What I hate about the current situation is that there’s no room for “Russia is a significant power that won’t suddenly vanish, so maybe if we can avoid being at complete loggerheads with them 24/7, it might avoid decades of tension and expensive military grandstanding.”

You must either fellate Putin or demand the entire 82 billion square kilometres of the Russian state turned to glass. No other options. It worries me that any more nuanced takes on Russia get pushed into the “Kremlin talking points” file.

Not that she isn’t a screwball all on her own, but we could use a less militaristic take here.

Thr death wave virus that crippled mankind requires a tech hegemony beyond belief.

The Apple II’s big selling point, compared to the other two big brands introduced in 1977 (the Radio Shack TRS-80 and Commodore PET) was colour.

But it was a weird and colour scheme that took advantage of clever Wozniak hacks to make it viable on a cheap machine. Good video hardware, and enough memory for the colour display, were spendy. That’s why even into the 1980s you’d have machines like the ZX Spectrum with limitations like “every 8x8 block can only have 2 colours” which used less memory, and 40-column screens that were readable on TVs instead of dedicated high-res monitors…

If we can pick home computers that lean into cartridges, the Atari 800XL is a real winner. Nice two-tone finish, classy silver buttons with a plexi trim oiece covering the power light.

As a reptile keeper who knows full well they don’t know when to stop eating, I find this story charming. I want to feed her a basket of eyes (pre-frozen to kill parasites)

One hour from new classic myth to kawaii. I think that’s near Rule 34 turnaround speed.

Trident TGUI9440 on a VL-bus card. Surprisingly peppy on a 486/66 overclocked to 80.

I was always disappointed that celebrity and character voice packs weren’t a thing for the voice-assistant platforms. I’d pay literal ones of dollars for a voice assistant with a Sebastian Michaelis intonation and theming.

Cortana for Windows Phone came closest, I think they did use the same voice actress as the game character.

I suspect that democracy is a “good times” system. It works well enough when the problems are either low-stakes or widely agreed upon.

When you get into a world of hard choices-- for example, anything where we have to devalue some existing wealth – suddenly there’s going to be both a lack of consensus (likely manufactured) and leaders too afraid of losing the next vote to pull the trigger.

That’s why I expect to see China solve its climate change and housing problems faster than the West. Without the almighty polls lurking in the shadows, they can say “petrol is 100 yuan a litre to discourage its use” or “we’re nationalizing second homes and disbursing them to schoolteachers.”

Maybe something failed to deliver for the people there that made them lose faith in Western institutions?

Some quality of life factors that didn’t appear in the metrics we track? An overall shift in role or relevance?

If you’re not connecting with an audience, there’s more to fixing it than berating said audience and acting surprised when they’re not interested in what you’re pushing.

Goung for the plausible deniability aspect.

Electric grid implodes It was like that when I got there, sir.

I thoight the trademarks were also claimed as reparations after World War I.

Fujifilm successfully repositioned towards other chemistry. I know there’s that Eastman spinoff but why wasn’t it as successful?

ARM has a high probability of blowing a tire.

They have a complex relationship with their licensees which may try to cause self-sabotage trying to pull more of the money home. See the various licensing fights.

If you don’t want or need x86, what does ARM have to offer-- in the long term-- over RISC-V, which is much less coupled to a single firm’s caprice? We can assume the gap in performance will continue to shrink ovrr time.

Maybe it’s time to re-randomize the map. Six Californias, merge a couple Dakotas, and a new state called “Steve” in the middle of Texas for no good reason.

States seem to be a classic seemed-sensible-in-1790 hack, goofier and less relevant as time goes on. At best you get arbitrage plays, finding the most comfortable jurisdiction for your particular graft. At worst, it seems to be a great line for the scum too stupid and/or crooked to get a federal position to settle at.

I wonder if a UK-style model, where the regional governments are devolved narrow lists of things they can play at government with, would work better.

Some game shows would give the contestant the novelty cheque they were handed at the end as a souvenir. I wonder if they’d do the same for other tokens. ‘I want my free spins!’

This group offends me for ruining the good nane of LGB model trains.

What you’ve gotta do is overrun their convention with model railway enthusiasts. Lovely peoole, but I suspect they’d sort of wreck the messaging.

“What is our number-one enemy?” Crowd: “poorly gauged track!” “Pets that rip up the scenery!” “That super-expensive model that runs like crap!”

But conversely, the “spoiler” factor of even a fuly realized Green campaign is nil if the Democrats tack left. Pull the plug on Bibi and Jill Stein has very little to talk about.

It’s like they know the party will never bother to win those voters, and assumes they’ll capture them as good-enough/lesser-evil.

Aside from anything else, an “alien intelligence” will either:

• Be immediately ignored and villianized for “not understanding humans” if they suggest any regulations or caps on superfluous waste that might have any economic impact.
• Be the perfect proxy delivery-entity for whatever genocide-the-poor/build-Elysium/flee-to-seasteads plan the rich actually want, in which case its conclusions will be holy and $10000% perfect examples of divine insight.

Wasn’t that why he loves fast food? It’s easier to target the White House supply chain for a precision poisoning than to try to hit every McDonald’s in a 50km radius and hope to get lucky.

Yeah. They don’t tell you at all what to do with the 3rd sword.