The National Guard functions like your Home Guard for the most part. Some states do full time deployment, but it is rare and mainly applies security tasks. States are allowed to have standing armies, but it doesn’t happen because it is usually considered a waste of tax payer money.

What I expect is that, as the Union military grows, individual European nations will stop operating militaries outside of their home guard. After all, why have a standing army for the country when you are contributing to a standing army for the Union?

Without having a way to deal with corruption, it is just inviting the troops to become corrupt as well.

El Salvador has seen crime drop across the country after Bukele arrested everyone with a gang tattoo.

Using the USA as a model, the federal military maintains the specialized units that don’t have a civilian use along with training the military leadership such that it can absorb a larger army.

Individual states have active reserve military units (national guard) that have both military and civilian use. For instance, a lot of disaster response activities in the USA is performed by the national guard under state control.

From that skeleton, the US military can then fill out other units in times of war.

My guess is that an EU military would follow that structure since it has been shown to work well and the union can’t rely on France to build and fund those specialty units by themselves.

What third party protest voters? Trump won a majority of votes.

People decided to stay home this election.

The government has been dysfunctional for a while.

They are in San Francisco while working on their tech startups.

I feel like the main draw is location.

Most of the people living in these pods are startup founders, so it makes sense for them to live in shitty pods next to their potential clients and investors.

Oh look, spam.

I’m a structural engineer with a Masters degree. The degree has been useful to me on the job as the classes apply to what I’m working on.

There is a major debate in the civil engineering community as to whether a Bachelors degree is enough, with the American professional organization, ASCE, advocating for a Master’s equivalent for licensure. The argument against is that there aren’t enough licensed engineers anyway and requiring a Masters degree would reduce the number of engineers. There are also some disciplines in civil engineering that are really simple and don’t need the additional education.

Having worked with structural PhD’s, the additional education isn’t worth it. Most of the education in a doctorate is on higher level models while most codes don’t need anything that advanced.

A state school is usually good enough school to go to.

In a push to deal with micro plastics, bacteria are developed to be able to break down plastic. Eventually, it gets into the plastic installed for a purpose and starts breaking that down.

I would like the song Firebirds by Clutch adapted as a Grind house movie. An alien comes to Earth seeking arms to defend her people and teams up with a guy living out of his car.

Dressing up in costumes. Eating candy. Being spooky in general.

I would like to see Gantz adopted as an American TV series.

I think it would be interesting what it would say about MAGA.

I don’t see the application of an O’Neil Cylinder within the Earth and Mars gravity wells given how expensive they would be to build next to better places to grow crops.

If one does get built, I would expect it in orbit around Jupiter or Saturn to support activity there.

If the colonization strategy is the Moon then Mars, I expect humanity would have the technology needed to colonize Mars easily while terraforming occurs.

The problem with an O’Neil Cylinder is bringing up enough processed material to build one.

It depends.

For a lot of adults, I would agree that they are a bright point in their lives. But it isn’t universal.

Prioritize exercise. Try to gear towards being able to run a marathon and doing some strength training and yoga.

Cook more for myself. I don’t think I’d go full vegetarian, but I’d probably have less meat dishes overall.

Try to learn Spanish or Portuguese using one of those quick learning methods.

Take at least two cross continent trips. One would be between the two inhabited North American coasts. The second would either be Europe from Portugal to Finland, Australia, or the Americas from North to South.

Maybe live in a low cost Spanish or Portuguese speaking city for a month.

It is probably just grumbling.

A lot of American municipalities have banned a lot of the cheap and small apartments that could house working people. Offer it as an option; it seems better than sleeping on the streets.