“An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.”

Reynolds has done something impressive. She has said one of the most stupid things I’ve ever heard from a republican. That’s a very high bar to clear, saying something so inconceivably stupid that it has special distinction from all of the other inconceivably stupid things republicans say. Yet somehow she managed to pull it off.

Yep. We can look at the source to see what their metrics are. They have economic freedoms and personal freedoms.

The metrics for economic freedoms they used are fiscal and regulatory freedom. Focusing on fiscal, that branches down into: state taxes, local taxes, government spending, government employment, government debt, and “cash & security assets.” It’s obviously a libertarian based definition of “economic freedom”, wherein they feel someone with $5 to their name and no obligations is more economically free than someone with $100 to their name and $10 of taxes. Completely illogical bullshit.

But you can look at it and see that a lot of them are incoherent or intentionally overlapping even if you buy into their base ideology.

Why are government spending and government taxation separate entries? Is someone with low taxes less “economically free” because their government budget is able to afford to be larger anyway? Why does government employment factor in at all? Surely — especially after you’ve accounted for any budgetary, taxation, and debt based impacts — there’s nothing inherent to government employees existing that can be argued to impact someone’s “economic freedom.” Even within their base libertarian fantasies, the overlap and design of the categories will specifically make a richer, but otherwise completely identical, state less free than a poorer copy-cat.

The rest of their categories are even more bullshit. They have an entire section under personal freedom categorized as “Travel Freedom.” A sane person might define that as both the right and the capacity to travel places. They define it as “This category includes seat belt laws, helmet laws, mandatory insurance coverage, and cell phone usage laws.” So a state is less “free” according to Cato if it makes it illegal to text while driving.

tl;dr it’s all libertarian bullshit.

Do you have data on that? A modern nuclear power plant is going to be in the 500-1000+ MW range. I have a hard time imagining that even operating at half capacity that they do not offset the carbon used for concrete within a relatively short order. But if that is in fact the case I’d love to see data saying so, so that I can correct my thinking.

Election law varies from state to state. But generally from what I gather, a write-in candidate is only valid if the candidate registers with the state in advance.

If there’s a winning plurality for Mickey Mouse in your state for a statewide office, it won’t matter. The state won’t be forced to see if there’s anyone there that has the name Mickey Mouse and then pick which (if more than one) was the individual meant by the voters. Someone has to register with the state saying that they’re going to run a write-in campaign for office with name XYZ.

Note that these details are a bit of a side track. The above person was talking about Trump being excluded due to the 14th amendment. However that doesn’t say “not on the ballot” — it invalidates people from office entirely. If applied to Trump, the not being on the ballot would be a consequence of being determined ineligible for office, not a method to make him unable to win. Also it’s all moot: while I think on the face of it the correct action would be to apply the 14th amendment to Trump, the fact of the matter is that this will not happen. States are not going to be willing to risk the political backlash from going down that path, so they will not.

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.

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 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.

I think the point here is that this feature would presumably allow you to just download the map at will. Regardless of what it thinks about reception at either end of your destination.

As I understand it, most disc copies of games today aren’t viable in the first place. Either all of the game data is not on the disc and some needs to be downloaded anyway, or the game copy on the disc is in such a shit state that you wouldn’t want to play that specific copy.

Discs don’t really protect us in the sense of ownership. It’s still reliant on the same backend to enable it in most practical senses.

The future of renewable energy is very promising. It’s easy to miss how fast it can turn around when growth it grows so much year-to-year but starts at a small place. Keep this kind of growth up and the grid will be clean a lot faster than seems possible.

Beyond solar I’m also very hopeful about offshore wind efforts in the US.

I think it’s simpler.

As things are in Texas right now, anyone he is replaced with will be a conservative republican. There is zero political risk to republicans in removing him. His only constituency within the party is the furthest right loons… but they tend to abandon “losers” quickly and will happily latch onto the newest far right loon. All while keeping him around does represent a political cost to republicans. That cost has gotten high enough that they’re willing to consider removing him.

They can remove him with no risk to their power and get rid of a headache at the same time.

We still live in the same society as others. People often adopt the cultures and ideologies of where they end up, or at least move closer to it than they were before. If reddit shifts its userbase to the right — even if the net effect is from “very very left” to “very left” — it will impact the lives of all of us that live in societies with large numbers of people using that site, as it’ll filter down into our politics. Even if we don’t interact with them.

For a long time, the “default” ideology of the internet was on the left. As internet usage has become dominated by a handful of sites owned by megacorporations, there has been a not at all subtle effort to nurture a conservative ideology on those sites. Stuff like reddit holding off on banning the Trump sub for however long or twitter refusing to implement their hate speech detection because it correlated too strongly with conservative politicians (not to mention what Musk has done there). I don’t think this is an accident.

