It's the Miss Piggy Machado thing. It took me a while to figure out why that particular skeleton in his vast closet of skeletons has destroyed Trump's candidacy. Also, I'm quite disappointed that Slashdot has so little intellectual energy these days... Some clever person should have figured this out long before I managed to slog through the implications.

The largest constituency that is strongly supporting Trump is poorly educated men, where he used to have a lead of something like 60%. America is mostly a well educated nation, so the size of the bloc is not overwhelmingly huge (or YUGE, as the Donald pronounces it), but if he had any chance of winning, it depended on their votes.

Unfortunately for Trump, they are mostly married. Even worse, most of their wives aren't as stupid as they are, partly due to regression towards the mean but mostly because women tend to be smarter than men. (Okay, maybe that's basically my opinion, but all of the stupidest people I've met or heard about were men.) Smart wives can manipulate their husbands, and one way or another, they are going to be pushing their husbands away from Trump. The "Miss Housekeeper" skeleton is destroying him with women.

Machado is being attacked quite vigorously now, but this is a case where shooting at the messenger is only making it worse. Any bad things she might have done can now be blamed on her highly negative interactions with Trump himself. She really is rubber and Trump is the glue now. She was barely an adult when she fell under Trump's malevolent influence, and I can't imagine too many women siding with Trump.

Trump is toast. Loser.

(So what do you think about the cocaine allegations? Regarding the next debate, if Trump shows up, should he pee in a cup?)

Maybe you are sincere, but I've concluded that this thread is just a waste of time. Maybe it's just an artifact of inline posting that makes you look like an intellectually dishonest Sophist, but we don't need another religious war on that issue.

Good day, sir. I'm sorry you wasted so much of your time, but even sorrier that you wasted so much of mine.

I don't think you are giving the founders sufficient credit. They tried quite hard to SOLVE the problems, not just complain (like the Donald). I'm not saying that coalition government is a perfect solution, but I do think it would have been better than the Electoral College approach. They were plenty smart, but they couldn't think of everything, and the ideas about coalition majorities were developed later on.

It seems you understand the problem. So how can you argue for the 3rd parties (from your earlier post). There are two ways that new parties become one of the top two parties in America. One is when an old party kills itself, which is how I interpret the end of the Whigs and Federalists. The other is when the single ruling party cuts itself to pieces, which is how I interpret the split of the Democratic Party in the election of 1860, which allowed the Lincoln's Republican Party to win.

Given the current situation, we're going to get Hillary or Trump, and when you compare them head to head, I just cannot understand how the election can be close. Yeah, she's a lawyer, and I don't like lawyers, but the evidence says she's a highly skilled lawyer, which means she will apply those skills for her clients' best interests. If she wins the election, we'll essentially become her clients and I think she'll probably do a good job. She even has the potential to do a great job, while I think Trump's potential goes to the opposite extreme.

At this point I think the so-called Republican Party is just a brand hijack, and it has become too sick to cure. We definitely do need a second party, but I think the GOP has to go away first to make room. I'd prefer the Greens over the Libertarians, but that's farther down the road.

That's why PRT is good. It's cheap, small and light enough to go places that rail won't go. Then you can use the ordinary rail for long hauls. You can load PRT vehicles onto railcars if you like.

It puts more force through the tires than cruising. But yes, just driving does the same thing, just not as rapidly as accelerating or braking.

Just using existing scrubber technology well within typical effectiveness norms delivers something like a 15% improvement in emissions per mile when you use coal power to drive EVs instead of burning gasoline (which is itself a refined product with its own energy input.) Of course, you would need an EPA with both a spine and teeth in order to keep coal plants running within the legal limits; we can find out-of-spec emissions as fast as we can come up with money and personnel to sample smokestacks.

Alas, the car still has rubber tires, and some of the rubber is worn away during braking, and some of it is actually turned into a gas. Most of what is worn away during braking becomes rubber dust, which is both made of and coated with petroleum products. Some of it is transferred to the road, and some of that will be liberated later by other vehicles passing over it.

