I mean, I get nosebleeds some times. Am I throwing away profits?

One guy is slightly hoarse.

The other is a delusional fascist.

So basically both sides the same.

Where do you think we are?

Sure, but you’re equivocating two things that aren’t the same. Until you’ve written infinity 9s, you haven’t written the number yet. Once you do, the number you will have written will be exactly the number 1, because they are exactly the same. The difference between all the nines you could write in one thousand lifetimes and 0.999… is like the difference between a cup of sand and all of spacetime.

Or think of it another way. Forget infinity for a moment. Think of 0.999… as all the nines. All of them contained in the number 1. There’s always one more, right? No, there isn’t, because 1 contains all of them. There are no more nines not included in the number 1. That’s why they are identical.

They don’t need to win the legal battles. Just getting to court is their victory.

So… we’re doomed?

Maybe, but there is a significant Jewish population in New York for whom no other issues matter. So you’d have to be an excellent politician to sell that line after you’ve already used the “Z” word. Bowman is not an excellent politician. He seems like a decent human being, in over his head and unprepared to defend his positions from all sides. I wish he was better, because we need more progressives in leadership positions, and the centrists will use this to continue to sell the line that progressives can’t win elections.

Nah, China already knows everything Americans do on computers.

It is physically equal to 1. Infinity goes on forever, and so there is no physical difference.

It’s not that it makes almost no difference. There is no difference because the values are identical. There is no infinity between the two values.

In a manner of speaking, yes.

See, the church of Scientology cloned Tom years ago, and rolls out a new “stunt double” for each movie to make sure that his productions are done on time. If one Tom falls during a stunt, a new one is released.

Unfortunately, due to a clerical error, the original Tom was mislabelled before being put back in his tank, so it’s unclear which one was the first. This led to several Toms being accidentally left out, allowing this picture to be taken and forcing the church to pretend that they are different people and give them each a fake identity under which to live out their natural lives.

Except it isn’t infinitesimally smaller at all. 0.999… is exactly 1, not at all less than 1. That’s the power of infinity. If you wanted to make a wooden board exactly 0.999… m long, you would need to make a board exactly 1 m long (which presents its own challenges).

The problem is the Wolf Amendment, a 2011 law that requires the FBI to review any scientific cooperation with China to assure that no sensitive national security information is leaked.

He doesn’t strike me as a particularly thoughtful or talented politician, but the situation in Gaza is particularly fraught. Nuance doesn’t fit into a campaign slogan, and you’d have to be better at this to thread the needle between Zionism and anti-Semitism. I’m certain he would have preferred to make the primary about domestic issues, but his opponent wanted to make it about Israel/Palestine.

He pulled it because he locked himself out of the room. He went the wrong way, and couldn’t get back in to the vote in time. The Republicans were trying to pull a fast one, and he did manage to delay it, but the ends don’t justify the means.

It was a stupid thing to do, but the real damage to his image was in trying to lie about it and coverit up. If he had said, from the beginning, “the Republicans were trying some bullshit and it was the only way I could stop them” then you could plausibly make that argument. I would still disagree, but I could respect that he did what he thought he had to do.

Ok, I’m as progressive as it gets, but Bowman was done after the fire alarm stunt. Voters in his district didn’t forget about that bullshit. Worse than that, he revealed that he was kind of an idiot in his attempts to explain his behavior.

Yes, all of the things about his opponent are troubling. The DNC is not on our side, and we need more progressives at every level of government. But we also need better politicians at every level of government. I’d rather have progressive morons than centrist who is competent, but either is better than a conservative, and the moron might not win a general election.

Let’s not even entertain the concept of “originalists.” Anyone who calls conservatives “originalists” should be laughed at to their faces.

Otherwise, I agree with you entirely.

Piece of shit perjured himself rather than admit he and his buddies like to squirt beer up each others’ asses. And he’s a Supreme Court Justice.

I’d love to see the trial of Reed Richards. Like, imagine a universe where Reed has ultimate nullifier, Doom has the surf board, and Galactuis is threatening to devour Earth. So Reed uses the threat against Galactus to depower Doom and protect Earth, but then Galactus goes on to devour many more worlds, like Titan, Xandar, and Skrullos, and Reed has to stand trial before Arishem, Ego, and other Celestials. His lawyer is Thanos, who negotiates banishment for the FF and Doom from this universe to one where an incursion is looming and threatening the entire Multiverse, in the hopes that the Reed Family and Doom can figure out how to prevent it.

I do feel like we’ve been seeing a lot of headlines that follow a pattern of MAJOR NEWS SCOTUS SIDES WITH BIDEN on something super obvious and inconsequential.

“Smart” could mean a lot of things. Animals can be relatively smart. What makes humans special is out capacity for language. We have the musculature to create audible language, and the specialized neural lobes dedicated to creating and deciphering it.

Language, along with our advanced prefrontal cortex, creates the opportunity for knowledge transmission. I can tell my kids everything I’ve learned, and they can learn more and tell their kids.

Some animals have some of these abilities. Dolphins have large prefrontal cortices. Whales sing songs with tons of information we haven’t even deciphered yet. Parrots can create language. Great Apes can be taught to understand language. Crows make and use tools, and teach other crows to do the same. But so far, we haven’t found any animals that can pass down unlimited information the way humans do.

Interstellar space travel would require either super advanced technology or hyper-specific biological adaptations. The idea that whales showed up from another planet and became the whales we know today doesn’t make a lot of sense in the revolutionary record. Now, if you said crustaceans or lichen or something were ancient aliens, that would feel more believable.

There are a shit ton of laws built around the idea of marriage. Your spouse has rights to make medical decisions, inhabit and inherit property, share custody of children and property, sign certain documents, and stuff you probably never think about. Marriage equality is not an exercise in vanity, it really makes a difference when the government recognizes your special relationship and commitment. It also makes divorce so important, because the ability to sever that relationship is the only way to untangle all of those rights and responsibilities to each other.

It would be better to have a different concept of contractual family, one that permits for more granularity and possibilities. But that ain’t what we got. Requiring demonstrations of fault to grant a divorce is just another way for shitty people to abuse other people. Prior to no-fault divorce, it wasn’t uncommon for judges to say things like “that’s not really spousal abuse” or “that’s not really rape” and then deny the divorce.