We pay more for healthcare than you do, per capita. It’s not that we don’t have free healthcare - it’s A) that the oligarchs have figured out how to build a money siphoning machine out of our healthcare system and B) that they can use it to enforce social classes.

He won’t negotiate because this isn’t a normal government shutdown over budgetary issues. This is the end of the federal government. This is how it dies. It literally just runs out of money while terrorizing people so that even the most liberal libs learn to hate the federal government and accept the new dictatorship of their redstate masters.

That’s a problem with high heat and non-stick surfaces. Rice cookers are much, much lower heat.

I prefer the STL in Card’s Ender’s Game series. They asymptotically approach the speed of light so the passengers only have several weeks pass when travelling to far flung locations but the universe around them experiences a normal passage of time which may be tens of years. This has really big implications on the plots in several stories.

They do have an ansible communications system that does allow instantaneous communication over astronomical distances.