Don't the feds collect mostly directly?

But more importantly, he who controls the purse strings controls all. If California decided to secede, it would instantly cripple the US economy. Sending in the military wouldn't help at that point, because you can't force a region to be highly productive at gunpoint.

It's strange to me to watch large populations willingly funding their own oppression.

Normally, I'd say pareidolia is a huge issue when interpreting data... but in this case, isn't the biggest issue that the 'signatures' in question have already been positively identified in places we know can't host life?

It's that last bit. The directors want it to sound a certain way under certain circumstances, and are unwilling to allow for the fact that most people won't be viewing their output under those circumstances and when dialog is deliberately unintelligible the only feeling that creates in the audience is frustration.

Sounds like an excellent targeting system.

> Men (and young people in general now) are more likely to be Republican while colleges keep pushing agendas further to the left

It is not the colleges. Republicans have no place in educational institutions; by their own choice they reject facts they don't like. Violently.

The basic concept can't be controlled, and the fewer rulebooks you have the better the game gets.

It's storytelling. You need a main storyteller who can allow some randomness via dice to affect the details of the story. You need players, who are basically subordinate storytellers who are responsible for individual characters... and they can also have dice to add some random factors.

Ultimately, you will have far more fun improvising your characters while the DM keeps things on hidden rails than you will spending hours rolling dice and checking rulebooks. When you're remembering gaming sessions after the fact, you're not going to remember those item tables you poured through, you're going to remember that awesome heroic stunt your character pulled that saved the party from the demon.

Put down the rulebooks. Have fun.

I don't believe you can leave politics out of this. Musk absolutely uses his control over X to platform and de-platform accounts for political reasons. Running your data through Starlink is a risk to mitigate.

The problem is Bezos isn't a lesser risk, just a different one. What is required is more foreign competion, enough that anyone trying to control the flow of information can be routed around.

Cool story time... I used to deal with shipping TO Walmart.
  Utter fucking bastards, that's what they are.

Ensure all products are re-labeled to their standard instead of UPCs. Ensure all products are re-boxed according to their standard. Ship only on CHEP pallets (I sympathize with this one, actually, dealing with decaying pallets and skids isn't worth it).

Delivery? Well, any company you want, but they must arrive at a specific time and then wait upon Walmart's pleasure. Even if Walmart receiving has lined up 10x more trucks than they can process. If your delivery driver gives up and leaves, that's a missed delivery and a penalty... so when you ship you hope to God for a morning appointment and then further hope you won't have to pay the driver to sit outside their gates for the full day.

Then the inspection. If anything, and I mean ANYTHING isn't 100% correct, there's a good chance they'll turn back the whole shipment. And assess a penalty.

But hey, Walmart says they'll buy from you if you cut into your margins, and they'll buy 100x what you normally move, so it looks really, really attractive. Eventually you find you're sweating to death working for pennies and now your company is basically toast if you stop. THAT is when Walmart demands another cut in price, and if you can't do it, they just find someone else and you watch your company crash around you.

Mapping and routing is horrendously complicated to do optimally (and you start by defining your criteria for 'optimal', which can be a job all its own).

You probably don't want the same honeycomb pattern over your entire map, but rather have multiple scales of honeycomb and local clusters that center on distribution centers. And then you allow for overlapping honeycombs (between multiple origin points and multiple scales, it's going to happen) and a point value system for determining which route should get priority under different circumstances.

Somehow, within those honeycombs, you also have to weight routes by speed and distance and things like low bridges, and decide how to weight those in your routing process and ensure you get your packages not only on a truck going in the right direction, but the right kind of truck for the route.

I could probably bring an arbitrarily large server farm to its knees trying to optimize routing for a large shipping company.

>Seriously. IQ does not exist?

Oh! Interesting but off topicish moment!

IQ mostly doesn't exist in any useful way; a single number to represent all the aspects of brain function that people consider to collectively be 'intelligence'? It's a very flawed pop culture thing these days. Probably not much better than phrenology, honestly.

You can use it as a linguistic shortcut to call someone smart or stupid, but if you want to use IQ as an actual and accurate assessment of how 'smart' someone is, you can't.

Actually, a connection between higher education and pursuit of knowledge, and this kind of decision.

Fascism is very anti-intellectual. I'm not claiming a PhD is a 100% effective vaccination against fascism, but it has to have a significant influence.

The kind of people we're talking about are constantly working with peers from different countries and cultures, which helps reduce the chances of fascist beliefs getting a hold on someone. Another factor is lack of religion - as education increases, faith tends to decrease and this also reduces the odds of becoming a fascist.

But even allowing for all that, we have the 'enlightened self-interest' angle. Trump's already coming for their funding, and researchers tend to be very aware of funding issues.

So I 100% remain standing behind my point, "If you're a boffin or boffin-in-training and you're NOT trying to get out right now, you're probably not bright enough to have excelled in your field anyway.".

What is the proportion of opportunistic garbage generated just to make a sale while the subject is hot due to the election compared to propaganda books - and because it's likely at least one is a liberal propaganda book, let's get the split between liberal and conservative propaganda while we're at it.

My gut says it's mostly crap designed in hopes of easy sales without a political agenda, but my gut also says it's stupid to listen to my gut about this subject.

Human creativity is hallucinated nonsense with an intelligent filter applied to pull out the patterns to which we can assign meaning. AI should manage without that filter once in a while, just due to random chance.

It doesn't seem like an efficient art generation method, though, since you still need a human to be the intelligent filter and go through all the AI-generated crap to find the gems.

They are fleeing the future of the United States. Not being stupid, they're not waiting around for the more or less inevitable future where they are rounded up and prosecuted.

To be fair, our answer to date was, "hitch our wagon to that convenient massive economy on our southern border and other than a bit of bitching now and then, don't think about it".

I am not sure that counts as "we know what makes a country stronger in the long run".

However, we appear to be smartening up faster than the global fascism trend can overtake our society, which is encouraging for the future.