Starship Troopers tells the story of an interplanetary war between Earth and colonies of large insect-like aliens in the twenty-third century.

It focuses on the experiences of Johnny Rico(Casper Van Dien), one of three friends who sign up to the military one year before Earth declares war on the Arachnids.
The film opens to a futuristic television viewing sequence. The news is dominated by an ongoing war with the aliens, called Arachnids or Bugs due to their appearance.
A one year flashback takes the scene to the posh Buenos Aires high school of a young man named John "Johnny" Rico (Casper Van Dien).
A blind, strutting biology teacher (Rue McClanahan) loudly corrects her students by pointing out the numerous daunting ways the Arachnids are superior to humans regarding competitive survival.
Rico is shown to have high athletic ability, a very competitive nature, low math aptitude, great, but mostly unreturned, love for his girlfriend Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards).
In a short scene where Johnny and Carmen have to dissect a bug as part of a Biology lesson, Johnny is also shown to have a strong stomach.
Required to dissect a bug for Biology class, Johnny nonchalantly carves open and pulls out the creature's innards while Carmen vomits at the sight of the entrails and runs out.

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This thread examining a detrans story puts me in mind of something that shocked me to the core fifteen years ago in early 2004. I’ve not often told this so there follows a mini thread of my own.


This time in 2004 was very sensitive. Our little team at Press for Change was carefully helping to support the government to get the Gender Recognition Bill through its parliamentary stages. It had already started in the Lords and faced a committee stage with evangelical-backed..

..opposition facing the government’s Bill minister Lord Filkin and and others from all parties supporting him. The heavy lifting of daily liaison work was handled on our side by my colleague Claire @2legged whose back room lobby efforts should never go unacknowledged in any..

..account of events. Our political backdrop was a small but determined effort by two evangelical groups touting very familiar lies about trans people and, perhaps more worrying, a couple of contemporary journalists (one a Guardian staffer and one a freelance) determined to tout..

..detransition scare stories as a way to perhaps cast doubt over formalising a legal recognition process. The thing that was obvious at the time was that their stories relied on constant recycling of the same 10-12 case stories, which they had discovered because they were the..

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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.