No. You’re high. You think it’s the year 1999. It’s actually closer to the year 2199. You’ve been living in a dream world.

It also works for metaphysics. Reincarnation is real and there’s only one soul, just bouncing around through all of time and space in an endless loop.

I always liked the idea that the genie rules, when they’re presented, are not laws/rules so much as hard physical limits. You can’t wish for more wishes because the genie just doesn’t have that much power. They’re powerful, but they’re not God with a capital G. The genie tries to add a electron to every atom in the universe. If fails and collapses with exhaustion before it’s even finished adding one extra electron to every atom in your body.

They’re making the electrons gay!

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You wouldn’t even need to organize some mass campaign to get people to pull money out. This thing will trigger a bank run all on its own. Do you think the banks have enough reserves to immediately cash out the accounts of every non-citizen? Sometimes a bank decides it doesn’t want to do business with someone anymore and will close their account. If that happens to you, they send you a check with your account balance on it. But we’re talking tens of millions of people here, many with substantial amounts in US accounts. This order, if implemented, would cause every bank in the country to collapse. They just don’t maintain the reserves to cash out that many accounts all at once.

Little Rover…

It is perfectly moral to burn down an ICE detention center before it’s occupied. It’s like burning down Auschwitz before they moved anyone in.

Private businesses have regulations on their ads all the time. Cities across the country regulate how large shop ads can be.

Seriously. And if Denmark did anything to intercept it, he could use that as casus belli to start a war. Remember the USS Maine? Of To Hell with Spain, Remember the Maine? Seizing or sinking a hospital ship is still an attack against a US Navy vessel, and it would be played in the media as an act of utter barbarity.

On the other hand, the ship could be used as a tool for war even if Denmark lets it dock. How hard do you think it would be for the CIA to arrange some false-flag or instigated terrorist attack against the hospital ship? Imagine if the hospital ship is docked and stormed by a bunch of armed gunmen, dubbed in the media as “radical Danish nationalists.” The US could then use that as justification to start “anti-terrorism activities,” which gradually grow into an outright occupation of the island. No clean formal start to war that would serve as as source of international outrage and could fracture NATO like a gunshot. The US already has large military presence in Greenland, but this would represent a massive expansion of that. And, over time, an ever-increasing US military presence and control over civilian areas. Think less Spanish American War and more of how Russia slowly occupied vast areas of Eastern Ukraine in the years before the breakout of the major overt war.

If North Korea could do it, so can Taiwan.

North Korea did it, and it had the United States, the nation with the most powerful surveillance capabilities in the world looking right over its shoulder. And keep in mind, we’re still technically at war with North Korea. And North Korea might as well be an island. But really, the island part is irrelevant here, as Taiwan already possesses all the nuclear material it would need. It has a well developed nuclear power sector. The island gets half its electricity from nuclear power. And they have several research reactors. It already has all the fissile material it needs to build a bomb.

Taiwan doesn’t need thousands of nuclear weapons to be a credible threat to China. A dozen bombs with delivery systems would be more than enough to make a credible deterrent. The goal isn’t to be able to wipe out the entire population of mainland China. The goal would simply be to make any invasion so costly that the cost would vastly outweigh any potential gains. I don’t know what all Xi hopes to gain by conquering Taiwan, but whatever it is, it’s not worth losing the dozen largest Chinese cities in a series of mushroom clouds. To the Chinese leadership, the conquest of Taiwan is not worth getting Beijing nuked. Maybe Mao would have made that trade, back when China was a rural peasant nation. But now? China is the workshop of the world. The entire economy and China’s place in the world are utterly dependent on its megacities.

And yet, plenty of other countries have managed to do it…

A peaceful and realistic solution? Taiwan develops a strategic nuclear deterrent. They’re already a near-nuclear country and an industrial and technological powerhouse. A nuclear bomb is fully within their capability, and they already have abundant supplies of all the precursor materials in their possession. The most realistic solution to the Taiwan crisis is that Taiwan obtains nuclear weapons, and China is never able to threaten them with invasion again.

People come to Lemmy precisely because they’re tired of big algorithmic corporate platforms. They come here precisely to get away from AI slop on platforms like Facebook. Hell, half the people here have been banned from reddit based on comically flawed algorithmic AI moderation tools. This platform is heavily selected for people who dislike AI and AI content.

Well, the IRA tends to bring people on more as independent contractors rather than full-time employees. Hence the preference for IRAs.

I mean, the data centers themselves are flammable. And you would do more damage if you waited til they were built…

Honestly, if there were alien craft zipping around, I can imagine why no government would want to disclose them. It would basically be an announcement of, “these damn craft are flying around the atmosphere and the space around Earth. They’re utterly beyond anything we’re capable of. We’re not sure if they’re aliens, time travelers, beings from another dimension, literal angels or demons, or something even stranger. But we are utterly at their mercy. They’re spying on us constantly, for purposes unknown. Oh, and occasionally they’ll just abduct people and carry them off for God-knows-what reason. I’m sorry, but there is literally nothing we or any human being can do about this. They’re basically gods to us, and we know next to nothing about them, where they come from, or why they’re here.”

What leader would ever want to give that speech? I don’t consider it likely we are being visited by non-human intelligences. But if we were, it wouldn’t be anything like Roswell and Area 51. We wouldn’t have a base full of downed or crashed alien craft. They simply wouldn’t crash, and we would have no ability to shoot them down. A real announcement of alien visitors wouldn’t be the reveal of some vast secret government project, a revealing of secret strength. It would be us saying, “we’ve been working on this problem for nearly a century, and we’ve learned nothing. All we know is that they’re there, and we can’t do a damn thing about it.” It would a confession of weakness and utter helplessness, a government openly admitting it’s completely powerless to protect its people from an unknown outside threat. Can you imagine a president telling the public, “yeah, you might get abducted by aliens. Sorry, that just happens sometimes. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

It would represent a complete shattering of our species’ sense of value and security. And voters tend not to like politicians who tell them the unvarnished truth.

New crazy conspiracy theory: we’re being quietly targeted for extermination by a hostile alien species.

They could wipe us out in an afternoon if they wanted to, but they can’t just come right in and bomb us from orbit, as that would cause an interstellar relations incident, maybe mass unrest back home. But they also want us gone. We gotta go because we’re an advancing young species, near their territory, and are a potential future problem. We’re not dealing with an alien army attacking us; we’re dealing with an alien equivalent of the CIA. They’re here to do the dirty work quietly.

They know species at our level often run headfirst into environmental catastrophes as their technology becomes great enough to threaten the planet they live on. Instead of helping us, however, they’re throwing gasoline on the fire. They’ve brainwashed/replaced with clones the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people. And their behavior was psychologically programmed to maximize the chances of them leading us right into a climate apocalypse. Most species eventually get their shit together and place limits on extraction and pollution, less they all die. But if the right type of crazies are running the place, a species can just slam the accelerator as it drives off a cliff.

And when we eventually do burn ourselves alive in a climate Armageddon, the aliens will run news stories, lamenting the tragic tale of a poor primitive planet that couldn’t right its ways in time. No threat of war between great interstellar powers. No mass protests movements back on the homeworld. Just a potential future rival nipped in the bud, no muss, no fuss. Mass murder dressed up as death by natural causes.