....I should go buy some Jinro.
DefinitelyNotAPhone
joined 5 years ago
Isn't Lara Croft canonically lesbian?
Diamonds have a lot of practical value for jewelry because it's damn near impossible to damage them in everyday use, which can't be said for more brittle gemstones.
That said, synthetic diamonds will likely completely replace traditional ones except for people that want to reuse family heirlooms or something similar.
How would you mix up crepes and pancakes? Those are entirely different pastries-
looks up English pancakes
What the fucking hell is that? Can TERF island make a single variety of food that isn't either complete dogshit or a worse version of something they stole?
Someone once said that fear of AI is just white people being terrified of having someone do to them what they did to the rest of the world, and I think they might have hit that bullseye so hard the dartboard shattered.
The Ur Restoration, if you will.
If two-thirds of JRPGs didn't recycle the same peppy squad of teenagers, one token older guardian who's too old for this shit, one token fanservice character who'll spend half the game being yandere towards the literal cardboard cutout protagonist, one token hyper-cute walking stuffed animal companion whose voice was designed in a lab to make you want to rip your eardrums out via rusty spoon, and token evil-but-will-renounce-their-ways-through-the-power-of-friendship traitor then I might actually give a shit about the story. I'm all for narrative-driven games, just so long as the narrative isn't a recycled anime trope that should have been dead and buried 30 years ago.
Looking at you Fire Emblem. If you're going to try and sell me on a political drama about overthrowing the old system for a more egalitarian one, concentrate on that and not teenagers going "waaaahhh, I'm an introvert and I had to go out into the sun today! Why are there so many people around?! Why can't I just hide in my room?!?" for 30 hours straight.
It's to keep the space normal and non-horny so people (especially women, trans comrades, etc) don't feel weirded out and have sex pests in their DMs constantly. It evolved into a running gag, because that's the most effective way to make sure people actually stick to it in terminally online spaces.
The answer largely depends on the specific country/party; socialism is a scientific ideology, after all, and often experiments with new ideas or processes depending on the specific conditions of that country and its needs.
Generalizing though, the party is an ideological animal whereas the government/state is a practical one. The latter concentrates on day-to-day issues like infrastructure, education, the economy, etc while the former acts to guide the state towards the goals of socialism. As a practical example, the government may be working to expand light industry to create more luxury goods for its people while the party would be working to ensure the long-term benefits of such go to the working class and not get consolidated into the hands of a wealthy minority. Both the party and the state are tightly integrated to ensure that this isn't just a bunch of armchair Marxists reading theory and yelling at a government that largely ignores them, so you'll often find that party membership is essentially required to get into the state in the first place (though there are, contrary to popular belief, multiple parties within typical ML governments. China, North Korea, Cuba, etc all have multiple parties, just with a very dominant communist party, so there is some wiggle room here).
The confusion around long-lived leaders generally boils down to this separation of party and state: a populist figure like the Kims might start off as both head of state and head of party, but gradually shift duties more towards the latter until they completely abandon the head of state position. Since the party still has massive influence this means they still have quite a lot of sway, but they're not making the day-to-day decisions directly anymore.
The tendency towards long-term political figureheads comes down to a few root causes generally:
- The leader/figurehead is an extremely popular figure in that country, generally due to being a revolutionary hero, and thus is popular enough to remain in a high position of authority or prominence for most of their life. This is your Kim Il Sungs, Fidel Castros, Lenins, etc.
- The communist party within that country wants a sense of stability that having a long-term figurehead provides. I keep using leader and figurehead interchangeably here as quite often what happens is that powers and responsibilities shift downwards over time, so while the leader may remain the same they actually have less authority within the system than you would think at a glance. A combination of this and #1 is what has happened with the Kims in North Korea; Kim Jong Un is still head of the communist party but is not the leader of government, which is split between what is effectively a prime minister and a head of the legislature. Each successive Kim has held less and less power within the government.
The late stage Soviet system did have issues with this sort of thing, less so because those at the top were consolidating power and more because they weren't investing in the party and recruiting new blood into their ranks, which resulted in the same party members remaining in power for decades and contributed to the eventual collapse of the union later on as the common Soviet was less a devoted Marxist and more a person living within a Marxist society.
Man-made radio signals will degrade into unrecognizable, undetectable garbage within a lightyear or two just due to wave interference from all the other vastly more powerful radio emitters in the surrounding area. There is no Great Filter, it's just that any intelligent life in our immediate neighborhood would have no way of making it clear they're there (nor have any particular reason to want to, in all likelihood).
The Great Filter is my least favorite sci-fi flavored shower thought, mostly because it refuses to die in much the same way that Roko's Basilisk won't either.