I'm also as a Democrat incredibly furious because they did absolutely fuck all about voter suppression. It was like watching a slow moving train wreck. I knew the disaster was coming and I could see the people who are in charge and I expected them to do I don't know something and they did absolutely fucking nothing.

I think a few of them filed some paperwork that didn't go anywhere.

Democrats are obsessed with propriety and being correct. So they don't know how to respond when the other side are openly criminal. The correct response is what LBJ did. You go in there and you fuck shit up like you're a fucking mob boss. You wield power.

I don't think it has sunk in with people that the Republican party is actively implementing fascism. I think that's just too much for most people to take in. It's the classic it can't happen here problem.

I don't think anyone's going to believe it until their third or fourth week in the camps. Some of them might think that they're actually going to get showers...

You know we have a Navy right?

Hawaiian eruption last a long time and the lava flows persist for years.

Your effusive eruptions last on average no longer than our effusive eruptions. The fact that Iceland also has phreatic eruptions doesn't change the fact that most of ours are effusive basalt, just like yours, with corresponding eruptive dynamics. Also, FYI, for a given total effusion volume, slow eruptions are easier to divert. Diversion is much more challenging when an equivalent volume of lava is effused in a short period of time. And it's not like you have vastly larger average lava flows than we do. The largest lava flow on Earth in the Holocene (modern era) is in Iceland (the THjórsárhraun - 900km2, 25km3, 70km underground travel followed by 130-140km on the surface). For comparison, Hawaii's largest holocene flow is the Ailaau Flow at 430km2, 4-5km3, and 40km.

If we want to limit to more recent flows (since Ailaau was fairly recent, in case you think Iceland stopped having big eruptions), Iceland's biggest *after* Alia'au was Laki (1783–1784 AD), at 600km2, 15km3, and 80km. It lasted for 8 months to 2 years, depending on whether you count the concurrent Grímsvötn eruption as part of it. So much gas was released from that huge volume of lava that despite us being nearly arctic (polar volcanoes have much lower near-term climate impacts than equatorial volcanoes), it caused a winter so severe that the Mississippi froze at New Orleans and ice was seen floating in the Gulf of Mexico.

We simply get bigger effusive eruptions than you, full stop. Not all eruptions, of course, both of us have a huge variance in eruption scales and dynamics. But trying to claim ours are somehow "easier" is just not in line with the facts. Also, Hawaiian eruptions tend to occur on terrain that slopes significantly more consistently toward the sea, aka where you want to divert lava toward; on flatter or less-consistently-angled terrain, lava "piles up" more and makes it easier to overtop berms.

There is a practical side that it is easier to move people and build coffee shacks

I'm not talking about "coffee shacks", I'm talking about whole communities and beloved places. In particular, I'm thinking about the 2018 Lower Puna eruption. Of course the homes near the vents in Leilani Estates were doomed, but there is absolutely NO reason why you should have lost anywhere close to as much as you did so far from the vents. Losing Kapoho Bay for example was simply cultural fatalism. I watched a person crying on the news saying she didn't understand why Pele chose to take such a beautiful place. It's not Pele who took it, it's your insane resistance against doing anything to protect yourselves. That was one of the easiest possible flows to divert. Most of the lava fronts moved at a crawl, you had warning long in advance of the eruption and a very slow eruptive rampup (didn't really take off until June), and you had a steep slope to the south into unpopulated areas you could have easily diverted it down. Losing all that was a choice.

"Oh, we can't!" is just an excuse for your fatalism that gives you an excuse to not put forth the effort to actually do it. It's not the 1940s anymore, we're not chucking surplus WWII bombs at lava tubes anymore. Lava diversion is a science and is routinely effectively done. There are limits, but you were nowhere near said limits for sites far from the vents. There are costs, but they are nowhere near the costs that you paid by refusing to act.

Listening to the cult of globalization (i.e. free trade in capital, i.e. recreating the race to the bottom that characterized the robber baron age in America at the scale of the entire world) is a 100% self-pwn on our part.

But China's government absolutely, positively, one hundred percent actively works to undercut American (and anyone else) competition in markets they want to control. Their government can prop up Chinese companies dumping X on the market longer than any private enterprise company mining or making X can hold out.

That's how they wiped out every American solar panel manufacturer: Dumping panels on the market for less than they cost to make. That's how they wiped out every single rare earth mine they don't control. It's how they wiped out western steel and aluminum making for everything except exotic high-cost alloys and defense applications.

I buy strictly Chinese transceivers and DACs. I'm just HPC, not hyperscale. Using Chinese saves me massive amounts. At least 75% cost after failure rates. (we generally don't RMA small things).

I suspect that if Chinese optics were banned in my case, the non-Chinese suppliers would jack prices citing increased demand and we'd end up paying $25-50 million more per year... This would genuinely harm national security in our case. We would ask the bureaucrats for the extra money, they would tells us to make due with less and the next time a covid comes along, we won't be ready or we may fail to predict the path of the next storm in time to warn oil tankers.

It's been a long time, but the US government's illegal mass wiretapping program was originally "exposed" in part because they installed a signal splitter in a San Francisco AT&T network house where the transoceanic cable came onshore. The network admins removed the unexplained fiber splitter going to a locked room because it dropped the signal strength enough that the legitimate transceivers were complaining.

You think that you're going to put a processor capable of interposing itself between two sources of traffic reaching 28, 56 or 112 gigabaud per channel, process and MITM that data at line rate, store more than a millisecond's worth of it on the gigabytes of memory this processor will have (you'll need a full speed ddr4 channel to keep up), exfiltrate copies (to... uh... somewhere) that totally won't be noticed by performance and network monitoring both...

