You forgot third: He delivers results often enough to keep the believers believing. Tesla really is an electric car company that builds actual cars. SpaceX is actually flying rockets, and has achieved reusability, opening the door for dramatically cheaper space access.

Little of that is his own genius, but he does seem to have a knack for getting actually smart people working on visionary stuff.

You could have a look at Zen browser if Firefox yanks your chain.

I am surprisingly happy with it so far. Been using it for, oh I don't know, about two weeks?

You also don't need anything so power hungry, a modern integrated GPU would be better.

Not only do we have the concept of a plan for negotiations for a peace agreement; the current level of disagreement between the agreeing parties suggests that we actually have at least three distinct concepts of a plan for negotiations for a peace agreement! Where a lesser leader might myopically interpret having a single agreed-upon set of terms as essential to a treaty; Great Leader understands that American Greatness requires more.

Is that really a bad thing? There are certainly plenty of examples of old things that suck; either because genuine improvements became available after they had already solidified or because they were always broken and are now running purely on denial-fueled risk tolerance; but, in principle, it seems like it should be a bad thing that age is seen as a bad thing. Especially when software is more like math than like civil engineering in terms of the tendency of its materials toward corrosion, embrittlement, and fatigue. (and when so many 'modernization' projects turn into expensive failures or go way behind schedule and over budget to eventually death march toward feature parity, sometimes even achieving it in time to be declared legacy themselves.)

I'm not calling for a crusade against 'fast fashion' software; if people want to bang out an app on the fast and cheap to catch the moment when people care they can do that; fine, whatever; but it seems like software built on real long term service timescales should get a lot more credit than it does. Absent specific criticisms; it's not "eww, there are people who weren't even born then", it's "the software has been in service for a generation".

All the more if there are a lot of outfits doing the same thing: having some unique oddball legacy thing means having potentially crushing maintenance requirements unless everything was gloriously secure from day 1, which it probably wasn't; but if there is some big mass of enterprise Java 8 why should we call it all eol and scramble rather than just maintaining java 8? Especially when we can do so in software, without some of the vendor and hardware inflexibility you see with things like old school mainframe applications where there's an implied commitment to a single old school mainframe vendor in perpetuity.

It's not elegant; but realistically we are far enough both into the history of computer science and the history of computers-as-hardware-you-can-buy that there's a lot less obvious, low-hanging, progress to be had by going 'modern' relative to the amount of fashion and fad chasing. Especially if (as is the case for a great many people and organizations) the scale of your problem has grown at or below the rate at which hardware advances have made systems not particularly well designed for scalability faster.

Obviously this would require coordinated action, and some people likely have other reasons to want to either poke at or kill legacy applications; but(since all those java versions are solidly post openjdk) I'd be very curious to know how the cost and risk associated with "modernize because java 18 is going eol!" would compare to just...not...having java 18 go eol. Unsexy maintenance project that you'd need to pay to have done, sure; but very plausibly better characterized and lower risk than trying to deal with a lot of the oddball internal accretions that would otherwise need updating; and, depending on how much people have running on java 18, certainly possible that they'll individually spend a fair bit more running the treadmill than it would cost to just keep kicking java 18 down the road until (almost) nobody cares.

The UK mostly doesn't do voter suppression. However, they did for the Referendum. Basically, anyone who might not be racist was not permitted to vote.

Even then, 48% still insisted on staying in the EU.

One of the reasons the UK doesn't do voter suppression the way the US does is because (until very recently) the House of Lords had a lot of people in it who owed no favours at all to the political elite but did have a huge responsibility to making sure that things functioned in the long term. This has since been corrupted, so the HoL is no longer anything like as independent and politically neutral as it once was. Rather, the two main parties have stuffed it full of sycophants, which makes it useless. Which, of course, was the intended effect.

Because those in the HoL were partly hereditary (and therefore not under anyone's thumb and impossible to manipulate) and partly chosen on actual merit (they'd done stuff that was actually impressive and good for the country), the HoL were the true guardians of the Constitution and the nation. The House of Commons has always been corrupt and degenerate, so a parallel system that politicians couldn't control meant their worst excesses would always be curbed. The HoL has defended the common person FAR FAR more often than anyone in the Commons ever has.

This didn't make the HoL perfect, or even advisable to retain in its historic form, but it made it immune to the corruption that we were seeing in the rest of the system. What we needed was a replacement system that retained that immunity and improved on it.

Although there is a right join, no far right join has ever been defined and there's no signs that it would in fact be possible.

My response was specifically to the original poster who, for some reason, was taking a "we are losing the class wars; breed faster!" position rather than the "if you are already losing the class war why would you even think about putting in that much effort and cost so your children can deal with a bad or worse outcome?" position.

It would honestly not surprise me if that is a nontrivial contributing factor: If you aren't emotionally invested in children as an end in themselves the wage and cost of living numbers have done very little to encourage you to see them as affordable since roughly the late 70s(with a combination of substantial stagnation for anyone who is primarily wages rather than capital gains; and such good news as there is mostly confined to people who complete at least undergraduate education and remain in a career track full time) and people who are emotionally invested in children are often willing to go to considerable lengths to try to improve their children's outcomes; but are presumably discouraged by the prospect that they will most likely be downwardly mobile instead.

It's not a surprise that people who want labor, cannon fodder, or taxpayers to be abundant for them are fretting about it; but it's hard to see why most of us should care. Why do things that are good for society when society is pretty overtly disinterested in being good for you? You may be able to squeeze the current labor market a bit; because people who already exist tend to take the "or starve" possibility pretty seriously when deciding what they will put up with; but if you offer nothing but the demand for a toiling underclass to encourage people to have children that's not terribly compelling, either for those who aren't interested in sacrificing for children and see hitting education and career hard as increasingly existential or for people who would sacrifice a lot to better things for their children but are more or less accurate in seeing it as highly unlikely that they will be able to.

Rich people don't liquidate assets when they want to buy something.

They get a loan against their assets. At extremely good rates. And no, they never pay them back. The strategy is called "buy, borrow, die".

First, you need to understand that if the stock price goes up more than their (low) interest rate, they're still making money.

Second, the whole thing is rolled up only when the ultra-rich person dies. The assets are revalued to their current market price at the time of death, wiping out decades of built-in capital gains tax liability. The estate can then sell a portion of the tax-free assets to pay off the outstanding loans.

tl;dr: They don't liquidate assets, if they did they'd have to pay taxes.

The reason for that isn't socialism, though. It's incompetence and corruption. Politics attracts the most incompetent and the most corrupt of people, always has and always will. Basically: If you're shit at everything else, you can always try making a career of telling other people what to do.

In theory. In reality, that has always been bullshit. The various bubbles, crashes and other events prove that. Valuations on the stock market are based on expectations, and expectations always include an element that is not rational.

True, though both of these companies do have an actual business and actual assets. There's plenty of companies on the stock market whose entire business can just pack up and leave tomorrow. Many of those are extremely highly valued. All the middle-men companies (ride sharing, food delivery, etc.) all work on the principle of outsourcing EVERYTHING. They hold no actual assets and their entire business model can be copied in a lazy weekend. Each and every one of them survives due to brand recognition, habit and by being just a little bit better in some way than alternatives. All of which can disappear in a week.

Tesla and SpaceX are overvalued. But they have factories and a workforce and produce things.Their value is not entirely made up.

I'm rather doubtful of the plan's viability; but if they are willing to justify the company name by chaining Bezos to a rock so a bird can eat his liver repeatedly I could be persuaded.