A 2:1 ratio on Social Security age limits wouldn’t affect a lot of his base, so I can see Trump pushing it.

I expect that the EU is going to have to claim defence competencies to continue the Union’s defense. There are way too many small countries in NATO that can’t contribute meaningfully to a military beyond some basic battalions and the EU needs something more robust than France and Poland.

It is worse.

Trump started with either incompetent yes men who didn’t know how to govern or competent yes men who tried controlling the damage that the President caused.

You now have a group of coordinated people who see Trump as willing to agree with whatever as long as he looks good enough.

And this is a policy the actors’ union went on strike for.

A raw number across the whole federation would be useless. Different instances have their own cultures, making a unified number worthless. People could also goose their numbers by creating an instance that gives their account unlimited karma.

Instance karma could be useful, but it is a design decision not to show it. I suspect that will continue until there is a need to use karma for moderation, but I suspect that defederation would be the lower lying fruit for now.

Karma has become a part of a measure to determine if an account is a human non-troll.

The first step in ban evasion is to create a new account and continue doing what you’ve done before. By requiring an account to be a certain age along with a certain amount of karma, it makes sure the account is less likely to be a ban evader.

This movie has Tom Hanks. But there is now a trained AI model that can make a very old Tom Hanks look younger. That same model could probably make someone who looks and sounds similar to Tom Hanks look and sound exactly like Tom Hanks.

I thought they went on strike to make sure the next Tom Hanks movie actually has Tom Hanks.

I don’t think the form of Lemmy as a federated service will be able to scale.

What I expect is that, if Lemmy is successful, it will be as a platform for various Reddit alternatives, kind of like how Truth Social is Mastodon.

It is hard to run an Internet site when the government turns off your Internet.

Oh look, spam.

For height and weight, there are links to the climate that the people live in. Typically, hotter climates favor skinny people while colder climates favor more husky people. As for height, my understand is that a dry heat favors taller people as they can take advantage of sweating more than a wet heat.

I’m a structural engineer with a Masters degree. The degree has been useful to me on the job as the classes apply to what I’m working on.

There is a major debate in the civil engineering community as to whether a Bachelors degree is enough, with the American professional organization, ASCE, advocating for a Master’s equivalent for licensure. The argument against is that there aren’t enough licensed engineers anyway and requiring a Masters degree would reduce the number of engineers. There are also some disciplines in civil engineering that are really simple and don’t need the additional education.

Having worked with structural PhD’s, the additional education isn’t worth it. Most of the education in a doctorate is on higher level models while most codes don’t need anything that advanced.

A state school is usually good enough school to go to.

In a push to deal with micro plastics, bacteria are developed to be able to break down plastic. Eventually, it gets into the plastic installed for a purpose and starts breaking that down.

I would like the song Firebirds by Clutch adapted as a Grind house movie. An alien comes to Earth seeking arms to defend her people and teams up with a guy living out of his car.

Dressing up in costumes. Eating candy. Being spooky in general.

I would like to see Gantz adopted as an American TV series.

I think it would be interesting what it would say about MAGA.

I don’t see the application of an O’Neil Cylinder within the Earth and Mars gravity wells given how expensive they would be to build next to better places to grow crops.

If one does get built, I would expect it in orbit around Jupiter or Saturn to support activity there.

If the colonization strategy is the Moon then Mars, I expect humanity would have the technology needed to colonize Mars easily while terraforming occurs.

The problem with an O’Neil Cylinder is bringing up enough processed material to build one.

It depends.

For a lot of adults, I would agree that they are a bright point in their lives. But it isn’t universal.