Thatâs not an independent thinker. Thatâ(TM)s someone who routinely doubts everything. But as Henri Poincaré already observed more than 100 years ago: To doubt everything and to believe everything are considered two equally convenient strategies, both of which relieve us of the necessity of thinking or reflection. (And I know, a witty saying proves nothing.)

Everytime I run the output through the Test test suite.

It's even more complicated. German law treats the grid as "copper plate", and ignores all regional differences. If a wind park in Northern Germany offers electricity for 8 ct/kWh, then a consumer in Southern Germany is allowed to buy that power and is entitled to get it delivered via the grid. And if the grid can't handle the load because of weak interconnectivity, then a gas turbine in Southern Germany will start and generate the power for 18 ct/kWh, but the consumer only pays 8 ct. The 10 ct/kWh difference is paid by all consumers with higher energy prices.

For Southern Germany, this is quite the deal, because they can now operate expensive gas turbines, and get them subsidized at least in part by electricity consumers in Northern Germany with higher energy prices, while the cheap energy generated in Northern Germany is switched off, as the energy on the books is sold already, but the electricity is generated somewhere else. But because Southern states profiteer from the situation right now, there is much resistance to changes in the law, which would make energy in the South more expensive, while Northern states would get a relief.

| And they get to do it because the FTC has been totally defanged. It has nothing to do with Trump or oil. Sheeple indeed.

In March 2025, Mr. Trump fired the two remaining Democratic commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, basically consolidating executive control over the agency. This action effectively ended the agency’s longstanding statutory and bipartisan independence.

So, basically, Mr. Trump defanged the FTC. Who's the sheeple now?

Depending on the study, from 30% to 44% of Vietnam vets came back with PTSD. The stereotype of the unhinged 'Nam vet was thus not just a leftist conspiracy. Today, Vietnam-era veterans remain disproportionately represented in the homeless population.

If we have a draft today the level of resistance will cripple the country. Nobody will tolerate the Government pulling that. That move could break the country.

Dual ISA? The z processors (z13 right now) were multi-ISA from the very beginning. You can load them with different microcodes, and they will turn into different processors, CP, zIIP, zAAP, IFL...

IBM sold off their massively cheap commodity stuff long ago. The eServer series are now Lenovo, like the laptop business.

This makes you no different than any other creature in this world, and I see nothing wrong with that. You need to do your best to exist in the world as it is, and be realistic about what levers and knobs you can actually adjust.

I assure you that the voters are far more short-sighted than the politicians.

Yes. So?

I already vote green party. I look for practical ways to reduce my carbon footprint.

I'm not going to stop living my life, providing for my family, and making sure my kids have as good of a future as I can manage. And if I'm weighing how much effect I can have on their future by a) putting money towards their education, or b) trying to single-handedly save the planet by spending exorbitant amounts of money on ground source heat pumps, super-expensive electric vehicles, etc., then it's quite obvious that I can do far more good by focusing on helping my immediate family, friends, and community.

How much are we really doing by installing a heat pump water heater vs. everyone else who's pushing crypto-currency mining or AI datacenters, both of which consume enormous amounts of energy for frivolous and/or corrupt purposes?

Honestly, it's completely ironic and sad but the combination of COVID shutdowns plus the high gas prices due to the wars in Ukraine and Iran have at least temporarily cut fossil fuel emissions by more than any other environmental program anywhere or any time.

So piss off already.

Israel tried it with Hamas back in the early 2000s. They killed at least three successive Hamas leaders within a few month. What they did not achieve was to crush Hamas. So no. The U.S. will be long out of bombs before the supply of new ayatollahs will run dry.

The problem with your argument is that while you rightly point out the strategic problem, you don't have a solution. The attempt at regime change has resulted in the very same regime emboldened now as they got the bragging right to have successfully repelled the largest military in the world together with the strongest army in the region in their unprovoked attack on the homeland. Additionally, you now have created at least one additional Shiite martyr, whose shrine will be a place of worship and pilgrimage for the centuries to come, and where oaths to defend Islam in his name will be renewed again and again.

Because the Buddhists for instance wreck havoc in Myanmar?

Why do you define people not adhering to your idea of a lifestyle "crazy"?

I for once neither like scuba diving, because I don't like the feeling of rubber on my skin, nor do I think skiing all year round is something important to do. I live in the Alps, I can go skiing whenever I feel like it anyway, but I barely do. And inhaling something from the boobs of some paid person was never a dream of mine. If that rocks your boat, why not find something who will do it because they like you, or they like the sensation of someone snorting something from their boobs? Ted Turner once said, Life was a game, and Money is how you keep score. Why in your opinion is chasing the next highscore in some computer game a worthwhile way to spend your time as a billionaire, while trying to increase your highscore in money is not?

No one seriously working in Cosmology does that. Indeed, there are a lot of theories out there trying to either displace or at least amend Einstein's General Relativity, like MoND or TeVeS. The problem: No one until now has come up with a good idea how to do it, and all the proposed alternatives don't work very well either, have to assume even more unknowns, or are outright wrong in places where GR has been shown to work. Until then, we continue to use GR, because we know, where it works fine, and we know, where it fails.

It's easy to sit in an armchair and wandwave some theories in existence which superseed General Relativity. It's really hard to actually write them down.