I would say it doesn’t really compare to any of the Star Trek Armada games. It’s more 4x like Master of Orion or Civilization (Or Star Trek: Birth of the Federation for an in-universe game). You start with 4 planets colonised, and a handful of other systems that have resources you can mine, but rather than building research stations where you have to spend resources for techs like Armada, you’re cultivating researcher ‘pops’ (population units) to generate research points that let you pick up technologies. And rather than like a single system you’re trying to take over, it’s a full galaxy that you’re having to spread around with. And you don’t just blow up enemy ships. You also spy on the enemies (and your allies sometimes), and conduct diplomacy. And there are plenty of anomalies around to keep your science ships busy doing Star Trek-y stuff.

[ace_ventura]o//Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalrighty then....o//[/ace_ventura]

Given how stupid American voters are, I’m going to go ahead with “hope for the best but expect the worst” here. I hope to be pleasantly surprised, but I’m sure not going to expect it.

We need to start nipping this in the bud. RFK Jr. isn’t your grandfather’s Kennedy. He’s more akin to a Republican in many ways.

• Anti-Vax. The guy believes that vaccines cause autism.
• He believes COVID 19 was engineered. He thinks it attacks Whites and Blacks, while somehow immunising Asians and Jews.
• He believes Fauci and Bill Gates used COVID 19 to push for vaccines, to give us all autism?
• He thinks the CIA killed JFK.
• He thinks prescription drugs lead to mass shootings.

There are a few things I can agree with. Yes, I do think the pharmaceutical companies have hooks in the government. I think they are joined by other corporations as well, as money = power and we follow the “He who has the gold makes the rules” version of the Golden Rule here rather than “Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you” version. And I’m sure shenanigans were done in 2004 to get Bush over the hump, though Kerry did our side no favours. But the bottom line is that this guy is going to draw away even more people from our coalition. We need to remind each other than 74 million Deplorables came out of the woodwork in 2020 to cast their vote for Trump. We’ll need every last person who does not want a Trump-Repeat to vote Biden and ignore shiny objects like RFK Jr.

And my answer back would be: “Jeffries is a perfectly good, perfectly viable option. I invite any Republican who is sick of the constant posturing between worse and worst candidates for Speakership to vote for him.” And if I were Jeffries, I’d say “We’ll keep the committees the way they are, we’ll respect the Majority’s right to set policy, but the Hastert rule is dead with me and if we can’t get a passing vote on a Republican idea, I will bring Democrat ideas up. Take it or leave it, but the clock is ticking.”

You do realise that there have only been 6 ‘systems’ in the United States over its 250+ year history, right? And you do realise that the only actual political party changes were the First to Second Party System (in 1828, with the Federalists dying off) and the Second to Third Party System (in 1860, with the Whigs dying off, replaced by the Republicans)? You do realise that the Third to Fourth Party System, the Fourth to Fifth Party System, and the Fifth to Sixth Party System have only been realignments of the two existing parties? You do realise that the last time a non-major-party POTUS candidate won even a single EV was in 1968? You do realise that even Ross Perot couldn’t get a single EV in 1996?

You realise that this country has a system in place to prevent voters from causing effective changes? Your vote for your minor party only ensures that you get the major party most opposed to your stances in a FPTP system elected, and you end up getting nothing of what you wanted instead of just something. If you want that fixed, your first step is to get your State to join Maine and Alaska and use Ranked Choice Voting. Your second step is then to get more third party Representatives and Senators in. Then you got to change the Constitution so that the POTUS is directly elected, rather than through the Electoral College, and use RCV nation-wide for that. That’s a far better strategy than relying on something that’s not happened in the past 160 years. IMNSHO, of course. :)

This is valid logic in normal times. But these are not normal times. Let’s get real here.

The First Past the Post system means Third Parties are virtually unelectable. Add to that the US system of government (needing a majority of votes to elect a Speaker or Senate Majority Leader, Electoral College, Majority needed to avoid POTUS picked by the House, etc), and we’ve got our own unique challenges to Third Parties, and those problems are going to need a Constitutional Convention to fix. People who willingly ignore this are stupid, and only serve to damage their political side.

