sylver_dragon

Soon to be “air delivered” by Israel to civilians in Gaza.

I would add the admittance of China to the WTO as another proximate cause. And one which probably had more of a material effect than NAFTA; but, NAFTA had already become a GOP talking point and it just stuck. China’s entry to the WTO was also moved over the finish line by Bush II, though most of the ground work was laid by Clinton. So, it wouldn’t have had the same clean narrative as NAFTA. US Employment in manufacturing went into freefall in late 2000 and early 2001. This was also during a recession, so that is intermixed with the effects of those changes in international trade. But, even as the recession receded and the US entered an economic boom, leading up to the 2008 crash, manufacturing employment in the US either held steady or decreased slightly. It’s unsurprising that the same period saw a lot of offshoring of manufacturing to China. And this was also the period of Neoliberal economists pushing “comparative advantage” and how the US losing all those manufacturing jobs was a good thing.

So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
– Barack Obama, 2008

I’d go for an “it depends” answer. If they are just out and about looking for food, most would probably run. No animal wants to risk injury and fighting with an unknown enemy carries too much risk. So, their instincts will likely make them run. However, if you do it near their den and/or young, the instinctual calculus may be very different and you could end up as an impromptu baby snack.

It probably comes down to the difficulty of of transport. We have a local fruit in the Eastern US, the Pawpaw. It’s a fantastic fruit and has a history of cultivation in the area. But, it does not transport well and has to be eaten pretty quickly after they ripen. So, it’s not a wide commercial success.

Also not mentioned in the article at all: the polling error.
While a 4% shift could be significant, I’d also bet that the error bars of the two polls overlap.

The Holocaust was unique in the industrialization of genocide. The Nazi party organized the state around the process, using industrial technology to track, move and kill millions of people in an efficient manner. It was also very well documented and was publicized in a way, which made people really aware of what was occurring. As horrible as genocide is, at any scale, most are fairly limited in geography and organization. The Nazis showed us just how bad things can be, if we bend the resources of a modern, industrial state, to those ends. So, I’d tend to disagree with Walz’s thesis that the Holocaust wasn’t unique. Though, I would still agree that it should be taught in context with other genocides which have happened and which are happening today. It can become an example of just how bad a genocide can become. But, the goal should be to teach students about the causes, and processes of genocides. So that, we hopefully will try to stop them from occurring.

That said, that the modern Israeli State uses the horrible things, which happened to Jews in the early 20th century, to justify doing similarly horrible things to Palestinians today, is downright atrocious. It cheapens the horrors faced by Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

I’d suggest reading up on parasomnia. It’s a class of disorders including sleep terrors, sleepwalking, nightmare disorder, sleep-related eating disorder, sleep paralysis and others. For my own issues (Night Terrors) I have found that I can largely manage them through lifestyle choices: get enough sleep regularly, don’t stay up too late, don’t drink caffeine in the afternoon/evening, manage stress, keep the sleeping room cool. Finding your own triggers can be useful for managing further episode.

His first speech as the Dem VP Nominee was really good. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be the catch phrase he’s pushing, but his line about mind your own damn business was fantastic.

The more I learn about this guy, the more I see him as the perfect counterpoint to Trump and Vance. Politicians like to talk about “the working man”. Who’s more in touch with “the working man”, a guy like Walz, who actually worked for a living; or, a guy like Trump who was born with a silver spoon in his ass?

Because the changes would likely require a Constitutional Amendment. For setting a term limit, Article 3 of the US Constitution establishes that judges serve while “in good standing”. This has been interpreted as meaning “for life”. And this interpretation has some pretty strong backing from Hamilton’s writing in The Federalist Papers No. 78. While the Federalist Papers do not, technically, have legal standing in the US, they are often used to fill in the gaps left by the imprecise language of the US Constitution.

Enforcing a code of ethics is probably a muddier situation. Article 3 establishes that Judges serve during “Good Behavior”. But how is that defined and who gets to define it? Technically, The House of Representatives can impeach a judge (and this has happened in the past). So, the Legislature could simply say, “we’ll impeach judges for violating this list of things”. At the same time, an impeachment is not self-executing. So, a judge would not be automatically fired for violating one of those things. At best, the list would be a guideline and the sitting House (at the time of the impeachment) would have to draw up and vote on articles of impeachment. Could the legislature pass a law making the removal of a judge self-executing by defining “Good Behavior”? Maybe, though the same Judaical Branch whom it would affect would be the one to make that decision. I strongly suspect they would say, “no”. And that may not be the worst outcome.

In Federalist No. 78 Hamilton makes the argument that the Judiciary must be very independent from the Legislature and Executive branches to avoid becoming an arm of those branches. The claim is that the Judiciary must be free to judge the actions of the other two branches, and rule purely on the Constitution and the Law. If the Legislature and Executive get to start tinkering with the tenure of judges, via rule making, there will be some incentive for the Judaical branch to begin serving the will of the other two branches. That’s fine, if you agree with the other two branches, it’s less so when you don’t. In the end, I suspect that an enforceable code of ethics is going to require a Constitutional Amendment as well.

The changes to Presidential Immunity are probably the worst one to evaluate. I’m convinced that this decision was very much the court picking a position and then papering over all the hideous gaps in it. Unfortunately, because the Judiciary is the final arbiter on this one, and they say the decision is based on the Constitution, any change will have to come as a Constitutional Amendment. I recognize the circular nature of that logic, but that’s kinda where we are at. Unless and until the make up of the Supreme Court changes, Nixon was right.

And for fun irony, the US President is actually not involved in passing an amendment to the US Constitution. That process takes 2/3 of each House of Congress and then 2/3 of the States. The President doesn’t get a chance to veto/sign the Amendment. And, that has about the same chance as a snowball fight in Hell of happening right now. So, everything around this subject is just useless posturing. Nothing is changing any time soon.

