It’s maybe worth pointing out that the analysis covers 10 years and appears to account for $0 in GDP growth (and corresponding tax base growth) dependent on those policies. If I’m reading this correctly (big if to be fair): Assuming the government continues to capture 17.5% of US GDP, Harris’ policies would need to generate roughly 4% GDP growth per year (no small feat, granted) to be net zero relative to absolute debt levels and less than that to be net zero relative to debt as a percentage of GDP. Government expenditure is not like consumer spending because almost every dollar it spends looks less like consumption and more like an investment, and leveraging investments is actually a valid strategy, especially when you have the economic momentum/inertia of a nation state to balance the risks involved with debt, and that is before you even get into fiscal monetary policy

The city already settled to pay about $3 per resident for the cops’ bad behavior and to put cops in a training on political violence. If some of the cops in question live outside of the city (not uncommon), they probably won’t pay a dime and the only impact they will feel is sitting through a training session that they will probably not take seriously

To be honest, I’m struggling to keep track of the points you are making because you brought in several tangential topics all at once without much context (shale gas vs. oil, oil exports, LCOE, Poland all in a thread about solar energy in Finland compared to fossil fuel energy in Texas). I’ll just point out that the US is #4 in oil exports, by either barrels or export value (source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_exports) and the number one oil producer (source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_production), so I think it is pretty obvious that the investments into fossil fuel infrastructure in the US are well and above what is necessary for a “strategic reserve” use case

Right now a lot of “renewable energy” sources are subsidized in Europe for only political reasons.

I can assure you the same is true for fossil fuels in Texas right now, so I don’t see how this is a strike on renewable energy

Nvidia does not have a strong history of open sourcing things, to say the least. That last bit sounds like pure hopium

It’s definitely not that. They are just pointing out that the right to free speech prevents the government from impeding someone’s ability to say something, it doesn’t (despite implications made by a lot of people who cry out that their right to free speech is being impeded) force others to listen to or agree with that thing being said. If anything, the people that abuse the name of free speech by implying that it means people need to agree with them, or need to amplify their message, are attacking free speech by mudding the water around what it means and making it harder for good faith entities to invoke that right

And yet the demise of the coal industry accelerated in his administration, with no apparent pause despite Trump rolling back the safety regulations that were protecting the coal miners. He’s pro coal baron, not pro coal miner

Vivian was victimized by her father’s heartless disregard and rejection of her identity. Elon is now going around stating a narrative that her coming out to him is at least a significant contributing reason he is a fascist (“I lost my son to the woke mind virus”), a narrative that this headline plays directly into. You can take the same sequence of facts and headline it as “Musk is going public with the same bigotry that he wielded against his transgender daughter. A lot of trans people have family members like him” that doesn’t make it sound like Elon Musk would have been politely building his rockets and evs in a corner if only his daughter hadn’t come out as trans, and doesn’t make it sound like Vivian indirectly donated 10s of millions of dollars to Trump’s 2024 campaign by coming out as someone that that exact campaign wants to suppress. The headline as written is almost a threat to closeted trans people. “Yeah, your parents may be Schrodinger’s bigots right now, but come out and they will go full scorched earth to dehumanize you and you will be responsible for their shift”.

I’m pretty sure you are agreeing that that isn’t the case, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the text of the article is also aligned against that message, but the headline (probably written by an editor hungry for rage clicks) is solidly aligned to it, and should be called out for that

Mike Johnson moves one heartbeat closer to the Whitehouse in this hypothetical. And the remaining heartbeat would be on tour campaigning, which we’ve seen can expose someone to high velocity lead poisoning. Plus, Kamala would have to oversee an unplanned administration turnover, taking time and energy away from her campaigning efforts. It’s all painfully obvious why they want this and none of it has to do with the good of the country

Am one of those “assholes”. Kamala was far from my favorite candidate in 2020, but I just donated a hefty (for me) chunk of change and will be volunteering. I didn’t need perfection, just a feasible path to victory in November and now we have it. I’m so pumped right now, project 2025 no longer looks like an inevitability. LFG!

Porque no los dos?

