I feel like it should be noted that the western pressure campaign to get rid of Netanyahu forced him to rely even more on people like Ben Gvir and other Hadreem, which allowed them to extract concessions in regards to expanding the settlements.

Like just from a place of pure competency it was an awful strategy. If Schumer has said something like “Israel has a right to defend itself, but the US refuses to help the IDF so long as they violate court orders and refuse to draft Hadreem” Bibi would have been gone.

I just don’t get the sense that the US State Department has a fundamental understanding of Israeli Politics, or the internal politics of most middle eastern nations. Without that knowledge projecting soft power becomes so much harder.

So one reason that everyone is glossing over is that republicans had a legit primary.

Trump is an extremely well known quantity. Republicans had a large variety of options to replace him. These were real candidates; There were multiple senators and governors who would be considered real candidates in a more traditional election. The entire political spectrum that makes up the republican party was represented.

Given all those options, republicans still chose Trump. They 100 percent knew what they were getting into.

On the other hand the Democratic establishment collectively chose to not challenge Biden. There were exactly three choices: Biden, a no name house member, and a woman most famous for trying to stop a hurricane with spirit energy. The extent of Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline was also hidden from the public to the point where bringing it up would largely get you attacked for being a MAGA republican.

The end result is that a lot of voters feel blindsided and gaslit when it comes to Biden, while Trump is exactly the asshole he portrays himself as.

I watched the debate with friends. We’re all liberals. We were all extremely upset over Biden’s performance. However during one of his more lucid moments, he brought up how Trump cheated on his pregnant wife with a pornstar. As he was talking, Trump grinned and shrugged. Even though what he did was objectively awful, the entire room burst out laughing. I feel like the election kind of has that energy.

Different divisions. This is more akin to when Sony decided to stop making floppy disks. The market is there for now, but it’s just not worth it from a financial perspective.

The amount of people burning their own blu rays is minimal. Even the type of people who emphasize owning their own content just use a NAS system.

Lol why do I ever bother. The only reason people like you ask for sources is so you can nitpick them.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/diversity-was-supposed-to-make-us-rich-not-so-much-39da6a23

I feel like the smartest thing for a corporation to do when asked about DEI is just to be like “in this economy, we’re focused on the fundamentals of our business”.

Like it or not, DEI is a huge culture war issue. Unless your customer base is almost exclusively on one side, you’re gonna end up alienating a huge portion of them.

Plus it’s not like you get some huge benefit from pushing DEI anyway. The people who like DEI have mostly realized that 99/100 times when a company says they are doing DEI it’s a cynical ploy. That McKinsey study that was supposed to prove DEI is better for business performance has been largely debunked. ESG funds are in full retreat, with many of them struggling to justify their own existence.

If Tractor Supply respectfully demurred when asked to implement DEI in the first place, I’m sure the outrage would be virtually non-existent. Instead they’re in this bud light situation where they’re at risk of alienating both liberals and conservatives.

Here’s some feedback

• Make it more clear this is a bot in beta mode
• Better formatting.
• A small blurb of what the bot does. No acronyms
• Instead of putting a warning, have it fire on all sources. Use some sort of color coding to differentiate quality in the better formatted message.

I agree, but with a small caveat. I think that a lot of 2010s bloggers were wannabe authors who only got into journalism because it was a lot easier to break into blogging versus literature in that era.

I get what you’re saying but yeah it is surprising. It would be one thing if their coverage was bad as in the sense the author doesn’t do legwork or add anything of value when compared to some YouTuber. However their coverage feels like it’s written by someone who doesn’t particularly like cars and doesn’t really follow this stuff outside of when their editor assigns it to them.

You know in 2021 I thought that the MSM was deliberately ignoring the issues with EVs and promoting overly rosy timelines as part of a political agenda.

After seeing the massive amount of FUD they published about EVs over the past year, I think they are just bad at their jobs.

It feels like the media covers EVs based on vibes versus doing actual research. As a result they’ve consistently publish articles that are either borderline nonsense hopium or complete doomerism.

IMO I still think hybrids will be instrumental tech over the next decade. Those 300 mile EVs often get much worse range in weather conditions that are common in many parts of the country. It’s also simply going to take considerable time for fast charging infrastructure to become ubiquitous enough to truly address range anxiety.

Investors generally want to get a positive ROI. They don’t want to tank the company to the point where it can be acquired by another company for pennies on the dollar.

Look at Nokia. When they hired a former Microsoft exec, they weren’t expecting him to tank the entire company so it could be acquired by Microsoft.

Honestly if you read the actual email I think there could be significant legal trouble ahead.

