I still have my very first credit card. It's 20+ years old, sits in a lockbox, and has a thousand dollar limit, by far the lowest of my cards. It costs me $10 a year to maintain. It's there entirely because it anchors the oldest account ranking for me.

Oregon isn't a red state overall. Almost all states, whether red, blue, or purple, allow felons to vote at some point.

Democrats sure don't. They want them to vote and everything.

The following red states allow felons to vote after completing their sentences (carceral sentences in some cases, or complete sentences and fines in others):

Alaska, Arkansas, Florida (1), Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa (2), Kansas, Kentucky (3), Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia.

That's the overwhelming majority of them. A couple of them have exceptions for certain crimes like rape and murder, but for the rest, if you can finish your sentence, you can probably vote.

(1) Sort of -- the state government has intentionally made a mess of the initiative that passed 65-35.

(2) While the Iowa constitution bars felons from voting unless they have applied to the governor to have voting rights reinstated, Gov. Reynolds (a Republican) has a standing executive order automatically reinstating voting rights of felons upon completing their sentences unless they were convicted of murder.

(3) Similar to (2), except that Gov. Beshear's executive order applies only to those convicted of non-violent offenses.

Automatic salary increases have been part of federal law since 1989, as your linked article mentions. They haven't happened since 2009. The bill that the link mentions didn't pass, and the replacement bill didn't change the prior block, so no pay raises are possible until the new session in 2027.

I get that members of Congress are unpopular. But if we want regular people in Congress, people not coming in wealthy, they're going to face extra expenses that aren't covered from their office budgets, and they should be paid enough to not end up poor for doing their service. Maintaining a separate residence -- even sharing in renting an apartment -- in or around DC is expensive. Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) was unable to rent an apartment in DC when he was elected last year because even with a guaranteed Congressional salary, he didn't make enough to overcome a poor credit rating coming in and the apartment complex rejected him. I'm all for the stock trading bans for them and their family. I'm fine with them participating in Social Security and the federal employee pension fund. I'm happy with them getting their health insurance off the DC ACA exchange. But at some point, the pay should increase so that we can send people who aren't already rich or who won't have extra temptation to bend or break the rules because they're about to go broke.

That brings up something interesting. According to US Census data, the median age of first marriage in 1950 was 24 for men and about 20.5 for women. But that was an outlier, with a dramatic drop from 1940, when the median ages were about 25.3 and 22.8. Between 1890 and 2010, the median ages were usually much higher -- 25 or more for men and 22 or more for women. In 1890, the median ages were 26 and 23. That really drives home your mom's claim that pregnancies were drivers of a lot of marriages, as the 1950s were an unusually difficult time to get birth control. In 2010, the average ages were about 28.4 and 26.9. That's a lot of time taken out of primary childbearing years, and birth control is more available and reliable than it was.

A company provides a contract that says that the functionality ends when the customer stops paying for the license. If Davis Lu provided software under contract and had terms allowing the software to stop working, yes, it would be legal.

But he was an employee. An employee is expected to leave things running after leaving the company. Leaving behind a kill switch and not telling anyone about it is a criminal act. He's not the first person to do this (look up Tim Lloyd in 1996 and Nimesh Patel in 2016), and he won't be the last. And they all have or will have committed a criminal act. Lloyd got 41 months in prison and $2 million in restitution. Patel was lucky enough to not get charged, but he was sued by his former employer, Allegro Microsystems, for damage he caused. They appeared to ultimately settle out of court.

Derelict in this use case is correct. In this case, you have landowners who don't have any interest in farming the land. Think a landowner who inherited the property from their farmer grandpa and don't have any plans to farm it but don't want to sell it for some reason. In those cases they lease the use rights yearly to farmers that do. Otherwise the farm would sit there growing grass and trees and therefore become derelict.

It shouldn't take a genius to realize that if a landowner is just profiting from land use, an energy company offering Lease + energy profit sharing looks better than just a straight land lease, even if the land lease is significantly higher up front.

First off, he's right about farmer destroying solar. There are big energy groups buying any farmland they can get cheap and putting Solar farms on them.

