I mean, the current borders of the US do include some former foreign states and land previously owned by others, that were taken over in the past, Hawaii for example. Does that not make it an empire, or does that stop counting after a century or so?

While I agree that its unlikely for him to go out that way, failed attempts dont make the chance zero. The people trying that only have to get lucky once, he has to avoid being unlucky every time.

Has this kind of thing literally once in history ever ended well?

IIRC the space force basically just is taking what was air force space command and spinning it off into its own branch. So they’d not be doing much that wasn’t being done before so much as making that operation independent of the air force, same as how the air force used to be part of the army.

I dont think Putin would let him nuke Ukraine. Beyond issues with it being on their border, and their own military forces occupying part of the country, a missile launched from the US towards Ukraine is going to look a whole lot like one launched from the US towards Russia, at least at first, and the nature of nuclear conflict is such that you generally would launch your own missiles when you see your rival’s missiles coming, rather than waiting to see where they land. Trump seems to care what Putin wants, and nobody is going to want their main rival, even if their leader is currently one you have influence over, to be launching nuclear missiles in the direction of one’s country.

The EU is even less likely, since France is both one of its most prominent members and a nuclear power itself.

What if that is true though? What if it’s even virtually guaranteed to be true, given the effort and time required to reasonably prove something like that combined with the limited resources given (and which we can afford to give) to the justice system to do so, and the sheer number of crimes to deal with?

Honestly, the more I hear about the number of cases of people being convicted falsely, or where it’s hard to tell if they truly were guilty, due to evidence being poor, or misconstrued, or based on faulty foresic science or known unreliable sources like eyewitness testimony, the more I worry that if called to serve on a jury I’d be effectively unable to do so, because I have come to doubt if the justice system is even capable of proving something beyond what I would consider to be a reasonable doubt.

If they get to the point of being able to just ignore something like that, they have no reason to amend the constitution anyway because they can just toss it out

to be fair (not that Trump really deserves the benefit of the doubt at this point), the clip doesnt really make it clear if he’s saying they rigged the 2024 election in his favor, or if he’s referring again to his conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was rigged against him (with the implication being that he was “supposed” to win the 2020 one and therefore would have been ineligible to run for the 2024-2028 term)

Grapefruits used to be my favorite citrus fruit. Then I learned about pomelos. Now I can barely stand grapefruit knowing there is something out there that has much the same flavor but with less of the sourness, while being much larger.

Id bet Mark Zuckerberg has mental illness. Having the level of wealth that he has makes connecting with common people nigh impossible and leaves his pool of potential friends limited a handful of people who themselves focus on hoarding wealth that they don’t even have any real use for.

Getting used to the power and comfort his billions give him means he has to worry about one day losing what he has attained, and forces him to justify to himself the possession of so much wealth while others starve.

I see no way someone can exist in that space for years on end without it warping their sanity into an uncaring money hoarder obsessed with making his numbers higher.

Honestly, Ive come to think that there is truly no such thing as sarcasm so blatant as for everyone to get that it is sarcasm without being told.

Those are the ideas I was referencing as taking decades tbh. Technically a few, especially the laser sail, can potentially get to high enough fractions of lightspeed to get that noticable time dilation effect, but given that makes something that already costs a huge amount of energy, much more expensive than it already is, I’m not sure if you’d actually want to go to those speeds very often.

I mean, saying it would take half of forever with existing technology, when we do not have the technology to do it in the first place, seems a bit redundant. There are any number of hypothetical technologies for travel to relatively nearby stars that, while we don’t have them presently, at least do not violate physics and are more an issue of requiring a civilization of much larger scale than ours to afford to build them rather than one of if they’re physically possible.

An analogy I once saw was this: suppose you were to go back in time to meet a medieval blacksmith, and you show him the blueprints for a modern jetliner. You might, with a lot of explaining of the relevant physics and engineering behind all the parts, be able to convince the guy that the machine could work if constructed. But, he’d have no idea of the process for how many of the parts are made, or the materials they’re made from, and if you included all that information too, the whole process would be so expensive and the size of the economy back then so small that in all likelihood, not even the richest kingdom on earth in his day could possibly afford to actually build and operate one. However, if the blacksmith took all that information and concluded “this can never happen, it’s just too hard”, time would prove him wrong.

Terraforming would seem a bit unnecessary if you can send a crewed ship there. Manned interstellar travel, unless we’re wrong about the whole speed of light thing, is going to take decades at least to reach the very nearest stars (I’d imagine that it is more likely we’d go to those stars first, and only reach Trappist when people from those stars later launch their own ships, until eventually the outer edge of settled space reaches 40ly).

That implies that, if you can send some colony ship to another star, you necessarily have the technology to build a space habitat that can sustain large numbers of humans in sufficient comfort to run a small civilization and all relevant industry, self-sufficiently using only the materials available in space from asteroids and such as inputs. You have this tech first, because the colony ship is itself just one or more of these habitats, on top of some massive propulsion system.

As such, why even bother with terraforming planets? That’s a process that may potentially take millennia to truly finish, longer than it took your ship to even get there with some of the possible propulsion options, will only be viable on a fraction of worlds, and will still get you a place that probably does not have an earth like day or gravity or any number of other differences. You would then be back in the bottom of a gravity well, which requires a ton of energy expenditure to get back into space again. Why not instead, find some asteroids and comets in your target system, there’s probably going to be some around somewhere if our solar system is any indication, and build more of those habitats as needed.

I mean, it’s kinda early to say that elections are never happening when the previous government has only just fallen.

Does anyone know if canned cat foods tend to be raw or cooked? I dont use this brand, but one of my cats has to eat a particular prescription diet for health reasons, and the limited options I have all are canned and contain some chicken from what I can see, this getting into the cat food supply and being seemingly so lethal to cats has me concerned about him.

Does divorce by itself even lower the birthrate though? Intuitively, one might suspect that a couple that were no longer interested in eachother probably isn’t having many children, compared to if those people were to pair off again with new partners?

You can find plenty of weird furry fetish art on the fediverse too if you find the right instances, that’s just an internet thing.

Antimatter does not replicate the way microbes do to be fair. It’s dangerous to handle in large enough amounts obviously, be we don’t have the energy to produce enough to create a serious danger nor the technology to store that amount at once.

To be fair, while I seriously suspect Trump’s stance towards Gaza will probably be worse than Kamala’s would have been, He isnt exactly in office yet, so his fault in this is at most limited to Israel anticipating that he probably wont do anything when he is. Had Kamala won, what is happening today would likely be largely the same.