charonn0

So instead of an illegal lottery it's just fraud.

I want Roland Emmerich to make a movie out of the short story A Pail of Air.

tl;dr/spoiler: ~20 years ago, a black hole passed through the solar system and captured the Earth, dragging it inexorably away from the Sun. This causes great earthquakes, tsunami, and other immediate civilization-ending catastrophes, but the real disaster comes when the atmosphere freezes and falls like snow to the ground. The original story follows a young boy born after the cataclysm whose chores include collecting buckets of frozen air.

Brussels sprouts, sure, but not lentils.

The OP should have included a content warning about content warnings!

There is no such thing as an innocent billionaire.

Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.

The government only knows that they voted, not how they voted.

Your replicator is probably too small to replicate larger components, which would be a major inconvenience at best or a showstopper at worst. And industrial replicators are even harder to come by than starships.

Then there's getting access to the replicator patterns for sensitive or dangerous components. Dilithium chambers, weapons, Mercassium composite for shield generators, etc. are classified by Starfleet.

Then there are substances that can't be replicated, such as verterium cortenide for the warp coils. I don't think it's explicitly stated that VC can't be replicated, but we know that Voyager had to find some to refit their warp coils, they couldn't just replicate it. Also dilithium.

And finally, there's antimatter. Building a starship won't do you much good if you don't have gas for the tank. Antimatter does not occur in large quantities in nature, and probably can't be replicated (or at least not safely.) So you'd need some sort of industrial base to produce it, further complicating your plans.

I yearn for the simpler days when the worst thing a Republican president might do is tamper with Medicare.

My intent was to point out how ridiculous the "103% increase" line is, not to suggest the comparison was valid in the first place.

In other words, it jumped from about 0.5% to 1.5%.