I’m sure they have a lot of nukes but how many have been stripped for parts (by them or for the black market or by spies)? I’m not saying they have zero or that their stockpile isn’t 2nd or 3rd in the world. But the more they mention them, the more I wonder why.

Things like planned obsolescence and software blocks on things like farmers fixing tractors without John Deere’s software permission almost makes me think the bad guys won the Cold War.

Between me and a mechanic friend, we can fix my car but we can’t turn off the (wholly unnecessary) “inspection needed” noise without me spending $1000 on software. Apparently, the inspection needed warning isn’t even related to anything. It just comes on every x miles. The car doesn’t have a detected issue or anything. That beep is radicalizing me.

These things go in cycles. I remember when “Fedora Core” — they dropped the “Core” part of the name — was the cool new distro. I remember when Ubuntu was the cool new distro. Just ignore it and play around with distros until you find one you like.

In my opinion, new users should use a very popular distro so they have documentation and message boards. After a few years, you get your legs under you. At that point, start distro hopping using weird desktop environments. Then, someday, you get a lot of experience and use a very popular distro because software is a tool and you don’t care. (If something has buzz, I throw it in a VM and go “Huh, that’s interesting.”)

It’s sort of like how the target audience for Nike Air Monarchs is people buying their first pair of Nike Airs and dads who aren't trying to hear the word “colorway” and just want some shoes.

Assassinations always lead to terrorist originations disbanding immediately. I’m sure this will usher in a century of peace and prosperity for the Israeli people.

Why? Did they escalate a war everyone warned them not to escalate and ignore a cease fire proposal backed by all their allies?

Those meteorologists get basically all their data from NOAA. They aren’t running the weather satellites and radars and they definitely aren’t flying planes into the eyes of hurricanes to measure the wind speed. The weather app on your iPhone uses data that ultimately comes from the NOAA.

The budget for NOAA (that has the National weather service, the hurricane center, etc.) was $6.35 billion in 2023 and their budget request this year is $6.6 billion. To compare, we just gave Israel, a rich country, (yet another) $8.7 billion aid package. Basically everything the government does is a rounding error on defense ¹, Medicaid, and Medicare. NOAA might be the best value-for-money we spend.

¹ Keep in mind, the $800bn plus DoD budget is only a part of defense spending. The Department of Energy manages the nuclear weapons, Veterans Affairs is its own department. The Department of Homeland Security has the intelligence agencies, border patrol, etc. Total defense spending is well past $1 trillion no matter how you want to count it.

There’s nothing in the constitution about the filibuster. It’s just a Senate rule and the current version (where you don’t have to make long speeches in an ultimately doomed attempt to block legislation with majority support) dates to the 1970’s. They adopted it because in the TV era, Senators were filibustering just to get on the national news and make a name for themselves.

I was in New Mexico recently and Google Maps gave me a route from Bandelier National Monument to Santa Fe that included a “shortcut” through the Los Alamos National Laboratory campus. I got to meet a security guard.

So, yes. I would say I have experienced this.

It’s not very hard to see that 90% of major media outlets want Trump to win. They aren’t incompetent. They aren’t sane-washing his words because they don’t know he says nonsensical and racist shit. They want him to win, for career or ideological reasons.

I had to move from a dorm to another dorm once and “borrowed” a grocery cart because I had like 12¢ in my checking account and had to just push all my shit in a grocery cart on a major city’s downtown sidewalks on a business day.

You don’t really even need to fund single payer healthcare. The U.S. spends twice as much on healthcare as other developed countries already. You just have to nationalize the insurance companies, which can cost as much as you’d like. There a no law of physics preventing it.

I imagine they assumed readers of PV Magazine would be photovoltaics enthusiasts.

Meta should probably never be blamed for innovating when all they do is steal ideas from potential competitors and crudely duct tape them onto existing products. Instagram was once a useful, good app and now it’s 80% features from Snapchat and TikTok and you maybe see a friend’s post a week late.

I think it should be 16 or so. If you can wreck my car, you should be able to vote.

Multiple electronics stores caught on fire. I doubt Mossad found a specific box that said “To: terrorists” on it and only rigged those pagers. They just don’t care about killing civilians.

It’s because they don’t use the same wireless networks as phones and have like a 96h battery life. That’s why hospitals give them to doctors. And plenty of people still use walkie-talkies because they work (within a certain range) even when nothing else does.

Also, the pager companies are still in business mostly because of the pucks you get at a restaurant that buzz when your table or food is ready. “Obsolete” tech that’s dirt cheap can sometimes hang around for niche use cases.

America was founded by a tobacco company. The Virginia Company had the first successful settlement. And then some obnoxious cultists got kicked out of England joined them.

Because the U.S. government gave them $6.6 billion to do it under the CHIPS Act: https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-wins-66-bln-us-subsidy-arizona-chip-production-2024-04-08/

With TSMC, it’s insurance against China invading Taiwan but Intel (and probably everyone else) got a load of subsidies too. After the chip shortage during the pandemic and Russia invading Ukraine, chip production became a national security issue.

It’s because every Sunday, he plays golf at whatever of his golf clubs is nearest to his last event. The secret service begged him not to do that.

When Obama played golf, he played on courses on military bases that are secure by design.

I usually just go camping and ignore it all. Nothing that happens before like October 15th is that important.