In the event there is one, I expect nothing less than Senator George Lang to be right there on the front lines leading the charge.

Last Civil war took 2% of the entire US population with it. And that was during muskets and cannons. So I’m pretty sure Senator George Lang wouldn’t mind being one of the 7 million people (if we’re that lucky to keep that number that low) that a second Civil War would inevitably kill.

All these blow hards cry war, but would start running with shit in their pants when the shelling starts. And looking at the turkey Senator George Lang is, I doubt man could run more than ten feet before being winded. A better title would be “Poster child for heart disease coward wouldn’t mind if a lot of other people killed each other so he could feel better about being unable to see his cornichon sized penis.”

Fuck this cunt and any other like him that call for war and clearly have zero intent or ability to actually fight in one. If you aren’t wanting peace in your own country, you should see your dumb ass out.

If I say the word coup enough, it starts to lose any meaning.

— Republicans

Google web services take advantage of an API that only Google knows about.

Completely unsurprising. Google should have been given the anti-trust treatment long ago. There’s not a saving us because the ones to save us are completely complicit. And people who write independent browsers will be smacked back down by having places like YouTube throttle them.

This is the thing we found out way back in the 1500s and 1600s. The various teams don’t play nice with each other. The only reason they are accepting of one another at the moment is common enemy. The second that State religion is permitted, South Baptist and Catholics are going to be kicking each other’s teeth in.

There’s a shit ton of money to be had in the church. No one is going to let some other team take it willingly. They will absolutely eat each other and in the process wreck collateral damage unlike anything anyone has seen since the 17th century. That’s not guessing, that’s like a for sure outcome. We’ve got a little under 20 centuries worth of history that tells us what the outcome is every time.

High inflation: I’m losing money faster.

Low inflation: I’m losing money slower.

That’s how it should be read.

Despite negative perceptions on the state of the economy, people are losing money a lot slower than its June 2022 peak of losing a shit ton of money per quarter.

The reason for that is that you have to look at this as if you’re some greedy corporate bastard.

A robot butler costs money to build and if it doesn’t pan out, they’re on the hook for the cost. Firing people saves money right now, and if generative art doesn’t pan out, they can hire new employees that will work for less.

AI is just the latest craze to justify what these greedy bastards do all the time. The way they’re fucking us is new, but the act of fucking us is as old as dirt.

Thanks man.

Punishment can include and is not limited to death.

I think there’s a bit of a sobering moment that we have a Presidential candidate that is calling for specific names to be held to a firing squad.

Some (specific points to be later determined at some random point in time) evidence is being indicated as being protected (ie, some of the evidence comes from official acts). Thus, it taints the whole thing and ergo everything should be tossed out.

Oh I see… (laugh/cry)

deleted by creator

And what exactly is there to stop the opposition from doing the same thing?

Process. The same that that puts barriers on this discussion from AOC. The entire impeachment process is the understanding of the people who created this country, to have a political process that is departed from the legal process. That’s why being impeached doesn’t also mean criminally convicted and vice versa. Historically, if you were a vassal of the lord and had your fief removed, you couldn’t hold court with your lord AND you basically were penniless with the potential to end up in jail. The entire impeachment process is to separate those two things. That’s why the process is spelled out fully in the Constitution and the execution solely left to Congress to implement.

There entire point of an impeachment is to execute some political justice without having legal justice married to it. What stops anyone from just abusing the process is the process itself and what it indicates for functioning government. If the goal is have no functioning government, then there isn’t anything that stops anyone from abuse. But no functioning government means that those in Congress would lose power, and a loss of power means they become less enticing for lobbyist to enact agendas, for people to seek recourse, and for States to enhance power within the vacuum.

