That is also interesting given the source.

The EIT (earned income tax credit) is more or less UBI. It is probably the most effective program we do have in terms of improving people's economic situation. Okay it is 'means tested' so it is not truly universal but functionally it works similarly in practical application.

Given the other arguments about income insurance etc, I am not sure why we would not look at EIT expansion, including state level implementations, and maybe temporary enhanced credits for classes of displaced workers. We have a thing that works, why not do more of it?

Again I come back the source and my suspicion is there are not enough strings attached, you got a job and stayed in the work force isn't enough, I am sure she wants to make sure you take some sort of Green/Woke/Nonsense job...

"ailing economy"

1) with near full employment
2) consistent consumer spending
3) stable interest rates
4) slightly elevated but certainly not alarming inflation levels
5) solid market growth year of year
6) easy access to credit

literally the only problem this economy has is consumer sentiment and regardless how people answer the polls its evidently not even enough to make them stop spending. If it wasn't for all the "negative covfefe" people would recognize the economy is doing great.

Its a bunch of ex pols grabbing money so they can have nice job where they don't actually do anything.

They will write up some policy position papers (well they'll have chat GPT do it) and make some websites where companies like MS can put their logos. The companies get pretend they are doing something for PR reasons for a few million, literally less they retaining a handful of salaries would cost them.

It is just 'learn to code all over again'

Grifters gonna grift.

Answer - It does not matter because

1) we have one atmosphere
2) People are going to buy stuff
3) China is a going to make stuff people want to buy
4) regulators in Washington and Brussels don't control how China makes things.
5) Everyone decided 'derp tariffs bad' so (2) will be filled by China, and poorer client states

This is all before we even explore the energy economy.

People need to come to grips with the fact that we are NOT going to be doing anything that is actually effective about carbon emissions via policy. Policy is a flat head screw driver, and the problem looks like a hex-head bolt. We'd be better off just not using it at all we will only injure ourselves and damage the work.

The only thing that will address emissions (if they really matter and work like most climate scientists have concluded they do) is technological advances. That is it, nobody is just going to shrug and abandon the lifestyle we have all enjoyed the last 50 years.. Its just unrealistic. That won't stop smaller groups and some local municipalities from slitting their own writs in self sacrifice, but those will be the losers because they are going give up the things they have, and be left to deal with any consequences of climate change.

The *average* blackout duration for Madrid (CAIDI) is 1.6 hours. While you wouldn't expect a large percentage of outages to exceed four hours if the average is just under half of that, infrequent isn't zero, and when you're talking about critical emergency infrastructure like telephones, you really should want the outage durations for those services to be zero.

And even if the average really were just 30 minutes, the point remains that this was done in response to an outage that lasted way more than 4 hours, so the proposed fix wouldn't have prevented the events that triggered the legislation.

Definitely. Standards shouldn't specify what kind of backup, just the duration. If they want to use batteries, fine. Generators, fine. Flywheel storage, fine. Compressed air storage, fine. If you can get more than 24 hours of storage, add some solar, and you now have basically an unlimited duration. This is, of course, the ideal answer, where practical.

There are two types of outages. Widespread outages at the transmission level are fairly rare (almost everywhere). Outages at the local level, like substation failures, overhead line damage from car accidents/wind/ice, etc. are not. It doesn't take a massive regional outage to make cell phones unavailable. In urban areas, cell towers cover a radius of only a couple of miles, typically, with lots of dead spots when even a single tower goes down. One bad traffic accident, and thousands of people could lose cell coverage. And those localized localized outages can take way more than four hours to repair.

For cellular phones, you either have the same system or you don't have any way for people to call an ambulance in an emergency. So that argument really doesn't hold water. And for urban towers, it could take you more than four hours to reach the owner of the business whose roof has the tower on it so that you can get access to the premises to connect a generator. So that's also not an entirely safe alternative.

What does the A-380 have to do with the Panamax?

Is there some component of the aircraft that has to be shipped where the ability to put it on a sea going freighter actually imposes a size constraint?

Flextape can fix anything right!

Can't wait to see the new infomercial. We cut this Jet Liner in half!

Except no not really there is basically no evidence to support that claim. Got look at some charts the portion of the public with health coverage was basically flat from the 70s on, then it ticks up a little in the early 2000s, and into the 2010s (ACA era) it rejoins the earlier trend.

Almost any expansion in coverage can be credited to expansion of medicare / medicaid eligibility. Which is just the fully socialized medical model the ACA claims not to be.

So no there is no real metric that indicates the ACA was successful in any way.

