Or do it the other way around, the amount of money that the government can spend is limited by voter turnout.

Clearly if you can’t get people excited enough to vote for your policies, you don’t have a mandate.

Yeah, and some of the biggest states (like California) solidly go for one party. So, the non-voters really don’t affect the presidential race there.

AFAIK it was a Thursday night push for people in US mountain time / pacific time. But, that ends up being Friday early morning in Europe and Friday mid-day in Asia.

It would have to be a big loss. If it’s at all close, there’s going to be a lot of violence.

The only other thing I could think of that could end things without a lot more violence is if a scandal finally stuck to him and resulted in him losing support. Like, the Epstein stuff. The right has spent years getting their base riled up against pedophiles and groomers. If people believed that Trump really was a pedophile, it could finally sink him. But, nothing seems to stick to him.

Whatever happens, I hope scholars can study him and figure out why he’s so charismatic to so many people. I don’t get it. I look at him and I see a dumb, fat blow-hard who lies constantly and can’t even string a sentence together. Yet, for some reason, other people look at that and see a hero.

After thinking about this REALLY REALLY HARD…offing him will do nothing to stop the creep of [fascism]

Who would step in to replace Trump? Trump has worked hard to discredit anybody who could potentially challenge him. Strongmen often groom a son to take over for them, but only after they’ve been in power for many years. Trump might want Junior to take over, but I doubt even Trump’s hand-picked yes-men would accept Junior at this point.

Instead you’d almost certainly get a power vacuum with various Republican factions trying to take over.

You cut one head off and 3 more will pop up

And those 3 would start snapping at each-other trying to become the dominant head. And, as long as they’re distracted snapping at each-other, they’re not going to be focusing on us.

IMO, Trump is also the only thing holding this right-wing coalition together. As soon as he’s gone the factions are going to turn on each-other. The bad thing is that they’ve already shown that they’re going to get violent when they feel their grip on power is slipping. I’m sure this assassination attempt is going to lead to right-wing violence, and if it had succeeded it would have been a lot more violence.

The most dangerous thing about Trump is that he’s he’s got almost half the US behind him. There are probably more cruel Republicans, and probably some who would be more effective at implementing their cruel policies. But, not many who would be able to get so much support and keep the coalition together.

The Republican base is getting smaller each year as old people die. It’s not a popular platform with the younger voters. If the US can avoid a Trump win this year, the MAGA version of the Republican party will probably fall apart. Then it will be back to the regular corporatocracy that the US has been dealing with for decades. If he does win… well I’m glad I don’t live in the US.

Honestly, just google it. Tons of people have that problem and if you search for it you get pages and pages of results.

No, it isn’t.

Linux on a laptop can’t even reliably wake the system when you close then open a laptop lid. There are some basic things that need to work 100% of the time before Linux can be considered ready for casual everyday use.

Ask a non-tech person where they JUST downloaded something to… they can’t tell you.

Nobody really bothers to change the default though, so it only really matters if they later try to find the file without using their web browser. And if they do try to do that, “Downloads” is a pretty obvious place to look.

Do you mean the byzantine directory structure for system files? The default of installing to “Program Files” doesn’t seem too unusual, although adding “x86” bit seems unnecessarily complicated for a typical end user. Same with the rest of the standard directories that people use most often.

The directory structure for system files is bad, but that’s true for Unix-derivatives too. Unix has /bin and /lib, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /var/opt, etc. Different versions of Unix have different ideas of what belongs where. Even different flavours of Linux have their own ideas.

That’s virtua, not virtual.

I really dislike using the term “virtual” for online meetings. It implies the meeting isn’t real, or isn’t authentic, or like it’s imaginary. The meeting simply uses video cameras instead of a conference room.

Nijjar was wanted

As in, was a suspect? I assume he was never tried?

The US didn’t inform or take permission from Pakistan to send in SEAL Team 6 to kill him.

Yes, the US gets to throw their weight around because nobody wants to go to war against them. It doesn’t make it right.

I love that article. There are also ones about dates and times. The more you deal with dates and times, the more you realize how messed up they are.

It was Internet Explorer. But, what was probably confusing about it was that anything that required Internet access would start up the program that dialed the modem and connected to the Internet. So, clicking on the icon would eventually launch the browser, but first it would launch the dial-up program, which would take about 30s to connect.

As an aside, it really grates to see how Microsoft called their browser “The Internet”. And that’s the least dastardly thing they did that let them use their monopoly on operating systems to destroy Netscape.

Was it Jen? She was entrusted to take care of the Internet by Roy and Moss, and she did a piss-poor job of it.

My favourite story about aircraft design about some of the design mistakes on the F-16 fighter.

