I don't give anyone a "pass" but my options last November were to throw* in with the side that rioted all summer in 2020 over one thing or the side that rioted in the fall of 2020 and a little into 2021 over another thing.

To be clear, I took absolutely no pleasure in voting for a candidate who egged on any of the rioting, but we live in a two party state where you have to vote for the extremists who scare you less.

And by "scare less" I don't mean abstractions or philosophical disagreement, I mean simply who in my assessment is more likely to prevent me from going about my day-to-day life. Who's going to do more to stop me from going to get groceries? Who's going to do make it harder to fill up the gas tank? Keep the power on? Let me walk down the street without fear of being targetted for looking to white or too property-owning to be down with the revolution?

Trump's escapades might jack up the costs of some imports. Harris was egging on the anarchists and wheb in office was pushing Cali-style energy policies that *would* make the grid unreliable, that *would* wreak havoc with transportation of things like food.

Massachusetts chickened out of the California Truck EV mandate before Congress killed it recently:

https://commonwealthbeacon.org...

But not before commercial truck sales ground to a halt earlier this year before the mandate was "paused."

https://www.masslive.com/weste...

A little of that is a nuisance. A sustained end to commercial truck sales means the food doesn't get delivered and the trash piles up.

Just like the good old days of the Soviet Union where central planning in service of ideology took precedence over boring things like keeping the lights on.

If the choice is between that and the capitol rioters....well that's not a choice, it's a hostage negotiation, and I didn't like the lockdowns and the mail ballot shenanigans all that much at the time.

*symbolically, since I live in an uncompetative one-party state and my vote is irrelevant

Now we humans have yet to figure it out and we've got as close a look as you're gonna get and millenia of time to ponder upon it.

This thing is a chatbot.

Maybe the guy who decided to try using chatbots for therapy is an npc chatbot himself. Sure would explain quite a bit.

Also...why in fuck's sake is there an ACM conference about "fairness"?

I think the mind viruses on open display through all of 2020 figure as rather important context.

Good statecraft 101: don't give tens of millions of people the idea you want them to suffer by putting them out of work while you ignore your own rules; some less stable fraction of those tens of millions will go over the edge and riot figuring they have little to lose.

Don't give people the idea they have little to lose.

Keep a lid on who and what you let through the border and nip the fashionable anti-intellectual mind viruses in the bud and you too can have a happy and safe country.

The astute observer will note the above policy prescriptions and proscriptions are orthogonal to tax rates, retirement ages, or the precise form and magnitude of the social safety net.

That would be moving mass outward from the axis. That would cause a slowdown not a speed up.

So would the icecaps melting and moving mass outward, btw.

Mass transfer to the polar regions on or near the surface would also cause a speed up. But my guess is all climate-related mass transfers on or near the surface pale in comparison to processes near the core.

Exactly America has no problem electing women. There are plenty of Federal legislators, and plenty of State Governors that prove it isn't a sex thing. Its a Hillary is insufferable and Kamala is a vapid whore thing.

Well, yes ... you are going to be replaced, in the long run, by those you allow to live among you who have more children than you.

That's just ... math. (Or "science" if you prefer.)

Now, if you'd rather that be done by the feisty followers of a certain Mo, well, okay ... but I don't think you are going to like that culture or politics either.

Just because the sky is glowing with scattered blue light doesn't mean it's not cold space out beyond it.

Correct, the headline should be: Why is Fertility So Low in EXPENSIVE Countries?

The reality is that 'high income' more likely than not means high prices, constant pressure to keep earning money, because there are very few things in 'high income' (expensive) countries that doesn't cost money. We are constantly forced to pay taxes, never mind that in expensive countries large parts of the population live in dense urban areas, in cities and nobody has land that they can live off of. If you have no source of food other than the store and you cannot avoid paying taxes and paying high costs of owning or renting a property, then you are constantly under pressure to earn money.

In an expensive country you have expensive government and this government never ceases to pressure you to pay more taxes, makes things truly unaffordable by pretending to give it to you for free, basically in expensive countries you are forced to provide not only for yourself and for your children and maybe for your elderly parents, you are forced to provide for your expensive government.

