12x GW*km at 9x the price is better than 1:1 performance/cost scaling. Obviously labor price and other factors make it not apples to apples, but that doesn’t seem like an awful scaling price premium

The presidential primary is probably the wrong place to start, unfortunately. Because of its scope, it’s hugely expensive in terms of both money and power to get a successful candidacy there. In order for there to be a Bernie on the debate stage 2016 and 2020, you need a couple dozen progressives in the House, a few progressive Senators, a handful of progressive governors, and a metric boatload of progressive state and municipal legislators. For international affairs, the dominant force there is going to be the House Reps and Senators because the other offices won’t have much leverage on that issue. It’s hard to campaign on an issue that splits the big tent and triggers foreign spending against your campaign. The fact that there has been no inkling of an indication that Congress would have the prospective candidate’s back makes it basically nonviable at the national level, as much as that stings. Airing a campaign message of “we will cease a betting thenIsraeli government in their war crimes” beside lower level candidates going out with messaging of “we need to strengthen our relations with our allies in the Middle East” is a disaster waiting to happen, and that is a message that won many a House Rep Democratic primary. It’s an unbearably slow process to drum up a response to a system that is murdering children by the day, and the only solace is that every success makes the next win easier. But it is the system we have, and the only way to change/reform that system short of violence is through a series of small, hard-fought victories. It’s how liberals/progressives were able to get the extent of LGBT rights that we do have, it’s how direct military intervention and corporate bailouts are becoming, if not fully frowned upon, a policy that carries some shame and embarrassment for its advocate. It’s also how abortion rights have been eroded by the regressives, and it’s how transphobic policies are becoming a nationwide phenomenon

… Your ballot was 74 pages? How? My city makes a big deal when we have to use the back of the 1 sheet of 11x18 paper. Granted we have off year elections in our state, so things are a little more divided, but that’s a long way from a 74 page short story of a ballot

This passive language bullshit is so obvious sometimes. “Oh, I wonder what the cyclist did to get run over? And that poor SUV driver getting charged for murder because of this event, Paris is really going off the deep end finding ways to attack innocent drivers.” And yet, per the article, the SUV driver ran down the cyclist in a fit of road rage. That sounds an awful lot like an active choice by the driver, not some passive circumstance that the headline implies. If this person got angry and attacked someone with a knife, and the victim died, the headline wouldn’t be “Knife owner charged with murder after person stabbed”. But use the “right” weapon and all of a sudden we put the kiddie gloves on

I’m assuming they are referring to the fact that this is an unironic usage of a format that typically contains an ironic message. But I think this format is used to express counter narratives of all kinds, both serious and unserious, so I wouldn’t call this an incorrect usage. I mean, the format already has some bone hurting juice energy to start with, so I think gatekeeping its usage is maybe outside of the spirit of the template

Hi! I just want to say fuck you for making me laugh at such a bad pun. I thought I had taste. I’m devastated

It’s maybe worth pointing out that the analysis covers 10 years and appears to account for $0 in GDP growth (and corresponding tax base growth) dependent on those policies. If I’m reading this correctly (big if to be fair): Assuming the government continues to capture 17.5% of US GDP, Harris’ policies would need to generate roughly 4% GDP growth per year (no small feat, granted) to be net zero relative to absolute debt levels and less than that to be net zero relative to debt as a percentage of GDP. Government expenditure is not like consumer spending because almost every dollar it spends looks less like consumption and more like an investment, and leveraging investments is actually a valid strategy, especially when you have the economic momentum/inertia of a nation state to balance the risks involved with debt, and that is before you even get into fiscal monetary policy

Dang, you’re right, I was wrong. It calls for NWS to be commercialized, which could technically be interpreted as either sell off the assets to weather.com or as lay off all the employees and pay weather.com 10x their salary in contracts to get the same product. It calls for NOAA to be downsized alongside NWS’ commercialization. It calls for FEMA to pay much less out to states and eliminate its preparedness grants and insurance programs. All that in mind, it kind of seems tailor made to specifically fuck over Florida and other hurricane/flooding prone states, but it doesn’t call for eliminating the agencies. My bad, thanks for the correction!

Okay, but they literally said they would eliminate them in Project 2025. It’s being awful generous to claim they only want to do the lite version of eliminate. Boil the frog is over, MAGA is masks off crazy. They probably won’t be able to do it, because odds are good that the House at least will be blue in 2025 thanks to some of the more egregious gerrymanders getting fixed, but that doesn’t mean they don’t openly want to do it. These people are not smooth operators stealing brand awareness, they are chimpanzees flinging shit at the wall

And natural gas was supposed to be an transition energy source to get America off coal so that we could transition to renewable energy. History has not been kind to the “if we can just implement this greenwashed fossil fuel process, it’ll really allow us to unlock green energy potential down the road” promise

He’s not running for reelection, the Rs are getting that Senate seat this year

Sure, but 23% of LGBTQ voters aren’t voting for Harris, which is significantly less than a third (33%). Still higher than it should be, granted, but I am pretty sure that is what the original reply comment was pointing out.

From memory and a couple quick Google searches

• January 6th, including both the violence at the national Capitol and related, often violent protests outside verious state capitols
• Death threats to election count and poll workers
• Republican legislator invites armed men into the Oregon State Capitol during a protest
• Armed protestors rally around the tallying center in Detroit while the count was ongoing
• Brawl with counterprotestors at the “million Maga march”
• Violent “Stop the steal” protests in Sacramento

I wouldn’t say there was just a little violence after the 2020 loss

Italy is 60% of the size of Spain and has a similar ratio of arable land (27.1 vs 27.9% per Wikipedia, Spain is also quite mountainous). Doesn’t really invalidate the point in your comment, but I expected a bigger difference when comparing "immense spaces and flat fields"to a mostly mountainous fraction of the territory

The city already settled to pay about $3 per resident for the cops’ bad behavior and to put cops in a training on political violence. If some of the cops in question live outside of the city (not uncommon), they probably won’t pay a dime and the only impact they will feel is sitting through a training session that they will probably not take seriously

short distances in solar radii

I think astrophycisists and I may have a difference of opinion on the meaning of the adjective short

Are you assuming that AI in this case is some form of generative AI? I would not ask chatgpt if a mushroom is poisonous. But I would consider using a convolutional neural net based plant identification software. At that point you are depending on the quality of the training data set for the CNN and the rigor put into validating the trained model, which is at least somewhat comparable to depending on a plant identification book to be sufficiently accurate/thorough, vs depending on the accuracy of a story that genAI makes up based on reddit threads, which is a much less advisable venture

For me, I think it’s the fact that I have to prepare for both a social interaction and a monologue depending on whether they answer or not. As someone with mild social anxiety, the uncertainty and the fact that I am unequivocally initiating the interaction messes with a lot of the ways I would cope with joining a normal social interaction and throws me off my game

There are many leaders in each American political party, the leader of their representatives in the house, the leader of their senators, the leader of the party committee, the leader of the governor’s association, etc. But when a party controls the White House, the president is generally considered the head honcho. Part of that is respect for the office, part of it is practicality (the president has the biggest ability of any one person to message a party’s platform), and part of it is mechanics (every four years at the national convention, the party adopts the platform of their presidential candidate, essentially signing up to work for that person if and when they become president to support enacting that platform. Chuck Schumer is the Majority leader of the Democratic Senate caucus, which makes him very high ranking in the party, but Biden would still “outrank” him, so to speak. Jaime Harrison is the DNC chair, which is largely a fundraising and campaign strategy position vs. a position of power.

It’s easier to read if you read it as a line spoken by the Silicon Valley TV character Jian Yang