Sculpting an unflattering portrayal of one of your petty, capricious deities seems unwise.

The article implies that tungsten pellets are particularly bad, but they’re actually a replacement for cluster bombs that could leave behind unexploded ordnance. Technology can’t save civilians from a missile targeted at where they are, but at least these missiles don’t also endanger people entering the area in the future.

I want a car with a manual transmission and ideally with rear wheel drive, so I’m looking at the Miata and the BRZ/GR86. Even the new Miatas still have real, physical gauges but the BRZ has an LCD display with the tachometer shown graphically but the speed only ever shown with digits, and that can’t be changed unless you buy the 2020 (or older) model which still has physical gauges.

I used to drive a sedan so I’d prefer a newer BRZ (I’m looking at a 2023 one) because the Miata has so little cargo space (the BRZ at least has back seats that fold down) but I’ve been renting a car with a digital display for a week and I still haven’t gotten used to it so I’m worried that I never will.

I don’t mean that the numbers flash when I’m going over the speed limit - I just mean that the value is constantly changing, the changes are abrupt (a big part of the screen updates), and visually the difference between “55” and “75” is no bigger that the difference between “55” and “57”. Actually monitoring my speed feels like having to look at my phone. This is as opposed to just seeing the speedometer needle out of the corner of my eye and knowing how fast I was going and how fast my speed was changing.

There is an element of hypocrisy in all this because American intelligence agencies were previously caught intercepting Cisco-made routers on their way to customers and updating their firmware to deploy espionage tools.

It’s not hypocrisy to try to spy on others while preventing them from spying on you.

It sounds plausible to me - the part about Hegseth, not the part about negotiations going well. (Although maybe Trump’s people are telling him that negotiations are going well.)

Well, criminals generally don’t like law enforcement officers…

Are we? I’m looking to buy a car and I think gas cars make the most sense even now, because the change in the price of gas seems like a relatively small part of the cost of car ownership. A one dollar increase in the cost of a gallon of gas works out to about $300 a year in extra costs for me. That’s not enough to tip the balance towards an electric car.

For reference, I’m comparing a Hyundai Elantra N to a Tesla Model 3 - the Hyundai costs as much as the base Tesla at about $36.5k, but to get similar performance you’d need the $42.5k premium Tesla, and that price difference pays for enough gas to go 40,000 miles.

My guess is that Trump personally has neither a good understanding of the political situation in Iran nor a contingency plan for what to do if this war isn’t won quickly, but Netanyahu presumably does have both and Israel can’t “chicken out” and leave the region the way that many people expect the US to. Thus while I remain pessimistic about the possibility of victory through air power, I presume that Israel does have some plan that isn’t clearly a bad idea.

I didn’t expect someone explicitly opposed to majority rule to call me an enemy of democracy…

As a matter of fact, I agree with you that there’s a difference between maximal democracy and good government. Sometimes it’s good to have a barrier between people’s whims and power, whether that barrier is anti-majoritarian procedure in Congress which is preventing Republicans from passing this law or a rule that prevents someone who didn’t go through the process of getting valid ID from voting.

There’s a difference between reinterpreting and simply considering a quote in context. “There” is the Strait of Hormuz and “it” is oil shipped through the strait.

Would you say the same thing if you didn’t know that it was AI? I think it actually looks pretty good overall, although some of the changes (like deciding that this character dyes her hair had has undyed roots) are odd.

Edit: It seems to do a better job with the soccer player.

Edit 2: I wonder if it works better with male faces than with female ones. It’s making the woman’s eyes and lips bigger but not the man’s.

He clearly meant defending the Strait of Hormuz specifically, not attacking Iran generally. Still a bad idea, but not what people are taking the quote to mean out of context.

It’s not enough to have fair elections - a democracy needs elections generally perceived as fair. It would have been better if the Republicans hadn’t created the widespread, false perception that voter fraud is common, but the fact of the matter is that they did and merely trying to convince the public that there is really no problem hasn’t worked so far. If 71% of the voters want to have to show proof of citizenship, and if most of the ones prevented from voting because of that are low-information voters likely to vote for Republicans anyway, I say let the Republicans shoot themselves in the foot.

I feel like Democrats shouldn’t have been fighting the Republicans on this. The law is popular, not entirely unreasonable, and potentially going to hurt Republicans rather than Democrats at the polls.

Yeah, although I admit that I thought biotech was the most interesting and important thing I wanted to do back when I chose it over 20 years ago, but knowing what I do now, I wish I had gone into machine learning instead.

Reporters and networks are prohibited from publishing the precise location of Iranian missile impacts, or even filming or photographing the extent of the damage in a way that could give away the location — restrictions designed, in the words of the army’s chief censor Col. Netanel Kula, “to prevent assistance to the enemy during wartime.”

The restrictions sound completely reasonable. This reminds me of how we would laugh when Russian soldiers uploaded detailed depictions of the damage done by Ukrainian attacks, because they were being so foolish.

But people actually do do this, if for some reason a PC is overheating or the built-in fans are making too much noise. A big fan running slowly moves more air more quietly than a bunch of little fans. I even wired an external DC fan into the PC’s power supply once so that I wouldn’t have to plug them in separately.

I worry that a major ground invasion is the least bad option available to the USA now, and the Trump administration is not capable of carrying it out.

It blows my mind that the USA somehow blundered into ruining its relationship with Hussein despite both his apparently sincere intent to stay on good terms with the USA and his clear utility as an enemy of Iran. And then blundered into a second, useless war against him despite his continued utility as an enemy of Iran.

But what about the people with strongly felt but incoherent world-views, like the ones who voted for Sanders before voting for Trump? They need memes too!