In 2021, 96% of Democratic Senators were in favor of abolishing the filibuster. Blocked only by Manchin and Sinema. But now, it's a damn good thing they did. Imagine what the last 2 years would have been like without it... Of course, we rewarded them for their foresight by forcing them out of office.

And what's something that the GOP Senate has not seriously considered doing to push their agenda? Abolishing the filibuster. Trump demanded it, and they've completely blown him off.

Also, please explain what gerrymandering has to do with the filibuster. Senators are elected by the entire state.

No, that's not how Congress works. This bill can be passed by a simple majority, and so can future legislation which alters or removes the limit.

Can we please stop proposing things that we can't legally do? That gives away the ethical and moral high ground against the other side proposing things it can't legally do...

Don't be silly. We'll be standardizing on the Trumpdick as a unit of length, mass, AND volume.

Like, the average adult human male is 17 Trumpdicks tall. Which sounds pretty tall.

Or, gasoline currently costs $0.07/Trumpdick. Which sounds pretty cheap.

The great thing is that for fuel efficiency the units of Trumpdicks per Trumpdick cancel out. So the average fuel efficiency of a full-size pickup truck is 5000. No units. Just 5000. It's a big number for big Americans.

The big 3 US auto manufacturers (GM, Ford, and Stellantis) have a combined 40% market share.

Which is a lot bigger than VW+BMW+Mercedes' 10% market share. So, Germans are not dominating the US market like you claim.

But 40% is less than half of the the 85% market share the big 3 had in the 1970s. And that market share is continuing to shrink. So, US cars still suck.

And they are colluding to slow the speed of my handbasket towards its destination.

Nope, try again.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vinaudit.com%2Fus-ca...

US car market share (2024):
- GM 16.89%
- Toyota 14.46%
- Ford 13%
- Hyundai 10.79%
- Stellantis 9.98%
- ...
- ...
- ...
- Volkswagen 4.13%
- Tesla 3.26%
- BMW 2.59%
- Mercedes 2.3%

*Each* of the big 3 US manufacturers has a bigger market share than Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes *combined*.

And again, I don't see Silicon Valley parking lots filled with German cars. Yes, I live there.

So, let me get this straight...
- American car companies with strong unions have lazy C-suites.
- They're upstaged by non-union Japanese car companies.
- And then again by non-union Korean car companies.
- And the one American car company to make significant inroads against them is... Tesla. Which is not union.

So, let's look at how they got upstaged... Asian car companies... ...didn't have the overhead of union retirement benefits, so they could make money on low-margin cars like compacts, vs. SUVs and full-size pickups here. ,,,which also do very poorly when fuel costs go up. ...invested heavily in automation to make cars more cheaply. Can't do that in Detroit; that could cost union jobs. ...made early moves towards EVs. Which have fewer parts, and thus require less assembly time. Can't do that in Detroit; that could cost union jobs.

Remember, unions are all about stability for their workers' jobs. When something disruptive happens, non-union companies can respond quickly. Union companies must negotiate changes with their unions. That works great (for them) when there is no competition, like in the public sector. But it often fails miserably when customers have a choice.

Unions are not always bad. But they're not always good, either.

There isn't an industry standard. That's because power storage is used for many different things:

1) Grid stabilization for load swings. Timescale = minutes.

2) Daily load smoothing. Timescale = hours.

3) Load smoothing over cloudy days. Timescale = days to weeks. (I can show you graphs from the last 10 years of my solar panels if you want...)

We could have plenty of MW for grid stabilization and the first half of the evening duck curve, and still not enough for the same on a cloudy day, especially if we turn off other sources of baseline or peaker power like nuclear and natural gas.

It's like your car battery. It can run your bluetooth speaker for days. Your headlights for hours. And cranking your engine will drain it in minutes. It's rated in "cold cranking amps", which doesn't tell you anything about how long it can do any of those things.

Yes, but are they driving American cars now? Or do those still suck? I don't see a lot of Volts, Bolts or F150s in Silicon Valley parking lots.

Programmers are correct that a union benefits them and right now.

But they are also correct that in the long run as unions mature, they often progress far past "reasonable collective-bargaining". To the point where company products are optimized more for protecting jobs than making what the customer wants at a competitive price. That's what happened with American auto manufacturers.

You seem to be conflating a lot of ideas, with the overriding theme of "Can't we all just get along?"

