Anybody but Biden. Kamala seems to be the expected replacement, that works. If not her, pretty much anyone else. Trump is a terrible candidate. While he has experience in show business, he’s way past his prime and pretty much any person should be able to beat him in a debate at this point.

I was actually recently thinking through people I’ve known and whether they could’ve done a better job debating Trump than Biden did. Generally any adult with a functioning mind would do better. Adults I’ve known with a HS education could’ve crushed Trump in that debate. I’m actually not sure if a homeless guy I once debated on the street regarding the meaning of pi would do better or worse than Biden, he seemed to be at about Trump’s level of sanity and if Trump won this last debate, well yeah even he’d do better than Biden. I can also think of some older teenage jocks I once knew, and while they were dumb as rocks their teenager swagger would’ve been more convincing than Biden’s rambling failed attempts to remember rote speeches.

If I try to think of who is actually about at Biden’s level, I think of myself at the age of 13, when I had a presentation in front of the class on an issue and for some reason I was struck by that early teenager nervousness, and haltingly tried to give a presentation as the class tried failingly to hide their laughter at how terribly it was going. It was probably the most embarrassing day of my life. That’s Biden’s level right there, because he sounded just like me back then giving that presentation. So any person in their late teens or older with a full grasp on sanity should be a much better candidate than Biden.

Lots of people have a problem with Trump. All the more reason to want someone opposing him who can beat him.

if you’re planning to kill the guy, what would you do with our cat?”

So…this makes no sense. If I had to guess, I’d imagine your girlfriend exhibits this kind of strange obsessive behavior inconsistently, has occasional bouts of depression, and is no older than 30. Regardless of whether I’m right (but especially if I am), you should consider whether your girlfriend is suffering from something that requires a psych evaluation and get her one.

To be fair, I’m not sure this is an unrealistic scenario of your average instagram influencer going out camping.

How about we pick someone who vaguely approaches the average age of an American adult. There’s a ton - Buttigieg, AOC, I dunno even Kamala would be a million times better. Literally anybody under the age of 70. Why is that so hard to do?

The crazy thing is everything up to this point was so much better. They’d show biden waiving at “nobody” and then they’d zoom out and there’s someone standing there. Or he’d say “president of Mexico” when he meant to say “president of Egypt”. But then last night was like nonstop fail. It’s the perfect nightmare scenario because now everyone can say “You shoulda seen it sooner!” but really, we couldn’t.

Going the whole distance in QWOP

According to this wikipedia page - Median wealth per adult globally is estimated at $8,654 for a total population figure of 5.5 million, quite a bit less than the global population estimated at 8.1 billion. I’m guessing because this is “per adult” rather than per person. The children of the world are all on the low end of the wealth spectrum and probably would be a large share of the 3.6 billion.

Also questions can be asked about how they value wealth, do we consider debts, etc…in which case there’s a lot of people with zero wealth or less, as well as a lot of people who don’t have bank accounts and whose wealth is hard to measure is any ordinary sense. Point being, this particular comparison is kind of meaningless without more context. There’s probably ways you can do it to get an even larger number than 3.6 billion.

But a more useful and perhaps more surprising metric is that 8 people have as much wealth as 158 million median people. Which is still ridiculous, like those 8 people are worth a Russia’s entire population’s worth of people. And not just of poor people, but your average adult person who likely has a job and may even be considered on the well-to-do side within some poorer countries.

I don’t know if the type of matter matters, rather I’m basing in on the idea that measurement collapses the wave function, and consciousness does measure things

There’s a lot of possibilities.

My top contender would be a desire to explore, which probably requires consciousness. Given that we have pretty much no idea what leads to consciousness, it can be guessed (dubiously) that if it arose more easily then we’d have an explanation by now. It could be that it’s an extremely rare phenomenon, and there may even be other planets with “intelligent” but mechanistic beings that act entirely for their own survival and don’t build civilizations or explore much.

Second would be intergalactic and to a lesser degree interstellar travel. If we assume both 1) intelligent civilizations are extremely rare and 2) faster-than-light transportation is impossible, it could be that everyone is just too spread out to make contact.

Third, and the one I most feel is right but it requires pretending I understand quantum physics (which I don’t) and probably offending many that do, is the notion that the concrete universe is not large but small and has no objective existence independent of our respective perceptions, and any part of the universe that’s invisible is a mere wave function that will only have concrete reality upon our perceiving it. I make the further dubious assumption that conscious beings can’t be part of the wave function. So there.

I think it makes sense to care more about problems that are solvable. If anyone out there has a realistic plan to reduce the suffering of the people of Gaza in any sort of lasting manner, I’ve yet to hear it.

But people spray painting the library? Yeah that can be solved. Report them to the police, take pictures. No tanks necessary.

I’d suspect it’s reaction to large cultural shifts in the last couple of decades - including gay and trans rights, George Floyd and increased racial integration in media, me too, etc. For whatever reason, perhaps loss aversion, many people tend to react angrily and violently to change and the threat of change. Perhaps it’s analogous to how communist movements in the early 20th century led to fascist movements a decade or two later.

I also don’t think it’s the US only, so you can’t put it all on Trump. I’d argue Trump and similar figures around the world are the result of the above counter-reaction.

The heat hasn’t killed me yet

I guess I’m an ingredient purist, preparation rebel. If your house is surrounded by tea plants, and the tea leaves fall in the gutter, how is that different from brewing tea the normal way?

I’m not the biggest fan of smoked herring myself, but thanks.

This is Snowden’s claim and it’s not implausible, but it’s also quite a coincidence that he’d end up in the top country for spying on the US it’s also possible that he wanted to be in Russia and simply made up the part about it just being a stopover. If Snowden was looking for asylum, there are several other countries that don’t extradite to the US. I can see why he’d temporarily be stuck in Russia, but after several years he couldn’t find any other way out? There was apparently a privately-funded attempt to get him to Iceland, but the last update on it was that they were in contact with a “third party representing” Snowden…and then nothing.

A third fact (in addition to Russiabot Greenwald’s involvement) that makes it questionable is that he eventually applied for Russian citizenship in 2020. One explanation is that he could do this to get a Russian passport and fly somewhere else with no US extradition treaty, but he hasn’t chosen to do so yet.

Beyond the point that others have made about Snowden not considering himself a hero, for me there’s two facts that I just can’t get past when it comes to Snowden:

1. He ended up in Russia somehow. Seems an odd place for a freedom fighter to end up going.
2. He first contacted Glenn Greenwald, who now spends his days showing up on Tucker’s show to spout straight Russian pro-war, anti-Ukraine Propaganda

One of these could be a coincidence, but I’ve not seen a lot of double coincidences in my life. It’s funny because I agree that the surveillance program got out of control and needs more transparency, and unlike Tucker and Greenwald, Snowden sounds like someone who truly believes what he says rather than a sleazy liar working for someone else. Emotionally I want to believe in Snowden, but I’m also a strong believer in probabilities and Snowden not acting at Russia’s behest and for some sort of personal reward seems hard to believe at this point.

X requires login to view tweets, and can only get away with this because they tricked users into believing they’d allow free access while they were growing as a platform. Let’s not do anything to help them.

Humans would not be able to annihilate all the animals, given how many live underground/in deep oceans etc., and how integrated they are into our own lives leading to an unacceptable risk of collateral damage. However, the animals would be completely ineffective due to a lack of cohesion and ability to coordinate attacks. So basically humans would kill some of the animals and then it would devolve into a stalemate.