You should watch his videos on solar panels if you like a rant, though it gets increasingly political as it goes.

The video may be primarily about solar, but he goes nuclear by the end.

There used to be a bit more truth to that statement. But not anymore. I'm exactly 43 years old.

Republicans today aren't the Republicans of my childhood and youth. They were bad then, but holy shit they're terrible now.

"Do something you love and you'll never work a day in your life."

Great quote that skips over the part where you grow to hate what you once loved, and are back working in the mines.

Sony sold the PS3 at a pretty significant loss and had an "OtherOS" feature that allowed people to install Linux on it.

Between that and ots cell architecture, it turned out to be a super affordable way to build supercomputers. Sony eventually disabled the OtherOS feature to combat people buying them en masse and costing Sony their lunch, and they got a LOT of flack for it.

Valve is doing the opposite. They're keeping the openness, but charging enough money it's not financially viable to buy a bunch of Steam Machines to build cheap AI clusters.

Cost isn't always measured in dollars. The problem with how we externalize the costs is by looking at it from a money perspective.

We're racking up an absolutely enormous environmental debt on margin, and we are not preparing at all to repay that debt.

I'm in a deep-enough red area that I simply have to deal with Republicans. And most of them are perfectly nice people until the Fox News switch gets flipped in their heads.

It's crazy. There will be a bunch of perfectly nice ladies gathering supplies for the food bank and blankets for the poor, and then something switches and they'll start talking about how the Demoncrats want to steal the election so they can use tax money to pay to have illegals get hormone blockers so they can rape Christian girls.

There are 2 parts to taking back the government. The GOP has to be stopped, so voting Dem is a necessity. We have a 2-party system, so anyone who isn't voting blue is contributing to the problem.

"But the Dems aren't what we want them to be"

That's what primaries are for, and Mandami is the perfect case study. Primaries are where the most important elections are determined.

That being said, I live in an area of Texas where Dems simoly aren't going to win, so I'm actually a registered Republican most years. I vote the in the Republican primaries for the least-crazy among them, but then vote blue in the general election.

It was basing standards on vehicle footprints. Starting in 2012, a Toyota Corolla had less-strict emissions and fuel economy standards than a compact truck, so they stopped making the compact trucks after 2011.

They brought back the Ranger, but it's larger than some of the older F150s.

And as standards got tighter, it impacted more an more vehicles. All the compact cargo vans (Transit Connect, ProMaster City, and NV200) were discontinued in 2022 because they no longer meet standards at that size.

That's an interesting example.

HL2 controversially required you to sign in to a new online service upon installation even though you had a physical disc. Everybody was super pissed about it at the time.

But now most PC gamers act like that service is the one good thing on earth.

I've accepted that we won't survive the coming storm. Covid showed us that people couldn't be bothered tonwear a mask or get a shot to fight off a disease that was visibly killing millions. If we can't come together on that, there's no way we'll come together to survive the climate crisis.

They brought in an excavator.

The city I work for is an enclave for the mega-rich. Literally every home is millionaires (cheapest house on the market in the city is 2.5 million), and it's going through another round of gentrification, where the 1% is getting displaced by the .01% who are buying 5 million dollar homes to tear them down down and build 15 million dollar homes.

All the properties are owned by LLCs who's membership is something like Register Agents Inc, who act as members for hundreds of thousands of LLCs for the purpose of obscuring ownership.

It means that when they ignore our rules, we end up having to cite the contractors working on the site to stop it, because the court process of tracking down the owners by through subpoenas can take months. So then they just hire different contractors, who we then cite and it becomes a vicious cycle.

Though we do tend to win in court in the end. We've had the court give us permission to bulldoze 25-million dollar houses built without permits, though we usually use that order as a negotiating tactic to make them fall in line instead of losing the house entirely. Also, it takes 5-10 years for those cases to resolve, which is very frustrating for the city and the neighbors.

We can deny the permit until they hire a real person, but that's what we were going to do anyway, so there's no harm in trying from the developer perspective. The building is usually being built by an LLC that's unique to that structure and will be dissolved when the property sells, so there's nobody to go after when it fails in 3 years.

I work in municipal development, and we have people trying to turn in building plans designed by AI. And the AI even puts in real-looking Engineering and Architectural seals. I really don't love that I have to verify seals these days.

Our team is made up of hyper-vigilant bureaucrats, but lots of cites have worn out people who stopped caring if it looked mostly right, and people are going to die when buildings start collapsing.

He hasn't been charged with anything, and the issue isn't picking up trach, but dredging the river with heavy equipment and removing silt.

That can have severe unintended consequences. You're changing the speed and flow of a waterway. That's a big deal.

My first car was a 1985 LTD that was pirpose built to scar. The seat belt, of course, but also fun little things like the controls and the metal bands in the steering wheel.

But it was also super easy to work on because the hood was the size of a small nation and you could get to anything. The big hood also gave the tires plenty of room, so it could turn on a dime. I swear you could rear-end yourself with that thing.

My retort to a lot of these people is to ask if they can prove their citizenship right now, on the spot.

They can't.

There's these new payday loan scam apps they call earned income advances or some bullshit like that where they take the loan amount and fees out of your next paycheck directly.

These asswipes charging what amounts to like 500% APR have the fucking audacity to ask for tips.

The difference that still matters (for now) is that the US justice system applies in the United States, regardless of citizenship, war, or anything else.

Gitmo detainees were strategically never brought into the US. NSGB is a naval base that's leased from Cuba and is explicitly not territorial ground of the US, so detainees there are not protected by US laws, but the adversarial relationship with Cuba also keeps the host country's laws from applying.

It's pretty much the only place the US permanently controls where there are no civil protections at all for detainees.

It's how the pretend it's a nutritious breakfast.