Nah, “conditional approval” is written into the regulation. You might know this wording better as “pay us a large sum and we’ll give you approval.”

The last also happens in the absence of religious motivation quite a bit.

Actually, Texas slapped barbed wire on the underside of these when they put them up. I feel like the feds might do the same.

Money does buy access to a lot better treatments, though.

Yeah, not every NPC is like this, but in a city, there should be a notable amount of people with power like this. Small towns even probably still have one or two people with Actual Player Class Levels, doubly so if their village is under constant threat or is otherwise Interesting.

Yeah, this feels more like “people haven’t experienced being in a walkable community with good transit”. My buddy is having to move back to the States after a year in Germany, and he’s so upset that he and his wife are gonna have to get a car again and not just walk/bike everywhere.

Heinlein was…rather directionless on his politics. I think it was Clarke that once remarked that Heinlein’s politics depended on who he was sleeping with - which is why you get weird whiplash from the anti-governance free-love (and incest and racism) in Methuselah’s Children and Farnham’s Freehold to a full throated defense of utopian fascism in Starship Troopers.

No no, she’s busy making sure that the Air Force Academy is like, super Christian-fascist.

Damn. Their headquarters is literally less than twenty minutes from me. Always thought they were shady fucks despite being “Best Place To Work in Cincinnati” year after year - you hear tons of horror stories out of TQL if you live here.

Hegseth sent a couple thousand Marines to the Med, and he apparently thinks a ground invasion is at least ONE plan on the table. I do truly think Hegseth thinks that it’s just like Iraq in a video game, where it’s all flat, featureless desert.

Or, more likely, Hegseth doesn’t care about the lives lost, and thinks that we can just throw bodies and missiles at Iran to cow then into submission. That seems in line with his stupid “warrior ethos” shit.

Engineering too. A huge chunk of my company’s design engineering staff are H-1B because you can get away with paying a lot less.

I however, give you Genesis 1:28: ‘And God blessed them, and God said unto them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”’

Combine this with the Revelation, wherein Jesus shall return and build the perfect Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, and you can see where a lot of more apocalyptic, “what does it matter” Christianity comes from really easily.

Nah, that’s a little too savvy for Trump directly. We can infer, from stories given to us, that he literally just sold secrets over the dinner table at Mar-A-Lago in his first term.

This is my thought. The admin (not Trump because I don’t think he can plan more than five minutes ahead right now) is either going to launch a false-flag, or deploy a nuke. Maybe both, so we can say “look, we SAID Iran had nukes!”

The FBI director is a podcaster, the HHS secretary is…whatever RFK Jr did before (the word “failson” comes to mind).

Yeah, their sales team is incredibly fucked over from their only significant revenue being various AI farms.

Not long. We’re already burning $1-2B per day on Iran, most of that being highly expensive and hard to replace munitions and fuel. Eventually the people we can borrow money from will stop lending (we’re already borrowing billions a month to keep things afloat as is).

Oh that’s easy. Turns out everyone on the board is now a landlord for like 100 properties each, they’re all simply ADMINISTERED through the corporation, for which each board member pays a modest fee.

Behind the Bastards also did a great series on it

We have nukes. Trump is desperate for ANYTHING to make his mark. Being the first president since Truman to deploy one would be something I could see him doing.