Well we probably wouldn't want to drag the whole thing back; we'd probably want to create some kind of robotic/remote-control refinery so that we could smelt the ore and refine it, then send the refined metal back to Earth. That would reduce the mass a lot.
Rocks being returned to earth are most certainly going to be guided in some manner. But as for fuel, the Apollo capsule did not have a lot of fuel on board. Somehow they managed to get back to Earth intact.
Yes, you can use a mass driver. But that requires some kind of energy source too; mass doesn't get thrown off an asteroid for free. But do you even need to bother? This isn't human cargo, so time isn't quite so important. You can probably just use an ion engine to push the thing into a trajectory that it'll fall to the Earth with aerobraking. Though more likely, it'd probably make more sense to try to refine the ores in space first, so we're not just dropping giant asteroids on Earth; smaller (and more concentrated) cargos with some type of cheaply-built-in-space reentry vehicle (maybe just an ablative shield on one side and a parachute for the final descent) might make more sense.
You have no idea what you're talking about. The Apollo missions did not need "an immense amount of fuel" to return astronauts to the Earth. That's just stupid.
Have you entirely forgotten that the Earth has an atmosphere?
Like where, besides Seattle and truly rural places like remote parts of Montana?
I live in a fairly rural county in Virginia and I have high-speed cable internet. It works great. (I think it's 20MB/s; I'm not sure, it's not their fastest grade available here, but one tier down I think, more than fast enough for Netflix, probably for 2 or 3 Netflix streams really.)
Extremely rural places are usually stuck on dialup because they're too far out for cable companies to bother with; people there use either dial-up or satellite internet. If you're in the boonies, satellite is really the way to go; ping times suck but for regular usage it works fine and isn't that expensive.
The only place I've heard of with such ridiculous regulation preventing people from getting high-speed internet is Seattle.
You don't need to go to the asteroid belt to find asteroids to mine; they're buzzing right by the Earth all the time. If you can find asteroids with valuable-enough ores (such as gold, platinum, rhodium, etc.) then it could very well be worth it to launch robotic (or at least remote-control, these distances aren't that far) missions to retrieve them and bring them to Earth.
I completely disagree. If you can find an asteroid nearby with a few trillion dollars' worth of gold and platinum, it can very well be economical to bring that back to earth. A few million $ worth of iron, not so much.
Sorry, no. You don't need fuel (or much of it anyway) to deorbit anything.
To get the mining equipment launched and out to where it's going to be used, sure: you'll need lots of fuel for that one. To deorbit it, no; you might need a tiny bit of fuel to push it towards our gravity well, but that's about it. After that, you can just let it fall into the atmosphere. There's various ways you can handle that without your valuable ores (or better yet, fully processed ores) simply vaporizing: you can build some kind of aerodynamic structure so the thing aerobrakes on the way down, or you can surround it with a bunch of ablative shielding (like how regular space capsules return to earth), maybe using some kind of cheap material that's also mined up there. If it's just a big hunk of rock, and not humans, then you don't need to worry about g-forces or high temperatures on the way down, you just need a way to make the thing fall to earth 1) in a place where you can retrieve it and where it doesn't damage anything (and someone doesn't steal it after all your hard work), and 2) in a way that it doesn't vaporize or disintegrate. We've been dropping space capsules like the Apollo and Soyuz capsules back to Earth, with humans inside, for many decades now without much trouble. I'm sure dropping hunks of rock intact won't be that hard.
The hard parts are getting robotic equipment built which actually does the job, launching it, capturing asteroids, processing them somehow to extract the valuable ores, and then packaging it to be sent back to Earth.
Unfortunately, YouTube is blocked for me here, so I have little idea what the link is about.
But I do think you're overcomplicating things with your alternate universe theory.
Let me offer my own alternate universe theory from Star Trek to explain this world we live in: if you're familiar with the Star Trek universe, you'll know that the TV shows touch on alternate universes several times. Most famous is the "Mirror, Mirror" episode from TOS where a transporter accident causes Kirk to be transported to an alternate universe where Spock has a goatee and the humans are basically evil, and instead of a United Federation of Planets, there's a "Terran Empire" that makes the Klingons and Romulans (in the normal universe) look like saints. This universe was explored further in Enterprise in two great episodes in the last season, where the TOS Enterprise somehow gets pulled into the mirror universe (and back in time too) and evil Captain Archer uses it for his own gain as it's far more powerful than the existing technologies.
The problem with Star Trek in general is that it seems extremely unrealistic (and I don't mean technologies which defy our understanding of physics like warp drive): the people in it are simply too *good*: they're altruistic, they're extremely competent (when do you ever see incompetence on the Enterprise? Compare that to your workplace or our government.), they're not corrupt, they're not greedy, they're only slightly flawed but overall are great people. We viewers like to think to ourselves that this is what the future will be like when we achieve a post-scarcity society and aren't required to work for a living to survive and pay the bills, and learn not to be greedy, racist, etc.
There's a much simpler explanation: Star Trek is actually realistic (about its portrayal of human characters), the catch is, we're in the mirror universe!. The universe where the humans are blatantly evil conquerors who enslave other races and fly around the quadrant destroying and subjugating every civilization we can find: that's us! If we figure out how to build warp-capable starships, that's exactly how we'll act. Those altruistic and competent characters we know and love from TOS and TNG, that's in some other universe where humans are good. We don't live in that universe.
