As usual, Trump only amplifies something that was floating around for decades. FEMA has long been the target of conspiracy theories. You can get a taste of it from the old X-Files movie. Being a federal department that gets to do extraordinary things in emergencies tends to make it a target.
Georgia has been turning around in recent years.
Also, I saw fewer confederate battle flags in Atlanta than I did in Indianapolis. Fuck Indianapolis.
Here’s some solid numbers:
The Shuttle was so expensive that it might have been better to keep using the Saturn V. It accomplished a lot, but was ultimately a failure at its original goal of a reusable rocket with a fast turnaround. Some of the old hopes for it were to launch 100 Shuttle missions per year. As problems were found, it was clear it would never be close to that.
Falcon 9 was already an order of magnitude drop from what came before. Being able to grab the Starship booster by the chopstick method means it can quite possibly do the quick turnaround the Shuttle promised. That could mean another order of magnitude drop. Possibly even two orders of magnitude.
That’s transformative. It’s not just cheaper. It let’s things be done that weren’t possible before.
One subtle thing that’s already come out of this is related to Starlink. Now, this has a whole lot of problems that I won’t get into here, but it does have one fascinating effect. A rocket coming back down generates plasma that blocks radio signals to the ground. This means there’s a blackout time where everyone in mission control stands by nervously while waiting to hear if it blew up or not.
What Starlink does is provide a high bandwidth link above the rocket, letting them relay data back to the ground. This means that not only do we have full communication during reentry, but even a live video feed of the exterior. This was not possible until fairly recently.
It should also be noted that we SpaceX didn’t do this on their own. They benefited from decades of NASA R&D, launch facilities, and funding. Their biggest success comes from working around the pork barrel politics that hangs around NASA’s neck.
RO also puts about four times as much water down the drain as it filters. A whole house RO filter is extremely wasteful. You don’t need to be filtering every toilet flush.
It’d be nice if it, you know, linked to the actual paper. The article reads like it was written by someone who knows cryptography words but had no clue what they mean.
The article says they hit AES, which doesn’t make much sense. Block ciphers aren’t vulnerable to QC in the same way as public key crypto. Even so far as Grover’s Algorithm would help at all, it’s far from being practical.
Technically correct. You would buy time well past the end of the universe. Advances in either quantum or conventional computers would not change this. There are theoretical limits at play.
Now, maybe you can find a way to substantially reduce the difficulty of breaking it over brute force. Cryptographers have been trying to break AES for 30 years now and haven’t found one that does more than marginal improvement. But it’s possible.
All we need to do to make AES secure is double the size of the key. That’s it.
Bluetooth wouldn’t save you from that.
Cuban is the best guy on Shark Tank. This is not a high bar, and isn’t worthy of unqualified praise.
There are intelligence briefs that we get from Israel, and the money we give them tends to boomerang right back into the US military-industrial complex.
OTOH, Israel collapses in a week without US support. Maybe politicians should realize this and use it to tell Israel to knock it the fuck off.
Except it doesn’t check out when you break down the numbers.
Right from the get-go, the Electoral College has produced no shortage of lessons about the impact of racial entitlement in selecting the president. History buffs and Hamilton fans are aware that in its first major failure, the Electoral College produced a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his putative running mate, Aaron Burr.
The EC in the 1800 election was 73/65 in favor of Jefferson. The popular vote was 60% in Jefferson’s favor, but he got 53% of the EC. If anything, the EC put him at a disadvantage.
The tie spoken of above was a technical issue between Jefferson and his intended Vice President, Aaron Burr. It doesn’t have much to do with slavery at all. They were trying to hack around the system of setting the second place winner as Vice President, and it blew up in their face. Burr was always intended by the Democratic-Republicans to be Vice President.
The 12th amendment was passed before the next election to do away with that means of selecting the Vice President. It was ratified by both slave and free states. It was rejected by Delaware and Connecticut, both of which had <10% of their population as slaves in the 1800 Census (only three states had zero slaves by then).
Adams was by far more consistently against slavery compared to Jefferson. You can find writings where Jefferson was against it, but his actions plainly speak otherwise. Adams never owned a slave and even avoided employing them secondhand. Which is about as difficult as avoiding products from tobacco industry subsidiaries today.
Adams lost, but he would have lost with or without the EC.
