I’d add that I don’t at all agree with some of the people in this thread, who are on the left end of the spectrum and mainly seem to be hoping that the Democratic Party will select someone further left than Biden because they personally would prefer a further-left candidate. In the American electoral system, voting is FPTP. That means that you tend to wind up with two large, big-tent, fairly centrist parties (which approximate party coalitions in parliamentary systems), and the smart move for each to win general elections is to run a centrist candidate.

A Big Two party can nominate someone out on the fringes, but then they will cede the general election to the other party if the other party runs a centrist candidate.

In fact, a major argument against primaries is that they may tend to choose a suboptimal candidate for the general election, since they tend towards electing candidates towards the center of the political party, and that that a more-winning strategy for a party is to choose someone not at the center of their party’s views, but between that and the center of the general electorate, and that the party members are more-likely to make use of strategic voting than are members of the electorate that votes for their party’s candidate.

I watched a very similar discussion play out on British political forums over the past decade or so. Due to Labour changing some internal party policies that lowered the bar to party membership, party voting changed. Some left-advocacy groups organized a campaign to get people on the left side of the Labour spectrum to become members, to act in the party candidate selection process, and as a result, Jeremy Corbyn – who is on the left end of the Labour spectrum – was chosen as Labour candidate. There were people who were absolutely convinced that running Jeremy Corbyn would be a stupendously winning strategy because they personally were politically closer to Corbyn and couldn’t imagine why anyone else would vote against him. I watched Tony Blair give a talk where he pointed out that unless a political party wins elections, it doesn’t get to have political power, and that while he was a centrist candidate, he actually won elections and that Labour had mostly been out of political power for an awfully large portion of recent British political history. Sure enough, Labour proceeded to run Corbyn twice and were clobbered in two elections. Now they’re back to the comparatively-moderate Keir Starmer and based on polling, are looking at having strong results in the imminent election.

the TL;DR is that the party can’t just replace Biden.

The Democratic Party can run whoever it wants. The primaries and party nomination are party-internal processes. They could say “now the rules are we choose a random US citizen”. They don’t have to do a primary at all. Some parties don’t. There was a point in time in US history when primaries weren’t a thing, and parties were quite happily doing their thing back then.

kagis for a starting date

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_election

The direct primary became important in the United States at the state level starting in the 1890s and at the local level in the 1900s.[17] The first primary elections came in the Democratic Party in the South in the 1890s starting in Louisiana in 1892.

The United States is one of a handful of countries to select candidates through popular vote in a primary election system;[12] most other countries rely on party leaders or party members to select candidates, as was previously the case in the U.S.[13]

EDIT: As a good example, the Libertarian Party – though much smaller than the Big Two – is the next closest. Under their rules, they participate in primaries, but they treat the primary simply as a way to obtain the preference of the electorate; the primary doesn’t bind the party, under their rules.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Libertarian_Party_presidential_primaries

The Green Party has a mix of conventions and primaries, depending upon state; a random member of the electorate may-or-may-not directly vote to select their party’s candidate.

https://www.gp.org/2024_nomination_process

I don’t really have a problem with this – I think that it’s rarely in a consumer’s interest to choose a locked phone. Buying a locked phone basically means that you’re getting a loan to pay for hardware that you pay back with a higher service price. But I’d point out that:

• You can get unlocked phones and service now. I do. There are some privacy benefits to doing so – my cell provider doesn’t know who I am (though they could maybe infer it from usage patterns of their network and statistical analysis). It’s not a lack of unlocked service that’s at issue. To do this, Congress is basically arguing that the American consumer is just making a bad decision to purchase a plan-combined-with-a-locked-phone and forcing them not to do so.

• Consumers will pay more for cell phones up front. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – it maybe makes the carrier market more competitive to not have a large portion of consumers locked to one provider. But there are also some benefits to having the carrier selecting cell phones that they offer in that the provider is probably in a better position to evaluate what phone manufacturers have on offer in terms of things like failure rates than do consumers.

Being libertarian doesn’t need mean one’s an anarchist (or even a minarchist!).