Spencer talks about how the main barrier to acquiring Nintendo is that they sit on a mountain of cash. He calls that unfortunate. He then proceeded to state a company with connections to Microsoft had just bought a lot of Nintendo shares, and how they could work with said company to make such an acquisition a reality.

The company in question publicly bought a massive amount of Nintendo shares. They then proceeded to pressure Nintendo to invest more capital instead of sitting on the cash pile they have now. They did this under claims that such a move would be beneficial to Nintendo in terms of ROI. However, it would also result in Nintendo being more vulnerable to an acquisition from Microsoft if any of those bets don’t pay off.

In short, it could be argued that Microsoft worked with investors to tank Nintendo so they could buy it. That’s a huge deal and will probably result in a shitstorm.

You know this isn’t canon because Sisco looks upset.

So she’s actually been around for a long time. The only reason I know was because she was a minor figure in a major internet drama…

Basically in 2014 there was something called GamerGate. It started off as anger over journalists being complete dickwads, and ended in being the blueprint neonazis used to radicalize people.

While the tech journalists were “the good guys” they embodied the “you’re not wrong, just an asshole” thing 10000x. They would behave like high school bullies and then be super vindictive to anyone who was perceived as crossing them.

During this time, Wu went to a tech conference with a LED miniskirt that she made. She posted it on the Internet and got a lot of comments. The vast majority of them were good. However, one person said something along the lines of “you look great. These tech conferences can be sexist, I hope you didn’t get body shamed”. She responded with something like “most people were chill. The only real dicks were the progressive ‘conformity non/conformity’ types”.

This caused a massive shitstorm. Bad actors were able to use the very real argument that the same people calling them sexist were judging Wu so hard that it was visible in pictures". The journalists then attacked her and accused Wu of working with them. Wu apologized. She said she was Chinese and didn’t mean to get involved in US culture war discussions. However, she also refused to take a side because she didn’t want to get involved in US culture war discussions.

As a result, she got put on a shit list by the media for a long time. That line about VICE NEWS considering outing her? A media organization linked to GamerGate called Gawker pioneered that tactic. They largely used it on us conservatives. Peter Thiel was the biggest example, most people outed were more or less nobodies. I’m guessing VICE had initial thoughts of outing her in the same way, and only later realizing that outing a woman for being a lesbian dating a minority in China is a very different ballgame than outing Timothy Geithner’s brother for being on Grindr.

Don’t the Vulcans have their own fleet of non federation ships?

Also I’m pretty sure a ton of Vulcans are super racist. Like hilariously so.

Yeah totally. The focal point of “In the Pale Moonlight” was when he told Sisco that he came to Garek precisely because Garek knew how to do sketchy shit like this, and that deep down Sisco knew that something like this was gonna happen with Garek involved.

The thing the world “noble” in popular culture doesn’t use Machiavelli as a reference.

Posts like this confuse me.

On the one hand, DS9 isn’t really known by people who don’t watch Star Trek. The chance of someone randomly running their mouth about it is infinitely lower than something like TNG or TOS.

On the other hand I can’t see how anyone who watched DS9 can call Garek noble. One of the best episodes in the series revolves around him orchestrating a plot to trick the Romulans into entering the war by assassinating a Romulan senator. Not only does he show 0 hesitation, but he correctly points out that Sisco went to him precisely because that’s his bread and butter.

Look you can call me any name in the book. The current where children can easily form para social relationships with what are essentially pornstars and it’s extremely easy for teenagers to become sex workers isn’t healthy.

I’m not saying Hawley is right but there needs to be some real effort to address this.

Jefferson County was one of two counties in all of Kentucky to go blue in 2020. It did so by a 60-40 margin.

Look people are gonna say Elon was always like this but I disagree. There’s a difference between being a major asshole and this kind of insanity.

We all acknowledge how being terminally online has a huge negative effect on your mental health. We all acknowledge that covid drove a lot of people crazy.

I’m pretty this happened to Elon. This isn’t a sympathy thing just an observation.

I think YouTube is in an extremely good position to elevate long form content. The problem is that I have 0 faith in googles management to the point where I’m sure they’ll ruin it eventually.

I disagree on telegram. It’s never been more relevant. Both Russian and Ukrainians post on them real time involving the war. You could follow the failed coup on Wagner via telegram.

Conceptually, I think there’s a huge need for a telegram like service that’s more or less free for all parties to broadcast via channels. Obviously there are downsides, but I’d argue the ability to broadcast revolutions real time is worth it.

The problem is telegram itself isn’t really trustworthy given the Russia connection