It does say “as a baseline” so presumably its just there for comparison’s sake

It should be noted that “independent” isn’t a monolithic position, so it’s probably not possible to create a single party that satisfies them; you’ll have people that find the democrats far too conservative to associate with, people that find the republicans too far left, people that do like one party’s policies but object to the idea of formally identifying with a political party, and people that just ignore politics.

Setting that aside though, while there are technically enough independents to win, it’s a classic collective action problem: if large but not big enough number of independents break off of whichever party they tend to vote for in absence of something more preferable to them, then they end up with the less preferred party to them, which means that creating a third party is worse unless you can get massive buy-in within a single election cycle. This isnt impossible in theory, as you’ve pointed out, but in practice these kind of problems rarely ever are solved this way, because people just don’t tend to all suddenly agree on one course of action like that, and the knowledge that a failed attempt is worse than no attempt is available to everyone.

It’s happened before in US politics a couple times even, but it hasn’t ever fixed the underlying design issue that leads to two parties, the new one just takes over as one of the major two when one of the older ones gets so unpopular as to collapse entirely, and the same forces that lead to the previous party drifting away from the wishes of the majority of the country work upon the new one.

It’s already possible in a “does it violate the laws of physics or not” sense, the real question is, will anyone that has the requisite resources to do it actually want to.

It would take such an incredibly long time (as in, millions of years or longer for the very closest galaxies) that anyone and any organization sending out such an expedition isn’t going to get any meaningful return on their investment, so it would only bring a benefit to whoever was on the “ship” when it arrived. As such, to even have a motive for doing this, you either need a society that does things for the benefit of extremely distant descends, or which is extremely long lived and patient.

As to how you would actually do it, my guess (obviously though, the guess of someone from a society that lacks the technology to do a thing is likely to be wrong about how it later is done) would be that one would use a hypothetical type of structure called a stellar engine These are similar to the “dyson spheres” that science fiction sometimes likes to talk about (usually inaccurately to the actual concept but still), except that they would use the energy emitted by a star, or its mass, to do some particular task, like propel the star in a given direction.

Doing this, your “ship” is actually an entire solar system. Getting that up to speed could take millions of years even for the most efficient designs, and obviously requires an economy capable of building stuff at incredible scales, and having an entire star spare to use for the trip. However, you’re going to be taking that kind of time anyway, and so you’re probably going to need an entire self contained civilization to have a hope of keeping things running that long, and literal worlds worth of raw materials. There’s not much else that even theoretically has enough fuel to move all that to notable fractions of lightspeed. Since there’s little point to going to live in another galaxy if there are still unclaimed places to go within your own, a whole star system is probably a relatively small expense for the implied size of civilization that would even want to try to sebd such an expedition. Galaxies contain a huge number of them after all.

While this is all obviously far beyond us now, both in technology and sheer economic scale, there’s nothing physically impossible about it, and at least some logical motive (the future resources of a galaxy for one’s descendants, if alien life is rare enough for uninhabited galaxies to exist). Given that and just how huge the universe is, I’d actually be willing to bet that somewhere there is someone or something doing this, and that if humans last long enough and keep advancing our technology and infrastructure all the while, some descendant of our species might, though they’d probably seem pretty alien to us by the time it took to reach that point.

Iguanas are plenty interesting to me, though I imagine a tegu probably is more sociable. My personal experience with lizards has been with geckos, but I hear that tegus tend to be very friendly, for a lizard of their size.

I wouldn’t say print books have no place today, it can’t be assumed that one will have access to electronics in all circumstances after all and many people do prefer physical media, but it’s definitely an indictment of the sort of cheaply made basically disposable books made in larger quantities than needed to fill their current niche, and of the way unwanted (by their owners) but usable goods are dealt with in general.

Sure, but it is rather a waste of paper, ink, manufacturing and transportation capacity etc. It’s not the only instance of this of course, waste of unsold inventory exists in just about any industry that sells physical products, but it’s still frustrating to see it.

Lizards. Alternatively, fish and other sea creatures, hypothetical space megastructures, or nuclear rocketry.

Not all the cars on the road are real, a few of them are some kind of creature that has adapted to mimic cars, to blend in and avoid predators, and eat roadkill when nobody is looking. That’s why sometimes you see a car with window tint so dark it seems like nobody could possibly see though it, to hide the fact there’s no interior.

Mine would, to complain that they’re hungry, two hours before their feeding time.

I never did. I got a learners permit at 16 or so, practiced with my parents for a number of years and renewed the learning permit at least once without testing for a full license, but eventually stopped and let it expire.

