Modern war planners mostly know better than to count on everything going well.

To add to this, N Korea also has a huge conventional army, and is a very mountainous country. Lots of soldiers+mountains=very bloody to invade.

This is also why Iran is fairly safe from ground invasion. It’s like a gigantic Switzerland, which if you’re familiar with WW2 history, even Hitler left Switzerland alone despite kinda wanting to occupy the place. The cost was just too high compared to the benefits, so, y’know, may as well skip it and invade the USSR instead.

This works, but the quicker method for me was to hold the book over my head, out of my line of sight while I focused my eyes on something a little farther away (a few feet away is fine). Then you can simply move the book downward into your field of vision while refusing to let your eyes refocus. It should be blurry, because you’re still focusing past it, despite it being right in front of your face. Then just relax and let your brain do the work.

This method got by far the quickest and most reliable results for me, most pop suddenly into view in just a couple seconds.

I think this method works best because you’re using established muscle memory to focus your eyes on an object at a measurable, consistent distance, and then just not letting them change. Removes several variables from the equation.

Not exactly a showerthought, maybe better off in a TIL, mildly interesting or history sub. This community is not for real information, though, showerthought communities are for more light-hearted and silly stuff.

How about a space station? Lot easier to keep things livable if you just contain everything. Would probably end up being easier to build a station and fly it out there than try to terraform something that distant.

Even when I see Elrond in LotR, that’s actually just Agent Smith in a funny costume.

Alternate challenge: Find a line of more than just a few words from Holy Grail that won’t be recognized.

We found them.

I was just gonna say, a squash that I cut in half, hollow out and dry is pretty low-tech stuff. Could probably use a coconut if you were in a pinch… Lot of options.

The purpose of a legal system is to provide stability to a society, so that a person can safely pursue long term goals over their lifetime in a predictable environment.

The most effective way to accomplish this is to make a system where laws originate from a process where people are allowed to have some say in the creation of the laws that will apply to them, and the laws are then applied uniformly, consistently and fairly to all people regardless of background.

Our system partially fulfils this.

Then you should hopefully already understand the multiple reasons anecdotal evidence is a poor way of trying to understand large groups of people, which is why we use statistical studies.

The people specifically in your community, engaging with welfare resources, are in no way an accurately representative sample of a larger social class in all areas. Your specific region likely has unique cultural factors at play. The subset of people engaging with welfare have unique economic factors.

If you want to start an irl group, yeah. If you’re joining an existing group, no though. Fully online is obviously the easiest place to find groups looking for players, but you can also head down to your local gaming store. I’ve seen bulletin boards before with flyers looking for players, but can probably just ask the people working there if they know of any.

Could also check online forums for your local community, maybe even make a post asking if any gaming groups have openings for irl players.

Dungeons & Dragons is one, for the sufficiently geeky.

Sure. It’s certainly not impossible, just unlikely when we consider all the possibilities.

Just adds an extra, unnecessary step. It’d be like if you had billions of grocery stores to choose from and went to the one crawling with ants.

The idea of imbibing potions whose recipes predate our awareness of things like radium or mercury toxicity somewhat disturbs me.

Probably not.

I also don’t see why any spacefaring civilization would have any interest in colonizing inhabited planets. It would just be more hassle for the same resources you could get on lots and lots of planets. If they have the technology for interstellar flight, they can probably extract whatever they want from wherever they want. Regarding living space, you wouldn’t even need planets, there are far more efficient structures you could devise when you don’t have to limit yourself to only what nature has provided.

It makes more sense with restaurant reviews. The business environment is so intensely competitive that any restaurant actually deserving of 1-2 stars would be much more likely to eventually go out of business.

So, over a long enough period of time, you’d wind up with mostly 3-5 star places, with some exceptions existing for restaurants that can survive without the benefit of repeat customers. (tourist trap places, places operated as some kind of money laundering operation, etc)

Maybe, but we also got Reaganomics and the beginning of that cultural shift towards greed being good. I suppose you could make a case that we also had HW Bush, the last repub afaik to actually raise taxes on the wealthy, helping Clinton balance the budget in the 90s.

Also had the Satanic Panic, though that seems to come back around every so often no matter what.

You might be interested in trying a polyphasic sleep cycle. Instead of one big 8 hour sleep each day, you could try two 4 hour sleeps. So, you can have your middle of the night sleep, and maybe another one after you get home from work or eat dinner or something.

Supposedly polyphasic was pretty common prior to the industrial revolution. Nothing really wrong with it if your schedule can accommodate it.