IHeartBadCode

Yeah. We don’t have anything in place for this kind of thing, so we had to rely exclusively on things we use for corporate litigation and what have you. The whole impeachment, that’s about it as for what our founders created to protect us and if Congress doesn’t exercise that power, well this is what happens. That whole argument way back “the courts will settle this” from the Senate that gave him a pass, that was the Senate knowing they failed and trying to pass the blame elsewhere.

Trump got away with everything because the actual few protections we have, the people entrusted to use those powers lacked the spine to actually use that power. Cowardice is how we got here. A short but important line of defense was entrusted to weak minded people and so they failed at every step of the way.

Perhaps we will one day fix these shortcomings. Maybe. But this shows that if we give power to weak individuals that will put wealth, power, and their own interests over the rule of law, then we don’t have a country. The Constitution is only a sheet of paper if we do nothing to enforce it.

Bold of you to assume that any family member of Trump’s would not already be stealing the money.

Someone, somewhere wished that Rubio and Gaetz were no longer in Congress.

And the monkey paw curled a finger.

One. Trump can’t fire the Comptroller. They report to Congress.

Two. Trump will get to select the next Comptroller on December 22 of 2025. So it’s kind of a moot point.

WHAAAAATTT?!

Rubio? Dang. That’s a choice. There’s Romney, Paul, Barrasso, and Cruz that are some heavy hitters on the Committee on Foreign Relations and he went with Rubio? I mean shit, Rand Paul is who I would think would slide the best into Trump’s Sec. of State. There’s likely no one for Sec. of State that’s on Foreign Rel. that’s been more meticulous about the southern border that him. Additionally, the man is an easy pick for if you wanted to have someone sign a giant check from the US Treasury to Israel in the amount of ALL dollars.

Rubio is a bit more slow paced. Don’t get me wrong, he wants a wall just as much, but he’d likely slow walk it to allow it to gain heavy media traction. Paul would just be like “Give me some fucking bricks”.

is viewed by State Department officials as unlikely to overly politicize the role

That is a massive understatement there.

All I have to say is color me surprised by the choice. I mean, obviously Trump is going to tell Romney to eat shit, but shit if Foreign Rel. is where Trump was going for Sec. of State, I would have surely thought Paul would be a a perfect fit to Trump’s mannerisms.

Dems Should Steal It Back.

Or you know, Bernie should just have it and everyone should stop stealing it. I mean I’m as liberal as they come, but c’mon Democrats, stop stealing Bernie’s shit and leaving him behind and just listen to what Senator Sanders is telling you will actually win Americans.

I mean, I get it, I’m bummed about Trump, but shit, PLEASE LEARN SOMETHING THIS CYCLE DNC!! I mean there’s a ton of reasons for why Trump won, but holy fuck, Democrats if you could run something just few nanometers short of the current level of insipid political rhetoric, that would be amazing.

I’ll still vote Democrat on the mid term, but c’mon drink a Red Bull or something.

You’ll have to speak up. He can’t hear you over the leopards.

While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.

Goddamn this hits the exact thing that Democrats really need to learn.

There’s a ton of emotion in this nation. Given:

• The opioid crisis where the people responsible are in perpetual litigation.
• The wars we fought that costed us deaths of young people who had lives ahead of them, and scarred millions more. All so that a few rich asshats could profit.
• The corruption of large companies as they swindle the working class, only to watch legislators continue to profit off of insider trading.

And that’s just to name a few. There’s a ton of emotion in this nation. And Trump, for better or worse, taps into that emotion. The cut and dry democrats, they keep telling us, “The system will work, this time” and you have a public that just screams “well how soon is now then?”

Democrats cannot just keep tapping on the system as it currently stands when the system so obviously doesn’t deliver. There are hungry democrats looking for change to the system to form a more better system that will serve them, and the party just keeps dressing the bones of the long gone bird from days long pass.

Sanders fucking sinks the nail in a single stroke of the hammer on this. And Republicans are using that emotion, that pent up distrust of the system as it is, to move people in their direction. The entire point of this living government is to have a government, to have a system, that matches the people who are alive and having to deal with it. Sanders sees that and cut and dry Democrats keep going “but Trump will ruin the system that doesn’t work for you!!”

Goddamn, one day, they will learn. Democrats will pick up on what Sanders is saying one day. But holy shit, they are going to clearly take an incredibly long and winding road to get there. I don’t agree with where Republicans want to take us. I don’t agree with how Republicans want to get there. But goddamn, we’ve got to hand it to them that they’re actively pointing out the exact same thing the Sanders is pointing out. “Status Quo ain’t going to fucking work anymore.” The sooner the traditional Democrats learn that, the faster they can come back to being relevant.

Remember 4 years of Russia-gate, everyone

That whole thing was about Russia using social media to spend disinformation. The entire thing wasn’t that, Russia hacked into the ballot boxes and changed votes, it was that Russia was using social media as a means to give false information to the public.

Underpinning the whole Russia-gate episode is the fact that human beings still physically pushed the buttons they pushed and that the vote they cast was indeed the vote they wished to cast. So we still accept the results as, technically speaking, the people have spoken.

