal, backward countries in the world are also those with the largest decoupling between workers and wealth. Historically these have been resource exporters such as oil and gas and mineral countries.
It’s a tragic reality of life that if people are deemed unnecessary for the productive functioning of the economy then they will come to be seen as politically and socially unnecessary. Then these people are extremely vulnerable to domination by a brutal elite.
If our society goes that way and we end up with a two class system with a small number of vastly wealthy capital owners and a vast number of unproductive basic income recipients then I can’t see that situation remaining stable without some brutal repression.
They’re spy machines designed for children. They give them to all students in school and force them to do all their homework with them!
I’d be wary of calling him guilty by association. Maybe when he realized who he was really hanging out with he was so horrified and disgusted that he just had to get involved and do something to fight back?
You can sell out on anything, no matter how unpopular it is, if you don’t make enough of them. How many of these things did they actually make?
Here’s the thing: if you change the thickness of the layer then the colour will change along with it, but the material is otherwise the same. This occurs because the layers produce a phenomenon known as thin film interference. So it’s not the material of the coating layer that produces the colour, it’s the interaction between two layers.
Anyway, you can see all of the colours of a light’s spectrum through a prism but you wouldn’t say the prism itself is any of those colours. It’s transparent and refractive. That’s all we have here with the glasses: refraction and reflection, with interference of certain wavelengths due to the exact thickness of the layers.
Heir apparent is one way to put it. I would argue that he used the Moscow Apartment Bombings as a false flag to install himself, just as Hitler did with the Reichstag Fire.
Both leaders (Putin and Hitler) already had a lot of power prior to the false flags but those attacks cemented their rule as dictators.
The Moscow apartment bombings were carried out in 1999. Putin used them, along with the invasion of Dagestan, to launch the Second Chechen War.
Alexander Litvinenko blamed Putin and the FSB for the bombings. For that he was infamously assassinated with radioactive polonium.
If Putin were a “good guy” then none of that would’ve happened either, so he might not have won the 2000 election.
How often do you use it, if not every day? Once a week? Once a month?
I use my laptop every day so it makes sense that I don’t use the power button even though it’s right there. I also have a raspberry pi set up to run Retropie that I only turn on once or twice a year when I have an old friend in from out of town. In that case I use the power button every single time but I don’t mind that it’s kind of finicky (I have to turn on several other devices with it as well as a power strip to power them all) because I don’t use it that often.
I could see the new Mac Mini being a bit annoying with its bottom side power button if you’re using it every other day. But honestly I would be more annoyed at the boot time taking 30s than the 2s it takes to reach under the case and power it up. If I had one I would probably just get the keyboard with built in power button and finger print reader though. I use the finger print reader on my laptop all the time because it unlocks my password manager.
How often do you use the power button to turn on your computer? These days I might use it once a year, at most!
And now I’m just picturing myself cracking open a can of beer only for bees to start flying out!
This is the shit at the bottom of my compost pile that somehow managed to avoid breaking down!
Putin has been in power for 25 years. He arguably has more enemies than anyone else on the planet. I’d say the deterrent factor is pretty strong with this one.
It’s not perfect though. When you’re destroying your own country with the most disastrous war in living memory then you need stronger deterrents.
I wonder if they’re afraid of Eternal September’ing the service. A lot of people on Lemmy were upset when a bunch of people on Reddit joined. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have millions join in one day. I doubt it would be good for the culture of the community!
Whoever said anything about that? You can make positive changes, just don’t expect them to be permanent. Nothing is permanent. That’s life! Eventually we all die.
It’s a Red Queen’s Race.
Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
They’re actually going after all of them at the same time. They’re just at different stages in each case.
In the long term, no. It’s a temporary measure. It’s like fighting against entropy.
Yes and they’re yet another collectible product that exploits the psychology of a subset of people who compulsively collect things. I put them in the same category as gambling and note that there’s a lot of crossover with these things (loot boxes and CCG booster packs being prime examples of a gambling and collectible combo).