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.

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.

Could be.

He did not say he won't burn it.

Plastic pollution is shaping up to be a far more pervasive and serious problem than I think most people are appreciating. The effects though so far unconfirmed are probably being felt a lot more acutely than anything "climate related"

Its almost like climate and green energy are getting paid a bunch of lip service for the sake of using up all the oxygen around environmental protection, so the industry isnt forced to try and solve the real crisis they don't want to address.

What are you the rep for some federal employees union or something?

Sure there is some increase in activity due to low fricition. It strains credibility to believe however the expanded support hours required are not more than offset by things that can happen as purely electronic transactions that formerly required someone to answer and phone or open an letter, and go hunt thru some file drawers, and then respond.

"requiring more services" - nope that is a purely a policy choice. It isn't as if we were a failed state or something in 1965.

What kind of classic car parts if I may ask?

I find ebay almost impossible to use for that. Generally speaking anything OEM by the manufacturer is in far far worse condition than represented or have starting prices something like 10X what they'll go for at the Owners club swap meet if you wait for summer, or catch a classified listing in the club mag.

As example, you'll see things like steering wheel assemblies that look great on the outside but an ebay seller won't tell you the plastic switches inside for the horn rim have turned to confetti. If you contact them they'll play dumb, as if they did not hear all the rattling debris inside when they were photoing the thing. Granted it still a usable part if you have CAD skills, a 3d printer or lathe, and are okay with having to 'fix it again' every few years but..

When it comes to adjacent stuff like brake parts, carb parts, etc, I find half the time they are Chinese knock-offs being sold as OEM for darn near OEM prices. They may look and work fine but often there are subtle things, that master cylinder sure its got a slightly shorter rod, fits works fine, but you can't replicate the original pedal travel exactly etc. Oh and you could have ordered from Rock Auto for 1/3 of what you paid.

I pretty much have given up on Ebay entirely for parts.

That is a absolutely pointless metric. The vast majority of Government employees spend most of the time doing some kind of record keeping, or record evaluating activity.

Obviously the exposition of digital technology should have dramatically reduced the number of people needed on a per capita basis vs eras 60-70s where even putting a dumb terminal on the desks of most public servants would have prohibitively expensive.

The 80s would be the start of when you could start to make some rational comparisons but even in the 80s the process of digitizing a lot of operations was only just starting.

I have spent only a $100 or so and only on things I would have bought later in the month anyway. Most were discounted 5% or less. Mostly ordered now because well it is "slightly cheaper" and hell I have app open.

Even last year it seems like there were some actual deals. This year it seems like they are just pushing crap they sell on Haul/Woot to the top of the algorithm in the main Amazon store, at no real discount over what it goes for on the bargain branded sites the other 348 days of the year.

The un-googled Chromium projects do manage to strip out most of the direct telemetry to that Chrome otherwise sends back to the mother ship. That is not unimportant and it is valuable. That value is however being undermined with every release of Chrome/Chromium.

I agree with that Chromium is about as 'captive' as it gets when it comes to FOSS projects, and does not in any way resemble the multi-contributor community effort we notionally think of when someone says FOSS.

I also agree that Google is doing things like getting rid of manifestv2 and not including the interfaces people want in later versions. They will continue baking in all the plumbing for their visions of how cookies, other identity mechanisms, etc into it. You are also correct it will be impossible for downstream chromium projects to effectively reverse these changes. They will be forced to either rely on a very old Chromium branch and maybe try to backport security fixes or do what Google wants, which is of course to neuter the effectiveness of any privacy or content controls and end user might try to implement.

Altman seems about a Skeevy as the come. I honestly would run a browser from Zuck/Meta before I would OpenAI.

At least browser based on the open source Chromium code base can be 'un-googled' and have a fair number of eyes looking to make sure Google has filled it with even more spyware we don't know about. Mind you that is only if you eschew the closed widevine stuff.

We need browser that isn't the product of an organization that isnt primarily the surveillance business. OpenAI is the wrong answer here. Mozilla does give any indication of getting their act together sadly.