But c’mon, you’ve seen the increase in AI slop. You know the Russia-gate stuff is true. In fact, I would dare say this election cycle they’ve gotten worse at doing it as they’re still pretty new at the whole AI stuff. Now where I, myself, and other Democrats likely disagree is the how to solve it. Lots of Democrats want to ban AI and regulate social media, but my opinion is you can’t fight fire by banning the match. You have to teach fire safety and hope the public is smart enough to not set themselves on fire.

But the important aspect is in all of this, the ballots that were cast, we still respect the final tally. That’s the fundamental difference between the Russia-gate and Trump’s legal challenges. The Russia-gate stuff is basically people are being misled. Trump’s stuff was that people were literally altering the ballot computer.

I think people are still being misled… BUT, Trump won this one fair and square. The law doesn’t say a person being misled shouldn’t have their vote count, and such a law would be insanely stupid/incredibly dangerous, even if it favored my particular team. We fix being misled by educating people and so losing this election just means that the educating folks game needs to up the ante. Best anyone can do is put the sources out there, show where the misinformation is wrong, and leave it up to the voter to read all of that come to the conclusion that matches reality. But if they don’t, we’ve got to accept that and work on better messaging.

That’s how one makes a point. They present the view, present the evidence, and use a persuasive argument. The rest is up to the voter to put together.

“They’re not hurting the people they need to be hurting”

We are so going to be hearing this again.

what long term storage would be the best option for storing digital information

The biggest factor with passive storage, something that’s not refreshed. Optical media that’s made to last. M-DISC comes to mind, but there’s no proof that worse case 100 years is a valid claim. Chemically speaking, a well kept disc should keep 100 years, but that’s chemical composition in an ideal case. Nothing in manufacturing is perfect, so impurities are always going to be there robbing the lifespan of these discs.

Magnetic tape ideally lasts decades if not close to a century, but these are tapes that are kept in incredibly controlled conditions. If you’ve ever worked in the server world you’ll know that any plain Jane LTO magnetic tape can’t be trusted after collecting dust for anywhere close to five years.

We have scrolls, we have books, and we have stone tablets that have endured centuries, but the key in all of those is how well they were kept. The construction matters, but the bigger aspect is the environment they were kept in. For digital media, we don’t know any real way to keep digital data in a passive state for centuries because, well, we haven’t had digital data for that long. We’ve got really old punch cards that are close to that age, but even then, some of the oldest stacks are now sitting in hermetically sealed cases and are actively upkept to prevent UV damage by clear coating those cases on a regular basis.

And that’s the thing with digital media, keeping it in an active storage rather than passive may be the key for centuries of longevity. USB sticks are fine so long as someone remembers to plug them in and allow them to refresh every some many years. Most USB sticks use ceramic capacitors, so leakage there isn’t too much an issue. The bigger thing might be corrosion of the various traces and pins, but if well kept, that might take decades to eventually make an impact.

Sometimes, I like to parallel digital long term storage as the Ship of Theseus. If you keep moving the data from one device to another, it’s still the same data. And in that sense, the data can live forever. Even if there’s a gap of say two decades, if you can still get to the data and convert it into something modern, the data lives on. It’s not the original medium, but with digital data, it doesn’t have to be, that’s the neat thing about digital data.

I think people still are working on trying to wrap their heads around digital data versus the way we used to do it. You know, someone might have the family bible and we’ve got to keep it nice and tidy and careful with it, because with analog data the medium and the information are one in the same. And I think sometimes people look at family digital photo collections like that. Like it’s the family bible and that we’ve got to keep it safe. But if it’s a USB stick that you pull out every so often, look over it, and call it day. Maybe move the photos from the Walmart USB stick that you got in 2016 to the new 800TB USB-F stick you just got from neo-Amazon in 2073, those photos can live forever. You don’t have to be careful with them anymore.

I think that’s one of the reasons that open formats matter so much. If you stored all your family videos in Windows Media Format, what happens when Microsoft dies in the Second US Civil War of 2038? That’s not helping you in 2073 to open those files on a format you can never figure out. But say you stored it in some open format. Now all you need is an implementation of that format and a compiler. And poof, now you have a modern codec to read the files of the before times.

It’s one of those fun maybe slightly existential kinds of things. Nothing lasts, no matter how hard we try, nothing will last. All things forgotten decay, we can only slow that decay down, but we can’t prevent it. But things that live, things that pass through the hands of the living, those things endure because there are people who put time, one of the most precious resources we have, into them. Our reward for that investment of time is something that continues beyond the decay.

I like to think of it as the balance of the universe. You get to keep this, but only if you give a bit of time to pay for keeping it. And sometimes it’s crazy to think of how much that applies to. Also I likely shouldn’t reply after having a few drinks. Wooooo!!

Environment makes all the difference for passive storage, sorry I really went out there on the reply.

Best bet is long term optical discs or long term magnetic tape. USB keys are not good for long term storage. USB keys use NAND memory that is a series of floating gate metal oxide semiconductors (FGMOS). These operate by using Fowler-Nordheim tunneling, in where a charge is carried along a regular style fin field-effect transistor (FINFET) and a charge above the transistor’s channel causes some electrons to quantum tunnel into floating gates that are isolated by oxides.