An expensive government is obviously the cost of running the government itself, salaries, pensions, buildings, all expenses but it is also all of the laws, that are constantly adding more and more expenses to the system, thus mostly forcing the government to get deeper into debt and to steal your purchasing power through inflation (money printing).

Under these circumstances people who have access to contraceptives will use them almost always and this prevents almost all unwanted pregnancies. The other part of the population is just too stressed out and too tired from constant earning to pay for all of this 'high income' expensive stuff.

At the end children become a luxury for those, who can afford just a little more than the other guy or they become a way to suck money out of the system itself by getting onto various programs. They are an irrational choice for many, so to have them you either have to have a direct financial incentive or to be irrational or to be wealthy enough to afford them.

It is not the same at all. There are no practical reasons to cut up the Mona Lisa and it is obviously best enjoyed as single piece.

The Shuttle is entirely different. First transporting as smaller components solves a lot practical problems, so there is justification.

Second it isn't one monolith to start with like a single sheet of canvas, its thing already made up of thousands, maybe 100s of thousands of components. So you're integrity argument is nonsense. I am not about breaking it up selling it off bolt by bolt or something at the souvenir stand, I am talking about a cohesive presentation of the whole thing.

Third it would be better enjoyed if you could see more of it. Ever been to railway museum, when we are talking about an old steam engine or something that can't run anyway what is more interesting to look at, what can learn more from? A long steel tube, or one where a section has been taken out so you can actually see inner plumbing of the boiler etc? We do this with other stuff like ships and aircraft as well. The Shuttle isn't "art work", it is a product of science and industry and it should be presented as such.

Well because it is actually hard.

Case in point. I arrive at our county transfer station.
There are two bins, one labeled cardboard and on labeled paper board. What is paper board? I did not know, honestly still don't looking on line lots of different products ranging from corrugated materials to construction paper. Also a sign that says no glossy print.

So I asked the attendant. Where should this serial box go is it cardboard or paperboard, is just trash because it has glossy coating? They could not tell me.

Ultimately I tossed it into the cardboard recycle. Figuring certainly if common grocery store cereal boxes (with the inner plastic bag removed) can't be recycled someone would have asked "why are we bothering with any of this" by now.

But honestly I am not 100% sure county waste can recycle anything but bog standard cardboard shipping carton with minimal printing and plain copy paper. In the way of paper products. Based on looking at what others throw into the bins this isn't the case but even if you go on the county waste site and read thru all the rules seemingly everything else is excluded in one way or another.

Plastic is even more complicated. You have the soda companies attaching the caps to bottles now so they don't get separated but I am not sure they are even the same type of plastic and don't need to be binned separately...

The whole system is really unusable

It is not like these things ever need to fly again. There really isn't a reason why it can't be cut apart and crudely welded back together at the destination site.

Can you do it for 2 million, hell no. Can you get it done for the 83 million in the bill, yes I think damn well can if you take a rational approach.

Heck you maybe don't even need to put it back together. mount the parts on polls arranged like they'd go back together but with space between them, slap some clear acrylic sheets on the sides to keep the weather out and build some stairs and platforms so people can walk between them and look in. Probably make a lot better exhibit anyway.

No Washington is mostly an ugly shit hole on swamp land. The National Mall is beautiful out side of that it really is just barely navigable often decaying urban landscape.

Now there are lots place in Northern Virginia and Maryland that are also beautiful and nearby but they are also not Washington.

So wait which is it?

Do we have the "capital, brain power and legislative frameworks to solve" this problem, or do we have "incapacity to deal with it at scale"?

I am going to go with the latter. We absolutely can't solve the micro-plastics problem. At least now without plunging a billion people back into the grips poverty, disease and death. There simply are not chemical and materiel analogs known that can replace plastics. Not without blowing a hole thru every other environmental remediation objective we have.

Umm it is before...

Big Beautiful Act, was for 'mandatory spending'; Congress will now pass several appropriations bills between now middle September for 'discretionary' spending.

Some of the negative covfefe around the BBA is fair but a lot of it is just negative partisan propaganda that only works because they convinced a huge portion of their base that just because the had a degree, or whatever that must mean they also know someone about the federal budget and political process that generates it. When the reality most people ..don't.. and can't grasp there was never going to be better bill that was getting passed. The Inflation Reduction Act was also mostly garbage, just the other side of the same broken coin.