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.

The elder looked at the interviewer like he was a slow child. “They will get wives from other tribes.”

I believe Darwin might have had something to say about this attitude…

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.

This is absolutely right. We are getting to the point where the circuit pathway is hundreds or even dozens of electrons wide. The fact that we can even make circuits that small in quantity is fucking amazing. But we are rapidly approaching laws-of-physics type limits in how much smaller we can go.

Plus let’s not forget an awful lot of the super high-end production is being gobbled up by AI training farms and GPU clusters. Companies that will buy 10,000 chips at a time are absolutely the preferred customers.

I think a lot of it was frog and hot plate situation. If they had done all this stuff all at once people would have dumped them immediately, but they did it slowly always seeming reasonable and considered at each step.

And a lot of people still adopt their product because for better or worse, it is the best known and relatively easy to use.

At the risk of asking a dumb question, isn’t parading military units down public streets the sort of thing communist dictatorships do?

I know I’ve seen video of this sort of thing from places like North Korea and Soviet Russia, can’t say I’ve really seen it from the states.

I don’t use Plex. I have never used Plex. But based on the one time I tried, this doesn’t surprise me even a little bit.

Years ago I installed it on my NAS, it was a one click download package. I installed it and hit the button to set it up. And then it prompted me to make a cloud account.

Why do I need a cloud account? I am logging into my local server and I am not sharing anything with anybody nor am I subscribing to any cloud services. I have no need of a cloud account. But, the way they built the thing, you need a cloud account to log into your local system.

I did not create a cloud account. I uninstalled it. I concluded that a company that claims to care about user privacy, but requires cloud integration in an area that absolutely does not require cloud anything, does not actually give a shit about privacy. I Googled and found that the requirement for a cloud account was, at the time, a fairly new thing. Lots of people didn’t like it. I concluded that this company was beginning to enshittify, although this was years ago and none of us had heard that word yet. But either way, it was obvious that the company was moving in a not customer-friendly direction and I did not want to be along for the ride.

My choice has been proven right several times over the years since. And yes, every time they remove a feature, or make some other customer unfriendly decision, I retell this story.

The moral here is that a company either cares about its customers or it doesn’t, and it’s usually pretty easy to tell which one fairly quickly. When one bad decision is made, and not corrected, others will follow.

Synology is the latest example of that. For anyone not paying attention, they have recently announced that their 2025 series units will only work with Synology branded hard drives, which are of course more expensive than standard Seagate or Western Digital drives (which work just fine). But if you look, the bread crumbs are there and form a trail. Over the last few years they have removed features, for example the device is no longer can decode h.265 surveillance video, and the units will no longer display SMART data for ‘unsupported’ drives. I say no longer because they used to, but an update changed that so they no longer do.

Bottom line though is don’t do business with companies that don’t respect you.

Yeah exactly. And from what I understand of this thing, it has a fairly easy to use auto update system. So every couple months just plug it into your router and hit the update button. I don’t think it’s a ripoff.

If you are asking this question, this product is probably not for you.
It’s for the non-technical prepper type, the guy who has 10,000 rounds of ammo and dried food for 10 years but still uses AOL.
The idea is just get this thing, plug it into a solar power bank, and then you can get information you might need to survive which wouldn’t be available online if there is no more internet. You could absolutely put the same thing together yourself without a problem. If you have the skill and the wherewithal to do that, you don’t need this. If you don’t have that skill, then you are the target market of this product.

Yeah exactly. I’m on vacation, if I wanted to do chores I would have stayed home. Plenty of choice to do right here.

This 100%.
AirBnB used to be cheaper than a hotel. Then it got so easy to tack on fees and ridiculous requirements that you’re basically paying more than a hotel to housekeep your own room. Mix in lots of shady hosts and most of the time I’d rather just stay at the Hilton for the same price.

It can still be useful as a novelty, like book a party house somewhere or as easily cheaper way to house an awful lot of people. But for the most part, I’ll pass.

Exactly. He has the right idea on this, but given his gun control background I don’t trust him any farther than I can throw him. Gun control is, at this point, nothing more than a way to lose votes. To an anti-gun liberal, gun control is good policy that saves lives. To a pro gun person, gun control is an unconstitutional civil rights violation that makes a candidate unlectable. This turns away an awful lot of pro-gun moderates from rural areas- these are the voters who make a difference in elections.
And as for the anti-gun base, and anti-gun moderates, what are they going to do, vote Republican in protest? Let’s be real.

Gun control is a lose lose proposition

Gun control seems to mean ‘a little more’. This comic is popular among gun owners because it reflects the feeling of constantly ratcheting ‘compromise’.

A perfect example of that is background checks. The original bill was a compromise, All gun sales at gun stores are required to have a background check, but the compromise is that private sales between one person and another are exempted. That was a negotiated compromise between the pro gun and anti-gun side. I think for the most part it was a decent compromise. But now the anti-gun side is trying to roll it back calling it the ‘gun show loophole’ which is horribly named because a gun dealer at a gun show has to do a background check anyway, and most gun shows require background checks for all sales either from a dealer or a private citizen.

The problem with universal background checks is the concept of a transfer. For example, under some proposals, if you want to lend somebody your hunting rifle to go hunting with, that might count as a transfer, which means you have to go to a gun store and pay about $50 and fill out paperwork to legally transfer ownership of the gun to them. And then when they return they have to transfer it back to you.

You should also know that an awful lot of gun owners absolutely hate the NRA. They serve a useful purpose, but their constant deranged rabble rousing fundraising makes gun owners look like paranoid morons.
What I would much prefer to do is outreach and education. An awful lot of gun control laws are based on a total misunderstanding of what guns do and how they work and what makes them powerful or not, I think if more Democrats actually understood guns you would see fewer attempts at bad laws that do nothing to increase safety but just try to turn the screws on gun owners.

It’s a matter of implementation versus invention.

If I asked you to build a hundred story skyscraper, that would be difficult, but we already have all of the technical components. All the component problems are already solved- we know how to make high quality steel, we know how to design the frame of such a building, we know how to anchor it into the ground, etc. You just need to put those technologies together in a functional design.

If I asked you to build me a spacecraft that goes faster than light, you couldn’t, because that sort of propulsion system has never been built. And while we have theories on how one might build it, we don’t currently have the capability to build any of those theoretical drive systems even as test articles (mainly because they need things in space larger than we have the capability to launch or will have the capability to launch anytime soon).

But if I asked you to build a thorium reactor, all of the component problems have been solved. We have a lot of coatings that resist corrosion, and so making valves and pipes out of them (and more importantly, designing the system of valves and pipes) takes work but we know how to do it. We understand how to make and process thorium fuel, even if we don’t have much experience doing it.

As for your grid, I don’t want my grade either powered by text that isn’t safe reliable and productive, but the fact is we don’t have that right now. A lot of power still comes from coal and similar shitty sources. So I will absolutely take less shitty.

Yeah I use the word if a lot, but that has a level of probability associated with it. I can say if we figure out a way to generate power from magic pixie dust tomorrow our energy problems will be solved but there’s no probability of that. Here there is a technology that has been known to work since the 1900s, that we have built research reactors on, and that is now being actively developed. The “if” here has a high degree of probability.