Some sources have reported the explosion was a result of a gas leak, however no official cause has been stated as of yet. Dallas Fort Worth has a history of gas explosions after heavy rainfall due to the clay soil absorbing the water, expanding, then contracting, causing explosions.

10 people have been confirmed injured as of publication, as per the Forth Worth fire department.

Loan shark shaking his head and waging his finger at all the predatory loans his neighbors have gotten themselves into.

Sure. But that’s one point of failure relative to the N points tied to each major update to a “supported” platform.

Spend 500 hours re-engineering your application for each platform

Just using ten year old proven technology that’s built on a universal backwards compatible framework

Europeans: “Those perfidious Russians and the nefarious Chinese are the two single biggest threats to our domestic security. Why… they’ll just hack into any old thing and fill it full of evil communist propaganda. They’ll shut down our critical infrastructure, hijack our data services, and spam us so full of phishing attempts that you won’t know what’s safe to click on! And all just to watch us fail, then laugh at us. The fiends!!!”

Also Europeans: “Google’s CEO said we need to dismantle the last ten years of digital safety standards so we can undermine the YouTube adblocker. Make this our top priority.”

staring at my Microsoft DevOps certification, dejectedly

Liberals love their resets, whether it’s with Putin’s Russia or Saddam’s Iraq or Bolsonaro’s Brazil or Milei’s Argentina.

There is a party whose population will gladly accept no Medicaid expansion in their state and lose out on public option benefits, because “black man bad”.

I remember when Kentucky got enough blue dogs in office to put the Medicaid expansion into effect. They called their program “Kynect” and did a reasonably decent job of administering it. The program became so popular that Republicans pivoted to “defend Kynect from the federal government!” mode. Its been delivering services for over a decade and is a vast improvement over the deplorable state healthcare system.

Plans to defund or kill Kynect have largely failed and GOP efforts to cut the program have backfired on politicians that tried it, but Democrats struggle to take credit because the savvier Republicans aren’t shy about voicing their support.

So they may be good at saying “No” to proposed legislation, but the GOP is awful at saying “No” to any broad based existing program. Its the same reason they’ve had such a hard time privatizing education even in blood red states.

It will be more insidious and the American people have proven over and over that so long as harming them is packaged with a temporary tax cut or sandwiched between a outrage social topic of someone else to hate; they will keep on voting the assholes back in.

Bush Jr ran on privatizing SS and got absolutely washed in 2006.

Obama ran on scaling back entitlements and got washed in 2010.

Trump beat Hillary in part by cleaving to SS/Medicare and attacking her on her plans to gut it.

Biden is almost a fluke in so far as he’s got an anti-SS/Medi history but finally landed a successful Presidential bid. Even then, without a House willing to do deals, he can’t really touch entitlements either.

The AARP rivals only AIPAC in terms of its influence. Its a classic “do not fuck with the money” situation that also shields the Pentagon and the Financial Sector.

Not to say entitlements are bulletproof, but its been a nut both parties have been trying to crack since at least Clinton without success. Reagan was only able to land a blow by “saving” it with higher taxes and some very lukewarm meddling with retirement ages. Even then, it wasn’t a trick any other President managed to pull again.

Every President promises to reform SS/Medi and none of them do more than tinkering with the margins.

The elected officials who have to choose between tapping into the general fund and telling 70M people they don’t get a full SS disbursement is going to be in a tight spot. Especially when we’re just shitting money over the wall to a dozen ongoing military disasters.

Boomers have been saying this since the 60s and continue to say it even as they cash their latest round of checks.

Social Security is crazy popular. Even marginal trimming around the edges is politically suicidal. The only way to end the program is for Congress to shut down the agency and end the distributions. That’s not going to happen so long as elections are even remotely contestable. Its the third rail of politics for a reason.

I would predict a military dictatorship before I’d predict an end to SS. One is practically a prerequisite for the other, and even then it would be dicey.

“What is the return on investment?”

In the case of 3Body,

That’s only very loosely a “profitable” enterprise. Certainly, the initial generations won’t see any kind of profit simply due to the length of the journey.

The same principle applies to other planets – if it’s profitable, it will be pursued.

But a practical ROI can only really be measured within a single lifetime. And extraplanetary travel will always have a return of $0, as anyone deciding to perform extra-planetary exploration today will not see the benefits for generations. One might argue a more Ursula LeGuin-esque view of interstellar colonization - as a struggle for survival that simply expands beyond the frontiers of a single planet. But then, what we’re really talking about with Martian colonization or extra-Solar travel is some kind of politically or ecologically motivated Exodus. Because the economic exploitation of the New World was mostly just hit-and-run raids early on. The Virginia Company was an abject failure as an economic exercise. It cost far more to maintain than it yielded.

The real motivating force behind early colonization was the 30 Years War and the flight of the Protestants. What you’re ultimately going to need are some Huguenots with space ships. Even then, the real labor force in colonization were indentured servants and slaves. And there’s not going to be a Trans-Atlantic Triangle to move people from Earth to the spacial frontier, because… Its space. There’s nothing out there.

Cynical take: To kill us. Dark forest style.

As a sci-fi explanation for the Fermi Paradox, I found Dark Forest Theory compelling and thrilling.

As an actual IRL explanation for a lack of First Contact, I’m totally underwhelmed. Space is big. The speed of light heavily truncates both travel and communication. Extraterrestrial life certainly isn’t common, as evidenced by all of the planets in our own Solar System that are lifeless.

It should be noted that

That strikes me as highly implausible.

Other thoughts: If aliens showed up it we wouldn’t detect them in atmo, not as a quick fly by. We’d detect something huge like engines or something going real fast way out in space. Like on the edge of the system. If they were in our atmosphere they would make themselves known one way or another at that point.

The sheer amount of energy for super-luminal travel would suggest we either can’t see them or can’t miss them.

But one posits a degree of technological advancement so beyond our current scope that we can barely conceive of it. And the other posits a kind-of soft ceiling to scientific advancement, such that alien life just can’t be an issue even in another thousand lifetimes.

If first contact is anything, it will more likely be communicative than a literal fly by. Humans tuning into the extraterrestrial equivalent of AM radio will be the first to discover an advanced off-world civilization.

Going back to 3Body, one of the most compelling plot beats for me was

Like, that’s what I imagine a real human/alien interaction would look like for… centuries. Long before either saw the other one face-to-face.