When life gives you lemons, make orange juice and then kneecap life while it’s distracted trying to figure out how the hell you did it

I personally think we’re on the slope of enlightenment - quantum computing no longer attracts as much hype as it used to, but in the background, there’s a lot of interesting developments that genuinely might be very important.

This makes so much sense to me - Iran joining in would give an invitation to USA, EU, etc. to join in with Israel, and take away focus from Israel’s war crimes and genocide to instead focus on the new bad guy.

Look, I understand your point. And to be fair, they genuinely are reading new ground with reusable rockets. But not only are competitors catching up, cost overruns and time delays do matter in the context of NASA, considering how their budgets keeps getting negatively affected and the Artemis project is suffering setbacks. They don’t have the scope to tolerate what’s happening.

I’m referring to the rockets intended for travelling to the moon and beyond (primarily the Starship), which has already failed thrice, has innumerable issues and massive cost overruns.

Considering SpaceX’s track record… I’m very eager for Elon and his other billionaire buddies to get on a rocket headed for Mars.

But the inverse also applies - there’s not much stopping wizards from portkeying/apparating into the Oval Office or the pentagon and magibombing them, or Avada-ing key targets. Wizards are probably the worst kind of guerrilla fighters - ones unchecked by range. And as far as food is concerned, food multiplication is a thing. I personally believe that in the long term, the way muggles would win would be through subverting wizards, not by pure overwhelming force.

But they were able to setup the core of their commercial and governance infrastructure in the middle of London, with no particular notice from muggles - not to mention, we know that the government already knows about wizards (MoM liaises with the PM). So there must be a quid pro quo already in place, with the government tolerating and aiding in the existence of a semi-independent polity in their heartlands in return for unspecified benefits, probably defence against foreign wizards.

True enough, the capabilities of Magic haven’t been explored enough canonically to disprove that - but if the government learned of Magic, the first thing they’d do is subvert some wizards to their side, who might be able to counteract them - in many ways, it’s a battle of statecraft as it is of actual power.

I personally think it depends on exactly what the limits of Magic are - it could be anything from Muggles eradicating Wizards, to the opposite, all very plausibly. To me, it comes down to the power of modern surveillance vs. the power of notice-me-not + space-expansion + anti-detection spells. Plus there’s a whole bunch of other powerful spells and devices (time turners, for example), but the muggles have a while fuckton of gold and other valuables to recruit these capabilities to their side as well.

Honestly? A major breakthrough in fusion, or to a lesser extent, any other clean energy. We’ve decarbonised a decent chunk of the world’s energy profile, but there’s a strong financial incentive that politicians are vulnerable to protecting oil and gas, slowing down further decarbonisation. Batteries and supercapacitors also could do the trick.

Why do I see numerous suspicious deaths of various government officials in the future? I wonder…

Nonetheless, it is hopefully an excellent Forrest step in tackling the various organised crime syndicates of the world.

Shocked, I tell you, shocked

I have to admit, the US’s policies are probably destroying what little credibility it has in the Global South, showing that the so-called “rules based international order” is not worth the air it is spoken with…

My glitch: summon a Dr. Pepper can into Trump’s brain, then into Biden’s brain after 14.5 hrs, then Netanyahu’s, then Putin’s, then the evil Sudanese dudes’, then Xi Jinping’s, and so on and so forth.

It makes sense - even after the inflation numbers go down, it just means that the prices have increased by less compared to before, not that prices went down - people have seen an erosion in spending power, which leads to negative sentiment towards the economy.

And the worst part? The money won’t come out of the police department’s budget, it’ll come out of education, housing, recreation, etc.

In theory yes, and in practice the US is planning on producing certain critical drugs locally, but most drugs will probably continue to be produced in India and China due to cost.