As much “doom and gloom” as the article pushes, I kinda feel that the compromised keys being well known makes detection easier. The malicious binary needs to be signed with one of these keys, this means that there will be very specific structures (e.g. the public key) at well known locations in the file. This is exactly the type of threat which anti-virus is good at detecting. Assuming a network’s security folks aren’t completely asleep at the switch, these attacks should get picked up and blocked pretty fast.

There is a reason attackers spend so much time and effort obfuscating code and keeping files off the disk. While A/V may be a pretty terrible security control and easily bypassed in many cases, watching for files with well known patterns is one of the few things A/V tends to do well.

Thank fuck. Biden’s actually been a pretty good President and I say that after strongly supporting Bernie over him. He’s got some flaws and (including some pretty big ones, e.g. Gaza). But, he’s also had some good accomplishments and finally recognized that continuing to steer this ship intro the dirt wasn’t the best plan. So, Thank you President Biden and let’s all now pull together and get whoever replaces him elected. It’s probably Harris. Again, not my first choice, and I suspect the selection process isn’t going to be terribly Democratic. But, we missed that boat by not having a real primary. But, we now have a chance for someone without one foot in the grave and the other on a patch of ice, to beat Trump. Let’s not squander it.

I may be wrong but I figure if it’s on Fox

Oddly enough, polling is the one area where Fox News isn’t a complete shit show. 538 has consistently rated them highly throughout the years. In this case, the poll was run by Beacon Research/Shaw & Co. 538’s pollster ratings have them at #15, with a 2.8 rating out of 3.0. While it’s proper to be skeptical of anything with the Fox name attached, this is one of those areas where you can accept the poll at face value. That said, it’s still June and polls this far out are wildly bad at predicting the final outcome. They are better as a barometer of current sentiment and may help candidates to calibrate their messaging and campaigns as we get closer to the election. Also, a 1-2 point “lead” is almost certainly within the margin of error. So, this poll is really saying “it’s a dead heat” and drawing anything more of a conclusion is more of a rorschach test than anything.

Fair enough, thinking about it at a microscopic level, individual molecules/atoms of material will be pushed into positions where they are being repelled from other atoms/molecules via electromagnetic forces. Those forces won’t go away as the chemical reactions happen; so, I would guess that the answer is kinda the same as it is at the macroscopic level. When the bond which holds an individual atom in the lattice of the material is broken, those electromagnetic forces would push the resulting molecule away. So ya, it becomes heat.

Let me borrow an image to put some numbers around it:

So, in one hour, the Earth receives more energy from the sun than us humans generate in an entire year. If we took all of the energy we generated over a year (and not just the waste heat) and converted it into heat, we wouldn’t even be adding half of one percent to the system. Our direct contributions to the system are minuscule. The problem is we’re pumping out green house gasses like there’s no tomorrow. And those directly increase the amount of solar energy the Earth retains. And when we start keeping 1 or 2 more percent of that insane amount of solar energy, it adds up really, really fast.

Well, unlike the vast majority of pundits and other forecasts FiveThirtyEight had Trump at about a 28.6% chance to win, and was catching all kinds of shit over it. While you would still expect a 70-30 favorite to win a majority of the time, sometimes the dice do come up craps. So ya, while I wouldn’t take his word as gospel, he did predict Trump to flame out in the 2016 GOP Primary after all, he’s also pretty good at evaluating polling data and is probably worth taking seriously.

And let’s be honest here, the fact that Biden is somewhere between tied and a slight underdog to Trump is bad, really fucking bad. If Biden had been willing to swallow his ego a year and a half ago, and bow out of the race, we might have had a much better candidate at this point. With his numbers slipping and his approval rating being so low, it’s hard to believe we would have had worse. Of course, were he taken out behind the shed now, that could result in a lot of chaos, which could be worse for any resultant candidate. So, it may now be that Democrats are committed to Biden and just have to hope things improve for him. But, with the DNC convention yet to be held and the Democratic Candidate yet to be officially named, it may still be worth considering the metaphorical Old Yeller option.

Assuming the spring dissolves perfectly (no breakage, just complete disintegration)

I think, eventually, this assumption breaks down. As the metal is dissolved away, the internal stresses in the spring will become greater than the remaining metal can hold, and the spring will break.

And once you have found your specific collection of plugins that happen not to put the exact features you need behind a paywall but others, you ain’t touching those either.

And this is why, when I’m investigating phishing links, I’ve gotten used to mumbling, “fucking WordPress”. WordPress itself is pretty secure. Many WordPress plugins, if kept up to date, are reasonably secure. But, for some god forsaken reason, people seem to be allergic to updating their WordPress plugins and end up getting pwned and turned into malware serving zombies. Please folks, if it’s going to be on the open internet, install your fucking updates!

It’s nice to see us reaching a tipping point where the market forces are no longer pushing so hard away from EVs. And it provides a good, texbook example, of the government stepping in to promote a better technology, until that technology can be fully competitive on it’s own.

Hey now, this headline is just all kinds of wrong.
He’s a Confused, Demented Old, Convicted Felon

Call me when the global birth rate is falling.

I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of the phone ringing.
UN Data shows the Fertility Rate falling from ~2.7 Births per Woman in 2000 to ~2.3 Births per Woman in 2024. Here is a handy chart of the data from 1960 to 2021. Global birth rates have been falling for most of the 20th and 21st centuries. Barring a major shift in demographics, the world’s population should peak this century. That isn’t a terrible thing, and probably a good thing from a climate perspective. But, it will have economic consequences which we will need to deal with (aging populations, economic stagnation, shrinking workforces, shrinking economies). None of this has to be a problem, but those types of demographic changes can cause societal instability.