With respect, if you’ve never in 70 years heard the argument that ‘this specific election is too important, we have to nominate the best chance to beat the other guy’, then you must either not be paying attention or your memory is failing you.
In fact, go back to 2016 and that is exactly what happened. Hillary was seen as the ‘safe’ option to put up against Trump, Bernie was the ‘radical candidate who wouldn’t get broad popular support’.

I am NOT drawing an equivalence between Donald Trump and other presidents. I am talking purely about campaigns and the discourse about them.

I don’t like Trump, but he’s on his second term. He’s done. He’s not running for election again. The question is, what do we do in 2028? Who do we put forward for the nation’s consideration?
Is it going to be another Hillary / Kamala type ‘safe’ candidate? Because they haven’t done so well of late.
Or is it going to be somebody who has a strong message of principle, someone who can energize millions in the same way that Barack Obama did and Donald Trump did more recently?

Sure is :(

I’m not a Trump fan. But I’ve been an adult long enough to remember this being said about just about every election. That yeah we should do better we will eventually do better but not this time, right now it’s most important to get rid of the other party or make them lose the election no matter what. It’s the same thing every few years.

It’s like hitting the snooze button over and over and over again, if you keep hitting it eventually your alarm times out or you just end up late for work.

I think the problem is the farmers would be happy to know IT if it meant they could fix their damn tractor. Deere doesn’t want them to know IT, it wants them to just call their local Deere service center anytime anything doesn’t work. Problem is, if it’s during a harvest or some other critical time, they can’t wait a week for a service appointment so they have to pay through the nose for immediate call out. And much of the time, the problem is something that they are easily capable to fix on their own, but can’t because they don’t have access to the service software that only dealers get. Or it’s a situation like iPhones where they can easily make the repair but need the software to authorize the repair.

The result was a lot of farmers installing hacked Ukrainian firmware on their tractors, simply because the hacked version would accept any part connected and not require authorization from a service laptop.

Exactly. This is why I have so little respect for Democrats these days. They go on TV and call red alert and say Trump is awful and Trump is horrible and we all have to do everything we can to oppose Trump, and then they go ahead and rubber stamp his candidates and his agenda, refusing to use political options that are very much open to them create the opposition they are so loudly claiming is necessary.
If Trump is truly that awful, they could simply refuse to confirm his candidates, make them fight tooth and nail and bargain with them for every single vote.
But they did not. So the only conclusions are either a, they did not actually feel Trump was awful and all the red alert press conferences were just performant political theater, or b, they have not actually stood up for real principle or wielded real power in so long they don’t remember how to do it.

Well that’s shooting yourself in the damn foot.

Apple users are a tiny percentage, and most of the sort that happily uses whatever Apple gives them without question or concern for other options. I have no idea what this thing did, but if it did something different than every other browser should start targeting Windows and Linux.

About damn time. We got a boost every few years from 10 to 100 to 1000. Then we just… Stopped. Stagnated. It’s understandable why, for a good long time one gigabit was all anybody needed, 100 MByte/sec is pretty good even for a NAS.

Of course then fiber ISPs got in the game, now in a lot of places you can buy 7-8gbps as a consumer product. And even multi-gig, which was supposed to ‘fix’ this, really ended up being insufficient. You could make a salad argument that multi gig was a waste of time and we should have just started moving to 10 gig.

Unfortunately, 10 gig switches still carry a significant premium. But this will start to shake that up. Sooner the better.

mentally [ill] man who needs help.

I agree with this. A while back he did an interview with Lex Fridman. For those not familiar with Lex, he does long-form interviews of an hour or more that get into great detail on various subjects, and he makes a point to educate himself on those subjects beforehand so it is an actual discussion, not the usual interview of a guy explaining his job to somebody who has never heard of it.

For anyone not convinced Ye needs help, please go listen to that interview.

Ye early on blames the ‘Jewish media’ for an awful lot of the world’s problems. Lex encourages him to call out specific members of that media for specific problems, rather than writing off an entire religion and an entire industry. Lex encourages him to use his platform to identify bad actors and directly oppose them. Ye refuses any specifics, talking only in broad general terms.

Ye then says with full conviction that we should stop teaching history in schools, that it is a waste of time and resources to relive the past and we should be teaching science and math and engineering instead as history offers us little or nothing of value. Lex of course brings up several parallels between history and modern society and similar problems happening under similar situations, once again Ye refuses to acknowledge and keeps restating his point in different words.

These are just two of the bigger issues. I got about halfway through the interview before I concluded that this man has no fundamental understanding of how the world works or of how human nature works, that he was either deluded or mentally ill or just very stupid, let his positions are almost entirely without merit and that he is a person and his ideas are probably unworthy of any consideration of mine. For me that’s a pretty big thing, I try to separate the person from the idea and give everybody equal consideration.

But after listening to Ye speak for half an hour, I concluded it was the same as going to a mental hospital and listening to one of the patients rant about how aliens ate their brain for half an hour- The only thing I get from the experience is half an hour older.

I don’t know what is wrong with Ye. Maybe he is just uneducated and ignorant and managed to fail upwards because he’s good at music. Maybe he is mentally ill. I don’t know. But I do know that he is not a smart or intelligent person that we should be listening to in any capacity.

The sad thing is, I think you are correct, without even joking. I think he literally needs some kind of help.

I try to keep an open mind always. So a while back he did a Lex Friedman interview, and I listened to it. For anyone not familiar, Lex does long form interviews of an hour or more and gets deep into various subjects.