Rabbit hole incoming: If you have to pick one, I suppose it depends on what metric you are trying to maximize. One doublestacked intermodal train car takes two long haul trucks off the road. One Siemens Venture passenger train car takes 74 people, or about 50 cars at 1.5 people per car, off the road. You can generally run longer freight trains than passenger trains, but 25x to normalize for VMT (which could be used as an approximate measure of direct health impacts from driving: crash risk, elevated blood pressure, obesity. It could also be used to approximate societal impacts of car culture: real estate dedicated to surface parking, voting bloc size that supports car-centric planning and development regulations) is probably excessive. On the other hand, if we normalize for emissions (hard to find data here, but as far as I can tell trucks are on the order of 10x as emissive), that gets us down to 5x train length, which is about on par (northeast corridor trains are typically in the 1/6 of a mile range, and median freight train length is somewhere in the 1-1.5 mile range from what I could find), and if we use infrastructure damage/maintenance cost (trucks are about two orders of magnitude worse than even today’s SUV saturated passenger car market, I’m assuming without reason or evidence that damage to steel rail infrastructure between a freight and a passenger car scales significantly less harshly for the sake of simplicity), things look downright strongly in favor of freight traffic. At the end of the day, it probably just depends on which use case has more unmet demand on a case by case basis. Of course, both pale when compared to the opportunity that high speed rail gives to take short haul flights out of the sky, but that is another set of analysis and does partially correlate to the elevated infrastructure cost of high speed rail vs conventional rail.

This makes one of the “solutions” from the article: “A law was introduced at the end of 2023 that will eliminate the need for permits and environmental impact assessments for bridges that are being widened to add lanes as part of renovations.” look particularly shortsighted. Infrastructure is a maintenance debt that we are reckoning with, so we will make it easier to build specifically bigger infrastructure so that in 25 years we will have an even bigger problem to solve? Not to mention the concept of induced demand meaning that those lanes are going to increase the amount of vehicles using the bridge, which would be exactly the kind of thing that should get an environmental assessment, versus repurposing some lanes for sustainable transit or building a separate bridge for those modes

If you use the right color of light, then the doppler effect means that the atoms will only absorb (and be pushed by) light that they are headed towards. That means that the light will always act as a brake for the atoms and never an accelerator, so the fluid will cool. If you do this from all directions, the fluid will start to stay still in one place and get very close to absolute zero. Idk, I just read the Wikipedia article, but that is my best attempt at an ELI18

Easy. His, erm, broad stature makes him an easy whipping target when it comes time to drive the capitalist pigs and their market stands out of the temple

The fact that you mixed up the Dakotas in your comparison to cities really emphasizes your point

You’re not wrong that GPU and AI silicon design are tightly coupled, but my point was that both of the GPU manufacturers are dedicating hardware to AI/ML in their consumer products. Nvidia has the tensor cores in its GPUs that it justifies to consumers with DLSS and RT but we’re clearly designed for AI/ML use cases when they presented them with Turing. AMD has the XDNA AI Engine that it is putting its APUs separate from its RDNA GPUs

Fair enough. Was just asking because the choice of company surprised me. AMD is putting "AI Engines in their new CPUs (separate silicon design from their GPUs) and while Nvidia largely only sells GPUs that are less universal, they’ve had dedicated AI hardware (tensor cores) in their offerings for the past three generations. If anything, Intel is barely keeping up with its competition in this area (for the record, I see vanishingly little value in the focus on AI as a consumer, so this isn’t really a ding on Intel in my books, more so making the observation from a market forces perspective)

Why call out Intel? Pretty sure AMD and Nvidia are both putting dedicated AI hardware in all of their new and upcoming product lines. From what I understand they are even generally doing it better than Intel. Hell, Qualcomm is advertising their AI performance on their new chips and so is Apple. I don’t think there is anyone in the chip world that isn’t hopping on the AI train

How nearby is nearby though? And, in the context of the proposed use case for defending a crowded stadium in a populated area, does this put people down range as well that could also be impaired by the pellets?

You are giving ants way too much credit. Those fuckers are brutal war criminals, the lot of them. Humans are bad, but we’ve had nukes for almost 80 years without glassing ourselves, ants wouldn’t last a day