You have a super majority in all branches of government

Oh, even the SCOTUS? Cool, that means I don’t have to do step 1: immediately impeach and remove all members of the Supreme Court who did not dissent with the ruling that the President is immune from prosecution.

So I can move on to the rest of the list:

• Instruct my Attorney General to bring a case before the current SCOTUS which would allow them to overturn Citizens United. Encourage them to hear and deliberate on no other cases before that case is decided.

• Have respected lawmakers introduce several pieces of critical legislation which I insist upon seeing on my desk before I see any others:

  • first, a bill which would establish term limits for all members of the federal Judiciary not to exceed 19 years (preferably closer to 13 years), and which would further institute a binding code of conduct for members of the Supreme Court and the federal Judiciary that detail their requirement to maintain impartiality, qualifications for appointment and approval, transparency obligations, and circumstances under which they should be removed from office;

  • second, a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College (I’m really hoping that my supermajority in all branches of government extends to the state level, too). If such an amendment seems unlikely to be ratified, I will have this lawmaker instead introduce a bill that would require the members of the Electoral College to assign their votes in accordance with the outcome of the national popular vote, independent of the decision of their state. Both the amendment and the bill should include a clause requiring all elections with more than one valid candidate be conducted via ranked choice vote;

  • third, a bill which would increase the maximum number of constituents per member of the House of Representatives to 250,000 (this would effectively triple the size of the House), establish a minimum of three senators for each state with a fourth apportioned to the 25 largest states, and apportion full voting members of the House and Senate under these rules to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico;

  • fourth, a bill which would immediately re-establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and establish its budget as significantly higher than it has ever been before. This bill would also remove all news sources (television news, online news, newspapers, etc) from private ownership and establish them instead as independent nonprofit organizations funded by the CPB;

  • fifth, a bill which would penalize the President of the United States with expulsion from office if they withhold or otherwise interfere with funds, agencies, and directives duly passed by Congress, and which would further re-establish any such agencies which have been eliminated since the beginning of 2025;

  • sixth, a bill which would penalize the President of the United States with expulsion from office and immediate felony charges of federal election interference if, for more than six months of their term, there are not enough commissioners sitting on the Federal Election Commission (or nominated to the Senate for consideration) for the commission to have a quorum to operate;

  • seventh, a bill which would establish a statute stripping all unused funds from every political party at the conclusion of every election. Those funds would be treated as tax revenue and appropriated for to fund the Federal Election Commission.

Now that the Legislative Branch has enough to keep them busy, I have some executive work to do.

• Expand the FEC and increase their mandate to include nonpartisan reviews of electoral maps. This might seem less important after the abolition of the Electoral College, but actually I think it’s still critical for local representation.

• Re-appoint Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, if she’s interested. Expand and broaden its powers to seek injunctive, equitable, and punitive relief where appropriate in the pursuit of consumer protections.

• Instruct my Federal Communications Commission to institute Net Neutrality common carrier laws for broadband providers, and further extend those rules to cover social media platforms as well. Also instruct them to assist a member of the Legislature in drafting strong laws that would enshrine those protections into law, once the six critical bills have been passed.

• Instruct my Attorney General to investigate, build a case against, and if necessary prosecute all members and associates of both Trump administrations who participated in any illegal activity; and to take Trump himself into custody immediately, pending trial; as he is clearly a flight risk. I would further instruct them to ignore the Supreme Court’s ruling of presidential immunity, as well as any pardons that he issued to himself, as necessarily invalid. Assuming he is convicted, I would further instruct my Attorney General to argue that pardons issued by Trump were in the pursuit of his criminal activity and are thus also nullified.

• Request that the House and Senate codify and harden their response to purveyors of armed insurrection under the 14th Amendment.

I think that’s everything I’d need to do to fix the problems that Trump and the GOP have created or exploited. There are probably other loopholes that need to be closed, and I’d want to take care of those as well. Basically, I want to eliminate a lot of executive power, and I want to codify norms and rules into actual laws wherever possible.

Now that the cleanup is done, I can actually get into some serious business, like…

• getting UBI passed;
• getting Medicare For All passed;
• getting us exploring space again;
• getting the FTC and FCC working together to regulate AI;
• getting the FBI to work classifying and investigating the NRA as a domestic terror group;
• establishing Congressional term limits not to exceed the average life expectancy in the United States minus ten years.

I’ve thought about this a lot.

There’s an artist online who made transit maps of Middle-earth. This would fit in well.

And it has to be exactly the way I want it, which is something even I can’t manage, so there’s that too

The problem with banning weapons basically boils down to “weapons already exist.”

Bad actors have them and will not give them up voluntarily. It’s very simple to say “they should be banned,” but short of Star Trek-level scanner technology, it’s impossible to find all of them. If everyone else gives them up, then the bad actors essentially run the show.

If we were somehow able to ban and dispose of all existing weapons, another problem presents itself: namely, weapons can be created or improvised from other items. 3D printers can make guns (yes, really), knives are a standard and critical kitchen tool, baseball bats are recreational equipment, even pencils have been used as deadly weapons. “Banning weapons” requires banning essentially anything heavier or sharper than a balloon; and even then, you could suffocate someone with it.

Imagining that we were somehow able to do away with all things that could be weapons, as well, we are faced with a third problem: that during the time that we’re making this change, law-abiding countries and citizens will be disarmed, while criminal elements will retain their weapons.

Conservatives and gun nuts (particularly in the US) deploy this weapon on an individual level (“when guns are criminal, only criminals will have guns”), but it’s much more salient on a governmental level: to wit, when you are invaded by another country, you’re going to have to have your own weapons to counter theirs. And the promise of police (while debatably realized) is that they wield weapons to protect unarmed individuals from violence carried out by criminals with weapons.

