ColdFusion

I was there, 3,000 years ago

Actually, not the wrong place. The similarities are enough that I think Ted was probably in the middle of a Ketamine bender when they told him about the Timor swarm

The criticality of any given service is inversely proportional to how recently released was the technology that it runs on.

This, if you see some ancient machine sitting there humming, don’t even make eye contact with that mf, don’t even think about it. In fact, try to minimize your time in the same room so when it eventually goes tits up, you don’t get blamed.

I would watch the absolute fuck out of this to the point that my family would be so fucking sick of it.

IIRC, you can get into public games on roll20. I also know Lemmy has an instance dedicated to TTRPGs; do they have any kind of game matchup community?

I’ve never met a public-facing tabletop group that wasn’t enthusiastic to introduce new people to it. I think honestly my worst experience was when some dude brought his insanely broken D&D 3.5 character to play in a level one 5E game. The DM handled it very well; much better than I would have, I think.

Your nearest, biggest city’s library is a good place to look. Libraries almost always have something going on in a spare public room or have public event flyers hung up. If you’re interested in politics, going and yelling at city council is a great way to meet local activists.

Are you sure it isn’t just that he’s Dutch?

Remember when Gemini said that you should eat at least one small rock per day?

Talking a whole lot of shit for someone riding around in a machine that will find literally any excuse to break down. Helicopters are sketchy as fuck, and even if you manage to autorotate perfectly to try and recover from a stall, you’re still liable to suffer severe or fatal injuries. It’s super easy to crash due to human error or some kind of mechanical failure.

Bruh wow

Basically, the cold war was already starting to wind down in the 80s and late 70s. We were comfortable enough that we’d won the Cold war that Reagan embarked us on the 40 year project of strip-mining worker benefits and social welfare programs. The most culturally aggressive aspects of the cold war happened during the mid-60s.

Hell yeah. When the right asks you which group’s rights you want to sacrifice to save your own rights, you tell them to eat shit. They’re going to come for your rights too, especially if they succeed in taking away those other people’s rights. There is no sufficiently small in group for conservatism.

Okay, it’s a really complicated issue but you’ve got three big things that are all kind of working together here:

1. Political capture: the US’ first past the post electoral system basically guarantees that there’s going to only be two main parties. They were always vulnerable to capture by the wealthy, but the Citizens United decision functionally guaranteed their capture by the groups with the deepest pockets. The democrats themselves are shit scared of any serious left policy because they know it’ll scare off their big donors, and despite the fact that fundraising has not directly translated into winning for them, they’re terrified that they’re going to lose the support of the wealthiest and that’ll guarantee election losses. At least, that’s the optimistic interpretation.

2. Cold war reaction: the US didn’t just have one red scare, we’ve had two or three spread out over several decades. There was a huge cultural reaction against communism after WWII, and being an open communist during the Cold war would just get your ass disappeared (according to my now dead boomer dad, though I’ve seen no evidence to support it), beaten up or killed by locals, or shunned. A lot of folks were terrified of espousing left policies because they could easily be suspected of or painted as communist. While the cold war is passing out of living memory, the chill that it left on American leftism for the better part of 100 years is hard to overstate.

3. Our intelligence agencies have consistently worked across all levels of government (local, state, federal) to harass, discredit, and sometimes kill left leadership and organizations. The CIA itself ran a very successful multi-decade campaign of overthrowing peaceful, democratically elected left-wing governments across the global south by directly sponsoring, aiding, and training right wing reactionary movements, and there’s not really any evidence that they stopped. There’s no reason to think that they’re not still working hard today to prevent any serious left movement.

Yes, actually. I probably could have stepped up to be an admin, but tbh, my plate is already overfull.

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I think the thing I haven’t quite sussed out is… Well, let’s take Wal-Mart and Dollar General. Wal-mart and DG both have this weird niche of being both major employers for rural areas, as well as depending on nearly their employee base as customers. If they automate all their jobs away, who do they think they’re going to be selling to? My guess so far is that all these MBAs think that certainly their customer base won’t run out of cash by having their jobs automated away.

Seems like a good time for shameless self promotion. I moderate a comm you might be interested in.

https://lemm.ee/c/close_encounters

I don’t think I understand what the point of colonization would be. At some point, the cost of keeping slaves exceeds the benefit of the “free” labor you get from them; likewise with colonial administration. I think if a species had access to the kind of energy capabilities necessary to make an Alcubierre drive run, then that’s functionally a post-scarcity society for a number of reasons, and the only possible reason they’d want to colonize or enslave is if they’re just kind of hard wired to go out of their way to be major league assholes, even by human standards. Even if you somehow figure out a configuration of an Alcubierre drive that makes it so you could power it with a conventional energy source, that still bumps us way up towards post-scarcity because of all the cheaty/hackey bullshit we can now do in space. Deploying even a small array of solar panels around the sun to beam as much electricity as we could want to wherever we want would become a trivial task. Oh, an asteroid with sixteen quadrillion dollars of gold? Ez. Just pop on over and scoop up as much gold as you can fit on the ship. Want to colonize and mine the moon for a laugh? No problem, just pop on up there and set up your tent, no giant fucking rockets needed, that’ll be two seconds, please. Transporting goods, people, and cargo across the earth becomes comically fast and easy, no more need for big ass jets and airports. The Alcubierre drive would probably have a bigger impact on our QOL than the discovery of electricity.