I mean if you had the thing iterate 1000 scripts following the story beats that Hollywood likes, the chances that one of them would be interesting enough to edit is probably pretty good. And an AI could probably do 1000 in a day. It wouldn’t be AI spending 8 months writing a single draft of something, it’s AI making 1000 of them a day every day. So if AI for some reason were to generate 10,000 scripts based on a prompt like “generate a star trek movie in which Kirk defeats a god” the chances that one of that 10,000 would be interesting enough to edit into a shooting script is probably decent. Make 100,000 and I’d say there’s probably at least one that’s better than Star Trek V.

This is what’s missing. The sheer scale of how much the computer can do and how fast. Yes, it took a human author 20 drafts to make something worthy of a vanity press. But an AI author bot could churn through 20 drafts in minutes, where it would take a human years to do the same. And again all of these drafts are free once you buy the AI license, where a human author will want to be paid for every successful piece they produce.

It’s what a lot of people miss about AI in general. It doesn’t have to be as good as a human doing the task, it just has to be good enough that it’s no longer worth paying the premium to have the human doing that work. Depending on the field there might be reasons that you want a human involved — either for legal reasons (ai are already pretty good at reading mris, however if you want legal protection from having a trained human verify) or for luxury or premium products (there are markets for original signed art, hand made goods, etc. most people don’t care enough to pat the premium for the real thing, so they buy factory produced versions — prints instead of original art, factory made pasta instead of hand made pasta). I think the eventual shake out will be that there will be a premium book and movie market for human written material, and most bulk books will be written by AI that will be cheap and mostly disposable, forgettable stuff that people buy to read on the bus or train or while on breaks at work. There will still be luxury books written by exceptional people, but it would be the kind of books you pay a lot of money to own, and are probably collectible to some degree. Movies made by people will be more like how we see indie movies today, as something for highly educated cinema lovers who appreciate fine are. The general public wants Avengers and Star Wars and Chick Flicks, and don’t care if the movie was written by ChatGPT or similar bots.

This isn’t going to happen by next Tuesday, but ask anyone who knows about technology how many times people thought a computer would never do that only to eat those words within ten years.

I don’t necessarily see this as an obstacle. If you gave 80% there copy to any decent developmental editor and line editor, you could probably get to the level of any bulk genre novel on the shelves at B&N within 6 months. The content of most novels is derivative even when written by human authors and professionally edited and published. Theres very little art in those novels, as most of them tend to follow formulae for creating characters and plots and settings that are common enough to have worksheets being used in production. To be blunt, AI is going to absolutely decimate the writing industry because most of the published works are derivative and formulaic — and that’s exactly what AI is good at.

Just to give an example, this (https://savethecat.com/beat-sheets) is the Save the Cat beat sheet page. Save the cat is a plot structure used by Hollywood rather extensively and is fairly common in novels. It’s also fairly specific in how a plot should be structured— down to the page number in the case of movie scripts (https://savethecat.com/beat-mapper). This isn’t people learning from experience, this is basically an algorithm for telling a story. And this is what is expected in the industry. I’m sure the there are niches in high literary fiction that are less derivative and more artistic, but this is only a very small part of the book industry, and furthermore it’s not easy to do well.

One huge thing that AI detractors don’t like to admit is that AI doesn’t have to be perfect to be adopted for a purpose, it just has to create content that’s worth editing in this case. This is a pretty low threshold because of the economics— the AI is owned by the publisher and other than the software license, it’s FREE. And if the AI can produce 5000 novels that can be edited for publication, why bother with humans? If all that novels do is follow formulae then there’s no point to the human.

If you could get a good job without college, then the price you’re willing to pay for college is elastic like anything else. You would never sign up to spend $30K a year for a BA if there were large enough pools of good jobs you could get without doing that. Hell, a lot of Gen Z are choosing trade schools over college now because 120K for a $40K salary is a terrible deal. But as long as most good jobs require college, people will not be cost conscious about college. And therefore colleges can get away with charging eye-watering tuition for an education that’s arguably worse than the one their grandparents paid $550 a semester for. Nobody wants to opt out because I mean what’s the alternative? Maybe you can do trades, but if you can’t, you either go to college or go wait tables, stock shelves, or collect garbage. Nobody’s going to say no if they want to be middle class.

