In 2024 Puerto Rico held a referendum on precisely this question, and the majority (58%) chose statehood while only 11% chose independence. It’s not a perfect measure (retaining the current status quo wasn’t an option, only 63% of voters turned out) but it shows a pretty clear preference IMO.

What’s nuts to me is that neither major American party has gone for it. The House passed a bill in 2022 which would have admitted PR as a state but it went nowhere - but damn that’s two whole Senate seats that could go to either party if they came out as strongly pro-PR. Same thing for DC.

Play carnival game

Guess the box!

Only one box isn’t empty

Open it

Tissue paper

“Better luck next time!”

What you gotta do is carry a small object and hold it in front of you, and then teleport forward and back so that the object goes into and out of the lock, breaking it.

3 for sure. Depending on how teleporting into other objects works, and how fast you can spam it, you could get some serious work done with a power like that.

This is a default family in the Sims.

The fact that our planet’s resources are finite is a matter of physics. Capitalism may come up with some innovation or another that adds more lifespan to it, the way that digital spaces and the financial industry have done, or it may have another global war that creates room for a new period of traditional growth at the cost of countless lives, but it will inevitably hit an insurmountable wall.

What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.

It’ll go the same way it went for abortion. Red states will get worse while blue states stay more or less the same, which will prevent libs in the blue areas from mobilizing effectively to protect minorities in the red ones.

historically

Right now Cuba has the most equal LGBT rights in the world.

I think people got mad at something she said about Avatar on twitter (the cartoon not the movie), and her anti-fandom reached a critical mass spreading around every single thing she’d ever said that could be interpreted uncharitably, and with her book out and her presence on Nebula secured she decided that being on YouTube was more trouble than its worth.

We’re back to the reading comprehension problem again.

That wasn’t a direct quote, that was a characterization of the shallow vapidity of your argument.

Coal is like 50% of their grid. If you removed it you would be plunging the whole country back into the dark ages.

The future is 100% green energy, but that isn’t going to happen overnight, and especially can’t happen overnight in a growing economy that needs to add energy at a high rate to keep up with demand.

China is spending more than the rest of the world combined on green energy, and they are currently putting more green energy on their grid than anything else. But they still need fossil fuels to maintain their current growth.

When that growth slows down, then it becomes possible for a shift to occur, where green energy is added and fossil energy is taken offline. It is not currently possible to do this in China.

You know where it is possible to do this? Fully developed countries like America, where demand has more or less peaked and there is no excuse for continuing to add fossil fuels onto the grid. If we spent half of what China spends on green energy, we could be retiring all of our own fossil fuel power plants by the end of the decade, but not only are we not doing this we have trained a certain sector of our population to clap like monkeys and point at other countries whenever the issue comes up.

Pointing at countries that have only developed recently and are still going through the process and saying “you can’t use fossil fuels” while living in a country that built its entire economy on fossil fuels is peak chauvinistic bullshit. Have some self awareness and think about context before you make broad proclamations.

If that’s what you think I was saying then you need to work on your reading comprehension.

Get a dog and pamper it.

Last year, China commissioned 96 GW of new coal production and commissioned 356 GW of wind and solar. This was the most coal production China has built in a single year since 2015, and it was still less than the amount of renewables that they put on it.

I wish China could wave a magic wand and have their entire energy grid go green, but the truth is that their middle class is still growing, and with it the demand for electricity, and even with the massive amount of spending they’ve put into wind and solar those forms of power simply can’t keep up with the rising demand on their own, so coal remains a necessary part of their multimodal grid with multiple redundancies and sufficient storage.

It was but they had to change it for Shrek and the G-rated version became the canonical one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago

literally a fiction book. You might as well cite fucking Animal Farm.

btw I’m giving your comment exactly as nuanced and in-depth a look as it deserves.

That first link is pure cold warrior nonsense on par with the black book of communism. As for the second, I defer to the words of Mark Twain:

“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

Truthfully I support all of those revolutions as historical processes which have brought about necessary change, but the Haitians and the Russians fighting for their freedom from Slavery and Capitalism respectively are much more commendable than the Americans doing so because they didn’t want to slow down their westward expansion.

Yar, I don’ be likin’ this new diction, “striminal.” I’ll be a pirate ‘till me dyin’ day.

New update for those of you following this story

We have established contact with the previously-AWOL owner, and after much discussion, we have determined that while there was an error in the auto-payment initially, the renewal funds were transferred manually to Sav and the auction continues despite that. We are currently appealing to Sav support with our domain credentials. We are also looking into whether an ICANN-compliant grace period was implemented prior to the rescinding and auctioning of the domain.