Hopefully, for the sake of intelligent beings across the galaxy, the humans in the good-human universes have figured out how to teleport between universes at will, and have sent agents to our universe to sabotage our efforts to achieve interstellar travel.
Gold dental fillings last 3x longer than the next best; It's really all any of us should be using but cost/rarity has made discouraged usage.
Citation needed. This sounds like a bunch of crap. There's lots of people walking around with amalgam fillings that are decades old (the mercury issues is another issue, you just talked about "lasting"), and the newer resin fillings seem to last a long time too: I have some that are at least 15 years old now and show no signs of trouble. If I can get, say, 30 years out of a modern filling, why would I care about one lasting 90 years? Unless these life-extension therapies come through, it's not like I'm going to be around long enough for that to matter (you don't normally start getting fillings until your teens at the earliest). And why would a filling that makes me look like I came from the ghetto anyway? Gold fillings look ridiculous and gaudy. There's a good reason they've moved to resin fillings, and it's not just the mercury issue, it's cosmetics: resin fillings are nearly indistinguishable from natural teeth.
Yeah, that too, I didn't say that wasn't possible. The warrant is for when they don't cooperate, but yeah, in the real world, if there's a hit-and-run and the cops go to the camera owner and tell him, not many will refuse the cops for that. I have no problem with that. But still, that's an extra layer of security: they aren't going to turn over the video for no reason at all (and on a regular basis) just so the cops can go on a fishing expedition, and it's extra trouble for the cops to get video from private sources like this anyway. With government-owned cameras, this isn't the case.
You yourself point to the 1984 election, but again I point to it: the Dems lost that election in a landslide!!! If there were so many Dem voters, why did they re-elect Raygun? I'll take your word for the Dems winning the House that year, but in that case, with the huge difference from the Presidential election (10M as you say), that points to gerrymandering being used by the Dems in that year, not the Reps.
As for the Dems and the KKK, I wasn't claiming the modern-day Dems are like that at all, I specifically pointed out that all changed with the Civil Rights Act and the whole Southern Strategy. After that point, the GOP became the go-to party for Southern racists. The parties are completely different now than they were in the 40s or 50s or even 60s, so how many Dem voters there were back then is really irrelevant to now.
My whole point is that you can use the Presidential elections as a rough approximator of the relative number of Dem vs. Rep voters at any given time (and specifically, the popular vote totals, not the stupid electoral votes). Because those group all Americans together, and every vote is counted the same no matter which state it's in or which congressional district. And these totals do not show a clear Democratic lead at all; they change over time, sometimes very significantly in just 4 years (such as 2004 to 2008). Of course you can also argue that voter turnout is better some years than others (Obama famously got a lot of normally-apathetic young people out to vote for him), but again, that really doesn't matter: the only thing that matters is who wins the race. People who don't vote don't count. And this holds a lesson for this election and others: if your party pushes a crappy candidate and people who supposedly identify more with that party are so disgusted or at least uninspired they don't bother to vote, then your party is going to lose.
I'm not going to go back and dig up what you wrote before, but I'm pretty sure you claimed there were more Democrats much farther back than "over a decade". And finally, it really doesn't matter what people claim to be; all that matters is how they vote. 12 years ago (just over a decade), Dubya won his re-election bid over Kerry, plain and simple. Polls are interesting and all, but they're flawed in one way or another. They don't count all the people in the population, and frequently have questionable methods for picking their samples (such as only counting people who have landline phones--WhoTF still uses those things? Of course, a poll like that would favor Republican voters anyway, I'm just making a point.) In the end, the only thing that really counts is how people vote in the actual elections.
I'm not saying there are more Republicans. Did you not actually read what I wrote? I said there were roughly equal numbers, and it's been like this for a long time, proven by how the White House (and also the Senate) have flip-flopped between the parties over the years. I said the elections are really decided by the swing voters, because the data fits that. That's why Dole loses in 1996, it's basically a tie in 2000, Bush wins in 2004, and McCain loses in 2008 and Romney loses in 2012. Who knows, maybe you're right and there's more die-hard Dems than Reps, and the swing voters were swinging (R) more back in the 70s-80s and now are swinging a bit more on the (D) side except for 2000-2004. I'm not saying Gallup is rigged, but the Presidential election results speak for themselves. Gallup doesn't get to poll every single voter, and is limited by their methodology. The elections are not: the elections are what decide who wins.
If you want to believe there really are more Dems, go ahead. But that's pretty worthless if it doesn't translate into election results. And you can't blame gerrymandering for the Senate or Presidential races, nor for gubernatorial races, state senates, etc. New Jersey for instance is usually considered a "blue" state, yet Chris Christy is the governor. Explain that one. "Liberal" Massachusetts elected Romney as their governor. Michael Bloomberg was the mayor of "liberal" NYC until recently. You can't blame that stuff on gerrymandering, and those places are all considered Democrat strongholds. California elected Schwarzenegger. Michigan I believe is usually blue, yet they have a Republican governor who's been directly instrumental in poisoning people in Flint.