And until it gets fixed and people have realistic and viable options to not go to college and be able to afford rent and groceries on one paycheck, schools can morph into club med and add conserve room service, massage parlors, and a personal butler for every student to the tune of 200K or more a year. People will still sign the loan papers because the alternative is Walmart.

We’ve been solving the wrong problem for decades and backstopping the problem by blaming colleges. People weren’t doing this until most of the decent paying factory and related jobs went to India, China, and Bangladesh. Back in the day, kids right out of high school could get jobs that could at least net you a comfortable life in a small apartment, and depending on the industry, possibly on the path to home ownership. Today, that path is mostly gone, and as such people who would have never seen college as something they want are shunted to college where they would compete with more diligent scholars for a dwindling (thanks computer networks and soon enough add AI to this) number of desk jobs where they pretend to care about excel spreadsheets of meaningless data.

The actual problem isn’t college or student loans. Those problems would solve themselves if we solved the actual problem— there aren’t enough good jobs that actually pay a living wage, and because there are so few, businesses are requiring college (and doing more above that at this point like an MA and internships) to the tune of mortgage levels of cost. If there were enough “can live on my own and possibly afford to have children” paying jobs the business could not hide them behind the paywall of college because someone else wouldn’t and the employees would choose that path instead. If we focused on creating those jobs, and therefore creating a situation where businesses compete for workers instead of one in which workers compete for jobs, then people would choose college less often and costs would go down a bit to attract more students.

No, but I’d say it’s an excellent counter argument for the idea that Osama bin Laden created these problems in the early 2000s. As I said, I think a good bit of our education woes stem more from Reagan GOP budget cuts and Union busting than anything that OBL could ever dream of doing. And thus saying he got what he wanted is a bit much. If anything, OBL was a gift to neocons, AIPAC and Israel — those groups made out like bandits using the Spector of 9/11 to invade two countries and secure more weapons for Israel.

Osama bin Laden didn’t break America. America did.

We did so in thousands of tiny decisions, but we did it to ourselves.

We broke our public schools through funding cuts, educational fads that don’t work, and by watering down the standards for educational achievement. Where in 1940, kids graduating from high school were generally capable of reading and writing at least at a twelfth grade level. In 2024, the median college graduate reads on an eighth grade level. Osama didn’t do that, we did. We’re now to the point in educational decline that students graduating from high school are not capable of reading and writing entire book on a topic, and certainly cannot read analytically.

We destroyed the work ethic to the point that an entire generation is unwilling to get a job despite having spent decades going to school to train for those jobs. It’s now a regular occurrence for that generation to return to mom’s basement where they cry on various forms of social media that no woman wants to touch them. Osama did not create the incels.

For that matter, Osama didn’t refuse to pay to keep up our infrastructure. The potholes, falling bridges, and out of date railways and ports are not caused because Osama did 9/11.

Most if not all of these problems are self inflicted. And I’d put much more of the decline on Reagan and the fiscal conservatives gutting tge funds used to pay for education than to some middle eastern engineers turned jihadist with a kidney problem, Reagan republicans gutted unions, thus making living wages harder to come by. Problem being is that this process started in 1980 and OBL didn’t target the USA until he tried to plant a truck bomb in the WTC in the early 1990s.

Osama’s most lasting legacy is that the USA has been bombing the crap out of the Middle East for decades and supporting Israel bombing the crap out of Palestine. It’s created a massive backlash against Islam in general and convinced much of the west that Muslims are holy warriors who want to behead them and rape their wives. His legacy has been to trash the reputation of Islam across the globe. I don’t see it as a win.

