I’m not sure about that for the UK at least. My British friends say Labour is going anti trans

I’m glad he’s taking it seriously. It looks like the next few events he does are going to be really important in determining his next steps. If they go badly, I think he drops. If they go well, he’ll probably stay in.

I also 100% believe that Biden is fully aware of this article and likely encouraged the NYT’s source to approach the media. Part of evaluating this whole thing is going to be gauging public opinion and testing the waters.

People will call this sort of thing performative since the legislation will be dead in the water, but you’re spot on. An important part of politics is virtue signaling. You’re telling your supporters what you stand for and that you’re at least trying.

Whether it’s progressive or moderates doing so, it’s an important political tool, and sometimes the only tool at their disposal. Showing people you’re willing to fight, even if you know you’re going to lose, is a big deal.

This is something I think about a lot. The best way to defeat fascism is within the process with democracy – because if we start playing by their rules to stop fascism, we prove them right in a sense. It’s preferable to actually letting fascism happen, but it would severely weaken our democracy.

If voting is not enough, then the next best option would be for Biden to pull his own Jan 6 and refuse to certify the results and call in Seal Team 6. And then after doing so, order his own arrest for violating our laws and norms. The only way to preserve democracy after taking steps outside of democracy is to fall on your own sword.

It’s like an alternate universe within the DC universe – the Joker goes too far and Batman snaps his neck. When he arrives at the police, he carries the Joker’s body and tells them to arrest him. Batman knew it was necessary to kill Joker, but he also knew he had to be held accountable for doing that. Any group which uses violence to end the fascist threat needs to turn themselves in afterwards to preserve peaceful democracy. It would be incredibly unfair to them, but it’s necessary to prevent a new normal of violent anarchy.

This isn’t a bad 4D chess move. Trick Republicans in Congress to heavily limit the power of the president to neuter this decision.

Biden isn’t going to say “yeah I’m thinking of dropping out”, nor will his campaign, even if they’re strongly considering it. It he does decide to step aside, it will be a sudden announcement with no forewarning.

I agree with your premise though. It isn’t impossible. We just need to collect data and do polling for like a week to understand how much the debate hurt Biden, and if there’s any good alternative options who have a better shot.

I think debates and townhalls are Biden’s best bet right now. He needs to show that it was just a bad night for him.

And if it wasn’t just a bad night, it’ll spur action to find a viable replacement.

It happens! The important part is review and learning from the mistakes.

We all make mistakes. I once forgot to include gravity in a pressure drop calculation for a 100 ft vertical pipe as part of a steam drum system. I had to send an awkward email revising the design pressure I previously communicated out.

But hey, if we were perfect, we wouldn’t need peer review.

I have a little bit of experience with limit switches, but that’s really interesting. It certainly seems like an unusual system. I’m a lot more familiar with safety relays.

It really says something when even oil companies will design for these considerations but Tesla won’t.

I’ve unfortunately been working on process control strategies for almost a year now on new and novel applications for my company, so I’ve been intimately familiar with this. If it isn’t obvious, this isn’t my favorite professional area of interest hahaha.

Designating fail open and fail closed valves is so intrinsic to what I’ve been doing that I can’t imagine someone designing a car control system and not thinking about that at all.

It’s basic safety for industrial plants to designate powered equipment as “fail open” or “fail closed” or on/off. It’s shocking that this wasn’t applied to Tesla cars.

We really need an industry that performs industrial grade HAZOPs on consumer products and publishes a report for everyone to see.

Might be the doors are fail shut if anything happens… But that seems like the worst design ever.

Come to think of it, it’s basic design to designate features as fail closed/fail open on loss of power in an emergency, and you go with what’s inherently safe. It appears Tesla did not consider basic safety design. To no one’s surprise.

Russian news sources really can’t be trusted, but assuming it is true, it’s certainly a tragedy that civilians were hurt. And I wish they hadn’t been.

The solution though is for civilians to leave Crimea. They are on illegally seized land, not wholly dissimilar to Israeli settlers. It isn’t their fault that their children died of course, but they need to leave the area. Issue is, Russia probably won’t let them, because they’d prefer civilian casualties to occur.

It’s also kinda rich of Russia to complain about this after they’ve bombed, killed, and orphaned countless Ukrainian kids. They’ve even kidnapped some of them. And from what I recall happened in Mariupol, they might’ve even done ethnic cleansing. It doesn’t excuse Russian civilians being killed, but Russia has absolutely no legs to stand on here.

This seems like an excellent way for the governing party to lose big time in elections.

Putin has a history of false flag operations, so it isn’t impossible.

I think what’s most surprising to me is that Florida’s legislature was in favor of the art grants.

We should really change that. Things would be so much safer if we applied this level of scrutiny for anything considering the public.

Nah this isn’t authoritarian or Tankie at all. It is a valid point that economically left-wing policy was very successful in the past (and it’s just a meme anyway, it’s tongue in cheek).

Now there’s a lot of discussion we can have about why left-wing economics aren’t as popular among Americans anymore – I don’t think FDR’s policies could win an election today necessarily. But I think they can in the future. Reagan made us a deeply conservative nation and we’re only just coming out of that now.

Absolutely. I just don’t think we should use him as a symbol of social democracy, because we can do much better. We need better than FDR, not just for leftwing politics, but leftwing social issues.