The city already settled to pay about $3 per resident for the cops’ bad behavior and to put cops in a training on political violence. If some of the cops in question live outside of the city (not uncommon), they probably won’t pay a dime and the only impact they will feel is sitting through a training session that they will probably not take seriously

That’s not right wing. Do not allow right wingers to hide in the shadow of your reasonable political views by assuming their identity. Call yourself a market capitalist, a liberal, or even a Reagan-era Republican if you believe that is what your views align to and are speaking in an American context, but don’t let yourselves be used to rehabilitate the image of the right wing. They will only take that as a permission structure to hold more and more heinous views while pointing at you and others like you and saying "see, we are reasonable people with serious political positions that deserve a voice at the table. They don’t represent you, so why give them leverage to claim that they do?

Are you assuming that AI in this case is some form of generative AI? I would not ask chatgpt if a mushroom is poisonous. But I would consider using a convolutional neural net based plant identification software. At that point you are depending on the quality of the training data set for the CNN and the rigor put into validating the trained model, which is at least somewhat comparable to depending on a plant identification book to be sufficiently accurate/thorough, vs depending on the accuracy of a story that genAI makes up based on reddit threads, which is a much less advisable venture

Spending energy to convince conservatives to vote D is not a winning strategy. The idea is to convince those who are convincable, not to create some epiphany moment when all the Republicans stand up and say they were wrong and switch parties. This is naming and shaming as an electoral strategy, not as a punishment

Nvidia does not have a strong history of open sourcing things, to say the least. That last bit sounds like pure hopium

It’s definitely not that. They are just pointing out that the right to free speech prevents the government from impeding someone’s ability to say something, it doesn’t (despite implications made by a lot of people who cry out that their right to free speech is being impeded) force others to listen to or agree with that thing being said. If anything, the people that abuse the name of free speech by implying that it means people need to agree with them, or need to amplify their message, are attacking free speech by mudding the water around what it means and making it harder for good faith entities to invoke that right

And yet the demise of the coal industry accelerated in his administration, with no apparent pause despite Trump rolling back the safety regulations that were protecting the coal miners. He’s pro coal baron, not pro coal miner

Vivian was victimized by her father’s heartless disregard and rejection of her identity. Elon is now going around stating a narrative that her coming out to him is at least a significant contributing reason he is a fascist (“I lost my son to the woke mind virus”), a narrative that this headline plays directly into. You can take the same sequence of facts and headline it as “Musk is going public with the same bigotry that he wielded against his transgender daughter. A lot of trans people have family members like him” that doesn’t make it sound like Elon Musk would have been politely building his rockets and evs in a corner if only his daughter hadn’t come out as trans, and doesn’t make it sound like Vivian indirectly donated 10s of millions of dollars to Trump’s 2024 campaign by coming out as someone that that exact campaign wants to suppress. The headline as written is almost a threat to closeted trans people. “Yeah, your parents may be Schrodinger’s bigots right now, but come out and they will go full scorched earth to dehumanize you and you will be responsible for their shift”.

I’m pretty sure you are agreeing that that isn’t the case, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the text of the article is also aligned against that message, but the headline (probably written by an editor hungry for rage clicks) is solidly aligned to it, and should be called out for that

Dutch=Netherlands Danish=Denmark

Mike Johnson moves one heartbeat closer to the Whitehouse in this hypothetical. And the remaining heartbeat would be on tour campaigning, which we’ve seen can expose someone to high velocity lead poisoning. Plus, Kamala would have to oversee an unplanned administration turnover, taking time and energy away from her campaigning efforts. It’s all painfully obvious why they want this and none of it has to do with the good of the country

Am one of those “assholes”. Kamala was far from my favorite candidate in 2020, but I just donated a hefty (for me) chunk of change and will be volunteering. I didn’t need perfection, just a feasible path to victory in November and now we have it. I’m so pumped right now, project 2025 no longer looks like an inevitability. LFG!

That’s generally true for all VPs. Biden was rarely on the news during the Obama years, same with Pence in the Trump years. She’s not an ideal candidate, but she does have some freedom of motion that is unprecedented. She gets to own the incumbency as the VP but only partially. Time and messaging will tell if she is able to define her candidacy by the positive things the Biden administration has done and the positive things that she can do moving forward or if Republicans will succeed in tying her down with whatever negative aspects of the Biden administration they can latch onto. It will be hard for them to pitch her as some kind of puppet for Biden or the DNC seeing as they spent some much air trying to convince everyone that she was puppeteering Biden from the start. If she can get a solid VP candidate (and there is a deep bench of Democratic Senators and Governors that she could pull from) and inject some energy into this campaign (suddenly Trump is the old man in the race), I think she’s got a really strong shot. There’s an outside chance someone will attempt to contest her at the convention, but as much as my personal views may be likely to better align with a more left-leaning candidate, I think the atmosphere of hesitancy from folks calling on Biden to step down or primary ing Biden in the first place suggests that the likelihood of a strong contender appearing and damaging her candidacy is low. I know there were plenty of folks on here who thought getting Biden to step down was some effort by the elite or the Republicans to steal away the incumbency advantage from the Democrats, but I really have a hard time seeing this as anything but a positive step in the campaign to beat Trump in November

