First, don’t panic. Harris and her staff, and Democrats around the country, they have planned for many shady actions on Trump’s part. Details are scarce because they don’t want Trump staff to have a heads up.

And then everything depends on the details.

But remember, anything that looks like a coup d’etat could easily get the military or spy agencies involved. And if they move, it doesn’t matter what SCOTUS says. As a result, it’s very hard to predict what would happen in various extra dramatic situations. There is no precedent; precedent wouldn’t mean anything anyway.

Raising questions? No. The only question is how far, how much, how many people will die.

Prison? …No. You’re just wrong. That’s bad no matter what.

That’s not what the Supreme Court said, though. Only official acts have absolute immunity. Murder is not usually an official act.

And as always, if you’re talking about a coup d’etat, the question is if the military or spy agencies will kill you before, during, or after it. When the rule of law is out the window, you must expect physical violence.

I feel there’s a potential suicide joke here, but it would probably end up in bad taste.

I have a question for you that needs answering first. Offensive to whom?

I think you answered your own question. If taking drugs actually makes you a better person, of course it’s OK. That’s true for both physical and mental considerations.

But look, you put everything into one definition. What is “better”, who decides, and how do they decide? If you don’t have anywhere to go, you probably won’t get there. Or maybe you will get there but you won’t realize it.

There is much debate on all kinds of drugs, but I can tell you that some of my friends have had various experiences that are relevant. For several friends, acid or shrooms helped them deal with some harsh trauma. For several other friends, various uppers helped them handle ADHD relatively effectively. But of course we all have different problems and goals, so the burden is right back on you to figure out what you want to do. There’s no way around this basic fact of life.

I think you need to take a step back and stop talking about income tax. Instead, talk about wealth distribution overall. What about businesses? What about corporations? What about passive income? What about savings that’s passed to children? What about inheritance tax? What about tax fraud and tax evasion? And I meant to separate those explicitly, because there are many weak points in the tax code that allow for companies to take advantage of the ability to send money overseas, for example.

If all you’re doing is adjusting the standard deduction or the base exemption or the top threshold for social security payments, you’re ignoring the gigantic high-dollar figures that are happening with the billionaires and the largest corporations in the world. And if you ignore them, then there’s no way you can fix the corruption that’s plaguing modern society.

Of course I think you were trying to keep your focus narrow, which is a reasonable thing to do, but it’s also worth noting in at least one comment that the big picture involves much more important questions about how we should allow wealth to be redistributed.

You didn’t tell us what you meant by “shoulder the burden”. Maybe you should have, or at least if you did it would allow more focused answers.

Some people that I have spoken with are fans of a flat tax. They think that income tax should be 10% on everyone, no matter what. They think that is fair.

In order to maintain that belief in fairness, they also need to magically forget about: the ultra rich, passive income, capital gains, the existence of businesses that have a different tax code, and the fact that they probably actually endorse various tax breaks.

On a side note, I think one of the underlying causes of people being willing to try to forget all of these obvious facts of life is the gut assumption that big banks and ultra rich people who are running scams or finding loopholes are doing so in a very complicated way, so there’s no chance we could figure out what’s happening and stop it. But what forensic accountants point out from time to time is that many of the scams and loopholes are new variations on old tricks. We can understand how they work, but it takes effort, because the names change and the money moves in slightly different ways.

The specific rules vary by state. Where do you live, what are you going to do, and can you stream it for us?

Your feelings are of course valid, that’s how you feel, and it’s a perfectly normal thing. On the one hand technology keeps changing, but on the other hand people are trying to drum up money by selling promises of new technology as if it were snake oil.

All of the talk you hear about AI, it’s 95% nonsense. Of course we can see some new cool toys, and we should be happy that we have new cool toys, but it’s not like something totally magical has happened in the last 2 years, and it’s not like something totally magical is going to happen in the next two years.

With all that in mind, you just got to take a break from the news, whenever you feel like it, and try to be open-minded about what the future will bring. A couple of decades from now is certainly going to be different from a couple of decades ago, and although that can be scary at times, remember that the same thing was true for our parents and their parents and their parents.

I think you’re just framing issues to match the claim you’re making. For example, an anti-bad-cop protest could be “protesting against cops violating civil rights” or just as well “protesting to bring justice to the victim’s family”. The former is a negative, the latter is a positive.

I’m not a professional code monkey although I’ve done a fair amount of coding, and every time I tried to do parsing myself, I later regretted it.

But telling people that they’re doing it wrong is rarely met with positivity. :-)

I think there’s an element of responsibility that some people feel when they respond. If you’re asking for a very niche solution that is likely to create other problems in the future, should anyone else look at your code or refactor it or rely on it, or should you forget how it works, perhaps people are going to be less inclined in helping you craft it.

If you still want to craft it, that’s okay, but you have to expect that some real percent of the answers are going to be those folk who know what the tried and true solution is, often because they’ve lived through the reality that you’re attempting to create and they’ve dealt with the aftermath of doing it special and different.

If you want to start on a philosophical question, try to define the word “exists”. Write down a bunch of definitions, whichever are your favorite, and then see if the expression “God exists.” has meaning.

Clearly the nomadic lifestyle does not work for everyone. Many people try it for a couple of months or a couple of years and then make a change. If you’re enjoying it, great, and if you enjoy it for years or decades to come, great, but don’t pretend that everyone does. And this is important because social workers cannot predict your future. They can only play the odds and make reasonable preparations for possible future badness.

Let me give you a related example that should shed light on their stubbornness…

If someone gets in an accident and hits their head, they might have a concussion. How can you tell? Basic first responder training says to ask several questions. What we don’t ask is, “Are you OK?” because the patient will say “yes” even when they aren’t OK. It’s answers to the other questions that give us enough information to get a sense of whether our help is needed.

It’s quite possible that some social workers are acting in a similar fashion to first responders here. They want the details because their checklist is longer than yours. (There are other reasons that social workers might be annoying, as others have explained, too.)

That doesn’t negate your frustration, but maybe it helps you understand one cause.

Can you explain what you felt was harsh?

If only people could have predicted this kind of thing a few decades ago… Oh wait, they did. But still it’s weird to frame it this way. We should have natural campuses because that’s better in general, not just because of the heat island effect.

Diversity, my friend. What will you do if the 401k doesn’t come through like you want? Bear in mind that the ultra rich and the big banks employ people who are really good at investing money. They have more experience and information than you. They’ll bail themselves, but not you, out in case of disaster.

“Show me the money” is not a good motto for long term savings. Inflation or poor investment can make that money disappear easily enough. Of course you don’t want to get scammed, so oversight is a good idea.