In my headcanon, the Borg eventually reach a truce with the Federation, and over time eventually become full-fledged members of the Federation. That’s CRAZY right?..Is it? I mean, the Federation warred with the Klingons and Romulans, and look how those relationships changed over time.

How about the Borg’s willingness to join? What we’ve been seeing over the years is that the Borg adapt. Their willingness to adapt had been established from their very introduction as a faceless hive-mind. Over the course of the franchise, they’ve experimented with individuality with Locutus, Borg Queens, becoming so infatuated with individuality that they even dispatched 7 of 9 to live amongst Starfleet to investigate directly, and then instead of efficiently assimilating her to gain her knowledge, they choose not to re-assimilate her so that they could ask her about that experience and avoid corrupting that knowledge via assimilation. Why is the Borg so interested? The Borg found that Federation individuality had repeatedly repelled Borg invasions when Borg calculations indicated that they should have won, and even after re-adjusting for past failures, the Borg still found themselves stymied in encounters with Starfleet. The Borg were even saved from total extinction by the ingenuity of individual creativity and a temporary alliance with a Starfleet ship. That is a huge motivator for the Borg to re-assess their approach and look for a new way to adapt to prevent their vulnerability to a similar event in the future.

Would the Federation be open to it? Like I said, they’ve allied with past enemies before. Ex-Borg members of Voyager served with distinction. Borg tech has proven invaluable to Voyager’s return. Most importantly, Borg Drones are not undead zombies! Assimilation is a reversible condition, and that means that instead of hating the Borg for killing their loved ones, the Borg ARE their loved ones. Moreover, Borg assimilation is a weapon of mass diplomacy. Chakotay found that the hive-mind allowed warring alpha-quadrant races to all live in harmony in the Delta Quadrant, and losing access to the hive-mind allowed their old destructive conflicts to creep back in, and ultimately they reinstated a local hive-mind to regain peace. Chakotay joined that hivemind and came away from it with unparalleled understanding and empathy for the other members of the collective, and an overall positive experience, and he disconnected with immediate recovery and no ill-effects!

That is a game-changer, it allows the Starfleet to show up on the door of a new alien race, and those aliens would naturally be cautious, suspicious, mistrustful of the Federation’s intentions. First contact is extremely dangerous. An alliance with the Borg could allow Starfleet to establish first contact by saying, “We come in peace”, assimilating the alien envoy, and then the alien representatives would know that Starfleet truly and honestly means to “come in peace”, casting aside all suspicion of ulterior motives. Starfleet then disconnects the alien envoy from the local hivemind, and then those envoys can go home and sing Starfleet’s virtues to the rest of their race.

I tried it once or twice and it worked well. It’s too stupid now to be worth the attempt. The amount of time spent fixing its mistakes has resulted in net zero time savings.

I hope one day my life will settle down enough that I can care for a dog properly.

Thanks, this was really interesting!

I’d say the first option is to simply talk to the mother and offer your help and paint it as a means of helping her out. Keeping the focus on the benefit to the mother and the benefit to the kid as secondary to keep her focused on how it would help her. Sympathize with her situation, she’ll be more amenable and that’s definitely the easiest way to get a constructive dialog going.

If that fails, involving CPS is still available as a fallback option but.0

I would like to learn more about what the U.S does to compete in the propaganda space. I worry about the fundamentally reduced agility in responding to competing powers that are much more centralized.

As far as I can tell, private industry leads American interest and since the private ownership is still spread amongst these individuals owners, there doesn’t seem to be a coordinated drive to spread propaganda without a more direct linkage to profit. However in other countries with more centralized power the national power can dictate the messaging and then private companies follow suit, which allows for a much more coordinated effort.

Voyager is scratching that itch for me. Its pretty apollo-like, which is close enough to RIF for me.

That’s pretty dubious, otherwise why would I get all these replies from 3-7 years ago? Not new replies on dead threads, but the replies were posted that long ago, and I’m being notified about them now as “new” comments. Seems a lot like deleted posts coming back.

Hmm, may also possible that vendor/carrier versions of the app carry more ads. This would nevertheless still be an android problem because I don’t think Apple allows other companies to do that with their apps.

It looks bad, but try replicating it.

When I search two dots, I find exactly the matching app, with screenshot previews and details about it. I get only 1/4 of the screen as ad suggestions. The rest of the screen is related suggestions (non-ad suggestions). So about 3/4 is non-ads for me vs. 1/8th from the OP screenshot.

If I search something more generic like “card battle games”, I get a listing of about 7 games, with tags, and zero ads.

I think what’s shown in the OP is what remains after the user has already read the details and approved installing the app. Considering that this is the end of the user story, what else should be on that page?

Or maybe he’s got a different version of play store than me from A/B testing? Anyway, try it out yourself. I don’t have a problem with too many ads on playstore, my main issue is more that the good apps go to apple store first and only sometimes port to android because apple users are more lucrative.