No, we're not talking about control of Congress at all, that's just a side-effect. Your allegation is that there's a significantly larger number of Democrat voters than Republican voters. I'm disproving it by pointing to the Presidential elections.
And according to Wikipedia, yes, there were approx. 550k more Gore votes than Bush votes, that's out of 50 million votes on each side. The percentage was 47.9% to 48.4%, a 0.5% difference.
If you want to believe that 0.5% more Dem voters is some kind of huge difference in numbers, then go right ahead. To everyone else, it's statistically insignificant. Like I said before, the numbers are roughly equal, which is why the elections keep swinging back and forth.
And if you think 0.5M votes is so much in 2000, that still doesn't explain 2004: Bush clearly won that race with over 2 million more votes than Kerry. That's 4 *times* as many more votes. And the turnout was much higher too: ~62M for Bush, 59M for Kerry (2.4% delta). That's approx. 21M more votes total than the 2000 election 4 years prior. The nation's population didn't expand *that* fast.
Now look at the 2008 and 2012 elections: in 2008, Obama won the popular vote with about 9.5M more votes (7.2% delta), but then in 2012 with only about 5M more votes (3.9% delta), which is just a bit more than Kerry lost to Bush by in 2004. Let's go back farther: in 1996, Clinton had a 8.2M vote lead over Dole (8.5% delta), and in 1992 a 5.8M vote lead over HWBush (5.6% delta) (note that Clinton had a pretty lousy 43% of the popular vote overall, not a majority at all). In 1988, HWBush had a 7M vote lead over Dukakis (7.8% delta), and in 1984, Reagan had a whopping 16.9M vote lead over Mondale (18.2% delta).
Face it: your claim is completely wrong. The biggest lead in the last 20 years was Obama's 2008 election with a 7.2% lead, but that totally pales in comparison to 1984's re-election of Reagan with an 18.2% lead. There is simply no evidence at all that this nation, for the last 50 years (you claimed all the way back to WWII), has had a significant majority of Democrat voters. It just doesn't. If it did, we'd at the very least see a Democrat-controlled Senate for that whole span, plus a Democratic president. We don't. Things keep flip-flopping every now and then, and for the most part, incumbent Presidents get re-elected no matter what their party. The only exceptions to that off the top of my head are LBJ (deeply unpopular because of Vietnam), Ford (wasn't even elected by anyone, only President with that "honor", though considering the miserable quality of the ones we've had since then he was probably one of the better ones ironically), Carter (unpopular because of economy and Beirut attack), and HWBush (unpopular because of breaking campaign promise not to raise taxes, and lost lots of votes to Perot). Nixon, Reagan, and WBush were all re-elected by a popular majority, and overwhelmingly so in the 1984 election.
Finally, claiming more Democrat voters since WWII isn't even something to be proud of. Before LBJ pissed off the Southern Democrats with his passage of the Civil Rights Act and drove them to the Republican party, the Democratic Party was largely the party of racists.
Read this line carefully: George W Bush won two terms in a row. Where did all those votes come from? I guess all those alleged Democratic voters aren't bothering to show up for Presidential elections.
Gerrymandering is something every party does when they're in power, to hold onto that power. The incumbents get to draw the district lines, so of course they do it to benefit themselves. Republicans are not magically far better at it than Democrats.
As for more Dems since WWII, that's just plain crazy. If that were true, Dubya would never have been elected twice, HW wouldn't have been elected, Reagan would have lost to Carter, Nixon would have lost to Humphrey, etc. Gerrymandering doesn't affect Presidential elections.
You may very well be right about Dems taking over the Senate this November thanks to Trump, but we'll see. But that isn't proof of there being more Dems at all. From where I stand, it looks like the numbers of dedicated Dem and Rep voters are really about equal, which is why every Presidential election ends up coming down to swing voters.
I think the problem is that you have certain assumptions about what appeals to Republican voters. Trump has proven you, all the pundits, and the GOP party, very wrong. Your assumptions include things like 1) they have a huge bloc of ultra-conservative, gay-hating Christians, 2) they love interventionist wars like W Bush's Iraq War, and 3) they love big business, lowering taxes on ultra-rich people, etc. All these things are certainly true of some Republicans to some extent, but not nearly as much as previously thought. The ultra-conservative evangelicals are apparently not nearly as numerous or powerful (or at least as dedicated to their position) as assumed, for instance, or else either Santorum or Cruz or even Carson would have done far better. While a lot of GOP voters certainly are big fans of Bush and his wars, apparently they're not as numerous as previously thought, because those guys didn't vote for Trump (who called the Iraq invasion stupid, and trashed W in general, much to Jeb's annoyance). And #3 doesn't seem to be quite as true as believed before. From what I recall, Trump's tax plan seems to talk about eliminating income taxes on lower-income people altogether (combined with a tax cut in general--how this is supposed to actually work out is a mystery though).
