Cult of personalities long predate social media.

The other person was a black woman. For a lot of americans, that is enough to count as 'worse'.

In terms of pushing a bit more each time... yeah, they probably will not call an emergency, but ICE and troops hanging around poling stations and selectively harassing people? That is plausible.. as is siezing ballots and subjecting them to mr pillow style recounts.

Every time they push just a bit more to see what they can get away with. Conservatives and libertarians have been wanting to do away with that pesky democracy and its anti-god communist implications since the evangelical takeover in the reagan years. So yeah... people have been warning for decades, but we keep getting closer.

Ah, but now it is socially acceptable christian approved violence against god's enemies, so Thompson is fine with it.

At this point, they are getting desperate for anything non-AI generated to train AI on.

Changing owners is neither here nor there... but the leveraged buyout is pretty nefarious and will likely kill the company.

Which makes me wonder if this was some kind of inside job. Faking both sides of a conversation to steal a one time payment for a project a small town and a contractor? This isn't 'send out a million emails and see who bites' type scam, they had to know about both parties and that a larger transfer was going to happen soon.

On the other hand, C does exactly what you tell it to do. Rust always feels like a constant argument with the compiler (linter really?) where it keeps going 'I understand what you are trying to but am not going to do it'

You also have to remember your place in the world. Acting above your station and taking actions that are reserved for higher ups is a social threat.

Their whole ethical system is built around the idea of a natural order and actor (rather than action) based morality. This person acted above their station and did things that people of their place in the world are not supposed to do. In a way, he stole from trump and his community by taking their natural right for their own.

This. One of the big problems with the modern environment is that the interests of shareholders no longer align with the interests of companies, and neither of those align with the interests of industries or the economy.

Though part of the problem here is, as I understand it, microsoft doesn't want games that simply succeed, but that have the same margins as Office or Windows. Sounds like executives only want to be associated with brands that can land them their next c-suite position, so 'profitable' isn't enough, it has to be big enough that outsiders go 'wow'. Put another way, the metric for success isn't 'sells well', but 'improves the personal brand of executives'.

Should it though? I'm not seeing the article touch on it, but I can not imagine the newtons per watt being all that high even in ideal circumstances close to the earth.

I actually wonder how it compares in efficiency to a photon rocket. The magnetic field even in low earth orbit is not all that strong, so I imagine you have to expend a whole lot of energy to get much translational movement out of it.