I think first of all, you need to shut up and listen to your public. The stuff they’re worried about are things you used to be all about solving before you decided to sell out and be the party of the laptop class, various identity groups, and elite college graduates. These are very meat and potatoes issues: wage stagnation, affordable housing, affordable college, grocery prices, good basic education for their kids. If you had a good speaker, with a message that “we will actually fix these things. We actually believe in helping the working adult population to succeed in America. We want to have standards of living increase instead of decrease. “. Then when elected actually make those things better. Banning VCs and investment firms from buying residential homes would be a quick, cheap and easy fix to at least part of the housing crisis. Entire neighborhoods being bought up — unseen, and above asking prices in some cases— reduce supply. There are stories of these kinds of things happening even to trailer parks. A VC comes in, buys the park, jacks up rents until nobody can afford to remain. It’s insane.

Well, yeah, I think we’d mostly agree on that. But I think what I’m getting at is that if you need a background in chemistry to recognize an ingredient, it’s not a good thing. Now im realist enough not not expect a housewife in Mississippi to be able to go without storebought breads, pastas, and so on.

I don’t think it’s horribly wrong, though I think if the median American would look at that ingredient and not know what it is or does, it’s probably not good for you. I tend to avoid it, but I’m personally realistic enough to say that if it’s 3/4 of the way down the ingredients list, it’s probably not horrible for your health.

I will say that this lidt ignores added sugars. High Fructose Corn Syrup is simply a diabetes inducer. Unless it’s a fairly rare dessert, you don’t need added sugars.

Hard disagree. Utilitarianism doesn’t work that well, as it tends to lead to favor the powerful as you balance the utilitarian books. I get a lot of utility out of saving Elon Musk, or making Elon Musk happy because he has money and power and thus control over millions of people directly or indirectly. The homeless guy we remove park benches to keep out of a park, well, he’d only benefit the utility of humanity by freezing to death. And thus it is on a thousand such interactions. It’s better for the self driving car to kill a pedestrian than the driver simply from the included calculation that nobody would ever buy the car controlled by an AI that would even potentially choose to do anything other than save the passengers at all costs.

I think most of the idea is crazy.

First of all, the only outcome of us being too frightened to make the AI ourselves or hobble it to the point it doesn’t work is that other, much worse actors will not only get their first, but have an AI that is much less restrained than whatever AI you are scared of. In fact, this is a much worse outcome. The military is absolutely building AI, so are Russia, China, Iran, and so on. Black rock is probably working on one. Guess what? Absolutely none of those groups give the smallest amount of attention to the idea that AI might make a decision that harms people. And so the AI race is at current much more likely to be won by people with no concern about the AI moral compass than those AI doomers that pride themselves on being cautious about AI.

And most of the fears seem to come from movies and TV shows, not anything that these robots do or have done. We have miles of film of shitty 1980s and 1990s movies that decry AI as doomsday science. But “it happened in Terminator movies” is not even to the level of a real argument. It’s no more realistic than being afraid of space exploration because there might be Klingons out there. If humanity wants to stagnate at 2010 levels of technology, fine, but at the very least I think it should be based on observation rather than stupid movies. If these kinds of people had been listened to in 1600, we’d have never built tge new world. If we’d have listened in 1900, we would not have electricity in our homes. I’m on board with maybe not letting “kill all humans” be a life goal. But I think the dangers of technophobic people is going to do much more long term harm than AI could. AI can already detect cancers better than humans.

They don’t have accountability. There aren’t enough districts up for grabs in the midterms to do anything other than deadlock Congress. The electoral map in 2026 isn’t good, nor is 2028. And without a 2/3 majority in the house and senate impeachment is off the table. The courts have made charging them with a crime very difficult. Other than a color revolution (hopefully mostly peaceful) there aren’t any real mechanisms to hold them accountable or stop them from doing anything they want.

I’m convinced Trump could be a revolutionary, it’s not just fanfic, as he’s actually executing a plan to bring the administrative state to heel and to some extent I think it’s necessary as much of it has been doing de facto legislation since probably the 1970s with little to no accountability or oversight. That’s not to say replacing everyone with loyalists is good, but letting the administrative system decide to outright ban things with no input from congress is not what I would call democratic either. Likewise, these agencies do waste a lot of money on things that don’t do the public any good. Someone needs to force these issues simply because the public is not served when agencies can make wide ranging decisions or spend millions with no accountability for following the directives of the actual elected government or for causing harm or wasting money.

