The issue is that that’s who Biden and leading members of the democrats are. They do not, in my opinion, have the framework to deal with a political campaign being an existential threat.

At some point, sound mixing just went to shit. My partner was in the industry working in post-production and agrees with me. The sfx are loud and the dialogue is not - thus all of the smart tvs and settop devices supporting features like “Dialogue Boost.”

I used to notice it a lot with poorly managed concerts - the singer’s mic would get drowned out by the instruments. I guess all the people who were responsible for that moved to LA.

But now I have a soundbar and two HomePods as speakers, and still turn on subs. And that might have something to do with the number of concerts.

Yup, and the reason for guaranteeing the right to vote regardless of race was also a result of a specific insurrection that occurred.

I think it’s perfectly fair to say that if someone tried to overthrow the US government, they’re not qualified to be running the US government.

Can you do a text search and find the word “conviction” in the amendment?

Here’s the text:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

And, again, this has all gone through Congress. Trump did it. Everyone knows it. Even the Trumpists know it.

Hey - quick question for those who make articles available as gifts.

Are you paid subscribers, or just email-registered? Are you limited in the number of articles that you can gift per week/month-whatever?

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol outlined 17 specific findings on Monday in the executive summary of its final report. Here are the findings, with additional context.

1. Beginning election night and continuing through Jan. 6 and thereafter, Donald Trump purposely disseminated false allegations of fraud related to the 2020 presidential election in order to aid his effort to overturn the election and for purposes of soliciting contributions. These false claims provoked his supporters to violence on Jan. 6.

Annotation: This reflects the committee’s finding that Mr. Trump’s repeated false claims that the election was rigged had both a political and financial motive. During its second hearing, the panel introduced evidence that Trump supporters donated nearly $100 million to Mr. Trump’s so-called Election Defense Fund but that the money flowed instead into a super PAC the president had created. It was not just “the big lie,” the committee said. It was also “the big rip-off.”

2. Knowing that he and his supporters had lost dozens of election lawsuits, and despite his own senior advisers refuting his election fraud claims and urging him to concede his election loss, Donald Trump refused to accept the lawful result of the 2020 election. Rather than honor his constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” President Trump instead plotted to overturn the election outcome.

Annotation: Mr. Trump and his allies filed more than 60 lawsuits challenging the results of the election and lost all but one of them. Many of the suits, the committee determined, were brought even after some of Mr. Trump’s closest aides — including his campaign manager, Bill Stepien, and his attorney general, William P. Barr — told him that there was no fraud that could have changed the outcome of the race.

3. Despite knowing that such an action would be illegal, and that no state had or would submit an altered electoral slate, Donald Trump corruptly pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes during Congress’s joint session on Jan. 6.

I would have just responded “Yo.”

If he can say ‘Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.’ then he passes the super difficult cognitive test that republicans think is the equivalent of the MCAT.

We’re not talking about punishing people for voting for Bob Dole here.

In a number of states, you cannot run in the election as a third party candidate if you lost the primary for that state. I’m not sure how widespread that is, but it’s come up in several recent elections. I think they’re even called something like anti-spoiler rules.

I think there’s pollsters who are looking at three way races now (usually throwing in Kennedy), but I don’t know if they’ve been able to say whether he pulls more Trump or Biden voters yet.

Sure, unless there was a correlation between the technologies deployed by the individual companies and their vulnerabilities.

I’m not saying there is in this case, but it’s a phenomenon we see all the time in systems ranging from technological to immunological. When network (social, computer, whatever) connect systems with correlated vulnerabilities, there can be cascading failures that do not spread outside those networks. It’s been so long (over 30 years) since I’ve even thought about RF and related systems that I have no idea what specific or proprietary technologies the major companies have, so I just shrugged it off as I was unaffected, and penciled in that there may have been a correlation with solar activity.

I’m a manager at a FAANG and have been involved in tech and scientific research for commercial, governmental, and military applications for about 35 years now, and have been through a lot of different careers in the course of things.

First - and I really don’t want to come off like a dick here - you’re two years in. Some people take off, and others stay at the same level for a decade or more. I am the absolute last person to argue that we live in a meritocracy - it’s a combination of the luck of landing with the right group on the right projects - but there’s also something to be said about tenacity in making yourself heard or moving on. You can’t know a whole lot with two years of experience. When I hire someone, I expect to hold their hand for six months and gradually turn more responsibility over as they develop both their technical and personal/project skills.

That said, if you really hate it, it’s probably time to move on. If you’re looking to move into a PM style role, make sure that you have an idea of what that all involves, and make sure you know the career path - even if the current offer pays more, PMs in my experience cap out at a lower level for compensation than engineers. Getting a $10k bump might seem like you’re moving up, but a) it doesn’t sound like you’re comparing it to other engineering offers and b) we’re in a down market and I’d be hesitant to advise anyone to make a jump right now if their current position is secure. Historically speaking, I’m expecting demand to start to climb back to high levels in the next 1-2 years.

