Being a nice person isn't bad but "nice guy" is a term for someone who presents themselves as nice and polite (but only to people they're attracted to) and expects romantic attention in return for being nice. Basically, they think the fact that they put so much effort into being nice they deserve that romantic attention. They'll often talk about how nice they are.

Of course, anyone who needs to repeatedly tell you they are nice tend not be.

Alcohol is worse for you than weed. But alcohol is far more harmful for you than many people realise. Being not as bad as Alcohol does not make it good or harmless. However, after many years of very overblown propaganda about the threat of weed the pendulum has swung the other way and no many people falsely believe all talk of the damage weed can do to be propaganda. Here's a good video explaining the topic; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBRaI0ZeAf8&t=661s&ab_channel=Kurzgesagt%E2%80%93InaNutshell

Wait till we get a flat earther in office who denies the existence of gravity, then it'll be political.

Sadly that not going to work; liquid explosives are a lot less reliable and far more unstable than the stuff they use now. All it takes is a little leak or some crack to set those off. This means manufacturing the mines is significantly more hazardous and transporting them is riskier. You wouldn'tbeable to stockpile them because the explosives would be losing potency from the moment the chemicals were made. Worst of all since they can't be used to make shaped charges most of the explosive force would go into the ground instead of being directed up and anti tank mines would be impossible.

This isn't to say self deactivating mines are impossible but every solution I've heard is either impractical or could easily be exploited by the enemy.

Mc Kinsey are the guys who invented and popularised the idea of executive bonuses for short term company performance and the idea of layoffs to temporarily make those companies look like they're doing better. They've also consulted for all of the most evil companies in this thread while they were doing their most evil shit. They constantly do the most courpt stuff imaginable. Often their advice creates massive problems which they will then sell their services to the people cleaning up their mess.

They've consulted for hostile nations while being paid by the US government to give advice on how to deal with those hostile governments.

Kosovo was UN not NATO. Only NATO engagement was Afghanistan and the Taliban had claimed responsibility for an act of war against a NATO member. Now the actual war was fought entirely in Afghanistan but that doesn't mean it wasn't a defensive war. It just doesn't feel like one.

Don't take this to mean I supported the war in Afghanistan or the many horrible things US troops did while there. (nor do I support the Taliban or their practises and tactics). But NATO is by rule and charter very much a defensive alliance. So much so that if Trump attacks Greenland he will have to face the rest of NATO. Which is something I don't think he comprehends, it's obvious that to him the US is the ruler of NATO.

Good God do I fucking hate the lobotomisation of our language to please algorithms that were made to please advertisers. The world is messy and gross if you want real people talking about the real world don't fucking try to hamfistedly sanitise everything they say.

There are only two ways for the homeless to stop being homeless; they get a somewhere to live or they die. Banning homeless camps accomplishes nothing but cruelty. Which of course is the point

So does that mean they're going to drop the South China sea thing and leave Taiwan be? Stop trying to push other nations around? Or are they going to stay organ harvesting, genocidal hypocrits? I know which one I'm betting on

That's to be expected; imagine the asteroid is projecting a cone in front of it that represents where we think it might go. Then take a cross section of the cone at the point where it meets earth. You can get a rough estimate for the odds of a hit based on how much area of that cross section the earth takes up. As observations and data come in our predictions get more accurate and the cone gets narrower. The circle of where it might be as it gets close to earth shrinks but earth doesn't so a higher percentage of the circle is covering earth hence the odds go up. But earth is not in the center of the circle so it'll shrink to the point where part of earth isn't covered by the circle which will cause the odds to suddenly start dropping as the circle shrinks past earth. This will be the case with every object that we spot that is going to be a near miss. The odds will climb up and then drop down.

I know most people hanging out in a space community probably don't need that explanation. But I've seen too many people elsewhere who seem to view the changing odds as a sign of unreliability and uncertainty.

Yes, I am ignoring the US military; because it is irrelevant. It's like arguing that a man's car can't be stolen because he's a heavyweight boxing champion. How many bases do you need to build before the US is immune to sabotage and subversion? How much money do you need to spend on guns before disinformation campaigns don't work? It is not as simple as one country being weaker than another. Different countries have different capabilities depending on what they have focused on. Russia has been building it's disinformation pipeline for a long time and has always been very good at exploiting corruption. The US is not very good at defending itself from those kinds of attacks as experts have been warning for frickin decades. This is not a video game where election interference is only targetable on nations in your level range and national strength can neatly be condensed into a single number and compared.