None of that is Trump going Full Hitler. That’s more of a democratic talking point than a political reality. He’s not massing troops to take Mexico, Canada, or Greenland. He isn’t undermining the power of congress. The worst I could say he’s actually done is rename the Gulf of Mexico into Gulf of America. Other than absolutely hilarious “google support notes” insisting that Google shouldn’t have gone along with the renaming, it’s not that important. I am concerned about mass deportations, and I think it should be stopped.

Real polyglots are under appreciated. However, I think it’s mostly an effect of so many pseudo polyglots who take a course on Duolingo and thus claim to speak several languages. Unless you’re putting in serious effort with real language learning materials, you more or less just memorize stock phrases that you can fool non speakers with. I’m not impressed with most of them.

We’ve been “ten years away from fusion and abundant energy from fusion” for the better part of a century now. In the last fifty years, we’ve sent hundreds of shuttle missions into space to do … basically nothing. We’re studying growing tomatoes in space at a cost of thousands of dollars a minute. It’s not going anywhere. The most interesting thing we’ve done is space telescopes. Okay cool, we’ve discovered the answers to future jeopardy questions, again, at a cost of thousands of dollars to let some self important astronomers take pictures and write equations that might or might not even mean anything. If you’re going to tax me for space exploration, is it too much to ask that we make some actual progress? We’re still doing the same sorts of make-work experiments that we were in 1975.

I just don’t see it. I can get behind the government funding medical research that might well prevent or cure a disease. Or to the FDA and Dept of Agriculture to control how much actual poison and microplastics are in the food supply. Those things benefit actual humans on earth. NASA has done basically fuck all, including building a launch vehicle (the boosters are basically repurposed ICBMs and the moon landing was a missile development and scare-the-USSR program disguised as space exploration). Now the Cold War is over and the Soviets are gone. We aren’t really going to go into space, and it’s past time to stop funding an agency dedicated to totally not being cover for a weapons program.

I don’t see a problem with ending NASA. We’re to the point that everything that we can do can easily be done by private companies anyway. And most of the things we wanted NASA for (men in space colonies, and FTL travel) are frankly not going to happen. Why not have SpaceX launch satellites and figure out how to grow space tomatoes in high orbit. That’s all we’ve done with the agency since the moon landing. At least SpaceX launched Kirk into space — it was a stunt, but it’s more than NASA has done since the shuttle program. They managed a few telescopes, which is cool, but I don’t see why we need billions a year to do the space equivalent of building big ships and usining them to dump random things in the harbor to see if they float.

That part is absolutely mind blowing to me, not only because tge policies are popular, but because they chose to snuff out their own popular candidate. The Bernie Bro movement was real. Maybe Bernie himself wasn’t viable — he’s pretty old — but there was genuine grassroots support and excitement for the politics Bernie was selling. But there democrats as a party chose to deliberately kill it off. They conspired to keep the only candidate to really get people excited to vote for them off the federal stage. Then they’re all wondering why nobody wants to vote for a party that doesn’t even bother with common people’s problems, kills off their most popular candidate, and insists on acting like it’s 1994 and the biggest problem is that we pollute too much.

I think I’ll agree that Democrats no longer “get” the new environment.

The media and social media landscape is changing, as this article points out. We are living in the era of YouTube and influencers. I agree. But saying that the entire problem of why democrats suck at elections comes down to “learn the social media game” is simplistic and misses other parts of the or.

First of all, I’d argue that the democrats are still living in the 1990s as far as policy goes. The concerns that they have as major initiatives just don’t seem to match up to what I hear people talking about. People are worried about declining standards of living, ghost jobs, affordable housing, and student loans. The Biden administration was worried about green energy, shovel-ready infrastructure projects, Ukraine, DEI, and Our Democracy.

