Face to face, this is definitely possible. I’ve convinced more than a dozen people that climate change is real, and humans are the primary cause of it in face to face conversation. Online, where tone is easily misinterpreted, everyone is a stranger, and people are more able to rapidly retreat into a bubble of others that agree with them, I think it does a lot less good - but every once in a while, something works a little bit for someone.

More importantly, if we decide that we should all exist in our isolated bubbles of (non)social acceptance, it leads to the rise of extremism in some of those groups, and even the most terrible ideas can be allowed to fester and grow. Pretty much regardless of who you are, or what you believe, you probably have an example or two of such beliefs.

Actually, debate between hostile strangers online serves an important role in churning up internet drama. This is vital to the continued survival of the popcorn industry.

The Affordable Care Act passed, and addressed some of the most glaring, campaigning worthy issues. It’s only been 14 years, and already support for the ACA is rising, and opposition is falling off.

Support for more fracking has risen slightly in the last 4 years, but it lags behind the growth in support for solar, wind, and even nuclear. I suspect (caveat emptor) that as renewables bring energy costs back into check, support for fracking will follow the drop in support of coal production. It should not be a surprise that any shelter is popular in a storm.

Both parties used to be strongly against illegal immigration, now one campaigns against it, but did most of the things they were allowed to do to encourage and allow it, including publicly declaring their support for illegal immigrants, and passing sanctuary city laws.

I don’t have a strong grounding in how much open support there is for genocide, but I think the American population is more aware of it happening than they were in the past. Hopefully that means we care more now.

It, uhh… It looks like your double peen is made of plastic. Are you sure this is something to brag about?

When I was 25, my girlfriend complained about buying the same bra, same size, same material, same URL, from the same company, on their website, 2 years apart. The first ones fit really well, the second ones didn’t fit at all.

Meanwhile, there’s a shoe that I buy a pair of every few years. They release a new “version” about once per year, but the fit has been consistent, so I’m over a decade, and 6 pairs, into my purchase of them, with no problems.

The 13th ended slavery. You’re probably thinking of the 12th which says that no person constitutionally ineligible to “be” president can be elected as vice president. Importantly, the 22nd only places limits on being “elected” as president, so it’s not (necessarily) creating a constitutional requirement to “be” president by some other means.

Like I said, it could be an interesting legal fight if it even came up.

You can only be elected as president twice. You can probably hack the system by getting multiple other presidents to select you as vice president, then resign. If you serve more than 2 years of the term they were elected to, that reduces the number of times you can be elected as president to one.

The 22nd amendment doesn’t say that someone that serves 3.99 years of another president’s term multiple times can’t still be elected, and it doesn’t say that someone not qualified to be elected as president can’t be elected as vice president, but the 12th amendment might. Either of those could be an interesting legal fight.

They just had sex, too.

Thanks!

Guys (et al), please don’t make fun of the dim fool’s name. It’s rude and frankly immature.

Edited: spelling

The belt and belt loops go all along the top row. If there’s only one row, the matrix can only wear a short-shorts version. There’s a crotch in each space between columns, and a leg on every column of length greater than 1.

Sparse matrices have their own special pants that are more efficient, of course.

George HW Bush was the last one to leave office while the economy was doing well. It was going fine at the end of George W Bush’s first term, then the 2007 housing crash brought it down. Trump’s first term ended with the covid lockdowns severely harming the state of things. So… 3 Republican presidencies ago, but that’s a lot of years.

Trump was pretty ineffective in his first term, largely because he did a terrible job of supporting people who really agreed with his agenda, and an even worse job of removing people from influential positions who didn’t.

He said during his campaign that he knew much better who to trust, but now he’s got Elon Musk and RFK Jr. prominently featured. I don’t think he has learned anything, and I think he will be just as ineffective this time.

It’s possible that some of the Republicans in Congress will support more of his agenda, but even there if they have to overcome the filibuster, I don’t think mass deportation, a federal abortion ban, or most of the rest of the potential worst of it is in the cards.

With 17, I understand that you’re referring to how 299,999 is also divisible by 17. What is the 51 reference, though? I know there’s 3,999,999,999,999 but that starts with a 3. Not the same at all.

Oof. The cheesies almost got me. 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟦🟦🟦🟪 🟦🟦🟦🟪 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟪🟪🟪🟪

You can just bitwise AND those with …000000001 (for however many bits are in your number). If the result is 0, then the number is even, and if it’s 1, then the number is odd. This works for negative numbers because it discards the negative signing bit.

Then you should return false, unless the remainder is also greater than or equal to the twenty second root of 4194304. Note, that I’ve only checked up to 4194304 to make sure this works, so if you need bigger numbers, you’ll have to validate on your own.

When I was in college, our sportsball team won a game against the other guy’s sportsball team by not many points. Many hundreds of students started a chant going out of the sportsball arena, and four freshmen decided to light a couch on fire, apparently thinking they’d just blend in. The police were there immediately, firefighters put out the couch in a few minutes, and they all got hit with fines.

In short, I think you’re exactly right, and most sportsball fans just want to be loud and drink.

The two numbers in the text aren’t equal. The first is 20 billion trillion trillion, and the second is 125 times larger.

Edit: I’m bad at counting zeros, too. The first number is correct (20 decillion), and the second is wrong (2.5 undecillion)

Any reasonably powerful god could make a non-Euclidean spacetime in which the points equidistant from a central point also form 4 straight line segments of equal length that meet at right angles.

I also think the classic rock so heavy it can’t be lifted fails, for the same reason that an omnipotent god could clearly commit suicide, if it wanted to (and once it did, it would no longer have the capability to perform other actions).

The omniscience thing is harder, because of things like incompleteness theorem, but I don’t think I can really describe what it means to know everything in the first place. “Able to provide a true, and comprehensive answer to any question for which a true, and comprehensive answer is possible” doesn’t seem to give any contradictions, but as you mention has the feel of dancing around all the hard issues.