2020 was different from 2024. It was a very unique set of circumstances with an election in the middle of pandemic, with an incumbent who was never broadly popular, amidst utterly terrible economic conditions.

Still, Trump’s base showed up, just as they did on Tuesday.

Biden had the benefit of all the unlikely voters not being able to ignore the country burning down around them, he got a lot of dissatisfied people who don’t pay attention to politics to come out.

Harris didn’t, she got the Dem base. People broadly dissatisfied at the state of things probably voted Trump since he isn’t the incumbent.

Just how it works - voters don’t have to be rational.

I really doubt double-digit millions of voters sat out because of Gaza.

Kamala’s vote total is roughly in line with what would be expected looking at 2008, 2012, and 2016. The massive turnout in 2020 on the Dem side appears to be an abberation - it was unique circumstances with COVID and all that. On the Republican side, Trump ran slightly ahead of his 2020 performance, and well ahead of 2016.

It’s basic electoral politics: Trump has succeeded at expanding his base of support and turning them out to vote reliably. The Democrats have not. No single issue is responsible for that.

You can blame protests or Gaza or third parties or whoever else you want - the truth remains that the Dem base from the Obama years is not large enough and not appropriately distributed to win an election against Trump’s base; whatever else you think of the man, he has been very good at gaining and retaining support.

The issue isn’t forwards, it is down.

You have a tungsten rod held in a clamp on a satellite in a nominally stable orbit. Releasing the clamp just means the tungsten rod is now in essentially the same nominally stable orbit as the satellite.

To deorbit it, you need to meaningfully change its velocity. As tungsten is very dense, that takes a lot of fuel. The more fuel that is used, the sooner the rod will hit the ground and the higher the angle.

Simply dropping it means you have to wait months or years for the orbit to naturally decay, a lot of energy will be lost to atmospheric friction, and there is little control over the impact point. Not exactly what you want in your WMD.

Dropping anything in orbit just means it is still in orbit.

You’d need a lot of fuel to deorbit that cube on a steep trajectory.

Instead of looking at the number of closed plants, one should look at the sum of emissions

That was in the link I posted. Emissions are Currently at record highs.

Slowing growth isn’t enough; we need significant, sustained, reductions in the very near future, and negative emissions and sequestering carbon in the medium term.

None of that is happening at a scale that would inspire optimism.

Building out more and more renewables doesn’t mean anything if emissions aren’t falling - and they aren’t. Since 2021, nearly 4 full years, the world has closed less than 1% of active coal power plants.

The buildout of renewables has arrived hand-in-hand with an increase in total energy usage. The energy mix has improved greatly in favor of renewables, tons of CO2 per KWh is way down, unfortunately we just use more KWh so total emissions are still rising.

Everything in the meme is a leading indicator for positive change, which is wonderful, but the actual change needs to materialize on a rather short timetable. Stories about happy first derivatives don’t count for much.

The issue is how the constitution lays out the choosing of a president. Pence had to certify the results, if he had refused to do so for long enough, then that session of Congress may have ended without choosing a president.

At that point, the Constitution prescribes there is a contingent election in the House, where every state delegation to Congress gets 1 vote. There are more red states than blue states -> Trump wins.

Runoff from a facility like this would be, in theory, easier to manage since it would be a concetrated source. A pipe of nutrient-rich water rather than a dozen contaminated streams and ponds. That also makes it feasible to recycle a lot of those nutrients, something that isn’t practical in a field.

Yes, you. And me. And probably most of the people reading this, who live in the US or another Western country

Not quite. 1% of global population is ~80 million people. There are about a billion people in the highly developed nations (US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and some minor others). So the top 8% of the golden billion, if we assume all in the US, the top ~25% of the country.

Intentionally did not talk about Vance, I was merely responding to the idea that using past prices adjusted for inflation compared to current prices isn’t that straightforward.

Thanks for the lecture, appreciate the tone.

I see the point you are trying to make, but inflation doesn’t quite when that way.

Comparing the prices of the same commodities at two different points in time is literally how inflation is calculated, the increase from $1.50 to $4 is real.

Now, what the inflation-adjusted dollars are telling you is that if eggs had only increased in price commensurate with general inflation, they would have gone from $1.50 to $2. The extra $2 increase is above what a consumer would expect given the general increase in the prices of everything else. If someone (magically) had a salary that increases with inflation, they would find eggs today to be a larger fraction of their spending if they kept the same level of consumption.

Eggs are more expensive both in absolute and relative to other products. The reasons for this are complex, but due in no small part to people continuing to buy large quantities of eggs even when they were heinously expensive in the early days of the pandemic. The market absorbed that information and came to the conclusion that eggs were previously undervalued.

Pretty sure he is talking about Burn After Reading, the green text image is from that movie.

If the VP spot is vacant, the president selects a new VP who must then be confirmed by the House and Senate; per the 25th amendment:

Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

Bro delete this I just shi myself omw to work

You haven’t really described what you are imagining.

Proper “AI”. No more coding, you just tell the machine what to do and it will do it. I don’t think in the physical world but computers and every profession that is not physical will be much rarer. Either pivot to AI Management or be the arms that the AI “guides” through a task.

Telling a computer specifically what to do and how to do it without making mistakes is coding. Programming is a level above that, in designing the architecture of how to approach the business problem.

What the other commentator is saying, is that simple being able to tell some model ‘build an app that does XYZ’ requires AGI because that set of instructions is not complete - the machine requires outside knowledge and the ability to make judgement calls in order to complete it.

If that isn’t what you meant, it is at least what you said. The breakdown in communication here, between humans, should also serve as another reminder how difficult it is to convey an idea to another entity and how that problem will remain difficult for a very long time.

To everyone saying he is ‘scared’ that’s not really the point, he has no reason to debate her. She is unknown compared to him, starving her of attention is a good strategy as he is still currently leading in polls.

Trump wants to nothing to change in the race, debates - as we just saw with Biden - are an opportunity for things to change.

Common misconception. He was actually saying most political violence is committed by people politically to his left, which I think is undoubtedly true.