In the early days, mages were less powerful because there was less power in the Aether. Their most powerful spells could only destroy small houses. Plenty of small houses were destroyed as these mages learned their skills, but it was mostly their own houses, and they learned from their mistakes. Over time, these mages not only became more skilled at their craft, they also improved the power all mages had to draw on, weaving isolated pockets of Aether together into one large Aether-net.

Through this, the mages were able to accomplish much, much more. But it meant that new mages could draw on power far greater than a new mage knows how to control.

99% of the time it’s fine, because 99% of the time the person who wrote the Makefile undertands Makefiles and knows that the first thing you do is define a default target. A default target that’s chosen reasonably is a very nice feature of make because there are no standard names for targets, and no easy way to find out the names of targets other than trying to read the Makefile, which can be a pain in the ass.

The ideal would be someone who was say a Major, or a relatively high rank, then left the military and had a successful career as an executive in the private sector, or one who reached a very high non-appointed post in the government via promotion. Someone who is familiar with the culture of the military and understands how things work, but doesn’t know the high ranking military members, and has no friendships with them, no obligations to them and won’t show any favouritism. OTOH, someone who has the personnel-management skills and small “p” political skills that you need in that kind of job.

But, you’re not promoted. You’re selected for promotion, so you shouldn’t be vacating your position just because your name was put up for promotion. Whatever the reason, it’s stupid.

Really, it should be the people who are not selected for promotion who are at risk.

If you have an excellent Navy Commander who deserves to be promoted to Captain, but you have too many Captains, then maybe it’s time to choose your worst Captain and retire them to make room. It doesn’t make any sense to take the Captain who was up for promotion to Admiral and didn’t get it and retire them instead.

And yes, Jensen cheated on his wife with a woman who has the same last name.

… as himself, not as his wife. If his wife goes by Huang it’s because she married him.

Seems like he watched too much stepsister porn.

Canta y no llores!
Porque cantando se alegran,
Cielito lindo, los corazones.

Well done, good sleuthing.

It’s the red patch on the lapel that looks really out of place for what I’d expect of a British-derived uniform.

This is the kind of uniform I was thinking of

Some searching leads me to think these are called “gorget patches”, but I’m not sure of all the details.

The reason that former US allies are still not going to trust the US after this vote is that after the absolute shit-show that is a Trump presidency with a GOP house and GOP senate, 50% of American men are STILL voting Republican.

And, that’s the vote. That’s not the people who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the GOP this time, but stayed home rather than vote Democratic.

It’s just a matter of time before the US swings back to MAGA again. If that happens the US might once again renege on its treaties, threaten allies, start wars, and break international laws.

Which English-speaking country has uniforms that look like that? That looks Russian or Spanish or something.

