I wouldn’t expect them to, but it would be a hilarious trolling :P

I also have a hard time believing this to be intentionally meaning bearing, mostly due to this being a pop art meme overused in both social media and marketing.

Compare it to the ad poster, it can be art, but most of the time it isn’t meant to. (and to my mind the ubiquity of ad posters raises the noise that the intentional art needs to cut through)

I believe OP is trying to troll the comm, or at least confused about the ambition of the comm.

But for shits and giggles I gave it a good 5 minutes of viewing and quite some generosity, two themes pop out: Contrast between old and new play, and a generational shift in Escapism

On the left side the legos are beige, interrupted by a line of chargers before the right side with candies, and the console controller.

This could try to convey a motif of a generational shift from constructive, wholesome play to an instant gratification paradigm. Maybe with the advent of the informational age

There’s a difference in compositional choices I don’t understand, and with the background of this art style am prone to dismiss as for visual effect rather than intentional meaning.

The shapes on the left side seem mostly to draw the eye rightward. The curve in the top left which could have signified a softening of regimentality is in contrast to the straight and formal positioning of non-rectangular pieces in the lower left. This could be trying to convey the variations or turmoil within the old paradigm, but this level of skill isn’t expected neither from art form nor artist, and as it’s a staple of the pop art style I’m leaning towards it being only for visual effect.

I find no way of differentiating the choice from just starting it as a social media post and half way thinking of a cool contrast.

Looking closer at the pills on the right side, none of them can be identified as pharmaceuticals, but several of them are famous candy shapes. I conclude that they most probably represent only candy and no pills/drugs.

Also on the right side, the controller breaks the motif and catches the eye, both for a visual payoff. But I see no reflection or contrast of controller against candy, nor divider, nor against lego.

If I stop looking for deeper meaning in the relations of elements and just look at emotional impact, it could simply be a nostalgic representation of early millennial childhood . Where the dividing line isn’t a divider, but it’s own part of a tableau, and the choice of items being significant as a collection rather than as elements.

I find no layers of meaning hidden in the contrast or relationships of elements, no artful nods that usually give away mastery enough to wield subtle meaning.

(and the more I look at it, the less I admire the craftsmanship)

Alternate plan (as it would be a shame to waste a dam): Keep the dam, flood the Baltic sea until Kaliningrad is under water?

Cuz Size Matters

Ah, but they gave him back story and motivation.

Spoiler warning: He wasn’t purely evil for evil"s sake, he just tried to rebuild society for the scions of humanity, and had already discarded the normies (can’t remember the term they used) as primitive, albeit barbaric, creatures.

The genius of Bester is that he was so self assured and uncontested, making him almost cartoonishly evil, but also that he was so essentially human. Driving home the major themes of the series: the dangers of unchecked power, the human drive to self determination, and that wielding power over others perpetuates a cycle of violence.

A lot of the energy comes from orbital speeds.

The Hypervelocity Rod Bundles project proposed 6,1x0,3 m tungsten rods, weighing about 8200 kg, impacting at about 3000 m/s, meaning about 42 GJ of energy per projectile [wikipedia].

The weakest recorded nuke, the Davy Crocket Tactical Nuclear Weapon, is estimated at about twice that (84 GJ), and the largest, Tsar Bomba, at about 3 000 000x the yield (210 PJ).

Theoretically you can put any amount of energy into a laser, as long as you can redirect and synchronise waves. And as several stars and black holes have gravities and stuff that can affect the starships, it seems evident you should be able to charge a laser enough to damage any USS starship.

And as the phase cannons seem to output 80-500 GJ, you should be able to match that fairly easily with 10 grams of matter annihilation or a second of about 10e-15 of the energy output of a sun type star.

Interestingly enough, phase modulation of a laser weapon makes more sense than of a particle beam (which the phaser weapons are), and also you don’t suffer from recoil like from phasers.

Because they are the same underlying condition, only presented at different levels of impediment.

Diagnosis works the same, treatment is the same, it’s mostly the amount of support needed that differs.

By that standard the only countries not monstrous are those too feeble to ally with.

Plenty of countries on all continents have sided with oppressive regimes, and conveniently ignored atrocities as long as they’re aimed at someone else. In anything from the Korea or Pakistani wars, to genocides in Central America, to slave trading within the African continent.

The West is due some criticism, but this approach is useless.

You are right that things would still look like we’re accelerating away from us, even if we were actually contracting.

Interesting hypothesis! How do we investigate?

What could we expect from a large central gravitational point? We should have other signs of the gravity well:

We would expect a point that we contract towards (and that seems ill fitting, as we see the expansion moves as the observer (including earth) moves), we would expect some kind of mass or similar effect, which would also have a size to fit it in (we know that gravity works different when you’re inside the mass, and we would be able to see it, much like black holes or dark matter), we would expect things to orbit the gravity well (which we know that at least our galaxy doesn’t orbit us).

You might want to actually check on these things to make sure they apply and are true, but at least at first glance it seems the expansion is better explained without a central gravity.

A programmer might, as trained/conditioned by the limits of programming languages.

A human would intuitively not, these are meaningless and/or convoluted concepts to the untrained human.

A common problem (before learning it is impossible/fraught with danger) is categorisation, like sorting of strings.

Say you have a text, and need to count words of different lengths.

One intuitive approach is to pass through it once and add each word to a list for the corresponding length, as well as making lists as needed. No 7 letter words, no 7-letter-word-list, even though there are longer words.

As humans we’re good at sorting things into an unknown number of categories, and we have to unlearn that for programming

Maybe the last bit is disgusting, much like certain earth beverages, and the cup is to protect you from the dregs?

But the question is not what is simplest for the company. Arguably it would be even simpler for the company not to pay Bob, or anyone for that matter, they could also simplify a lot with not bothering with doing anything beside extracting money from people, slavery and robbery are very simple.

If we change the viewpoint from people living to serve companies, we might arrive at different conclusions, and maybe even a society better suited for humans, rather than companies.

Why? Bob has higher costs and longer preparation time for work.

In economic theory, the job is worth less to Bob, and he should be compensated more for taking it.

Is it fair that Bob should subsidise the company’s labor costs?

Bob’s labor also incurs greater costs on the communal infrastructure (roads, pollution, gas, etc), why should the company not also have a higher burden (higher tax) to compensate the commons for that?

But in several countries it is legally abuse to withhold emotional safety from a dependant, including withholding the right to privacy.

I know, as I teach this to youth organisations who have a reporting duty against that law.

As for the health benefits, I’d urge you to read a basic textbook on child developmental psychology. The keywords used in most models are autonomy, privacy and keeping secrets, as important parts of social (and cognitive) development from about the second year, and only get more important with age.

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You are confusing the everyday use of the word with the sociological.

You are literally correct, yet showing ignorance about group privilege, social equity and structural discrimination.

Yes, we’re using the same words, but we’re not talking about the same thing.

Why not organise some politically challenging demonstrations and raise the terror threat level?

That usually dampens tourism and housing market for a while, especially if there’s an actual attack.