2020 was different from 2024. It was a very unique set of circumstances with an election in the middle of pandemic, with an incumbent who was never broadly popular, amidst utterly terrible economic conditions.

Still, Trump’s base showed up, just as they did on Tuesday.

Biden had the benefit of all the unlikely voters not being able to ignore the country burning down around them, he got a lot of dissatisfied people who don’t pay attention to politics to come out.

Harris didn’t, she got the Dem base. People broadly dissatisfied at the state of things probably voted Trump since he isn’t the incumbent.

Just how it works - voters don’t have to be rational.

I really doubt double-digit millions of voters sat out because of Gaza.

Kamala’s vote total is roughly in line with what would be expected looking at 2008, 2012, and 2016. The massive turnout in 2020 on the Dem side appears to be an abberation - it was unique circumstances with COVID and all that. On the Republican side, Trump ran slightly ahead of his 2020 performance, and well ahead of 2016.

It’s basic electoral politics: Trump has succeeded at expanding his base of support and turning them out to vote reliably. The Democrats have not. No single issue is responsible for that.

You can blame protests or Gaza or third parties or whoever else you want - the truth remains that the Dem base from the Obama years is not large enough and not appropriately distributed to win an election against Trump’s base; whatever else you think of the man, he has been very good at gaining and retaining support.

The momentum is the same, the impulse (and therefore forces) are very different. The bullet is propelled down the barrel gradually - the force is spread through the entire time it takes the bullet to travel the length of the barrel, the reaction forces are applied to the stock gradually, and spread over the area of contact between the shooter and the gun.

A bullet stopped by a vest/plate has a much larger impulse. The bullet needs to be stopped essentially immediately, rather than gradually slowed down over a length equivalent to a rifle barrel, otherwise it kills you. The force is also more concentrated, occuring over the cross-sectional area of the bullet, rather than over the entire contact surface with the rifle.

The issue isn’t forwards, it is down.

You have a tungsten rod held in a clamp on a satellite in a nominally stable orbit. Releasing the clamp just means the tungsten rod is now in essentially the same nominally stable orbit as the satellite.

To deorbit it, you need to meaningfully change its velocity. As tungsten is very dense, that takes a lot of fuel. The more fuel that is used, the sooner the rod will hit the ground and the higher the angle.

Simply dropping it means you have to wait months or years for the orbit to naturally decay, a lot of energy will be lost to atmospheric friction, and there is little control over the impact point. Not exactly what you want in your WMD.

Dropping anything in orbit just means it is still in orbit.

You’d need a lot of fuel to deorbit that cube on a steep trajectory.

2000 Bezos or about 4x the GDP of the planet.

People just need to invest and stop blaming others for being broke SMH.

Invest one penny at 3% per year, who can’t afford one penny? You’ll have $68 billion in just one thousand years. Poverty is a choice.

Instead of looking at the number of closed plants, one should look at the sum of emissions

That was in the link I posted. Emissions are Currently at record highs.

Slowing growth isn’t enough; we need significant, sustained, reductions in the very near future, and negative emissions and sequestering carbon in the medium term.

None of that is happening at a scale that would inspire optimism.

Building out more and more renewables doesn’t mean anything if emissions aren’t falling - and they aren’t. Since 2021, nearly 4 full years, the world has closed less than 1% of active coal power plants.

The buildout of renewables has arrived hand-in-hand with an increase in total energy usage. The energy mix has improved greatly in favor of renewables, tons of CO2 per KWh is way down, unfortunately we just use more KWh so total emissions are still rising.

Everything in the meme is a leading indicator for positive change, which is wonderful, but the actual change needs to materialize on a rather short timetable. Stories about happy first derivatives don’t count for much.

It depends on the type of fusion.

The easiest fusion reaction is deuterium/tritium - two isotopes of hydrogen. The vast majority of the energy of that reaction is released as neutrons, which are very difficult to contain and will irradiate the reactor’s containment vessel. The walls of the reactor will degrade, and will eventually need to be replaced and the originals treated as radioactive waste.

