I don't know much about Doug Jones, but this seems like a suicidally stupid idea at first glance. What kind of Democrat does it take to get elected senator in Alabama? That sounds like the kind of conciliatory milquetoast centrist bullshit that has gotten us into this mess.

When a group of people decides that they are no longer going to respect democracy, and they are willing to burn down the republic for their own gain, milquetoast centrism is suicidal. Going easy on these bastards didn't make them stop. They're still denying they lost, and they're still trying to steal the election. Historically, this type of authoritarian movement that seeks to destroy democracies only ends up one of two ways. Either the authoritarians end up winning, or everyone remotely involved gets multi-decade prison sentences. While the Justice Department has tried a lot of the low-level people, Garland's intransigence has protected the real people in power, the ringleaders behind the whole thing. Trump hasn't faced justice. The Republican Congressional members involved in the scheme haven't faced justice. The media that deliberately fomented the rebellion hasn't faced justice.

Compare this to something like the Guy Fawkes's attempt to blow up the English parliament. They didn't give those people a slap on the wrist and say, "it's time for the nation to heal." Back then they rounded up everyone remotely involved and publicly executed them via torture. Historically, the absolute worst punishments a state could apply were reserved for treason and rebellion. And they were applied liberally after any serious attempt at overthrowing a government.

Now, we're not in that era anymore. We don't need to resort to mass summary executions or public executions by torture. We hopefully are a bit more enlightened now. But these people still cannot just be allowed to run around and continue their attempts at overthrowing the government. The people who organized it? The people on the ground? The legislatorss involved? The prominent media figures who deliberately spread lies about the election being stolen? All of them should never see the light of day again.

And yes, that includes people in the media. Look at how the Union states cracked down on Southern-sympathetic press during the Civil War. That's we what we should be doing now. I'm sorry, but if you are deliberately spreading lies about an election being stolen, you should be in jail for attempting to foment a rebellion. You're as guilty as Goebbels or any Nazi propaganda minister. The first amendment does not protect conspiracy to treason.

Instead we did nothing. Milquetoast centrist bullshit led us to ignore the scale of the problem. Now these same bastards are attempting to foment a pogrom against Haitian immigrants in Ohio. THAT is what treating these people with kid gloves gets you. It doesn't let the nation heal, it just gives the traitors another bite at the apple.

We do not need another limp-wristed centrist leading the Justice Department. We need someone willing to come down like Hammer of God on these people. Maybe I'm being unfair to Doug Jones. But the fact that he was able to get elected as a senator in Alabama hints that we might just be making the mistake all over again.

So...mostly 18-24 year olds?

I'm just pleased to see that they finally recognized how to debate Trump. He's a fat fart of a narcissist who debates with a cloud of grievance and endless lies. He isn't a regular candidate; he is simply a bully. And like all bullies, deep down he needs to make other people feel small because that's the only way he can not feel small himself.

The mistake that so many others have made is that they treat Trump like any other ordinary candidate. Instead, it seems like team Harris actually sat down with a few psychologists, got to the core of Trump's fragile psyche, and figured out how to break him. If he wasn't such a cruel villain himself bent on ruining the lives of countless others, I would actually think such a trick is unfair and cruel. But sometimes you have to do what's wrong in order to do what's right. Trump is so consumed with his own ego that he is literally willing to order the extrajudicial imprisonment and summary execution of people who offend his ego. He is a dangerous man that cannot be allowed near any real power. And if taking advantage of his mental deficiencies is unfair play, so be it. I am willing to break the mind of a signal malignant narcissist if it means saving the Republic. I have no more sympathy for his mental illness than I do for those of countless dictators through history. The worst tyrants of the 20th century may have had some legitimate psychological illnesses that made them act the way they do, but that does not excuse their actions. Mentally deficient or not, they need to be taken down by any means necessary.

Hell, the only reason I don't endorse violence to keep these people out of power is that it's counter-productive to create martyrs. These people need to be shown as the fools they truly are. Only then can the spell be disrupted. If Trump's attempted assassin had succeeded, a dozen baby Trumps would have quickly risen up following the same playbook. Trump instead needs to be defeated not with violence, but with total abject humiliation and defeat at the ballot box. He needs to die not as a martyr at the height of his power, but from old age, as a sad, tired old man, repeatedly defeated and ranting at the clouds, repeating facebook rumors, til his dying breath. THAT is how you defeat Trumpism. You have to break his psyche so fundamentally that he never recovers. He needs to be defeated resoundingly and made such a fool that no one will ever attempt his playbook again, or at least until his humiliation has passed from living memory. Ideally he will end up dying in prison. But regardless he needs to live to til the end of his natural life, making a greater fool of himself with every word he speaks, from now until the end, digging his pit of shame ever deeper. THAT is how you defeat a demagogue like Trump. You don't out-logic him. You don't kill him. You break him. You shatter what his left of his ego and mind. Leave him a blubbering fool trapped in the remnants of his own shattered ego. That is how you deal with Trump. You have no mercy, and you break him.