And he’s also libertarian in the sense that the unadorned word has been used in the US, a right-libertarian, rather than how it was historically used in Europe in an unadorned sense, left-libertarian, where I’d say that it was somewhat-closer to anarchism than the more small- or minimal-government right-libertarianism.

Why did they do this?

Probably because Ariane 6 is a new rocket, and new rockets haven’t had the bugs worked out and have a disproportionately high failure rate.

But now, on the eve of restoring European access to space, Eumetsat has effectively stabbed this industry in the back.

That is not too strong of language, either. In its release, Eumetsat described its new Meteosat Third Generation-Sounder 1 satellite as a “unique masterpiece of European technology.”

Good grief.

NASA flew the James Webb Space Telescope on Ariane 5 for exactly the same reason – because it was an extremely-expensive payload, and when they expected to launch the thing, Falcon was immature, and Ariane 5 was mature. I didn’t hear people running around saying that the US had “stabbed American rocketry in the back” by launching something on France’s baby. Hell, we spent a long time launching stuff on Russian rockets, which I think probably has a lot more potential for controversy.

However, even if that strategy is somehow successful, again, and Biden does manage to get reelected, the Democrats MUST nominate a better candidate in 2028.

The Constitution mandates a maximum of two terms for a President. If he wins, he can’t run again. He can technically additionally serve up to half of a term without “using up” one of his terms if he’s vice-president and the serving President dies.

The two-term limit was originally purely a convention that had been set by George Washington, who was getting on in years, wasn’t many years away from his death, really wanted to retire to his plantation (as in, he didn’t even want to serve a second term, and was only convinced to do so by politicians arguing that without him, there might not be sufficient unity), and was also extremely popular and would have been re-elected again.

That convention held until FDR broke it and ran for four terms. In response to that, the Twenty-second Amendment was passed, prohibiting anyone from having more than two terms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

and the U.S. is considering not re-installing it unless aid begins flowing out into the population again, several U.S. officials said Friday.

Honestly, this was a ludicrously cost-ineffective way to transport aid. We built the thing remotely, floated it in, and it was only there for a few weeks before a storm caused damage and grounded multiple ships. We repair it. Then the UN decided that they weren’t going to use it for delivery because one of their warehouses had been hit (just dump it on the beach at Rafah, guys, if you don’t want to use the warehouses, has to be better than not bringing it in).

Only HR, IT, and management are believed to be unaffected by the cuts, which reportedly would see the developer’s title, 2016’s Disney Magic Kingdoms, transferred to Gameloft’s studio in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

Kharkiv? Damn. I mean, Kharkiv is an active war zone. As in “I read regular news reports about fighting there”.

This was today:

https://kyivindependent.com/russia-attacks-kharkiv-with-fab-500-bomb-for-first-time-injuring-4/

Russia attacks Kharkiv with FAB-500 gliding bomb for first time, injuring 4

searches further

And it’s not just casually using the term to refer to Kharkiv Oblast, either. The studio is in the city, slightly on the Russia side.

10 Nezalezhnosti Ave, BC Kvartal, 61022 Kharkiv, Ukraine

EDIT: They aren’t in the district that was bombed above, but they’re one block away from said district.

I haven’t used it recently, but last time I did, I used MO2 with vanilla WINE, just setting my WINE prefix to the Skyrim Proton prefix. WINE and Proton would convert the registry in the WINE prefix back and forth each time one launched. I haven’t used SteamTinkerLaunch.

Prior to that, I used Wrye Bash, which was a mess to get working in Linux – but could run natively, at least at one point, with some prodding. I’ve also run it under WINE. It took a lot of massaging. I don’t recommend that route unless you can program, know Python and are willing to get your hands dirty.

And I also had a stint where I wrote my own scripts to reconstruct the modded environment from scratch.

