Well, the IRA tends to bring people on more as independent contractors rather than full-time employees. Hence the preference for IRAs.

Honestly, if there were alien craft zipping around, I can imagine why no government would want to disclose them. It would basically be an announcement of, “these damn craft are flying around the atmosphere and the space around Earth. They’re utterly beyond anything we’re capable of. We’re not sure if they’re aliens, time travelers, beings from another dimension, literal angels or demons, or something even stranger. But we are utterly at their mercy. They’re spying on us constantly, for purposes unknown. Oh, and occasionally they’ll just abduct people and carry them off for God-knows-what reason. I’m sorry, but there is literally nothing we or any human being can do about this. They’re basically gods to us, and we know next to nothing about them, where they come from, or why they’re here.”

What leader would ever want to give that speech? I don’t consider it likely we are being visited by non-human intelligences. But if we were, it wouldn’t be anything like Roswell and Area 51. We wouldn’t have a base full of downed or crashed alien craft. They simply wouldn’t crash, and we would have no ability to shoot them down. A real announcement of alien visitors wouldn’t be the reveal of some vast secret government project, a revealing of secret strength. It would be us saying, “we’ve been working on this problem for nearly a century, and we’ve learned nothing. All we know is that they’re there, and we can’t do a damn thing about it.” It would a confession of weakness and utter helplessness, a government openly admitting it’s completely powerless to protect its people from an unknown outside threat. Can you imagine a president telling the public, “yeah, you might get abducted by aliens. Sorry, that just happens sometimes. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

It would represent a complete shattering of our species’ sense of value and security. And voters tend not to like politicians who tell them the unvarnished truth.

New crazy conspiracy theory: we’re being quietly targeted for extermination by a hostile alien species.

They could wipe us out in an afternoon if they wanted to, but they can’t just come right in and bomb us from orbit, as that would cause an interstellar relations incident, maybe mass unrest back home. But they also want us gone. We gotta go because we’re an advancing young species, near their territory, and are a potential future problem. We’re not dealing with an alien army attacking us; we’re dealing with an alien equivalent of the CIA. They’re here to do the dirty work quietly.

They know species at our level often run headfirst into environmental catastrophes as their technology becomes great enough to threaten the planet they live on. Instead of helping us, however, they’re throwing gasoline on the fire. They’ve brainwashed/replaced with clones the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people. And their behavior was psychologically programmed to maximize the chances of them leading us right into a climate apocalypse. Most species eventually get their shit together and place limits on extraction and pollution, less they all die. But if the right type of crazies are running the place, a species can just slam the accelerator as it drives off a cliff.

And when we eventually do burn ourselves alive in a climate Armageddon, the aliens will run news stories, lamenting the tragic tale of a poor primitive planet that couldn’t right its ways in time. No threat of war between great interstellar powers. No mass protests movements back on the homeworld. Just a potential future rival nipped in the bud, no muss, no fuss. Mass murder dressed up as death by natural causes.

Do you have an example of a city that runs on renewables with battery storage with no duplicate backup base load generator?

Thankfully cities don’t build isolated power grids.

A few hours a year? That’s what batteries are for.

Honestly, if anyone is talking the freaking arctic when discussing the energy transition, they’re a bad faith actor and can be completely ignored. We care about the bulk of energy usage. The tiny little remainder is irrelevant. A few innuit can keep their gas generators for all I care.

Your talking points are ten years out of date. The cheapest form of baseload power now is batteries plus solar. For seasonal variations? Nuclear is so expensive that it’s far cheaper to just build enough to meet your winter electricity demand and have abundant power the rest of the year.

Fission is a dead end technology that people mostly support now so they can feel a sense of contrarian intellectual superiority. It’s all just vibes at this point.

If you’re willing to throw one minority under the bus, you will throw all of them under the bus.

You have piss poor reading comprehension. I suggest you enroll in an adult learning class at your local community college.

Wait, which is it. Are Palestinian supporters too few to care about, or were they numerous enough to blame for the election loss? Cause you’re doing the classic fascist “our enemies are both incredibly weak and incredibly strong” bit.

Oh quit the Orwellian bullshit. It’s embarrassing.

Complaining about voters is like like complaining about the weather.

Politics has always been a popularity contest? Did you not learn this in your grade school student council elections? You’re whining about human nature. People need to be inspired. They don’t give a shit about someone’s Senate voting record.

You’re right. Liberals do love their straw men.

Not voting for them has done just that! We’ve seen real change at the DNC, and that is only because the neoliberals have been completely discredited. They can no longer claim the narrative of being the adult in the room, the logical choice for electability.

Party power structures only change after the party loses.

People don’t like being insulted and taken advantage of. Why is that so hard to understand?

The primaries are run by the DNC, you silly goose!

I remember debates on Reddit. I kept pointing out that the official inflation figures fail to measure the pain people were figuring. But I just got downvoted to Hell by a bunch of troglodytes mindlessly parroting the CPI figures, as if that was the only thing that matters.

There is a severe strain of Orwellian magical thinking among liberals. Speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil. Ignore all bad news and try to give your way to victory.

What election would you have preferred they take that stand?

The DNC controls the primaries.