Lithium/deuterium fusion releases most of its energy in the form of alpha particles - making it much more practical to harness the energy for electrical generation - and releases something like 80% fewer high energy neutrons – much less radioactive waste. As a trade-off, the conditions required to sustain the reaction are even more extreme and difficult to maintain.

There are many many possible fusion reactions and multiple containment methods - some produce significant radioactive waste and some do not. In terms of energy output, the energy released per reaction event is much higher than in fission, but it is much harder to concentrate reaction events, so overall energy output is much lower until some significant advancement is made on the engineering challenges that have plagued fusion for 70+ years.

But if you could see them, they could see you …

The issue is how the constitution lays out the choosing of a president. Pence had to certify the results, if he had refused to do so for long enough, then that session of Congress may have ended without choosing a president.

At that point, the Constitution prescribes there is a contingent election in the House, where every state delegation to Congress gets 1 vote. There are more red states than blue states -> Trump wins.

Runoff from a facility like this would be, in theory, easier to manage since it would be a concetrated source. A pipe of nutrient-rich water rather than a dozen contaminated streams and ponds. That also makes it feasible to recycle a lot of those nutrients, something that isn’t practical in a field.

That is a screenshot from Victoria 2

Well, sort of. HDCP exists, and does make it harder to capture an AV stream.

For interactive content, the current push online components hosted on external servers adds a lot of complexity. While a lot of that stuff can be patched around by a very dedicated community, not every piece of content gets enough community appeal to attract the wizards to do such a thing.

And while anyone can digivolve into a wizard given enough commitment and effort, the onramp is not easy these days. Wayyy back when cracking a game meant opening the file and finding the line for 'if cd_key == ‘whru686’, it was much easier to get casually involved. Nowadays, DRM has gotten so much more sophisticated that a tech background is essentially required to start.

Yes, you. And me. And probably most of the people reading this, who live in the US or another Western country

Not quite. 1% of global population is ~80 million people. There are about a billion people in the highly developed nations (US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and some minor others). So the top 8% of the golden billion, if we assume all in the US, the top ~25% of the country.

Intentionally did not talk about Vance, I was merely responding to the idea that using past prices adjusted for inflation compared to current prices isn’t that straightforward.

Thanks for the lecture, appreciate the tone.

I see the point you are trying to make, but inflation doesn’t quite when that way.

Comparing the prices of the same commodities at two different points in time is literally how inflation is calculated, the increase from $1.50 to $4 is real.

Now, what the inflation-adjusted dollars are telling you is that if eggs had only increased in price commensurate with general inflation, they would have gone from $1.50 to $2. The extra $2 increase is above what a consumer would expect given the general increase in the prices of everything else. If someone (magically) had a salary that increases with inflation, they would find eggs today to be a larger fraction of their spending if they kept the same level of consumption.

Eggs are more expensive both in absolute and relative to other products. The reasons for this are complex, but due in no small part to people continuing to buy large quantities of eggs even when they were heinously expensive in the early days of the pandemic. The market absorbed that information and came to the conclusion that eggs were previously undervalued.

Pretty sure he is talking about Burn After Reading, the green text image is from that movie.

You are definitely better of snacking on peanuts than, say, Doritos. It’s not that they are a bad food, they just don’t have a great macro balance if they are the major component of a diet. From this unvetted comparison they don’t seem to be too bad compared to other nuts.

If someone really wanted to get most of their calories from peanuts, they would probably want to supplement with something like pea protein powder and some high-fiber greens (or even beans). This would allow for keeping carbs relatively low while having a more even balance between fat and protein intake. Not quite keto, but not the typical high-carb western diet.

I agree, but at least nuts are high in unsaturated fats, which have some rather solid clinical backing as being healthy. Obviously still energy-dense, and if nuts are used a primary protein source it will likely be difficult to stay within a restricted caloric budget.

E.g. if you want to follow the government recommendation and have 20% of your calories come from protein, peanuts will fall short as only 18% of their calories are sourced from protein (79% from fat). 349 grams of peanuts (about 3/4 of a pound) has 2000 calories and 91 grams of protein - with 175 grams of fat.