No, the Republicans also don’t have the power to fix the system. That’s not their goal. Both parties have the power to completely gum up the works of the government, which is antithetical to fixing the system, but is perfectly acceptable if your goal is to weaken protections to allow a privileged few to gain more power through extragovernmental levers. If we entered a mirror world where the Democratic party were gunning to be a fascist dictatorship and the Republicans were gunning to stop them, but all voters retained their current alliances, not much would change long-term because there are enough people in both parties to obstruct and roadblock, unless the now-pro-civil-rights supreme court kept being radical but in a positive direction

Still a conspiracy if it aims to conspire, if there are receipts it ceases to be a theory and becomes just a true conspiracy

It works great for notes, it’s not great for recording data because if it mishears me/I mumble once an entire set of 500+ observations can be frame shifted away from their identifiers and I have to redo it

Gesture typing is definitely faster, but I find it much less accurate and requires vision. My old sliding phone I could write whole essays in my hoodie pocket while walking home with few to no typos, which was a niche use-case for sure but an existing one. I work outside a fair amount and would love having that back for notetaking in the field

Look, I’m with you most of the way in theory, but a lot of rural areas don’t have plumbing and drinking water from public utilities, they have their own septic and water wells. I know it’s pedantic but a lot of parts of the world are so rural that it probably doesn’t make sense to have fully public transport, like it doesn’t make sense to have centralized water. The scope needs to be great systems within towns and cities and lots of park and ride hubs around the perimeter

It’s more like the 30% who always vote R will vote for whoever, the 30% who always vote D will vote for whoever. Kamala’s task is to get the 1-2% independents who always vote, yes, but also convince as many of the 40% who never bother showing up as possible to actually show up like some have started to in the last elections where reproductive healthcare/etc have been on the line. If she can motivate people for herself and simultaneously underscore that trump is an octogenarian with dreams of fascism and Project 2025 is what he would do, I think we’ll have a landslide. That’s a big if though.

I think it applies equally, the fallen victims will be held up and honored no matter what they had done, the shooter will be an evil antifa devil no matter who he was, and Trump will be the barely escaped Messiah no matter if this was a lone wolf attempt or a conspiracy

I don’t buy it, tbh. I’ve been hearing some variant of “Tesla isn’t growing more and the stock is overvalued” or in the last five years “Musk is an idiot and is going to tank the stock” since I started paying attention to the markets circa 2012. Musk is a fascist piece of shit, but he does have some quality–and it may just be having more money than God and thus having a sort of wealth inertia–that keeps the stock merrily tripping its way upwards. I bought three shares several years ago on a whim, and between the upward growth and the stock splits I’ve sold my initial investment amount 3x already and could sell it three more times today and still have Tesla stock leftover

It’s definitely not a perfect system and you’re absolutely right that it significantly favors people with strong support and safety nets, especially those of a financial nature.

That being said it’s a very easy shorthand for a company to take and is reliable enough to keep using it, just like how financial institutions in the US use SSNs as private identifiers because it’s easier and cheaper than running and supporting their own systems/assessments and mostly works well enough

The other factor not yet mentioned is charging time/range. There are EVs with more range, and EVs with faster charging times, and EVs that are cheaper, but there are no EVs with a comparable long-range driving ability as Teslas for less money. The Hyundai ioniq 6 is comparable now but it’s new, untested, and doesn’t really have a used market

Sure, but so do a lot of other things that aren’t as costly. If NFTs were the first secure way to authenticate things online we wouldn’t have had online banking until very recently

For many of those years it was the only electric pickup truck being advertised. And also, yes people do like the Tesla name. Musk and growing competition has done a ton to tank the reputation lately, but until just a couple years ago Tesla was far and away the best and most advanced electric car, and depending on your criteria the most advanced/best car period. Perception shifts slowly outside of well-informed groups, and the Musk hate is really only affecting well-informed left wing groups right now, so a lot of libertarian Musk fanboys are still fully on the Tesla train

In all three cases, he can do it as long as Congress gives him that power. In this case it’s unlikely Congress will push back on banning Russian software, in the other two the republicans have promised to block any executive effort

In addition to what Blisterex said, the open-source hardware ethos is very similar to the Linux open-source software ethos, so it attracts a similar crowd

I think that’s part of the point? The twitchy zoomers aren’t on?

Because companies mostly don’t want the degree to prove skill sets, which is why they don’t generally ask for transcripts, just that you have a degree in a somewhat related field. The value of a bachelor’s degree to a company is that it proves the applicant is capable of undertaking a ~4 year commitment, achieving a tangible result, and that they pass a threshold competence at navigating beaurocracies and interacting with other humans. The specific skills/experience the company wants are much better assessed using prior experience, interviews, assessments, etc.

Tariffs in general aren’t inherently bad if they protect domestic interests, especially against a foreign power that is subsidizing production as part of an economic power play. If Trump had limited his tariffs to China and Russia not included all of our allies I would have agreed with him. If we didn’t desperately need more EVs and if US automakers weren’t such colossal assholes about making good cheap EVs I’d agree with this one

Funny thing is they aren’t even GMOs, they’re hybrids between tetraploid and diploid watermelon cultivars. You could do it yourself in your backyard if you can find tetraploid seed for sale, or make it yourself with colchicine

Not to beat a dead horse but do you know how we get/got novel variation in crops before targeted DNA technology? It mostly wasn’t wild germpasm unless you happen to work with a crop with large amounts of historically documented pools, e.g. corn and wheat. No, most historical breeding programs use mutagens, either chemical or sometimes radioactive, to cause novel variation, grow the seed, see what looks interesting and not too weird, and cross it back into your gene pool. GMOs are significantly less mad science-y than what they replace.

As I understood it, VPNs don’t work in this threat model because it’s essentially routing traffic through a compromised router before it ever reaches the VPN, so the VPN acts normally but there’s a snooper before you ever connect to it