Yes, Biden had a bad debate – but so did Trump.

“Bad” is not nearly as descriptive of a word as is necessary here. Biden had very low expectations and somehow fell short of them. Even worse, he fell short in the exact, perfect way to feed into Republican talking points about him having dementia, in by far the worst way he or any other president has ever done, at the most important moment, with literally years to prepare for that moment.

I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that 2024 Joe Biden is the single worst major party candidate at winning an election in the history of the US. Name someone worse - I know some people have been totally crushed in elections, but you gotta judge those results relative to the competition. Look at all that’s happened with Trump during and since the 2016 election. In 2016, there was no Stormy Daniels, no sexual assault verdict, no fraud verdict, no tragicomic failed attempt to steal the election from the very voters who he’s asking to vote for him again. Forget 1980 Jimmy Carter, I think current, 99-year-old hospice patient Jimmy Carter would have no problem beating Trump. The fact that Biden is behind proves he’s the worst politician in history, and by far.

Yeah all that X can really do now for new features is roll out things that were half-built before Elon fired everyone.

Yeah the thing I really can’t understand is why did the voters pick Biden in 2016? Even on the moderate side of the party there were much better choices. The democratic voters who just seem to pick the name they’re most familiar with - Clinton, Biden - those are the people who made Trump happen.

I think the majority of Democratic voters just assume the most familiar name is the most electable in the general, but as we’ve seen that’s simply not the case. Ironically, if it feels like Democrats run the worst candidates against Trump, that’s probably not an accident. Trump makes Democratic voters pick the “safest” candidate, who turns out to be the least electable.

I think what it all comes down to is most people don’t really want rational debate, and don’t participate in debates in the hope of learning or even to help others learn. Most people participate in debates to feel superior/“own” the other side. The result is debates that are typically lazy, uninformative, and downright mean.

I think all of us have a little bit of this desire for superiority in us and we need to consciously make an effort to suppress it.

I’d argue madness is sticking with a candidate who now has virtually zero chance of winning what should be an easy race with anyone else. Democrats have stuck their head in the sand way too many times. They did it with how unpopular Hillary was in 2016. They did it with RBG not retiring. And now They’re doing it again.

This is the simple, undeniable truth: Biden is extremely unpopular. One could argue he might win, but that’s the best you can do. A remote, unlikely possibility that he could beat what should be the least electable person in history.

Ok let’s see how the polls move. If they move in the right direction, Biden stays on. If they move in the direction everyone knows they’ll move in, he steps down. Deal?

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Anybody. Buttigieg, Harris, Sanders, AOC, John Elway, I don’t care. Biden keeps saying he’s the only guy who can beat Trump. After last night’s debate it should be obvious that he’s the only guy who can’t beat Trump.

At this point it’s starting to feel like Biden’s holding the nation at gunpoint and making us have a second Trump term. He’s always been a terrible politician, running twice for the nomination and failing to get a single delegate, until Obama made him VP. Honestly I suspect part of the reason Obama chose him is because he didn’t wanna play kingmaker and figured Biden was too old to run again.

Then in 2020 I think the argument was Biden could benefit from Obama’s popularity. I certainly thought that was a terrible pick, but not totally lacking in logic. But in 2024 there was utterly no rational basis for Biden to be running in the first place. Now that he’s been a complete disaster, he’s just fucking us as a nation for his own narcissism.

We should start a campaign to write him in to force the Dems’ hand.

We would be, if not for Devo

According to this wikipedia page - Median wealth per adult globally is estimated at $8,654 for a total population figure of 5.5 million, quite a bit less than the global population estimated at 8.1 billion. I’m guessing because this is “per adult” rather than per person. The children of the world are all on the low end of the wealth spectrum and probably would be a large share of the 3.6 billion.

Also questions can be asked about how they value wealth, do we consider debts, etc…in which case there’s a lot of people with zero wealth or less, as well as a lot of people who don’t have bank accounts and whose wealth is hard to measure is any ordinary sense. Point being, this particular comparison is kind of meaningless without more context. There’s probably ways you can do it to get an even larger number than 3.6 billion.

But a more useful and perhaps more surprising metric is that 8 people have as much wealth as 158 million median people. Which is still ridiculous, like those 8 people are worth a Russia’s entire population’s worth of people. And not just of poor people, but your average adult person who likely has a job and may even be considered on the well-to-do side within some poorer countries.

One party in particular is stifling attempts to change FPTP. So step one is to remove them from office.

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Now imagine this happens in a remote area with no cell coverage. In Arizona those are a thing too.

I mean do girls actually like that thin moustache? And I feel like if I walked around in one of those velvet jacket things everyone would just be creeped out and/or think I’m wearing it inside out. And I’d be hot, like sweaty kind of hot.

“Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events,” the report says.

First administration: “We must do something about the asteroid. I’ve started a plan to divert it, but it’ll take several years.”

Second administration: “The asteroid is a corrupt globalist conspiracy. We never needed to divert asteroids in the past, why do we supposedly need to spend all your hard-earned tax dollars on this all of a sudden? I will prove my anti-elitist attitudes by cancelling the asteroid program as soon as I take office.”

Third administration: “Yes we recognize that the asteroid is a threat, but as we saw last time there’s just too much political resistance to solving it. Let’s focus on other priorities that we can solve.”

I’ve been using deepstatemap.live which has proven accurate and reasonably up to date in the past. When things are moving fast though it may fall behind.

There’s a bit of uncertainty principle at work. The more accurate the data, the less up to date it’s gonna be.

Autopilot “is not a self-driving technology and does not replace the driver,” Tesla said in response to a 2020 case filed in Florida. “The driver can and must still brake, accelerate and steer just as if the system is not engaged.”

Tesla’s terminology is so confusing. If “Autopilot” isn’t self-driving technology, does that mean it’s different from “Full Self Driving”? And if so, is “Full Self Driving” also not a self-driving technology?

Tesla and Musk’s attorneys, the court decided, “were unable to prove that the stockholder vote was fully informed because the proxy statement inaccurately described key directors as independent and misleadingly omitted details about the process.”

I’m guessing this was the key problem. Courts are very reluctant to set aside corporate decisions like CEO pay packages for soft reasons like general unfairness. But when you start getting into dishonesty and not meeting basic requirements, it’s kind of forcing the judge’s hand.

Full decision for those interested, it’s long. I like this part:

Defendants also argue that Musk needed additional incentives to stay on at Tesla or he would spend more time at SpaceX, where he could fulfill his galactic ambitions to establish interplanetary travel, colonize Mars, and potentially earn more money in the meantime.858 That argument begs another question: if encouraging Musk to prioritize Tesla over his other ventures was so important, why not place guardrails on how much time or energy Musk had to put into Tesla?