It doesn't require nearly as many people working nearly as hard as we have now to provide for everyone.

Most of Virginia doesn't get all that cold. 30 kids in a room with limited air circulation should suffice, even without lots of insulation. Air conditioning, however, might well be a different matter.

IIRC, there's a decent link between registered gun ownership and the suicide rate. However, a lot of gun ownership is unregistered, so that's probably not reliable.

I might well agree that the current administration is worse, and scale does, indeed, matter. But judging scale when one side is crippling state governments and the other side is removing individual rights isn't clear. The events are too different.

One can say that "morally the crippling of state governments to enfranchise the disenfranchised" is better, but it's still a centralization of control.

What a weird ... hey, wait, I think I figured it out!

You're looking at it from the point of view of the bank robber, aren't you? (Instead of from the point of view of all the people who didn't rob the bank but still somehow had their locations leaked to the government.)

Did I guess right?

To be fair, both sides have uniformly supported measures to increase the government's control over the citizenry. They tend to support different measures, with different arguments, but both do it. This is basically because people act to make their jobs easier. The differences are because they have (sometimes only slightly) different goals, or "centers of power".

Note that this applies to the Warren Court and the civil rights decisions as well as to the current more blatant authoritarianism.

There are huge differences, but it *is* a reasonable analogy. It's certainly more like that than it is like "copying", even though copying, in the extended sense, is involved. As it is in all learning.

I'm imagining devices going by a conveyor belt, and a worker with a wirecutter is making a brief snip on each of the devices as it travels by.

The boss walks up, and the snipper guy asks "Is it true? Is the customer canceling?"

The boss briefly nods but then shakes his head. "Yeah, they're canc--no, I mean they still want the devices. They just don't want the snipping anymore. They say go ahead and leave the warrant-detection-and-lookup circuit live."

"Good. I never really understood what I was doing here. They're still weren't required to check the sensor anyway, so why disable it?"

The boss explained, "so we could charge them for the snipping."

There's no way to interpret these costs, that nobody is ever going to be willing to pay, as a reminder that soon these companies are going to be bankrupt.

Every time I see an AI story like this, it makes me realize I really have no idea what the AI bubble hardware is actually like, and how it might be used after auction.

A few months from now you might find yourself at an auction where 4TB of faster-than-anything-you-have RAM might be for sale for $80, but of course it won't be in the usual DIMMs that any of your existing mobos can use, will it? What will it be, and how do we best exploit it?

No, of course a broken spar is A Very Bad Thing when it happens in midair.

Is this changing-the-timing-chains-in-an-Audi difficult, or is this replacing-your-spinal-cord-without-killing-you impossible?

Are these planes repairable? I think it's a reasonable question.

(Of course, with the Audi, if has anything more than a loose gas cap it's not economically feasible to repair, but that's what you get with European engineering.)

I use left as change things quickly, break things, tear down Chesterton 's Fence, taking big chances, and right as gradually careful change, thinking about why things exist before destroying them, and be averse to risk. Trump is left of FDR in that view.

Republicans lost two presidential elections, 2008 & 2012, due to running conservative candidates. So they gave up and became a further-left party. Now Obama looks like a relative conservative .. but Clinton & Harris look conservative _too_.

Voters are insisting on left-wing presidents, with the exception of Biden because the initial leftist shock of Trump pt1 was too much to absorb.

But by the time you get that, she'll be over 50, and not at all as appealing.