1. After WWII one of the whole reasons behind the European Union was that the countries in Europe should be interdependent. Why? Because when you’re interdependent it’s a lot harder to go to war. Europeans realized they were strongest when they were part of an alliance, not when they were standing alone. Interdependence isn’t the same thing as dependence. The Germans found that out when they realized they depended on Russia for natural gas supplies, but Russia didn’t really need them. It’s probably not a good thing how much the US depends on production in China, but that doesn’t mean that all manufacturing should be done in the US and the US should be an isolated island. That leads to weakness. Look at North Korea, for example.
2. The US is the furthest thing possible from an empty cup. The US is incredibly wealthy and powerful. It was easily able to donate food aid to the poorest places in Africa without hurting Americans at all. In fact, this was a major subsidy for American farmers. In exchange, there was a lot of goodwill towards the US in Africa. The best African scholars wanted to study in American universities, and often to move to the US and provide the US with their talents. Now they’re going other places. And, if you’re going to prioritize your own people, you should actually do something for your own people. Prioritizing your own people isn’t tax cuts for the rich, which is the MAGA agenda. Maybe the reason it felt like an “empty cup” to some people is that the richest of the rich have been getting obscenely rich while the poorer just keep getting poorer, but that’s the MAGA agenda.
3. The election process is secure. Illegal immigrants can’t and don’t vote. In some places legal immigrants can vote in city and state elections… and why not? They’re here legally, they pay taxes. Why shouldn’t they also get a vote? The idea that illegal immigrants vote or that elections are insecure is just MAGA propaganda. Occasionally people have been found to have been voting illegally, but it’s often Republicans. Trump voted many times in places he didn’t live, but nobody on the right raised a stink about that. But, this happens in small enough numbers that it very rarely has any effect.
4. Sure, veterans should be taken care of. Both parties failed there. Just look how hard Jon Stewart fought to get 9/11 victims health care problems covered by the government. It’s more typically the republicans who cut off aid to veterans because they hate the idea of anybody getting government benefits. And, again, the US can take care of US veterans and take care of the poorest and least well off in the world. And, often, that benefits the US. When the US spends money fighting the spread of Ebola in Africa, that means it’s less likely that someone will travel to the US and spread it there.
5. I don’t think most people are fans of illegal immigration. But, it’s incredibly difficult to stop. The only realistic way is to turn the country into a police state. Even Trump didn’t go that far, he only went after the dark-skinned people who might be here illegally. But, that’s going to miss any light-skinned illegal immigrant. Of course, most people would say that’s the point. It was really more about race than about illegal immigration. In any case, most people who are in the US illegally aren’t the ones crossing the southern border. They’re people who arrive on a plane and then overstay their visa. It’s very difficult to track them down. Having said that, most people in the US illegally work extremely hard and are never going to get any of the benefits that legal residents have. No social security, no medicare, etc. They are almost always net contributors to society, often because they have to send money back home. They do jobs that Americans wouldn’t do, at least for that wage. Also, it would be a lot easier to crack down on illegal immigration if they actually prosecuted business owners who hired illegal immigrants. Too many business owners are effectively cheating the country by hiring someone who doesn’t have the right to work in the US, then exploiting them knowing they have no real options, and raking in profits because they don’t have to pay payroll taxes, healthcare, or any other benefits to someone working illegally. Those are the people who should get prosecuted. If they were being prosecuted and were afraid to hire illegal immigrants, there would be a lot fewer people wanting to stay because finding work would be so hard.
6. Great. Now shut up about it too?
7. You say that, but you wouldn’t say that when someone passes as the other gender. If someone who was born a woman but now has a thick beard and a deep voice goes into a women’s bathroom, you’d be the first one screaming about it.
8. Schools are for learning, and the only people interfering with the curriculum are Republicans.
9. The US has mental health issues, so do most countries. The US is worse off because there’s no safety net. People worry about healthcare because it isn’t automatic. They worry about retirement because the system is broken. They worry about their own safety because of all the guns and violence. The US should address its mental health crisis, but that will require the government spending a lot of money, and traditionally MAGA people somehow want this problem solved, but don’t want to pay for it.
10. Guns are the problem. Every other country regulates them for a reason. Of course background checks are a good idea. But, that’s not enough. Does someone who is granted permission for a gun need to go for a re-evaluation every year? Are MAGA people really going to accept the word of a government official about who passes the background check? Are MAGA people really going to support checking the home of someone who has never had a background check to ensure they don’t have guns? Somehow I think this is a smokescreen.

As for just wanting a government that protects your rights, secures your borders, defends your freedoms and then gets out of the way, what about point 1? Should the government get out of the way and allow free trade between countries, or should it be policing what’s going in and out? Should it be spending money to prop up American companies so that they can compete with foreign companies? If American companies are making shitty computer chips for $100 when Taiwan is making great ones for $10, there will be a huge black market for the much better Taiwanese product. So, are you going to spend a lot of tax money ensuring that no Taiwanese chips get into the US, or are you going to get out of the way and allow people the freedom to buy what they want from wherever makes it cheapest? Are you going to eliminate all farm subsidies? That’s the government getting out of the way, and then the US becomes dependent on food being grown elsewhere. Or, are you going to pay for subsidies out of tax dollars to ensure that Americans are eating American-grown food?

