That's not how science works, but it really is how Trump works. This is the guy who made drunk Hegseth fire the DIA chief because the intel assessment of the Iranian bombing wasn't loyal enough.

He wants his underlings to lie to him. If you tell Trump the truth about something, it makes him angry. Wouldn't pollution censors on a satellite also pose a risk of seeing something Trump disagrees with?

It raises the question: why are any sensors being tolerated at all? Aren't temperature and moisture readings just as threatening? Who is the disloyal never-Trumper who authorized that any weather satellite be launched? Fuck all weather satellites; they can only lead to weather heresy. Weather satellites are a Democrat hoax.

I wish there were better labels than left and right. Often the issue is about authoritarian versus the enlightenment i.e., governments constrained by reason, fair laws, freedom of thought, etc.

Then, when we can be reasonably sure that we're living in a modern enlightened state, we can analyse whether a problem is more caused by the system (left) or by the individual (right).

But if the issue is something like where, this or that free speech should be allowed, that's not a left versus right thing, it's that one of the two in the particular debate are being more authoritarian or less reasonable than the other.

Both the left and right and made of a mixture of people -- there's some authoritarians on both sides.

What the wind and solar developers seem to be screaming about is how the federal government will no longer be issuing subsidies and tax breaks for the construction of wind and solar facilities

I wonder if maybe there could be a compromise.

Instead of zero subsidies for wind and solar, what if, instead, we gave them a subsidy equal to one percent of the money we give to fossil fuel industries? For example, if we give a thousand dollars to an oil company, give ten dollars to a solar company. If the taxpayers are forced to give the oil industry a hundred million dollar subsidy, then also force them to give a one million dollar subsidy the solar industry.

Might that be enough to keep the cheap renewable energy wackjobs happy, but still palatable to oil-burning enthusiasts?

I think if the government gave oil advocates a guarantee that they were getting more than everyone else, it would make them feel better about technology. Imagine an Exxon-branded T-shirt with "100:1, losers!" on it. Who wouldn't proudly wear that, and cackle with glee as they walk through hippie protest lines, watching the hippies' faces fall into despair as they realize they really were the losers.

As long as the trademark legally exists, it exists. There are a fuckton of Americans who vote for Rs and Ds, but don't know anything about the parties' policies. If you own the R or D trademark, you automatically get tens of millions of votes for nothing. You can be as politically nutty as you want and you won't lose those votes. You can declare those voters your enemy and work directly against them, and they will reward you for that by voting for you.

"Republican" is still an extremely real thing, and it's worth more far more money than it cost Trump to buy. He really did find a great deal.

Well, some of that is for classes for people who can't see that default 3-pixel wide scrollbar on Windows 11 in high contrast dark mode. :-)

Fair. Just making fun of Windows 11.

Yeah, you're blessed to have one of each. Until they start conspiring against you, which you KNOW is going to happen.
ha!

Hopefully we'll raise them better than that. And let them see us honoring our parents.

You charge to "upgrade" to Windows 11? How evil are you? :P

For all my pro-life ramblings, we were granted only one child.

Precious. I feel bad you couldn't have more though. G-d has been very generous to us.

Keeping up with two toddlers after age 50 can't be easy.

And yet i wouldn't trade it for anything! Thank G-d, we have a lot of help. Especially, when some neighboring girls come by to take our son for a walk. G-d bless them all.

Is the Republican Left (MAGA) now asserting the government has gained the power to control how The People generate electricity? I know transitioning from Free Markets to a Planned economy is a stress for everyone, but before We The People fully accept that stress, are we sure they can really force it on us?

I think we ought to at least wait and make SCOTUS agree that the 10th amendment does not exist. Until they say so, let's keep pretending the constitution is the law. Anything that will help to slow down Trump's implementation of Putin's vision for America, ought to be used.

There's a percentage of people who want to find ways to exploit others. Ethics and morals are not things we are naturally born with in fully developed forms, they start out at simpler stages. Many people grow past the exploitative stage, but many also don't. So there's always going to be a certain amount of exploitation to varying degrees. If we have a WWIII and return to a Mad Max style existence, exploitation and strength would be the highest morality available.

I gather the same is happening to the NHS. Private companies get contracts to do the easy profitable procedures, and leave the complex difficult cases with the ever more pressured NHS.

They're not even particularly expensive or big enterprises. I'd add something about left and right spin but someone somewhere will get offended. Like, we need commercial managers because of public waste, or, we need people to stop being wasteful consumers who deny climate change -- just maintain the infrastructure please.

I agree, the story here isn't that a common web app had bugs which are now fixed, it's that the system design is fundamentally careless, even with high value and high quantity real world targets.

I travel a fair bit for work, and if I'm going to a new (to me) city I'll often google "X hotel chain Y city" to see what options I have. Unfortunately Google has been victimized in their search results on this for a long time; it's not just redirects to various third-party hotel sites but it can be other sites entirely as well. This can lead to outdated or completely inaccurate information, and bad phone numbers too. Sometimes I'll see the correct link about 5-6 entries down, but that's not guaranteed - and if chain X has more than one hotel of name A in or near city Y the results could well be missing some locations on the first page.

This is the old googlebombing technique from years ago (remember "miserable failure"?), but deployed for profit instead of politics.

I agree. As someone put it, we may have an Indian culture and a British culture, we don't have an Indian science and a British science, each with their own laws of physics and different fundamental constants.

Some artefacts are more about objective reality and some more about subjective or cultural realities, and I agree, a world map is more of an objective reality -- otherwise, next we'll also be complaining about which colour was used to fill in each country, rather than the colour being a visual aid.

Likewise this weird thing of banning the words "master" and "slave" as analogies for peripherals. Playing semantic games isn't going to stop real world human trafficking.

Maybe there's lots of people who want to feel like they're activists, but because the real problems are tough and need highly capable people, the activists just do games with semantics and trivialities? Am I being mean?

Yes, exactly. And to be clear (and disambiguate from being called a troll), "woke" is really about extreme postmodernism where the practice is to assume the world is filled with hidden power structures which are oppressive, and then accuse people of unconsciously being complicit in those power structures, and -- this is the mean and stupid part -- they believe that they can see into your unconscious and point to your unconscious biases, but they never think to look into their own unconscious and check at all whether maybe they themselves are just projecting, and deluding themselves.

Liberal is generally a fairly healthy modern thing, where people are individuals with a right to freedom and happiness, and sure you can argue about things like taxes and personal responsibility, and maybe a bit more or a bit less of one or the other. It certainly shouldn't have to be an all out war.

But "woke" liberal is the destruction of liberal because it believes there's oppression everywhere, so much so that many will say they hate America or that USA should not exist, etc. which ignores that in the grand scheme of things, USA isn't that bad, it's a fairly free modern state (with room for improvement), compared to the rest of the world.