Even when campaigning, they barely bothered to nod in the direction of concerns people have. They were all over project 2025, or Schedule F, or Trump hates (whatever group were pandering to right now). They were careful to be pro Palestine. But they never got around to anything average Americans would care about. They just sort of assumed “I hate Trump” was sufficient. It wasn’t, and won’t be next time. Our Democracy doesn’t matter to people watching their kids struggle to afford housing. It doesn’t matter to people sitting around the kitchen table trying to squeeze yet more money out of their budget to afford groceries.

And even when they did have a message that would have resonated with average people, their ability to actually do anything significant about the issues that matter to the average person is practically nil. There’s no real chance that the majority of students will see student loan relief. There’s even less chance that housing will be more affordable anytime soon. Prices are still high.

There are a lot of problems with headset based social media.

First, unless there are major improvements to the base technology, headsets are not going to work that well. They’re big and bulky, maybe not heavy for short term use, but probably heavy enough to be tiring after a couple of hours. They’re ugly, thus no grownup is going to whip out their Oculus in public to use the internet. They’re fairly isolating as well, as you can’t participate in conversations around you while wearing an Oculus— your ears are blocked and no eye contact is possible.

Second, a lot of adult Internet use is done while doing other things. You might surf while watching TV, or while eating or cooking, or talking to other people. And at least for me, I tend to dip in and out of th3 phone or iPad. Adults, in short are casual users of the internet. And if you’re trying to lock people into an environment, that actually doesn’t work well if the typical users of your service are casual users. And herein lies the problem— Zuck is using a technology that’s casual hostile to try to corral a user base that’s extremely casual.

I don’t see this ever actually working because the friction between social media is extremely low. The cost of switching is basically zero, as it costs nothing to join any social media network you choose. The apps are free, the servers are free to join, and unless you’re in a very tight group of friends Theres no reason to choose one network over another. I can get the same stupid memes on X, insta, facebook, threads, blue sky or truth. And the interfaces are similar as well, which means that there’s no learning curve preventing a switch. Facebook is proposing to put a lot of negatives on their social media platform in an environment where Theres literally nothing to compel people to put up with those negatives.

I’m not sure there were any candidates that could win. Trump has enough charisma to pull off a lot, and democrats don’t understand that most of the country operates on a junior high level of understanding of most issues. They try to bring in the nuances of some issue, and all the Homer Simpson’s watching on TV get bored and confused. Trump gets them and knows “illegals are criminals and eat cats (isn’t that ALF?)” lands while “migrants cross the border illegally to make a better life for their family and our legal immigration system is bullshit unless you’re on an H1B,” doesn’t. They understand “food costs more, and Biden hasn’t fixed it,” but not “bird flu because of poor farming practices and shit luck, and the war in Ukraine is raising grain prices”.

Even that, from my understanding comes from the same place. Once you stop forcing the economy to slow down by lockdowns and vaccination mandates, just saying “you can go back to working and buying stuff in stores now” is going to end tge artificially created recession. Wages didn’t go up because the government did something, it was an enticement to get people back to working in restaurants and warehouses and retail stores because people who were doing those jobs found other work.

Honestly, it’s because they know better. The fascist thing was a counter to flagging interest in their own ideas. Their ideas have nothing for average people, it’s all about set asides for minorities, and quite often those are only accessible to those minorities who are already middle class. Or maybe they have a plan to … make sure prisoners and grade schoolers can get cross-sex hormones. That doesn’t excite anyone who works a regular job and is hoping to afford Top Ramen after paying rent. It doesn’t help people who were tricked into college and will be paying for their four year degree into their 40s. It doesn’t help millennials who are literally praying for a housing collapse so they can finally dream of buying a tiny house in which to raise a family.

When you can’t convince people that you can make their life better, the only thing you actually have is standing in the center stage screeching to anyone who will listen that those guys over there are going to steal your democracy. Now don’t misunderstand Trump is a twat and he’s going to try to get away with stuff. But as you say, if the democrats actually thought he was going to “end democracy “, they would not stand for it. They’d have too much to lose as opposition parties tend to end up dead if democracy actually dies.