What about point 2 and 4? You seem to also want a government that takes care of veterans and Americans. Which is it? Is the government supposed to take care of Americans, or just get out of the way? Also, does getting out of the way mean that Americans get scammed and the government does nothing about it? Does it mean that foods and medicines aren’t inspected? Does it mean that the stock market is unregulated and Ponzi schemes are rampant? Or, is some regulation good?

What about 7? You also want a government that polices bathrooms.

What about 8? You want a government that ensures that schools don’t teach students something that you find offensive.

What about 9? Do you want the government treating the mental health crisis or not?

What about 10? Is the government going to do background checks, and ensure that anybody who hasn’t passed a background check doesn’t have guns? Or, is it the status quo where even the mentally ill have the freedom to shoot stuff?

Also, how much do you want to spend securing the borders? It used to be about 0.1% of GDP, now it’s 1%. Should it be 10%? 20%? Whatever you spend, some people will slip through. It’s impossible to completely eliminate illegal immigration. And, it’s not just the poors. Elon Musk violated the immigration rules. At what point are you spending so much to fight illegal immigration that you’re just wasting money? Is the 85 billion being spent on ICE really money well spent? And, aside from spending, do you want the government to ensure your freedom, or police the country for illegal immigrants? Even if you spend 1 year of the US GDP to build a perfectly secure wall at the Mexican border, you’re still going to have people coming in legally on a tourist visa or something and then just not going home on time. So, to catch those people are you going to have checkpoints spread throughout the state where people have to present their papers? That’s going to catch some of those illegal immigrants, but that’s going to conflict pretty strongly with merely defending your freedom and getting out of the way.

Ok, once we get to 90 million 1GW datacenters we should start worrying. Currently we’re approaching 1.

There is actually a spot, the L2 Lagrange point, where something can orbit in a way where it’s balanced from the sun’s gravity and the earth’s gravity, and as as a result anything orbiting there will continuously be in the earth’s shadow.

That’s where they put the James Webb space telescope, because being in the Earth’s shadow means it can avoid interference by the sun and stay super cold, allowing it to take amazing readings of distant things.

Unfortunately, if you’re out where the sun doesn’t shine, your solar panels don’t work very well, and for something as hungry as a datacenter, that’s a problem.

The sun is continuously delivering 173 petawatts (PW) of energy to the earth, the biggest planned datacenter will have a capacity of about 1 GW, or 0.000001 PW.

The heat created through datacenters, and all other human activity combined, is minuscule compared to the incoming heat delivered by the sun. The reason climate change is an issue isn’t that humans are doing things that generate heat, it’s that by dumping CO2 into the atmosphere we’re preventing the earth from being able to effectively radiate that heat back into space.

The amount of heat the earth normally radiates is roughly equal to the amount of heat the sun delivers. But, CO2 and other greenhouse gases are preventing the heat from radiating into space. Instead it gets trapped in the atmosphere, so the planet warms up.

Nothing you have mentioned is socialism

Of course it’s socialism. It’s genuinely astonishing how people don’t understand that virtually every country in the world right now has a Mixed Economy: “A mixed economy is an economic system that includes both elements associated with capitalism, such as private businesses, and ones associated with socialism, such as nationalized government services.”

Providing social welfare programs is a fundamental function of virtually every form of government

And the mechanism through which that is done is… socialism. The government could choose not to do any of those things and let the free market sort it out and it would be… capitalism. This isn’t rocket surgery.

Your argument that every economy in the world is a hybrid

The correct term is Mixed Economy.

specifically incorporate socialism, is fundamentally incorrect

No, it is a standard view, as you can see if you just read that Wikipedia entry.

So, you know how a good thermos keeps its contents hot or cold, depending on what you put in it?

You know the trick they use to do that? They use a vacuum.

Heat can be passively transferred using convection, conduction and radiation. Convection requires the movement of fluid, there’s no fluid in a vacuum so that can’t happen. Conduction requires that one vibrating molecule causes another adjacent molecule to vibrate. Again, not possible in a vacuum because there are no molecules to transfer that vibration. That leaves radiation.

