There’s a reason so many poker players wear sunglasses.

Anyway, try to preempt your emotional reaction. There’s always many different flavors of reactions we can have to something really negative, which normally depends heavily on mood. By default, this all just runs unconsciously, but it doesn’t have to. Of the many potential options, like anger, sadness, condescending disdain, arrogant bemusement or surprise, you can try to consciously pick one and channel your feelings towards it instead of just letting your feelings run wild.

Or you can just practice a proper poker face, but that can be really hard. Doable though, just takes a lot of practice. Playing poker would be an effective way to get that practice.

Is there thinking among the locals that a big war might break out? Or do more people think it will just be small border skirmishes?

You know getting a progressive President wouldn’t have gotten us any closer to abortion rights? Unlike Trump, we actually follow our separation of powers principles, which means the Pres has limited authority. You expect us to just ignore court orders and the legislature like Trump does or something?

A law enshrining abortion rights would require a filibuster-proof Senate majority and control of the House.

I’m all for being critical of the DNC, but we should be clear-eyed on how governing actually works. Also, pretty hard to say Harris was less progressive than Obama, her Senate voting record was pretty damn progressive.

Agreed. I understand people’s desire to look at the fact that both women lost, but we should also remember the fact that they both failed to unify their own coalition. This is a pretty big deal, if you can’t even unify your own coalition, your prospects are pretty damn challenging.

That charisma element is very valuable for that, as is tossing your own faction members enough policy bones to satisfy them even if you’re not fully pleasing them. Clinton and Harris both failed to do this, and took their coalitions a little bit too much for granted. Harris came close with the Walz pick, but Gaza weighed very heavily on her with progressives. She needed to do more to distance herself from Biden to thoroughly win them over.

Ultimately, I think our problem stemmed from them not understanding the appeal of the far right. This caused them to underestimate the strength of their opponent and fail to run as dynamically and aggressively as necessary. They played it too safe. With Harris in particular, I wanted to see the prosecutor prosecute the case against Trump, with the voters as the jury. Instead her stump speeches and interviews remained frustratingly soft. Hilary did this too.

We the people can look at Trump as some big joke, and make fun of him and his supporters as much as we want. But the opposition candidate has to take him deathly seriously, and give him the gravity he is due as a potentially fascist leader of the worlds most powerful military. That is no laughing matter.

This sort of speech by AOC is what we needed more of, and even it is a little bit soft: https://youtu.be/OO7SE4Zpd9s

Bernie could have done it too, I think. He did come fairly close in the primary, even though he was fighting upstream against lingering negative sentiment about “socialists” in middle America. I think the country has changed enough in the past 10 years, partly due to his trailblazing, that that’s no longer as much as an albatross as it once was though.

Certainly. But we still cannot say that should mean every beneficial mutation for their lives was likely to be adopted. Like I said earlier, the majority of possibly good things are left on the table, even when drawbacks are not considered.

Including drawbacks muddies it up even further, we can look at how cardiovascular shock occurs and how the particular traits that create it were a bit of a double edged sword.

But what is the likelihood of this autonomous stress relieving function arising, how many mutations would be required to implement such a thing? Would it have any significant drawbacks or side effects in other aspects of our biology?

You can’t look only at the propagation side of things.

Another thing, stress isn’t event based per se. It’s more of a floating value that always exists to a certain degree and provides both positive and negative effects at different levels and in different situations. The negative health impacts come in when it remains high for a long period of time. So what we’d really want to look at is something like the frequency of headpats given to your dog or something, and the effects of this compared to other potential stress relieving activities like meditation.

Lastly, I would check your data on pet availability, I think it’d be far, far higher than 10%.

Negative health outcomes are an evolutionary pressure.

Also, evolution does not work from a plan, we do not spontaneously generate all the things that would benefit us over a long enough timeframe. Instead, random things happen and certain ones propagate while others don’t. Because it is not a conscious force operating from any sort of plan, and instead works via random mutation and propagation of beneficial traits, it leaves a whole bunch of potentially beneficial things unadopted.

Otherwise all life would just move towards some sort of optimal form, maybe crabs, instead of evolving greater and greater diversity that can better handle changing environments.

One I can think of would be stress relief. Stress contributes to a lot of negative health outcomes, and cuddling with a pet can help mitigate some of that stress. Wouldn’t surprise me if amount of stress also has a more general effect on overall decisionmaking.

Meh. Let me just ask my buddy Pete what’s going on, he’ll have all the details.

Dual citizenship is probably a bit premature, I doubt you need to concern yourself with that just yet. I would probably have a few places picked out as likely options for a work visa though, after doing some basic research into pay grade vs cost of living and how much you like/would fit in with the local culture.

You probably already have a vague idea of which countries you might enjoy living it.

So let me get this straight, you think some hitman posed, as a school bus driver of all things, to assassinate her, and that failing, she’s so important that someone else gets sent in to get her?

Occam’s Razor is dead.

Not too long after the automobile started gaining popularity, they started releasing a sort of driving guide, basically cool road trip ideas to get people using their cars more. Part of this guide was rating restaurants. After a while the guide part fell off, but the restaurant ratings stuck around.

Until today when nobody remembers the guide but the restaurant ratings are the most prestigious awards in the entire industry.

tbf, “manipulating time and space” is a pretty low bar to clear. You’re manipulating time and space sitting in your chair, given that under general relativit,y spacetime warps around any mass present.

Those are clearly whiskers. gtfo.

Can a solar sail get something from Earth to Mercury?

The issue is less that it’s the hardest to land on and more that it’s the hardest to get to, to arrive at and orbit. It takes less fuel to get to Pluto than it does Mercury.

It’s expensive and the conditions are harsh.

The daytime side gets hot enough that a rover would be difficult to operate for long. You’d also be getting big swings between daytime hot and nighttime cold, so thermal expansion would probably be annoying.

Then it’s unusually expensive because orbital mechanics make it very difficult to approach the sun. We’re currently all flying sideways with respect to the sun, so if you launch something, it just wants to continue that orbit. In order to get closer, you’d need to shed most of that momentum, which takes a whole bunch of energy since inertia in the vacuum of space just means everything keeps going forever.

You know, this post made me realize something. Some people are viewing it in terms of “rank”, instead of an arbitrary scientific classification designed to efficiently communicate ideas in a clear and concise way.

It’s like … mythology or something, and the planet(oid) being anthropomorphized.

Do people also view kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species as “ranks” of some sort, with some intrinsically greater value being given to some over others?