Because, frustratingly, Biden isn't the sort of LBJ-esque power player who can haul miserable DINOs like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema into the Oval Office to threaten them with political death unless they fall into line with his agenda. The fact of the matter is that just like in Obama's first term, Democrats really only had control of Congress for two years, and by a margin so slim that they needed unanimity to actually advance rules changes in the Senate, let alone legislation. That meant that Biden's entire agenda was bottlenecked by two of the most worthless assholes in the whole party, people who are definitely guilty of the short-sighted political gamesmanship that you want to ascribe to the entire party. Their obstructionism meant that, because of Senate rules, there's only one chance or year to pass major legislation, and even then it has to ostensibly be budget-related.
Despite all that, Biden and the rest of the Democrats did manage to get major legislation on climate enacted, in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act. Was it the whole Green New Deal? No, Manchin the coal baron wasn't going to vote for that. But it's still major change in a positive direction. Your frustration that there hasn't been more is misdirected at the party generally, when it should be aimed at two senators in particular -- and the solution to that is not to throw up your hands and declare "both sides are the same!" It's to get out the vote for more progressive legislators to make those assholes politically irrelevant.
I think this is a more cynical view than can be supported by facts in evidence. For sure, in Ye Olden Days when the parties weren't actually all that far apart, there was some level of building up a bogeyman to get out the base while everybody was friendly behind closed doors. But especially in the era of Trump, I think most congressional Democrats (leftwards of Machin and Sinema, at least) are genuinely afraid of what a second Trump turn would mean for the country, not least because it would likely mean a practical end to democratic processes at the federal level. Hard to benefit from the bogeyman when the bogeyman has made your presence in politics impossible-to-illegal.
Reform-minded legislators have previously floated the idea of rewriting the Farm Bill to favor smaller family operations instead of agri-conglomerates like Con-Agra -- to near-universal dissent from farmers. No matter the reality of the situation, conservative media has them convinced that they're just one good season away from riches, and they don't want to lose their subsidies when that happens.
Man, the Puppies' anti-representation Hugo campaign backfiring into Internet fame for Chuck Tingle was one of the few highlights of 2016. I was at WorldCon that year and the number of people sporting " I Am Chuck Tingle" ribbons on their badges was amazing.
I've only ever needed to use a tool like Wireshark a couple times, but when I needed it nothing else would do, and the convenience of being able to just download it and go instead of having to shepherd a purchase order through the organization was a lifesaver. It's one of many reasons why I am a big proponent of open-source software.
Speculations indicate that Navi 3.5 might enable integrated graphics with performance comparable to an Nvidia RTX 3070.
Uh huh. Given that the Radeon 780M that represents the current state of the art in Zen4 iGPUs is still trailing a discrete 3050 (by no means a strong performer itself) by about 30% on average, this seems wildly optimistic. Don't get me wrong, I would love a beastly iGPU, but this seems less like informed speculation and more like fanboy hype.
I'm about 99% certain that the image in the article is some AI-generated nightmare fuel. There's a link to the actual paper at the bottom of the article, and it has this figure showing a few example organoids, which are ~10mm across and look a bit like white mushrooms.
The ethical dilemma posed by a brain in a petri dish is an interesting hypothetical, but probably not one worth worrying about at this point. There's less brain tissue here than in the average lab mouse, with no sensory inputs and little differentiation relative to a real human brain. The neurons in the organoids are probably able to do as neurons do individually, but they lack the structure or infrastructure required for them to have basic awareness, let alone consciousness.
Organoids like these can be useful for in-vivo study of brain tissue without the ethical troubles of rooting around in somebody's head now, but that's about it. We're a very long way from growing a brain-in-a-jar and hooking it up to The Matrix.
Does it, though? In the past the argument was that aggregators like Google were stealing site traffic by showing large excepts or summaries of the articles they linked to, and I could understand that, but the new Canadian law seems like it wants to attach a fee to simply showing a hyperlink. That's fundamentally contrary to the way that the Internet was designed to work, and as the examples of blocking in the article demonstrate, it seems to confuse who is providing value to who in this specific instance. I take issue with the big platforms co-opting the open Internet, but penalizing them for showing links off their sites to news organizations seems to be the exact wrong thing to do about it.
