I’d say it’d depend on the specifics of the result.

Taking the wind out of MAGA’s sails would take a blowout victory and Hillary wasn’t gonna get that without doing some serious full court pressing for the entire general campaign, like well beyond even the “she should have campaigned more in the rust belt!” ideas people have about where she fell short.

I was talking since Jefferies would likely be Speaker in the scenario where Biden won the election but then died of old age.

99% of what he’s doing is using his own past traumas as a tool to prevent similar traumas from happening to other children.

If you can’t see your batman comforting a dying child in her last moments, you don’t have batman, you have the punisher in a funny hat.

Stop commenting on the punisher in a funny hat and telling us you’re talking about the guy with the best track record in comics for rehabilitating rogue’s gallery members if not completely then to the point of finding a place in society where they can live their peace, save maybe for the flash, depends on how much of his rogue’s gallery by mass is currently evil speedsters.

President Harris and Vice President Jefferies

Anything else means instant constitutional crisis, but at the same time, we’ll be able hear the explosions from space as right winger minds absorb that circumstance has brought about the first female president and also the first PoC President Vice President team.

If Kamala was good at trolling she’d not nominate any white people to the cabinet so we can all enjoy fox pundits trying to find the magic combination of words that let them be mad about an all PoC cabinet without it being racist, but I’m pretty sure she’s at least going to keep Buttigieg on as Transit Czar since he’s been going at least hard enough to get HSR moving finally between LA and Vegas.

Was that actually confirmed or was it just Joker vandalizing historical documents to make bruce think he knew about a Lazarus pit under the bat cave?

Inb4 the flood of people who get all their batman knowledge from the Nolan trilogy and the stupid one liners they added to Injustice to try and whataboutism him against superman literally murdering people and installing a fascist autocracy.

Yeah because when I think of the working class I think lunatics dressed like clowns arming chemical weapon dispersing explosives on the orders of a guy who caught a chemical burn induced skin condition and decided everyone was gonna die suffocating over it.

Batman is a detective, a detective! 99% of what he does has nothing to do with fighting, you just don’t hate read the detective work because Batman going out of his way to find the murderer of some nobody with nobody to care enough to ask it be done doesn’t feed this bizarre obsession some folks have with making Batman the worst thing ever because he has money as a plot convenience to explain where all his insane tech comes from.

Also, he does constantly do work addressing wealth inequality by backing community efforts to relieve the effects of poverty and by championing community leaders standing up to corruption. Why doesn’t it work? Because there’s a literal criminal conspiracy of the wealthiest of Gotham dating back centuries that most recent versions of Batman has been at war with since near the outset of his investigative career. Again, read any of the comic books published in the last like 20 years and this would all be entry level stuff.

Also, Gotham’s gangs are not normal gangs, like I exampled above, but also consider the sheer level of advanced education or ability to outsmart most folks who have one Gotham’s criminal leaders have. Even Joker is heavily implied to have retained advanced chemical engineering training from before he went psycho.

If the idea that even one rich person has genuinely good intentions and does genuine work addressing the causes of criminal activity at every level is that hard for people to grasp, maybe just put the comics down and find another topic because man are you all gonna struggle with basically everything else you’re gonna find in the genre.

Do they at least get one day of shoukshouka for breakfast?

Germany gets a pizza day?

You eat hamburgers, it’s a similar scale comparison

Unless it’s the sale of a product or service or the wage earnings or someone who worked on a product or service, it doesn’t contribute to GDP, if country A made product X, it being sold in country B contributes to A’s GDP

I think that’s what people really ought to fear about our future. Once there are enough of us, once we’ve spread out widely enough, horrors and disgusts the likes of which we speak of in hushed tones praying we never find ourselves even adjacent to them will be cut loose into the universe.

Until we develop means of consistent and viable FTL travel and communication, we’re going to all live with knowing that any heinous act we can possibly imagine is not only playing out somewhere, but the victims of it were probably bred for the purpose of making the show as enjoyable as possible for whatever freaks arrange for it.

