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Comment Re:Thanks for the research data (Score 4, Insightful) 104

Your belief is shared by a lot of my republican-voting family members. I'm skeptical this belief is warranted. I never in my wildest dreams thought it possible the unprecedented and permanent changes Trump has made to the character of the institutions of American government over the last 11 months.

Until now presidents respected and upheld the idea that executive institutions were loyal to the constitution and the country and the president's job was to enact policies that would guide them, and make sure Congress' laws were followed. Civil servants would do their best to make these policies a reality, with the constitution being the guiding light. The president never had power to fire mere bureaucrats just because he didn't like them personally---in fact the idea that a president would have a personal interest in any civil servants was absurd. This led to stable institutions that allowed for peaceful transfer of power and made the US very powerful, even if it sometimes seemed schizophrenic to the outside world. This was admired and envied around the world.

Now it's different. These institutions are completely partisan now. They no longer serve the country, but serve the president personally. Can you imagine they will allow a peaceful transition of power and serve the new president as they have the current one? A Democrat would have to completely fire absolutely everyone every time he got in office. We've already seen the chaos this has caused. Imagine every president doing this when he first gets in? What a disaster! And add to that the inevitable temptation to ever increase presidential power. They will do so to "get things done and back to normal."

These are watershed events that we're witnessing play out, and unfortunately just as permanent as brexit.

Comment Re:not protectionism on either side (Score 4, Insightful) 104

Unfortunately this lesson is continually lost on many who push for separation and sovereignty of various kinds. For example those calling for western separation in Canada. Canada as a whole is already a very tiny market with minimal world bargaining power. Yet these geniuses think that a small subset of Canada would somehow have more clout in the world than all of Canada does. Because freedom and oil or something. They are completely delusional. Possibly they think they would join the US which is entirely possible, but even that will come at great personal expense. A Faustian bargain if there ever was one. Ironically some of the people who stand to lose the most, such as farmers, tend to be the most supportive of such an idea. The lessons of Brexit are plain to see, but very few see much these days.

Comment Re:I'm not worried... (Score 1) 90

Too bad Rush didn't know that EVs can out-accelerate any ICE sports car of that era by a huge margin despite weighing 50% more, and even out-accelerate any current ICE vehicle quite handily. Outside of maybe super cars, any sports car of that era would feel pretty anemic to modern drivers. Corvette in 1981 could do 0-60 in 8 seconds and for a time was considered America's fastest car. Today my SUV with a Pentastar can do it in about 7.5. California drivers would think anything under 10 seconds is unsafe. The difference is torque, though. My pentastar downshifts at the slightest hint of a hill, whereas the 80s sports car wouldn't even notice.

Comment Re:amazing (Score 1) 154

I used to follow Chris as he does draw attention to things the CCP would rather we didn't know about. But when he started believing Trump will save us from China I was done. Besides that, a lot of talk about China's imminent destruction is wishful thinking and just a touch arrogant. Our own current form of capitalism isn't working so well either anymore. The CCP will fall sooner or later, I have no doubt, and for many of the reasons Chris talks about. But our western socioeconomic systems are just as likely to fail also in that same time frame.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of very smart, hard-working Chinese that are building some pretty good cars, even if they have too many of them. Ford's CEO drove a Chinese EV daily for months and he was impressed and said publicly we're way behind. Of course he only cares about making luxury cars and not affordable cars, so we're screwed either way.

Comment Re:An unpopular opinion (Score 1) 128

I bought one of these. Horrible low res screens. No auto screen dimming. Slow, older generation processors. Also most of them lie about their specs. 12 gb of RAM! Actually just 4 GB with 8 GB of swap enabled. I bought it because i figure it I can get my software that I'm developing running on it decently with those low specs out should run everywhere. But I wouldn't recommend this tablet to anyone.

Comment Re:To what extent was it AI generated? (Score 1) 68

None of the music is "real." No human talent. Here's a video from a few weeks ago where Rick Beato did just this very kind of thing as a bit of warning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... . Very interesting. The software came up with a couple of different-sounding songs. Beato didn't do anything other than the initial prompt that generated the lyrics, and then he fed that into another AI that generated the music and the vocals.

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