It’s useless for answering a questions that wasn’t asked, sure. But I didn’t pretend to answer that question. What it is useful for is answering the topic question. You know, the whole damn point?

How much of a factor off do you think the estimate is? You think they need three drives of redundancy each? Ten? Chances are they’re paying half (or less) for storage drives compared to retail pricing. The estimate on what they could get with $100m was also 134 EB, a mind boggling sum of storage. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re using up on the order of 1 EB/year in needed storage. There’s also a lot more room in their budget than 0.34%.

The point is to get a quick and simple estimate to show that there really will not be a problem in Google acquiring sufficient storage. If you want a very accurate estimate of their costs you’ll need data that we do not have. I was not aiming to get a highly accurate estimate of their costs. I made this clear, right from the beginning.

If each video was on a single hard drive the site would not be able to function as even the fastest multi actuator hard drive can only do 524 MB/s in a perfect vacuum.

The most popular videos are all going to be kept in RAM, they don’t read them all off disk with every single view request. If you wanted a comment going over the finer details of server architecture, you shouldn’t have looked at the one saying it was doing back of the envelope math on storage costs only, eh?

Not surprising.

Bioware has spent over a decade chasing mass appeal for their games, to the detriment of what they’re good at. They made that work as they shifted from 2D to 3D to action-3D. That stopped working as they went too far, abandoning their core strengths. Bioware hasn’t had an unmitigated success since… ME2 in 2010? That’s 13 years of them floundering, with the very mitigated successes of ME3 and DA:I early on in that.

That kind of floundering is going to filter down to everyone working there. It’s hard to bounce back from that. They know Dreadwolf needs to hit it out of the park if they hope to continue on. Easy situation to end up in development hell with delay after delay…

I wasn’t calculating server costs, just raw storage. Google is not buying hard drives at retail prices. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re paying as little as 50% of the retail price to buy at volume.

All of what you say is true but the purpose was to get a back of the envelope estimation to show that the cost of storage is not a truly limiting factor for a company like youtube. My point was to answer the question.

With the level of compression youtube uses, the storage costs of everything below 4k is substantially lower than 4k by itself: for back of envelope purposes we can just ignore those resolutions.

It’s a superscript. You can see it in the comment editor options. It’s: ^text^ which looks like ^text

You can also check a comment’s source by clicking on the icon that looks like a dog eared piece of paper at the bottom of it.

Storage is cheap, especially at the corporate scale.

Make two simplifying assumptions: pretend that Google is paying consumer prices for storage, and pretend that Google doesn’t need to worry about data redundancy. In truth Google will pay a lot less than consumer prices, but they’ll also need more than 1 byte of storage for each byte of data they have, so for the sake of envelope math we can just pretend they cancel out.

Western Digital sells a 22TB HDD for $400. Seagate has a 20TB HDD for $310. I don’t like Seagate but I do like round numbers, so for simplicity we’ll call it $300 for 20TB. This works out to $15/TB. According to wikipedia, Youtube had just under $29b of revenue in 2021. If youtube spend just $100m of that — 0.34% — they’d be able to buy 6,666,666 of those hard drives. In a single year. That’s 6,666,666x20TB = 133,333,333 TB of storage, also known as 133^{note 1} exabytes.

That’s a lot of storage. A quick search tells me that youtube’s compression for 4k/25fps is 45Mbps, which is about 5.5 megabytes/s. That’s 768,722 years of 4k video content. All paid for with 0.34% of youtube’s annual revenue.

Note 1: Note that I am using SI units here. If you want to use 1024ⁿ for data names, then the SI prefixes aren’t correct. It’d be 115 exbibytes instead.

EDIT: I initially did the price wrong, fixed now.

Aviation is one of the smallest contributions to greenhouse gas emissions as-is: in 2016 it was 1.9% of global emissions.

The danger the rich pose to the planet isn’t being first in line for the second generation of supersonic transoceanic flights.

The danger the rich pose to the planet is them keeping coal and natural gas plants open longer because they personally profit from it. It’s them keeping their taxes low, reducing our ability to fund renewable energy. It’s them fighting tooth and nail against any new energy efficiency regulation (remember the incandescent lightbulb ban fight?) because it “hurts profits.” It’s them fighting against public transportation.

This? This isn’t even in the top 50 of their ills against the climate. The hate for the rich is well placed. Applying that hate to basic science is dangerously misplaced. The rich love when people push-back on funding science efforts.