Even when we regain the proper footing of being able to enforce basic rules of prevention of the worst things we can imagine, the sickos will always be finding another remote world, another star at the fringes where justice can’t reach reliably yet.

We will live in a universe of untold prosperity, and yet also one of an eternal game of whackamole against the worst kinds of us that could ever exist, and some that can’t yet but will come into existence with what we learn going forward.

Even colonizing the solar system, we will regularly see headlines that force us to ask if we are doing enough to protect others, if everyone can live like kings while some are made to be the victims of Caligula, or of Pol Pot, or of Jim Jones, or of any of the other depraved madmen of history who made those underfoot their playthings for the worst impulses that not even the call of the void dares give an ear to.

Slowly dying out as our descendants evolve into divergent races and species and stop being technically classifiable as human.

People who think doom is upon us really don’t understand just how hard it is to kill all of us, it would take a confluence of several extinction level events at this point to completely wipe us out just because of how resilient we’ve made our society to collapse factors.

We’re gonna live, we’re not gonna escape living with the world we’ve made as easily as just all dying because of it, and someday one of your descendants is gonna regard you the same way we do the savannah apes that figured out how to walk upright to get a better vantage over the tall grass.

As for what our descendants will evolve into, honestly, it’s gonna be a much more designed process as we continue to master gene editing tech. I could genuinely see several branches just being different “forks” of the base human body plan that try to resolve “design flaws” like disconnecting the respiratory and digestive systems or restoring partial water breathing or fully activating our potential for bioluminescence.

I think 40k is on to something too, the practice of the mechanicus of augmenting their bodies with tech to the point of even enabling their own brains to perform mass data analysis akin to a binary computer will be where a lot of folks end up too.

In fact I believe that the moment a “third hemisphere” implant to the brain is successfully developed will be the actual singularity point for humanity rather than the development of an independently intelligent artificial being. Unlocking the potential of human pattern recognition in harmony with binary number mastery would instantly change so much about how people even understand the world let alone interact with it that predicting beyond that point is more an experiment of speculative evolution than of more standard futurism.

As for immediately, I believe we’re a lot closer to a solar punk world than anyone’s really comfortable with accepting, because doing that means giving into fatalism means them having personally failed a goal within reach instead of “just accepting reality.”

Gossips will tend to respond to outright rejection by gossiping about you instead, and being a man in a predominantly woman’s field is gonna mean that gossip can get very dangerous for you and your career very quickly.

Remember, gossip doesn’t have to be true to still be hot, and scorned gossips will be more than happy to exploit that to the fullest to spite you.

Don’t tell them you don’t care about religion and politics either, because even if you don’t women have learned from shitbags to translate that to “I may or may not have been at the capital on Jan 6th and held a bonfire celebration burning IUDs when Dobbs came down, but I still want to get laid ever.”

My advise, try just being boring. Contribute duds to any conversations they try to involve you in where you’re uncomfortable.

Most importantly speak to a supervisor you feel you can trust to not tell the gossips and tell them the gossip makes you uncomfortable so that if the boring act doesn’t work and they start gossiping on you already, there’s a previous record indicating they might do that and it’ll at least insulate your future career prospects.

As for sex life talk, women are under two impressions, 1, that they aren’t being raunchy when they talk about their sex lives, and 2, that men do it way more and are way grosser about it.

It is entirely possible that they keep bringing up sex lives because they’re trying to relate to you and extravert adopt you, so if you gently explain that you don’t feel comfortable talking about sex with coworkers you might find yourself in a more open conversation about mixed signals and how you all can create a better working relationship.

Some people keep trying to talk to ya because they really do just want to be friends! That sounds obvious but trust me it’s hard to actually internalize that to the point that you can believe it when it’s happening to you. Missed out on chill compsci bonding time with this pretty cool dude named gabe because I didn’t get that he was being so spontaneously friendly to me so much because he’s just a friendly guy. I met tech wiz Ned Flanders and it didn’t register to me for a solid year lol.

You strike me as a bit of an introvert so I’ll add, uncomfortable but tactful conversations now can save you exponentially more awkward and embarrassing ones later.

