The heat shield can double as protection from interstellar debris in slower than light voyages (if your world has no FTL). Karl Schroder's Permanence has interstellar ships called cyclers that have a design like this (for that purpose). The cyclers don't slow down and just cycle around on a preplanned route, coming by a given system on their route every few decades - centuries. They can eject cargo at a star system as they fly by and the locals can accelerate up to trade or what ever.

What fuels your ship? How long are the voyages? How do the crew live aboard?

I think it would depend on how much attention it gets. Given that both MAGA and Progressives want this out there (although I bet MAGA won't like or believe what they see if it DOES come out), it could be dangerous for ANYONE to vote against it, and interesting to see who does.

My guess is

• Centrist media tries to cover it as little as possible and everyone hopes the story goes away. (Hopefully Elon's antics and both progressive and red cap media make this difficult to the point of absurdity)
• Congress (Mike Johnson) tries to quietly shut it down in way that's not obvious why nothing ever happened and the doofuses on the right don't understand who's responsible (somehow blame Biden). We need to keep telling them "Your boy Mike kept the vote from happening. Why?"
• If Congress IS forced against the will of the establishment to vote on it, they'll try to make it as procedurally confusing as possible, or make noises about how they are going to vote on it, but not for a while and then they just never do.
• If it passes in spite of all that, Trump won't comply and no one will hold him accountable and MAGA probably eventually WILL move on to other conspiracy bullshit and this will get left in the dust.

It's infuriating that the ignorance and stupidity of a huge chunk of the country is what keeps enabling these bastards.

We tried to build systems that perform a kind of basic, rudimentary, extremely power intensive and inefficient mimicry of how (we think maybe) brain cells work.

Then that system lies to us, makes epic bumbling mistakes, expresses itself with extreme, overconfidence, and constantly creatively misinterprets simple instructions. It recognizes patterns that aren't there, and regurgitates garbage information that it picks up on the internet.

Hmmm... Actually, maybe we're doing a pretty good job of making systems that work similarly to the way brain cells work...

So this is... what I do for work, just now in my leisure time?

This is something I wrote on a recent post. I think it's something that we should help as many people as possible understand:

This really tracks for me. I grew up around wealthy liberals and am intimately familiar with how these motherfuckers think. I have been telling my friends for months that we cannot expect the Democratic establishment or our current batch of elected Democratic representatives to address the problem.

• People are like "Don't they understand that it's a war?"
• Most of these people think we're idiots for thinking of it as war.
• Their high spending donors think we're idiots for thinking of it as a war.
• They think Republicans are angry idiots who have to be negotiated with so we can "get on with business."
• They see Republican voters MAGAing and rioting on Jan 6th and they think "What a bunch of yahoos!" (my multimillionaire boomer dad's literal words).
• They see Leftist protests turning out en-masse and they think "What a bunch of yahoos!" (again, my multimillionaire boomer dad's literal words).

My father has literally said about the second Trump presidency.

• "This will all blow over."
• "You just watch, the system will slow all of this down."

See, it's not just our "elected dems in office," who don't seem to get it, it's the entire leftish / center leaning, privileged ass, rich ass, mostly white, mostly older demographic, all comfy with their owning of multiple homes and their inflated stock portfolios and their rubbing shoulders with billionaires. We complain about the "elected dems in office," because we see them out there being like this in public, in the news in front of everybody. But this whole demographic is like this and that's why we keep seeing it.

EDIT:

The only way we'll change this is to STOP ELECTING DEMS FROM THAT DEMOGRAPHIC. They're not "spineless cowards," they just DON'T ACTUALLY REPRESENT YOU. They represent other neolibral rich people (people just like them, in other words). Those people's highest values are

• Stability.
• Business Economics (the price of gas and eggs doesn't really effect them that much).
• Maintaining their comfy "compassionate upper class" culture.

They DO genuinely care about

• Philanthropy (usually of a sort of egocentric variety).
• Social safety nets (most of them genuinely value compassion especially when it doesn't really cost them anything).
• Sound fiscal policy.
• Science (they believe in climate change and worry about their children and grandchildren).
• They LOVE to reassure and prop themselves up by talking about all the good they're able to do because they're rich / influential.
• On that note, they tend to embrace a kind of leftist, New Agey take on Prosperity Gospel and see wealth as something that enables them to do good in the world and help people (See? Greed is GOOD!). Some of that has merit, but it is NOT nearly as true as they tell themselves and others it is.

Faced with chaos and instability they will

• Try to negotiate with the people causing it, to get things "back to normal."
• Compromise with those people to keep things as stable as possible Every. Fucking. Time.
• Run off to meditation retreats and vacation homes and time shares in Hawaii or ritzy parts of Mexico to "find their center."
• Abandon their higher values to circle the wagons around the first, basic three (Stability, Business, Culture).

