Especially when it’s off or has no power.

And I had said nothing about voting at all, let alone suggesting that people should vote and do nothing else. Maybe I confused you for the straw man because you were still covered in the stuff from fighting a straw man of your own.

It’s just too bad that people are only capable of one form of political engagement at a time. There’s no way that someone could try to organize in their community and fill out a ballot a few times a year.

And really, why would you? Things will be exactly the same no matter who is in power as long as they aren’t 100% aligned with your views.

Nah, best to mock anyone who chooses coalition building over ideological purity and stick to the plan of having a tiny fraction of the population lead a revolution… eventually.

Engaging in politics? Pointless.

Obviously the solution is to constantly talk about the necessity of violent action while never actually committing any acts of violence.

SkyFuel™

As I understand it, one of the other advantages of the bolt is that it’s fairly easy to disconnect. There’s a dedicated fuse you can pull which will disable the telemetry as well as the microphone and a lot of the related infotainment system functions like gps. Or for those who want more of those functions, you can open the panel behind the screen, unplug the antenna, and replace it with with a terminator so that it thinks it’s intact but has no signal.

Of course, it will still try to send data home through your phone if you let it. Apparently it can do that through android auto and carplay if they are connected via bluetooth but not over USB.

Scorpius from Farscape is a fantastic villain. He was meant to be a one off villain of the week for a clip show. By the time the episode was finished it was a two parter that had only a few seconds of clips, and instead set up the plot elements that would drive the rest of the series, with Scorpius at the heart of it all.

He’s one of the rare genius villains that’s actually written well enough to seem smart. He’s ruthless but not unreasonable. He’s horrific, but also charming. He’s a bottomless pit of hatred and vengeance, and yet he is cold and calculating, perpetually in control. I’ve heard him described as mirror universe spock turned up to 11 and I kind of agree.

Plus, we also get Harvey.

See also: David Xanatos. Imagine if Bruce Wayne put all that effort and planning into villainy, mad science and sorcery, theoretically for money but really just for the fun of it. Now give him an Iron Man suit and the voice of Jonathan Frakes. He’s an evil genius that’s so good at what he does that his name is literally synonymous with plans can only end in a win.

"They cannot, in any legally relevant sense, be irreparably harmed by a court order that makes it more difficult for them to commit crimes,”

Unless of course it’s the Trump administration committing the crimes. Then even slowing them down and maintaining the original status quo while the courts adjudicate the case is causing irreparable harm.

Until recently, the Wisconsin state legislature was heavily gerrymandered to give Republicans supermajorities despite it being a purple state with an almost perfect 50/50 split. They were never going to let Wisconsin join since the electoral college gives their party an advantage and gives their state extremely disproportionate influence.

Some of his supporters will accept anything with a smile as long as it’s their side doing it. Some are so drowned in right wing media bullshit that they might as well be living in a parallel universe. And some will just be so averse to criticizing Trump (particularly in a poll which is likely to have political remifications) that they’ll defend or ignore almost anything bad, even if they do hate it.

That’s what happens when the party repeatedly purges anyone that has any principles beyond self-interest and blind loyalty to a corrupt leader.

I dont believe this (but I’m open to being wrong). I think giving the same amount of money invested into EVs to public transit and ebikes instead, we’d be better off.

I’m all for investing in public transportation, and ebikes certainly have their place as well. But realistically, those will reduce the need for cars, not replace them entirely. We aren’t going to have trains and buses constantly running between every small town in the US. People will still need to haul big items or large amounts of stuff. And even where public transit is readily available, there is still going to be an advantage to being able to go where you want, when you want, in a vehicle you already own. Unless we ban private ownership of cars, people will still buy them because they offer much greater flexibility than public transportation.

I also don’t like that most incentives aren’t set up in a way to support poor people buying EVs. But that wasn’t going to be a realistic possibility until cheaper EVs hit the market and enough older EVs declined in value to the point that there could be truly cheap options out there. Unfortunately, the political will does not exist to simply mandate the switch to EVs. And even if we had done it that way, without developing the market for EVs the transition likely would have meant raising costs at the low end instead of gradually lowering costs at the high end.

