While that’s true, it was mostly just because Mondale was from Minnesota, and even then he only won by 0.18%.

I always liked the name Woodrow, but I hate the nickname Woody, so it’s a bit of a wash.

Correct - every government eventually welcomes corruption that needs to be flushed out, and if it gets too strong of a hold on the country, it may need to be forced out. When the US was founded, it was prosperous for the wealthy and non-wealthy alike, and continued to be prosperous for a while. There were ups and downs, but it slowly got worse for the common citizen as the wealthy used their power to influence the country in their favor over time. It came to a head about 100 years ago, and we were able to get through it nonviolently back then.

It’s happening again now, and we might be able to pull through democratically again, but we might not. 100 years ago there was much more of a sense of solidarity against the rich and powerful, but now that we live in a world with a much better understanding of human emotion and motivation, a huge percentage of the country has been thoroughly convinced to fight for their own exploitation by the wealthy. Pair that with all of the war going on right now that we’re more aware of than ever given the technology that globally connects us, and we’re a lot more divided than we were back then.

I hope that we don’t need violence to solve our current political issues - democracy has certainly worked before - but it’s always been the backup plan when civility doesn’t get the job done.

Again, it’s not necessary, but it did work. I hope we can resolve the issues in our country democratically, but I’m mentally preparing myself for the violence that will inevitably follow if that doesn’t work. If our country falls to fascism, it’ll take a real fight to get it back.

I mean, our country was founded through a bunch of people getting really uncivil and violent. Sure, it still needed - and still needs - a lot of improvement to be fair for everyone who wasn’t part of the “in-group,” but the same could be said for most countries at the time ours was founded.

I certainly don’t believe that it’s necessary to be uncivil and violent to achieve a fair and civil society, but it has shown past success at ridding a country of leaders who don’t have the people’s best interests at heart.

Looks cool, but I worry that they’ve got so many different enemies pulling in different directions that they won’t really get into an interesting story for any of them. The reason I loved Origins was because it really focused on the darkspawn, both in terms of the lore surrounding them, and the effect their invasion has on society. Then the DLC came out and teased that the darkspawn are more than they appear to be, setting up for future games to delve into that even more. It was great, but then the next couple of games came out and didn’t seem to have that same feeling of depth, and I lost interest. If the game is just a checklist of different things to kill, I’m not really interested in playing it.

When you accidentally grab a blank slide and panic for a little bit.

Would you want to enter a legal battle with Nintendo? This system is broken in a lot of different ways, one of which is the incredible expense of legal fees even if you’re in such an open-and-shut case as someone clearly using your intellectual property without your consent. The one with deeper pockets wins regardless of what the law says.

But they DO have the exclusive right. People want to be told the world is different - that it’s better - but if we want to change it we need to see it for what it is. If we say “They don’t have the right!” before we’ve done the work necessary to strip them of the right, then we’ll never even understand how to start fixing this broken system.

Well yeah, as the owners they have the exclusive right to determine what’s okay. They’re just following the rules as they’ve been laid out by centuries of corporate lobbying for more exploitable copyright laws. Those are what we need to focus on if we want more fair use of intellectual property that the rights holder has already sufficiently profited from - the thing that such protections were initially meant to ensure to a much more reasonable extent.

I sure hope so, but I don’t see much changing. I guess we’ll see by looking at where Reddit is at business-wise by next year. People were saying it was doomed last summer after the 3rd party app fiasco, and their daily traffic has only gone up since then. I’ve long since lost all faith in the masses making the best choices for themselves.

They’re better than the OLD alternative, which was total boycotting at best, and torches and pitchforks at worst. The NEW alternative is complaining about it for a week or two, then continuing on without making any changes at all. They don’t mind the new alternative.

Well, it worked with the news.

The point of whisleblower laws is to make people feel like a lack of whistleblowers means a lack of things to blow whistles over. Then all they have to do is silence any whistles before they’re heard by the general population and boom, public trust in the system is strengthened without actually needing to do anything drastic like actually fixing the system.

A lot of cops are so high strung that you essentially have to pretend you’re having the time of your life while interacting with them - any nervousness or annoyance is taken to mean that you’re potentially a violent criminal who could kill them at any moment.

Just the realization that a woman holding a pot of hot water could hypothetically use it as a weapon, however unlikely it was in this scenario, was enough to make him instinctively shoot with only minor notice that still did nothing to prevent him from killing her even as she began cowering and apologizing.

This is the culture we’ve allowed the police to build in this country; the job is dangerous, and they’re only human, so they believe they should be forgiven for being scared regardless of the situation, and should be forgiven for taking drastic measures while they’re scared.

I put my alarm far enough away that I need to get up to turn it off. By then I’m already out of bed, which is otherwise the hardest part for me by far.

My mom died of cancer a few months ago because she was convinced that a combination of sunlight’s natural vibrational frequency and some expensive “medical” herbal teas would cure her. Placebos affect people, but if you let them believe that they’re an alternative to actual science and medicine, then they’ll use them as such.

I started with 4e, so I have fond memories, but my friends and I also had no idea what we were doing and just made a bunch of stuff up, so that probably helped.

Again, selective breeding suffers from the same issue of introducing changes that can be detrimental to the organism itself and its place in the balance of the environment. Look at dog breeding as an example. Pugs were bred for a specific look, and that inadvertently caused them to have severe breathing issues. Dachshunds are another example, with many developing spinal issues over time. The difference, as I said before, is the speed; making a change causes unintended side effects - when you make a huge change quickly, it will produce more side effects than making a small change slowly will.

And… again… as I already said… there should be limitations to prevent rolling out new GMOs without specific testing for safety, both in a lab for potential problems to the organism or - in the event of an agricultural product - its consumers, as well as in the environment as a whole, to determine how it may affect the ecology if and when it is introduced. It may take decades to notice changes if the GMO is released immediately after being developed, but if testing protocols are made and followed, we should have no problem quickly spotting any issues before the organism is rolled out into the world.

Just like newly developed medicines need to go through rigorous testing to prevent things like the Thalidomide scandal that caused an immense amount of birth defects due to lax testing, new GMO’s will need to be tested as well. But, just like you likely understand the benefits of medicine for helping people suffering from various diseases, GMO’s can provide the same level of benefit to people suffering from malnutrition, among a wide range of other positive uses. The key is to study new developments to the point where we can spot and address issues. Throwing away the technology as a whole is not the answer.

GMO’s trace back further than that - even when we’re specifically talking about modern methods. The first Drosophila melanogaster fruit fly genetics experiments happened in 1910, though it took a while for us to begin actually creating GMO strains; the first study I know of that did so was in 1927 by Hermann J. Muller, using x-rays to purposefully induce mutations. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter who was the first to purposefully modify the genetics of an organism, modern or otherwise.

The fact of the matter is that we can use, have used, and should use genetic modification for beneficial purposes. Again, GMO’s are neutral; it just means an organism was purposefully modified on a genetic level by humans - it’s the purpose itself that determines whether its good or bad. People will use it for bad reasons just like any technology, and we should stop them, but that doesn’t mean we should shun the technology itself when genetic modifications have been used beneficially for millennia, and modern techniques are just as capable of producing incredibly beneficial changes as they are the detrimental ones everyone’s scared of.