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.

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…

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.”

Can we start calling Amazon “AliExpress with American characteristics” now?

I can’t see how this won’t further undermine the value proposition of Prime, as yet more of their inventory is ineligible for “free 2-day shipping.”

Goung for the plausible deniability aspect.

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

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.

I figured systemd is a 90s-JRPG boss with multiple phases taking over more and more of the screen.

You hold up a Slackware CD like some sort of vampires-and-faith-objects bit.

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.

That does seem like something that would violate some rules-of-war convention.

Booby-trapping something that might be mistaken by civilians as a legitimate humanitarian aid drop risks non-combatant casualties and makes it harder for actual aid operations to operate.

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.

“Ten Bits” seems viable, although nobody cares much about the Spanish real anymore.

I put out one of those big plastic storage units with like 30 little drawers recently, figuring although 2 were missing, someone could still use it. I stood it next to the dustbin, on trash day where it would be optimally visible for anyone who wanted to scrounge it.

The bloody HOA took a picture and sent a nastygram.

Check a local coin dealer/show.

Silver ounce rounds come in infinitely many designs, and there are a lot of right-wingers in those interest groups.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them done up with his ugly maw on. I think sometines as copper too.

Discussion: you can have an “extinction event” in any ecosystem-- not just biological ones.

For example, the abandonment of steam locomotives in the mid-20th-century, or the Home Computer crash of the 1980s.

Similar to a biological mass extinction, you have:

• A discernable ecosystem change, either a sudden event (the introduction of reliable, mass-produced diesel locomotives), or a measurable decline of “habitability factors” (as hundreds of firms brought cheap 8-bit computers to market, retail space and overall consumer interest saturated)
• a rapid diversification of new and exotic types to fill the vacated niches (the cabless “B-unit” and flexible “road-switcher” locomotive types didn’t exist in the steam era. The post-crash computer market brought in new entrants like cheap IBM clones, the C128 and Atari 130XE, all chasing a sub-$1000 market that was now free of Sinclair, Coleco, and Texas Instruments)
• followed by a shake out and consolidation of the survivors/winners as they select for fitness in the new world (ALCO was a strong #2 in the diesel locomotive market in 1950, but didn’t make it to 1970. The C128 never became the world-beater its predecessor did.)
• a few niches largely untouched (China was still building steam locomotives into the 1990s. The Apple II series lasted about as long.)

A month or so ago; I had a 32G card, and bought a 128G card.