It would be an ok point, but the trouble is just about everything you can say about Harris is about a thousand tribes worse with trump. He's the king of word salads.

I dunno. China is a "market socialist" system -- which is a contradiction in terms. If China is socialist, then for practical purposes Norway and Sweden have to be even *more* socialist because they have a comprehensive public welfare system which China lacks. And those Nordic countries are rated quite high on global measures of political and personal freedom, and very low on corruption. In general they outperform the US on most of those measures, although the US is better on measures of business deregulation.

It makes no sense to claim Chinese courts have a lot of power, although it may seem that way â" itâ(TM)s supposed to seem that way. One of the foundational principles of Chinese jurisprudence is party supremacy. Every judge is supervised by a PLC â" party legal committee â" which oversees budgets, discipline and assignments in the judiciary. They consult with the judges in sensitive trials to ensure a politically acceptable outcome.

So it would be more accurate to characterize the courts as an instrument of party power rather than an independent power center.

From time to time Chinese court decisions become politically inconvenient, either through the supervisors in the PLC missing something or through changing circumstances. In those cases there is no formal process for the party to make the courts revisit the decision. Instead the normal procedure is for the inconvenient decision to quietly disappear from the legal databases, as if it never happened. When there is party supremacy, the party can simply rewrite judicial history to its current needs.

An independent judiciary seems like such a minor point; and frankly it is often an impediment to common sense. But without an independent judiciary you canâ(TM)t have rule of law, just rule by law.

Oh fair enough.

Hereâ(TM)s the problem with that scenario: court rulings donâ(TM)t mean much in a state ruled by one party. China has plenty of progressive looking laws that donâ(TM)t get enforced if it is inconvenient to the party. There are emission standards for trucks and cars that should help with their pollution problems, but there are no enforcement mechanisms and officials have no interest in creating any if it would interfere with their economic targets or their private interests.

China is a country of strict rules and lax enforcement, which suits authoritarian rulers very well. It means laws are flouted routinely by virtually everyone, which gives the party leverage. Displease the party, and they have plenty of material to punish you, under color of enforcing laws. It sounds so benign, at least theyâ(TM)re enforcing the law part of the time, right? Wrong. Laws selectively enforced donâ(TM)t serve any public purpose; theyâ(TM)re just instruments of personal power.

Americans often donâ(TM)t seem to understand the difference between rule of law and rule *by* law. Itâ(TM)s ironic because the American Revolution and constitution were historically important in establishing the practicality of rule of law, in which political leaders were not only expected to obey the laws themselves, but had a duty to enforce the law impartially regardless of their personal opinions or interests.

Rule *by* law isnâ(TM)t a Chinese innovation, it was the operating principle for every government before 1789. A government that rules *by* law is only as good as the men wielding power, and since power corrupts, itâ(TM)s never very good for long.

We needed to stop it in America in 2024 by electing Kamala Harris but we didn't.

Yeah but she had a stupid laugh. I mean she wasn't found by a court of law to be a rapist or racist. And she wasn't using the system to massively enrich herself. And she wasn't both ancient and going senile. And she wasn't going to appoint such incompetent people that Hillary's emailed paled in comparison.

But her laugh. Also Benghazi for some reason. And maybe pizza or whatever.

-1 Troll, here I come!

It cares about it's citizens. Except the ones who criticise Xi. Or the ones living somewhere where it's convent to pollute. Or the ones who have the wrong religion. Or the ones it's using for slave labour. Or the ones it's actually committing genocide against.

Sure, "most" might be happy with that but most Brits were pretty happy with going around the world, invading places and stealing their shit.

"Things hooked in parallel (Figure 1.1) have the same voltage across them."

Ah you mean the entire premise of the OP's question?

So no the source of the EMF is not shown but it is clearly there as the text underneath states. Thank you for proving my point.

At this point I have to wonder if you know how capacitors work. If those two floating wires are unconnected to an EMF, the two capacitors will still have the same voltage across them, due to whatever charge/energy is stored in them.

You don't need an external EMF to have a voltage across them.

And in fact it'll be behaving like one capacitor with the sum of capacitance in that regard.

In fact it's really easy to imagine using switches to convert a parallel circuit to a series circuit.

No shit, sherlock. But I'm not talking about switched capacitor filters or supplies or Marx generators or anything like that, but something much, much simpler.

You have a battery. Connect it to a resistor, then that to a capacitor then back to the battery. R1 and C1 are in series. A basic RC circuit. Now connect another capacitor in parallel with C1. You now have a pair of parallel capacitors, in a way we both (I assume, who knows) understand.