The F-16 was the first fly-by-wire fighter. They didn’t have much experience with it, and tried out some new things. One was that instead of having a stick between the legs of the pilot they used a side stick. And, since everything was fly-by-wire they didn’t need the stick to mechanically move. They decided they’d just use a solid stick with pressure transducers, since it was simpler and more reliable than a stick that moved.

The trouble was that the pilots couldn’t estimate how much pressure they were using. This led to the pilots over-rotating on take-off (pulling back too hard). Even funnier was that at early airshows, when the pilots were doing a high-speed roll, you could see the control surfaces twitching with the heartbeat of the pilots as they shoved the stick as hard as they could to get maximum roll.

That led to them adding a small amount of give to the stick, essentially giving the pilots feedback on how hard they were pushing the control surfaces.

Another more subtle issue with the design was that originally the stick was set up for forward, back, left and right aligned with the axes of the plane itself. But, they discovered that when pilots pulled back on the stick, they were pulling slightly towards themselves, causing the plane to also roll. So, they realigned it so that “pulling back” is slightly pulling towards the pilot’s body, rather than directly along the forward / backward axis of the plane.

There was a listener question on a science podcast recently that asked about how the temperature changed on the moon during the recent solar eclipse.

They almost got what a solar eclipse was, but not quite. During a solar eclipse, the moon gets between the sun and the earth, blocking the light getting to the earth and casting a shadow on the earth. The side of the moon facing the earth is completely dark because the thing that normally lights it up (the sun) is completely behind it. But, the back side of the moon is getting full sun and just as hot as normal.

I think part of the problem with understanding all this is that the sun is just so insanely bright. Like, it’s a bit hard to believe that the full moon is so bright just because it’s reflecting sunlight. It’s also amazing that the “wandering stars” (planets) look like stars when they’re just blobs of rocks or gases that are reflecting the insanely bright light of the sun.

It’s amazing if you think about it. Light comes out of the sun in every possible direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the surface of Mercury, and only some of that light is reflected back out. The light reflected from Mercury goes in almost every direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the earth. But, even with that indirect bounce, it’s bright enough to see with the naked eye.

It’s not just Europe, it’s everywhere.

Before the British Mandate, Iraq was part of the Ottoman Empire, and as Wikipedia says:

Throughout most of the period of Ottoman rule (1533–1918) the territory of present-day Iraq was a battle zone between the rival regional empires and tribal alliances

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

Before the Ottomans were the Mongols, who slaughtered their way across the world.

The only kind of “stable” period was when the Abbasid Caliphate had Baghdad at its core – but that only meant that the border wars were happening elsewhere in the middle east.

When the Europeans got to the Americas, they killed a lot of natives. But, they also made alliances with some of the natives who were eager to have a new ally in their territorial conflict with other native groups, because, surprise surprise, before the Europeans got there the native groups were in a constant state of conflict over territory too.

The history of humanity is conflict. Even chimps fight brutal fights with other chimp groups over territory, so it goes back to our non-human ancestors.

There’s nothing unique about Europeans and conflicts over territory.

I’m a woman and I have never needed to chart 28 days.

Is this because you don’t care when your next period is? Or because you don’t need to record it to remember it?

I can imagine a modern woman might not care if she always has menstrual products on hand or nearby. But, it might have been more meaningful in ancient times when there might have been more taboos associated with menstruation, plus it might have been more important to know as part of family planning. And, it might have been much less convenient to carry around whatever was needed to handle menstruation.

Also, in a modern world where calendars are everywhere, I can imagine someone might say “ok, so my next period will be in early July”. But, there was a time when days and months were not tracked, or were only tracked by priests, etc. In that kind of situation, I could imagine it might be useful to count the days until the next period was expected. On the other hand, a primitive society probably spends a lot more time outdoors and sees the moon a lot more often, so it might be just as easy to go “ok, so my next period will be when the moon’s 3/4 full”.

28 notches means that the bone had 29 sections, which more closely matches a lunar month than a typical menstrual period. But, I could see it being used either way.

In English common law, a “lunar month” traditionally meant exactly 28 days or four weeks, thus a contract for 12 months ran for exactly 48 weeks

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

So, depending on the legal framework, a 28 day marker could be very useful. If they were actually tracking the moon, you’d think it would be 29 units even though a lunar month can vary between about 29.1 and 29.9 days. Then again, 28 notches on a stick means 29 sections, so…?

It’s interesting that a woman’s menstrual cycles is approx 28.1 days on average, with a standard deviation of 3.95 days. That means 28 days is a lot closer to the average menstrual cycle than the average lunar month. But, the standard deviation is a lot greater.