The term is a bit confusing to me as we use “black” for working in the informal economy.

You’d think by now Jean-Luc Picard would be a well known example and systems are able to deal with it.

Yeah, this is his daughter

“We call her Carrie, because of the carriage return.”

You can also try to give the child NULL as middle name for additional fun.

A patriarchal religion is going to put a male figure in charge of course.

In church I’ve been saying in the name of the father and the son, not mother and daughter, so that’s an easy assumption to make.

(about $4,000)

Usually civilian targets are avoided because it galvanizes the population’s opinion to pro war but in Russia’s case it doesn’t seem to matter much anymore.

but this is really about predicting what trump will do

Trump plays pigeon chess — it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.

It’s football. Attacking civilians because they wave around the wrong flag, or just wearing the wrong color of t-shirt or scarf is reason enough for a beating.

That’s probably the perception. Democrats have been in power for 4 years, things didn’t get better for a lot of people and then they say to vote for them for more of the same. Surprisingly that doesn’t help with voter enthusiasm. They’ll have more chance next time with messaging things won’t get worse with them after Trump mishandled stuff.

Simple, good-sounding things they want to hear is what wins elections these days.

Alright, what are the best options for blocking mentions of Trump? Last term there was so much noise from that guy or about him.

“But he tells it like it is!” they say.

Then you listen Trump giving s speech and telling 4 outright lies in the first 3 rambling sentences.

USA is a country with a lot of inequality, if not rising inequality, so a fertile breeding ground for populists. And it has an ancient voting system that always gives a two party system so perfect for this kind of polarisation. The system with campaign contributions will also make sure nothing changes about inequality and is making things worse. Yeah, it’ll happen again.

Sounds like the perfect excuse to subject any vehicle coming from a country that deals with Russia (cough China) to some additional time consuming bomb checks. They can’t say it’s tarrifs or unappropriate as there is a legitimate threat made.

It’s a bit of a shock after years of hearing that this thing will happen in the future, to realize that the future has arrived and it’s within our lifetime. Kinda how you look back and suddenly realize that your favorite movie is now closer to world war 2 than it is to present time, but it still feels like last year.

A consequence of Ceaușescu’s natalist policy is that large numbers of children ended up living in orphanages, because their parents could not cope with looking after them. The vast majority of children who lived in the state-run orphanages were not actually orphans, like the name implies, but simply children whose parents could not afford or did not want to look after them.

So it often comes back to the economics of the situation. Kids used to make money, helping on the farm and stuff. Now kids cost a lot of money and paying women a substantial amount (and not the pizza party amounts) to have children is deemed economically nonviable.

The weather services did see this coming and were giving red alerts. Local governments were like “nah, it’ll be fine.” It’s straight out the movies with the classic “we don’t want to cause any panic in case the scientists are wrong.” It’s especially damning after the exact same ignoring red alerts already happened in Germany and Belgium.

At this stage, it’s ignoring reality. Yeah, preparing and being ready for this kind of catastrophes is expensive but rebuilding everything isn’t cheaper. It’s why experts already said that in the end it’s cheaper to prevent climate change than dealing with the consequences.

It’s more about good writing. It’s often said you’re allowed to have one cheat. You have to be consistent about it and the rest of the rules of the universe still apply. But often enough in fiction the writers start breaking any rule or law of physics when the plot requires it instead of fixing the plot to follow consistent world building. It’s lazy writing and bad for immersion. A lot of the tension in a story is from the characters overcoming limitations, not having limitations disappear whenever convenient.