Now replace the resistor with a switch. Are those capacitors still in parallel?

In the UK, which (I think that's like consumer reports in the US) has basic high performing models for £30, so 40 bucks?

With that said, it'll get near daily use and probably last a decade. Even at $200, that's 2c per slice toasted. Though apparently often the expensive toasters aren't that good.

You can do that with any modern phone but people don't do it....

Kiiiinda I guess, but somehow everything is shit.

Yep. It basically just does the job. Straightforward, no strange takes on interaction, plays well with non XFCE things, low resource, decently configurable, unopinionated and works decently out of the box.

The literal definition of a parallel circuit is one where the circuit divides and the current is split between two components - look it up.

You know I actually reached behind me and grabbed Horowitz & Hill off the shelf just because.

Looks like someone has h4x0rized it so you can look too:

https://kolegite.com/EE_librar...

Page 2, Figure 1.1, "parallel connection". See the lack of an EMF in that diagram?

When the OP said "capacitors in parallel", that's exactly what he means. Those wires on the left and right? They're not connected to anything. They can be sure, by implication, but need not be. They're just floating there in diagrammatic or real space.

If there is not more than one path for the current the circuit is not parallel.

OKey dokey, since you keep dodging this question I'll ask again. I'm beginning to suspect you're dodging because you don't have a good answer that also is consistent with your definition.

So take two capacitors connected in parallel, yeah with one end connected to + on your battery the other end connected to -. Cut the wire to +. Are they no longer in parallel? What if you remove the wire completely? Now replace the cut wire with a switch. Turn it on. Turn it off. Do they change from parallel to undefined as you flip the switch?

This is not a physics vs. engineering definition, it is THE definition of what parallel means.

So you say, but that sounds like a definition with holes in. Somehow I've got this far in life without ever having a super precise, pedantic definition that fails when you flip a switch.

WTF is wrong with UI designers these days? I have my fair share of 'get off my lawn' moments, but I really don't think my hatred for new UI paradigms falls into that category. Designers today seem to have no familiarity with the 'form follows function' concept.

My guess would be that it's kind of reached if not an optimum, a deep local minimum. A huge amount of the awkwardness of early GUIs has been thoroughly hammered out, and the WIMP idea has generally settled into a number of core interaction mechanisms, but with a lot of similarities. The problem is that most of the big variations have been done, and we've kept the ones that worked.

But the only way for a designer to do something to make their mark or stand out is to do a big variation. Trouble is there's not a lot of options left for big changes that improve things.

Also, see Zawinski's CADT: people in their zeal for newness forget all the very hard won lessons of the past. Like GNOME bringing back bits of MDI. MDI was an interesting, but ultimately (IMO) failed experiment. One might argue tabbed interfaces are a remenant of MDI, but in firefox, I can make multiple toplevel windows and move tabs between them, which is somewhat outside of the scope of MDI. I suspect the GNOME people never lived in the Win 3.11 era where MDI was somewhat popular, so never got past the stage of "hey this is cool grouped things move together" to see how that can fundamentally defeat the point of windowing in the first place.

As far as I know most any adult mammal loses their taste for any kind of milk or dairy upon becoming an adult. It's an anomaly among European humans to tolerate lactose into adulthood, an artifact of living in a cold European climate where long winters left adults without a source of vital vitamin D but the milk extracted from cattle.

Kiiinda but more likely it was also a good source of calories. Cows can eat stored, human inedible food such as hay and make useful calories (for humans) out of it. Plus cheese can be stored for long periods of time without spoiling.

Eating eggs is also an artifact of domesticating animals for food. Do lions eat eggs? I know raccoons do, but they are vile creature

Your personal hangups are completely irrelevant here. Many many animals eat eggs.

I cry when I see raccoon roadkill as I didn't have the chance to run them over.

You sound like a psychopath,

I remember hearing something about how many potatoes the typical Irish farmer ate in a day before the potato famine put an end to that. It was something like 40 potatoes.

Kind of depends on the size of the potatoes. Maybe the baby new potatoes at the beginning of the harvest but not the 200g ones at the end.

Didn't Joe Rogan cover this theory at some point?

Joe Rogan doesn't "cover" things. He invites people with dubious opinions on to his show then "just asks questions", to give plausible deniability. His show is not a source of useful information.

Funny I haven't heard the howls of rage about "cancel culture", free speech and whatnot from all the usual idiots. It's almost as if it was never about free speech, just about whether right wingers get the megaphone.