Thank you. While fixing our system to reduce wealth inequality is a huge deal for our future, I’m much more concerned with dump and cronies fleecing our system through grift, flouting the law, monetizing government function

By far the two largest races for my local election were nyc mayor and prop 50: all the press, all the publicity, all the talk …. And my ballot held city councillors and school board candidates who were mostly unopposed.

It’s actually unexpected: my town has had some contentious issues lately on school funding, higher density housing , bike lanes, pedestrianizing a section of our “main” street, and a war between a strong mayor and ineffective city council …. I expected to attract more candidates, more voters

You can always find more toxic stuff to worry about but fire fighting foam is independent of fuel toxicity and the concern is not lead

Jet fuel doesn’t contain lead and never did.

AvGas does still have a lead problem and it was commonly used before the jet age, but is now relegated to small general aviation aircraft - a miniscule percentage. If you look at aviation as a whole, leaded gas usage is effectively zero.

Really the problem comes down to contamination at and near small historical airfields.

I thinks it’s more that there is no acceptable solution for aviation yet, so yes there’s room

• batteries will never have sufficient power density
• plant based fuels are unlikely to scale
• hydrogen has technical challenges
• ammonia is dangerous

Every option has significant limitations but we need something to work

Jimenez pulled up to three immigration officers, two from Border Patrol and another form ICE and “engaged in a verbal altercation,” it states.

It doesn’t even get any better if you just accept their version of what happened. Six agents vs one guy in a “verbal altercation”, and they think it’s ok to just start blasting?

No that just opens opportunity for more delay by saying “the right thing”. At that point MAGAts can say they cant spend money Congress hasn’t allocated, and is blocked on the shutdown.

In this case the executive does have a certain amount of money already allocated by Congress that they can spend to support critical government functions. Part of that was explicitly allocated to fund SNAP in case of a shutdown. But they’re also making choices like spending billions on ice and border patrol to terrorize dark skinned people and to suppress voting. Are those really critical government functions? Should they really be higher priority than keeping citizens from starving?

At the very least, maybe there will be a few people whose echo chambers ring with “it’s the dems fault”, who will hear this and finally start to think.

Presidential elections hinge on one or two percent of voters do every little bit helps

Maybe but that flood or hurricane was an “act of god” even if society’s actions made it more likely and more serious. Meanwhile this crisis was directly and immediately man made. It’s not like you can blame probability or the vagaries of weather or claim climate changes indirect, this is directly caused by sociopaths that are somehow in control

My first reaction was also that it seems like an easy win in court. I hope that’s true

I’m going to speculate he’s dark skinned and doesn’t want to get disappeared by a gang of masked criminals

The challenging part is a lot of it is indirect. General incitement to violence or misinformation is difficult to tie back to directly causing harm.

Freedom of speech was simpler before internet when you were likely singled out as a kook and ignored. Now with the internet you have a much bigger audience as well as other kooks where you can build on each other. Your reach is farther, you can more easily appear to have common opinion, you can do more harm, and yet are more distanced from the harm you do.

I have no idea what to do differently but we’ve seen free speech in an online world without any accountability has been able to do a lot of harm.

There’s got to be something to do for accountability, but ….

Just want to point out the guy who made up the whole vaccine-autism scare was a scientist. All of the propaganda against anti-smoking, anti-climate change, anti-pollution, anti-lead efforts over the years has been produced by scientists

Educated people are people too. Just because they should know better doesn’t mean they are

For cereal, I have a hard time getting past how small boxes are getting. How is it that I used to get cereal for the family and a box would last a while but now as a single person, most boxes cost way too much yet don’t last the week.

My selection of cereal is pretty limited these days, because I only select from the normal size, even if they’re now labeled “mega”. Cheerios are my favorite, and luckily they’re usually one of the few

And this time around the hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure spending got cancelled in the last few months, so ……

At least nvisia is making something. The proverbial “selling shovels to gold miners”

Most of the ai companies will never turn it into a profitable strategy but they’ll all buy from nvidia

In this case, I don’t understand why it’s profitable to enshittify candy like this. The only reason to have it is for the good taste

I can’t believe I’m the only one who gave up on cheap candy because it just wasn’t good. While I don’t eat much good candy, I still eat some despite the higher price because it’s good. Aren’t people like this? Or do too many get stuck in then addiction and not realize it’s just no longer good enough to be worth it?

Tesla has a huge advantage in scalability. If they can succeed, they will quickly scale out to the biggest.

A lot of people believe Waymo is closer to achieving self-driving, since their pilots are more established, but they are not scalable. They’re not ready to mass produce vehicles nor can they do so at a cost that could be profitable

There are pilot programs from several vendors. Waymo May have the biggest but it’s unscalable. Tesla is growing and if they succeed will scale massively. There are several smaller ones

But what they have in common is

• all have shortcomings
• None are generally available
• each are individually approved for limited scope - there’s no legal framework to make them generally available
• none are even on a path to a profitable business model

Kessler syndrome is not a big deal here. These particular satellites are so low they would self-deorbit after like 5 years. That’s an argument that more should be at such a low altitude. Let them collide, and drop out of the sky

You also forgot all those rural people that still don’t have another way to get internet. Yes they should have an option