LetMeEatCake

The story of the end of reconstruction is more depressing than that, IMO.

It was successfully implemented for a decade. Then the North started to grow complacent and socially and politically wanted to move on. It's easy to pretend a problem is solved if you personally face no direct risks to it not being fixed. Southerners became increasingly violent towards those in favor of Reconstruction and towards blacks in general. With many people being killed. The economic and social costs were staying high and people were inching towards just pretending the problem was solved and being rid of the issue.

Then the 1876 presidential election happened, and that killed off any hopes of maintaining Reconstruction. After the election, the southern candidate, Tilden, had 184 electoral votes; the northern candidate, Hayes, had 165 electoral votes. There were 20 contested electoral votes from four states. The majority threshold was 185. Hayes needed to win all four states to become president. In the end a compromise was reached: the power brokers of the south would not contest having all four states awarded to Hayes if Reconstruction was ended.

Reconstruction ended shortly after. Congress did change hands to the south at the time too, but that was in no small part a byproduct of their years-long campaigns of violence to sow discontent with the northern populace.

The only silver lining is that the US actually did learn from this failure. The post-WW2 denazification of Germany relied heavily on the lessons learned from Reconstruction and its ultimate failure.

I think in US society at large it likely is an unpopular opinion. The south has successfully sold itself as: affordable, nice climate, with extremely hospitable people. My mom has a highly romanticized view of the south because it's the setting of so many of the romance novels she reads. Not going to pretend she's typical, but there's going to be a decent chunk of people falling for that or the myth of southern hospitality.

My experiences are limited, but "southern hospitality" has always come across as performative and insincere to me. It's a superficial level of ineffectual niceties done for social expectations while actually requiring no true kindness to be displayed. A lot of people fall for the myth of it all the same.

I'd bet that while a majority of people are not pro-south, the pro-south group (excluding southerners) is larger than the anti-south group — with a large majority of people not giving a fuck.

The very start of that article:

October 6 Update: A newly published report has clarified that the discovered code bits are not related to Windows "12." Also, the next-gen Windows version will not require a subscription.

The stuff that made Vista shitty to most end users wasn't truly fixed with W7. For the most part W7 was a marketing refresh after Vista had already been "fixed." Not saying that it was a small update or anything like that, just that the broken stuff had been more or less fixed.

Vista's issues at launch were almost universally a result of the change to the driver model. Hardware manufacturers, despite MS delaying things for them, still did not have good drivers ready at release. They took years after the fact to get good, stable, drivers out there. By the time that happened, Vista's reputation as a pile of garbage was well cemented. W7 was a good chance to reset that reputation while also implementing other various major upgrades.

Cities Skylines sees a fairly decent improvement going to the 3D cache chips from AMD (17% speedup here for the 5800x3D). Whats your ability to increase the budget to go for a 7800X3D look like? If this is a genre of game you like and you want to hold off as long as possible between upgrades, it might be worth springing the extra. The difference the 3D cache provides in some games is rather extraordinary. City builders, automation, and similar games tend to benefit the most. AAA games tend to benefit the least (some with effectively no gain).

A 7600X should be more than capable of handling the game though. So it's not a question of need but if it's worth it to you.

You do not want 4800 CL40 RAM though, that's too slow. I'd strongly recommend going for 32GB of RAM as well; 16GB can be gobbled up quickly, especially if you want to use mods in Cities Skylines.

Going up even to DDR5-6000 is not much of a price increase. I'd suggest 6000 and something in the range of CL36-CL40. There's a lot of 32GB kits in those specs in the ~$90 range. I would not build a gaming system today with 16GB of RAM.

I don't think Kotick is at all certain to be kicked out. As easily as I can see MS letting him go with an enormous golden parachute, I can just as easily imagine them keeping him onboard because all they care about is Activision's ability to make money.

In all likelihood Blizzard isn't going to be managed any differently. Microsoft's modus operandi with gaming acquisitions is to leave the leadership in place and let the dev/publisher run itself. Why is everyone expecting different here? The most likely outcome is MS does nothing to Blizzard and Blizzard continues on more or less the same trajectory as before.

