ShittyBeatlesFCPres

That’s probably the Occam's razor explanation. I obviously have no proof for my little pet theory.

I stand corrected. Everyone listen to 👆that poster.

My state (Louisiana) has a different election system — actually several and it’s currently a confusing mess — and I’m not really familiar with Vermont’s primaries.

In Louisiana, the November election is actually technically a primary. If no one gets 50%, the top two candidates (regardless of party) have a run-off in December. For various reasons over the years, some elections were changed to be more like first past the post with closed party primaries. Others weren’t. And now, it’s just a messy hodgepodge. (And to top it all off, our governor and many other elections are “off-year” so it doesn’t align with federal elections. We’re voting on Amendments on March 29th. It’s idiotic.)

I don’t know if this counts as a conspiracy theory but I kind of suspect the story of the Vision Pro was that it was originally a real project focused as much on patents as anything. If they wanted a viable consumer product line, they’d have sold the 1st generation(s) at a loss to help an app ecosystem flourish and compete with other XR products (even if an Apple’s XR headset would still cost $500 more because Apple).

The US military was calling for XR headsets and even evaluated HoloLens. Companies were obviously exploring too. That’s when Vision Pro was under development. Apple isn’t really a military contractor — I’m not sure if they do any — but having patents to license to future XR headsets could potentially be very valuable and subsidize Vision Pro consumer pricing until the component prices fell.

Then, HoloLens shit the bed. It made soldiers nauseous and the military (and companies) pretty much lost interest in XR. The entire HoloLens team got laid off. By then, the Vision Pro was probably in early production but the potential revenue from having the most advanced XR’s patents became essentially nil. So, they just sold them at the actual cost and gave up on the product line.

In that scenario, the Vision Pro lead (and team) delivered exactly what Tim Apple wanted but the revenue potential disappeared. Meanwhile, “A.I. Siri” continued to suck (except the new animation; props to that team). So, the Vision Pro management was rewarded even if the Vision Pro failed in the market.

They kind of are in a different party: the Democratic Socialists of America isn’t on the ballot but Bernie runs as an independent who caucuses with Democrats. If Democrats wanted to, they could run a candidate against him. But to form a truly independent third party, you’d just be splitting the votes on the left.

As you get to state and national elections where much of the nation is pretty evenly divided, running as a third party all but ensures the Republican will win (even without winning a majority in most states, though a few use different systems). In essence, our system requires coalitions to be made before the election rather than after.

You could compare it to UK elections. In 2024, Labour won 33% of the votes but won 411 of 650 seats because the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, and regional parties split the rest.

I don’t really get what selling Chrome and Android would accomplish. I’m all for breaking up tech monopolies but both of those projects are mostly open source that get proprietary Google crap and (for Android, at least, some monopolistic behavior like requiring what’s preinstalled, which is fine to ban).

I don’t work on ad-supported projects so I may be out of my element but it seems like what would actually help end the monopolistic behavior is requiring Google (and Facebook) to spin off their ad network businesses. The monopoly problem isn’t Chromium or AOSP or that Google runs ad-supported search. It’s that if [insert random site] wants ads, they typically use AdSense. If Facebook and Google want to run ad-supported services, fine. But they shouldn’t also also be the middlemen for advertisers who want to run ads on third party sites. That’s a recipe for monopolistic behavior.

In my ideal world, there would be no targeted ads at all and advertisers had to sponsor — and were so partly responsible for — the specific content they want to be associated with. But that probably isn’t going to happen since every politician is an advertiser that wants to launder their sponsorships through a middleman.

Well, Putin’s demands also include Ukraine ceding additional land — land not controlled by Russian forces — that are mineral rich so…

This is the easiest bluff to call in history. Pissing off every retired person in America is how you lose a landslide election but even if you think there won’t be elections anymore, pissed off retired people will find a way to make your life miserable.

The arrow of time is thought to be based on entropy — things inevitably tend to get less organized over time — and a song played backwards would be just as organized as the same song played forward. It (probably) won’t sound pleasant to human ears but it’s not actually a different song in a physics sense.

Musical notes are just noises our little brains find pleasant. Dogs and cats might not even find them pleasant, much less animals that won’t hang out with us. The entropy that defines the arrow of time operates of much bigger scales. Life has been defined as a fight against entropy but we, too, inevitably decay and become disorganized atoms.

I wonder what plastics are made of and who has a lot of money? It is a mystery.

Just because he’s a clueless fool with connections who hasn’t invented anything (except maybe a truck where the sides fall off) doesn’t mean he’s not a “technologist.” He’s just as smart as smart as every other “effective altruist” or “networked state” moron.

You may be too young but remember when AOL had a highly paid “Digital Prophet” who was about as close to an actual clown as you could get without floppy clown shoes?

For the record, the network state movement means “seceding from the union.” And it won’t go any better for them than when Seasteading enthusiasts found out pirates exist.

Almost every FedSoc judge has connections to Leonard Leo and has probably gone to one those creepy Bohemian Grove retreats that was already creepy like a century ago. They can’t all recuse themselves or we’d have a democracy.

Not the female judges, of course. No women allowed at Bohemian Grove retreats — maybe some trafficked teens but no grown women. Grown women would probably react like how younger generations of men quietly changing clothes in gym locker room react when a creepy old man drying his saggy old balls on a bench makes direct eye contact and asks you a question.

The federal Education Department is a very small department. It’s basically the college student aid program and (typically) non-controversial and often universal grants to state and local governments for K-12 stuff (like special education).

At major D-I schools, “revenue sports” like football, basketball (men’s and women’s nowadays but much smaller than football), and sometimes baseball or a random other sport turns a profit and funds the athletic department along with donors. Sometimes, there’s an “athletics fee” students pay that (ideally) funds things for a gym and intramural sports.

But generally, it’s donors. And college presidents keep sports around to advertise the school and keep alumni attached so they donate. A rich alumnus might not donate to sports but the college president wines and dines them at a football game.