I am not racist here, the racists are the ones given Obama credit for the fat-lot-of-nothing he did. They exist in both directions, people who run around saying he was the worst thing that ever happen are by and large expressing racist sentiment, but anyone claiming he was actually a good and at anything are equally doing so out of racial bias. The Obama did nothing besides be more Gorge W. Bush, and the ACA. The ACA failed, and failed completely.

Insisting it Obama is relevant is just lying.

Okay, the news article I read said that it took days to fully restore everything, but that may have been a few fringe places or something.

Either way, mandating 4 hours of backup in response to an event that lasted 15+ hours still seems more than a bit shortsighted.

That may be what sg_oneill meant, but that's not what I meant in the post that sg_oneill was replying to. NotRobot is talking about exactly what I'm talking about — using a tablet for reading sheet music while I sing or play music on an actual physical instrument.

The best part of the Android tablet experience is that MobileSheets lets you have two tablets side-by-side and sync them with Bluetooth so that you can turn two pages at once, so that you get to the spot where the publisher (hopefully) left time to turn before having to deal with it. That costs $320 with basic Android tablets, or $1500 with iPads (or $1660 for iPads with cases to match the Android tablets).

To be fair, I *do* compose music, record music, etc., but I do all of that on my Mac, not on a tablet. Tablets are simply the wrong tool for the job.

For recording, iPads don't have nearly enough storage for recording, and don't provide an easy way to back up locally, which makes giant audio files a no-go.

For composing, I can't imagine doing it without a physical keyboard, because keyboard shortcuts are what make that survivable. And Apple's keyboard for the 13-inch Air is a $280 add-on. Worse, even if you do that, you'll still have a tiny 13-inch screen, which IMO is undesirable. And if you can tolerate a 13-inch screen, a MacBook Neo would still be $400 cheaper than a Wi-Fi Air with keyboard and is vastly more capable.

Also, even though I'm slowly starting to get used to non-discontinued score editing software, 100% of my existing compositions were done in Finale, which has no iPad version at all. So for working with all of that content, an iPad would be basically useless. Given that it was one of the most popular music editing apps for a very long time, I'm not alone in that problem.

On a stone or anything else non-flat, sure, though that's just shy of 50% of the outer surface area of an iPad, and you're keeping it on a music stand with feet that stick out, so I don't exactly like those odds. You might get some protection from the case, but did I mention that the $160 tablet comes with a magnetic folio case, whereas Apple's folio case for the iPad is an $80 add-on? If you add the cost of the case to the cost of AppleCare+, the things you would typically do to make a bad accidental drop not be horribly expensive for the iPad add up to more than the total cost of a basic Android tablet. Ponder that for a moment.

No big deal. Most of the sheet music reader apps offer cloud syncing, etc. And even if I had to redownload them from IMSLP or some publisher/distributor website, re-downloading the dozen or so pieces of music that I'm actively rehearsing at any given moment isn't exactly a huge burden. Or I could buy two, sync them every few weeks when I add new music, and keep them both in my car except when I'm charging one of them. With that approach, I'd be all but guaranteed to have a working one with me at all times even if I drop one and break it, and I'd still pay just a third the cost of the cheapest equivalent 13-inch iPad.

Turning the senate into a state wide popularity contest, and fundamentally altering what the body was intended to be, a place where the States themselves were represented vs the Peoples house is hardly nutty.

Arguably the current system is not just flawed but down right nutty. The House provides equal representation where by each person gets roughly the same weight in voting for representation. On the other hand the Senate no-longer represents the States because they are also elected by the people but for some reason living in a low population states entitles you to extra proportional representation? WTF?

It does not fit into the 'we're actually a republic not a democracy argument' nor does it fit into the "on man one vote" argument. Its just crazy. Either the Senate should do what it was designed to do and represent the interests of State Governments or it really ought to just be eliminated as a body.

The theory behind the ADA is completely irrelevant. It failed, objectively by any measurable metric it failed. As I said maybe it was legislatively sabotaged. Nothing stopped Obama from saying this won't work as implemented, it isn't what I asked for, refusing to sign it and telling the legislature to try again. He did not do that, why well because it was never going to get past the legislature again and he wanted his name on something transformative. That isn't good leadership its pure vanity!

And no the divisiveness came from the President. He is the one who made those statements. He chose to use the pulpit to make fun of people. That is also on him.

As I said Obama wan't actually a bad president. He was and continues to be someone who is actually vapid and empty headed but does good job sounding insightful. Its an act, he is good at it. He also accomplished exactly nothing other than getting elected while Black. It is literally the only significant thing he did.

The other thing to consider is this stuff is not magic its a bag or numbers and software.

Its going to boil down to a 1A argument and ultimately government attempts to prevent the publishing, sale, SaaS offering of models is likely to look to the courts like "prior restraint" it probably won't fly, once someone with money decides to spend it lawyers without or without LLM assistance.