And do all of this, with the 1-2 watts of power you MIGHT be able to steal from the transceiver's socket without tripping a power and eventually thermal shutdown?

You think you're going to "dead bug" a processor capable of spying on a 28 gigabaud (or faster) link, by definition at line rate, into a device the size of an SFP transceiver? Actually let's back up one. You think there's a processor inside an SFP transceiver that you can attach a spy to? The things have as much brains as a battery charge controller. Their job is to provide stable DC bias to the receiver PIN diodes and the laser emitters, and in present datacenter units to have either 28, 56 or 110GHz of analog mo/dem bandwidth. To that end, they have a micro-brain in their ASIC silicon that lets I2C find out what's going on and how hot the unit is, that's it.

Now let's just snap our fingers and imagine that's possible. Oh, and there's also an entire bank of nvme drives to allow this "dead bugged" spy processor to store more than a millisecond of captured data. This also definitely fits inside the SFP transceiver, and doesn't parasitize more than the 1-2W you'll have available. What, exactly, do you plan to do with it now? If you're the SFP (and not the QSFP or OSFP) you're plugged into the host, but you have no access to it (seriously - *SFP transceivers are dumb).

Are you going to tell me that this "deadbugged" spy processor is actually an interposer with its own entire network stack that can inject outbound data? Because you know, these sorts of networks, they come with guarantees on latency that are either sub microsecond (ethernet) or sub 100 nanoseconds (infiniband). Good luck not stepping on timing margins like -that-.

More like, "with an entire engineering team and being handed power and cooling for free, I could insert an interposer into the rack that could spy on whatever line I asked the DCOs to plug into it."

All of which is a very long way to say you have no idea what you're talking about. There's places in hardware threat actors can attack you. Those places are the BIOSes of your servers. When was the last time you updated your laptop's bios? If it's more than a year I about guarantee you there's multiple CVEs out for it that Fancy Bear or Fancy Panda could utilize.

There's plenty ways China may try to steal things from a datacenter. There's a lot of ways Chinese threat actors try to steal American IP and data. I don't think I could possibly write a list long enough for "the optical transceivers in the switches" to land on it.

The idea that a stick with half the volume of a finger is going to both do its job as assigned (and that is not an easy job - it's really quite a miracle that they're able to pack all those optics and electronics into those things) AND contain a processor capable of decoding, processing, and stealing information from an absolute firehose of data capable of overwhelming a powerful CPU, all without compromising the sub-15W power and cooling envelope of a QSFP transceiver (and that's being really generous), AND on top of that then be able to *inject* data into the outbound stream (whichever one -that- is, could be either set of lanes because you have no idea if the transceiver is in host or switch) in order to exfiltrate the stolen information, ... oh right and it's also got 16G of ddr5 in there so it can buffer 2/3 of a second of the firehose, and...

You're not stealing information from the switch either, because nothing in the switch is capable of it. The ASICs in the switches now burn several hundred watts of power. It's mind boggling it's so little because they're capable of receiving and forwarding sixty billion packets a second. There's no splitting streams, no spying, just an ASIC designed for pure, raw, insane speed, handling over a thousand DVDs a second of data running in and out of five hundred data lines. The single-board x86 computer in it that does the setup has a handful of Celeron-level cores, maybe 4G of ram and a tiny little SSD with less storage than your last phone.

APTs may use that switch computer to achieve persistent access to your network, but that's a whole different can of worms.

The Republicans are deeply deeply underwater for the midterms and as much as they will cheat using common county level voter suppression tactics there are limits to what they can get away with even in deep red Texas.

So short-term they're going to back off at least until after the midterms because America is still nominally a democracy.

If we get another term of the Republicans in the white house though I don't think it's going to matter anymore and you're going to find out what it's like to have one party rule. They're not going to give a fucking rat's ass whether you have electricity and water..

Does this mean I can't use Deluxe Paint III on my Amiga any more? *sighs* OK then!

I think there's some nuance needed there.

Pelosi's trading is legal, it's highly problematic from an ethics perspective, but it's completely legal and somewhat common for legislators to do. So she can be criticized for using an unfair advantage, but it's not unprecedented nor a major sin.

Trump's grifts on the other hand do violate laws and precedent, those laws just aren't enforced.

For an extra $100k you get a pardon!

Trump said and did absolutely batshit in the same things all throughout the 2024 campaign and he also if you were paying any attention to politics made it crystal clear that his brain is mush and that he is actively senile. We pretty much have confirmation that he is on Alzheimer's medication. That's why he keeps having to go to Walter Reed and why he has those bruises on his hands that's how they deliver the medications they're using to try and keep his brain just functional enough that he can get through a speech.

The news media is 90% billionaire owned and they cover it all of that up. Meanwhile every time Joe Biden stuttered we got eight weeks of non-stop coverage. It was so common that it's created a new term in politics called sane washing which is the idea of taking a batshit crazy politician and covering up how insane they are.

If you're a low information voter who doesn't pay attention to politics then what you came away from in the last election is that Kamala Harris was going to help you get an abortion and Donald Trump was going to lower the price of eggs. Yeah that's absolutely fucking insane but that's what happens when so many people are so low information and our news media no longer even tries to inform them. Anyone who did last cycle got fired.

I watched as a couple dozen well respected journalists got fired from their jobs for reporting things Trump said and did.

If your hobby is sports and sports video games then I don't know what to tell you. I feel really bad for those folks. If that's what takes the edge off from your daily life it's about to get a lot shittier and it was already pretty shitty.