I wonder why we can’t just decode the term ‘settler’ for what it is:

“terrorist”, but with state aegis and pliant media cooking up anodyne narrative cover

All of these locations (Alaska, California, Hawaii, much of eastern Europe) are ones that Russia has at one point in its imperial or soviet history had either outposts or territorial claim to. Of course, much of Eastern Europe was as recently as the 1980s under the Kremlin’s direct control, either as puppet states or as territory Russia or the USSR directly claimed. Finland and Poland in particular have both been completely invaded by Russian forces multiple times, but at the moment they are built up defensively in ways that Russia quite honestly has zero chances of winning against.

Alaska was territory that imperial Russia claimed before any European country did. It was sold to the US during the Crimean war (1853) because Russia needed the money and in all likelihood it was going to lose it to Britain. Russia established early trading outposts in Alaska and California but sold or abandoned them after wiping out the fur animals they’d come to harvest and trade.

This talk for the benefit of Russian audiences is about reminding Russians of former imperial or soviet glory, but the problem with that historically is that it wasn’t actually glorious.

The current propaganda push to get Russians thinking they really have a shot at rolling back the map changes since Imperial times is just an effort to sustain Russia’s modern project: dismantling the post-WWII order in which the West (the US, in particular, but NATO and much of the UN) upholds alliances that Putin sees as against Russia’s interests.

I’d take it today. I’m in my 50s, I’m an endurance athlete (I race bikes) and the calculus looks like: if I wait 20 years I get to experience body-age 50-70 twice, but if I take it now I experience 30-50 twice. Living my prime twice is better than enduring my decline twice, thanks

Ok, that’s fair. The point I wanted to make upthread was that these sorts of impossible things are regularly made to work when making it work is worthwhile. Most of the ‘but this is a limitation of the technology’ talk here (about how EVs can’t work in the cold, etc) is defeatist bullshit that ignores that really if you want it to work it can be made to work

The main thing is that electric is the same way,

No, the larger point is that it’s a struggle to make diesel work at +20F if you don’t do the things to make it work, and yet these things can be made to work reliably at -50F. The obstacle isn’t the limitations of the technology, it’s whether or not the cost curve makes sense. Electric can be made to work cheaply, if it’s important to you that it work- just like it’s possible to make that diesel turn over at -50F

I grew up and rode the bus to school in Iowa.

I rode the bus in Alaska. The buses ran well below -50f. It turns out that it’s not that hard to keep your batteries and oilpans heated if you bother putting plug-in heaters (literally, electric blankets for the purpose) in your fleet vehicles, winterize your vehicles, and plug them in when it’s cold.

I get that it’s uncommon to be that cold-prepared in places that don’t expect to see temperatures below -20 for more than a few days in a given calendar year- at some point, it makes sense to just call it off when it’s that cold. After all, do all (or even most of) the kids have proper clothes to deal with real cold?

Really cold weather can be adapted to, it’s just that when you don’t need it that often it makes sense not to spend the resources doing it.

"We’re tracking you for your privacy 🙄

For those of you who haven’t been in a school bus in years, do you remember how loud they are? Reducing diesel pollution is a win, but being in a less-noisy environment for however long each day is also a win.

As a cyclist and occasional user of public transit, I really like the idea of most buses eventually being at least plug-in hybrid-electric if not entirely battery electric. I’m curious about the mass difference between a diesel, diesel-electric, and battery-electric bus (after all, the heavier the vehicle, the harder it is on the road). I expect some of the fuel-and-maintenance-cost-savings from the bus fleet will have to go to road maintenance in the end, but I’d rather spend money that way (locally) than spend it on pumping fresh hot carbon out of foreign wellheads

They’re not the ones being affected by the boomers.

My dude, they’ve been riding us our whole lives

Rhetoric of this sort just promotes distrust in election systems, which of course prompts demagogues like Trump to promise voters they can fix it if they gain power. The fun thing here is that the right here needs you to believe things that aren’t true in order to justify them doing a coup, the stupid thing is that stupid people take this kind of talk seriously.

But seriously, American voting is relatively secure- it’s just that where lawmakers don’t want voters deciding the ‘wrong’ way they’ve gerrymandered them into districts to prevent them doing it, and they’ve done things to strip voters of their voting rights and to suppress voting and to make it inconvenient or difficult to vote. This has been a bipartisan thing in the past, but today the GOP are the chief offenders.

Also, Putin’s Russia is in the stage of democracy where elections are an exercise in flaunting the death of democracy itself, and nobody should ever take his talk about elections as being in good faith, ever

It could, depending on how the court is feeling about it that day, and on whether or not congress writes legislation to provide specifics to just what Article IV, sec4 means. (This seems to have been one of those clauses the framers left as a to-do for future legislators to fill out)

Article IV, section 4 : “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.” [~https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S4-1/ALDE_00013635]

The ‘guarantee clause’ was both a promise that the federal government would help suppress state-level insurrections and protect member states from foreign attack, and a requirement that in order to be a member state, you had to have a government in the form of a republic (i.e., no monarchy-states, no dictatorships). This can be read to mean that democracy of some sort is required, as republics implicitly derive their public authority from the people living in them.

What seems to be going down is that tech firms are laying off AI teams that aren’t based on large LLMs like ChatGPT. My read: they’re thinking it’s time to lay off those workers in anticipation of replacing that functionality (in siri, cortana, echo/alexa) with a large LLM stack

That means its working

“Can’t tell if obviously-criminal things are illegal”, and “still thinks he should be president” 🤡

It’s wild to me that when the phone companies need to bill for a phone call they know exactly who to bill for it, but when it’s something like this everyone is helpless because you can’t track these things

Religion is America’s original sin

It’s worse than that. Religion was co-opted into the maintenance of slavery, and it caused schisms in multiple sects, including the Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists

Generation after generation, Southern pastors adapted their theology to thrive under a terrorist state. Principled critics were exiled or murdered, leaving voices of dissent few and scattered. Southern Christianity evolved in strange directions under ever-increasing isolation. Preachers learned to tailor their message to protect themselves. If all you knew about Christianity came from a close reading of the New Testament, you’d expect that Christians would be hostile to wealth, emphatic in protection of justice, sympathetic to the point of personal pain toward the sick, persecuted and the migrant, and almost socialist in their economic practices. None of these consistent Christian themes served the interests of slave owners, so pastors could either abandon them, obscure them, or flee.

What developed in the South was a theology carefully tailored to meet the needs of a slave state. Biblical emphasis on social justice was rendered miraculously invisible. A book constructed around the central metaphor of slaves finding their freedom was reinterpreted. Messages which might have questioned the inherent superiority of the white race, constrained the authority of property owners, or inspired some interest in the poor or less fortunate could not be taught from a pulpit. Any Christian suggestion of social justice was carefully and safely relegated to “the sweet by and by” where all would be made right at no cost to white worshippers. In the forge of slavery and Jim Crow, a Christian message of courage, love, compassion, and service to others was burned away.

https://www.politicalorphans.com/the-article-removed-from-forbes-why-white-evangelicalism-is-so-cruel/

Give Boeing a choice- retain 25 hours of flight records, or pay a billion dollars for every incident where the data is requested but was destroyed to save disk space that costs about nothing to keep

Yeah when I visit boomer relatives they seem to think retail stores in big cities are war zones- and they vote, which kinda tells me there’s political support to put S.W.A.T. teams in every retail store

Where the first speech absolutists at?

They’re buying social media platforms and censoring speech they don’t like