If you need this explained again to you, here we go. Suppose 50.1% of the nation leans Left, while 49.9% leans right. That’s a pretty narrow split. You really can’t afford to lose anyone. But then some doofus comes up with a Left2 party and claims the mainstream Left party isn’t doing enough, and if you just elect them, they’ll give everyone the shiny golden alicorn that farts rainbows they swear they are owed. It doesn’t take much. If 0.3% of the voters in the country believe that Left Party isn’t doing enough, and switch their vote to Left2 Party, suddenly it’s 49.9% Right, 49.8% Left, and 0.3% Left2, and now EVERYTHING Left and Left2 cherish is torn down by Right party, and you regress.

This is fine in most circumstances. You don’t always get what you want, and sometimes, Left2 voters need to be reminded of this harshly by the Right party, and maybe in the next election, they’ll figure out how voting works in the Not-So-United States of America, and they’ll turn out to vote for Left party despite not getting the shiny golden alicorn that farts rainbows because they realise they aren’t even getting a broken down old donkey from Team Right.

But these aren’t normal times. We don’t have Left and Right parties here in the USA today. We have Centre-Right and Fascist parties. You aren’t getting a shiny golden alicorn that farts rainbows. Your choices right now are a slightly used donkey from Team LeftCentre Right, and a jackboot on your face from Team RightFascist. Team Shiny Alicorn is there to suck your votes away, but when you lift the curtain JUST a little on Shiny Alicorn, you see one of Team Fascist’s goons operating the controls. We’re just trying to ask you to make the smart choice here, buddy. But I’m helping my wife get set up for school in New Zealand, because I don’t trust the rubes who will fall for the bait and switch with Team Shiny Alicorn…I half expect Trump to be POTUS and his goons to start looking for people like my Bisexual Black Pagan Goth Wife, and people like me who dare sully the White race by being with someone like her. Please prove me wrong…

They really aren’t Fascists. Hey, I did a 14 point analysis on the two parties! Here’s the summary: 1: Powerful and Continuing Nationalism: R***, D*. 2: Disregard for Human Rights: R***, D* 3: ID of Enemies as Unifying Cause: R***, D* 4: Supremacy of the Military: R**, D** 5: Widespread Sexism: R***, D 6: Controlled Mass Media: R***, D* 7: Obsession with National Security: R***, D* 8: Religion and Government Intertwined: R***, D 9: Corporate Power Protected: R***, D*** 10: Labour Power Suppressed: R***, D* 11: Disrespect of Arts and Intellectuals: R***, D* 12: Obsession with Crime and Punishment: R***, D* 13: Rampant Cronyism and Corruption: R***, D* 14: Fraudulent Elections: R***, D*

I go into lots of detail about why I award the stars (*) above. Zero Stars means I think the party is actually really damn good about this topic. One star means they have some problems but are otherwise fair. Two means they have a real problem with this, despite making some headway on righting it. And 3 stars means they aren’t even bothering to do anything about it and are in Hitler/Mussolini levels of devotion to Fascist ideals. As you can see, I ranked the Republicans 3 Stars on everything, with the Dems really only joining the Reps when it comes to protecting corporate interests.

What do you rank the Dems on this list, and more importantly, why? I mean, if you asked the Republicans, Dems hate the US and want to see it fail, so they’d not get any points for 1, 4, 7 or 8, and, according to Republicans, we’re all baby-eating, baby-f***ing Satan worshippers, so the only religion we want intertwined with government is Satanism, but we all hate Christians, so we can’t be guilty of 8. I’d be interested to see your take of how the Dems match the 14 characteristics of Fascism. Maybe we’ll learn something about you here.

The Electoral College is just to elect our President. It has no other purpose than that.

As an American, you vote for four people who represent you directly in the government: your Representative in our House of Representatives, two Senators in our Senate, and the President. The Senators are a relatively recent addition as for a long time, Senators were appointed rather than directly elected, and some people are talking about going back to that system. But for now, that’s 4 people you vote for.

Representatives are voted for by their voters in their individual districts. This is like a MP. In some districts, such as those in Maine, we use Ranked Choice Voting. In others, we have a sort of runoff election if nobody wins a majority. However, in most, we vote FPTP, and the guy with the largest share of the votes wins.

