If they were only selfish, but smart, they wouldn't be voting for politicians whose demonstrated aim is to reduce their constituents' wealth and funnel it into a class of people which their constituents have zero chance of ever joining.

No, they're dumb. They're certainly also selfish, but that's because they're dumb and can't comprehend the value of helping someone else, because the feedback loop on that mechanism has more than one step before they receive value back, and because the value received is most often in intangibles.

Never heard of her, her irrelevant song, "attacks" on her, or anything that would make her stand out from the rest of the toiletpaperUSA bumblefucks, but I'm glad that you find it profound that some random person on the internet who paid money to an ethno-nationalist illegal immigrant for a blue checkmark thinks that there's a connection between criticism of a random bigot and music sales! It's VERY interesting to keep track of random "records" that require no less than three qualifying statements! Do you have any fun facts about the most decorated member of the US Armed Forces who is also a woman, and for whom none of those decorations are the Purple Heart? Or perhaps do you keep track of the male athlete who has won the most national titles, but never scored a point in any of the title games? I think we would all be interested in this random person's unfounded root-cause analysis of those peoples' achievements to precisely the same degree as we are interested in this random claim about the causes of popularity for "the longest-running, non-holiday #1 song by a female artist in billboard's hot 100 history (since 1955)"

After looking it up, even that "longest-running" wording is bullshit, because they were nonconsecutive weeks. If the Simpsons were cancelled, then brought back after a season, it wouldn't hold the record that it does.

What a sad joke.

The problem is that the theory of supply and demand requires the assumption that buyers and sellers are rational actors, and if there's one thing the last 25 years has taught the corpocrats, it's that humans are not rational, and are easily manipulated.

The other thing they learned is that, if you don't want to face regulation, you just need to buy the government. They already knew this, but now the process is perfected.

To give additional options, because Stephenson and Sanderson aren't everyone's cups of tea (producing insanely large tomes like Reamde, Cryptonomicon, and the Way of Kings), you may also consider the following, which are either hard scifi (requires few, if any, scientific discoveries we currently lack), speculative SciFi (requires one or two unexplained leaps of scientific advancement, but thoroughly explores the mechanics and consequences thereof), or speculative fantasy (any magic system is internally consistent, operates in particular ways, and the interactions between them are explored)

1. Adrian Tchaikovsky, creator of the most - realistic alien species in literature: Children of Time Series (Spec. SciFi (but only barely), Tyrant Philosophers Series (Spec. Fantasy), and an insane number of standalone stories among the three genres listed above, such as Alien Clay, Shroud, and And Put Away Childish Things
2. Dennis E. Taylor, for those with crippling reference-itis and enough of a science background to want the author to regularly presume the reader's knowledge of plate tectonics and special relativity: Bobiverse Series (Spec. SciFi, but only because of "subspace" and optoelectronics), Outland Series (Spec. SciFi, because the portal's function is never explained)
3. Andy Weir, who makes every book a high-school science class (in the best way) with a plot: The Martian & Project Hail Mary (Both Hard SciFi, and I'll fight anyone who tries to claim that the astrophage makes PHM speculative), also, several short stories, including The Egg (Spec. Fantasy) and James Moriarty, Consulting Criminal (Historical Fiction/Mystery)
4. David Mitchell, who is like if James Michener wrote historical fantasy: Cloud Atlas (Historical/Speculative Fiction), The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, the Bone Clocks, & Utopia Avenue (all Historical Fiction with Minor Fantasy Elements)

If you want something more in line with YA, but with hard magic systems, consider "The Will of The Many", by James Islington, or "Sufficiently Advanced Magic" by Andrew Rowe.

Oh no not the shitty country that attacks me and my people daily!

This is what I was asking about. It sounds like you were saying that you were in one of the various countries this country bombs or otherwise attacks on a daily basis.

And those 18 weeks weren't even consecutive. No "longest running" title if there's a break in the middle.

For the uninitiated: this is the current most-efficient method found of packing 17 unit squares inside another square. You may not like it, but this is what peak efficiency looks like.

(Of course, 16 squares has a packing coefficient of 4, compared to this arrangement's 4.675, so this is just what peak efficiency looks like for 17 squares)

Edit: For the record, since this blew up, a tiny nitpick in my own explanation above: a smaller value of the packing coefficient is not actually what makes it more efficient (as it is simply the ratio of the larger square's side to the sides of the smaller squares). The optimal efficiency (zero interstitial space) is achieved when the packing coefficient is precisely equal to the square root of the number of smaller squares. Hence why the case of n=25, with a packing coefficient of 5, is actually more efficient than this packing of n=17, with a packing coefficient of 4.675. Since sqrt(25)=5, that case is a perfectly efficient packing, equal to the case of n=16 with coefficient of 4. Since sqrt(17)=4.123, this packing above is not perfectly efficient, leaving interstices. Obviously. This also means that we may yet find a packing for n=17 with a packing coefficient closer to sqrt(17), which would be an interesting breakthrough, but more important are the questions "is it possible to prove that a given packing is the most efficient possible packing for that value of n" and "does there exist a general rule which produces the most efficient possible packing for any given value of n unit squares?"

