Huh.

Bro you gotta put down the ketamine

The user you are responding to is a tankie

Morally pure characters are unrealistic.

Morally grey, nuanced characters are much more interesting, compelling, and relatable.

What are you talking about? Are you seriously trying to push the narrative that he’s a trumpian? Because he’s very, very obviously not.

Again: I trust a guy who seems to have done his best to change into a better person from a very flawed starting point, and who now supports a ton of progressive positions that I and his potential constituents agree with, than a status quo establishment Democrat candidate pulling the same bullshit I’ve seen done for pretty much the entirety of my politically active life. But you do you. Carry on with your ad hominem attacks. Nothing to see here.

What’s your play here? What are you trying to do?

They’ve made at least two rather desirable EVs. And then killed them.

Their product strategy department needs to be taken behind the shed.

Maine unions, who contain people who would be his constituents.

now get out there and make me some goddamn money _{*huh* *huh*}

But multiple Maine Democrats have raised the prospect that the negative stories could lead to a sizable protest vote in the race. Mills even teased the idea.

“People have the impression that I ‘withdrew’ or ‘dropped out,’” Mills said. “But I simply suspended active campaigning. I am still on the ballot.”

Oh my god, fuck off, Mills. You’re going to keep Collins in her fucking seat with this bullshit.

This sort of imbecilic boomer political virtue signaling idiocy is far more disqualifying to me than a dude who had (to be fair, rather serious) issues in his past and then made real efforts to change and improve himself. Mills is a fundamental part of the problem - and in my eyes, barely a shade better than Collins herself.

It’s not something to ignore and sweep under the rug. But it’s also something you should look into the context and fucking have a discussion with the guy about, instead of making a unilateral public statement that plays right into the DNC establishment’s hands. Very frustrating and disappointing move on AOC’s part.

I mean yeah, that is multiple fair points. All I’m saying is that it would behoove the strength of that argument to be able to establish a causal chain that makes that unavoidably clear.

So uh to be clear, I am 0% defending orangeboi. What I AM saying is that understanding what went wrong in the context of the Biden administration’s response to the situation is far more worthy of consideration. Scapegoating orangeboi for process failures that arose specifically from the Biden admin would be refusing to learn from a poor outcome, and a rejection of agency over the part of the dynamic that wasn’t outright malicious, and simply could have been done more effectively, or without error in the future.

I’m talking about a 5Ys, basically. And if you are ever in one of those, you’re not trying hard enough if you’re scapegoating. A malicious actor is one answer; you have four more good ones to come up with, and usually the best answers have to do with process - or, at least, strategic learnings.

You are getting downvoted, but containment was breached in 2022. Personally, I’m unsure how much orangeboi’s first stint harmed matters - did they kneecap funding for that? I’d believe it, to be clear, but I do think it’s important to bring receipts in matters like this.

And that said, while I’m sure the US had some sort of role in supporting the quarantine zone at the Darien Gap, I’m not familiar enough with the nuance of their operations to say whether or not it was the US, Panama, or someone else dropping the ball, or simply a combination of bad luck and natural adaptation. We are talking about a species of parasitic insect here - the lifecycle is so quick that 22 years very well may have been enough time for evolution to throw a wrench into containment efforts.

Edit: yes, by all means, continue downvoting because I and other users are pointing out that (CW: images of active infestation in animals) there is a lot of context and detail to this situation and it’s not actually as simple as “orangeboi cut funding”.

While it is true that orangeboi surely did not help, and him gutting programs to track things like this at the start of his second term (note: in 2024, which is after the original containment breach in Panama in 2022) was absolutely fucking stupid, the breach did not actually occur on his watch. The outbreak made it from Panama to the Mexican state of Chiapas between 2022 and 2024, all under Biden’s purview.

By no means am I defending orangeboi here. I’m simply saying that to my eye, this is looking a lot like one of the many areas in which Biden dropped the ball, and orangeboi exacerbated the matter, and then tried to fully blame it on Biden. But both are culpable: Biden and his admin for not treating a horrifying parasitic outbreak with the “oh fuck all hands on deck” attitude that it deserves, and orangeboi and his regime for being simplistic imbecilic fucks with far more concern about getting rich and casting blame than doing literally anything else to help anyone else.

Ignoring, of course, that it’s actually a constitutional matter for Ukraine

Based EU

The fact that I have heard company executives talk about both of these activities unironically within the span of the same meeting damages my calm

Unfortunately, that’s not profitable :(

The one silver lining of an actual serious war would be that I’m pretty sure a lot of billionaires would get ganked, which is a big component of what the world needs to start moving in the right direction.

I mean… yeah, DARPA will probably be one of the first adopters of that stuff, it’s true. But DARPA is pretty much always a first adopter of any new tech, because they’re basically the research wing of the US military, and they have effectively infinite resources at their disposal (note: I am not debating whether or not that is a good thing here; simply stating that it is a thing). But just because they’ll likely do something military-ish with it first doesn’t mean that it’s a “bad” technology. The internet itself was, after all, initially a project of DARPA’s predecessor, ARPA, and was initially named “ARPAnet”.

Analog as in analog signals vs digital signals. Reductively: circuitry designed to operate in a continuously variable electrical domain, as opposed to circuitry designed to operate in a clocked binary domain.

Analog is (with a LOT of handwaving) way closer to how biological neural nets (that is, actual neurological tissue) operates. This is one of many domains where the exploration of biomimicry could yield some incredible advantages in a lot of areas.