And yet we are the only conscious beings on any of these heavenly bodies that are aware enough to give their existence any meaning at all.

Sorry, best I can do is the sci fi dystopian option where we grow entire cows in vats, but we make it humane by just growing them without brains.

Yeah, this is one of those areas that capitalism really screws us over.

The natural and most obvious use for these lab-grown and imitation meats are for filler meats. Think a ground beef replacement. Something that would be added to a casserole, a burrito, or any other dish where meat is present, but not the primary focus of a dish.

But it costs money to develop lab-grown meats. And to pay that investment back, for-profit companies have to target the luxury market first. It’s like how Tesla started with building an expensive sports car. Then they used the profits from that to build a cheaper next generation car, and so on. That’s what the lab grown meat companies have had to do. The ideal market for products like these would be things like chicken nuggets or the meat inside hot pockets. But those are also the cheapest form of meat sold, and they need to target the upper end of the market to have any hope of profitability.

If it makes you feel better, cows themselves are opportunistic carnivores.

I’m not in that community myself, but from what I hear a high quality for suit can cost $10-20k. Not sure what differences in construction may exist between those and what you made. But some artists definitely make decent livings making them.

I’m just imagining the scene in a sci fi comedy.

“I thought you said we were getting mechanical tails? Why the Hell is this attached to my front?”

“Experiments determined that this was actually the more effective and cheaper option. Don’t worry, a front tail works just fine for balance!”

Won’t someone think of the poor working class furries? A fur suit can already cost 10 or 20 grand. Now they’re going to have to add cyborg body parts to the mix as well? Talk about gentrification!

Improve it by covering it in fake skin, the same used on limb prosthesis! /s

My point is, you never even bothered to google Kamala ICE policy. If you did, you would have found this article:

https://www.wvtm13.com/article/fact-checking-kamala-harris-border-security/61780748

From 2024.

Speaking to a crowd in Atlanta on Tuesday, Harris reiterated her support for a border bill that would increase funding for ICE detention beds, border patrol agents, asylum officers and immigration judges. It also would also reinforce new restrictions on migrants seeking asylum, alongside other reforms.

This is a casual forum, not an academic debate. If you want to start demanding sources for things, show that you’ve put some good faith effort into disproving the claim. If you just want to reply casually, that’s fine. That’s what most discussion here is. But when you start demanding a higher level of rigor, it’s only polite to demonstrate that level of rigor yourself first.

They didn’t even start the process until two years in to the Biden administration. Biden sent the nation to Hell through the oldest liberal failing - seeking to compromise with Republicans. He appointed a Republican as his attorney general. Did you forget that? And then Garland proceeded to slow-walk the Trump prosecution. They only moved forward at all after the House investigatory committees forced their hand.

Before demanding sources, please provide you own. What research have you done so far, so others can help you find what you’re struggling with?

Neoliberals are just Republicans waiving a rainbow flag (as long as waiving the flag doesn’t involve defending trans people.)

Obviously you’re instructing OP to pump chlorine gas into the cabins of loud vehicles.

I would prefer a mixed system. All wealth over 1000x the median household income taxed at 100%. So no one should have a fortune larger than that, a number that would be approximately $80 million today. But if you secretly gather a fortune much larger than that? If you somehow secretly amass a fortune 10,000x the median household income? At that point I would apply severe criminal penalties, like a mandatory minimum 20 year sentence. I don’t want to throw the book at someone just because they accidentally let their fortune grow a bit beyond the limit. But if you’re a whole order of magnitude above it? Then that’s when severe criminal penalties should apply. At some point your wealth becomes so large that you personally become a threat to national security. Amassing a fortune in the billions should be treated like a private citizen trying to build their own nuclear bomb. No one should have that much power, and we should treat both the same.

I like the 1000x threshold because that is approximately the maximum possible fortune one can amass in one’s lifetime off of ordinary salary work and extreme frugality.

1000x the median income would be about $80 million. Consider the highest-earning non-executive salaried employees - people who spend years in school in very challenging fields. People like neurosurgeons. Imagine if there was a couple composed of two neurosurgeons, and they earn very good salaries. They’re also so frugal that they spend basically nothing. You have a pair of neurosurgeons literally sleeping on the sidewalk out front of the hospital. They live like that, and they invest and save every penny they can. The highest salaried incomes combined with pathological frugality.

Even if they did all of that. Even if two highly educated workers lived off nothing and saved everything, even then those people would still struggle to earn, over their whole life, a fortune that exceeded 1000x the median household income.

Such a system allows for a capitalism that actually does live up to the marketing. You’re allowed to earn a fortune as large as your own labor and skills will allow. However, the only way to obtain a fortune larger than this is to get into the business of labor arbitrage - hiring other people and harnessing the surplus of their labor. I want people to be able to earn as much money from the sweat of their own brow as they can. But I don’t want people to be able to hoard strategically dangerous fortunes by exploiting the labor of others. And 1000x the median household income is a nice even number that’s easy to explain to people and that achieves this goal.

Having wealth over 1000 times the median family income.

My dad sometimes uses that word, and he’s in his sixties. But then again, he and my mom had six kids and had kids in potty training for a long cumulative amount of time. The word just stuck I guess.

Seems likely. The most rigid materially known, (or at least theorized) is nuclear pasta.. Nuclear pasta only forms inside neutron stars, stellar objects that are the last stage of matter before matter gives up entirely and collapses into a black hole.

It would work, but only in the impossible world where you have a perfectly rigid unbreakable stick. But such an object cannot exist in this universe.

Pick up a solid rigid object near you. Anything will do, a coffee cup, a comb, a water bottle, anything. Pick it up from the top and lift it vertically. Observe it.

It seems as though the whole object moves instantaneously, does it not? It seems that the bottom of the object starts moving at the exact same instant as the top. But it is actually not the case. Every material has a certain elasticity to it. Everything deforms slightly under the tiniest of forces. Even a solid titanium rod deforms a little bit from the weight of a feather placed upon it. And this lack of perfect rigidity means that there is a very, very slight delay from when you start lifting the top of the object to when the bottom of it starts moving.

For small objects that you can manipulate with your hands, this delay is imperceptible to your senses. But if you observed an object being lifted with very precise scientific equipment, you could actually measure this delay. Motion can only transfer through objects at a finite speed. Specifically, it can only move at the speed of sound through the material. Your perfectly rigid object would have an infinite speed of sound within it. So yes, it would instantly transfer that motion. But with any real material, the delay wouldn’t just be noticeable, but comically large.

Imagine this stick were made of steel. The speed of sound in steel is about 5120 m/s. The distance to the Moon is about 400,000 km. Converting and dividing shows that it would actually take about 22 hours for a pulse like that to travel through a steel pole that long. (Ignoring how the steel pole would be supported.)

So in fact, you are both right and wrong. You are correct for the object you describe. A perfectly rigid object would be usable as a tool of FTL communication. But such an object simply cannot exist in this universe.

You will end up paying the share of taxes to your state government that you currently do to the federal government. If the federal government collapses, all 50 states are now de facto independent. Those states can now start forming a new country or new collection of countries as they will.