My most-recent attempt for Bethesda modding was in Starfield, with a much-simpler CLI mod manager, this. I have gotten some mods working but not others; don’t know if it’s a case-folding issue. Will need more experimentation. It doesn’t have the conflict-diagnosis tools that Wrye Bash does, or I assume MO2 probably does (though I haven’t run into). I don’t think it supports Skyrim, Fallout 4, or Fallout 76; that probably matters at least insofar as mod managers for those need to merge leveled lists. My (brief) impression is that the Starfield modding community is heading down the direction of avoiding needing the mod manager to do that, having a mod that merges that stuff dynamically at game runtime.

the performance is not great.

Uh. The performance of MO2 or Skyrim?

MO2…I don’t recall, it might not have been snappy, but I don’t recall it being especially unusable. Certainly not at the level that I wouldn’t use the software. I was using a reasonably high-end system, but I don’t think that it’s particularly resource-intensive. I was running off SSD, and maybe some of the stuff might have been I/O intensive.

Skyrim was fine from a performance standpoint. I mean, you can obviously kill performance with the right mods, but I assume that you mean “modding at all”.

EDIT: If you put a lot of mods into Skyrim, like, hundreds, it can take a while to launch. IIRC, one problem – not Linux-specific – there is that loose files aggravate launch performance issues. My understanding is that, where possible, use mods that merge files into a .BSA rather than loose files. A number of mods have multiple versions; pick the .BSA one.

EDIT2: Skyrim, Fallout 4, and the Fallout 76 versions of Bethesda’s engine don’t really take much advantage of multiple cores the way the way the Starfield version does. I get buttery-smooth performance in Starfield; Fallout 76 invariably is a bit jerky when loading resources in a new cell. I don’t get a pretty consistent framerate at 165 Hz in Fallout 76 the way I can in Starfield. But I don’t know if that’s what you’re running into, without specifics of the performance issues. And that’s not gonna be a Linux-specific issue or anything that can realistically be resolved short of forward-porting the Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76 games to the Starfield engine.

Unison might be worth a look, provides bidirectional merging and command-line operation. It’s what I’d use if I were mostly working with binary files and didn’t want a history.

Rsync, which someone else recommended, is really aimed at efficient unidirectional replication, not keeping two directories on computers that are both being changed and are intermittently connected in sync.

config files

If there’s mostly text and you’re going to want to review changes, want to keep a history, and do a lot of merging, I’d use git, symlink files to aim at the git repo. I have a custom helper script, but stuff like GNU stow is aimed at this, and I’d probably recommend that someone look at it before rolling their own. Here’s an example of someone using it with git in this role:

https://ratfactor.com/setup2

I agree with that guy about using bare git repos as the “master” copy, even if one of the machines in question also hosts the bare repos and technically you have some redundant information on it. Makes life easier, no machine is “special”.

If I had both binary files (say, a music collection) that I wanted kept in sync without a history and text files that I do (say, my dotfiles), I’d use both.

I’d like to highlight this bit, as we recently had a post talking about North Korean soldiers being sent to Ukraine.

There is currently no evidence supporting recent reports that North Korea may be sending engineering forces to rear areas of occupied Ukraine, and ISW has been unable to locate the North Korean confirmation that some Western amplifications allege has been made. Western news outlets circulated reports that North Korea is planning to send engineering forces to occupied Ukraine, largely citing a June 25 statement from Pentagon Spokesperson Major General Pat Ryder.[36] Ryder stated that he questions a hypothetical North Korean decision to send “forces to be cannon fodder” in Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the reports implied that Ryder’s statement confirms that North Korea is sending engineering forces to Ukraine.[37] Ryder did not confirm these reports, however; Ryder was responding to a question claiming that the North Korean Central Military Commission “confirmed” the report, and Ryder himself hedged his answer by stating that “that’s something to keep an eye on.”[38] ISW has been unable to find any such statement by the North Korean Central Military Commission. The most recent press release from the North Korean Central Military Commission is from its Vice Chairperson Pak Jong Chon on June 24, in which Pak expresses support for Russia in its war in Ukraine but does not confirm any force deployments to Ukraine.[39] Similar statements from North Korean officials mentioning Russia or Ukraine since June 21 also do not mention any force deployments.[40] As ISW has recently reported, the original report regarding North Korean engineering troops deploying to Ukraine came from South Korean television network TV Chouson, which reported on June 21 that an unspecified South Korean government official stated that South Korea expects North Korea to dispatch engineering forces for reconstruction efforts in occupied Donetsk Oblast.[41]

