70 or older in my family. My dad’s wife just posted an excited post on Facebook about a Tesla Concorde taking off, and do had to explain to her that it’s a flight simulator. She’s 73.

I think old people are the ones less likely to understand this stuff.

Any time a budget is not passed on time, House, Senate and Presidential/VP salaries are cut to minimum wage until a new budget takes effect.

(I say “cut to minimum wage” because unfortunately the Constitution has been interpreted as dictating that their pay never be interrupted. It does not, however, specify how much they have to be paid.)

In Atlanta I had a choice of natural gas companies, even though it would have been cheaper if there were simply one single regulated monopoly.

Competing utilities are just a way to give out cash to rent-seeking middlemen.

Yeah, the US is the only thing keeping Israel in business. They’re useful to keep an eye on Iran, because we don’t like Iran, because…?

Saudis need our weapons, and Qatar likes the money we spend to keep our increasing number of bases there. But these are purely transactional relationships that we can have with anyone.

I think Kuwait are still fans of the US.

Other than that, everyone hates us because we protect Israel, and they hate Israel. Why don’t we just join the club, and pick up an entire region of strategic allies instead of “Israel at all costs”?

I received these about once a week when I was a Spectrum customer. Since I dumped them when ATT fiber became available, I now receive them three times a week.

It was great when Ohlmeyer went on Colbert Report and got mocked for saying NBC was going to lose money on the Winter Olympics. Colbert did a fund drive to help, and presented him with a giant check for like $5.08

It’s also great that he’s been dead since 2017. Conan was right when he called him one of the silverback gorillas running TV.

When AIPAC stops buying the US government.

It’s one of the better -isms currently available.

Workers owning the means of production is the way it should be. Until we can mature further.

If you’re a fellow American, please stop weighing in on this whole thing. We shouldn’t be propping up Israel to begin with. We shouldn’t be involved in this at all.

Our support of Israel was certainly factored into Hamas’s decision to escalate things. And the blowback we’ll get from unconditionally supporting Israel is completely, COMPLETELY predictable.

Covid gave us an opportunity to turn the page on the war on terror, and now our unwavering support for one side of this conflict is going to prompt some yahoo to commit something stupid, and start the war on terror up all over again.

There is no upside in supporting one side over the other in this one - we need to sit it out. Stop sending billions to Israel every year and providing a pretext for some sort of revenge attack on us. Saudi doesn’t care what we think anymore, OPEC is going to do whatever it wants.

The US foreign affairs community seems to be of the opinion that our involvement in Israel and its recognition by KSA or any other big player in the region is going to secure the status of the petrodollar. But de-dollarization is going to happen anyway, thanks to BRICS.

So we’ll continue to sell arms to Saudi Arabia while they continue to not supply us with enough oil to keep prices low, and we’ll continue to prop up Israel while they continue to piss off the entire region.

And everyone is just… okay with this?

I know we have outposts in Israel keeping an eye on - as an example - Iran and shit, but why do we have to be enemies with Iran in the first place? Our situation with Israel just seems like a pointless one-way relationship that only serves to further alienate the rest of the middle east from us.

The US doesn’t have any strategic benefit in propping up Israel other than doing so being weirdly important to white voters.

I live in SoCal and love it, and do not intend to have kids, but it really seems like you’d be struggling to raise 3 kids around here on less than $150k (2 cars, rent/mortgage, etc).

Obviously many people manage it somehow, but it must be incredibly stressful. I have no idea how most of them do it.

Hillary’s plan was being developed and debated in '93-94, Romneycare in Massachusetts happened in 2006.

In a vacuum, sure, hydrogen for personal vehicles is great. In reality, though, you’re down at about 30% efficiency between the H2 geting extracted from wherever, and you gassing up your car.

Additionally, if more than 5% of that H2 escapes into the atmosphere at any time, it actually does more damage to the planet than fossil fuels, by preoccupying the hydroxyl radicals in the sky that would otherwise be breaking down greenhouse gases.

Add on to that, that if I actually had to pay for hydrogen fuel, it would cost me 6x as much per mile to run my Hyundai Nexo than a Prius. H2 in SoCal is currently $36/kg at the pump, having doubled or nearly tripled in price in the last 18 months. (Somehow, in Korea it’s only $2/kg.)

H2 fuel cell tech has its place as a fuel (but not in combustion engines like BMW is trying to do though… that’s just a farce). Trucks/long-haul vehicles, planes, ships all would be better off running H2. It fuels up fast, is way lighter than any battery, and is pretty darn energy dense. But for around-town driving, BEVs right now are just a much better option. Their problem is heavy batteries and comparatively longer fueling time than gasoline/hydrogen.

Fossil fuels are just amazingly energy dense, and we’re not going to replace them 1:1 any time soon. Every alternative involves massive tradeoffs.

Source: I own a 2022 Hyundai Nexo hydrogen SUV. Love it as a car, but most of the H2 fueling stations are broken down half the time (you need to check an app to see which one, if any, are currently working), and the price of the fuel in the US is no longer viable. When my free fuel card expires in 2025, I’ll be getting either a BEV or PHEV. Lucid or Polaris are looking nice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies

Most of them, but I’m just tired.

I normally just listen to podcasts on those earbuds, but it’s what I had at the moment, so it’s what I used.

This was more true when the labels were running everything. Now you can get a lot of the material more-or-less directly from the artists on various platforms. Instead of artists getting 5% of the $$$, they can get 70%+.

Just saying that not everything you listen to is necessarily by a band signed to a label. A lot of newer talents have gotten wise to the scam the labels have been running (for the same reasons you articulated - who would knowingly sign up for that?) and are putting things out themselves instead.

This is what I’ve done. Not all it’s cracked up to be. 24/96 is still my sweet spot for casual listening (as long as the recording/mastering chain was all at least 96khz… Otherwise, whatever the weakest link in the chain was).

For having a career, though, 3 decades of piano ain’t a bad way to go.