Oh wow.
I want to be clear that I think I’d be a pretty bad president. I wouldn’t be worse than Donald Trump, admittedly, but I think being president is legitimately a really hard job which you can kill billions of people by screwing up badly enough and kill millions of people just by not thinking to ask the right questions or appoint the right people. And I don’t know the right questions or the right people. I don’t even necessarily know how to find them, it’s not like ‘interviewing people and determining whether they are competent at federal policy’ is a skillset I have.
I think like @ozymandias271 I probably call Obama and explain what has happened and ask him for suggestions and take them unless they involve bombing people, which I am not going to do even though becoming president seems to mysteriously make people conclude it’s a good idea. And instead of spending our foreign aid bribing people we should probably spend it stamping out malaria and neglected tropical diseases. And maybe I could try to wiggle Trump’s position on immigration around to the stance that we should have an arrangement like Canada’s where communities can raise money to sponsor a refugee and help their integration.
And of course throwing a whole lot more resources at ending animal agriculture and developing carbon sequestration and so on and so forth (how much power does the President actually have to do this?) and bringing in people to have debates over things like the minimum wage and healthcare where the end result of the debates will not be ‘I know what to do’ but just ‘I remain horribly uncertain what to do, and I feel terrible about myself for not being smart enough to have it figured out’. Meanwhile I desperately try to replace the VP with someone who will be a good president. As soon as this person is secured I step down.
- to, uh, be a seventy year old man? The rest of my life sounds super unpleasant tbh. I will feel uncomfortable around all of my friends who have made cracks about how ugly Donald Trump is (moral: you shouldn’t body-shame people because what if a random blogger is bodyswapped with the sitting president and feels bad about themself as a result?), and most people I interact with will think I have a long history of sexual assault and this will be, like, incredibly unpleasant and terrifying and make me feel constantly disgusting. And I’ll have a ten year old who thinks I’m his dad, though maybe improving on Trump’s parenting would be as easy as improving on his presidency.
> throwing a whole lot more resources at ending animal agriculture
Moonshot making an artificially-grown human heart. It’s doable, it’ll go over better than vegetarianism, pave the way for better tissue engineering, and help push us to the far side of the medical care cost curve where costs start coming back down again. So far we’ve been hurting from costs coming down from infinity.
The tissue engineering technology can then be used to develop and mass produce in-vitro meat, which will almost entirely replace animal agriculture within a few generations, to the point at which our descendants will wonder why we didn’t do it sooner.