In a nutshell, Trump's base is disaffected, white, mainly lower-income voters who feel betrayed by the Republican establishment, and see absolutely nothing on the Democrat side to identify with. Their jobs are disappearing, or have disappeared, they don't have a college education, and things just aren't looking too good for them. The establishment Democrats keep telling them "the economy is doing great!!! The Dow Jones has recovered!!!", but that doesn't help them when they don't own any stock, and don't have a degree and a highly-paid programming job. Basically, they're being left behind, and they're doing something about it. And of course they're blaming some of it on convenient scapegoats too (Mexicans). But the reality is that they're right to blame the establishment politicians, on *both* sides, because they haven't done anything for this very large voting bloc, and instead of have pursued globalist policies which have really hurt the lower middle class. It's just too bad they couldn't have been persuaded to registers as Democrats and vote for Bernie, since growing income inequality has been a central pillar of his campaign all along.
Even Washington Post (the HIllary-shilling news outlet) points out that she's historically pushed for more military interventionism than Obama. She wants to establish a no-fly zone in Syria.
I'm not so sure about that, especially if you include my suggestion about having ranked voting in the second primaries. Now (in my hypothetical reality) that people know who won the first primaries, and now that they have the ability to vote in order of preference with a ranked system, I think you might see some really different results.
For one thing, a lot more people might manage to get registered and vote (let's suppose the second primaries allow instant registration or something otherwise pretty easy, plus easy party affiliation choice), who didn't manage to vote in the first round. The number of actual votes in the primaries this year wasn't that much really; a new raft of voters could really change things all by itself, even without my ranked voting proposal.
Secondly, considering how unpopular both Hillary and Trump are, I think the ranked voting system would give very different results, with many voters ranking those two rather far down, and ranking other candidates much higher. Even with the Hillary and Trump lovers voting those two as their #1 picks, they'll also pick the other candidates for their #2, #3, etc. picks. With a proper ranked system, you may very well end up with someone like Jeb or Kasich or O'Malley winning the nomination in their respective party, because they were the least-hated candidate overall. This is the problem with first-past-the-post elections with lots of candidates: all the not-so-bad candidates split the votes among themselves and you end up with a really bad candidate who attracted the nutters, who are a minority but manage to outnumber the supporters for any single one of the less-bad candidates.
And really, how is Trump not the Establishment? He's a semi-successful property tycoon ?
There's a whole bunch of billionaires in Silicon Valley. Is Elon Musk or Peter Thiel part of the establishment? Since they aren't at all involved with what's going on in DC and with politics, I'd say no. Trump isn't either.
"The Establishment" doesn't just mean "rich people".
First, there are a lot more Democrats than Republicans in the US
Where'd you get this crazy idea? If this were true, then the Democrats would control Congress. And if you're going to pull the silly "gerrymandering!" card, you need to go study how Senatorial elections work.
Additionally, you seem to have forgotten the 2014 election, where Republicans totally stomped the Democrats. Even if there supposedly are more Dem voters, it doesn't count if they don't bother to vote. And the fact that they don't bother suggests that they aren't Dem voters at all, but rather independents who didn't feel the Dem candidates were worth the trouble of making time to go to the polls. Considering how unpopular Hillary is, the same may very well happen this year.
Basically, your whole theory (and that of all the pro-Hillary people) rests on the assumption that so many people will be so scared of the prospect of a Trump presidency that they'll do whatever it takes to get to the polls and vote for the (D) candidate, whoever that is, and because of that Hillary must be a safe choice. That's a pretty big assumption. Voter apathy has been a long-time problem in this country, and this year we're now faced with two presumptive nominees (neither is official just yet) who are *both* extremely unpopular among the general population. Personally I think that's going to result in very, very low turnout, and with very low turnout there's no telling which way a race will go.
I won't be surprised at all to see Trump eke out a win in November. And if that happens, I'm laying the blame at the feet of the DNC for giving us such a horrible candidate. (This is nothing new; they've been giving us terrible candidates for quite a while -- Gore and Kerry for example -- but this one really takes the cake.)
you probably would agree that early on, most would seem to be better candidates than Trump.
No, I'd have to completely disagree with that. You're going to have to explain yourself on that one. (I'm a Bernie voter BTW.)
Maybe I've forgotten about some of the candidates, but here's a list of ones I thought might (*might*) have been better than Trump: Carly, Christy, and Jeb. That's it. Cruz was far, far worse, Carson was an idiot and religious nut, Santorum is a religious nut, Marco was a puppet, etc. The GOP candidates were just awful in this cycle. The Dem candidates have been pretty bad too, except Bernie (IMO of course).
Trump sucks, but the Republicans in this cycle were all really awful. I'll take Trump any day over Cruz, for instance, or Santorum. Even Carson would have been worse: that guy is a religious nut. There really weren't many "moderates" on the Republican side this time; Kasich tried to paint himself that way, but he really wasn't. Carly was probably the closest to a typical moderate, big-business, non-religious-nut Republican, but she was also provably incompetent at leadership (she ran HP and Lucent into the ground). Oh yeah, I guess I forgot about Jeb, but he really is forgettable... plus he's tainted by association with his dumb brother and the wars he got us into. Unfortunately, with Hillary looking like the next prez, we can look forward to some more big wars, since she's proven herself to be a big warmonger. Why do liberals love war so much anyway? LBJ, and now Hillary both epitomize this.
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Well we probably wouldn't want to drag the whole thing back; we'd probably want to create some kind of robotic/remote-control refinery so that we could smelt the ore and refine it, then send the refined metal back to Earth. That would reduce the mass a lot.