Cars are lame. Really, really lame. I really enjoy driving, I adore the sound of a V8 with an open exhaust at full song- hell, I thrill to hear the little growl that my W126 300SD makes during a full-throttle change-up, and that's a diesel with 120HP. I really love cars. But they are a really, really crap way to move people around. We should be replacing them with a combination of PRT and rail, and relegating cars to motorsport — where they should be run on carbon-neutral fuels or electricity, and run on biodegradable, carbon-neutral tires. That sounds like a bunch of hippie bullshit, but every tire manufacturer is actually working on such things in expectation of future environmental protection regulations which will effectively outlaw the compounds they are using today, and carbon taxes which will make them unprofitable in any case. And of course, we already have some electric racing series. We have carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative replacements for both diesel and gasoline (green diesel or biodiesel and butanol, respectively) so all of the pieces are there. As usual, the only thing missing is the will.

Ironically, much of the improvement in LA actually was due to cleaning exhaust pipes, and not due to cracking down on industrial production. Don't get me wrong, they did do that as well, but Los Angeles has a serious transport problem. Back when cars were more polluting, they had a serious transport pollution problem. But these various laws that people love to hate in California actually made a substantive difference in vehicle emissions. I myself am not very happy with the regulations surrounding equipment restrictions; if a vehicle can pass a tailpipe dyno emissions test then you should be able to mount whatever equipment to it you like. But that's another rant.

The EPA regulations are a bad joke. It took the CARB (an entire additional emissions regulation board!) to fix the problems in Los Angeles (and the state as a whole) because the EPA is so pathetic. California has the most vehicles, almost the most road, and the most vehicle-miles traveled, so cleaning up vehicle emissions made a big difference. But the CARB also handles other kinds of emissions, like VOCs and particulates from commercial sources.

California could probably do without the EPA, because we could replace it by expanding the CARB's mandate. The rest of the country would go immediately to shit. Well, more shit than it is now. Enjoy your lead, America.

Yep. Unless my phone can sequence my DNA, upload the results "to the cloud" and then someone else can download them on their phone and print a sperm, the sperm bank is not an app. I don't use the sperm bank by spooging on my screen, so the sperm bank is not an app.

Slow editor day.

No, America loses.

The founders wanted to pretend parties didn't exist so they didn't place any limitations on them. This was a gross mistake, one which must be corrected if we are to approach democracy.

It says the GOP is not the potential prosecutor in this case. Comey said that no one would seek conviction in this situation, because he couldn't find sufficient evidence to seek a conviction. Not that there wasn't evidence of malfeasance.

I am with you in being puzzled by people who think that Trump is somehow better than Clinton. What I am confused by are people who think that Clinton is great.

You run the risk of industrial espionage anywhere, but Apple sells products based not upon superiority but cachet. Thus, the risk is not lower for them, only the penalty.

If you're not actually building manufacturing facilities then there's no risk of losing your massive capitol outlay.

On the other hand, Apple will probably insensibly insist upon building their own campus while there's plenty of empty office space already.

They actually changed not just the suppliers of the chips, but actually what chips were used, and therefore changed the schematic. I would actually suggest that there's really only two C64s, the C64 and the later-serial-numbered C64S. Still, that's two models.

Actually, all of their step vans are custom-made. They were doing Aluminum boxes long before it was trendy, to save weight and thus fuel, so they had to get them custom-made. Now they just do it to do it, since everyone is doing that. You're right about the euro vans, although ironically the drivers are not fans of them here. They have adequate physical design, but not the logic. For instance there's an oil level float in the Sprinters that would trip going up steep hills, how sad.

That would be a problem if you didn't already get your money out of Prime, which many of us do. I still shop around but at least half the time I find a good price on Prime. And Amazon is much easier to deal with than most other suppliers, with refunds and replacements flowing freely in most cases, which is another strong motivation. Sure, I might be able to find something cheaper on eBay, but if it's coming from the Czech Republic I'm going to have a hard time with returns if it goes wrong.

The streaming video is also awesome. It works much better than Netflix (e.g. in low bandwidth situations) and has tons of content now. How do you complain about that? Don't have high-speed internet?