The traditional method is to define noon as when the sun is at its zenith.

The REAL headline and buried lede for the original post should be:

Trump guts nuclear safety regulations

“The president signed a pair of orders on Friday aimed at streamlining the licensing and construction of nuclear power plants — while panning the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its ‘myopic’ radiation safety standards.”

We now have industry capture of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Who here knows about Admiral Hyman RIckover? All of this is worth reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Safety_record

Are You Scared Yet?

I would be.

The Department of Energy is selling off more than 40,000 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium from the Cold War arsenal to nuclear reactor startups. All of which I’m sure will be thoroughly vetted and monitored, because this is done under the direction of a former board member. Yikes!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Wright

Who IS Oklo, Inc. the "private nuclear reactor builder/operator"? Oklo is Sam Altman:

Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman

We're in territory where weapons-grade plutonium is being given at fire-sale prices to billionaires who's ethical boundaries include creating their own demand for otherwise unnecessary, high-risk energy projects. Guys like Altman, who get their ideas from Wikipedia articles about Ayn Rand — because they are one rung lower than people who actually READ that garbage.

But I'm sure no inventory of hot nuke metal will ever go missing.

Does it make more work than it saves, or will it replace character artists and level designers?

Apple had a culture of authenticity. Culture dies pretty hard in most cases. I think we will see the last of that culture dissipate, as it eroded so greatly under Cook and Ive. Then the extractive, enshittifying corruption will spread from Apple, too.

There really was something, that began with Jobs and Woz. It wasn't perfect, and Jobs had a way of twisting ethical stances in ends-justifying-means sophistry. But Steve Jobs would never have prostrated before Trump, proffering a solid gold token.

Oh, you want profit? This is a surveillance spyware wrapper around the entire MacOS user experience - so if you thought Microsoft's Copilot Recall was invasive monitoring, you haven't seen anything yet.

If Apple won't monetize a user panopticon and partner with governments to do it, OpenAI will be right there, to take the cash.

I will argue against strict adherence to this statement. Gnome applications written to the project guidelines have become very fine, since the introduction of GTK-4 and libadwaita. I prefer many of these to their equivalents on MacOS.

It's true that most of these fall into a general category of "utilities", and that Windows enjoys a broader ecosystem driven by commercial incentive. But Windows programs are hardly "better' for this, and the widely varied usability is generally sub-par compared to level that's become norm for Gnome/Adwaita software.

Best I can tell there's already a classic book in this space: Earl Mindell's Herb Bible. Its a neat coffee table book. You can just read parts at a time and it is enjoyable. Super fun to look out for the herbs that specifically warn they're unsafe during pregnancy ;-) Made me wonder just how effective a cocktail of these would be to induce a miscarriage.

Chinese misinformation trolls are working overtime on this one

Did US Intelligence Agencies hack the national timekeeping agency to set their clocks back 10 minutes in order to make it seem like everything was running late?

I still use my 2010 27" iMac as my main computer at home. It works perfectly well for web browsing and it runs several old apps like Quicken 2007 that I use on a regular basis.

Written on Election Night 2016 by Paul Krugman:

It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?

Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear.

Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.

During Donald Trump's first term, the S&P 500 rose approximately 83%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 73%, and the Nasdaq Composite surged 152%.

It is likely true that software quality is dropping. But the important point I would like to make is that quality elsewhere is horrible too. Our relatively new house is on its third bathroom sink faucet in about 12 years total time. I cannot fathom how this could be so bad. Car quality, parts, engines, transmissions all of it is worse. Worse parts, worse designs, it all is bad and so much more expensive. A twenty year old car w/ only front wheel drive, a four speed transmission, a reasonable power v6 in comparison is SO solid. A little worse MPG but that is it, and sometimes that isn't so clear cut. I'm sure there are examples of things that have improved, and others that have gotten worse. But those were a couple I can think of off hand. A lot of this is driven by big government making decisions for us, even during republican administrations ironically. Fuel efficiency standards go back to Bush. Anyways, enjoy, the future is gonna suck. And be expensive.

Farmers will bitch about a def burn/regen, but still buy the new huge combine because even with sitting for 45 minutes, they get so much more done so fast it is unreal. So they buy/rent huge equipment they cannot work on because they run so many acres they really have no other options. Our government bankrolls all their risk so land/rent values keep going up and everyone is too happy to question anything. Red America complains about market access while voting in Trade War Trump. We're all so stupid. Nevermind GMO everything. If only we could make tofu w/ all this cheap soy. Nope, we gotta feed it to cows/pigs/chickens. No one cares about the river and aquifer water quality, or how expensive it is to treat for high nitrate levels. Sorry for the slightly unrelated farming rant. But I really wish our local river was cleaner. It is never a focus and so sad. But I'd refer to it as a "water quality collapse." Ironically you have to pay farmers for buffer strips and CRP, I'm not sure they'd do it on their own. Left to their own devices they're even ripping out the shelter belts around here.

and it's here today. No homelessness. No medical bankruptcy. No food insecurity. Affordable education. Decent places for everyone to live.