That sounds like a fun time to have been part of the tech universe, I presume it was the bounce back from the dotcom boom.

The elusive Chocolate Starfish.

You’re missing half the plot here, yet I’m the summer child. Newsflash: the day and age when people elected the American president is long gone.

The cult is irrelevant, they’re not even cattle - they’re yeast: when they’re fed with oxygen they leaven dough, when they’re starved of air they produce alcohol. It’s the moguls who own their feeds who control their output, not trump. He tried to grab a hold over them, with truth social, newsmax, etc but didn’t get anywhere.

Case in point, the constant Epstein talking points. Why do you think this has come up now? Was there any progress in the investigations? No. Was a smoking gun found anywhere? No.

But do you know what is actually relevant? The “big beautiful bill” - this has the big pocket people very, very concerned. Musk is the higher profile example, and I’m sure many others have been reaching out to Trump “under the table” to change it, but since he’s being headstrong, they’re giving him a taste of what to expect if he doesn’t bow down - get dragged into jail, kicking and screaming, and the very rednecks who right now would gag on his orange shriveled balls would be the first to shove a broom handle up his ass.

With sufficiently bad economic policies, the powers that be will let the pitchforks rise. Our best bet is that we can catch them too in the chaos.

Fighting a raging forest fire with kindling is a viable strategy - if successful, it will lead to the fire starving itself out. Sure it’s risky, but it will put it out for good, while throwing water, even assuming it does anything at all, would still be one stiff breeze away from re-flashing.

But let me be more specific with what I mean: last April, we were very close to one of these breaking points that would have killed the Trump presidency. If you recall, amid the Chinese tariff escalation, the stock market got very panicky and turned to treasury bonds, as it usually does when things get a bit crazy, but this time it didn’t work. It raised alarm bells everywhere, and wise enough people (and I suspect Jerome Powell played no small role in this) forced the White House to do a 180 and stop their bullshit.

I wonder what would have happened if the tariffs went ahead, but I’m 99% sure that Trump wouldn’t be president right now.

will inevitably lead misery and the deaths of thousands of people. People who can’t afford to stay alive die.

You seem to be under the misconception that this is the future, or even that it is reversible.

It is not. The only way the current US political scenario will change, peacefully, is as a consequence of the power struggle between the oligarchs and the would-be dictator.

Then there’s the non-peaceful options, which are the only ones that effectively bring back power to the majority. The issue is that people will gradually adapt to anything, so the only way to prevent the long-term crawl back to the middle ages is for things to get so bad, so quickly, that people actually get up and do something about it.

In any case, let me know if a few years who was right. If either of us live to see it.

Powell getting replaced by a trump bootlicker is probably the best that could happen.

Sure, in the short term it would massively fuck up the economy, but that would bring trump’s downfall all the quicker.

It’s a shame about the TACO tariffs too. If they had all gone into effect as the dorito wanted, the economy would be so fucked up right now that you’d have the whole nation, except for the billionaires, out in the street with pitchforks.

It will come, it’s just taking longer this way.

Explain why it’s not you who is the absolute buffoon here?

Because you’re presented with a photo of a ferries wheel that is installed in apparently uneven terrain. It’s highly questionable just how compacted that dirt actually is, seeing as nobody even bothered flattening it in the first place, so what do you wager are the chances of one of those massive outrigs you claim are under there sinking or slipping, putting a bunch of load on the structure, and causing it to fail violently?

And what if it rains? How is that soil gonna behave when it’s full of water?

Because going by the care these guys took when setting up these horrifying stilts, I feel like I’m looking at an involuntary manslaughter case waiting to happen.

But sure, go on with your “uhyuk, people stoopid” chant, may you convince many others like you to ride deathtraps. I’ll be sure to send thoughts and prayers.

EDIT: here’s manufacturer schematics of what looks to be a similar sized ride. Those outrigs aren’t looking that mighty…

EDIT2: Actually, nevermind. Here’s one of your super secure outrigs:

This shit’s a deathtrap alright.

Exactly. They seem exceedingly effective at what they do - enabling the absurdly rich to become obscenely rich.

This is the same approach as “add one more lane” to a congested highway. You know it’s not gonna work.

Just get a saucer.

What’s a mater?

No really, I don’t know what it is. Is it like a local dialect for tomato?