Locally there's a solar group that bought out leases for land that farmers were planting on that would otherwise be derelict. Even when the farmers offered to buy or lease the land at significantly higher value than what it's worth (or in one case, higher than what the solar company was leasing it for) the leasing company refused because the solar group offered stock in their company that if the solar farm is profitable would result in a solid revenue stream that would be sustainable for at least a few decades until the panels wear out.

The problem with this is that food demand is not getting smaller, and once you dedicate farmland for solar, it basically makes the land useless for anything but solar since the solar shade blocks plant growth and once the solar panels are degraded and/or the company goes under, now you have rows and rows of useless solar panels that were cemented into the ground as well as their wires and conduits (and possibly chemicals if batteries are involved) that you will absolutely have to find and remove at a significant cost in order to even attempt to return that land back into farm capable condition.

Meanwhile, Malls, Stores and Plaza's have these huge parking lots that you can easily install solar canopies in that not only shade the cars of customers and can be used to charge parked electric cars, but you immediately have an electrical customer in that Mall, Store or Plaza and the stores aren't going to care since they see it not only as a green thing, but as a customer service thing due to the shade.

Now to be fair I don't know if Trump is banning all solar or just farm solar, but it makes sense to ban farm solar to encourage more parking lot canopy solar if that is what he's planning. As for wind, I'm not sure why he's banning them other than because he doesn't like the look of them or he read that study from 50 years ago that says wind turbines kill birds (because wind turbines in the 70's moved at significantly higher RPM's than modern turbines) even though 1 solar thermal plant reportedly killed more birds and insects per year than all of the bird strikes on all modern windmills combined.

The birth rate in the US has not significantly recovered from the last peak in 2007. The number of births in the US was mostly gently climbing from 1997 to 2007, rising from 3.9 million to about 4.3 million (10% in ten years). But since then, it generally declined through 2020 to 3.6 million (16% decline in 13 years, and 8% lower than in 1997). The numbers for 2020-2024 are fairly flat at just above 3.6 million. The maternity rate in 2007 was 2.12, while in 2024, it was down to 1.60.

I am more convinced with each passing year that the global population is much closer to peak than we think. In the 1990s, the peak was expected to be around 2080-2100. By 2010, the forecast moved to 2070-2080. More recent forecasts have suggested 2050-2060. I'm thinking that some of the more aggressive forecasts that see the global population peak before 2050 are right. After that -- and maybe before it, in some cases -- we're going to have to figure out how the new economy works, because expanding markets will become a thing of the past.

No. He'll interview the I Am Hunger in America girl.

This isn't the First time AI imagery has been used for political purposes and it will most definitely not be the last.

This is the American Electrola DXC-100
https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/...

This was a radio made in 1993, cost around $250-$300 in 1993 money, was made in Pittsburgh PA and qualified for the Made in USA logo at the time. 2000 (2 batches of 1000) of them were sold by a primarily shortwave Rush Limbaugh clone named Chuck Harder that was previously selling Drake branded radios made in Japan before one of his listeners challenged him to sell a "Made in USA" Radio. It's so American, when you turn it off, the Display says "USA 1" on it.

And it's made out of 80% US parts. The other 20% is made from friendly foreign components (Think Europe, because in the 90s JAPAN BAD! EVIL! TRADE WAR!!)
And it sucked. The first batch could barely pick up local AM or SW stations and the 2nd Gen while better, didn't justify the cost when a GE Superadio III or a cheap Radio Shack rebadged Sangean would smoke it for 1/3 the cost. Within a few months Chuck was selling Drake receivers again.

So Even in 1993, when we still had a semiconductor and computer industry in the US, we couldn't even build a simple radio out of 100% American made parts.
So what snowball's chance in hell do you think we have to build a PC out of 100% American parts in 2025?

JSON is an improvement over XML and easier to transmit than YAML.

Patrick was not happy with the veto.

Abbott has called a special session for the purpose of writing a new bill. I suspect that Patrick will get a very slightly looser version of SB3 passed, which may itself get vetoed.

The number of times that my wife has had to submit a copy of her marriage certificate to confirm her original name even though we've been married for 11 years baffles me. It made some sense in the first year or two, but she still has to do it a couple of times a year for seemingly random things. I encouraged her to keep her original name when we were planning the wedding, but she insisted on the name change.