I hope it turns out well; I’ve wanted to experience 2e as a player since before the playtest, and this would be the closest I expect to come for a long time.

If lurking in the USPS subreddit for a few years had taught me anything, it’s that some really love the LLVs and some just hate the platypus that’s replacing it, as it was often called.

That claim is such a pet peeve of mine. That’s not even how our eyes work, and it’s demonstrably untrue.

It can even be proven false by rapidly moving the mouse cursor across the screen very quickly and the lack of motion blur.

Even if he’s only removed from the ballots in blue states, it’ll have an effect on an downballot elections in those states. The base of the Republican party is still very deep into trumpism; and they’re more likely to vote at all if their guy is on the ballot. If he’s not, they may refuse to participate at all, which could potentially swing local races or otherwise make them competitive rather than safe positions.

On the national scale, if a congressional district is already competitive and those otherwise reliable Republican voters don’t show up, it could give the democratic nominees for those districts an edge- assuming “keep Trump from getting back into the White House” isn’t the only motivation energizing the Democratic party’s base.

The Republican party’s majority was already thin after the midterms, and the gap has been narrowing due to party infighting; on top of that, they barely won back the house during a midterm election without securing the Senate during the election cycle that is most advantageous to the minority party (since a ton of voters only vote during presidential elections).

The more states that ban Trump from the ballot, the more likely it is that the discouragement felt by the Republican party’s base- particularly the Trumpist faction- leads to a number of them no longer feeling energized to vote, which may lead to progressive and centrist Democratic wins in competitive districts up and down the ballots, which may affect local or state politics enough to affect policy in a way that less more toward the progressive side of things- again, provided that the Democratic party doesn’t rely too heavily on “we’re not Trumpists” and find themselves going against Haley instead of Trump without a cohesive plan.

Tl;dr: Trump missing from the ballot in only blue states could still significantly affect downballot elections and initiatives, and give the Democratic party an edge in their efforts to take back the house and solidify their hold on the Senate- provided the Dems work on their messaging, energize their base, and win over independents.

It’s not hard, but it’s still a hurdle. Warrants also can’t be requested from a judge by just anyone in the USPS iirc, so the start of the process often relies on an employee taking time out of their day to report something they deem suspicious in the first place, likely in an understaffed and overworked office that’s not built to handle the package volume of the area they serve.

Iirc, the USPS can’t unilaterally search your letters or packages because, as a government institution, it would be a major violation of the 4th amendment- even postal inspectors need to get a warrant to open a letter or package that’s not expressly addressed to them if it was in the care of the USPS. I think the only exception is when it’s an ‘Operation Santa’ letter, and there are regulations in place for how those get handled to protect the privacy of the sender.

The private parcel and package companies probably don’t have to abide by the same restrictions because they’re not government owned and operated.

If they’re viable samples, it would be probably be possible as soon as it’s people can have their contemporary eggs and sperm used in a fully artificial gestation process.

I wasn’t talking at all about overpopulation because it wasn’t directly related to your comment about bullying. I don’t think we have an overpopulation problem so much as a resource distribution problem and lack of political will among those with power to actually change our systems into something less cruel to ourselves and the planet. We produce far more than we need to in our current system for the population we have, but our resource distribution system is directed by the whims of market forces and profit instead of community need.

Plus, I tend to automatically reject the assumption we’re overpopulated because bringing it up gives off an implication that it needs to be intentionally resolved, and that gets into really horrific territory really quickly.

On top of that, nobody even knows what the human carrying capacity of the planet even is; there’s zero scientific consensus on total human capacity or how to even measure it. It’s a non-starter for me, and I just do not think it’s an issue worth worrying about, but I am deeply concerned with how quick people are to blame everything on overpopulation as the cause of shortages when we haven’t really tried a different approach.

Edit: I fixed the last sentence to make sense.

How would anybody find out? The kid would only ever really need to know at a young age (where they might out themselves without Knowing the social risks) if they had ongoing medical needs from complications resulting from it. Plus, it’s an artificial womb, not cloning; the kid would still have two genetic parents who would be their actual legal guardians, unless life happened and the kid lost one or both of them, which would just mean the bullying would focus on that instead.