Moron is no longer enough. Republican voters at this point are malicious, not stupid, not poor gullible fools, they are malicious people who actively seek to harm others, no matter how ‘nice’ they may seem.

I am not interested in hearing about how someone knows a Republican who is such a nice pleasant person, willing to help just about anyone, kind, caring, etc. It is a mask, like that of…I forget the precise medical term, either psychopath or sociopath. But the irony is they are worse because they do have the capacity for empathy, but they choose not to.

And this is, and always has been, who they are. This is not new. This is exactly who they have always been, people who, if they lived in a different time, would happily own slaves, or watch someone tortured for the evening’s entertainment at the coliseum, or any number of such things.

That’s the people we’re dealing with, and they are a significant portion of the population as they always have been.

If I had to choose between global high speed internet access, and ground based astronomy, I’d pick the Internet every time. I’d completely blot out the sky forever if that’s what it took.

We don’t need ground-based astronomy to learn about the universe, I’d rather encourage more space-based astronomy. Or build some observatories on the moon if you really want to build on a solid space body.

However, Starlink is a for profit company run by Elon Musk. I don’t really want them doing it, because they’re not going to provide unlimited global Internet to everyone. So as the guy said, the idea is good, but Starlink is bad, although it is currently the only such option.

Consider this question: how is it that anyone under the age of 40 today has ever smoked?

By the time they were born, the bad effects of smoking were well understood. By the time they were teenagers, not smoking should have been as obvious as not jumping in front of a train. People already addicted find it difficult to quit, but it in no way explains anyone starting.

The question is different and yet very similar, because the things you mention wind up in a similar way. Somehow people start in that route even though it should be obvious not to. And these things you mention are much easier to fall into than smoking because parents, family, etc are all pushing it on people. Smokers generally aren’t pushing their kids, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, etc to smoke, and somehow smoking still proliferates to some degree, just consider how much more difficult to avoid it is for those whose families are actively encouraging them to fall into these methods of belief and hate.

No, but they should be public to everyone, and not hidden unless you jump through hoops.

“AI”, especially art. I’ve spent years trying to learn to draw on and off and have never gotten good at it, but now I can use words to create illustrations I want in a level of quality and detail I could never dream of.

Now I just want the interface to be easier and more able to understand natural language and be capable of making directed changes better.

Because so-called second amendment advocates are really just gun nuts, and so over the years they have worked hard to maintain the right to keep and bear guns, rather than arms.

Thus knives, swords, halberds, maces, and all other ‘arms’ have had restrictions go unchallenged, or at least, not challenged by an extensive and well funded network of advocacy.

That first edition version looks like a dog’s head with horns and pointy ears to me at least, and that’s kinda what I was referring to.

Admittedly the 2nd edition version looks a bit less doglike, but I still see similarities with some breeds.

It’s not a mistranslation that caused it, kobolds were both described and illustrated as doglike until 3rd Edition where with no explanation they simply changed it and decided they were lizard like/draconic.

I do think the new version of kobolds is an interesting creature, but truthfully they should’ve just come up with a new name for this new creature instead of just completely changing the kobold.

We could start with holding police officers responsible. It’s great that they charged this one, but why aren’t the other police there being charged as accomplices since they took no action to prevent the shooting?

So here’s a few simple starter thoughts.

1. Establish an external agency with the mandate of prosecuting police. They have their own prosecutorial system, their own investigators, their own prosecutors, their own courts and their own judges, completely unconnected to the prosecutorial system the police work with. You cannot have the same people that work together one day and rely on each other be the ones to investigate each other, it doesn’t work. Not even a separate ‘internal affairs division’ is enough.

2. Any police officer who discharges their weapon, for any reason, is immediately suspended, and any pay is withheld until an investigation for why the weapon was discharged is completed. The investigation of course is conducted by that external agency.

3. If a police officer discharging a weapon causes injury or death, all police officers on the scene are suspended and their pay withheld until the investigation is over.

4. If the police officer who discharged their weapon is charged with assault, murder, whatever, then all other officers at the scene are charged as accomplices, unless they took proactive action to prevent the first officer from committing their illegal action. Think of it like felony murder - if you and a group of friends are committing a crime and someone is murdered, you are all prosecutable under felony murder even if you had no direct hand in the murder at all.

That’s probably a good start, it may not solve all the problems, but it’d be a lot better than what’s being done now, which is very, very little. I’d say an even better thing to do in addition would be to have every current police officer purged and never work in law enforcement again. All police organizations kinda need a clean slate with fresh people and no organizational momentum and culture carryover from how it’s happening now, because a lot of what needs to change is organizational culture, and just altering the rules is more difficult than rebuilding a completely new organizational culture from the ground up.

That would be hilarious if someone prepared a bunch of little clips of things Hitler said that Trump also says very similar things to, and then anytime he says one, just respond by playing a clip of Hitler saying basically the same thing, and giving a ‘Do I need to say more?’ look.

No. They’re not. If they were, they’d be stopping this themselves. This guy shot her. What about the other officers that were there? At least one other is mentioned in the article. Why didn’t they immediately draw on him and stop him from attacking this woman?

Every time we hear about one of these bad cops, there’s other cops just standing around doing nothing at best, and helping at worst.

No ‘good people’ are cops. If they were good people when they went in, they either get fired, get mysteriously dead on the job, or stop being good. There are no other options.

These convictions were for state level crimes that happened before he was president. So completely outside the scope of the official act thing.

That decision is probably going to be used to get him completely out of the classified documents case though, not that he really needed the extra help since that one was already being presided over by a crony judge he appointed.

Yeah, I mean, Trump already got convicted of felonies and then nothing happened. Did he even pay a fine or something for that? I heard about the conviction and then… absolutely nothing.

Yeah, Trump is a stupid target and this is bad timing. Now if someone had gone after the Supreme Court a year or three ago, that would’ve been a good thing. Even now it might still be. But Trump? Terrible choice of targets. He’s…his relevance has already happened. It’s too late for his death to be positive in any significant way.

Hell, I suspect that it might boost the Republican candidate, whoever is selected to replace him, unless they wind up having a really nasty fight where various supporters get extremely entrenched against each other. But that’s not likely - Republicans are very tribalist, once they select a candidate, most of them are going to support him, regardless of how badly they were speaking of him five minutes ago when they were in full support of his opponent.

Better to try to get them not to vote at all I think. Push that and it might convince them to go vote when they might possibly have been willing not to. And other offices are also very important.

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Not ‘to grant them greater control’ or even ownership. To secure exclusive right for a limited time. And this only because it was meant to promote science and art.

Using copyright to prevent a work from spreading is a direct perversion of the intent, it is using it in a manner diametrically opposed to what it is supposed to do.

I’d go the other way, adhering very strictly to the letter of the law without the tiniest bit of wiggle room or interpretation of anything as nebulous as the ‘spirit’ of the law.

Trouble being that natural languages that people use to converse are ill suited for that level of precision and detail. I’ve thought that perhaps a constructed language, something between a language and programming code may be a better way to write laws.

While breaking off diplomatic relations is an extreme step I wouldn’t recommend, I do wonder if it might not be practical to severely limit the number of diplomatic immunity eligible people allowed in after something like this.

Tell China that henceforth they get to send no more than three or maybe five people to whom it applies. Still gives it to the ambassador and a very small staff, but removes the feasibility of sending in teams of spies and kidnappers thus protected.

These changes could be applied retroactively; this isn’t like creating an ex post facto law and then jailing people for breaking a law that didn’t exist at the time of the event.

How about reword it slightly: it must be available for purchase if you want to use IP law to prevent others from distributing it.