The cost is less from the design and more from the safety regulations. Best case scenario the state just starts making nuclear power plants, it’s just not a good idea to mix profit incentive with nuclear.

Pretty hard to detect. But… probably easier than finding the petunias I guess.

There is an argument, but I don’t think it’s convincing. The single best way to cripple their most deadly foe (so far) is to be less evil and make everyone’s lives less shit. They could hamstring chaos by simply ceasing their eternal crusade and focusing on improving the average peon’s life. The Imperium as a state only exists because of a “well-intentioned” checks notes… galactic crusade of conquest and omnicide against any non-human. In pretty much any other media they are unambiguously the bad guys, having other bad guys to fight doesn’t change that. They are literally a characture of every evil space empire. We just get fed so much propaganda that it starts to work a little.

Allegedly.

Pineapple is so metal, fucking fruit that tries to eat you back.

I think I see the direction they wanted to go. Show that she’s still obsessed and starting to fray at the edges, but then give her a redemption when she realizes she doesn’t need a biological child when she has Ciri right there as a daughter. It’s just that every show like this seeks to have to be CW’ed these days. It’s a big reason why I had to drop Supernatural too. It worked really well for 5 seasons. But after that, the 3rd time the brothers fought about X and the 6th time they kept Y secret, I realized there was never going to be any development past this and had to step away. It’s exhausting.

It’s value is still great though because it costs nothing. Every time you draw it you may as well have just drew 3 cards, for absolutely nothing.

Exactly, it was (very relatively) cheap and quick. And they figured when, not if, it breaks, it will be again quick to repair. And it is interesting tech that could be useful down the line that they may figure is worth the cost in training alone.

They did show them sweeping through a horrificly deadly funnel defended by relatively well covered rebels and toasting them with no issues is the very first scene of the movie. The assault on the Tantove IV was basically suicide, and they still mopped up like it was Tuesday. The double reveal, by both Leia and Tarkin, is more than sufficient to make the point, instead of a hamfisted scene earlier of Vader giving them orders not to kill and eliminating all the tension from the escape.

Lol, no, that stuff was catching on at least 15 years ago, and was a massive meme before the pandemic. The “what are you doing step bro,” meme is from 2018, and the industry had already gone hard in that direction for a while before that.

Not to mention it wasn’t really “the church” as much as one egotistical asshat in the church that had beef with Galileo and more or less made up a reason to persecute him. And when more level headed parts of the church told Galileo to chill and he’d be fine he just doubled down and thumbed his nose at the pope. It was never really about the science at all, he was being funded by the church to do his research in the first place.

The setup is the same as another joke, where the second person asks for H2O too, which the bartender parses as H2O2, and gets served poison.

It’s one power the ring posses. I think Galadriel implied that, with training, Frodo would be able to turn that automatic function off, and access more powers. But the process of learning to use it would inherently corrupt whoever attempted it. I always took it to mean that the ring gathered power from the Unseen world, and so someone with no presence there and without the ability to manipulate it would be inherently dragged in, but it’s not a core aspect or intended design, and nullifying that would not be a hindrance to using it. It’s just a bug turned feature for folks that want to remain unseen.

The Istari were conceived because the last time Maiar went to war a continent sank. They have their memories altered in order to greatly weaken them and prevent that kind of power from being thrown around. Their mandate is to do exactly as you say, get the kids to get themselves straightened out, but they very specifically are not powerful enough to do it on their own, by design.

Gandalf’s danger didn’t come from raw power though. Olorin was considered the mightiest Maia they could send, but Olorin’s power was greatly diminished when he became Gandalf. The danger Gandalf presented was due to his ability to inspire and organize the mortal races, not in his prowess or main force.

Well, Istari were not full power Maiar, that was kind of the point. Honestly, there may have been some elves from earlier ages that were stronger than some of the wizards.

It helps that when one uses them on their own land, they are more likely to carefully track where they were used and can conduct cleanup operations when feasible.

There are already places that use IRV in the US and there has never been a significant issue with this. IRV is certainly better than what we have, but for my money, I think STAR is the way to go, there’s still issues with strategic voting in IRV with situations that make good-faith votes hurt the voter, but it’s still a lot better than the circus we have now.

Yes, the energy of the explosion is a function of the total energy between the output of the laser and the shield, specifically the shield energy being pointed at the laser origin. That’s why they randomly hid some maximum powered, monodirectional shields facing up when they fled the attack. So that even the relatively weak personal shields would still have a large impact. In general use, the shield energy is being projected in all directions, so the amount facing the laser origin is very small. IIRC, an average powered lasgun hitting a personal shield creates an explosion that can range between roughly an HE hand grenade and an HE naval shell. They only went up like nukes because the Harkonen were using the lasguns at max energy, and the shields were tweaked abnormally. And as another comment says, the actual point of the explosion is at a random point along the beam.

This isn’t the same. Host nukes is not owning nukes, they seems to be proposing housing US nukes that Poland would not have control of, or be able to launch. With no launch codes, they aren’t a valid deterrent to conventional war, unless the world is convinced the US would use them to protect Polish sovereignty, which would obviously not be on the table.