Honestly, it just sounds like your job sucks. I have regularly had students, interns, and mentees in my career because that’s important to me. One thing I regularly tell people is that if there’s something that they choose to read about rather than watching Netflix on a Saturday, that’s something they should be considering doing for a living. Obviously that doesn’t cover Harry Potter, but if you’re reading about ants or neural networks or Bayesian models or software design patterns, that’s a pretty good hint as to where you should be steering. If you’d rather work on space systems, or weapons, or games, or robots, or LLMs, or whatever - you can slide over with side and hobby projects. If you’re too depressed to even do that, take the other job. I’d rather hire a person who quit their job to drive for Uber while they worked on their own AI project than someone who was a full stack engineer at a startup that went under.

Anyway, that’s my advice. Let me know if I can clarify anything.

You’re absolutely right. In my memory, though, the ones that stick out the most are the ones where the hero is pro-corporate but in an anti-corporate way. I’m thinking about movies like Working Girl, 9 to 5, and Secret of My Success, and even Other People’s Money. The villains were the very straight and square boss types and the heroes were the young(er) upstarts who could out-business them. OPM was a little different but I think it fits the theme.

The main difference I’m seeing is that even in the pro-capitalism shows, it was still all about sticking it to the man. If the good guys were cops, the man was the chief of police. If the good guys were businessmen, the man was their boss. If the good guys were soldiers, the man was their CO, or the generals or politicians back in Washington.

Maybe it’s purely subjective on my part, but it seems like there’s a lot more pro-authority movies being made now. You can’t take a movie like Top Gun (which still had the shaggy haired rebel as well as one of the most homoerotic themes in mainstream cinema at the time) with something like Bill Murray in Stripes. Stripes is great comedy that I’d place almost at the level of Caddyshack, but even though both movies could have been shown by recruiters to get people to enlist, Stripes was still a goofball comedy of the slobs against the snobs (with the snobs in this case being their leadership).

I’d really like to get back into that kind of default cultural image. Cops were mostly corrupt (Serpico) or idiots (Cannonball Run), or else inept (Escape from New York, or all of those stupid Charles Bronson movies).

It just feels like we hit that point where the default is to love Big Brother.

Wasn’t there also a report today (I think) about an unusual level of sunspot activity? Without digging into it, I think I sort of just assumed they were related.

I have AT&T fiber and a Verizon iPhone and I didn’t notice disruptions on either. My partner has an AT&T iPhone and didn’t notice any issues.

Ironically, Robocop would have defended him from the terminators.

I really do miss the 80s/90s era anti-capitalist dystopian future movies. We have the Purge series now, which has been pretty good (at least 3 and 4), but nothing approaching the massive numbers of productions ranging from They Live to Rollerboys to Robocop to Running Man and so many others.

It feels like we’ve hit a tipping point where subconsciously at least we’ve figured out we’re actually the bad guys from Red Dawn and the Wolverines are the people we’re killing, and just decided to lean into it. I’m waiting for Handmaid’s Tale to get a Birth of a Nation makeover in the next ten years.

It wasn’t, really. We need to stop attributing some kind of infinite foresight and wisdom to the authors of the constitution. The Supreme Court was a bad idea poorly implemented, the senate as the superior house was a fucking terrible idea, and the independent executive is not defensible at this point.

The authors (who, let’s remember, were working with a 17th century philosophy on the nature of humankind that has since been discredited) were operating on entirely different premises, for an entirely different country, and balancing things like slavery and freedom and democracy versus rule by the elite (the elite were justified to rule by their identity as being elites) by trying to come to a middle ground compromise on those and related issues. It’s really kind of crap by modern democratic, political, and philosophical standards. The only reason it hasn’t been addressed is that we’ve become self-aware enough that we’re terrified that US democracy has fallen to the point that we could only do worse than 18th century slaveholders, landlords, and wealthy lawyers.

To make it explicit, the authors thought that a) the rich would put the country’s interests ahead of their own, b) that selfishness would mean people wanted to protect their branch of government rather than their party, and c) that part b would be a sufficient bulwark against demagoguery. They believed in a world where men (and I mean men, specifically, and rich men in particular) were rational actors who would act in their own self-interest.

Don’t get me wrong - they were reading the scholars of their time - but if political and social science hasn’t made advances in the past three centuries we should probably just give it up.

May I present to you the teratoma?

If you’re feeling brave, go ahead and do an image search. Not only more cells, but things like teeth and hair and bones.

Nice work, god. Great design. Absolute perfection in his image and all that.

It will rise to the level where the supply and demand curves meet, modulo market uncertainty and information imbalance.

I’ve rented several places that listed “no pets,” and after telling them I’d pay an extra $200 per month or whatever because I had two 75lb pit bulls, no one even blinked. If they had originally thought they could get away with charging the extra $200 and people would snap it up, they would have.

Most people renting houses do not do sufficient due diligence on market rates, and there’s enough variability in both housing and tenants that it’s probably a bit difficult to price ideally. If you have a large enough company that you can write some kind of statistical analysis and are renting similar/identical places in the same building, that’s one thing. If you’re a new buyer just purchasing a second house to rent over on 2nd Street because it’s $800k and you think you can cover the mortgage in rent after looking at Zillow, that’s something else.

It’s totally not how it works. If you could get an extra $400/month because someone was willing to pay that, you’d do it.

I already control technology with my thoughts. I just use my fingers to do it.