Rocks being returned to earth are most certainly going to be guided in some manner. But as for fuel, the Apollo capsule did not have a lot of fuel on board. Somehow they managed to get back to Earth intact.
Yes, you can use a mass driver. But that requires some kind of energy source too; mass doesn't get thrown off an asteroid for free. But do you even need to bother? This isn't human cargo, so time isn't quite so important. You can probably just use an ion engine to push the thing into a trajectory that it'll fall to the Earth with aerobraking. Though more likely, it'd probably make more sense to try to refine the ores in space first, so we're not just dropping giant asteroids on Earth; smaller (and more concentrated) cargos with some type of cheaply-built-in-space reentry vehicle (maybe just an ablative shield on one side and a parachute for the final descent) might make more sense.
You have no idea what you're talking about. The Apollo missions did not need "an immense amount of fuel" to return astronauts to the Earth. That's just stupid.
Have you entirely forgotten that the Earth has an atmosphere?
Like where, besides Seattle and truly rural places like remote parts of Montana?
I live in a fairly rural county in Virginia and I have high-speed cable internet. It works great. (I think it's 20MB/s; I'm not sure, it's not their fastest grade available here, but one tier down I think, more than fast enough for Netflix, probably for 2 or 3 Netflix streams really.)
Extremely rural places are usually stuck on dialup because they're too far out for cable companies to bother with; people there use either dial-up or satellite internet. If you're in the boonies, satellite is really the way to go; ping times suck but for regular usage it works fine and isn't that expensive.
The only place I've heard of with such ridiculous regulation preventing people from getting high-speed internet is Seattle.
You don't need to go to the asteroid belt to find asteroids to mine; they're buzzing right by the Earth all the time. If you can find asteroids with valuable-enough ores (such as gold, platinum, rhodium, etc.) then it could very well be worth it to launch robotic (or at least remote-control, these distances aren't that far) missions to retrieve them and bring them to Earth.
I completely disagree. If you can find an asteroid nearby with a few trillion dollars' worth of gold and platinum, it can very well be economical to bring that back to earth. A few million $ worth of iron, not so much.
Sorry, no. You don't need fuel (or much of it anyway) to deorbit anything.
To get the mining equipment launched and out to where it's going to be used, sure: you'll need lots of fuel for that one. To deorbit it, no; you might need a tiny bit of fuel to push it towards our gravity well, but that's about it. After that, you can just let it fall into the atmosphere. There's various ways you can handle that without your valuable ores (or better yet, fully processed ores) simply vaporizing: you can build some kind of aerodynamic structure so the thing aerobrakes on the way down, or you can surround it with a bunch of ablative shielding (like how regular space capsules return to earth), maybe using some kind of cheap material that's also mined up there. If it's just a big hunk of rock, and not humans, then you don't need to worry about g-forces or high temperatures on the way down, you just need a way to make the thing fall to earth 1) in a place where you can retrieve it and where it doesn't damage anything (and someone doesn't steal it after all your hard work), and 2) in a way that it doesn't vaporize or disintegrate. We've been dropping space capsules like the Apollo and Soyuz capsules back to Earth, with humans inside, for many decades now without much trouble. I'm sure dropping hunks of rock intact won't be that hard.
The hard parts are getting robotic equipment built which actually does the job, launching it, capturing asteroids, processing them somehow to extract the valuable ores, and then packaging it to be sent back to Earth.
No, they shouldn't.
We, the people, should be ashamed for allowing our court system and IP laws to reach this state.
Unfortunately, YouTube is blocked for me here, so I have little idea what the link is about.
But I do think you're overcomplicating things with your alternate universe theory.
Let me offer my own alternate universe theory from Star Trek to explain this world we live in: if you're familiar with the Star Trek universe, you'll know that the TV shows touch on alternate universes several times. Most famous is the "Mirror, Mirror" episode from TOS where a transporter accident causes Kirk to be transported to an alternate universe where Spock has a goatee and the humans are basically evil, and instead of a United Federation of Planets, there's a "Terran Empire" that makes the Klingons and Romulans (in the normal universe) look like saints. This universe was explored further in Enterprise in two great episodes in the last season, where the TOS Enterprise somehow gets pulled into the mirror universe (and back in time too) and evil Captain Archer uses it for his own gain as it's far more powerful than the existing technologies.
The problem with Star Trek in general is that it seems extremely unrealistic (and I don't mean technologies which defy our understanding of physics like warp drive): the people in it are simply too *good*: they're altruistic, they're extremely competent (when do you ever see incompetence on the Enterprise? Compare that to your workplace or our government.), they're not corrupt, they're not greedy, they're only slightly flawed but overall are great people. We viewers like to think to ourselves that this is what the future will be like when we achieve a post-scarcity society and aren't required to work for a living to survive and pay the bills, and learn not to be greedy, racist, etc.
There's a much simpler explanation: Star Trek is actually realistic (about its portrayal of human characters), the catch is, we're in the mirror universe!. The universe where the humans are blatantly evil conquerors who enslave other races and fly around the quadrant destroying and subjugating every civilization we can find: that's us! If we figure out how to build warp-capable starships, that's exactly how we'll act. Those altruistic and competent characters we know and love from TOS and TNG, that's in some other universe where humans are good. We don't live in that universe.
