Also, I think it'd just be smarter to nationalize the tech. Have the government bid out new advancements and maintenance, but the actual IP is owned by the government. It's wild that we're letting a single company control effectively 80% of our agriculture. Huge national security risk.

You'd need an organization to manage the satellite assets at least. That's presumably the biggest barrier to overcome. They have a custom gps network specifically built for them

Presumably Sauron could've destroyed the ghosts, he was just a little distracted at that time frame, or not yet able or willing to face them directly. Like the Eagles, they can't really tackle the Sauron problem, so aren't as much of a solve as they appear.

Also the reason they only fight in the final battle I think is because that is the only battle they're bound to fight in, I'm not even sure you could use them to fight any other battle than against Sauron's armies.

They're selling the software that makes all the shit actually work. So you'd get a tractor with a bunch of processing power and have to program it yourself.

To be fair the entire army itself was just a distraction so that frodo could destroy the ring. The ghosts weren't what caused them to win, they just prevented the death of the bait.

It's less than half, but ya pretty much

Even like 'real' dildo manufactures tend to claim the toy is for novelty use only and don't recommend actually using the thing as an insertable object. Adult toys aren't really regulated, because that would mean legitimizing them which is icky to the government. So they'll never really be regulated for health and safety

The government has ceded the entirety of modern currency exchange to private companies, which is still crazy to me, but I honestly don't see people even question it that often. As if it's just a given that online purchases (the increasing majority of all economic activity) is subject purely to a ToS and not the laws and protections granted to us by the government.

Because the lefties are essentially a loose coalition of every marginally sane political view that remains, containing the actual fiscal conservatives, the center, the progressives and the far left all in a single party.

I'm the opposite. All the focus on the people and the random facts of their lives and trying to constantly manufacture some sort of sob underdog story around various players is boring.

I can appreciate a good game, one that's close and exciting and played with skill, but the whole sports culture and focus often feels like celebrity gossip, but for men.

Which is also why esports are boring to me too, despite my love of video games (and even watching people play video games, like let's plays). Esports just brings that whole sports culture and it's a huge turn off for me.

I think it'd be pretty tricky to get a fire going at that size and get the photo taken before the thin plastic of the tent melted or burst into flames. The tent in the picture is fine, which I honestly think would be impossible with that setup, even if you tried to be quick

I'd be impressed if someone was so busy they literally couldn't decide if they were pro-racist or not pro-racist. Politics is no longer a complicated question of policy but a simple division of core ethical values in America.

Yes! A 15% tip in 1980 should still be a 15% tip today. Not this 20-25% madness that they try to keep pushing.

Agreed.

'undecided' = "unsure if I give a fuck enough to go vote for my side"

This seems to have been true for awhile now. The two parties are so different, it's hard to imagine anyone bouncing between the two as if they were close enough to compare.

Which is honestly why I find a lot of the democratic campaigning and rhetoric weird. It seems to still be trying to cater to a group I don't think exists, instead of trying to excite their existing voter base enough into actually voting.

It'll only be weak for the presidents they don't like

Oh, I absolutely agree with you on the probable outcomes if America did implement structural changes these days. That has like a 1% chance of actually being something positive. I think perhaps the most recent, best possible time for significant reforms was somewhere between 1930-1990. It depends mostly on the specific kind of reform (basically whether or not women or minorities were relevant to the change, farther in the past would be worse outcomes for them).

But some things like campaign finance reform, how many seats there are in the House, Supreme Court Reform, etc could've been accomplished with a relatively high likelihood of positive outcomes.

Basically before the complete collapse of proper journalism, when broadcast media was still king and most politicians still tended to compromise and were at least mostly interested in actually governing. It feels like post 90s, our governing body has passed some sort of tipping point where the majority of members are simply gaming the system, obstructing others from actually doing anything and shooting down any and all reasonable compromises. The actual productivity of Congress seems to be in total free fall. Bad actors pretty much always existed, but they only became a crippling number somewhat recently. (Or at least this seems true for the last 100 years, I have no idea if Congress was this dysfunctional in the early 1800s or something)

I'm not sure if anyone could conclusively declare a certain country's democracy is totally better than ours, but several more recently created democracies have avoided many of the pitfalls that have been discovered with American implementation. Things like mandatory voting, ranked choice voting, better and stronger rules around money and political campaigns, more comprehensive list of citizen rights, etc. Most of those countries have their own missteps as well, but a lot of our issues have been solved, we just haven't adopted the methods and improvements already shown to work. Typically because they'd require pretty extensive reform, which is incredibly hard to achieve with our government especially in the current political climate.

I've often thought that America suffers from being the first successful iteration of our style of government. It was great and a huge improvement over all the other examples at the time. So much so that much of the world eventually followed in its footsteps.

But where other countries looked at our first successful attempt and further improved and refined the idea, we're still stuck on that very first version. What was once a radically new idea that worked so much better than everyone else, is now an old, outdated and barely functional relic. We're the early prototype iPhone 3g, while several other countries have iPhone 6/10/etc

The problem with humans reviewing AI output is that humans are pretty shit at QA. Our brains are literally built to ignore small mistakes. Digging through the output of an AI that's right 95% of the time is nightmare fuel for human brains. If your task needs more accuracy, it's probably better to just have the human do it all, rather than try to review it.

You're expected to go to prison where they can legally use you for slave labor