Not a doctor, but I live in the southeastern US, and I've said that I have personal, regional, national, and global reasons for wanting to move north.

Drive through rural America and see how many underpopulated small towns there are. Shuttered businesses for lack of customers. Abandoned buildings. These places need people.

Suppose that Australia wants to become republic.

Scenario A: King Charles tries to oppose this. His opposition is overridden by, you know, democracy. Now he looks like even more of a schmuck for standing in the way of something that was going to happen anyway.

Scenario B: He doesn't oppose it. Australia votes to become a republic, and seems like a cool guy for not standing in the way of the inevitable.

Seems like a pretty straightforward choice between options.

Hawkeye: War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.

Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye?

Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?

Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.

Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.

Humanity truly is a species built on community and mutual support.

Oh no

There's two points that I look at when I think of how much the Star Trek future is driven by people just doing what they enjoy.

The first is when Captain Jellico takes over the Enterprise and everyone gets all grumpy and Riker gets relieved of duty. Things aren't going well and Jellico goes to Riker's quarters to talk, and after asking for permission to speak freely, Riker tells him "You've taken all the joy out of everything." In this ship of hundreds of hyperqualified people working with bleeding edge technology, literally hours away from possibly facing their deaths and the start of a galactic war, Riker is correctly pointing out the the commanding officer isn't letting them have fun anymore. People in Star Trek don't get paid, they do what they do for the love of the game.

The second point is when Eddington goes rogue and Sisko realizes that he was fan of Les Miserables, and that Eddington is essentially cosplaying as Jean Valjean and wants Sisko to be Javert. Sisko points out that Eddington didn't have to become a terrorist or betray his uniform. He could have resigned any time he wanted. But he loved his role play so damn much that he was willing, even eager, to get the most determined man in the quadrant pissed off enough to hunt him down at all costs, and Sisko was able to use the implied script of this role play to capture Eddington. In this case, Eddington was having so much fun with his version of living his best life, he was literally willing to get captured and sent to prison because it was how he wanted to play the game.

People in Star Trek can choose to stay on any number of paradise planets, and quite a lot do, but they will also will face death and worse than death, all in the name of self-actualization, and that's pretty fantastic.

Jesus, when you put it like that, even if Darla isn't a robot or a paid astroturfer, she's still making the case for unions.

Plus the hero killed like thirty goddamn people along the way to the big bad guy. Some of those guys had families too, asshole! You're already a monster!

DM: The enemy champion approaches. He is eight feet tall, fully armored, and a seasoned warrior.

David: I select my sling.

DM: Okay, so that does 1d4 bludgeoning damage--

David: Hang on, let me tell you about all my buffs and saved up Holy Favor points...

DM: -___-

It's more of a generalized rule but:

Assume that your own time has value.

A lot of "frugal" tips operate off the assumption that you can spend your own time and it doesn't cost anything. But your time is valuable. Time spent trying to save a few bucks should be considered working time; ask yourself how much you would get paid by your job for the same amount of time. Maybe you enjoy doing whatever the thing is, so it can be considered recreation, but if it's some difficult or mind numbing slog, then that doesn't necessarily mean that you actually saved yourself anything, because you weren't getting paid to do work, and you could have been doing something more rewarding instead.

Isaac Asimov, a very intelligent person, wrote a lengthy essay to the effect that he had no idea what intelligence was. He talked about how society would generally consider him more intelligent than the nearly illiterate man who repaired his car, and yet whenever something went wrong with his car he would go to his mechanic and listen to his advice as if it was being handed down from the mountaintop by Moses himself, because Isaac Asimov knew fuck all about car repair. He talked about how he thought that supposedly objective IQ tests were generally a series of gates designed by people already considered intelligent to keep themselves in power, and that they totally disregarded huge swaths of indispensable human knowledge and talent. Isaac Asimov, who has been published in literally every section of the Dewey Decimal System, concluded that he had no firm idea as to what exactly "intelligence" even was.

In short, how could one even define "the dumbest 50%"?

And that's why Thanos should have made everybody half as large as they once were.