At this time, all actors involved have either explicitly denied or refused to confirm reports that North Korea may be sending engineering forces to support Russia in occupied Ukraine. Claims that such reports are “confirmed” by US officials are inaccurate. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated on June 27 that the Kremlin is unfamiliar with recent reports that North Korea may send engineering units to occupied Ukraine.[42] US Department of State Spokesperson Matthew Miller was also asked on June 26 about the alleged North Korean troop deployments, which the question described as having been officially “announced,” but Miller responded that he does not “have any specific comment” and that he “had not seen that report.”[43] ISW will continue to monitor North Korea’s evolving relations with and military assistance to Russia, including continued provision of weapons for use in Ukraine and speculation of force deployments to Ukraine.

Einstein was wrong

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

He didn’t say that World War III wouldn’t be sticks, mind.

It’s like a baby CAESAR.

Most of California has a Mediterranean climate where the summers are dry and the winter is when the rain comes.

Would be better if some holiday around February or so, at the end of the winter, was when the “big fireworks holiday” was.

There is, but that isn’t why I split it – comment #2 was an afterthought, dealt with a peripheral issue.

Well, I’ve called for it on here. Now this’ll put it to the test – we’ll see how Californian students perform before-and-after the introduction of the classes and relative to states that don’t make it part of their core curriculum.

I hope this works.

Skimming their material, looks like it also deals with countering some sales tactics and the like, like companies aiming to exploit fear-of-missing-out to sell product.

I don’t see why they wouldn’t, or couldn’t do this

There are only 52 organizations that Firefox trusts to act as CAs. An ISP isn’t normally going to be on there.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Included_Certificates

https://ccadb.my.salesforce-sites.com/mozilla/CACertificatesInFirefoxReport

If whatever cert is presented by a remote website doesn’t have a certificate signed by one of those 52 organizations, your browser is going to throw up a warning page instead of showing content. KT Corporation, the ISP in question, isn’t one of those organizations.

They can go create a CA if they want, but it doesn’t do them any good unless it’s trusted by Firefox (or whatever browser people use, but I’m using Firefox, and I expect that basically the same CAs will be trusted by any browser, so…)

Ukraine has a navy. The navy just – for the moment – doesn’t have any ships, just boats and anti-ship missiles and USVs and such.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Navy

Toss-bombing always looks cool, but has had very little application before this war. With dumb bombs it’s inaccurate, and with precision bombs countries like America gain air supremacy and fly high and drop from level flight.

We used it for nukes for a while – I remember reading an article from an early Cold War USAF pilot who did it. When you’re throwing the equivalent of tens of thousands of tons of explosives, pinpoint accuracy doesn’t matter too much in a lot of applications.

kagis

I don’t think that this was the article I remember – this guy is Navy – but same idea:

https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2000/october/bomb-and-i

By 1953, two years after I graduated from the Naval Academy, I was a first-tour aviator (a “nugget”) in an AD Skyraider squadron, where a small, special cadre of pilots were training for something secret. Everything was hush- hush. On cruise, however, our contemporaries in VC-35 (flying AD-4Ns) and VC-3 (F2H-3N Banshees) were more open—they were practicing new ways of delivering bombs using a loft maneuver, a variation on toss bombing.

The AD had an analog toss-bombing computer, and we had all had a fling at toss bombing, theoretically a way to provide some distance between the target and your release point, but we had always done it out of a dive. Now, we did it from low-level with an acrobatic maneuver for recovery—too good to be true for hot (we thought) pilots.