If this were real, one of the kids who admits they have no idea what they're doing would have already, quite confidently, stolen a pair of scissors from god knows where, cut out every single square, then arranged them in numerical order. Only THEN would they admit to not knowing wtf they're doing.

Also, D even gets the entire bay of Naples, in addition to the cuisines of 3-4 billion people. Anyone who wants anything from A can get anything from there in Oceania.

D is so OP, I cannot imagine anyone picking anything else unless they are basing their choice on where they live.

Technically, the legal term is Exile, IIRC. But doing that without the backing of legality is also what you said.

This belongs in uplifting news

c is a measurable constant, not some unit that is arbitrarily defined. Like Boltzmann's Constant, or the ground state hyperfine transition frequency of the Cesium-133 atom... it just... Is.

Therefore, it is a useful tool to define units. You claim it is a tautology because we write it in units of meters per second, while the meter is defined based on c. This is easily disproven, as you can represent the speed of light in any unit of velocity. It is a fundamental constant, derivable through experiment without any units a priori.

You can always trust SatansMaggotyCumFart to chime in with the wholesome memes.

Precisely. That's why I wrote the parenthetical about the greater efficiency of 16 as a perfect square. As the other commenter pointed out, this is a meme. This is only the most efficient packing method for 17 squares. It's the packing efficiency equivalent of the spinal tap "this one goes to 11" quote.

"Wish granted. Electrons, being a human construct, have now always been defined slightly differently. Just as Franklin got the polarity wrong and you still use his labeling system, J.J. Thompson will now have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the electron, leading to a cascading assumption by later scientists that the number of electrons in a neutral atom is one greater than the number of protons. Even though this completely breaks the math of quantum mechanics, everyone is just used to subtracting one at this point. This is a minutely worse world, but as a bonus, every physicist who sees you will now be preternaturally certain that you are personally to blame. You're welcome."

Well, since the only myths we are given are not from her perspective, but her enemies', we can't say for sure, but consider:

You are a faithful priestess of Athena on a remote island. One day, the literal God of the Sea and Tempestuous Rage decides to walk into Athena's Temple and brutally rape you. Athena, the goddess you have so faithfully served, but who refused to protect her own priestess in her own temple from her own uncle, takes some serious offense at the sacrilege of her priestess being raped in her temple, and the Goddess of Wisdom decides that the only appropriate action is to punish the priestess by cursing you to never be able to be in the company of anyone ever again, and to add insult to injury and betrayal, you've been turned into a monster. Now, you have just been raped, cursed and transformed, and so you run away to an island. Now, when random men start coming to your island to "slay the vile monster", what do YOU do? The last time a man came to your island, he raped you and literally ended your existence as a human being, and the clear and stated intention of these men is to kill you. So yeah, you probably don't feel too bad about some dick-waving "heroes" getting turned to stone.

And when that one guy inevitably comes along with the help of Athena and chops off your head? Turns out that not only were you pregnant the whole time from the rape, but your children are born from the gushing wound from your beheading and are a flying horse and a giant.

Oh yeah, your head? Athena was so proud of herself for all of this shit that she made your severed, tortured death mask her personal symbol and stuck it to her fucking armor to intimidate her enemies.

Religious zealots are not exactly known for their reading comprehension when it comes to their holy texts.

Though let us consider the ch-ch-ch-ch-changes that would actually be necessary for each of these to exercise real choice in the matter at hand:

The Public: Die, because that is the only thing that doesn't actively destroy the biosphere, because you have no actual meaningful control over anything

Farmers: Change professions, likely losing everything (at which point they become "The Public"), because you can't even control what seeds you buy (See: Agricorps), let alone anything else you do with the land, and it's all a monopsony, anyway (See: Agricorps) so you can't even choose who buys your crops or for how much you sell them.

Government: Literally the only thing required here is to take a long view and invest in infrastructure that also has huge short-term benefits. Realistically, the actual reason is because the politicians get money from the corpocrats (See: Agricorps), and don't want to not get money from the corpocrats.

Agricorps: It is explicitly against their fiduciary duty to tank the value of long-term investment in their own business by making the planet uninhabitable. The only change required is to actually hold to fiduciary duty, rather than "number go up, STONKS".

Huh, it's almost as if there are very specific problems that can be traced to a single, specific spiderman here... interesting.

What would be better is if, when people were being kidnapped by these brownshirts-at-home, the bystanders started beating these kidnappers to a bloody, gelatinous pulp. That way, the street sweepers could come and gently push their mouldering viscera where they belong: the gutter.

Remember: there is no evidence that these people have the force of law behind them. Citizens should not allow others to be kidnapped in broad daylight.

Did you know that Mormons are actually preferentially given security clearances, since the United States Constitution is one of the foundational documents of their faith? Do you realize how many people with positions near nuclear sites, NSA datacenters, and CIA operations these bumblefucks are aggravating?