So in other words, her winning would have been materially better.

Such a society would not elect Donald Trump as President.

His base will do what they're told. A few days on Reddit demonstrated while there is a core of what one might call libertarian and far right true believers who are disappointed, most of MAGA is really a religious cult, and if Donald Trump says he didn't know Epstein and to blame Obama for something, they'll go along with it.

One can see clearly how guys like Jesus and Mohammed produced religions practically defined by believing absurd, nonsensical and at times even outright impossible claims.

Frankly, it's getting to the point where I suggest leading Democrats probably start getting the hell out of the US while they can, before the judiciary is so undermined and marginalized that if the DOJ orders the arrest of Barack Obama as an illegal alien in the US, ICE will do it and Obama will never be seen again. The US is becoming a Falangist state, and enemies of the state won't be sued into silence soon, they'll be disappeared.

So America, how's it going with this demented halfwitted sociopathic president of yours that is so much better than Harris would have been?

Being a liar would suggest that they in fact know what they wrote was bullshit. The fact that he admits using ChatGPT and actually thinks 500PPM is lethal would indicate he's simply stupid.

So you had ChatGPT do calculations based on unknown inputs (since you don't provide them) and claim that 500ppm causes the death of all animal life, when in fact there are perfectly livable environments that are many times higher than 500ppm

Or in short, you're either a moron or a liar, and I'm leaning towards moron.

Do you accept thermodynamics and the energy absorption and re-emission properties of carbon dioxide?

I think the real point is that human beings are, like the chimpanzee cousins, rather good at assessing proximal risk. We're hardwired to see something like fire or even strange movement in the tall grass, and move swiftly from assessment to reaction.

Assessing risk that is more remote requires someone to actually put the cognition to work. It means putting aside emotions, whether they be fear, denial or a sense of comfort, and actually analyzing the trends and what they mean at some point in the future. I think most people are probably capable of this, but emotionally it's easier to simply go along with what seems to be the most desirable strategy, which usually ends up being the path of least resistance.

I had a fascinating discussion with one of my partner's relatives. He's a guy who spent most of his career working in the oil and gas industry. His metric for determining the veracity of the effects of AGW was essentially economics; his livelihood and pension are fed by this industry, and thus claims about emissions and their effects must be false. In other words, faced with the choice between reality and a pleasant myth, he chose myth, and in fact became quite irate at the very thought that his beliefs were based purely on short term economic benefit.

It leads me to believe that, in fact, most deniers, including the people who post on /. shaking their fists at climatologists actually know that we're in a mounting crisis, but until remote becomes proximal, their emotional responses will drive their cognition.

In short, most people are reasonably intelligent and quite capable of understanding enough chemistry and physics to know that increases CO2 and other GHG levels is causing serious problems and those problems will only get worse so long as emissions continue to rise. It's just that, well, they're emotionally immature. It's not a matter of stupidity, it's a matter of many, perhaps most adults that you encounter are actually not much more mature than a cranky 12 year old.

There's not a hope in hell that I would ever expose a SMB file server to the Internet.

That doesn't do a lot of good for distributed workforces. The alternatives, such as VPNs, come with their own issues. I think Sharepoint is a horrible beast that's the worst of all worlds, but the concept itself isn't bad.

Considering you can pretty much take any low-end hardware and emulate a C64, or any other 8 bit system, probably the only real challenge is the keyboard. Ironically a suitable mechanical keyboard is by far the most expensive item, with the price ranging from $100-$200.

I've been using LO pretty much constantly for the last two years (even wrote a novel on it). Like any interface, it just takes time to become familiar. In fact, I like the way Writer organizes styles and style configuration far better than Word, and often, even for DOCX files, do initial style set up and layout in Writer and then move to Word if I have to (which is seldom enough).

LO is a damned good office system. Its default UI is older, but since I used MS-Edit and Word pretty extensively back in the 1990s, it feels familiar to me. There is a ribbon interface, but I've only tried it a few times before remembering why it is I actually don't like the Word ribbon.

And he certainly can't be held responsible for Brexit, which is why Britain is in the state it's in now. It's fascinating to watch how the Tories, and their fellow travellers across the pond, hold a government that is only been in power for a year responsible for their own actions.

It means the next time they show up, they'll need a court order to do so.

F = G * (m1 * m2) / r^2

Or as we call it, Newton's inverse square law, where the force of gravity on any two objects is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Space is really really really really really big (the observable universe has a diameter of about 93 billion light-years), so it is literally impossible for any combination of mergers to have any effect beyond an infinitesimal region of the universe. Even a galactic merger which caused two supermassive blackholes to merge would have little or no measurable effect on a neighbouring galaxy as far away as Andromeda is from us (about 2.54 million light years away).

In fact, it's not until LIGO that we have even been able to detect the mergers of super dense and super massive objects like neutron stars and black holes, just to give you an idea of how the inverse square law limits the influences of gravity over very large distances.