Importantly,

• They DO NOT see you as being "like them," "their people," or "part of their culture." They're actually VERY aware that you are NOT part of their culture.
• They usually honestly think that that's because they made better choices than you. They ARE able to acknowledge that there are people less fortunate then them, and even that they may have an obligation to these people. But they don't think they OWE you anything.
• When I say culture, I'm not talking about your Italian heritage, your black southern cuisine or how your abuela only speaks Spanish. I'm talking about private school / charter jets / fundraiser dinners / owning a mint condition classic car / keeping your boat in the garage of the OTHER house you own on the same street as your primary home.
• They do not feel obligated to go out of their way to defend your culture. Although if your culture is artistic, entrepreneurial, agitates for social justice, or is tangential to their own religious beliefs (looking at you Buddhism), they might be willing to fund it.
• They DEFINITELY feel entitled to exploit or profit off your culture, if they see an opportunity to do so, and will pat themselves on the back for "the good they're doing in the world" and "how they were able to help people" the WHOLE WAY TO THE BANK.
• This doesn't mean they're bad people or lack compassion for you.

When we're asking our congressmonsters to fight, we're asking them to take up our values in ways that many of them (rightly or wrongly) see as abandoning their own core values. THAT'S why they're angry.

They're NOT cowards. They just don't actually value the same things you do and their core priorities aren't in the same place yours are. They never have been. And as long as we primarily elect Dems from this demographic, they NEVER will be.

I love the Lemmy UI.

But I'm a gen Xer.

There's some great analysis floating around of how different generations actually interpret UIs (and make decisions about how or whether to engage with them) very differently. So there is no "one size fits all" that will make everybody happy. Change the Lemmy UI to something like Photon and I'd be like... "this is dumb." Making a bunch of very different options is a lot of work. If you want to do it... no one is stopping you. The Lemmy project is opensource and you could go start contributing and making pull requests today. You could go run your own instance and make it look like whatever you want and get the average redditors to join that. I run my own instance. We have a whole two users. It works exactly the way I want it to and federates with exactly who I want it to.

Frankly, I'm not sure Lemmy needs to go out of it's way to appeal to the average redditor in order to have a thriving, healthy community. Sure, there are some things I miss about having a giant user base to engage with, but honestly, I'll trade them for the MUCH MUCH lower toxicity. I don't know that "growing Lemmy" should be our focus. It's not like we're getting paid.

The same FBI that keeps telling Congress end to end encryption needs to have legally mandated back doors in it?

I actually met this mother fucker in Mexico in 1999, giving a talk on habitat preservation at Lagoona San Ignacio to a bunch of C list celebrities who were there to support the Natural Resource Defense Council and it's efforts to stop Mitsubishi from building a salt extraction plant in the middle of a gray whale breeding sanctuary (super good cause).

I was there with a bunch of high school students who's rich white parents paid for them to go on an expensive ass field trip to watch whales fuck (and do eco protest activist tourism). Coincidentally, the NRDC was there too and they got really excited to invite a bunch of American highschool students to their media shindig.

RFK Jr. got SUPER drunk and gave a sloppy, rambling, barely coherent speech, thanking people for their generosity. The kids were like "WTF is up with this dude? We've never seen grownups act like this!"

We did get to hear some really cool marine biologists talk about gray whales. Then one of THEM (Roger Payne, I think) got really drunk too and told us "Whales are people damn it! But you can't publish that! You can't fucking publish that!"

An excellent example of spending your points all over the place and somehow ending up with an actually pretty broken build.

I spent 10 years LARPing with kids professionally. Age may be "irrelevant", but kids imaginations are special.

This meme reminds me of two very specific incidents.

1. We're running an adventure about zombies. A coworker has a group of six year olds. One of them is late getting picked up and we're all hanging out together sword fighting with this kid pretending to be zombies. When the kid's mom finally shows up, he runs up to my coworker, gives her a huge hug and says "I love zombies!"

2. I'm running a group of 8-10 year olds and they're traveling to a big "good aligned" city in a big "good aligned" kingdom. One of them randomly decides to bust into a farm house, tie up the family, load them into their own donky cart, drive them into the city, haul them out in the center of the town square and start shouting "Slaves! Slaves for sale! Get your slaves here!" At every step of the way, I keep asking the rest of the group if they're going to do anything about this and they don't care. So the city watch shows up, overwhelms the party, claps them in irons and they spend the night in jail. When they're dragged before the magistrate the next day, the rest of the party is indignant, protesting "Why are we in trouble?? We didn't do anything!" I took great relish in (playing as the magistrate) squinting at them, nodding my head and saying "That... is why you are in trouble!"

Man, Unions in America are anaemic. I REALLY wish our labor force would grow that kind of spine and stand up for each other that aggressively.

Yep.

I have an old Google account from like 2012 that was a spam trap account I made back when you could easily sign up anonymously for gmail over Tor. It will not let me log into it anymore unless I connect a phone number to it. It hems and haws about how this is "for your protection" but really it's pretty simple that your activity has no value to Google unless they can tie it to your identity and connect it to other activity and then bundle that and sell it to advertisers. (And fuck you Google, I'm not protecting that account from anyone except you... hackers are WELCOME to know I types a throwaway email into some online medical insurance shit...)

In fact, if you don't want companies to collect your data, you're more and more locked out of any app, service or platform that asks for a verified email. I've encountered things recently that won't accept protonmail emails (and invite you to use OAuth to sign in with Google, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, fuck that noise).

I actually imagine that OAuth locked to a major provider FOR EVERYTHING is the future those guys would all like to see.