And what the frack is that? Quite a number of people sail their boat up to Vancouver and back to Seattle, not always with the same number of people traveling each way. If I get on someone's boat in Vancouver and ride it to Bellevue should I be deported? And to where? (Please don't send me back to Michigan.)

My gr-gr-grandfather Bolle walked across the frozen Lake Superior one winter, and married a mine widow in Calumet . She had apparently sailed on a boat all the way up the Saint Lawrence Seaway, through 4 of the 5 Great Lakes to land in Calumet with a bunch of other mail order brides from Scandinavia. Should they have been deported? Actually four years later they all voted as legal citizens.

I'm sure that was part of the whole purpose of DOGE, to destroy government employment as a viable career choice for competent people.

Women who I have worked with call themselves "linemen", so I don't think that's a problem. The fact that almost all of them are Union members is probably more of an issue to this Sadministration.

Considering "the companies named in conjunction with the play" I think that failure is pretty much guaranteed. For that matter, I personally believe that's the plan.

"If you want voters to believe that government is broken you'll need to break it first." - Grover Norquist

Yeah, one of the things I like about Claude (and Gemini 3 as opposed to 2.5) is that they really clamped down on the use of "Oh, now I've got it! This is absolutely the FINAL fix to the problem, we've totally solved it now! Here, let me write out FIX_FINAL_SOLVED.md" with some half-arse solution. And yep, the answer to going in circles is usually either "nuke the chat" or "switch models".

What I find amusing is that even after spending hundreds of millions supposedly fighting opium growing over 20 years, every year but one (partial crop failure) set a new record for opium production. In comparison, in their first year the Taliban almost completely eliminated opium cultivation.

What I find interesting is the timing. Fentanyl production had just reached the levels where it could replace most of the heroin on the Western market when we pulled out of Afghanistan.

When did your ancestors come to the US? Did they have to go through "quantified and validated immigration control"? Almost certainly not. The whole conservative ethos of "I've got mine, now go fuck everyone else" is stupidly short sighted. Liberal immigration is what made the US the leader of the world, as our politics get more conservative and our immigration policies get more restrictive we fall further and further behind. That's pretty blatantly the goal of your leadership.

As neocon 'thought leader' Grover Norquist told an assembly of conservative congresscritters in the '90s, "If you want to convince voters that government is broken then you'll have to break it first." I don't think that even he imagined that in less than two decades the Democratic Party 'leadership' would be quietly acquiescing in the effort.

Yeah, when thinking of the typical air fryer market, think "working mom with kids who wants to serve something nicer than a microwave dinner, but doesn't have the time for much prep or waiting". You can get those mailard reactions that microwaving doesn't really get you, nice crisping and browning of the surface that you normally get from an oven, without having to wait for an oven to preheat. I don't think anyone disputes that an oven will do a better job, but the air fryer does a better job than a microwave, which is what it's really competing against. They're also marketed as easy-clean, which again is a nod to their target audience.

How costs build up is really staggering. I'm getting into the business of importing 3d filament. In Iceland, it currently sells for like $35/kg minimum. The actual value of the plastic is like $1. The factory's total cost, all costs included, is like $1,50. If it's not name brand, e.g. they're not dumping money on marketing, they sell it for $3 for the cheapest stuff. Sea freight adds another dollar or two. Taxes here add 24%. But you're still at like $5/kg. The rest is all middlemen, warehousing, air freight for secondary legs from intermediary hubs, and all the markup and taxes on those things.

With me importing direct from the factory, sea freight only, I can get rid of most of those costs. Warehousing is the biggest unavoidable cost. If I want to maintain an average inventory of like 700kg, it adds something like $5/kg to the cost. Scanning in goods and dispatching user orders (not counting shipping) together adds like $2,50. And then add 24% tax (minus the taxes on the imported goods). There's still good margin, but it's amazing how quickly costs inflate.

Your "junk" is someone else's "must-have".
Your "must-have" is someone else's "junk".

You act as though Western European culture is the only conceivable model, and you're wrong. The Chinese model has worked for China for 5,000 years, modern Western Liberalism is barely two centuries old. Over the last 500 centuries they have managed to learn that while their system works for them, it isn't automatically the perfect fit for everyone everywhere in every time. We as a young barbarian culture have yet to learn that.

I've been called 'conspiracy theorist' for noting that he got his shares of a bank, steel company and shipping line confiscated under the 'Trading With The Enemy Act'.

I mean, from a horticultural perspective, there is some potential to gain more of other nutrients, in that if you have more energy, you can develop a larger root system, or generally more effectively, better feed mycorrhizal associations (fungal hyphae are much finer than root hairs, so can get into smaller cracks, and fungi can "acid mine" nutrients out of mineral grains - as an example, here's a microscopic image showing what they did to a garnet)

That said, yeah, in general if you can provide more energy, you expect the storage of "calories" to grow much faster than the acquisition of other minerals. Also, it's important to note that while more CO2 is generally good for most plants, more heat, or greater periods of drought (land dries out faster, monsoon belts spread) and flooding (atmosphere holds more moisture, monsoon belts spread) are not. In regards to heat as well, there's a lot of details. First off, though we commonly don't think about it, heat management in plants is critical. Their proteins are designed for function within an optimal temperature range, and to maintain it, they have to cool themselves down with transpiration, creating more water stress. Also it's worth noting that C3 plants (most plants) fundamentally don't tolerate heat as well as C4 or CAM plants (there's work to engineer C4 into some common agricultural crops... it's frankly amazing to me that they're getting some success, as it's not a trivial change).

BTW, the reason that plants grow better with more CO2 isn't what most people might think. The TL/DR is that the protein that sequesters CO2 so that (using ATP and NADPH from photosynthesis) - RuBisCo (the most abundant protein on Earth, something that has been evolving for billions of years) frankly sucks at its job. Something like 20-25% of the time (at normal CO2 levels), instead of binding with CO2, it binds with O2 instead ("photorespiration"), which means not only does it not sequester a carbon, but the plant has to *give up a carbon* to regenerate the RuBisCo. This is disastrous in terms of energy efficiency. And as a side effect, you also have to keep the stomata open more, which means more water loss. But as you increase the CO2 levels, the ratio between binding CO2 and binding O2 improves, and photorespiration waste drops. C4 plants "fix" this problem by instead of having RuBisCo directly bind CO2, they first bind CO2 into malate (with high selectivity), then the malate transports into bundle sheath cells, the CO2 is re-released, and THEN - in a high-CO2 environment - RuBisCo takes it up. This reduces photorespiration, but also introduces some more wasteful chemical conversions. (CAM plants to even further by storing malate inside vacuules - at the cost of even more energy - so that they can store it up during the night, and then use it during the day, which - although even more wasteful - lets them keep their stomata closed during the day to conserve water)

(BTW, there are some microbes that have developed a more efficient RuBisCo, but it's proving challenging to engineer it into higher plants)