StarDestroyer.Net BBS

every month for [i[40 months[/i] This is going to be a major problem for any UBI experiment unless you can find someone to credibly commit to paying the subjects for the rest of their lives (or you can credibly lie to them, if you don't care about ethics). How people act given a temporary income bo...

I enjoyed it, though not as much as the first one. It wasn't good, but it was mostly what I wanted. I agree that the soundtrack was unbelievably worse (like, I'm legitimately confused as to how they fucked that one up; they could've just recycled the soundtrack from the first and been fine). They al...

The man who saw Hobo With a Shotgun and unironically thought it was a good idea.

They're pretty good overall, though I've found the quality fairly variable. I found 3PD and 4RC to be better than and 2SR RoA, which were turn was better than L1S (which I was underwhelmed with at the time and liked less the more I though about it). Also: I feel obliged to slightly contradict you, i...

We don't know. For all we know, the public belief is that Palpatine and Darth Vader were killed when Rebel fighters destroyed the Death Star II.

edit: so far as I've read, but my reading of the new material is less than comprehensive.

There's a fundamental difference between the post-ROTJ Legends and the sequel trilogy in the nature of the stories we get. In Legends, the New Republic is declared and the dynamic shifts from rebels trying to overthrow a corrupt order to people trying to build and maintain a better status quo agains...

Jedi education presumably also covers the assorted practical skills required for their function as diplomat/detective/commando/super cop. A lot of the Jedi we see exhibit multi-disciplinary competence (if not always mastery).

Well, she surpasses every feat of force power we've seen Yoda use, certainly. Yoda can apparently control the weather well enough to cause a precision lightning strike. While dead. Beyond that, Yoda only overtly uses the Force once in the OT, specifically to make a point to Luke. In the PT, we see ...

Seriously, does Scalia's quote not explicitly undermine this basic principle of our form of government? No? The Supreme Court has declined to rule on cases because the subject was deemed a 'political question'. In the past, gerrymandering has been held to be one of these things because no one had p...

you cannot cut anything with a triangular blade, not even bare skin. Nitpick: practicably true of a hollow-ground smallsword blade like needle, but there are plenty of examples of triangular cross-sectioned cutting swords (e.g. backswords, sabers, messers). I thought the point of sparring was to pr...

The Secretary of Defense has to confirm the launch order, but legally cannot veto it. Um-if he has to confirm, and can choose NOT to do so, isn't that kind of the same thing as a veto? It could fall under the category of 'ministerial duty', which is to say a duty of the office which he has no discr...

The Democrats don't have core values. It's party welded together from different factions who were at some point in time convinced their interests were pointed in roughly the same direction and/or were promised support in exchange for support. You could make the same accusations of the Republican pa...

The Democrats don't have core values. It's party welded together from different factions who were at some point in time convinced their interests were pointed in roughly the same direction and/or were promised support in exchange for support.

An ax sounds promising. That's why I was thinking of the machete-like messer too. Can one carry a spear and an axe at the same time? Cause I was thinking of the fallback when the spear/halberd can't be used anymore... Can a person carry an ax as the primary weapon AND a messer as a fallback? There ...

Uglies never make sense, really. Anything as small, tightly integrated, and high performance as a fighter needs all its parts to work together; you'll never get performance out of a random combination of parts that comes anywhere the performance you'd get out of the same parts if they were built to...

So all I have to do to get away with a crime is refuse to cooperate with the police? As long as I'm not the one initiating the use of violence, it sounds like the drones will intervene on my behalf.

I think you can make a strong case for Ravnica being the weirdest. Many of these cultures closely resemble bits of Earth's past, e.g. Eberron's resemblance to the early 20th century as filtered through a fantasy lens. Ravnica, on the other hand, gets pretty odd with their legal system, aggressive re...

The house degenerated long ago. I think Hermione (or whoever) pointed out in the first movie that essentially every shit wizard ever pretty much came out of Slytherin.

Even if most evil wizards come from Slytherin, most Slytherin alumni are not evil.

Has anyone ever seen Alejandro Jodorowsky and Shroom in the same place? I have a theory I need to check.

Kingmaker, it is stupidly easy to design things so this doesn't happen. You're right. A negative income tax is a vastly superior scheme to a flat income guarantee. But the proposal Alyrium Denryle made in response to my original post was a flat income guarantee, where this exact issue is a glaring ...

Which is why GBI would be better. We'll go household rather than individual. I have a table here for income distribution in 5k incriments with a mean within that range along with percentages [snipped numbers] This seems like it would have some weird incentives. You haven't got an actual welfare cli...

At present, any livable UBI would also be ruinously expensive. At 10k USD/year, you're looking at 2.5 - 3.5 trillion dollars depending on who qualifies, i.e. most of the federal budget in the US, and $10k is not exactly the high life. You can scrap existing welfare programs, of course, but UBI is no...

Your archetypal subterranean city in fantasy is built by dwarves - who (usually) live hundreds of years, are extraordinarily patient, have more sophisticated science and technology than everyone else (often thanks to a helping hand from the local god of engineering), and (most importantly) seem to h...

Rogue One is the antithesis of grimdark. A grimdark movie would leave us questioning if the sacrifice mattered and make it ambiguous whether or not the Rebels were really any better than the Empire. Instead, we know that it mattered (and the movie's not exactly subtle on the hope theme, anyway) and ...

Then that underlying reason could be viewed as flawed. Disenfranchising larger state voters so that the voters in smaller states get massively more power and influence than they should via the Senate could be viewed as wrong, plain and simple. Let the states do what they want at their level, but wh...