Hopefully, for the sake of intelligent beings across the galaxy, the humans in the good-human universes have figured out how to teleport between universes at will, and have sent agents to our universe to sabotage our efforts to achieve interstellar travel.
Gold dental fillings last 3x longer than the next best; It's really all any of us should be using but cost/rarity has made discouraged usage.
Citation needed. This sounds like a bunch of crap. There's lots of people walking around with amalgam fillings that are decades old (the mercury issues is another issue, you just talked about "lasting"), and the newer resin fillings seem to last a long time too: I have some that are at least 15 years old now and show no signs of trouble. If I can get, say, 30 years out of a modern filling, why would I care about one lasting 90 years? Unless these life-extension therapies come through, it's not like I'm going to be around long enough for that to matter (you don't normally start getting fillings until your teens at the earliest). And why would a filling that makes me look like I came from the ghetto anyway? Gold fillings look ridiculous and gaudy. There's a good reason they've moved to resin fillings, and it's not just the mercury issue, it's cosmetics: resin fillings are nearly indistinguishable from natural teeth.
Yeah, that too, I didn't say that wasn't possible. The warrant is for when they don't cooperate, but yeah, in the real world, if there's a hit-and-run and the cops go to the camera owner and tell him, not many will refuse the cops for that. I have no problem with that. But still, that's an extra layer of security: they aren't going to turn over the video for no reason at all (and on a regular basis) just so the cops can go on a fishing expedition, and it's extra trouble for the cops to get video from private sources like this anyway. With government-owned cameras, this isn't the case.
You yourself point to the 1984 election, but again I point to it: the Dems lost that election in a landslide!!! If there were so many Dem voters, why did they re-elect Raygun? I'll take your word for the Dems winning the House that year, but in that case, with the huge difference from the Presidential election (10M as you say), that points to gerrymandering being used by the Dems in that year, not the Reps.
As for the Dems and the KKK, I wasn't claiming the modern-day Dems are like that at all, I specifically pointed out that all changed with the Civil Rights Act and the whole Southern Strategy. After that point, the GOP became the go-to party for Southern racists. The parties are completely different now than they were in the 40s or 50s or even 60s, so how many Dem voters there were back then is really irrelevant to now.
My whole point is that you can use the Presidential elections as a rough approximator of the relative number of Dem vs. Rep voters at any given time (and specifically, the popular vote totals, not the stupid electoral votes). Because those group all Americans together, and every vote is counted the same no matter which state it's in or which congressional district. And these totals do not show a clear Democratic lead at all; they change over time, sometimes very significantly in just 4 years (such as 2004 to 2008). Of course you can also argue that voter turnout is better some years than others (Obama famously got a lot of normally-apathetic young people out to vote for him), but again, that really doesn't matter: the only thing that matters is who wins the race. People who don't vote don't count. And this holds a lesson for this election and others: if your party pushes a crappy candidate and people who supposedly identify more with that party are so disgusted or at least uninspired they don't bother to vote, then your party is going to lose.
I'm not going to go back and dig up what you wrote before, but I'm pretty sure you claimed there were more Democrats much farther back than "over a decade". And finally, it really doesn't matter what people claim to be; all that matters is how they vote. 12 years ago (just over a decade), Dubya won his re-election bid over Kerry, plain and simple. Polls are interesting and all, but they're flawed in one way or another. They don't count all the people in the population, and frequently have questionable methods for picking their samples (such as only counting people who have landline phones--WhoTF still uses those things? Of course, a poll like that would favor Republican voters anyway, I'm just making a point.) In the end, the only thing that really counts is how people vote in the actual elections.
I'm not saying there are more Republicans. Did you not actually read what I wrote? I said there were roughly equal numbers, and it's been like this for a long time, proven by how the White House (and also the Senate) have flip-flopped between the parties over the years. I said the elections are really decided by the swing voters, because the data fits that. That's why Dole loses in 1996, it's basically a tie in 2000, Bush wins in 2004, and McCain loses in 2008 and Romney loses in 2012. Who knows, maybe you're right and there's more die-hard Dems than Reps, and the swing voters were swinging (R) more back in the 70s-80s and now are swinging a bit more on the (D) side except for 2000-2004. I'm not saying Gallup is rigged, but the Presidential election results speak for themselves. Gallup doesn't get to poll every single voter, and is limited by their methodology. The elections are not: the elections are what decide who wins.
If you want to believe there really are more Dems, go ahead. But that's pretty worthless if it doesn't translate into election results. And you can't blame gerrymandering for the Senate or Presidential races, nor for gubernatorial races, state senates, etc. New Jersey for instance is usually considered a "blue" state, yet Chris Christy is the governor. Explain that one. "Liberal" Massachusetts elected Romney as their governor. Michael Bloomberg was the mayor of "liberal" NYC until recently. You can't blame that stuff on gerrymandering, and those places are all considered Democrat strongholds. California elected Schwarzenegger. Michigan I believe is usually blue, yet they have a Republican governor who's been directly instrumental in poisoning people in Flint.
