Eh maybe “wasn’t stupid” is more accurate before the brain worms got him.

I want to agree with you, but Elon is not stupid and definitely had something to do with the success of Falcon 9.

What I think he is good at is having crazy innovative ideas and pushing his engineering team to make it some kind of reality. Being able to spend the time to listen to engineering, work through the issues, find ways to do things to make it work while still achieving the fundamental goals.

My guess is that he’s not had the time to do that process and instead became the “do it my way or you’re fired” guy. Less Elon could be bad because they have less chance to talk sense into him. He certainly didn’t give up any control when he gave up his focus.

The graph on the right only shows that more variables impact unemployment than just interest rates alone, which you obviously know. It doesn’t prove or disprove the model on the left, which is a pretty simplified relationship. Monetary policy, like adjusting interest rates, was demonstrated to be quite effective just recently with the Fed successfully keeping inflation and employment under control with these tools over the past few years.

Wrong thread

Why would an optional feature be a deal breaker?

It also seems like an issue that could be easily solved by whitelisting.

We need lots and lots of lawyers on our side to fight this stuff. Sometimes we will lose in court, but often we won’t. A lot of judges actually do believe in the rule of law. Not everything will make it to the Supreme Court and not everything that does make it there will be upheld.

If we don’t fight things in court, nothing stops them from taking effect, so that is priority number 1 in terms of funding. We need to pay good lawyers good money or else they’ll watch the US crumble with the rest of us.

Rug puller. He got his, now anyone else can fuck off.

SLAM

Their only solution is wait until enough people become leftists to have a successful revolution. They’ll say it with a straight face like it’s a realistic near-term plan.

No you do both. Voting is the hedge if the “tear down the system” plan doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked here for 250+ years and a civil war, but it is because of voting and labor action and protests we have made any progress.

So far Musk’s relationship with DoD is mostly just hucking their satellites into orbit. He’s not really doing the crazy military stuff.

DoD is way more interested in the big primes - Lockheed, Northrop, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Boeing, etc. Satellites are just a piece of the bigger package. They still need missiles, tanks, and aircraft to act on what the satellites teach them.

Leftists are just about the only group that will go around saying they “won’t vote” if there isn’t a candidate making enough concessions to them. Leftists are a small group but they are enough they could sway an election if they came out and made their voices heard by voting instead of just holding signs and yelling. But getting that to happen isn’t as simple as just saying you’re against the genocide, because Harris did that and it wasn’t enough. It isn’t as simple as supporting unions, because she did that and it wasn’t enough. It isn’t as simple as supporting rights for women, minorities, and LGBTQ, because she did that and it wasn’t enough.

The right isn’t stupid enough to believe that they can get their oligarchy without winning elections, but belief in incremental change is fundamentally incompatible with a lot of leftist ideology.

Checks and balances only work if the branches fundamentally care about their job and the country rather than their party. We just have a completely disfunctional parliamentary system where sometimes, just for funsies, the prime minister and cabinet are the minority party so nothing gets done. Oh and also we have a critical part of our legislature elected just from arbitrary lines.

Again the polls seemed to be OK. I need to have the article ready with the headline “We are a normal polling error away from a landslide victory for either candidate”.

I agree with you, what we’ve been doing hasn’t worked. Allowing Reagan and Bush and Bush and Trump to get elected hasn’t helped anyone. You could argue Nader got GWB elected but cheating and the Supreme Court were a big part of that too. How different would our current politics be if we had a term or two of Gore instead of Bush? Hard to say. Maybe primary voters wouldn’t have felt like they needed to pick a “safe” neolib over a demsoc in 2016 if they could believe he’d be viable.

Posting memes on lemmy won’t change Kamala’s positions or strategies, but convincing “both sides” lemmy users how important it is to pick the better of two options could change things. Every time the left-leaning party loses due to lack of turnout (aka punishing them for not being left enough) they move right instead of left. The only way to move the country left is to do whatever you can to get the most left-leaning viable candidate elected. Over time this pushes the whole electorate left.

I mostly agree with you, especially point (1), but what are you talking about with “Hamas did genocide on Isreal last year”? They did a terror attack for sure, but that’s not genocide. Wiping out significant percentage of a population because of their ethnicity or culture is genocide (see what Isreal is doing in Gaza) and it takes months to years.

Yeah you could probably find a path through New Mexico and Arizona that’s not too mountainous, like along I-10.

But really where the US “needs” more water is where all the farms are. The cities don’t use much in comparison. It’s just a lot in a small area compared to the farms distributed in the big valleys.

I’m sorry, are you saying that a pipeline from the great lakes to Los Angeles would have to go through less mountains than from British Columbia?

* gestures vaguely at the entire mountain west *