Just because a person is a charlatan doesn't mean they don't have anything of value to offer. This is far more a case of thinking that the leopards wouldn't eat his face. FAFO

I particularly love that we are currently in a war of literal negotiation right now, where the exact traits of the Art-of-the-Deal Master Negotiator himself, the reason we just had to have him in foreign policy because he just such the dealmaker is not only flopping at dealmaking when there's real actual stakes on the line, he doesn't appear to be leading the negotiations.

Obviously that's why the U.S. hasn't succeeded with negotiations: Trump is too busy with important matters like redecorating the White House and he doesn't have time for pettiness like negotiating a deal to end the war that he started. I'm beginning to think Trump would prefer to be the First Lady rather than the President. He loves the power and prestige that come with the office, but when it comes to the work itself he'd rather delegate that out to whomever will get the job done while kissing his ass, which leaves him more time to work on vanity projects.

• Dickhead imposed tariffs that were obviously illegal
• Congressional dickheads refused to assert their checks against the obviously illegal tariffs
• Businesses paid many billions for the obviously illegal tariffs and passed on much of that cost to consumers
• Businesses get paid back the money (plus interest) for the obviously illegal tariffs
• Consumers get no relief from the additional costs of the obviously illegal tariffs but do have the privilege of having their tax dollars pay for the interest on the obviously illegal tariffs

Yup, seems about right.

The extent to which consumers realize any gain hinges on whether businesses share the proceeds

Oh, that is fucking hilarious. History is consistent when it comes to being ruled by elites who are this fucking tonedeaf. Do they not fear the Mario Bros.?

It's funny how we validly complain about overly-compressed music but the film industry is dramatically underutilizing compression. Many times I miss a word or phrase in a movie or show because the background music gets loud for a second during a quiet part of dialog. The music industry has numerous techniques for improving clarity when there's lots of competing tracks (just ask anyone who mixes heavy metal), so there's really no excuse. I see reports about more people enabling captions when watching content at home and I can't help but wonder if that's at least one contributing factor (among many others) to the decline of theatergoers. Given that this issue is very well-known, does anyone know why filmmakers seem to be doing absolutely nothing to address this? Also, why are so many scenes intentionally darkened when I can see a whole bunch of ambient lights turned on in the scene? And don't even get me started about how modern action movies have camera angles that change so frequently you can't even figure out what's going on. Filmmakers, do right and keep off my lawn!

That high-quality camera in your pocket is designed to take high-resolution photos of relatively-stationary subjects from several feet away. Using that same camera to capture video of objects many miles away while they're moving at many hundreds of miles per hour will not yield similar results. That doesn't mean that aliens exist but it does mean that the expectations people are placing on video evidence of UAPs, whatever their origin, are not in line with the actual capabilities of most of our equipment.

The good news is that I believe the general craziness of the citizens is winding down, especially as the craziness of the executive branch winds up. People finally seem to be tired of living life at the political extremes and are very slowly and quietly drifting closer back to the center. And since Trump is torpedoing the Republican party, the Dems just have to resist the temptation of getting mired in identity politics that affect a small portion of the population and instead focus on household issues that affect everyone, such as affordability.

The same government that turned ICE into a paramilitary organization and allowed their agents to wear masks during their antics on the streets wants to unmask a person who expressed criticism of their behavior on the internet.

I'm not sure about Reddit, but on many other forums the post is usually deleted, which makes it almost impossible for anyone other than the mod to judge whether the ban was warranted.

Did that happen when Trump 1.0 ended?

No, and this is why supporters of Trump's behavior aren't worried about the consequences of these expansions of power. They see liberals' reticence for engaging in the same behavior as a weakness that can be exploited since they don't have to worry about the expansion of power being used against them. I'm not arguing that liberals should abuse these expansions of power - I'm simply explaining why Trump's supporters don't fear the effects of those powers coming back to bite them in times of liberal leadership.

There's nothing wrong with, you know, not marginalizing groups of people.

As a left-winger who dabbles in consuming some right-wing content, most of the objections I hear to the messages against marginalization are not due to them being in favor of marginalization. Instead, the objections regard the way the messages are being delivered. And as someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s, I can kind of understand why they feel that way. In those times, messages against marginalization were framed as "we're a flawed species but we're capable of coming together and doing better and this is how great it can work out if we try harder to achieve that." Today, the message is much closer to "we, the writers and producers, know better than you and if you don't fall in line with all of our core beliefs, then you're an evil person who gets what you deserve." The modern message is steeped in pompousness, tribalism, and self-righteousness which turns off a lot of viewers. The goal should be to draw in the viewer and make them want to be a part of the lore, not weaponize ideologies and beat your viewers over the head with them.

This has to be draining whatever morale is left from Microsoft employees. How much time and energy did they just spend filling Windows with this branding only to have to spend a ton more time extricating it?

I completely concur about Ceph. This is my first VM management system, so I have nothing to compare it to, but Ceph is definitely the most complex part of the administration. We've never had an issue with it that we couldn't fully recover, but no other aspect of my job can pucker my asshole faster than an issue with Ceph. I honestly don't know what I'd do if one of our pools ended up in an unrecoverable state.

Or Nutanix could just sell out to Broadcom and put their customers back where they started.

Do you have any idea how many federal laws there are?! You can't expect a federal appeals judge to know them all!

How do you expect ReactOS to be stable and working when the purpose is to achieve feature-parity with Windows?