DefinitelyNotAPhone

I'm fully willing to go stand against a wall if it means all the tech bro bazinga brains around me at work like OOP have to too.

How did a 4-month old tell you she was colorblind, and can you stand against this wall for a moment and count down from 10?

Time doesn't slow down when you approach the speed of light

Correct, but only from your perspective. To other people you've slowed down, but from where you're sitting (or careening through the cosmos at the universal speed limit) everything happens just as fast as it normally does.

the theory we're using to describe much of the universe is based on a bad premise, that the speed of light is constant.

Quasi-correct. "The speed of light" as we think of it in physics is actually the speed of information, which dictates how quickly changes can propagate outwards (or put another way: how quickly you can know about something happening elsewhere). We refer to it as the speed of light because photons move at that speed in a vacuum due to having no mass and thus moving at the fastest possible speed, but things like gravitational waves also propagate at that same speed and have nothing to do with EM radiation. However, the speed of information doesn't change; it's a hard natural law with no known exceptions.

Physics in general is cheating for this thread though, because the answer to what makes stuff happen as we understand it is a giant metaphorical mass of "I 'unno." The Standard Model, relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, etc all have giant gaping holes in them that other models can often fill, but cannot be properly combined in any way that we've tried so far. They're still correct enough to base your entire life around without any worries, but there's always that last 0.01% that amounts to the margins of old maps reading "Here There Be Dragons".

I'm not sure how someone can look at the mask-off cryptofascism of the American political system at this point and convince themselves that voting blue over red makes the tiniest bit of difference. The mountains of corpses both parties routinely inflict on the world at large makes any tiny delineation in rhetoric (and it is just rhetoric, because anyone with eyes knows the national level Democrats aren't doing shit about fuck even on culture war issues that they've fundraised off of for three decades, let alone any of the systemic evil and rot leaving billions in destitution) so fucking irrelevant that it's honestly a joke someone could even bother to try and shame people into casting votes that statistically would never influence the outcome of an election even if it was a fair and democratic process.

I have to imagine this gets shut down hard. Capital is hardly going to get rid of the enforcement arm of the state that protects their investments and ensures ground rules for trading capital... right? It's not that self-destructive?

Because Stormtroopers are functionally heavily militarized colonial police more focused on enforcing a terror regime than fighting against peer militaries, and the Rebels are more or less the singular exception. Same reason that wearing typical riot body armor IRL is unlikely to keep you from getting fucked up if someone's shooting .308 at you.

As much of Scott's character arc the movie had to skip over, they pretty much gutted Ramona's entire arc in service of keeping the runtime manageable. A large part of the point of the comics is that they're both terrible people with a trail of ruined lives behind them and they both have to become better for themselves, each other, and everyone else.

Anyone who's spent more than twenty minutes in corporate America knows it was feudalism all along. Half my job is just keeping a handful of senior managers vaguely happy lest their endless infighting spillover into my life like a bunch of feuding lords burning down a peasant's farm for being in the way of their glorious battlefield.

I refuse to take the side of lizards that also have mammary glands, no matter how many threads about the Hist you write!

You need to either go see a doctor or share what supplements you're on.

At least Phantom Menace was trying to do something original and coherent. It's a shit execution, but there's a story in there that doesn't suck.