No, we're not talking about control of Congress at all, that's just a side-effect. Your allegation is that there's a significantly larger number of Democrat voters than Republican voters. I'm disproving it by pointing to the Presidential elections.
And according to Wikipedia, yes, there were approx. 550k more Gore votes than Bush votes, that's out of 50 million votes on each side. The percentage was 47.9% to 48.4%, a 0.5% difference.
If you want to believe that 0.5% more Dem voters is some kind of huge difference in numbers, then go right ahead. To everyone else, it's statistically insignificant. Like I said before, the numbers are roughly equal, which is why the elections keep swinging back and forth.
And if you think 0.5M votes is so much in 2000, that still doesn't explain 2004: Bush clearly won that race with over 2 million more votes than Kerry. That's 4 *times* as many more votes. And the turnout was much higher too: ~62M for Bush, 59M for Kerry (2.4% delta). That's approx. 21M more votes total than the 2000 election 4 years prior. The nation's population didn't expand *that* fast.
Now look at the 2008 and 2012 elections: in 2008, Obama won the popular vote with about 9.5M more votes (7.2% delta), but then in 2012 with only about 5M more votes (3.9% delta), which is just a bit more than Kerry lost to Bush by in 2004. Let's go back farther: in 1996, Clinton had a 8.2M vote lead over Dole (8.5% delta), and in 1992 a 5.8M vote lead over HWBush (5.6% delta) (note that Clinton had a pretty lousy 43% of the popular vote overall, not a majority at all). In 1988, HWBush had a 7M vote lead over Dukakis (7.8% delta), and in 1984, Reagan had a whopping 16.9M vote lead over Mondale (18.2% delta).
Face it: your claim is completely wrong. The biggest lead in the last 20 years was Obama's 2008 election with a 7.2% lead, but that totally pales in comparison to 1984's re-election of Reagan with an 18.2% lead. There is simply no evidence at all that this nation, for the last 50 years (you claimed all the way back to WWII), has had a significant majority of Democrat voters. It just doesn't. If it did, we'd at the very least see a Democrat-controlled Senate for that whole span, plus a Democratic president. We don't. Things keep flip-flopping every now and then, and for the most part, incumbent Presidents get re-elected no matter what their party. The only exceptions to that off the top of my head are LBJ (deeply unpopular because of Vietnam), Ford (wasn't even elected by anyone, only President with that "honor", though considering the miserable quality of the ones we've had since then he was probably one of the better ones ironically), Carter (unpopular because of economy and Beirut attack), and HWBush (unpopular because of breaking campaign promise not to raise taxes, and lost lots of votes to Perot). Nixon, Reagan, and WBush were all re-elected by a popular majority, and overwhelmingly so in the 1984 election.
Finally, claiming more Democrat voters since WWII isn't even something to be proud of. Before LBJ pissed off the Southern Democrats with his passage of the Civil Rights Act and drove them to the Republican party, the Democratic Party was largely the party of racists.
Read this line carefully: George W Bush won two terms in a row. Where did all those votes come from? I guess all those alleged Democratic voters aren't bothering to show up for Presidential elections.
I'm sorry, I think you're delusional.
Gerrymandering is something every party does when they're in power, to hold onto that power. The incumbents get to draw the district lines, so of course they do it to benefit themselves. Republicans are not magically far better at it than Democrats.
As for more Dems since WWII, that's just plain crazy. If that were true, Dubya would never have been elected twice, HW wouldn't have been elected, Reagan would have lost to Carter, Nixon would have lost to Humphrey, etc. Gerrymandering doesn't affect Presidential elections.
You may very well be right about Dems taking over the Senate this November thanks to Trump, but we'll see. But that isn't proof of there being more Dems at all. From where I stand, it looks like the numbers of dedicated Dem and Rep voters are really about equal, which is why every Presidential election ends up coming down to swing voters.
I think the problem is that you have certain assumptions about what appeals to Republican voters. Trump has proven you, all the pundits, and the GOP party, very wrong. Your assumptions include things like 1) they have a huge bloc of ultra-conservative, gay-hating Christians, 2) they love interventionist wars like W Bush's Iraq War, and 3) they love big business, lowering taxes on ultra-rich people, etc. All these things are certainly true of some Republicans to some extent, but not nearly as much as previously thought. The ultra-conservative evangelicals are apparently not nearly as numerous or powerful (or at least as dedicated to their position) as assumed, for instance, or else either Santorum or Cruz or even Carson would have done far better. While a lot of GOP voters certainly are big fans of Bush and his wars, apparently they're not as numerous as previously thought, because those guys didn't vote for Trump (who called the Iraq invasion stupid, and trashed W in general, much to Jeb's annoyance). And #3 doesn't seem to be quite as true as believed before. From what I recall, Trump's tax plan seems to talk about eliminating income taxes on lower-income people altogether (combined with a tax cut in general--how this is supposed to actually work out is a mystery though).