Regardless of how we accomplish the transition from internal combustion to electric, it is better for everyone if the vehicles we use are electric. Even if we ignore the environmental side of things, EVs are much cheaper to operate and are much lower maintenance. If that first beat up old rust bucket that someone buys is an EV, that car will cost less to own and maintain, and will be less likely to die because of some hidden mechanical issue.

And of course, there’s also the massive amount that we as a society spend supporting ICE vehicles. There’s the obscene amount of money that goes into finding, extracting, refining, and distributing oil, and the billions in profits that the fossil fuel companies pocket on top of that. And then there’s the added cost to everything else because of the increased transportation costs. And the geopolitical costs. Every dollar saved by someone driving an EV is a dollar not being drained out of us by the fossil fuel industry.

Transitioning to EVs is better for everyone in the long term. Improved technology and greater marketshare among new EVs today means more and better used EV options in the future, with the effect increasing as the economics of scale make budget models more viable.

It’s not that we shouldn’t subsidize solar and EV, it’s that we should also use incentives and regulations to make these options work for renters. We should be requiring rental properties to add outlets to parking spaces. We should be pushing policies aimed at getting solar on apartment buildings for the benefit of the tenants.

Honestly, we should be working towards getting every building to have solar and battery and reducing our dependence on the grid.

This is why my games always run on the silver standard. Each unit of currency is 100 times the value of the previous unit Instead of 10, and the listed prices that would have been gold are now in silver.

This makes it a lot less weird when dropping coin on watered down ale, stale bread, and a cot. And it also makes finding gold coins for the first time a lot more exciting. And when your characters start getting wealthy enough to actually carry gold and buy big ticket items with it, it actually feels like you’re getting rich.

And then there’s platinum. A single platinum coin becomes an event, the kind of thing that causes the greedy to become reckless and the experienced to become paranoid. It’s the perfect schmuck bait, a massive fortune in a single coin, all you have to do is pick it up. [Cue evil laugh]

Given the anatomy of a submarine, I’m pretty sure that whale is now Jewish.

According to Oklahoma state law, the special election for the remainder of the term takes place during the next statewide primary and general election. However, if the vacancy occurs after March 1st during an even numbered year, the special election gets delayed until the next election cycle after that year.

Source: https://law.justia.com/codes/oklahoma/title-26/section-26-12-101/

So they won’t have to have the special election this year. Though I doubt it makes that much of a difference. If they were going to lose that seat, they were going to lose the senate no matter what.

Just waiting for them to come up with a version of this bill that keeps all these same restrictions but which adds an alternative of using digital identity verification processes administered by third parties. Then they can just approve Xitter and the like as verification partners, making the easy route available through platforms their side controls, all with no transparency or accountability.

I used to beat myself up a little for dismissing bitcoin early on and therefore missing a chance at being rich. But then I realized that it was like beating myself up for not winning the lottery just because I know now what last week’s winning numbers were. I would have had to dedicate time, effort and money I couldn’t easily spare into chasing an irrational long shot.

Plus, odds are I would have sold it all the minute it was worth a little, which would be much worse. Or that someone would steal it all, as happened to a lot of people early on.

No surprise there. They don’t give a shit about solving the problem. They certainly weren’t going to put any effort into it. This was all about being able to announce that they brought down prescription drug prices. Well, that and to slap Trump’s name on yet another useless waste of time and money.

Part of the problem is that propaganda has convinced them that solar and wind are just pipe dreams and scams which are too weak and expensive to be useful. That it’s just part of an agenda being pushed by the radical leftist hippy green weenies who want your taxes to subsidize their useless toys. That renewables are all about virtue signalling and aren’t practical because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, etc.

It’s not just the imbeciles either. I’ve known otherwise intelligent people who simply never bothered to investigate the claims they heard. I have these conversations with my dad on occasion because he knows I’m interested in EVs and solar and he’ll mention the bullshit articles he reads and I have to point out the flaws in those articles. The last time we talked he questioned if a solar roof really works in the northern parts of the country and he had trouble accepting it until I pointed out that all the plants outside are solar powered and they do just fine.