Senators are state-wide votes. We’ll only vote for one at a time, and over 6 years, we’ll have one election for one seat, another election for the other seat, and a ‘bye-year’ where we don’t vote for Senators at all. Like the House, this is rarely RCV or Runoff, but is frequently FPTP.

POTUS votes are run nation-wide, but they really are state-wide in all states except Maine and Nebraska, where they are hybrid Congressional District-wide and State-Wide. This is where the Electoral College comes in, and trying to RCV this could well challenge constitutional crises because if no one candidate gets more than half of the EVs, the race is thrown to the House, which is an anti-democratic thing.

I’m kinda new here, so I don’t have much of a posting history, but let me set this up immediately.

Calls for a war of any kind in a nuclear-armed country is hella-damn dangerous. I don’t care what kind of war it is. Civil War, Revolution, whatever, the bottom line is that even if we don’t get mushroom clouds out of it, there are plenty of dirty bombs worth of nuclear material that could be employed by ideologically and hate-blinded assholes with an agenda and the unbending but quite wrong notion that they are not only RIGHT but are backed by their concept of goodness itself, the Almighty. And while I agree with the other poster that the entire US military isn’t a seething pool of Neoconfederate fucksticks, that doesn’t mean there aren’t enough to appropriate and attempt to launch nuclear weapons against ‘dins of sin’ as they might call large, liberal cities.

I’m not going to go dig through some poster’s posting history. You wanted DadWagonDriver to say he’s against righties calling for war? You got it in the post you’re replying to. Bam. There, he’s on record now for saying the Neoconfederates should fuck off already. That should be good enough for you, and that should be enough to set you straight. Enough with the calls for naked warfare. The way to fix our country is in the ballot booth, not on the battlefield. War always has been and always will be the weapon of last resort. Be ready to protect yourself, but don’t be looking for a fight. Why? Because wars rarely lead to the outcomes you want. Look at Iran when they overthrew the Shah. The Left then quibbled amongst themselves while the religious fanatics that were the Left’s ally during the war stole the reins of power and then outlawed being a leftist, among many, many other things.

Oh yeah, and in closing? The battlefield of today is a thermonuclear battlefield, and the thing about Thermonuclear War is that it is a most strange game to play. The only winning move is not to play!

Heh. One of my favourite pasttimes is TTRPGing, and one of the settings I made to explore my disdain for the hard-right was a setting that featured the destruction of San Francisco by nuclear weapons by Conservatives. I could totally see a ‘Christian States of America’ nuking a liberal city…

Yep…many Red Teamers removeded when we just marched holding signs. “Rioting in the streets,” they said. Then they lost, and they rioted at DC and in the halls of government. Projection, much?

It’s actually more involved than that.

My dad, red-blooded every-thing Democra- hating (including now, seeming, Democracy itself) Goldwater Republican has said that Dems are owed payback going all the way back to Nixon. This opened my eyes on a lot of things.