While these floating gates are sealed off from everything, so the charge should stay “indefinitely”, quantum effects cause some of the electrons to “leak” out of the floating gate, causing a degradation of the stored signal. Typically there’s a refresh circuit within the USB key’s integrated circuit that takes care of that and USB data can last seemingly forever. However, that refresh circuit requires a small amount of power, which if you store the USB stick somewhere for years on end, will never get powered.

This is the reason why flash memory only assures data can be retained for about ten years without power. Eventually the electrons “trapped” in floating gate have enough time to tunnel out of the floating gate completely obliterating the signal. The tunnel events aren’t many per second, but give enough time, and all of those events add up. Paired with the whole thing that USB sticks mostly no longer use binary logic levels. Most are now using something like four or eight logic levels. So instead of there just being on and off, there is 0V-0.7V = 00, 1V-1.7V = 01, 2V-2.7V = 10, 3V-3.7V = 11 logic levels. So a small amount of charge loss can create a different bit pattern.

One thing to look at for long term storage is something like M-DISC. The matter by which the burned data onto the optical media is made is via a process that takes about 10,000 years (estimated) to break down. However, the disc itself is in a polycarbonate thermoplastic that has an average breakdown of only about 1,000 years in extremely dry environments and about a tenth of that in your average sealed lock box environments.

Your average spinning disk hard drive can store information for some time, but the storage requirements are pretty intense and even then hard drives loose about 1% of the magnetic strength per year without power. And about 70 years is the max before the various magnetic bits that form the low level format of the disk have degraded without power to the point that the disk has too many bad sectors to be called usable. But outside of that, the biggest fault is mechanical failure. No matter how well you think you’ve stored a drive, it’s never good enough and the spinny bits always fail from becoming too fragile from pervasive oxidation. Basically the drive will spin up only to tear itself apart as some weaken part of the armature flies into the spinning platters.

But USB sticks will only give you about a decade before the stored information fades away into the quantum ether.

Kamala is going to win comfortably. Mark it.

Popular vote? Oh yeah, not even a question. Harris is going to absolutely dominate in the popular vote.

Electoral vote? Oh see, that’s a different story. Shit is close, like uncomfortably close.

Biden pulled Michigan in 2020 by about 150k votes. A 2.8% margin. And he was up in the polls by 10% going into it. Right now Harris is showing only a 1.7% lead in the polls in Michigan. Harris has to absolutely take Michigan, there’s not a path to winning without Michigan without pulling something like Ohio or Georgia, which she’s 6% under in Ohio and 2% under in Georgia. So the GA surprise, nobody should be counting on that. Georgia by the numbers is going Trump this election. Ohio is solid Trump territory. Thinking Florida or Texas might sway is foolish thinking. So without those four, Harris has to pick up the Rust belt if she wants to win, and she’s not polling well there. Like she’s ahead, but Biden was double digits leading the Rust belt in 2020 and that turned into single digit percentage leads in votes. Harris has single digit leads in the Rust Belt polls (in aggregate).

If Harris wins this, in the electoral college, it’s going to be by the thinnest margins we’ve seen before. Not even joking, Trump on the Electoral college has a collection of states that he’s made incredibly safe that puts only a handful of battlegrounds he needs. Harris has nothing but uphill from where we are currently at.

The lead is larger than the one Hillary Clinton had over Donald Trump in the 2016 election as the Democratic nominee woos swing states

From the article. And Clinton lost by some of the thinnest margins in key states. In Michigan, she lost by 0.1% of the vote. That was a massive loss that costed Clinton incredibly. Literally 10,000 votes were the difference. The Libertarian candidate received twelve times the number of votes that Clinton lost by. WI, MI, and PA, Clinton lost those three states by less than 100,000 votes. And it was those losses that gave Trump the win. Less than 100,000 votes is was made the 2016 election.

Anybody who thinks this election is a done deal is talking out their ass. You run the numbers for who will win which State, Trump is inches from victory. This is going to be a insanely close race. Everyone HAS TO GET OUT THERE and vote. This is going to get decided by single digit percents in key states if not even closer than that.

Typically you warn someone of something that they were not originally expecting. When it is expected, that is usually referred to as reminding. Like a reminder that this Sunday is the end of daylight savings time in the United States.

Literally stealing the vote.

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can absolutely withhold weapons see leahy

He can’t legally, and Republicans in the House would absolutely jump at the chance to impeach Biden and have it carry over into the next session as Democrats did with Trump’s second impeachment. It would literally be the train they ride till midterms.

Gosh you are really bad at this.

You clearly confuse words on paper with real world consequences

I don’t think you’ve ever worked for the Government. You are insanely bad at this.

I’ve given you plenty of opportunity and you’re just spewing “nothing means anything anymore!!!” Gosh, it’s not like I haven’t met countless numbers of you types.

Not once have you managed to identify how the judicial branch can hold a president accountable\

Enjoined. You clearly aren’t reading anything, I’m not typing any more. Consider yourself blocked, you are a waste of time.

Really I’m just disappointed in the lack of blackjack here.