I have pretty bad anxiety issues, which driving has proven one of the triggers for, and unlike everything else that triggers it, for driving it got worse with exposure instead of better. I actually wasn’t even that nervous at first, but every time I’d make a mistake, or witness someone else make one, it’d come to mind every time I’d practice driving, because I didn’t want to accidentally kill someone from a lapse in judgment, and eventually every little thing built up so much that one day, my father handed me the keys and asked me to try taking us to a store, and I had a full-on fight-or-flight panic response just sitting in the drivers seat. At that point I finally deicided that it just wasn’t responsible of me to be on the road if after several years I still couldn’t even think straight while driving, and Ive never done it since, and ended up moving states a couple years in order to live somewhere that going with out a car is at least somewhat viable.

To be honest, Ive actually been happier since, its a huge expense that I don’t have, and Ivr found I can get a decent amount of exercise without having to go an intentionally make myself do it, just from walking a lot. But of course, it’s only comfortable in the kind of dense urban area with decent (by US standards) public transit that in the US seems to exist only in a handful of places, the cost of living for which eat a lot of the savings from not having a car in the first place.

In a pure debate sense, this would be true, even an unpopular or suspicious person is still capable of making a valid point. It should be considered, however, that internet arguments are not formal debates. They can at times use the form and language of them, but most people are not skilled in that kind of formalized arguing, and most people are not arguing in an actual attempt to use the debate to identify stronger vs inconsistent positions (rather than just trying to push people towards ones own ideas or to put down ideas one finds reprehensible).

Now, I dont personally tend to find much point in looking through profiles, it takes too much time for little benefit in my view, but it can sometimes tell you if an account is not worth the time and emotional investment to interact with, or if it has signs that it might not be. The nature of social media is such that there are always far more user’s trying to get your attention, than you have attention to spare. As such, if theres even a notable red-flag that an account isnt worth the time and potential frustration to engage with, it can make pragmatic sense to move on (depending on how much one is willing to put up with, I guess).

From that perspective, telling other people what it was that seemed like a red flag to you lets them consider if that thing makes that account worth their time or not, without them having to find it too, and therefore potentially does those other people a favor. That sounds a bit harsh (at least to me) because plenty of things others might consider suspect, like a new account, cant always be helped (everyone starts off new after all), and being ignored, or having other people call out that thing as a reason they might want to ignore you, is frustrating, but that’s just the nature of giving massive numbers of people the ability to talk to everyone else; most people wont want or have the time to listen to you, and you’re not entitled to their time, however unfair their reason for dismissing you might be.

I mean, that doesn’t really fix it if you have an actually omnipotent diety though, because that diety would be responsible for, well, everything, to include what the results of rejecting that diety would be.

I mean, if were talking about efficiency tools for artists to use rather than straight up automatically generating the assets (not sure what those tools would be at the moment, but I’ve not been following what the AI industry actually releases for awhile because it’s always seemed a bit useless), then the result should be an increase in the output of those artists rather than replacing them with statistical amalgam.

So, what you’re talking about (the past and future appearing different to different observers) sounds like a different concept to what this comic was about; if im understanding your meaning, that’s something that comes up from relativity, and as such has a bit more grounding to it than any position on if other points in time exist somewhere else along a “time axis” already or if the future is truly unwritten. Either position on the nature of time will result in a universe that looks exactly the same from our perspective, and therefore can only be speculated on, but relativity makes physically testable predictions that can be experimentally verified. I can’t really explain it adequately as I only understand the basics myself (though from what I know, nobody ever actually observes the future, its more that different observers see the time between connected events compressed compared to others).

This sounds like an idea called “eternalism” or “block time”. I tend to suspect it might be the case just because it requires assuming fewer unique properties for the time dimension that aren’t shared by space dimensions, but obviously that’s not really evidence for it as such. It can be an interesting idea to think through the implications of though, whether true or not.

not these days, I did once, but nowadays I have a lizard because they’re a bit more interactive for a scaly animal.

Wasnt really planning to draw tonight, but you know what, sure, Ill try something, Ive been needing something to distract me from my anxiety problems today anyway.

I would assume that, since humans sometimes pretend to not be human, that would simply be a subset of human behavior, and so what would make the comment make the most sense wouldn’t be “looking for behavior atypical for humans”, but rather " looking for behavior that humans arent able to engage in no matter how hard they try". What that would even be in a text based system though, I’m not sure. Typing impossibly fast maybe?

I thought that fire inheritly pushes things, and that all you needed to do to make a rocket, was to take a sizable flame, like a campfire or something, flip it upside down so that the flame pointed down instead of up somehow, and attach it to the bottom of something.

Maybe we’re reading things differently, but I thought their sign implied that fairly strongly, just that they wanted to tack “Trump is a criminal” onto that without drastically increasing the wording.