Says the ‘man’ who just tried to buy an election in Wisconsin.

That’s far too realistic a lab for stock photos. Stock photo labs have clean benches save for a handful of test tubes and Erlenmeyer flasks. Real labs have equipment on every flat surface and boxes of shit stacked up to the ceiling on the shelves.

Weirdly enough, I recognized a publicity shot of a lab I’d designed being used as a stock photo recently… in an article about how scientists are trying to flee the country. …Hooray?

Eugh, daylight.

When the base is mad enough to throw them out if they don’t. The Florida special elections didn’t flip any seats, but they showed a 15-point swing away from the GOP in deep red parts of the state. That’s gonna make them sweat. Unless they can sufficiently rig the midterms or sway Trump off his current “crash the economy for lulz” trajectory, it may well be a bloodbath, and that’s the sort of math that starts peeling sycophants away from Trump.

Back in my day us hermit types just did our grocery shopping after 9PM, this is a whole other level.

It took several violent landgrabs and wars of aggression before Russian oligarch money wasn’t welcome around the world, and those guys were all but openly affiliated with the Russian mafia from the days of the fall of the Soviet Union. I fully expect American oligarchs’ money to be happily accepted just about everywhere for at least as long as it takes Trump to get around to trying to take Greenland by force.

The Zionist factions that were foundational to the establishment of the Israeli state saw the Holocaust as proof of two things: first, that the Jewish people would never truly be safe in the world without a country of their own, and second, that the horrors visited on Jews by the Nazis, and European antisemites before them, and the Cossacks before them, demonstrated that no extreme was unjustified in the establishment and protection of that state. Those attitudes have been at the bedrock of modern day Israel from its founding. To those who adhere to them, “Never again” is short for “Never again to us,” and damn anybody who doesn’t fit their narrow (conservative, religiously observant, largely white Ashkenazi) vision of Jewishness.

To these folks, ethnic cleansing of Palestine was always the goal, and they’ve been waiting decades for an international order that would look the other way while they purged, displaced, and slaughtered their way to complete Israeli control of the land they saw as theirs to take. Now they’ve got it, and they’re not wasting any time.

Fair point. My thrust was more that the reason why things like system boot times and software launch speeds don’t seem to benefit as much as they seem like they should when moving from, say, a good SATA SSD (peak R/W speed: 600 MB/sec) to a fast m.2 that might have listed speeds 20+ times faster, is that QD1 performance of that m.2 drive might only be 3 or 4 times better than the SATA drive. Both are a big step up from spinning media, but the gap between the two in random read speed isn’t big enough to make a huge subjective difference in many desktop use cases.

Femme V really nails the emotional arc of V’s story in ways that the VA for masc V doesn’t, to the point that I’m truthfully less invested in my current playthrough (male street kid origin) than I was in my original (female corpo).

That said, everybody who did voice work in BG3 did fantastic in ways that have made other things I’ve touched feel hit-and-miss – I nearly dropped Avowed due to some early mid voice work making me worry about the overall quality – but Neil Newborn has been rightfully getting acclaim for Astarion, and you have to hand it to him – they gave him the character, but he was the one who decided “I’m gonna chew the scenery so hard I shit splinters” and made it work so damn well.

The trouble with ridiculous R/W numbers like these is not that there’s no theoretical benefit to faster storage, it’s that the quoted numbers are always for sequential access, whereas most desktop workloads are more frequently closer to random, which flash memory kinda sucks at. Even really good SSDs only deliver ~100MB/sec in pure random access scenarios. This is why you don’t really feel any difference between a decent PCIe 3.0 M.2 drive and one of these insane-o PCI-E 5.0 drives, unless you’re doing a lot of bulk copying of large files on a regular basis.

It’s also why Intel Optane drives became the steal of the century when they went on clearance after Intel abandoned the tech. Optane is basically as fast in random access as in sequential access, which means that in some scenarios even a PCIe 3.0 Optane drive can feel much, much snappier than a PCIe 4 .0 or 5.0 SSD that looks faster on paper.

Libertarianism also was my first stop out of my childhood religious right upbringing. I still tend to see issues from a libertarian framing – i.e., if it’s not hurting anybody why should the government care? – but most US libertarians seem weirdly fixated on ideas like “why can’t I dump 5,000 gallons of hydrofluoric acid into a hole in the ground if the hole is on my own property?” or “why shouldn’t I be allowed to enter into a contract with somebody that allows me to hunt them for sport?” or especially “why can’t I have sex with a minor if they say it’s OK?”, where there’s really obvious personal and societal harms involved and the only way that you can think otherwise is if you’ve engaged in some serious motivated reasoning.

Whereas my thinking these days is more like, “who does it hurt if somebody decides to change their outward appearance to match how they feel inside?” and the like – i.e., the right to personal autonomy and free expression, rather than the right to do whatever I want to others as long as I can somehow coerce them into agreeing to it. I don’t have much patience for the anarchist side of left-libertarianism – in my experience you need robust systems in place to keep bad actors from running amok, and a state without a monopoly on violence is simply ceding that monopoly to whoever wants to take it up for their own ends – but that starting point of libertarian thought, that people sold be free in their choices until those choices run up against somebody else’s freedoms – is still fundamentally valid.

In anything like a competitive district, a progressive Independent challenger is more likely to split the vote for a milquetoast Democratic incumbent and hand the seat to the Republican challenger. Working within the Democratic primary system has its challenges, but also clears the field so that there’s one clear choice for left-leaning voters rather than two.

First past the post sucks ass, but it’s what we’ve got to live with until we’ve got enough power to change it.

I also grew up in Missouri, though I live in Kansas now, and I know several people who fit that description.

The thing that kills me about Missouri is that it used to be a competitive state for moderate Democrata, but the rural chunks of the state fell victim to right wing populism during the Tea Party wave in 2010 and now there’s a whole generation of Missourians whose defining political characteristic is rancorous hate for “liberal” city people. Kansas’ politics aren’t great, either, but at least the rural voters care about farm issues here… In Missouri, particularly south of I-70 where the only real industry they ever had was lead mining, all that’s left is the hate they’ve been fed from right wing assholes.

This psycho was just in the news for attaching her Democratic opponent for “raising a groomer” because one of her grandkids is trans. She makes Marjorie Taylor Green look polite by comparison, and the shame of it is that, given how state-level politics have been trending in Missouri, she’s got a decent shot of winning in the general just because of the magic ®.