With our new knowledge, we began to practice loft maneuvers (surreptitiously, of course). Racing in toward the target on the deck at 260 knots (attainable only out of a shallow dive), we’d pull up at a pre-determined point, smoothly applying 4.5Gs within two seconds, maintain that G-loading during the wings-level pull-up until the simulated weapon released automatically as we passed through 45° nose-up, continue the pull wings level over the top of a loop inverted, then at 45°nose down—still inverted coming through about 2,250 feet above the surface—roll right side up, and continue diving back down to a low-level run out leaving the target at our six o’clock: a half Cuban Eight. Nobody ever shared with us the real reason for lofting, and we were too naive to figure it out.

It all came together at the Special Weapons School at Moffett Field, California, where we learned all there was to know about the Mark 7 nuclear bomb. The AD could carry one Mark 7, and a special cockpit control box (with a complex set of switches and lights we had to learn cold) readied the weapon for use; an in-flight insertion (1F1) device was the key. The heart of the Mark 7 was a spherical charge of nuclear material, surrounded by conventional explosive and wrapped in an electrical harness. A cone cut from the nuclear material normally sat on the end of a screw jack outside the sphere. With the cone backed out, the bomb lacked critical mass, and thus there was no chance of a nuclear detonation in the event of a mishap; it might go low-order conventional, although even that was not likely. Not until nearing the target would a pilot activate the IFI, which slid the cone into the sphere and armed the weapon. We practiced this in flight with dummy weapons (called “shapes”), and it always worked. We wondered if it would work as well with real weapons.

During training, we used 25-pound Mark 76 practice bombs and, occasionally, a 2,250-pound shape with electrical innards similar to those of the Mark 7. We then practiced (legally) the loft and high-altitude dive delivery maneuvers that were designed to enhance our chances of surviving an actual nuclear burst. The goal was to be as far away as possible when the bomb detonated, and the loft maneuvers generated various degrees of “safe separation” distances. We assumed our chances were not good, but lofting was fun, so we practiced enough to get our circular error probable (CEP) down to a very respectable 250 feet or less.

Note regarding the above with the guy training for nuclear toss-bombing at Moffett Field, which, reading through, makes me chuckle – normally, US airfields have ICAO codes that sound something like the airfield’s name. Moffett does not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moffett_Federal_Airfield

Moffett Federal Airfield (IATA: NUQ, ICAO: KNUQ, FAA LID: NUQ), also known as Moffett Field, is a joint civil-military airport located in an unincorporated part of Santa Clara County, California, United States, between northern Mountain View and northern Sunnyvale.

I’d guess that that explains where it got its ICAO code.

Getting back to the Ukrainian plane here, that’s gotta be kind of anus-clenching for them, since I assume that by flying up like that, they’re also potentially flying, at least momentarily, into the engagement envelope of a SAM.

Also, regarding Russia knowing what’s up there and being able to talk to it, apparently earlier in the week Ukraine attacked a Russian satellite communication facility, so I dunno what secondary implications that might have, whether it could relate to this satellite situation.

https://www.newsweek.com/crimea-attack-atacms-space-radar-fire-1916340

Crimea Videos Show Fires Blazing As Space Radar Targeted with ATACMS—Report

Ukraine has struck a Russian deep space network hub in annexed Crimea—allegedly used by Russian Aerospace Forces—using U.S.-supplied missiles, according to local reports.

Kyiv’s forces launched the ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) attack across Crimea on Sunday night, and “successfully struck” Russia’s Center for Long-Range Space Communications in the village of Vitino in the Saky region, open-source intelligence X (formerly Twitter) account OSINTtechnical said.

“Multiple areas of the facility are burning,” the account said.

The center is one of three complexes that make up Russia’s Yevpatoria Center for Deep Space Communications, which supports manned and robotic space missions. The facility was reportedly previously struck in December 2023 with British-supplied Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles.

If it’s a “radar” site, then it presumably deals with stuff nearby.

I don’t think that Russia needs deep space communications facilities to talk to stuff in LEO – hobbyists can do that with simple setups – but it was apparently a military facility, and I think that most military applications today are for LEO. Maybe GLONASS, which has military applications and is in a larger orbit.

And Ukraine presumably isn’t gonna be expending limited weapons on it unless it’s got military significance to Ukraine. So maybe it was also being used to talk to satellites in LEO, dunno.