Some people on Reddit were talking about how only dictators would want to disarm people.

They’re wrong that only dictators want to disarm people, but they are right that dictators have a vested interest in banning weapons. A resistance is a lot harder to put down when that resistance is armed.

The reality, though, is that this particular talking point was encouraged by the American NRA (National Rifle Association), which masquerades as an organization for firearm owners and users but is actually a professional organization of firearm manufacturers. It has spread to other countries from there.

I believe weapons should be banned

Should be? Yes. Can be, safely? Good question.

and that crime should not exist in the first place.

Everyone thinks that. That’s why we call it “crime.” It’s named that because it’s stuff we don’t want to happen, so we get together and assign a penalty to everything we don’t like and call them “laws.”

Okay, everything above is not my opinion, but reality. That’s the state of the world, and the logical outworking of the state of the world. What follows is my opinion. As you may be able to tell, I am a U.S. citizen, so my answer is based largely around that context.

We have to significantly ban and restrict and curtail weapons: sale, possession, and use. Dramatically. Especially firearms. Particularly especially military-grade weapons.

It should be essentially impossible for private citizens to own firearms, and those who are allowed to own them must provide a valid reason (“collecting” working, non-historical weapons is not a valid reason) and be subject to a background check, registration, psychological evaluation, extensive training, and mandatory safe storage requirements. They should be required to join and maintain good standing in their local National Guard or other defense organization. Individuals who currently own firearms and are unwilling or unable to comply with the new regulations must surrender their weapons or face imprisonment for the sake of public safety.

In line with that, ordinary police and private security firms should not be permitted to carry weapons more deadly than a nightstick and pepper spray; with more psychological evaluation and extensive training, perhaps a taser. Firearms should be exclusively allotted for specific use cases, such as animal deterrence in communities near wilderness areas, and perhaps SWAT teams. Qualified immunity should be abolished, and every person killed or injured by a police officer’s weapon should result in immediate suspension of the officer, pending an external audit and investigation.

All weapons and ammunition used by any private citizen, police officer, private security employee, or military personnel should be subject to strict check in/check out regulations, and should include a valid reason for checkout associated with specific training activities or a specific, single incident requiring their issue. Government employees (members of law enforcement and the military) and private security employees should be subject to mandatory bodycam activation (with the footage declassified) any time weapons are checked out.

That is what can be done now, safely, without unduly endangering individuals. We know that it can be done, now, safely, because many other countries have done it.

I desperately want to have finished my book, more like

The plan is to cast everyone aside to die once their capital has been extracted. The ones who survive must still have some capital left to extract.

This is a tiny truckload, but a pleasant one

Not OP, and I can’t relate to the part where he’s incredibly jacked, but the expression of “why does this suck so bad” as the food is falling out of his hands definitely fits the bill.

If it supports your use case, sure. But splitting down the Pacific doesn’t distort China and the rest of East Asia nearly as much as splitting down the Atlantic distorts South America and Africa, because Asia is much further from any reasonable dividing line than South America is.

And splitting through mainland Europe and Africa would only compound the problem, since it would put all of that distortion right down the middle of two very populous continents. If you’re in a use case where a distortion that big is immaterial, it probably doesn’t matter much where you split the map; you can probably just center the map over whichever country or region you’re trying to focus the map on, and not even bother showing the other hemisphere.

It’s such a highly processed video, it honestly might be nothing. Just signal noise digitally amplified over multiple successive image enlargement loops.

If not, it also could be some kind of hi-vis material. The explosion appears to have been far more concussive than combustive, so it doesn’t seem to have burned stuff so much as it broke everything apart and flung it around.

Oh, well I don’t even know why I would need an explanation, I’m convinced.

Fell For It Again award

I don’t think it’s particularly debatable that more people live in Europe and Africa and South America (the most notably distorted landmasses in the Pacific-centered map) than in Alaska, Eastern Russia, and the few Pacific isles that aren’t tucked right in next to Continental Asia and Australia. The most populous nation negatively affected by a Pacific split is probably New Zealand, and that only represents about five million people. The most populous nation negatively affected by an Atlantic split is probably Brazil, with over forty times as many people.

I think putting the line down the Pacific makes the most sense in most cases. But the national narcissism has historically been a defining characteristic of the UK and the US

I don’t think it’s that difficult to decide. There’s a lot more room between San Jose, California and Hokkaido, Japan than between Natal, Brazil and Dakar, Senegal; cutting through the Pacific makes the most sense for most applications, I think. Sure, the Bering Strait is pretty tiny, but if you break in the Atlantic you’re going to get a lot of distortion in Greenland (hasn’t it had enough?), mainland Europe, and Brazil.

Yes, but the maps we’re more used to split in the middle of the Pacific, far from all land, more or less at Point Nemo. That minimizes the visual distortion since the land is further from the edges of the map.

Splitting through the Atlantic makes it trickier, because the ocean is significantly narrower, meaning that the land masses are all closer to the edges.

Positioning the map with North at the top is truly arbitrary, but splitting the map in the Pacific actually makes a lot of sense from a usability perspective.

Well, specifically a couple of countries on either side of the Atlantic.

It’s not effective. Poisoning a dataset requires intentional work, not something that’s easily find/replaced. The linked article goes into more detail on that.

He also thinks he’s smart, attractive, beloved by all Americans, and good at golf. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and just thinks that’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s never occurred to him that he might not deserve anything he wants, from companies to political victories to sexual conquests to accolades.

Potentially true, but that just makes the idea of a notification less likely.