In a nutshell, Trump's base is disaffected, white, mainly lower-income voters who feel betrayed by the Republican establishment, and see absolutely nothing on the Democrat side to identify with. Their jobs are disappearing, or have disappeared, they don't have a college education, and things just aren't looking too good for them. The establishment Democrats keep telling them "the economy is doing great!!! The Dow Jones has recovered!!!", but that doesn't help them when they don't own any stock, and don't have a degree and a highly-paid programming job. Basically, they're being left behind, and they're doing something about it. And of course they're blaming some of it on convenient scapegoats too (Mexicans). But the reality is that they're right to blame the establishment politicians, on *both* sides, because they haven't done anything for this very large voting bloc, and instead of have pursued globalist policies which have really hurt the lower middle class. It's just too bad they couldn't have been persuaded to registers as Democrats and vote for Bernie, since growing income inequality has been a central pillar of his campaign all along.
Even Washington Post (the HIllary-shilling news outlet) points out that she's historically pushed for more military interventionism than Obama. She wants to establish a no-fly zone in Syria.
I'm not so sure about that, especially if you include my suggestion about having ranked voting in the second primaries. Now (in my hypothetical reality) that people know who won the first primaries, and now that they have the ability to vote in order of preference with a ranked system, I think you might see some really different results.
For one thing, a lot more people might manage to get registered and vote (let's suppose the second primaries allow instant registration or something otherwise pretty easy, plus easy party affiliation choice), who didn't manage to vote in the first round. The number of actual votes in the primaries this year wasn't that much really; a new raft of voters could really change things all by itself, even without my ranked voting proposal.
Secondly, considering how unpopular both Hillary and Trump are, I think the ranked voting system would give very different results, with many voters ranking those two rather far down, and ranking other candidates much higher. Even with the Hillary and Trump lovers voting those two as their #1 picks, they'll also pick the other candidates for their #2, #3, etc. picks. With a proper ranked system, you may very well end up with someone like Jeb or Kasich or O'Malley winning the nomination in their respective party, because they were the least-hated candidate overall. This is the problem with first-past-the-post elections with lots of candidates: all the not-so-bad candidates split the votes among themselves and you end up with a really bad candidate who attracted the nutters, who are a minority but manage to outnumber the supporters for any single one of the less-bad candidates.
And really, how is Trump not the Establishment? He's a semi-successful property tycoon ?
There's a whole bunch of billionaires in Silicon Valley. Is Elon Musk or Peter Thiel part of the establishment? Since they aren't at all involved with what's going on in DC and with politics, I'd say no. Trump isn't either.
"The Establishment" doesn't just mean "rich people".
First, there are a lot more Democrats than Republicans in the US
Where'd you get this crazy idea? If this were true, then the Democrats would control Congress. And if you're going to pull the silly "gerrymandering!" card, you need to go study how Senatorial elections work.
Additionally, you seem to have forgotten the 2014 election, where Republicans totally stomped the Democrats. Even if there supposedly are more Dem voters, it doesn't count if they don't bother to vote. And the fact that they don't bother suggests that they aren't Dem voters at all, but rather independents who didn't feel the Dem candidates were worth the trouble of making time to go to the polls. Considering how unpopular Hillary is, the same may very well happen this year.
Basically, your whole theory (and that of all the pro-Hillary people) rests on the assumption that so many people will be so scared of the prospect of a Trump presidency that they'll do whatever it takes to get to the polls and vote for the (D) candidate, whoever that is, and because of that Hillary must be a safe choice. That's a pretty big assumption. Voter apathy has been a long-time problem in this country, and this year we're now faced with two presumptive nominees (neither is official just yet) who are *both* extremely unpopular among the general population. Personally I think that's going to result in very, very low turnout, and with very low turnout there's no telling which way a race will go.
I won't be surprised at all to see Trump eke out a win in November. And if that happens, I'm laying the blame at the feet of the DNC for giving us such a horrible candidate. (This is nothing new; they've been giving us terrible candidates for quite a while -- Gore and Kerry for example -- but this one really takes the cake.)
It's too bad we can't just have him as President. He'd probably be a pretty good President, unlike Trump or Hillary.
you probably would agree that early on, most would seem to be better candidates than Trump.
No, I'd have to completely disagree with that. You're going to have to explain yourself on that one. (I'm a Bernie voter BTW.)
Maybe I've forgotten about some of the candidates, but here's a list of ones I thought might (*might*) have been better than Trump: Carly, Christy, and Jeb. That's it. Cruz was far, far worse, Carson was an idiot and religious nut, Santorum is a religious nut, Marco was a puppet, etc. The GOP candidates were just awful in this cycle. The Dem candidates have been pretty bad too, except Bernie (IMO of course).
12??? Probably more like 2.
Trump sucks, but the Republicans in this cycle were all really awful. I'll take Trump any day over Cruz, for instance, or Santorum. Even Carson would have been worse: that guy is a religious nut. There really weren't many "moderates" on the Republican side this time; Kasich tried to paint himself that way, but he really wasn't. Carly was probably the closest to a typical moderate, big-business, non-religious-nut Republican, but she was also provably incompetent at leadership (she ran HP and Lucent into the ground). Oh yeah, I guess I forgot about Jeb, but he really is forgettable... plus he's tainted by association with his dumb brother and the wars he got us into. Unfortunately, with Hillary looking like the next prez, we can look forward to some more big wars, since she's proven herself to be a big warmonger. Why do liberals love war so much anyway? LBJ, and now Hillary both epitomize this.