That's the thing, though -- in these sorts of communities, they arguably were. As the old lead mining heartland of the nation, the southern half of Missouri isn't far off rural West Virginia coal country or the Rust Belt in terms of post-industrial decline. I have my own theories about why that area is the way it is (and I suspect endemic low-level exposure to lead mining waste might be part of it) but at a fundamental level it's not surprising that these communities would try to reach back into a mostly-imaginary past to reclaim the trappings of middle-class comfort. The present just doesn't have anything to offer them.
Not just territory, but social stratification and ingroup-outgroup dynamics are present in nearly every social species of animal. Some are more strict and/or violent about it, but everything from fish to birds to other primate species have social hierarchies, a concept of territory, and a willingness to fight over both. Great apes have been documented conducting violent wars with other troupes over territory and resources.
I have to say that I've always found the argument that "X is an tool of control by the rich!" to be reductive. The implicit (or sometimes explicit) corollary is that "X" is therefore arbitrary, artificial, and bad, whereas I tend to think that usually inverts cause and effect. "X," whether it's social hierarchies, the concept of property ownership, or in this case territorial boundaries, are more often than not rooted in some innate social instinct that can often be found not just in people but throughout the animal kingdom. The powers-that-be may well be manipulating those behaviors to their benefit, but that doesn't mean that the solution is to deny that they are innate and claim that we can make a better society if we could only ignore them hard enough. You have to make changes keeping in mind the limitations of the human mind and behavior if you want to create a viable real-world solution.
Good on 'em. I'm not looking forward to coming flood of terrible reality television, but hopefully between this and the writer's strike, the people doing the work in the industry can get a more equitable stake.
This hits close to home. My dad grew up in a house about a half-mile from the creek mentioned in the article; my grandparents lived in that house for almost thirty years. That said, I think they were "uphill" in the watershed from the creek, and the only unusual cancer in my family is from my own generation, which was never exposed. Grandma and Grandpa both had cancer in their senior years (brain and colon, respectively) but neither died as a result of it -- Grandma's was so slow moving that they just left it be for fifteen years until she passed from other causes! -- and the health problems my dad and his siblings have are mostly hereditary in nature.
Looking at how Mercedes fell off, I think they decided to roll the dice on their drivers being able to hold off the initial attack from others on the used softs, and then pull away for a safe margin one the hards were in their working range. A scary bet, but one that paid off for them.
Regardless of the sourcing, it's important to have open eyes about these things. While don't think many outside of Lemmygrad would argue that there isn't a clear moral difference between the defenders and aggressors in this war (and Prigozhin didn't exactly name his organization the Wagner Group out of a deep artistic appreciation for German opera, either), Ukraine has also been willing to take help from unsavory groups, particularly in the original Azov Brigade and the RVC. I won't condemn Ukrainian leadership for engaging in realpolitik while fighting for their nation's right to exist, but they and their Western allies all need to be careful that fascist elements within Ukraine don't get the opportunity to leverage the war for greater power and influence.
Off-topic, but wow, what a spaghetti bowl of adjectives that first sentence is. What does "first non -incumbent gay Republican elected" even mean as a string of qualifiers? I can just about parse it, but the phrasing makes it read as though all the incumbent gay Republicans before him were straight when they won their first elections, instead of just closeted.
Because, frustratingly, Biden isn't the sort of LBJ-esque power player who can haul miserable DINOs like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema into the Oval Office to threaten them with political death unless they fall into line with his agenda. The fact of the matter is that just like in Obama's first term, Democrats really only had control of Congress for two years, and by a margin so slim that they needed unanimity to actually advance rules changes in the Senate, let alone legislation. That meant that Biden's entire agenda was bottlenecked by two of the most worthless assholes in the whole party, people who are definitely guilty of the short-sighted political gamesmanship that you want to ascribe to the entire party. Their obstructionism meant that, because of Senate rules, there's only one chance or year to pass major legislation, and even then it has to ostensibly be budget-related.
Despite all that, Biden and the rest of the Democrats did manage to get major legislation on climate enacted, in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act. Was it the whole Green New Deal? No, Manchin the coal baron wasn't going to vote for that. But it's still major change in a positive direction. Your frustration that there hasn't been more is misdirected at the party generally, when it should be aimed at two senators in particular -- and the solution to that is not to throw up your hands and declare "both sides are the same!" It's to get out the vote for more progressive legislators to make those assholes politically irrelevant.