Seriously. This article is an embarrassment. Yeah, no shit, our disability payments have gone through the roof. A decade of the War on Terror will due that. Ironically, much of this has come from better medical technology; many people now survive with disabilities that previously wouldn’t have come home at all.

I tried to look up the author of the article, but they seem to be cowardly not sharing it. How much you want to bet it was penned by some neocon who was pushing for the Iraq War before it happened?

Why not just start with disclosing that you’re human right off the bat?

Don’t worry. This is just the future timeline that Scrooge is seeing. Eventually he will mend his ways, and Marley will no longer die on stage.

Thankfully Elon will never be a MAGA successor, and is ineligible to run for president.

You’re also ineligible to be president if you’ve engaged in an insurrection against the United States, and look how that turned out.

I remember a moment like this in Asimov’s Foundation series, a series set in a far-off setting of a galaxy-spanning empire built on easy interstellar travel. At one point a couple gets on board their personal interstellar space ship. As they’re getting on, the husband tells his wife to go cook dinner.

Oh, and for an added bonus, their ash trays are nuclear powered.

Sure. I remember reading the concept somewhere, perhaps in an old r/asksciencefiction thread. I didn’t come up with it originally.

I don’t believe in ghosts or psychic phenomena, but I do love the concept in fiction that ghosts aren’t actual human souls. Rather, they’re a sort of psychic “burn in.” If a living person experiences strong emotions, such as a prolonged period of grieving, or the incredible emotional intensities that come with being murder victim, those emotions can become embedded within a place. Do you grieve for a deceased partner, mourning for years, remembering key moments over and over? A reflection of that grief becomes embedded within reality in the location you experienced those emotions. When you die or leave, someone else can come into that place and experience a recording, a reflection, or echo of the emotions and memories you experienced.

Ghosts are effectively traumatic memories burned in to the fabric of the world. They don’t actually experience anything; they’re not conscious beings. They’re not souls looking to complete their business and move on. They’re simply psychic echoes. They’re imprints left on reality from very intense and painful emotions, particularly those experienced repeatedly over a long period of time.

This also explains why ghosts have a half life. Ever wonder why in the US, all the ghosts seem to be old timey white people from the 1800s or similar? Considering the total number of Native Americans that must have lived in what is now the US down the millennia, the vast, vast majority of ghosts should be Native American. But aside from the classic example of a disturbed native burial ground, Native American ghosts don’t show up much in fiction. It’s usually old timey white people.

The reason for this, in the imprint theory, is that like any imprint, ghosts tend to fade with time. Just as most footprints will slowly be eroded, the knots in the psychic fabric that ghosts represent slowly work themselves out over time. The ghosts people do experience tend to be from the last century or two, as most ghosts older than that have decayed below the level of human perception.

Ah yes, the classic Iranian system.

Yes. Because social context and group think matter. The Democratic Party is indeed stuck in a coastal elite mindset. When I say school, it’s not even specifically about the kind of instruction the schools teach. It’s more about the social networks that have developed around these elite institutions. It encouragesc group think and narrow minded approaches. It’s why every Dem policy proposal is the same collection of wonkish tax credits. It’s why nationalizing the banks wasn’t one the table during the 2008 recession. It’s why they don’t know how to reach regular people. They just don’t know how to think any differently. Hell, look up the figures on federal judge nominations by law school attendance. It’s insane how much narrow minded we allow our institutions to be simply by primarily recruiting from a handful of elite schools and their alumni networks.

I don’t view it through the lens of Marxism. Rather, I see this simply as cheating a cheater. The whole reason McD’s is pushing the app is to gamify the experience, take advantage of people’s psychological weaknesses, and trick them into paying more than they otherwise wood. I see this as just scamming the scammers.

Perhaps what is needed is a “progressive caucus pre-primary.” Have a party within a party. The progressives hold an unofficial primary in 2027 between anyone who wants to run under the banner. They hold debates, have some way of getting people to vote, etc. The progressive caucus holds debates and selects a single candidate to endorse. Then, going into the actual primary, the progressive voting base is entirely united around one candidate from the beginning. That candidate would also have a hell of a lot of momentum going into the primary as they would already have one wing of the party entirely behind them.

