CarbonIceDragon

A hostage implies the purpose of holding that person is as leverage to extract some concession from someone, whereas a prisoner does not necessarily imply that intent and could be held for any reason?

The internet has taught me that there is no such thing as sarcasm that everyone can detect.

I hate to break it to people, but this universe is the one where people occasionally eat spiders.

Consider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_spider

Okay but why is Metro Man the representation of Political Correctness

Any shirt not soft enough to not really need ironing, is too stiff to really be comfortable, imo.

I mean, you can just be neutral towards or unfamiliar with something, so not necessarily.

maybe some things so incredibly niche that only one or two people total like them, if those people happen to be men?

I do sometimes wonder if you could technically still run a working government off printing money, just recognizing that doing so didnt create more value, but instead acted as a form of taxation. Imagine a government that currently holds no significant fraction of its currency. It then prints an amount equal to what is currently in circulation, doubling the money supply and in doing so presumably halving the value of a given unit of that currency. Once it has done so, no new value is created, but that government has gone from having no significant fraction of the money in circulation, to having half of it, which it can now spend.

Suppose you did this predictably, you let everyone know that you will be increasing the money supply by x percent every year, and will be re-denominating it to avoid difficult to work with numbers at set intervals. Wouldnt you technically have a functioning system for extracting value from the economy to pay for government functions?

It might not be a very good system, since all it would effectively tax is people's savings of currency and not stuff like property, and you would have to set up things like employment contracts or debts to compensate for constant high inflation rates, but Im not sure I see a reason why it technically couldn't be done.

guess there really is such a thing as bad publicity

Imagine the shock he'd be in for if he ever met Q.

I suspect that we might not use the term "dwarf planet", were it not that the objects we initially created the category to describe were originally classed as planets. The category labelling is a bit arbitrary, we just discovered that what we now call dwarf planets are quite abundant and that there was a clear line that could be drawn to distinguish them from the rest of what we called planets, and so decided to draw that line between them.

Unless of course, you target the bear calvary's supply lines instead of engaging them directly, and the logistical difficulties of sustaining a number of massive predatory animals that cant just graze grass catch up to them.