the space race may be the funniest point in history period and i’ll stand by that. the US is like “yes whoever gets into space first will prove once and for all that our economic model is superior and that we are, in general, the superior country of superior and smarter people.” then the soviets just went and did it and the US freaked out and needed to cover their ass so were like “WE MEAN THE MOON, WE MEAN THE FIRST TO LAND ON THE MOON.”
yeah its cus walking on the moon was cool as hell and all this other boring shit sucked ass
When I was a freshman in a red-state college, I had a professor who taught Newtonian physics with a super thick Russian accent. The student body was unusually conservative for a state college, so there was a sort of general bemusement about learning physics from a Russian, but even back then the Cold War was far enough in the past that not even the red tribe was inclined to stir up trouble about it.
He was aware enough of this to get off on trolling the class, though. Whenever some force diagram in a homework assignment needed to be weightless, instead of being some generic spacecraft it would be “Mir” specifically. And he’d always use ‘cosmonaut’ instead of ‘astronaut’, that kind of thing.
One day about halfway through the semester, he’s doing this with in-class examples on the board, and one of the students finally gets up the guts to troll back a little. So this kid shouts from the back of the auditorium, “Hey professor, what’s the difference between a cosmonaut and an astronaut?”
And this beautiful man spins around on one heel to face the class, whiteboard marker triumphantly over his head, clearly having been waiting for this moment the entire semester:
Finland explained himself in the comic, but in 2010 Denmark started giving heroine to drug addicts for free and it was such a huge success that it has continued until today. Because of this Norway has started experimenting with it too.
It’s a lot cheaper for society because the addicts commit less crime, they don’t have to spend money on drugs so instead they spend it on things that are more healthy for them so they don’t end up on the hospital as often, they have to take the drugs in special clinics so there’s no chance of them taking an overdose or using dirty needles and spreading diseases among each other, there’s always staff ready to help them if they want to get off the drugs, and it’s a lot more effective way to help more people because addicts come into contact with professionals who want to help them before they even think about getting help themselves.
Nobody wants to be homeless or an addict. Though they often end up getting involved in criminality because of their situation, the act of being homeless or an addict is not a crime in itself and the people deserve help like anyone else.
It also gets money out of mafia/crime communities. Really hard to base your business on selling drugs people can get safer for free. Really hard to spend that drug money on weapons or other dangers if you never made it in the first place.
The Postal Service is older than the country itself — the Continental Congress made Ben Franklin the first postmaster general in 1775 — and it remains the most popular agency in the federal government, beloved by Americans for the daily service it provides them, no matter where they live or who they are. I think often about how Title 39 of the U.S. Code defines its mission:
The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities.
“To bind the Nation together.” Think how important that is right now, at a time when we have a president working so hard to tear us apart. It’s no wonder he looks at the Postal Service and sees it as one more thing he wants to destroy.