(In a thermos it’s not quite that simple. A thermos isn’t floating in space, the outside needs to connect to the inside somehow, so even though there’s a big vacuum bottle, the heat gets transferred through the parts that aren’t in a vacuum.)

Radiation is possible in a vacuum, it’s just really inefficient. People used to see radiation transfer in a vacuum all the time: incandescent light bulbs. They’re much more rare these days. But, in that case a filament was heated up so much that it glowed white hot. To reduce the heat transfer, that white hot filament was put in a vacuum – the bulb of the light bulb. If you ever touched one, you know they got hot. But, the filament was 2500 celsius, and the bulb itself was maybe slightly over 100C. That shows how inefficient radiation is. Even with something that’s thousands of degrees, it only heated the glass of the bulb from say 20C to 120C.

So, it’s hard to dump heat in space. The only thing that works is radiation, and radiation is much less effective when things are not glowing white hot. In addition, anything in space is getting heated up by the sun. So, not only do you need to dump any heat the device produces itself, it also needs to dump any heat it’s receiving from the sun.

What are two of the main things that datacenters need? Power and cooling. The need for power is famous because it’s driving up electricity costs. The need for cooling is well known because of all the water being used.

To meet the power needs, a datacenter would need massive solar panels to collect as much sunlight as possible. The solar panels on the ISS provide about 30kW of power. A small datacenter (and I mean small), uses 1 MW. So, for one small DC you’d need 30x the number of solar panels as on the ISS. If you’re talking a conventional pre-AI datacenter, it’s more like 100MW, so you’d need 3000x the number of solar panels as on the ISS.

Solar panels create electricity from sunlight, but by design they have to be facing the sun, which means they get heated up too. So, before you even turn on a computer in the DC, you have to find a way to dump all that heat that the solar panels are creating. Then, let’s say you want to actually turn on the computers in the DC. On earth can be cooled by dumping water on something hot and letting water evaporate. That’s really easy to do, and really cheap. You just move the heat from the computers into the water and it goes into the sky. But, in space, there’s no sky to evaporate into, and no source of water. So, you need radiative cooling. Now, just imagine how much radiative cooling you’d need to match the performance of a simple “dump water on it” cooling system.

tl;dr: The idea of datacenters in space is ludicrous. Even someone as stupid as Musk knows that. But, investors are dumber than Musk – or at least investors think that there are other investors that dumb, so they won’t get stuck with the shares if they need to sell them. Musk needs the belief that datacenters in space to be possible or his shares all crash in value.

What’s amazing is that Americans don’t live in a purely capitalist state. Nobody does. Every major country in the world has a mix of capitalism and socialism. AFAIK no country has purely private firefighters. UPS and FedEx exist, but so does the national postal service. In many countries various utilities like water, sewer, electrical, etc are publicly owned, but in most places the phone service is private.

China initially went full publicly owned, but it was a disaster, so they now have a mix of public and private. Cuba has had to open up its economy to allow privately owned businesses. Meanwhile, the US learned long ago that purely private is a disaster. Policing used to be private, run by companies like the Pinkertons. Firefighting used to be for-profit only.

90% of people campaigning for “socialism” are talking about European-style socalism, at least as a first step. A social safety net. Healthcare provided by the state. Utilities owned by the state, or at least heavily regulated, etc.

But, Americans, while they love the fire department and couldn’t imagine replacing it with a for-profit fire service, somehow think the economy will collapse if the government opens a grocery store.

It’s not the racism of the country that’s at issue, it’s how the prisons are run. US prisons are a hellscape designed to cost as little as possible, where the prisoners have the freedom to do drugs, form gangs, etc. because there aren’t enough jailers to stop that, and the few jailers they have are easily corrupted. Virtually every rich country in the world has more control over its prisoners than that.

I think she is, but I don’t think she’d convince enough people she is. She needs a higher office than congress to convince people, ideally one with executive experience, like governor. It’s too bad that she won’t have a chance to run for NY governor before 2030. And, she has no real ties to any other state, so she can’t go to her second home state and run there.

In British prisons?

Those are some hard-working mofos.

Based on the one guy you know.