Here's a few you can try in the future. You can take a paywalled link and append the address to the following sites: archive.is/
archive.ph/ 12ft.io/ removepaywall.com/

Just take the website link from the taskbar and paste it directly after. This works the vast majority of the time.

Some might complain about getting around paywalls, but I don't mind. The web was built to be free. If you want to have your info and stories completely behind a login, fine. Make your page require a log in to even see stories. Make that worth it to people, and you can build an audience. But don't have your pages and stories accessible to draw people in, only to slap them with a paywall. That strategy always felt like a slimy bait-and-switch to me. I remember back in the 90s when Congress had a serious debate over whether for-profit commercial activity should even be allowed online at all. And it's been downhill from there. Put your content on the open web or not. Pick a lane. Want a walled garden? Build a walled garden and don't let people see inside without paying. But don't lure people into your garden and then slap them with a pay booth once they're starting to enjoy the flowers.

As a matter of course, one should not even open a link that goes to OpenAI.

It's best not to become dependent on these piracy engines. These models are hopelessly unprofitable, and they will not be cheap and accessible for very long. They take such colossal resources to train, billions upon billions of dollars. Currently OpenAI is trying to do the classic Silicon Valley bait and switch. They have a product that is more expensive and inefficient than the previous method. If they charge the real price for their product, they know no one will adopt it. So instead they offer their product at an artificially low price initially. They hope that everyone will become dependent, after which they can jack up their prices.

It's the Uber model. Start by paying drivers more than they would make driving taxis, and by charging riders far less than they would pay for a taxi fare. This is possible through billions of angel investor subsidies. Then once everyone is dependent, slash driver pay and jack up ride prices. This is the only way for Uber to make back the billions they've squandered on market capture sub Silicon Valley execute bloat. If we had functioning anti-monopoly law enforcement, the executives of all these companies would be in jail. But for now they're able to take advantage of practices that would have seen them in chains two generations ago.

Same with OpenAI. They want to get all the copy-editing companies dependent on their piracy engines. They want all the graphic design companies dependent on their image stealing tools. Then, once these companies fire their real human copy editors and graphic designers, OpenAI will start charging the real price for its services. And considering the literal hundreds of billions being poured into these hopelessly inefficient piracy engines, the rate they will have to charge will be enormous. Someone has to ultimately pay for those billions Sam Altman is sponging up. And even if they didn't have billions of investor dollars to recoup, their ultimate goal is to gain a monopoly position in the copy editing and graphic design market. They will replace a million competing copy editors and graphing designers with a single provider - OpenAI. They'll control the market. Once all the real human copy editors, graphic artists, and voice actors/readers have been driven from the industry and been forced to move on and take jobs elsewhere, they will be able to charge whatever they please.

Any executive that lets their company become dependent on this technology is a fool. They're a sucker, falling for a classic bait-and-switch. Hopefully enough of them are smart enough not to be suckered in by the OpenAI con job, and OpenAI can hastily be driven into bankruptcy where it belongs.

We're bringin' back capes and cloaks.

To prevent the obvious reference, the trend will be called, "'No capes' only applies to superheroes."

Now I really want to see an animation of what the European discovery of the planet looked like. Imagine a time lapse of a Civilization game, as the map is slowly revealed. I want to see that, except actual history.

Insurance companies need to face financial penalties for having these ghost networks. You should legally be able to demand, and sue for, $50 for every fake listing you find in your insurance's company's network. This is the 21st century. It should be possible for insurance companies to instantly know whether providers are still accepting new patients. Insurance companies could have a platform where providers can instantly indicate that they're no longer accepting new patients. And insurance companies could add penalties to their contracts with providers. If the providers don't update their status as soon as they are no longer accepting new patients, then the providers themselves will have to pay some sort of penalty.

We are currently undergoing the greatest transformation in energy infrastructure since the start of the industrial revolution. Solar power and batteries are not only growing, but absolutely exploding.

Solar has become so cheap so fast that it's going to fundamentally change the very way we use power and energy as a civilization. Seriously, look at new power generation by source. It's almost all solar and wind, with a bit of nuclear and natural gas as a rounding error. And really, new power generation is majority solar.

