So far as I understand, there is a common idea that Texas has the legal ability to leave it it wants, but it’s just a popular myth as far as I’m aware. Whatever their state constitution says doesn’t matter anyway, because federal law trumps state laws and as far as I’m know there’s not a legal mechanism for states to leave again, it’d have to either get the government as a whole to make legal or possibly even constitutional changes to allow it, or leave illegally, either by force or by having a sympathetic government just not press the matter and just ignore the laws in question. I can’t really see them getting enough support for the former two, they’re too weak compared to the federal government for an actual war, and the current administration is not likely to just let them go, so I don’t expect them to go anywhere unless one of those things drastically changes.
I just look at the port and the USB connector and see which side the plastic bit inside is blocking and which side is open, can get them right every time if you take 2 seconds to look at them
They exist, but are only really relevant at the local level, or rarely as a spoiler effect if one gets vaguely popular. This isn’t so much that people don’t want other options, but mostly because the US system is badly designed. The US has a first past the post, winner take all type system, ie, if you win the most votes in a given election, you win that spot and it’s all yours. That makes some intuitive sense, but is actually not the most democratic option, as it means that parties that have, say, 20% of the population supporting them don’t get 20% of the seats, they get none of them, because for each individual seat, they won’t win the most votes. Worse, such a party will cause the major party it is less similar to to win, because it’s voters voted for them rather than the major party it was most similar to, so even if the voters on that side of the political spectrum are in the majority, their votes are split among multiple parties where their rivals that stay as one party can then be the single largest one. The US system accidentally makes it mathematically inevitable for two and only two parties to dominate.
Historically they have switched up once or twice, when one party became so unpopular that it basically became nonviable, and a different party rose to replace it, and once the current major parties have swapped ideology more or less, but this kind of thing is very rare.
There’s a kind of fish called an archerfish that shoots jets of water from it’s mouth at insects to knock them down. Those ones probably have the mental capacity for calculating trajectories to at least aim one I imagine, if you gave them a weapon modified with some kind of mechanism for one to fire it
I mean, that does happen with a lot of traditionally scary monsters to be fair. Look at how cutesy Halloween monsters sometimes get portrayed as, or dragons, which at least in the European sense would traditionally have been dangerous and scary monsters but nowadays are just as often friendly or protective as they are hostile.
Just Nebula. I do admittedly rent movies from YouTube from time to time as a sort of special thing to do with my friend (a bit less than once a month I think, I don’t think I watch them often enough to justify any kind of subscription to them, which probably wouldn’t have all the ones I end up wanting to see anyway, and since at the current pace it might be years before I rewatch something if ever I don’t think buying is really worth it either in my case), but on the whole, I just have kind of given up watching “normal” TV anymore. There are a handful of shows I liked watching when living with some family that had the subscription, but there’s not nearly enough entertainment in just one show or two for me to want to bother buying a subscription to any of them myself, and I’ve sort of found that except for only one or two shows I get more enjoyment per unit time out of content made by individuals or small teams anyway, I’m not really sure why, maybe because it can be more niche or something.
That isn’t to say that I don’t spend any money, beyond that one subscription that is, on entertainment or anything, I just generally spend it on games. (And since I like games with thousand hours or more levels or replayability, usually buy them or any dlc on sales, and don’t play games with mtx much and never buy any if I do, the amount of entertainment hours per dollar I get there is rather extremely high I suspect).
I’m using the term to mean more or less the collectively agreed upon “identity” of a state. Not merely a single contiguous government (for the same reason you just bring up, people still consider France to be France even though the government has changed fundamentally many times over the years), but I’m not using it to just mean “nation” either, since were France to be completely conquered and annexed by a foreign power, the French nation, as in the group of people, would still exist, but the country would not, at least until such time as it could be recreated, or for a different reason, that one can have a national identity split between different states, or a state involving different such groups.