Or have I misunderstood your argument and your arguing that Putin has nothing to force Trump to obey him? Yet still in that argument the US military and the assassinations are still irrelevant. Trump is Putin's puppet not because Putin is a master manipulator dangling some blackmail over Trump's head. Putin's an unhinged, cowardly nutjob who spends most of his time hiding in a bunker marinating in the propaganda he himself commissioned. No, it's because Trump is a moron who accepts simple answers and lashes out at anyone who tells him he's wrong. Trump is a stupid man smart enough to know he's an idiot but terrified people will realise he's an idiot. He is a weak man desperate to be recognised as a strong one. So when someone who he views as a strong man dangles the potential for their approval in front of him he wags his tail like a good little dog. The former Australian PM talked about how Trump looked at Putin with awe to the degree that it was creepy. That is why Putin worked so hard to get him elected, why Trump spends so long on phone calls with Putin and why the military might of the US has no bearing on whether or not Trump will do as Putin tells him to. Trump is also very, very willing to accept bribes in whatever form they take and shown no limits to what he is willing to sell out for those bribes.

Or are easily manipulated narcissists. Trump before running for office in the first place laundered money for Russian oligarchs and an extensive and prolonged Russian based disinformation is the main reason he has the cult he does. Also key point: everything Trump has done indicates he is a coward. It doesn't matter how strong a coward is

I am a big proponent of free speech and the merits of free access to information.

Or at least I was. I've always known that bad actors with control over your information input can do an awful lot of damage. I used to think free and open access was the best choice. But seeing how a few companies captured the entire social media environment and have swollen to near-total monopolies and then how those same companies have shown themselves to be bad actors with malicious intent I have changed my opinion. Banning them would help slow down the flow of info sewage into the EU and encourage more competing companies to form. We need that since the EU can't break up American companies. So if new companies were ever to be competitive we need to remove the giants from the pool and commit to breaking up any that get too big.

This is sadly not a surprise. Any carbon capture project that doesn't involve trees is guaranteed to be a money sink and little else. Any process that pulls carbon out of the air is going to be an energy intensive one. Which means that many carbon capture projects are carbon positive. Often by a significant margin. Most of them are pushed by the oil companies since it's something they can point to as helping the environment but it increases power usage and their profits. So it's the option they want everyone to go with. And they'd prefer if we ignore the option that uses self replicating structures with built in solar panels that have spent the last billion years becoming hyper efficient at this exact task.

The thing is they've actually made a mistake charging him with terrorism. It is surprisingly narrowly defined so even without a sympathetic jury he might get a not guilty verdict for it and it weakens the whole case against him. But most of all by including it they've made all his intentions and politics central issues to the case. All the evidence and his statements about this will have to go into the public record. If he had pleaded guilty that wouldn't happen nor would there be a chance for jury annulment. Pleading not guilty is simply the smarter option to take.

Project sundial was a cold war American project to build a bomb so big it wouldn't matter where it was detonated It was a true doomsday weapon

There is alot of things the government does for you that most people likely have never thought about. Take invasive species for instance; There are huge efforts to contain and eradicate a variety of invasive species. You've probably never heard about these efforts. But they are needed to maintain and protect both farmland and the ecology of the United States. If those efforts are defunded and those species are allowed to run rampant it'll be almost impossible to put that genie back in the bottle.

I'd love be as optimistic as you but unless Trump changes his mind the US will get a brainwormed fanatical anti-vaccier in charge of deciding which vaccines are safe to use. Even if the states don't cooperate with trump's agenda there are so many long standing federal institutions which till now you've never needed to think about that are about to get wrecked.

Multiple regulatory bodies are going to get disbanded. The EPA is unlikely to survive, whole departments of the FDA are about to get gutted. Anything involving industrial safety is going to get its funding cut. Unconstitutional crackdowns on free and independent media is almost certain. Large scale damage to the functions of many government institutions can be expected. Massive economic damage due to reckless deregulation ( that's even before they start putting tariffs on everything and wind up in multiple simultaneous trade wars). Funding for education and infrastructure maintenance will be reduced to allow tax cuts for the already wealthy. Massive loss of global influence and a massive gain in influence by hostile autocratic nations is also something you can expect.

I could go on and on but even if you were to assume they weren't serious about project 2025 (if you haven't read that you should) it's real bad.

Space is big. It's so big that our tiny ape brains have a hard time conceiving of how big it is. The sun is actually (despite it's size) a relatively small target and is very very far away. Now the more delta-V you burn to slow the trash down the smaller its orbit around the sun will be. But that orbit starts enormous. So to get that purple line near the sun you do need to slow down almost the whole way, just to get it close.