Yeah, the simplistic “Just be yourself” advice doesn’t take into account the “If you don’t love me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best” type of attitude.

It also bypasses the fact that “yourself” is such a fuzzy concept anyway. So because I’m bad at public speaking, that shouldn’t mean I should “be myself” and avoid it. I should merely be aware of my current limitations. That was an accurate way to describe myself in the past, but instead of accepting it, I worked on it, forced myself into a job that requires it, and now I’m pretty good at it.

I think almost everyone can look back 10 years ago and think of some way they ended up changing. So with that being the case, who knows who we’ll be 10 years into the future? No need to anchor too hard on who we think we are right now, it’s valuable to also give consideration to the kind of person we want to be in the future and take action towards becoming that person.

They are, that’s why the majority of them are in favor of it. However the individual official might get more Russian money than corporate sponsorship and flip their vote to go against the larger group. Also, kompromat can be even more impactful than bribery.

Yes, just a lot less because theres no app for it, so I only check it from a desktop PC instead of constantly the way I have in the past.

Maybe it’s just me but the volume of interesting posts has fallen off a cliff after July 1st. The front page has much less activity and noticably more of it is reposts (which were there before, just a much higher ratio now).

The niche subreddits were always the key draw though, those still only exist on Reddit and nowhere else on the internet.

I heard somewhere that people on average will make 3 career changes during their lifetime. Which is not a hard fast rule of course but the point is to expect that your goals may change over time as you yourself will also likely change over time.

So in the meantime, I suggest pursuing stable work that gives you a comfortable standard living and maximizing the use of your free time to pursue enrichment in your life and not worrying too hard about trying to get satisfaction from your work.

Yeah, it’s very relaxing stress release. I spend a lot of my day looking forward to my lifting between 10-11pm and thinking about what accessory work I’ll be able to get to do after my main lifts.

You can listen to podcasts, nobody is coming to ask you to do something and demand your attention, there’s no other chores to do during that hour.

It’s addicting too, feeds the same itch from video games leveling up, grinding in Diablo for that piece of loot that raises one stat by like 2% you get hungry for those little boosts and they stack up over time and you keep trying to optimize your loadout so you can squeeze out a little more performance from the build, same thing with lifting and trying to keep pushing to the next increase.

There should be no illusions about resisting an attack. That’s not really possible in the modern transparent battlefield. All fixed defenses are struck in the opening salvo, AA defenses, radar networks, airfields. China would take immediate air superiority. Amphibious assaults are ridiculously dangerous, nigh impossible, but every shot fired in defense receives immediate retaliation from the air. This is different from the war in Ukraine where there’s contested airspace instead of one-sided superiority. Mines will slow the landing but without the ability to resist it, its just a matter of time. Deterrence needs to be economic and political, a military deterrent is not going to work on the doorstep of a world power with anything short of nuclear armament.

Some women’s libido goes down from the stress of seeing a lot of chores needing to be taken care of. Doing those chores reduced the stress. Going further and doing what is normally their share of housework can be an act of affection.

It’s also noted in a study of women asked to rate a number of pictures of men on various factors including attractiveness and reliability. When they are also asked for dating preferences, as the age range went up, the prioritization on reliability ratings also went up. Doing chores is reliable AF.

More to the point, she’s already told you she likes it. Just believe her.

A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would look nothing like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China could attack Taiwan with fires from the mainland, there isn’t a deep depth of terrain within which to hide. It would be more about resisting an occupying force than trying to meet them on the battlefield.

The deterrence here isn’t in stopping an invasion, but from making the fallout so costly that it wouldn’t be worth it. Just rigging the TSMC plants with explosives and blowing them up when an invasion starts would accomplish deterrence more effectively than having soldiers shoot at each other. The unified economic sanctions of Russia after the invasion of Ukraine has been extremely costly and acts as a major message of deterrence against China trying to take Taiwan and risking reduction to the foreign trade that’s so vital to their stability (which is why they’re to develop their domestic market to reduce economic dependence).

Taiwan should stay independent, but it doesn’t make sense to have a lot of people bleed for it.

For daily upkeep it’s best to clean as you go. Little tasks embedded in your other tasks. Like if I need to change my shirt, grab the laundry on the way and put it away before putting on that shirt. It saves 1 trip of walking along the way. Same principle as cooking, you clean as you go. Like you slice meats and start the browning…so turn around and clean the cutting board while you wait for it to brown.

For monthly upkeep we hire cleaners to go through the whole place for 200+25% tip. It definitely costs money, but saves on our time and sanity to not have to remember to do all these little cleaning tasks all over the house that just keep piling up until you “find” time to do it.

I have been playing this game for years. A20 on all characters. Bought it on 3 different platforms. I am still playing it daily, and I’m not sick of it.