So an abuse of that power would end with them loosing more and more power. This is the same reason why Congress has had a hard time really pinning impeachment and contempt charges and have talked about inherent contempt for Garland (which inherent contempt is basically using Congress to enforce a contempt charge via the Sergeant-at-arms doing the arresting and Congress inventing a “trail” system all of their own outside of the Judicial system… which by the way SCOTUS way back in the 1930s, the last time this was used, indicated that THAT specific instance was not a violation of habeas corpus, but trying to ring Garland up on inherent contempt and trying to put him in Congress jail, would be such a complex process and likely wouldn’t survive a habeas corpus challenge, but who knows at this point? For all we know SCOTUS may be completely cool with Congress tossing people into Congress jail without a proper trail. But of course that brings with it ALL KINDS of ramifications about our Federal government jailing people in a a jail completely ran by Congress and outside the entire legal system, but I digress).

Long story short, all of this stuff is political process. And you do all of this to further a political agenda to the public. But if the public isn’t backing that action, it has the ability to backfire in that entire you don’t get to come back to Congress or you weaken the overall power of the Federal government. So you have to look at the long term goal of anything you want to do with this process. Like the inherent contempt vote got delayed after the first Presidential debate. Biden’s performance was so bad that Republicans feel that they got what they wanted. The whole Garland audio tapes, the GOP wanted them so that they could play back the tapes to the public and show that Biden was losing his marbles. But now since the debate, there’s little reasons for the GOP to go down the tossing Garland into Congress jail and going down a path that’s likely to not play well for anyone except their most harden supporters.

The process limits the process. That’s what prevent the whole “same thing”.

Are we going to replace the court?

I mean, yeah, that’s the goal. SCOTUS has had about a dozen cases that they’ve overturned decades long, and in some cases century long, established rule. One or two per lifetime of a justice is a lot to completely overturn. This court has overturned nearly a dozen long established rulings. The entire point of a justice system is to bring about stability to the political process. Congress answers to the public, and the public can change their mind often, so random laws flying over the place isn’t unusual. SCOTUS is not elected and thus they faintly answer to the public. So they need to have some stability to maintain legitimacy. Even Robert’s talked about this in the ruling that overturned Roe and felt the majority was going too far.

So I think if the court itself is saying that it is ruining their own legitimacy, bringing them up into the political process to answer to these statements the court itself is making is fair game. And I don’t think that’s unfair to mention in that whole process. Judges don’t answer to the public, so justices that massively change the landscape in short orders of time, are shaking the stability they’re supposed to be building. If SCOTUS wants to rewrite the law of the land, it needs to be gradual not as fast as possible.

I guess. Technically. I don’t usually count encrypted without the ability to decrypt as useful, but, I’ll give you the up arrow because technically correct is the best kind of correct.

it physically lives in your RAM for the duration of the stream.

It physically lives encrypted in your RAM and only temporarily. Remember TPM exists.

I think the two of you are focusing on either end of this and not really seeing the bigger picture.

China absolutely (stole / acquired) all the technology they have for solar, EV, and grid based storage. They have literally innovated 0% in this particular industry. I don’t think there’s any debating this aspect.

At the same time, China has pour billions into domestic production of solar panels, lithium and sodium batteries, vehicle production, and grid based storage solutions the likes that no other country has even remotely attempted. They recent demonstrated cheap sodium based 10MWh storage systems that can be built using seawater sodium. Something that California makes a shit ton of in their desalination plants, that they currently just shove the salt off as waste byproduct.

Like, if we wanted to, that kind of thing that China just demonstrated, we could be building GWh level storage systems for 10% the cost of a 1 GWh nuclear facility strictly off a byproduct that California distinctly doesn’t want and is literally paying people to take away. They could literally flip a cost into a revenue stream, but we don’t because “reasons”. We could literally have large batteries charged in Utah, and then use rail to move the sodium based batteries into the Eastern sections of the US, using literally the same infrastructure that we use today to move the tons of coal we move around for the TWh of power we generate. We could be doing this today. But we don’t because many nations just buy the arguments politicians feed them, or “it’s complicated”. And then there’s China demonstrating at small scale that it’s doable. So instead we say “oh well it wouldn’t scale” or “oh well you stole all that tech” because apparently our pride is more important than climate change.