I think the campaigns at this point can be funded with regular donations. I don’t think corporate donations are even needed at this point.

The key thing to realize is that in a presidential race, you reach advertising saturation. Hillary and Kamala both massively outspent Trump in their campaigns, but they still lost. Their financial advantage didn’t help because ads reach saturation. At some point, everyone already knows about the candidates, and additional money spent really doesn’t help you.

The Democratic party could get by just fine with the amount of donations they can raise from individual donors. They don’t do this because the consultants that run the DNC ad buying get paid a percentage of all ad buys. And the DNC itself simply benefits from having larger budgets in general. So the push is always to have as much ad spend as possible, even if having that large ad spend requires cozying up to oligarchs.

The self-driving taxis and humanoid robots companies like Tesla are developing are just a thinly disguised way of getting around immigration law. We’re a very long way away from having autonomous humanoid robots that can clean your house for you. But one remotely piloted by someone in Bangladesh wearing a haptic suit? If the tech was cheap enough, that sort of thing would be profitable.

It’s effectively an extremely perverse and exploitive form of immigration. When we bring immigrants in, they typically take low-level jobs. But they also get opportunities to advance themselves further. Moreover, in the US at least, any children immigrants have on US soil automatically become US citizens. So yes, immigrants come in on the bottom of the social ladder, but they have an opportunity to climb.

Here though? This is a way of getting all the labor we want from immigrants but without offering them the usual deal in return. And even worse, they won’t even be owed minimum wage.

It goes beyond just that. I think a Democratic presidential candidate could do well addressing elitist thinking in general. I think they could do quite well with a pledge not to appoint anyone to their cabinet or to a court that graduated from an Ivy League school. One of the reasons we keep seeing the same shitty approaches is that both parties recruit heavily from the same handful of schools. This they’re recruited from the same social circles. I would suggest that candidates just flat out state that they’ll be filling all their major spots with people who got their education at state schools.

I was in Houston for Hurricane Harvey. We didn’t get flooded, but the whole city was paralyzed for two weeks. And that was just to get basic transportation functioning again. I was teaching undergraduate students at the time, and my class was just cancelled for two weeks in the fall term. We just missed two semesters of the fall term with no makeup.

My home didn’t get flooded, but many of my students and colleagues did experience flooding. We did however have a leak open up in the back wall of our townhome. We had a leak that allowed water in the back wall, which resulted in water damage in two rooms. I filed a claim with insurance, but they lowballed us, and after the hurricane, contractors only wanted to work on big projects, whole house gutting and repair. So I actually did the repairs myself. I figured I could either use the insurance payment to cover 1/3 of the repair cost, or I could use the insurance payment to buy the tools I needed to do it myself. I first built an access scaffolding behind the unit to fix the leak. Afterwards on the inside I tore out a bunch of drywall and repaired the interior damage.

Oh well, it put me down the path I’m on now. I eventually got really into woodworking, starting with the tools I had bought to do that repair. And further down the road, that put me on the path to pursuing a PhD in wood science. So what a tangled web we weave, I suppose…

A lever and a proper surface on which to stand.

One trans person will commit a misguided act of violence in a protest against anti-trans laws. All price increases from then on are blamed on transgender terrorist cells targeting the supply chain.

Of course, deportation requires cooperation of the other country. Until your new home is willing to accept you, you will of course have to remain in custody…

Unethical life pro tip: get an apartment that isn’t at the end of a hallway and has floors above and below. In some cases, you can turn off your heat completely and simply steal heat from your neighbors, leeching off of them like some sort of thermal mosquito. It won’t be as warm as is comfortable without bundling up, but it may be warm enough to get by just by bundling up. Watch out for freezing pipes though!

For an added techno bonus: install a smart thermostat connected to a camera pointed at the door with facial recognition tech built in. If anyone other than the residents walk in, the thermostat is automatically reset to 72F/22C. That way if you DO burst a pipe, and the landlord walks in, they won’t have any proof you did it!

The War of the Tiger Kings.