• Nixon literally set up lists of political enemies and went outside the law in order to win an election. Dems cried foul. Republicans said “Deal with it B).” Dems brought Impeachment charges. The tide turned, quickly, against Nixon, to the point Republicans started feeling heat in their districts and told Nixon if he didn’t step down, they’d be forced to convict. Still, they thought Dems crying foul over the dirty tricks in Watergate and getting Nixon removed was a horrible sin against America and started holding a grudge. Chalk up the first GQP Rage Point.
• They really couldn’t get anything on Carter, but they sure tried hard to sabotage his administration, and they were successful thanks to a slew of situations Carter couldn’t manage effectively. They got 8 years of Reagan and 4 of Bush-41 before they’d get their next change to ‘pay the Dems back’ for Nixon.
• Clinton was HOUNDED from day one of his administration. No stone was left unturned in the GOP’s hunt for something…ANYTHING…to hold against Clinton. They found what they were looking for in a stained blue dress. The impeachment was supposed to be payback for the impeachment of Nixon, but…well, they couldn’t convince the 11 Democrats they needed to convince in the 55R/45D senate. In fact, they would have needed an extra 5 votes for Obstruction and an extra 10 for Perjury, because they couldn’t get all 55 of their votes! So, now the angry Righties had TWO injustices to pay the Democrats back for, and thus two Rage Points.
• Bush-43 shat the bed so hard, the hoped for Republican dynasty died in the crib. 50 years hoped for. Only 6 realised. Mostly because Bush was a complete buffoon who is now the SECOND worst POTUS in my lifetime (Nixon was before my time).
• Obama was hounded much the same as Carter and Clinton before him. Like Carter, he didn’t have much to really fault him on. He was a competent administrator who didn’t have the scent of corruption about him, let alone actual corruption to prosecute, but that sure didn’t stop the GQP from trying. They now had TWO things to pay Dems back for, plus the stain on their legacy to erase, plus the guy was half-Black, which pissed the GQP off even more! Proving that Impeachment is a political tool, Burgess of Texas called for Obama’s Impeachment for no other purpose than to stop Obama from “pushing his agenda.” But despite their numerous probes into ways to get Obama out of office, they couldn’t get enough traction even when they controlled the house, and Obama sailed through his 8 years untouched. Another injustice in the GQP playbook, so now three rage points boiling over.
• The Dems nominated someone that I’m sure they WOULD have found justification to impeach her, at least tangentially through her husband, and America, not wanting to have another 4 years of Clinton, AND not aware of how bad Trump really was, picked the Reality TV Show host with a heaping side of Mussolini-style Fascism despite all the warnings against doing that by literally everyone who paid attention. The utter shitshow display of corrupt incompetence was everything the GQP accused the Left of being, and so it was only a matter of time before the shithead was impeached. And impeached he was. Twice. He was not removed because the GQP was in full payback mode by now, and now the GQP has built up a boiling pot filled with five rage points.
• What couldn’t be done through the GQP was accomplished by 81 million votes, and now Biden is in office. That’s SIX ‘crimes’ for the GQP to rage about. And boy are they hunting. But with a scant 4 vote lead in the House, and 18 Reps in districts also won by Biden, AND the fact that voters are kicking the GQP in the teeth even in deep red states like Ohio over Roe, there’s a lot of reality intruding into this, meaning that by the end of Biden’s first term, the GQP rage count will now be up to 7. It’ll increase to 8 if Biden wins 2024, and even more if they try to push an Impeachment and fail.

Needless to say, the GQP is beyond angry that they haven’t paid Dems back for Nixon in 40 years. Team Blue has its grievances as well, but unlike Team Red, we’re not planning the mass murder of their politicans and voters. They ARE for us, and I’m not sure how many more rage points they can rack up before they start putting that plan in practice.

I don’t believe for a second that you actually believe this. I think you’re just a concern troll trying to hide behind the inequity that allows kids to go without food and water while pushing the false narrative that every actor earns millions of dollars a year and thus doesn’t “deserve” to strike. If you really are concerned about kids, then perhaps stand in solidarity of the hundreds of thousands of people NOT earning seven figures so THEIR kids may be guaranteed food and water, and pressure the folks who ARE earning seven figures to show a little charity for the kids you’re so concerned about.

Excellent comment. I’m just going to add some numbers ans a source to it.

If you’re in the United States and are working as an actor, your income is closer to Minimum Wage than to the big names in the entertainment industry, with wages (not salaries, these people are paid by the hour) ranging from $7.75 up to $36.00, averaging at $15.29. We talk about the big names, but these are the people really being hit. Hollywood execs don’t even want to pay these wages. They’d rather give you a month of wages in order to have access to your voice and face for all time. This is even worse when you factor in that your image might get big…imagine being a fresh face right out of acting college, going in for your first audition, and they say “We like you. We’ll give you $3000 if you just enter our scanning booth and spend an hour saying nonsense lines.” That pays your first month’s rent (barely), but lo and behold, down the road, your likeness is earning the studio execs a cool billion, and you ain’t getting a penny of that, because you signed a contract saying your likeness and voice could be used by them at no compensation for you for all time.