My theory of the problem with America is that we are paying so much attention to politics that it’s fried our brains. I see it on both sides, people are absolutely hyperventilating about what Trump is doing or not doing, what the democrats are or are not doing about whatever Trump is or is not doing. Liberal women taking to TikTok to tell other liberal women to buy “cute winter boots” (read: firearms to hold threateningly near ICE agents). Honestly, I think most of this will eventually blow over and mean nothing. We aren’t going to take Greenland or Panama. I doubt we’ll do anything substantial in Gaza. The purge of government employees won’t change anything substantially, and might make things more efficient, maybe (I don’t think it will, it will mostly make a giant mess). I don’t think this is anything the liberal side fears. Trump isn’t ending democracy, and he likes Jews too much to be Hitler. It’s actually somewhat amusing that people believe in the End of Our Democracy— by a guy who has never bothered to pay attention in briefings.

As far as the Covid response, I don’t see how Biden did all that well. At best, his success was being elected after the virus had burned through the population. By the time Biden was in position to do anything in January of 2021, the virus had been around for five years, most sane people were vaccinated, and often had a couple of boosters, and the virus had weakened enough to be a glorified flu bug.

I don’t know why “for now” means anything. Trump has the ball. And he has 2 years before the next election to wear down the opposition. And he’s going to do the same with opposition to his other agendas. He’s going to wear people down until they get bored, get tired, run out of money, etc. and then do it anyway. And I think anyone who believes he’d back down is an idiot. His game has always been do something provocative, let his enemies vent their spleen until the6 look crazy, then do some slightly less terrible version of what he wants to do.

It works because most ordinary people simply don’t have the wherewithal to continually fight on multiple fronts at all times. And so eventually most of the protestors will accept a symbolic win “yay us, Trump hasn’t declared martial law yet!” Ignoring that his state of emergency allows him to do a lot of tge stuff he wants to do anyway. “Yay! We got some funding through!” But most of it is still cut off and we don’t know for certain if the appeals will go his way. But people have lives to live, bills, kids have baseball games and dance recitals, and damn the Chiefs rock. The media will eventually get over Trump’s being Trump because everyone else is exhausted by it. Who wants to hear about Trump doing something else?

> Up until 1940 or so, "educated" meant "through the 8th grade." Meanwhile the argument from authority fallacy, which is misunderstood by most of the Internet, goes back to at least the romans: "I am an excellent general, therefore I shall be an excellent emperor."

In terms of formal education, sure, they stopped at eighth grade. On the other hand, they were absolutely reading books, newspapers, magazines, and so on. We have more schooling, but very few people still bother with long form articles, books, magazines, or even long form podcasts with subject experts before making a decision on an issue. My grandfather didn’t have much formal education, but he read a lot of books on history and as such knew a lot about history. That generation also tended to get their news from newspapers not gossip.

I don’t think that’s always been the case. At least in the past, it was expected of those who considered themselves educated would be expected to know something about the subject they were talking about. The new attitude is much more of a feelings based vibe where the only criterion for taking a given position is that it feels right to them. I wouldn’t expect everyone to derive everything from first principles, however I think at some point, you need to at least know how a given system works, or the actual facts on the ground before you form an opinion.

But we’re a culture that doesn’t read books, one that will absolutely fall for anything. The Q phenomena was pretty much a wake up call from inside the house. People somehow came to believe that germ theory was fake. Or that Biden wasn’t really in tge White House or something. The threads on numerology of the exact timing of a tweet were insane. We are more credentialed than ever, but I think it would be fairly rich to say that we’re educated. Most people seem to lack the skills to understand anything going on around them. They don’t understand logic, probability, statistics, history, or basic sciences. As such the ability to make rational decisions about how to run a government are lost. People who think demons run Hollywood won’t make good decisions.