I got about halfway through before concluding that there is something seriously wrong with West. Maybe he is just stupid (not as an insult, I mean like he lacks any sort of intelligence) or maybe he has brain damage or maybe he is just delusional. But you listen to the guy talk for more than 5 minutes at a time and you wonder what the hell is wrong with him.

For example, he spent a lot of time blaming the ‘Jewish media’ for a lot of America’s problems. Lex repeatedly asked him for specifics, challenged him to call out specific members or leaders of said media for specific actions, challenged him to use his platform to identify bad actors. He had few if any specifics and saw no particular benefit in any specific call outs, in his world it’s all a conspiracy and the whole ‘Jewish media’ and everyone part of it is all one and the same.

Furthermore, he spent a lot of time explaining why we should stop teaching history in schools. Said we should focus on science and technology classes and not waste time reliving the past. Lex tried hard to challenge that, even brought up specific non-partisan examples from history that presented useful lessons for today. It had no effect, West continued to double down on the position that teaching kids history is a waste of time and resources.

At this point I had wasted about half an hour listening to the guy, and decided he was simply not worth my time to listen any further, because he obviously fundamentally misunderstood how the world works, how human nature works, and had little or no facts or evidence to back up his positions. I concluded that any further ideas from West can probably be safely dismissed without much consideration, because his thought process shows no evidence of rational or scientific thought.

Honestly the best analogy I can think of is like going to a mental institution and listening to a crazy person. They will talk your head off for an hour about how aliens infected their brain or whatever, and the only thing you will get from it is an hour older.

For anyone not familiar with thorium…

Thorium is a great nuclear fuel. Much much safer than the uranium we currently use, because the reaction works best only within a narrow temperature band. Unlike uranium which can run away, a thorium reactor would become less efficient as it overheats possibly preventing a huge problem. That means the fuel must be melted into liquid to achieve the right temperature. That also provides a safety mechanism, you simply put a melt plug in the bottom of the reactor so if the reactor overheats the plug melts and all the fuel pours out into some safe containment system. This makes a Chernobyl / Fukushima style meltdown essentially impossible.

There are other benefits to this. The molten fuel can contain other elements as well, meaning a thorium reactor can actually consume nuclear waste from a uranium reactor as part of its fuel mix. The resulting waste from a thorium reactor is radioactive for dozens or hundreds of years not tens of thousands of years so you don’t need a giant Yucca Mountain style disposal site.
And thorium is easy to find. Currently it is an undesirable waste product of mining other things, we have enough of it in waste piles to run our whole civilization for like 100 years. And there’s plenty more to dig up.

There are challenges though. The molten uranium is usually contained in a molten salt solution, which is corrosive. This creates issues for pipes, pumps, valves, etc. The fuel also needs frequent reprocessing, meaning a truly viable thorium plant would most likely have a fuel processing facility as part of the plant.

The problems however are not unsolvable, Even with current technology. We actually had some research reactors running on thorium in the mid-1900s but uranium got the official endorsement, perhaps because you can’t use a thorium reactor to build bombs. So we basically abandoned the technology.

China has been heavily investing in thorium for a while. This appears to be one of the results of that investment. Now this is a tiny baby reactor, basically a lab toy, a proof of concept. Don’t expect this to power anybody’s house. The point is though, it works. You have a 2 megawatt working reactor today, next you build a 20 megawatt demonstrator, then you start building out 200 megawatt units to attach to the power grid.

Obviously I have no crystal ball. But if this technology works, this is the start of something very big. I am sure China will continue developing this tech full throttle. If they make it work at scale, China becomes the first country in the world that essentially has unlimited energy. And then the rest of the world is buying their thorium reactors from China.

There’s two things going on here.
As a pilot, I’m familiar with hypoxia and how it works. I or pretty much any other pilot could very quickly write a completely bulletproof execution protocol that would guarantee a 100% painless death every time. It would involve a non-rebreathing 100% nitrogen mask so every lungful taken is 100% fresh nitrogen. In this mode, you just get drowsy and euphoric and pass out with no physical pain.

If they ask me to write it, I don’t care if they offer a million dollars I wouldn’t do it. I think the death penalty is barbaric and the way we have applied it is even worse, given how there are numerous instances of people executed despite evidence they were innocent being blocked by court procedure and prosecutors. I’m not saying there aren’t people the world is better off without, there absolutely are. But if we are going to kill people, we need to be absolutely 100% totally fucking sure beyond any doubt regardless of procedure. So I will not support the death penalty.

And that brings us to the two issues.
First is that very few people who actually understand how to do it have any interest in writing good execution protocol. Thus a lot of the protocols are written by people without understanding of human physiology. And quite frankly, I would rather that be the case, if only so it is easier to challenge capital punishment.

Second, is that I think some of the people who write these protocols actually want to cause suffering. I say I’m a pilot so I have understanding of hypoxia, but none of my knowledge is unique or difficult to obtain. A quick Google for ‘painless death nitrogen’ would tell you everything you need to know.
So when I hear that the condemned is breathing his own CO2 from a bag, I conclude that either whoever wrote the protocol doesn’t have Google, or they are intentionally writing a protocol that will look good on paper but cause suffering in reality. Or the protocol is being implemented in such a way to cause suffering, for example if the nitrogen flow is not enough. An executioner could easily prolong suffering by simply using less nitrogen, causing the prisoner to breathe CO2 and thus feel panic reaction.

But I think that further illustrates why the death penalty is a bad idea. The fact that the entire stack from prison guard up to Governor isn’t 100% focused on a humane death sense to me we need to clean our own house before we start burning others.