Perhaps we just need to generate a little excitement.

Gladiators worked nicely for the Romans, maybe we could generate similar hype with a reality show to choose the governor of each new province. I think “Love Island, Argentinian Governor Edition” would be a real hit.

Hard to argue we don’t have the appetite after spending our first 150 years conquering territory roughly double the size of the Roman Empire at its peak

Can you imagine the Italians running everything? Sure there’d be plenty of good pasta and wine worldwide but I doubt we’d stay productive with three-hour wine lubricated lunch breaks every day

I say the USA needs to have a proper go at an empire. People could serve in the legion (navy) for citizenship and everything

I live in an opulent old Victorian with all the associated trappings you’d expect from the era

It’s glorious

The only threshold that will automatically get you a reckless driving violation in CA is over 100 mph

Texas has no defined speed threshold

Alabama, where I lived previously on the east coast, has no defined threshold

The guideline for officers in CO is to consider a reckless driving ticket at 26 over the limit and above

I could keep searching individual states but I guess my point is there are many states where 20 over is pretty much a common thing among drivers and not typically punishable with a reckless driving charge. I haven’t spent much time in the northeast, perhaps things are different there.

Lol no, you have to be going something like double the speed limit most places to get arrested

You might get a ticket, but almost any judge will throw the ticket out if they write you up for going 5-10 over. Some places will write the ticket anyways in the hopes of making some extra revenue, but generally speaking it’s not a ticket that is worth writing because it’s so easy to get tossed out.

What part of the country are you from? IME that’s far from universal. I have gotten pulled for 20+ over in multiple states and it’s often just a warning, if I do get ticketed it’s just a ticket and that’s the end of it:

When I had first gotten my license in CA I got pulled over while doing 105-110 in a 65 mph zone. The cop wrote it up for 99 mph, which was a simple speeding ticket without the option for traffic school. I went to court and the judge knocked it down to a <$200 ticket with traffic school so I didn’t get any points on my record.

85 mph in a 65 is normal in a ton of states, they’d be they’d be writing up people for reckless driving in every other traffic stop if 20 over were the threshold.

But bro

You could get yourself a yeast infection with 3000 year old yeast

They collect a tithe of 10% of members’ income from the entire congregation. Most people accumulate less than 10% of their income as net worth annually

So yes, quite possibly they do.

I work in the industry and know people who work dream chaser.

I’d honestly rather take my chances with the Boeing capsule than sign up for a ride on Dream Chaser.

That’s the joke

We don’t need to understand cognition, nor for it to work the same as machine learning models, to say it’s essentially a statistical model

It’s enough to say that cognition is a black box process that takes sensory inputs to grow and learn, producing outputs like muscle commands.

This, and cultural diffusion is a normal part of human society. It has been for countless thousands of years.

I understand why cultural appropriation can be problematic but the fact remains that the usual mode of cultural diffusion has been, “that’s really cool. I wanna have that too”

It’s not a zero sum game because there isn’t some finite limit. By wearing a kimono or whatever you aren’t taking someone else’s right to wear one away from them.

N1 had 30 engines on the first stage

It was partially staged. The main benefit of staging is dropping dry mass during the burn, and the Atlas I dropped engines

Full power 45-70 is extremely punishing to shoot out of a lever action rifle much less a derringer

Ehh if you are on a reputable tracker that has scene releases it’s generally downloading a torrent, copying a crack into the game directory or running some crack software, and play. It’s not in the least bit difficult.

Realistically most people don’t care about things like automatic updates enough to justify spending money on it.

Many games are trivially easy to pirate and this has been the case for decades. It’s literally as easy as downloading it from Place B.

People still buy the games.

The Panama Canal, obviously

I don’t think that’s the case at all. Not everything has been successful, and in many cases efforts got watered down so they could pass congress. However, Obama and Biden have pushed for some pretty serious left wing talking points. Some examples off the top of my head:

-Medical reform

-Student loan forgiveness

-Renewable energy initiatives

-Marijuana rescheduling

-Repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in the military

-Immigration clemency with DACA

Compare that with Bill Clinton, whose strategy explicitly was to place himself midway between liberals and conservatives