Unit Ready
Unit Ready
Unit Ready

Construction complete

They're fixing the last line of that. Republicans parred it back some it's still seeing substantial budget increases. You can see the 10 year timelines.

The tax enforcement budget would see a 69.2% increase relative to the pre-IRA projection. I forget what the size of the debt limit deal cutback was, but my recollection is that it was not enough to change the core fact that the IRS is going to see substantial improvements to its budget and especially to its enforcement arm.

EDIT: Worth highlighting that stories like this one are exactly why republicans hate the idea of the IRS being properly funded.

It’s also because their current shows suck, and because any shows that are actually good get shitcanned after season 2, because Netflix sees less consumer growth after two seasons.

I'm always surprised at how often other people (not you) will defend this practice from Netflix. It's classic case of following the data in a stupid way. If their data shows that interest drops off after two seasons, I don't doubt it.

But... that comes with a cost. They have built a reputation as a company that doesn't properly finish shows that they start, that will leave viewers hanging. That makes it harder to get people invested in a new series, even one that's well reviewed. Why get interested in something you know will end on a cliffhanger?

That kind of secondary order impact from their decision isn't going to show up in data. Doesn't change that it happens all the same.

It should be done, but Biden has never had the opportunity.

The size of SCOTUS is set by statute, and would need a law passed by the house and senate to do so. Democrats don't hold the house today, but did in the prior congress. That vote likely could have succeeded. It would have failed in the senate. At the time the senate was 50-50 and I cannot possibly imagine any scenario where Manchin and Sinema would have voted for that law. King and Feinstein wouldn't have been certain votes either, but likely winnable if it came down to the wire. Even if all of them did vote aye, regular legislation can be filibustered and there is definitely 0% chance that Manchin+Sinema would have voted to kill the filibuster.

Dems need a house majority and at least a 52-48 senate majority for this to happen. I suspect that rage has already faded enough that it won't happen even then, barring SCOTUS doing more Dobbs sized awful decisions.

The pressure campaign for RBG to retire was when democrats still held a senate majority with 53 seats. Republicans blocked Obama's SCOTUS appointment when they held the senate majority. In 2016, republicans simply just didn't allow a vote to happen because the senate leader sets the vote schedule. The nuclear option had already been invoked by that very same dem caucus on all other presidential nominations too.

The scenarios look similar on a surface level but in the details that matter they are leagues apart. If RBG had retired in 2013 or (most of) 2014, her replacement would been confirmed, barring a Kavanaugh-sized scandal. Either republicans would have provided the seven votes needed to secure cloture, or Reid would have invoked the nuclear option to lower the cloture requirement on SCOTUS nominees to a bare majority, like all other positions. Either way the nominee would have been confirmed.

I'm more willing to forgive members of the house running despite their old age than I am senators.

Representatives only serve two years, so they're making a shorter commitment. It's substantially easier for someone to think they can keep doing something for another two years than it is for them to think they can do it for another six years. Especially on health matters. But also, individual representatives are simply just less important. In our current political environment, an individual senator leaving office is going to be a huge disruption for any balance of power that's less than 54-46, with another critical point reached at the 60-40 balance. In the house it won't matter for any caucus that's ahead by ~5+ seats. Even in today's razor close house, it was elected as 222-213 seats — a nine seat gap.

There's a decent number of older representatives out there. I wouldn't have minded Lee sticking around there for a bit longer. The only real issue with older representatives is that by staying in office they block the pipeline for new blood and building a bench for future offices. Running for senate in her late 70s is ridiculous though, especially for a first term.

For Pelosi specifically, I'd put it at 50-50 odds that she retires shortly after the 2024 election. If it wasn't for her personal feud with Hoyer I'd put it at near-certain. When she decides to retire, I expect she'll stick around for one last campaign solely because it will improve her ability to fundraise for the DCCC. She's a team player through and through.