Anything that happens later (which is where the article goes after the above) isn’t particularly relevant to how the EC was intended to work. The population dynamics and entry of new states couldn’t have been predicted at the time.
The three-fifths compromise, though? Absolute fucking evil. Adams maybe wins the EC in 1800 without that, and (more importantly) Congress would certainly look very different. The EC was, if anything, a counterbalance to the three-fifths compromise, though not a very strong one.
The EC should go away because it’s antidemocratic. The argument that it was for slavery, though, just doesn’t add up.
When do politicians realize that Israel needs the US a whole lot more than the US needs Israel?
While there’s plenty of criticism of the constitution along slavery lines, this isn’t one of them. Sorting the 1790 census by total population and then comparing the percentage of slave population, you’ll see that it’s very mixed. If the EC were to protect slavery, we would expect states with a high slave population to have a lower population overall, but that isn’t the case.
Also of note is that only two states (Maine and Massachusetts) had zero slaves. There were a handful of house slaves in almost every state at the time. Those states didn’t have a heavy economic dependence on slavery, though. It’s the southern states, with their whole economy built around plantation slavery, that are the real problem. But again, they don’t line up in ways that would give them an EC edge.
Let’s see what the founders had in mind:
The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue. And this will be thought no inconsiderable recommendation of the Constitution, by those who are able to estimate the share which the executive in every government must necessarily have in its good or ill administration. Though we cannot acquiesce in the political heresy of the poet who says: "For forms of government let fools contest That which is best administered is best,‘’ yet we may safely pronounce, that the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.
In other words, it’s supposed to stop someone like Trump from ever being President. Since that clearly failed, maybe we should junk the whole thing.
Even this is generous. The Federalist Papers, IMO, should be taken as a way to sell the new constitution to the populace. They make it sound like the whole thing was more well thought out than it really was. The constitution that came out is just the compromise everyone could live with after debating it for hours. Politicians back then aren’t that different from today; they have their own agendas, their own ambitions, and their own squabbles. They also get tired after long debates and will vote for anything as long as it gets them out of there.
On top of that, a good chunk of what they were thinking at the time–which you can see echos of in the quote above–was deflecting criticism that democracy couldn’t work. The US was the first modern democracy, and there were plenty of aristocrats in Europe (and even some useful idiots domestically) who laughed off the idea of a government run by peasants. The result is a system that doesn’t go all in on democracy, and has all these little exceptions. “No, no, see, the electoral college will stop a populist idiot from taking executive power”.
We’ve changed a lot of those over the years, such as electing senators rather than having them appointed by state governors. In hindsight, these were not necessary at all. It’s time for the electoral college to go.
Brave, but foolhardy.
You’re way off base to the point where I’m not sure if you’re serious or not.
Nvidia would probably cease existing without cheap Taiwanese labour to do all theoretical work for them so those shorts could be free money
Nvidia uses TSMC, and it isn’t because of price. It’s a very expensive fab because it’s the best one in the world. If war blocked it from functioning, Nvidia would switch to some other fab. What they put out would be worse than what they had before, but nobody else would be able to make anything better, either.
But more likely, open war over Taiwan would tank the economy worldwide. Shorting Nvidia would only be a technical victory for yourself.
What if we make a better world on accident?
There’s tons of grift that went on with those shortages. The Trump Admin is protected from criminal investigations the same way Mr Burns’ body is protected from disease; have so much of it that it doesn’t matter anymore.
Don’t let him take power ever again. It’s literally the least we can do.
It’s not just the electoral college. The US was the first big modern democracy, and all the democracies that have sprung up since took one look at its structure and said “nah”. This includes democracies the US directly helped setup in their current form, such as Germany, Japan, and Iraq. Nobody wants to replicate that structure, including the US.
States as semi-sovereign entities rather than administrative zones? Nope. Every state gets two reps in the upper legislative branch? Nope. Those two reps plus at least one lower legislative rep means that the smallest state gets at least three votes in the Electoral College? What madness is that? Even the executive being separate from the head of the legislative branch is uncommon everywhere else.
Parliamentary systems, where the Prime Minister is both head of the legislative branch and the executive, are more common. Some of these split some of the duties of the executive off into a President, but that President isn’t as singularly powerful as the US President. The US idea that the different branches would have checks and balances against each other was rendered pointless the moment the first political parties were developed.