THAT is a big part of what this strike is about.

https://www.indeed.com/career/actor/salaries

Sure. The leading actors in a production are crazy rich. But according to indeed.com, the average actor earns between $7.25 and $36.00 an hour, averaging at $15.29. For every lead, you’ve got countless little people backing them up. Strikes aren’t just about the crazy wealthy leading actors. It’s also about the dude pulling in $15 an hour. In fact, the leads aren’t going to license their likeness and voices to the studio execs, so they really have nothing to worry about. But they’re here standing in solidarity with the people who don’t have that luxury, who will go in, get a $3000 cheque, then never work in the industry again.

Just to be clear, you’re busy simping for the billionaires who run the media industry, pointing to the millionaires who are saying they are being nasty to everyone in industry. Says a lot about you, buddy!

Where is anyone saying you don’t have the right to be mad when the Major Party that represents you squashes Progressives. I sure don’t see that anywhere in this thread.

All I see is that people are telling you that you have every right to fight for Progressive candidates, but when push comes to shove and the choice is between the Red tyrant, and the Blue spineless creature, don’t be distracted by the Green and Yellow ‘protest’ votes because you didn’t get the progressive you wanted. The cost of doing that may well see our Republic replaced by a Republican Dictatorship.

Imma about to drop some history on you. The United States has only seen three instances of a Minor Party becoming a Major Party in its history, and all three changes corresponded with the first three ‘Party Systems’ in the United States. The Zeroth Party System (my own term) was that idealistic time when Washington publicly advocated for no parties, while aligning himself with what would arise as the First Party System in 1789. This put Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans against the Adams’ and Hamilton-led Federalists. Both parties had a bit of a breakdown in the early 1820s, with Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans breaking off into a more Jacksonian Democratic Party as Jeffersonian principles got left behind, and the Federalists outright replaced by the Whigs, as the Second Party System got started. Then, as Slavery became a big issue, the Whigs got left behind by events as the Republicans emerged to oppose the Democrats in the Third Party System.

The Whigs being replaced by the Republicans was the last time a Minor Party rose to prominence in US politics, despite there being between 3 and 4 more party systems. The Fourth Party System saw the Republicans grow out of their anti-Slavery roots as they became the party of Industrialisation, while the Democrats continued their historical role as Voice of the South and everything that represented. The Democrats started evolving away from their role of being the party of Southern Landowners to more speaking for the common man as Northern Democrats embraced FDR’s New Deal. And the Sixth System saw the Republicans embrace the dissatisfied Southern (Conservative) Democrats when the Democrats embraced minorities after the 1960s. Not once after 1856 has any party come anywhere close to upsetting the Democrats and Republicans, with MAYBE the closest being Ross Perot in the 1990s.

There’s a new realignment going on now. Civil Rights has been absorbed into a much larger question. The Republicans and their core Southern Dixiecrat constituency has decided that the work of winning elections should be dispensed with, and they given dictatorial powers in the United States. Let me make this clear to you, Ensign. You grumble about how mean the Dems are to Progressives. We just want to remind you that Republican voters are gleefully sharing pictures of a stolen cartoon character wearing Trump’s hair and a Nazi SS officer’s uniform, forcing people ranging from Hillary and Obama, through people like you, down to Minorities and Jews and Gays, into very clear cartoon reproductions of gas chambers and ovens. We’re saying that the OTHER side will be following the rules of “Vote for our guy in the closest Major Party primary, and the Major Party candidate closest to our ideology in the General.” Either we do that as well, or we go down like the Left did in Iran in 1980 when the Ayatollah in Iran outlawed the very same Anarchists, Intellectuals, Artists, and Leftists that worked with him to overthrow the Shah.

I managed to last for another 10 years, but right around when COVID ramped up (Age 47 for me), my ability to manage sleep went sideways. Part of that may have been sleep apnoea with anoxia, with my doctor prescribing APAP + Nocturnal Oxygen, but if I get less than 9 hours of sleep, things start going bad for me quickly.

My suggestion for OP is melatonin 30 minutes before bed, cutting back blue lights by either going for night-mode on screens or just not using them, and either setting up nightlights with 2700K bulbs or getting something like Hue or other colour changing lights, and white noise in bed. This is helping, but I still wake up at 5am without fail. :(

Indeed! But it still is useful to put the lie to his nonsense, if for no other reasons than to point it out to others.

OK, ngl that {democrat|republican} rendering as democratrepublican is pretty cool.