Really, Don? This is your big play for the news coverage this weekend? Weak.

So if I’m doing my math correctly, that’s 49%-45% for Harris in the popular vote. And that 49% is pretty much right on where she’s been polling in traditional polls. But Trump has been polling way higher than 45% recently—so if this is in any way true, he’s got a much tougher path to victory ahead of him than the standard numbers suggest.

WELP that’s enough internet for today.

Yeah, do we have any evidence that people have stayed home because they thought everything was settled and there wasn’t any need for them to vote?

This seems to be received wisdom, but this will be my sixth general presidential election, and in that entire time I haven’t seen any news or studies or polls (or even any anecdotal stories) about it.

Do we have any evidence that that has ever happened, ever ever? Based on the exit polls, we didn’t see that in 2016 (Democratic turnout was about what we expected it to be). And we know that people really like to play for the winning team, even if the team is already winning.

I am pretty confident I’ve heard that the opposite is true–that hopeless feeling like the other side is certain to win, and your vote will not change anything, can get people to stay home–but I haven’t heard anything compelling suggesting that complacency can get people to sit out an election.

Like Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Once they’re out of the party, they can’t be fired or voted out for saying it.

Also, they’re spineless.

He’s so upset Kamala stole his momentum, but the sequel never does as well as the original.

Don’t miss the reality of what he’s saying here. He’s not saying that you should make your own decision about who to vote for, he’s just saying that you shouldn’t listen to her.

He still wants you to listen to him, and vote in lock-step with whatever he spews out.

Yeah, gravity assists are a cheat code here, but the delta-V is still being changed—just by stealing velocity from elsewhere.

Yeah, orbital mechanics gets a little bit mind-bendy sometimes. If you’re in a stable circular orbit, accelerating in the direction you’re traveling will actually result in you traveling more slowly because you have moved to a higher orbit, and firing engines to slow down will actually speed you up because you move in closer to the host body and take up a faster orbit.

This is actually a problem spacecraft deal with regularly. If a Dragon capsule is behind the ISS and wants to dock, using its thrusters to accelerate toward the ISS will actually result in it falling further behind. Decelerating will get it closer, though it will then be in a lower orbit. Orbital rendezvous is tough.

I didn’t think he was having an affair with Laura Loomer until he basically insisted he wasn’t as an answer to an unrelated question.

Gavin Newsom. #SavedYouAClick

If you’re willing to settle for that kind of timeline, you could “launch someone into the sun” by just…leaving them on Earth for five billion years. At that point, the sun will become a red giant and probably expand to engulf the Earth.

Good question, but if you cancel out only a little bit of orbital velocity, you just orbit in a little bit closer. Without any appreciable drag acting on you, there’s nothing that will keep your orbit decaying. You’ll just be in a smaller, perhaps slightly more eccentric orbit.

It’s obviously a head shot of a person holding their hands in the air like they just don’t care.

Because the Earth is really cookin’, and anything anyone you hurl toward the sun will inherit that orbital velocity as well, meaning that they’ll actually end up going around the sun, instead of into it. And due to the speed it would pick up on its way in, it would basically take up a highly-eccentric yet stable elliptical orbit.

“Well, what if we throw them in the other direction, to make up for it?” That’s called retrograde, and that’s basically exactly what you’d have to do: cancel out the Earth’s entire orbital velocity. Which would take a lot of energy, plus a couple of really exacting gravity assists from planets on the way in.

(Edit to add: I may have explained this poorly. Basically, if you don’t change your orbital speed at all, any movement you make toward or away from the host body means you just end up in an orbit of the same average distance, but in a more eccentric [elliptical] shape.)

By contrast, even though the escape velocity from the solar system is no slouch (42 km/s), you get to start with the Earth’s orbital velocity (30 km/s)–meaning you’re already a little under 3/4 of the way there. Plus, if you can make it to Jupiter and Saturn, you can get a significant gravity assist, and they’re much bigger targets for such a maneuver than Mercury or Venus are.

So, yeah, bottom line: you only need a delta-V of about 12 km/s to get out of the solar system, but a delta-V of 30 km/s to get to the sun without going into orbit.

I’m a simple man. You go into ad hominem territory, I leave the conversation. See ya.

How would you have written this comic to get the idea across, then?

I realize that. The person above seemed to think that everything in this clearly allegorical comic is somehow intended to be taken literally.

I mean, they can rein them in or not. I really don’t care either way, because I’m going to leave most of them off anyway. I turn off the obvious ads, of course, but almost everything else too. Basically, unless it’s something that I can take direct action on or someone I know who is intentionally trying to contact me, it doesn’t get a notification.