The thing is, yes China has not committed to educating their population into novel development of these technologies. But at the same time they are deploying this stuff at rates every other developed nation has said they’d like to try and do that one day off in the future. Or can’t do right now because their hands are tied.

For the folks pointing at China as the enemy, fine. I’m not going to debate it. But there’s still things to learn from what they are doing with that stolen technology. Do we need to cozy up to them? Nah. But they’re showing off that grid based storage at scale and cheap is a thing even though people like France and the US say that such a thing is not possible at this time. They are showing LFP is viable if you’re willing to take an initial domestic loss to invest in the infrastructure, something the US citizens know but keep saying “well oil interest are holding us back”. No, there’s only a few dozen oil execs, there over a three hundred million non-oil execs. It’s a lack of will power.

Like most western nations keep coming up with excuses for delaying EV and green technology pushes and China keeps showing many of the excuses given to be false. And we know they’re false. We know the expectation of no less than $36k USD for an EV is some bullshit that car companies are pulling to offset all the baggage they have from leaving ICE. We know we could have charge stations every 100 miles on the Interstates, but we don’t because oil companies don’t want to lose their investments in the infrastructure they’ve got right now.

We know the reasons being given by our political and industry leaders are all bullshit. China is over there showing IRL how bullshit they are. Yeah, they stole everything they have, but at the same time all this “oh we couldn’t possibly do that here in the US” is shown for the BS it is, that we already know it to be, in China.

I mean, great, we’re all very smart people. Awesome. What good is that awesome smartness if we keep letting dumb fucks in politics pander off dumb excuses for why we don’t get to enjoy any of the stuff that awesome smartness provides? What good is being innovative if corporations keep handicapping that innovation to ensure they have a steady stream of revenue?

I mean yeah, let’s call China out of the bullshit they pull. But I mean, let’s not forget all the damn windows we’ve broken ourselves in our glass house here.

you could never have a place that full of screens without ads being everywhere

I audibly laughed.

Remember those ads long ago from Microsoft where everything was a to the edge display? And your taxi cab window was also a display? And the sidewalk was a display? And some random piece of plastic was also a display? And your fucking desk, surprise, is also a display but also one you type on! And so on…

Good times.

I mean all of that looked cool I’m sure at the time, but all of that would be horrible to use, structurally unsound, and require device interactions unheard of.

Unfortunately, this patent is likely just an echo of a project that will never see the light of day

This patent is likely a “we would love to use this to sue someone remotely trying anything that might look like this, but isn’t someone who has a legal team that could convince a judge to send us home with our tails between our legs.” This kind of shit gets pulled by Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, et al all of the time. It’s to ensure their continued ability to keep new entries in the industry away.

I had my fun with Copilot before I decided that it was making me stupider - it’s impressive, but not actually suitable for anything more than churning out boilerplate.

This. Many of these tools are good at incredibly basic boilerplate that’s just a hint outside of say a wizard. But to hear some of these AI grifters talk, this stuff is going to render programmers obsolete.

There’s a reality to these tools. That reality is they’re helpful at times, but they are hardly transformative at the levels the grifters go on about.

AI-generated artwork is detrimental to the creative industry and should be discouraged

Man you wouldn’t guess how airbrush artist felt when Photoshop came around.

Just a reminder that the last of the tax cuts under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 for citizens ends in 2025. The flat 21% rate for businesses tax cut will continue long after that point.

The Republicans are the ones who passed the TCJA with the whole point being that they would run on this plank hard in 2024. The reason the income tax on people are ending in 2025 was because the House and Senate (both controlled by Republicans at the time) couldn’t agree on a unified measure and decided to instead use reconciliation to move the TCJA through. And they’re planning exactly this same tactic if they win in November.

Because they don’t want a solution, they want a never ending problem.