Foundation is not a faithful adaptation of the books, but the show is at least internally consistent.
Based on OP’s description, it seems like there are a few things that viewers of the Dune series will have to suspend their disbelief on, or else it may fail to meet logical consistency with the newer movies.
I thought Prometheus was neat. Far from perfect but the premise was solid and I was interested in the direction it was going. It’s more of a shame that Alien Covenant kept all of the bad parts and kept very little of the good.
The only thing is that there’s not really a vehicle for the fed to implement those bans. For all the weaknesses in the US constitution, freedom of speech is a historically tough nut for the government to crack. Not that they haven’t tried, but they have almost no control over what media is and is not allowed to be published publicly.
What is working is when states get to decide what material to provide in schools. That includes required curriculum and what books they will buy and offer in classrooms and libraries. So the state can teach (or not teach) whatever they want within the confines of their own schools, but there’s nothing they could do if, say, someone was to set up shop on the sidewalk across the street and hand out free copies of Gender Queer to any students who walk by. Nor could the fed, as it stands.
So we’ve led our horses to water, but how do we make them drink? How do you convince the students to want to pick up that book and read it for fun, and how can you help them understand what it all means when the critical reading skills for queer literature are not being taught?
I’m not expecting much to be banned or censored, per se, but I can see more GOP-controlled states removing a lot of LGBT books and other media from schools.
In general, education in the US is left to the states, which means I’d mainly just expect a continuation of the trend we’ve been seeing for a few years now in places like Florida and Tennessee of removing queer books from schools.
From the federal perspective, I’d also anticipate the possibility of FAFSA being gutted and making higher ed inaccessible to more students. If this sort of content is not covered in public schools, there will be fewer opportunities to study queer literature later on. And even then, state universities in red states are subject to the same restrictions as their public schools, so those students may be SOL unless they have the means to study out of state.
The main problem is: even if the material remains pretty freely available outside of schools, how do you make the people who would benefit from it the most feel driven to seek it out independently?
I hope so. Less cost to the taxpayer, and the high calorie and sodium count will send Trump to an early grave.
Jerboa does not
There are valid uses for AI. It is much better at pattern recognition than people. Apply that to healthcare and it could be a paradigm shift in early diagnosis of conditions that doctors wouldn’t think to look for until more noticeable symptoms occur.
Since the economy/inflation are already on a rebound trajectory after the pandemic, he’ll likely have a better economy at the start of his presidency than Biden, which will be credited to Trump’s “day 1 dictator” policies.
If the economy declines further in the latter half of his presidency, once all of the tariffs are more widely felt and income inequality continues to worsen, that decline will be attributed to a probable loss of the Republicans’ Senate or House majorities (or both) come 2026.
And if you read that and come to the realization “Don’t you mean in 2027, when the newly-elected folks actually begin their terms?” Just consider how much of the US’ poorly-planned pandemic response in 2020 was attributed to Biden…before he took office in 2021.
deleted by creator
Implement a keyword filter and I’m in.
I was advocating for the $15 minimum wage back in 2010 when I was barely earning $9 in retail, as even then $15/hr was considered the bare minimum needed to avoid poverty.
I’d say we should be pushing for $25 now given how much the value of a dollar has changed between then and today. But then by the time the state finally implements that in 10-20 years, we’ll probably need to be at $30 or more to just break even with inflation.
And modern Americans are doing their damnedest to make the polio one true again as well.
Will also add, not sure how big of a difference it makes, but the data in that article also captures the window of time when Mass implemented its millionaire tax. There was a lot of blustering from the 1% about moving out of state and taking the jobs with them; I doubt the last part but wouldn’t be surprised if a good chunk ended up leaving for elsewhere to avoid paying.
Also worth looking at how the transition to remote work is a contributing factor. Since the pandemic, it’s no longer necessary for a lot of people who used to work in Boston to live around Boston, and so they can keep their high-paying jobs while moving to more affordable surrounding states (or even other parts of the country). That is definitely middle-upper class migration and it affected regions with high percentages of pre-pandemic office jobs the most, which applies significantly to Boston.
That being said, I know anecdotally many members of my generation here in Mass (80’s-90’s Millennials) still live with their parents well into their 30’s, and those who did not have that as an option often resorted to moving out of state. Rent remains high and property is even higher, so it’s a waiting game to see if/when this bubble pops. Mass also happens to be close to the bottom in the US in fertility rate (which is not an inherently terrible thing) but speaks to the difficulty of starting a family here.
I guess the medical care is just so good here that the old people aren’t dying off fast enough!
Don’t forget about the intentional lack of people of color in this image!
I just have to continue reminding myself that people somehow continued to live happy, fulfilling lives during the fall of the Roman Empire.
Is your refrigerator running?
Yes?
Then you’d better go catch it!
Shit fuck there it goes.
No arguments from me, that’s why I don’t want to live anywhere else.
It does sting a bit to be stuck living with high rent in an apartment when my income would allow me to buy a decent house in another part of the country. But then I likely wouldn’t have this income in other parts of the country, either.
When I moved back to the US from China, I immediately had health insurance thanks to Masshealth. Helped me have peace of mind while I was searching for a job back here. And now I get to work for an organization that helps other people land on their feet when big life changes happen, which is easier to do here than elsewhere.
Sadly Mass is also close to #1 in terms of cost of living.
I like it here but I don’t like what it costs.
Dragonball
I mean what I said. You can preserve content and make it as accessible as you want, and I don’t think there will be much resistance from the government in doing so. But that doesn’t solve the bigger issue of states having the authority to say “We don’t want to teach this content in our school systems.” How do you address that?
Even if the content is free and accessible outside of the classroom, what makes a student want to pick up a book on their own? Fewer US students today read for fun than they used to. And if their classes do not provide the critical reading skills to sufficiently understand the content of a given text, how much can they appreciate it?
One could suggest establishing a national curriculum that could realign these renegade states. But in the current political climate, that would be more likely used to make the problem worse, leading to bans on a national scale.
Private schools are not beholden to government entities when it comes to content they do/do not include in their curriculum. But I can promise the solution is not to privatize school systems en masse, which would be disastrous for a number of reasons.
So instead of focusing on preserving the content that is being taken out of classrooms, which isn’t otherwise going anywhere, why not focus more on meeting students where they are? Ensure that LGBT+ representation continues to exist in other forms of media that they consume. Normalize being queer in all spaces, not just the classroom. Provide support and social services for queer youth. Eventually people will come to realize that these identity politics are a waste of time and leading to worse outcomes in conservative states. Reformed curricula will follow.