Where is this coming from, did I miss something? Last I checked, Nvidia was raking in absurd profits…

Of course, parents fill out a form, like a testament really, where they get to choose which kid gets which dinnerware set and who gets which mental illness.

I meant the machine itself! The print out is your typical systemd boot, though they’re usually covered by a distro splash but it can be disabled.

He doesn’t 1) install, 2) approves any bowl, 3) or should he. He can refuse to make bidet seats any time, but prefers wașiki seats instead.

He directly provides releases for Windows x64/ARM64, Linux x86_64/ARM32/ARM64 (in AppImage format), and macOS. He also explicitly forbids modifications, and since he considers “pre-configured settings” to be modifications, and this is basically barring any other distribution.

So while ultimately you’re right in that he doesn’t install it himself, he provides a super-simple “do it yourself” kit for people who live in apartments, while making anyone else who lives in a house have to assemble it from a million separate pieces themselves.

Note that I’m sympathetic, and I don’t know what the solution here is, but hopefully everyone figures it out…

My take on a better analogy:

The bidet maker is pissed because people complain to him that their bidet is leaking or has cracks. He’s annoyed at a distribution/installation company because they fumbled, so he’ll handle installation himself but only to the houses he approves.

Oh, and the bidets are free and nobody gets paid a cent.

Yep, this sounds like the main issue.

The helicopter route has since been closed, but NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said she doesn’t believe “anyone did the math until the NTSB did the math” to determine how close planes and helicopters were getting until after the crash.

There are technical aspects, like how the Black Hawks report incorrect altitudes while flying fast over the river, but this strikes me as the largest cause: nobody valued the controllers pleas sufficiently to do proper management of heli routes around the airspace.

And by nobody, that’s probably the FAA who had the responsibility of doing it.

I pay a lot more for a large coffee at a brand store (Starbucks, Costa,…) than I do for a pint at my local bar.

Alcohol is fairly inexpensive here. People need to live, somehow.

I’m sorry to call you out, but I think you’re disregarding a valid point and establishing a false equivalence between this contraceptive method, and traditional hormone-based methods.

Please let me elaborate. This drug is not hormone-based. It works by blocking a receptor called “RAR-alpha” that exists in every cell’s nucleus, and it works as a switch that controls gene transcription - it determines what the cell eventually produces and does. The body chops up vitamin A and uses it to trigger this receptor, and we know that it plays a role in many different processes, from cell differentiation (including formation of the heart, nervous system, and white blood cells), to development (like the formation of limbs) and even cell death. Incidentally, it also plays a role in sperm production, which kinda makes sense because of how important it is for cell differentiation and development.

The body doesn’t produce a “blocker” for these receptors, which is the function that the drug in the study, YCT-529, performs. This actually mimics the loss of RARa signaling in a vitamin A deficiency, which unsurprisingly, causes fertility problems (among a host of other symptoms).

This is a different approach from “traditional” hormonal contraception, where the most common pills (progesterone only or progesterone-estrogen) activate the same receptors that the body usually activates (and this is what the person above you was referring to) - but in way that prevents the regular cycle from progressing. The fact that the body has these “natural levers” that regulate this process is the reason why birth-control pills have existed for decades - we just push those buttons harder (I’m not denying there are consequences to this, I’m just pointing out the buttons exist). There is no such mechanism for sperm production however, so scientists have been looking at all steps that lead to sperm being produced trying to find something they can block, and that hopefully won’t have terrible consequences elsewhere.

I 100% agree that calling either method “more complicated” or “more natural” or “easier" is wrong. But we cannot gloss over the fact that this drug is a compound that is novel to the human body, and that it works through mechanisms that we only have a limited understanding over, while the other is inherently less risky (because most of its effects are to mimic the body’s normal responses) and, at this time, much better understood.

Hopefully this will prove to be a very safe and effective drug, and that responsibility for contraception is equally divided because of it, but this needs to be proven first.

Also sorry for the wall of text, but it’s kinda in my ballpark so I sort of ran with it.

49% owned by Rosneft while another 49% are owned by “UCP” (Russia’s United Capital partners). Basically a 100% russian refinery in India…

I’ve never seen one of these, but I assume it performs other functions - surely monitoring sensors, probably reporting that data, maybe allowing triggering maintenance functions, etc.

That said, processing and storage is so cheap on this scale that it’s probably better (and cheaper) to go with a tried and true, widely supported system, than it is to optimize with custom hardware/firmware.