I’d had it before and disliked it. Probably because it was dried out, crappy, US grocery store stuff that gad been on the shelf for who knows how long.

Tried it again because of TNG, except it was a good loose leaf, and man it was good. Had a box or bag around consistently for decades now.

Just received my third PM from this person. While s/he (because we don’t know who is actually doing it) is certainly now infamous for their well-known solicitations, it’d still be great to close the door on them.

I got it. I think it was 3 weeks. Unfortunately it was unpaid. I had to take on extra work before and after to make up for the loss in income. It was all we were allowed.

I would do it again. Those 3 weeks at home are irreplaceable. Should it be paid? Should it be longer? Abso-fucking-lutely. But paternity leave? Take it if you can get it.

Fusion power or cures for diseases.

Fusion power, should it work, would solve a lot of problems. Environmentally, in particular, but if we could get a decent distribution of reactors around the planet we’d alleviate food problems, water problems, and a whole bunch of suffering of one kind or another. Cheap power would help a lot.

Otherwise, anything to help cure diseases. Genetic, auto-immune, cancers, misfortune, whatever. Alleviate more suffering, let people live and work again.

Need a similar one where the democrats are negotiating with MAGA about the length of the rope, whether it’s silk rope, etc.

There’s this thing called “Alert Distance”, it’s the distance at which animals perceive and begin to react to a threat.

I’ll use it as an analogue for humans’ perceptions of threat.

Say a squirrel knows a cat is a threat, and may react to it when the cat is 15 feet away, whether that reaction is turning to face the threat, making a warning call, or running away.

Now put 50 cats hiding in the bushes and surrounding area around the squirrel. Can’t see ‘em, so it isn’t a problem, even though the squirrel knows cats are a bad thing. The alert distance hasn’t been triggered. The squirrels in the surrounding neighborhood are disappearing, eaten by cats, but our squirrel isn’t thinking too hard about this. More acorns for me!

Put a car in the garage and you can smell the exhaust. Your eyes probably water from the fumes. You know this is potentially lethal, so you do something about it. Shut off the car, leave the garage, open the garage door, whatever. Your alert distance has been triggered. The threat is right in front of you.

Now, as you say, drive that car outside with millions of other vehicles and systems consuming fossil fuels. No real smell or issues for most of us. The alert is only being triggered by what we read (if we bother to read anything that accurately portrays the threat) and maybe a rare bad storm or cluster of hot days that won’t negatively affect the vast majority of people. Negatively = inconvenience.

I don’t know if squirrels lie to themselves about how close a cat threat might be, but humans excel at lying to each other and to themselves for a crapload of reasons. So the fact is that the threat is invisible to many, ignored by most, and actively and willfully obfuscated by a shitload more. So the figurative alert distance doesn’t even exist at all for the vast majority of humans. It’s not going to kill you now, next week, or even next year.

Even when the world has crumbled, plenty will still lie about what’s to blame.

Are they both objectively terrible?

I mean, trump seems obvious. Unstable wannabe tyrant/dictator from a party of evangelical theocrats, criminal, fraudster, blatant liar, thief, rapist, sycophant of dictators, insurrectionist, wife beater…and we haven’t even dug in to the party that supports this behavior along with their LGBTQ hate, restricting womens’ rights, voter fraud, election fraud, gun rights > your life, handing everything to the billionaires, environmental destruction of most every kind, and of course their NAZI underpinnings.

Joe is a career politician with all the baggage that goes with that, but he’s not actively and willfully sabotaging the country.