I think the real answer is that we end up kind of like the UK – going from the worlds ultra-dominant superpower to a sort of slow regression to the mean, as China, India and others take the spotlight.

When you look at what China is doing with their Belt and Road Initiative, and their move to dominate the transportation infrastructure of developing nations – the US isn’t anywhere near equipped to counter that. We’re still in a cold war mentality thinking that we will dominate as the world’s police force.

Meanwhile, all the actual economies will be run by Chinese companies operating with state support.

I half ass all the things.

Just look at the numbers. Harris will probably finish 15 million votes behind Biden 2020. Those are people who could have voted, but didn’t.

Nobody is under the illusion that Trump is better for the situation in Gaza than Harris.

But, too many left-leaning voters feel they have to “take a stand” by staying home or voting third party. I have several friends who did exactly that, even though it’s abundantly clear that staying home is effectively a vote for Trump.

Meanwhile, NOBODY on the conservative side is doing that shit. It’s been true since the Reagan era, the conservatives put aside any personal distaste they have, and they get behind their candidate.

I mean, there’s a whole lot that went wrong, but the big one was subverting the democratic process with primaries that didn’t really pick a popular candidate (2016 and 2024).

The primaries are the time for the candidate to energize a base of support. Harris has never energized anybody, and it was silly to think that affection for Biden would carry her.

Conservatives vote in force to signal their loyalty to their chosen community.

Progressives stay home when they perceive that their community doesn’t chose them. Harris’ vote totals at the end of this will sit somewhere below Biden 2020, for that reason.

Here’s the quote in context:

“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face. You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building, saying ‘Oh gee, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’ But she’s a stupid person, and I used to have, I have meetings, with a lot of people, and she always wanted to go to war with people.

I smell the poop of a warrior!

That was my reading in 2016 – before the election, I realized that the “thrill vote” would go to Trump, and the average folks were going to sit it out because Hillary Clinton couldn’t energize anybody.

I’m getting a lot of those feelings around KH too. I just hope folks come out for the anti-Trump vote, at least.

Check the label before you drink it, especially if you’re watching your sugar intake for medical reasons.

Umm. How would checking the label help? If the drinks were labelled correctly, there would be no reason for a recall.

Ah, Wikipedia makes it really easy to list by per capita representation.

The top 10 in “lowest population per electoral vote”:

 Wyoming
 Vermont
 District of Columbia
 Alaska
 North Dakota
 Montana
 Rhode Island
 South Dakota
 Delaware
 Maine

It’s also really good for making sure that whoever wins the most acres of land gets a huge electoral boost. Because that’s important.

Is it? The most disproportionate representation in the EC belongs to the people of Delaware, last time I ran the numbers of EC votes per capita.

State population is all that matters. Very small populations still get an EC vote for each Senator, which is the root of the problem.

I wish I was the kind of person that could feel surprised, disappointed, or offended by that. But I’m not.

Dunno why you’re surprised. Dude is a consummate performer with a large songbook of his own.

Here he is singing “Never Gonna Give You Up” with the Foo Fighters.

Here he is doing voice and drums on Highway to Hell.

The man owns the stage.

Currently, PopOS although I’m not really that enthusiastic about it.

The relevant:

“I better win or you’re gonna have problems like we’ve never had. We may have no country left,” Trump said at his weekend swing-state rally. “This may be our last election. You want to know the truth? People have said that. This could be our last election.”

Eh. The article goes on to quote pundits who claim he’s threatening voters – that if he doesn’t win, he’s gonna do something to end democracy.

Seems kind of overblown to me. First, Trump would have to do something (laugh) and second, this is normal posturing. If you elect the other person, it’s doom and gloom, if you elect me it’s 4 more years of good times. These folks would have watched LBJ’s Daisy and concluded that LBJ was planning to nuke the country if he didn’t win.

People trying to make sense of Trump’s incomprehensible blather are always gonna come out looking silly.

Certainly, but Apple was comparing itself to other computer companies with international reach, not to the white box PCs coming out of the Floppy Wizard store in the strip center.

The interaction between Jobs (Michael Fassbender) and Woz (Seth Rogen) pretty much sums up the Apple ][ era.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fweZsmH4Tw

So, I lived through that time, and I supported computers professionally during that time. I started working at a university help desk in 1989.

It’s easy to go back and look at Apple products and white-box PCs of the era (or quasi-legit clones like Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc) and say, “oh, on specs, the Apples were MASSIVELY overpriced – you can get a much better deal with the PC”.

The problem was that PCs were nowhere near on par, functionally, with Macintosh.

• Networking. We were running building-wide Appletalk networks – with TCP/IP gateways – over existing phone wires YEARS before anybody figured out how to get coax or 10base-T installed. We were playing NETWORK GAMES (Bolo, anyone) on Mac in the late 80s.

• And when they did… what do you do with networking in DOS? Unless you ran a completely canned network OS (remember Banyan, Novell, etc. ad infinitum?) and canned apps specifically designed to work with it, you were SOL. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were a joke compared to System 7.

I configured PCs and Macs for the freshman class in 1995. For the Mac? You plug the ethernet port in and the OS does the rest. For the PC… find a DOS-compatible packet driver that works with your network card, get it running, then run Trumpet Winsock in Windows 3.1, then… then… it was a goddamned nightmare. We had to have special clinics just to get people’s PCs up and running with a web browser, and even then, there were about 10% of machines we just had to say “nope”. Can’t find a working driver, can’t get anything working right. Your IRQs are busted? Who fuckin’ knows. I ran the “Ethernet Clinic” until the late 90s, when Windows 98 finally properly integrated the TCP/IP layer in the OS.

• Useful software on the Mac had a pretty consistent look & feel. On the PC? Even in Windows 3.1, it was all over the map. You might have a Windows native program, you might have a DOS program that launches in a console window, you might have a completely different graphical interface embedded in the software (Delphi apps, anyone?). Games were using DOS into the mid 90s because getting anything working right in Windows 3.1 was a total fuckin crap shoot.

Windows 95 started to fix things, finally. And Windows XP would finally bring an OS with stability comparable to Mac (arguably WIndows 2000 as well, but it was never really offered on non-corporate PCs).

The short version is: that $3000 Mac could do a lot more than that $1800 PC, even if the specs said that the CPU was faster on the PC.

Well, that button probably dates from the late 80s or early 90s, when Apple was comparing Macs to branded IBM PS/2s and such that were sold to schools and enterprises.

And they weren’t wrong, at the time. Those PS/2s were fuckin’ expensive.

Then they would have to remove the various hooks in the Settings app that actually call and open the Control Panel.

How many are there? I can think of several (advanced mouse settings, advanced network settings, printer properties, date & time has a callout back to the old panel…)

Windows 10 came out nine years ago, so they don’t seem in any particular rush.