MAD is still working. Did we need 30,000 warheads to make it work? No. A couple thousand on each side was plenty. Do we need a stupid warhead sponge of new missile silos? Also, no. Is China building a similar pile of silos? Also, yes. I'm not sure how that's going to go; arms limitation talks were "easy" when it was just the US and USSR; much tougher when it's three-way talks.

The NPT worked... until it didn't. Libya, Iraq, and Ukraine have all demonstrated what happens to smaller powers without nukes, or who give them up. Israel and North Korean have demonstrated what happens to smaller powers with nukes. Iran clearly understands that lesson. And then the dominos start falling, because it's also quite clear from both Biden and Trump that the US would never trade New York for Kiev. Maybe not for Berlin or Paris or London, either. Every system we were worried about giving Ukraine (HIMARS, ATACMS, tanks, F-16s, etc.) we eventually gave them... after it was too late to do much good, because we were worried about escalating. Can we put that genie back in the bottle? I doubt it.

Gun control is something a government imposes on its citizens. Hopefully with their consent, as in Australia. And don't get me wrong, I'm for getting rid of the 2nd Amendment so we could do the same thing here. But... it works because people trust their government will protect them, so they don't need their own guns.. What's the equivalent for international protection? NATO? The WTO? The UN?

All that aside... Nukes for governments and guns for individuals are only offensive (you shoot the people who are trying to shoot you). AI is different, because it's both offensive and defensive. AI can be used to find your own vulnerabilities before the other side exploits them. Or to limit the damage when they do. Whether that's software, or germs, or defensive drones swatting down other drones.

AI also doesn't provide (and never will provide) any assurance of mutually-assured destruction. There's no way of putting old AI in silos or submarines for a credible second strike after a surprise attack, the way there is with nukes. Old AI goes bad faster than lettuce or British governments.

Yes, of course we can reject all that and keep living our pastoral existence in harmony with nature and peace with our neighbors.

After all, that's worked so well for lower-technology civilizations in the past.

If you don't have steel and guns, there's only one result when you interact with other civilizations which do. Well, ok, I guess enslavement and extermination count as two results.

Ask Ukraine now whether they think it was a good idea to give up their nukes.

Iran learned the rules for 21st century drone warfare. And now, they're holding the US, who didn't, to a standstill.

China has learned all these lessons, after learning the first one the hard way.

Someone will use AI to pilot drones without humans in the loop. It's inevitable. The only defense against that is to do the same with counter-drones. Humans are just too slow.

Someone will use AI to engineer a virus, whether it's used against humans, livestock, or crops. If we don't have AI to engineer a vaccine, again, we'll be too slow.

People are already using AI to find and exploit coding vulnerabilities faster than humans can find and fix them. If there's a defense against that other than using AI, I'm all ears.

Materials science, encryption algorithms, medicine, weather prediction (just ask Napoleon and Eisenhower), hacking, etc. If AI can provide a competitive advantage, it will be used.

I hate this timeline. But to misquote WarGames: The only winning move is to play.

If it saves even one life, it's worth whatever it costs.

And no, I don't mean keep releasing new songs dubbed over Genius of Love. That already happens too frequently.

And not to me.

Even better if the bots go rogue and start buying things to decorate their data centers.

Finally, something useful AI can do for us.

If the ads were injected straight into the stream, you could skip past them. Because you can skip around in the normal video.

If the stream says, "allow skipping around... except for this 30 sec here and this 30 sec there", then that tells you exactly where the ads are, and a client-side blocker can trim them out. Or at the least, mute them and replace the image with a big middle finger.

I would accept skippable ads in the stream. Content creators do that already with their own sponsors.

It's the unskippable ones that interrupt *mid sentence* in the original video that I find unacceptable. That pushed me to uBlock Origin. And then when Chrome blocked it with Manifest V3, that pushed me to Firefox. Your move, Google.

British Thermal Unit doesn't give any hint at all...

I suspect starting with power (vs. energy) is historical. It's horsepower, not oats/second.

But really, which unit is most natural depends on what you're engineering. If you're making a transmission line or a motor or a heater, power is what matters. With a car or a train, power is what gets you over the hill. And you don't buy fuel by the MJ, you buy it by the liter (or, gallon in Freedom Units).

Even just with electricity, storage as electricity is a relatively new thing outside of niche cases like battery backups for telephone substations (you know, back when it was 42V over a copper pair to your house). If you needed to store power, you did it as fuel for a generator. And then that has to take into account the efficiency of the generator.