The key thing is that solar is a technology that can be mass produced in absurd quantities. And the more we produce, the cheaper we can produce it. It appears now that solar is this epochal leviathan, a glacier sweeping across the energy landscape that will grind everything else to powder before it.

We have a very clear path to a grid that is almost entirely solar and wind. There's nothing wrong with nuclear, but it cannot even begin to compete economically against the tsunami that is the solar revolution. Hell, I expect the grid to be almost entirely solar in the future.

Obviously the Sun doesn't shine all the time, but panels have gotten so cheap, so fast, that a lot of these problems are just being carried away by the solar tsunami. For swings over the course of a day, batteries are getting so stupid cheap that we're going to have no problem making enough power during the day to meet our needs at night. But the bigger concern was always seasonal variation. How can we possibly store enough energy to last through a winter? In years prior, this was seen as the Achilles' heel of a largely solar grid. To store that much energy in batteries would seem completely impossible.

But it seems the seasonal problem is going to solve itself. You see, if solar power gets cheap enough, you can start doing really wild things with it. Even on a snowy day in winter, solar panels still generate some electricity. They may only generate 10-20% of what they do on a clear summer day, but they still generate power. And if solar is cheap enough, you can simply size your system so stupidly large that you can meet even your winter's need without any seasonal energy storage. If you spam enough solar panels, you can meet your needs in the winter and then have dirt cheap, essentially free power the rest of the year. And it really looks like this is where we're headed.

I foresee that many of our most energy-intensive industries will adopt a seasonal or semi-seasonal schedule to take advantage of the dirt cheap power in the warmer months of the year. We have a crop growing season, why not an aluminum smelting season or an AI-model training season? Or that free summertime power could be used to desalinate vast quantities of seawater affordably. Or, such a low-cost energy source is exactly what we need to make bulk atmospheric carbon removal a real possibility.

We used to live in tune with the cycle of the seasons. We lived according to the cycle of the Sun. So important was the Sun to our ancestors that we named our greatest deities after it. Amun. Aten. Ra. Huītzilōpōchtli. Ba'al. Aryaman. Mithra. Apollo. Helios. Sol Invictus. These were but a handful of the thousand names we gave to the mighty Sun upon which we so depended. We rose to its light and slept in its absence. We worked when it shone brightest and in the winter, invented elaborate holidays and rituals to encourage its return. We built our entire calendars and organized our entire civilizations around its cycles.

With the Industrial Revolution, we abandoned this close relationship with the Sun. We learned to draw upon bottled remnants of old rotted sunlight, and for a time learned to live apart from the mighty Sun. And those energies in fossil fuels improved our lives so greatly; they raised us up from the mud. We improved our standard of living so much, that we would rather burn the world to ashes than give up the lifestyle we have grown accustomed to. And so, the great challenge of our age is to find a way to keep our lives and comforts going, without destroying the Earth in the process. Millions of people have dedicated their lives to this one central challenge of our age. All our efforts. All our sciences. All of our industry. Our brightest minds and every tool of finance and government at our disposal. All of it searching, seeking, trying to desperately to find a way out of this horrible trap that we have built for ourselves.

And now, after all this yearning. After all this wondering. After all this wandering. The solution was in front of us this entire time. A ray of Sunlight has been cast down into the cave that we are so lost in. And it is leading us back to the light. We will cast off these shackles and leave the fossil fuels in the dust where we found them. We will once organize our entire civilization around the infinite bounty that the Sun freely gives in such abundance. And we will continue to enjoy the fruits that science has given us, but in a way that not only does not damage the Earth, but allows it to heal. That is the future ahead of us. That is the light in the darkness. As our ancestors did from time immemorial, we will once again live in the endless generosity of the star that birthed us. And we will rejoice. And we will sing.

Sol Invictus. We are coming home.

Look, if we in 'fuckcars' can't agree on entirely reasonable things like setting fire to cars parked in bike lanes, what are we even doing? 😂

You know. That's actually an interesting hypothetical. How does the Secret Service react if two people with Secret Service protection try to fight each other? I imagine they would first protect whoever has the most seniority, as in the current serving president, then current vice president, etc. But what if say, two former presidents try to duke it out?

Or can the president waive Secret Service protection? Since the president has broad immunity for 'official acts', does this mean the president can now duel someone on the White House Lawn at dawn?

I just wish we lived in a world where the nutjobs went after politicians that opposed gun control, firearms manufacturers, or gun nut gatherings. In the immortal words of Futurama, "smite someone who deserves it, for once!"