I think the reason people are so into the culture war stuff is that it provides lots of opportunities to create negative imagery that play well on screens, and that it’s easy to generate a hot take on. It’s spectacles. The freaky looking trans person is a spectacle to dangle in front of the screen to get conservatives big mad, especially if it looks like the6 work in a school. Getting liberals hopped up by showing weird Jim Bob’s unhinged sermon is likewise easy. But this level of discourse is happening because the idea of having long conversations based on factual evidence doesn’t work on a society that runs on vibes.

Honestly, I think Carl Sagan was right about the USA. We’ve long since abandoned the idea of seeking truth, and very much prefer comfortable lies. A conversation with the average American would have confirmed this decades ago. I’m not shocked mostly because I was watching the credulous news coverage of effing UFOs (okay we’re calling them UAPs now) and there was no real pushback even among people who like to consider themselves rational.

If people still credulously believe it’s possible for alien craft to travel through the galaxy despite the laws of physics denying the possibility, I don’t expect us to have rational arguments about more serious matters. And this plays directly into the hands of fascists as their narratives tend to have the virtues of being simple and easy for people to understand. Reading three articles about climate change is work. Calling it a hoax is simple, easy and requires nothing of the believer. Blaming immigration for inflation, lack of housing, and so on is easy. Talking about home investors buying up every house on the market to make rentals is harder.

I’ll agree that we’re on our own. What’s worse is that I don’t think most people can understand their times. Nor can we really sustain the attention and the dedication needed to do anything. We’re the society of the spectacle, everything is on screens or as media stories. And thus we’ll be bothered much more by things that can excite an audience— like the salute — over the boring reality of things that will actually happen.

I don’t think the aesthetics are the problem. The campaign was not really making a huge secret of anything they wanted to do. Trump talked about immigrants eating pers — did you think anyone missed that? He said he’d declare a state of emergency and deport people. Annnd he’s declaring an emergency so he can deport people. People knew what they were getting in this election, so why the pikachu shocked face when they cheer for a Bellamy salute on Inauguration Day? This was all in your face the whole time. I went in deciding whether I wanted cackling Harris or Nazi Trump. Between nothing changing for four years or Project 2025, military deportations, and abandoning Ukraine for the lols.

What I don’t see is any serious opposition from leadership. They’re shocked by the salute, but we’ve known the results since November 5. I guess the best we can muster is a day or two of protests, pardons for the important people (not you) and whining because Elon did a dorky version of a Nazi salute. I saw as much outrage over the senator from Minnesota wearing a hoodie. Honestly if this is the tenor of the response, if the best we can muster is “Oh no, not the straight arm salute! Well, anyway…” I don’t see how you actually keep any of our constitutional rights intact. I suspect we’ll still be voting, but it’s like voting in Russia— Putin always just so happens to win in landslide and a lot of opposition leaders fall out of windows.

The universe is 14 billion years old. I’m not sure how long it would take for the first truly habitable planets to form. You need to cycle through enough stars to form heavy elements and AFAIK you need the building blocks of carbon based matter so it might take 5 billion years just to get to the point of life being possible, let alone complex life, we’re talking just barely enough to support E. coli. Life on earth took 5 billion years to go from E. Coli to Elon Musk and being able to go to the moon and hopefully Mars. Being optimistic, I think you might have a window of opportunity from 10 billion years ago to a couple billion years in the future.

It might be that you need more than just a marginally habitable planet. We might be lucky because we have outer planets to stop asteroids from hitting the earth, we have a moon to create seasons, we aren’t tidally locked, and we have lots of liquid water. If you get all life on the planet destroyed by asteroids and comets, or the seasons are too short, or only the twilight zones between the super hot tidally locked zone and the frozen night zone— all of this might make it hard to start life and might make colonization difficult.

Wouldn’t life have to spring up pretty quickly to make this feasible?

To get from primordial cells to us took 5 billion years. Then it’s 2K years per system, which might mean 2.5 million stars 10 billion years after life begins on the planet in question. There are 100 billion in just the Milky Way (and I think anyone outside of that could safely be neglected as we cannot possibly detect them. So less than 1% of all stars in a galaxy within several billion years? I just don’t understand why anyone was asking the question.