The monkeys paw curls. Texas has implemented more laws to stop minorities from voting

Was 68 the last time an incumbent was switched out? Because as conflicted as I am about wanting Biden to give way for a candidate who is physically capable of campaigning vs being concerned about the ability to find someone with a better probability of victory than him, I don’t find the conventional political wisdom of 1968 a very convincing argument in today’s media and political landscape

He didn’t go far enough. World population doubling time is down to 50ish years. Thanos probably took 50 years to formulate, prep, and execute his plan, during which time the population had doubled and he was just returning to status quo. It’s like what is happening to the $15 minimum wage movement with inflation

Porque no los dos?

Rabbit hole incoming: If you have to pick one, I suppose it depends on what metric you are trying to maximize. One doublestacked intermodal train car takes two long haul trucks off the road. One Siemens Venture passenger train car takes 74 people, or about 50 cars at 1.5 people per car, off the road. You can generally run longer freight trains than passenger trains, but 25x to normalize for VMT (which could be used as an approximate measure of direct health impacts from driving: crash risk, elevated blood pressure, obesity. It could also be used to approximate societal impacts of car culture: real estate dedicated to surface parking, voting bloc size that supports car-centric planning and development regulations) is probably excessive. On the other hand, if we normalize for emissions (hard to find data here, but as far as I can tell trucks are on the order of 10x as emissive), that gets us down to 5x train length, which is about on par (northeast corridor trains are typically in the 1/6 of a mile range, and median freight train length is somewhere in the 1-1.5 mile range from what I could find), and if we use infrastructure damage/maintenance cost (trucks are about two orders of magnitude worse than even today’s SUV saturated passenger car market, I’m assuming without reason or evidence that damage to steel rail infrastructure between a freight and a passenger car scales significantly less harshly for the sake of simplicity), things look downright strongly in favor of freight traffic. At the end of the day, it probably just depends on which use case has more unmet demand on a case by case basis. Of course, both pale when compared to the opportunity that high speed rail gives to take short haul flights out of the sky, but that is another set of analysis and does partially correlate to the elevated infrastructure cost of high speed rail vs conventional rail.

If you are going to and from points within a solar system, probably but not necessarily. Every transfer made between gravitational influences increases the chance that you will enter at an angle to the equatorial plane, especially if the two influences are not coplanar traveling between solar systems would likely have you entering at a significant angle. Furthermore, approaching a ship at a low velocity means slowing down as you approach them, so even if you do approach coplanar, it would be engines first and not nose first (unless star trek vessels have an ability to reverse their propulsors? I don’t know if that’s ever been shown aside from by approaching things nose first). The expanse showed this aspect of space interaction well with the flip and burn maneuvers

If you use the right color of light, then the doppler effect means that the atoms will only absorb (and be pushed by) light that they are headed towards. That means that the light will always act as a brake for the atoms and never an accelerator, so the fluid will cool. If you do this from all directions, the fluid will start to stay still in one place and get very close to absolute zero. Idk, I just read the Wikipedia article, but that is my best attempt at an ELI18

Radiation does not by definition make things it impacts radioactive, and most of the lingering effects that we associate with radiation have to do with radioactive particles that are left behind by the atmosphere. Since there is no particulate matter traveling between the sun and Mars (photons not withstanding), the surface of Mars would not be expected to acquire radioactive properties from an acute solar radiation event like this one. However, an entity on the surface of Mars would be exposed to radiation from the Sun, much more so than an entity on/near earth and it’s magnetosphere (Mars’ thin atmosphere and distance from the sun probably helps reduce that disparity relative to something in say low earth orbit, but I don’t think it fully equalizes or shifts the scales). I am not an astrophysicist, so there’s at least a 20% chance I got part of that wrong.

Because it was the smallest unit of currency and the comment said the fees “should be” not “should be scaled by” or something to that effect. I first assumed it was dollars, but used pennies when it was obviously going to be too large. Idk, I guess that is where I went wrong, but it seemed like a reasonable assumption to make at the time that the formula was expressed in some denomination of currency