That’s not how GDP works

Edit to elaborate, GDP is calculated based on final goods and services, outsourced work exclusively counts towards the GDP of the country that work is done in, and only affects the GDP of another country when they buy what the first country made, but the outsourced work still happens in country A, so country A gets all the GDP created by selling finished goods, and all the GDP of the work done on unfinished products within their borders.

Basically, the US isn’t sitting on everyone else’s money, it just genuinely makes and sells that much shit

Well it can certainly involve being a piece of shit

Part of it is that America just has an insane amount of resource richness even compared to historical empires of it’s comparative influence.

Let me try to explain it in agricultural terms. America is a nation of immigrants, and yet a common phenomenon is an observed disconnect between what Americans consider local cuisine from a given country and what people from that country today consider average cuisine of their culture.

This is because those immigrants were the tired, the poor, the hungry masses yearning to be free. The cuisine they brought was the stuff people would make to subsist as peasants, notice how many different varieties of “take this basic grain as a filler then layer on bitsins and fixins to give it flavor and nutrition.” Meanwhile in the home country, cuisine culture continued to be defined by the elites who had already been defining it. What’s really interesting is that the cuisine brought by the poor, did not stay pauper meals.

This is because America as a country is so packed to the gills with farmable land that ingredients considered a rarity for sheer cost in “the old country” were abundant to the point of being cheap. American serving sizes are so big because they were pioneered by people who were thanking god that they could be that big. Chop Sui literally was just “whatever you can throw in the pot, serve it up!”, tacos and sandwiches were invented basically to maximize the flavor and nutrition of expensive fresh ingredients on limited supply, Pizza has roots as the equivalent of a street pretzel in NYC.

Imagine if someone took the NYC pretzel, moved to a land of unheard-of plenty unseen by human eyes thus far, and decided to spice that pittily ass bread and salt with choice of topping by loading that shit with the most unimaginably luxurious ingredients they could conceive of because that shit is all cheap there. That’s the story of Pizza. That’s what happened to basically every peasant food culture that made contact with the US and its because American resource richness is just that unprecedented for anyone who isn’t from America already to conceive of.

Stalin once stated that WWII was won with, “British Intelligence, American Steel, and Soviet Blood.”, but America wasn’t just a factory for the world, the American kitchen put into that war just as hard as the American foundry, arguably more, America’s first casualties of the war were the merchant marines who faced U-Boats head on to run food aid to the British public and anywhere else they could slip past the Nazis.

We got so much shit we will literally give it to you for free sometimes

That is how 4% of the world population ends up sitting on 25% of its GDP

Importing and screen capping software can also have the certificate software on and sign it with the metadata of the original file they’re copying, taking a picture of the screen with a separate device or pixel by pixel recreations could in theory get around it, but in practice, people will see at best a camera image being presented as a photoshopped or paintmade image, and at worst, some loser pointing their phone at their laptop to try and pass off something dishonestly. Pixel by pixel recreations, again, software can be given the metadata stamp, and if sites refuse to accept non stamped content, going pixel by pixel on unvetted software will just leave you with a neat png file for your trouble, and doing it manually, yeah if someone’s going through and hand placing squares just to slip a single deep fake picture through, that person’s a state actor and that’s a whole other can of worms.

ETA: you can also sign the pixel art creation as pixel art based on it being a creation of squares, so that would tip people off in the signature notes of a post.

There are ways to secure signatures to be a problem to recreate, not to mention how the signature can be unique to every piece of media made, meaning a fake can’t be created reliably.

I agree pretty heartily with this metadata signing approach to sussing out AI content,

Create a cert org that verifies that a given piece of creative software properly signs work made with their tools, get eyeballs on the cert so consumers know to look for it, watch and laugh while everyone who can’t get thr cert starts trying to claim they’re being censored because nobody trusts any of their shit anymore.

Bonus points if you can get the largest social media companies to only accept content that has the signing and have it flag when signs indicate photoshopping or AI work, or removal of another artist’s watermark.