I mean, this is the same guy who said we’d be living on Mars in 2025.

However you want to phrase it, they’re very different problems with different solutions.

“Someone picked the lock on my door and got into my house” is meaningfully distinct from “Someone stole my keys”.

You can keep your nasty chips

You can argue it’s a classic ID-10T error in your workflow.

But nobody has discovered a security vulnerability within the system architecture. This is the system operating as designed, abet with the wrong person standing in front of the terminal.

Yes, but that doesn’t make the comparison to all countries with over 500 000 people meaningful.

Fair enough. Any state with less than 500k people probably shouldn’t be on the list.

It’s framed as “look, if we put US states on a graph with other countries, they have such a high incarceration rate that there are almost no countries even on the graph!”

It’s certainly possible that you have one big state with a high incarceration rate - Texas or California for instance - that’s throwing off the national average. States are free to set their own penal process. It’s not a given that every state has a globe-shattering incarceration rate.

Saying “It’s not just one or two states with astronomical incarceration rates, its the whole country contributing to the total” indicates something notable about the politics and culture of the country as a whole.

Wyoming could have an incarceration rate of 0% without affecting America’s position as a carceral state. That it doesn’t is meaningful.

If we play that game we can’t trust American numbers either

😏

If it was absolute numbers, it would maybe make a point.

If you have a population with 10M people and 20,000 of them are prisoners, that’s significantly less concerning than a country with 100,000 people of which 10,000 are prisoners. You can’t make an apples-to-apples comparison between Texas and Wyoming with raw head-count.

it’s somehow shocking that the individual states of the county with the highest incarceration rate in the world also have a high incarceration rate

It’s shocking that the state of Louisiana has a full 2% of its population in jail. That’s twice the US national baseline.

Interesting how it’s southern states at the top eh?

Legit amazed California wasn’t higher on the list. They’ve been doing mass-incarceration at an industrial scale since the 70s. But I guess the population is big enough that the per-capita statistics work out.

States like Alabama, Louisiana, and Oklahoma have such small and anemic populations and dedicate so much of their domestic budget to incarceration that they’re basically giant publicly subsidized slave plantations.

Nothing more American than privatizing and off-shoring our concentration camps.

Israel is trying to zero out that number as quickly as they can.

The trick is to always assume “China is lying about its internal statistics” and inflate whatever number they give by an arbitrary large percentage. 1.7M is obviously an under-count because the CCP is always lying about everything.

Also, you can do some broad brush “Everyone in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, North Korea, and Taiwan are prisoners of the Chinese state, so actually that’s over 60M people” napkin math to make the numbers look better.

I don’t know how we got from exploding pagers to space lasers.

Removed by mod

Well, in that case, how about you pay me that $10 you owe me?

Proximity to the equator and high elevation make for ideal launch sites. Then eastward facing, because you want to run counter to the earth’s spin as you launch and be out over open water if something fucks up. One reason why Kenya, Brazil, and Indonesia were floated as a high efficiency international spaceports decades ago, when efficiency was considered more important than inflating a billionaire’s ego.

I mean… its a big deal if you’re anywhere near the launchpad. Or, in or around South Padre Island.

Also can’t help but notice that Starbase, Texas is practically hugging the US/Mexico border. Almost as though Abbott didn’t want this shit landing in his own backyard when it failed.

Heavy Lift drones can carry upwards of 55 lbs. And there’s no reason you’re limited to one.

We’ve been busting through constitutional amendments with abandon. I don’t think you could point to one that this administration would honor or respect.

none of the checks and balances have any balls

Trump took full control of the DHS and the FBI, staffed it with loyal goons, and is actively arresting/assaulting anyone who stands in his way.

This isn’t a matter of “no balls”, its a matter of Biden handing Trump’s biggest supporters a bunch of money and guns back in 2021 and Trump telling these guys “Arrest all the Bidencrats” the moment he took office.

Dafuq is any judge or legislator supposed to do in a country when ICE can kick down your door?

They fucked up thinking they’d never lose power. Now its too late to politics their way out of the mess.