Can I legally drop someone else’s baby off at the fire station? 🤣

Little Rover…

Again, I don’t care. You vote to throw me and my people on the pyre, you can all go to Hell as far as I’m concerned. We can all burn together.

Private businesses have regulations on their ads all the time. Cities across the country regulate how large shop ads can be.

If he’s the candidate, I’m sitting the election out. Look, my community is under an attempted genocide right now. And as we’ve seen from the Starmer government in the UK, a nominally liberal government can be just as bad for trans rights as any Republican government. When Newsom says “be more culturally normal,” that is a dogwhistle for “take away the human rights of trans people.”

If the party isn’t willing to fight for my civil rights, sorry, I don’t owe you shit. You chose to do nothing after they first came for me, so I will laugh when they come for you.

If North Korea could do it, so can Taiwan.

North Korea did it, and it had the United States, the nation with the most powerful surveillance capabilities in the world looking right over its shoulder. And keep in mind, we’re still technically at war with North Korea. And North Korea might as well be an island. But really, the island part is irrelevant here, as Taiwan already possesses all the nuclear material it would need. It has a well developed nuclear power sector. The island gets half its electricity from nuclear power. And they have several research reactors. It already has all the fissile material it needs to build a bomb.

Taiwan doesn’t need thousands of nuclear weapons to be a credible threat to China. A dozen bombs with delivery systems would be more than enough to make a credible deterrent. The goal isn’t to be able to wipe out the entire population of mainland China. The goal would simply be to make any invasion so costly that the cost would vastly outweigh any potential gains. I don’t know what all Xi hopes to gain by conquering Taiwan, but whatever it is, it’s not worth losing the dozen largest Chinese cities in a series of mushroom clouds. To the Chinese leadership, the conquest of Taiwan is not worth getting Beijing nuked. Maybe Mao would have made that trade, back when China was a rural peasant nation. But now? China is the workshop of the world. The entire economy and China’s place in the world are utterly dependent on its megacities.

And yet, plenty of other countries have managed to do it…

A peaceful and realistic solution? Taiwan develops a strategic nuclear deterrent. They’re already a near-nuclear country and an industrial and technological powerhouse. A nuclear bomb is fully within their capability, and they already have abundant supplies of all the precursor materials in their possession. The most realistic solution to the Taiwan crisis is that Taiwan obtains nuclear weapons, and China is never able to threaten them with invasion again.

Except that attitude pretends that the election in front of you is the only election that will ever happen ever again. It’s a short-sighted view that leads us to exactly where we are now. We’ve had 30 years of Democrats telling everyone “don’t boycott this election. This is the most important one in history. If you don’t vote for us, democracy is dead forever. I know we’re not really going to do anything to change things, but what choice do you have?”

In retrospect, we would have been a lot better off today if in 2016 the entire left wing of the Democratic party just boycotted the election entirely. The fact that Hillary came close to winning is the only reason the neoliberal wing was able to retain any credibility.

Exactly. Could one of the blue MAGA folks let me know when Newsom publicly announces he supports completely dismantling DHS and rolling back the post-9/11 surveillance state? You cannot seriously pretend to want to fight fascism if dismantling the tools of the fascists isn’t the first thing you intend to do when in power.

It has some serious Lord of the Rings vibes. The surveillance state and the unconstitutional powers created after 9/11 are this immensely powerful tool created for evil ends. But after the evil is defeated, the nominally good guys choose to not to dismantle the evil tools, but to keep them, telling themselves that they will be used for good. Except they cannot be used for good, as they are fundamentally evil. Meanwhile I’m over here shouting, “cast it into the fire!” But they decide to keep it every time.

Nah, you’re arguing in bad faith.

Part of the problem with wood construction is that wood is a biological material. It’s never going to be perfect. It’s going to warp, twist, and bend. When carpenters build a house, they can work around this irregularity and fit pieces together one at a time as they go. But a factory robot needs to operate with every piece having the same predictable geometry. Even if you mill all of your lumber up perfectly square, it will warp a bit sitting in your warehouse as hygroscopic changes and retained stresses subtly change each piece’s geometry.

If you’re building with wood, you’re always going to need some manual hand-fitup to make all everything fit together nice. And if you have to do that anyway, you lose a lot of the efficiencies that come with manufactured homes. If your giant robot assembly line still has a bunch of carpenters at the end of it fitting everything together, you might as well skip the robots and just have the carpenters build the house.

There is still room for automation in home construction, but it’s most useful for the efficient production of individual components. Look how we mass-produce roof trusses in factories. That’s a great application. Or you can automate the production of things like cabinets, which then in turn will be installed and fitted by actual human carpenters.

YOU have chosen to ignore history. And how typically in authoritarian takeovers, the first step to fighting the takeover is to abandon the captured opposition party and to start fresh with something new. A popular front is usually needed to defeat them. Authoritarians often let toothless opposition parties continue to operate. And there are always blind fools like yourself who insist that they must be supported, though they are just another tool of the autocrat.

The only way you’ll get any change under the current system is to elect a Dem super majority in every election for the next fifty years.

This shows you are not a serious person. If that is your solution, then I can only conclude that you actually support Trump and the Fascist party.

Democrats are not a real opposition party. They are the potemkin opposition, fully captured by the Fascists.

The key problem with factory-built housing is that while a home can be built in a factory, it has to be maintained in the field. And a home isn’t like a piece of disposable consumer tech. It has to last for decades, preferably for generations. That means it has to be maintained.

When you build something in a factory, you start optimizing for factory production. That eventually affects the home design. Manufacturers end up making things with a lot of non-standard components, and they can be assembled in ways that are possible in a factory, but difficult to repair and replicate in service.

Compare that to a stick-built home. There everything has to be built by actual humans on site using standard labor and materials. This guarantees that it can be repaired in the future using standard labor and materials. That which is built by hand can be repaired by hand.

Of course not. We have only two choices of party:

1. The Fascist party.

2. The party that tells you to vote for them lest the Fascists win, but when elected, does nothing to fight the Fascists, reverse their worst atrocities, or prevent them from coming back to power.

Horniest? I mean, DS9 did run concurrently with Lexx…

Can we ask the aliens to abduct Trump, never to be seen again? I’ve always said he isn’t good for anything. But now that I think of it, dissecting his brain would be a great study on the extremes of human narcissism and degenerate behavior. I’m sure the alien scientists would love to study such a odd case.

Do you have an example of a city that runs on renewables with battery storage with no duplicate backup base load generator?

Thankfully cities don’t build isolated power grids.