Mnemnosyne

Every former president tends to be called president still quite often. If you look up news articles about most former presidents you'll find a pretty solid split between just saying 'President X' and specifying 'former President X'.

It might be related to a military rule where retired officers get to keep using their rank title unless discharged in negative ways. Or maybe it's just sort of traditional.

25 years might actually be a potentially realistic timeframe for that. But I'd still bet on a little longer myself. I hope it happens within my lifetime.

They don't say it, they don't even acknowledge it themselves, but they view this in the same way a credulous middle ages individual would view making a deal with the fey. The right set of words, the right incantation, will grant you power over them whether they want to acknowledge it or not.

That's the mental image they have. If you ask them how these secret laws are enforced and what actually obligates the judges, police, government, etc to follow the rules, they won't admit the magical thinking, though they will babble and make up nonsense that sounds, to them, like genuine explanations but is in truth gibberish.

At the end, though, that's what they're doing...they're chanting mystical incantations that will bind the Queen of the Faeries to their will and prevent the fae from doing harm upon them or impeding them.

But they don't even take the cautionary parts of the tales to heart, for even if you should succeed on pulling one over on the Faeries, they are wily and patient, and someday they will trick you into giving up the protection you thought was unbreakable. Just as even if they actually managed to stumble upon the correct legal maneuver, it is likely the system will be back to get them one way or another.

If I had to choose between global high speed internet access, and ground based astronomy, I'd pick the Internet every time. I'd completely blot out the sky forever if that's what it took.

We don't need ground-based astronomy to learn about the universe, I'd rather encourage more space-based astronomy. Or build some observatories on the moon if you really want to build on a solid space body.

However, Starlink is a for profit company run by Elon Musk. I don't really want them doing it, because they're not going to provide unlimited global Internet to everyone. So as the guy said, the idea is good, but Starlink is bad, although it is currently the only such option.

First I even heard about this game was a comic talking about it's unattractive characters. I looked it up out of curiosity to see if this was an exaggeration like it has been with some characters like Aloy, and....ehhh...mostly true.

One of the big draws of these types of games is cool character designs people want to play. This game definitely doesn't have that for me. Overwatch quickly pulled me in with cool character designs, this one...does not.

That article reminded me of that politician who said women's bodies would prevent pregnancy from rape. Clearly he had so little contact with women he confused them with ducks.

Roaming the earth means roaming all - or at least a very significant portion of - the earth, not some very isolated region. So I would say yes - if some tiny population of mammoths was still alive in some limited area at this time, they were not 'roaming the earth'.

The irony is that if they put it at or near the end of the video, after I have learned that I like whatever I watched, I am much more likely to do so, because I often really do just forget to like things, and a reminder near the end would in fact make me go 'yeah, this was good, I'll do that'.

But if they ask me to do it at the beginning, I won't do it until I have seen enough to decide I do in fact like it.

Yeah, while there was mockery it didn't come from 'official' sources. They called him serious names and didn't ridicule him. They made it clear he was dangerous, but they also gave him respect like a serious candidate, contender, opponent, rival.

It probably would have worked from the beginning to just laugh at him, IF it was coming from the actual political establishment. If Clinton had essentially based her entire campaign around 'hahah...oh wait you're serious? Let me laugh harder.' there's a good chance he would've crashed and burned before ever getting off the ground, I think.

Hey, deep fakes are awesome. They are a necessary step in the evolution of the technology that leads to holodecks.

I want holodecks, I bet you want holodecks, practically everyone wants holodecks, so we have to go through this stage of the tech to get there.

Consider this question: how is it that anyone under the age of 40 today has ever smoked?

By the time they were born, the bad effects of smoking were well understood. By the time they were teenagers, not smoking should have been as obvious as not jumping in front of a train. People already addicted find it difficult to quit, but it in no way explains anyone starting.

The question is different and yet very similar, because the things you mention wind up in a similar way. Somehow people start in that route even though it should be obvious not to. And these things you mention are much easier to fall into than smoking because parents, family, etc are all pushing it on people. Smokers generally aren't pushing their kids, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, etc to smoke, and somehow smoking still proliferates to some degree, just consider how much more difficult to avoid it is for those whose families are actively encouraging them to fall into these methods of belief and hate.

Every person in these movies is a blistering idiot. Like, the levels of stupid on every single person in these expeditions is insane.

The original Alien didn't require the entire cast to be complete morons, unfit to even operate as an adult in society, much less be mission-critical crew on a colonization mission.

If it hadn't been for the android in the original Alien, they would have observed reasonable quarantine procedures and there wouldn't really have been a problem.

That's one of the main reasons I think these movies are bad. The writers either did not care enough or were too incompetent to write intelligent, believable, relatable characters that I actually grow to care about.