Well, they didn’t specifically feel concern for them electing a despot. They were concerned simply that they might pick wrong from the viewpoint of those with political power at the time. They weren’t specifically afraid of a despot or demagogue, but someone who would either threaten the political elites wellbeing, or loosing support from the “less populous” slave states. A system that gives disproportionate weight to smaller states to buy their support while also giving themselves more influence over a check on the legislature and one of the branches of power is what they went with.

They weren’t afraid of Trump, they were concerned about Lincoln.

Some countries have more consumer protections than the US does, and consumers from there are wary of the lack of assurances a lot of us products have.

To them, it’s like being told you have to pay for your food at the restaurant even if they mess up your order and you don’t get to eat it. It doesn’t matter that the waiter probably isn’t going to drop your food on the floor, throw it away and then give you a bill: the fact that they could makes you not want to go there.

Likewise, your watch will almost certainly not break via factory defect after more than a month, but the expectation is that if they sell you something it’ll either last the expected lifetime or be suitably replaced or refunded on failure.

We’re used to our particular blend of capitalist hellscape, so a company saying they’ll replace things if they’re obviously broken the moment you buy it, but beyond than you’re out of luck just seems normal. It’s on us to make sure they don’t mail us subtly damaged microelectronics and tiny lithium bombs.

It actually largely has. It both reduced the numbers of people who needed to ride horses around to figure out the winner, and it helped keep power consolidated with the powerful.

A good chunk of our early democratic institutions were designed with a lot of influence by people who didn’t entirely trust their constituency and wanted to keep things from being too democratic. So you have several options for elected officials to disregard voters in most matters, and the president has the power to say “nah” to legislation.

This is for the primary. This means that people can vote for a more progressive candidate as their first choice and have their second choice be for the “safe” candidate.

The winner of the Democratic presidential primary is almost certainly always going to be a Democrat. There’s almost nothing you can do to change that.

Beyond that, they can do multiple things so doing w good thing doesn’t mean they didn’t do something else.
How do you propose they fix gerrymandering, a state level issue affecting the election of representatives, or citizens United, a supreme Court ruling, via the procedural rules of the party presidential primary? It’s like saying there’s no point brushing your teeth if you have credit card debt.

I had someone indignantly think I was making a racist joke when I said algebra came from the middle east.
I had a tricky time explaining that no, I’m not joking about the word sounding Arabic, it’s actually derived from Arabic and I was earnestly sharing a fact.

Their heart, if not their head, was in the right place at least.

I’m inclined to disagree because I doubt he’s working for any voters. If he’s leaving office, he gains nothing from their support and if he’s planning to stay then splitting the country also weakens him.

Further, sentiment among the southern population is very different from the civil war era.

I mean, that was his goal. Either destroy trust to weaken our position globally for the benefit of someone else, or blind adherence to the belief that other countries are the only beneficiary of the relationship we have with them, and they need to “stop freeloading”. That in exchange for military defense, technology, aid, and everything else we get unparalleled military freedom, everyone meeting us on our terms and first mover advantage, control of global financial markets and preferential market access basically everywhere. Their boneheaded view that government is a business and everyone who came before just didn’t understand somehow is infuriating.

Entirely agree. Personally most of what I would want done would be better handled by a macro system that was easy to setup. Most of what I want is pretty usually the same so “remember this setup” is basically good enough.

If they hadn’t jumped the gun so badly and tainted the launch with crap results, Google would have been well positioned to do something profoundly useful.
If it could actually extract useful information with citations and pointers for next steps and work as an interactive search, that would actually be really really useful.
The whole “hallucinating health advice” and “being terrible” thing really set them back, even if they’ve improved.

Like you said, I don’t really need help creating. I do need help remembering things or finding information: that’s why I’m using a search engine in the first place.

At work, there’s a person who knows everything about the job. He regularly gets questions where the answer is just the correct way to find out for yourself.
That’s what I want. “Oh, you mean X? Try looking at YZ. Oh, you wanted X, but in G conditions. That’s over in FOO. It’s confusing because reasons written down here…”

Some people do want to talk to their computer and would love it if it worked right.

The problem is that it often doesn’t work right,cans they’re setting it up as though everyone has that as their top priority for their desktop.

Instead of baking it in to the os, expose the bits needed so it can be an installable program. Now people can have it or not, and you open the door for different non-ai tools to also work on the computer.
It’s almost like a proper, consistent API would be better than a bot you try to convince to use a dozen bad ones.

I’m not sure I follow your logic. The environmental impacts of manufacturing will be averaged out faster with something that’s getting a lot of use, and targeting the efficiency of something that gets continuous use has more impact.

Throwing away busses to switch would be silly, but it’s a perfectly good idea to switch as you maintain your fleet. Your alternative is buying more diesel busses, which… No, building a trolley or tram system which is more expensive and less flexible, or rebuilding cities to be livable without needing vehicle transportation, which isn’t happening soon and has trouble for people with mobility issues like the elderly without other some accomodation.

It’s super annoying, because that term should belong to “if you’ve got an hour we can grab coffee and I’ll explain my politics to you. You don’t? Uhh … ‘rather to the left’?”, and not “I’m fine with the gays and poors, but I don’t know if I’m comfortable with the government helping or protecting them”.

We have a code of conduct training at work that includes and anti corruption segment (nothing weird, just stuff like “a vendor buying lunch at a sales meeting is fine, but no gifts or having lunch at extremely expensive places”, and “some places give small symbolic gifts around holidays, usually a pastry. That’s fine. Do not accept a $500 pastry”)

A couple years ago they updated the module and the person engaging in non-obvious corrupt business practices became gay in passing. The overwhelming response by a lot of the company was “yay! We made it guys! They realized that we like bribes too! I feel so seen”.

And one of the first steps in artificial insemination is giving a guy a handjob.

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I think we’re just at a point where a company not constantly trying to find ways to squirm out of every single thing is a breath of fresh air.

“Hi! We’re valve. We’re mostly following the law without fuss, mostly make money by getting people to buy things they want, and our excessively wealthy owner acts like a preposterously rich person, not a comic book villain: Fantasizing about living his life isn’t deeply concerning. The hardware we sell isn’t deliberately worse for consumers to no benefit to ourselves” – Hands down one of the best “big” companies out there.

The annoying thing is that the credit cards fully support authorizing for some amount likely to cover the transaction and using the same transaction to capture so no lingering auth sits around.

If a merchant has captured the funds and still has a hold sitting around the someone has implemented something wrong.

It’s a matter of priorities. A large portion of Linux users don’t actually care about adoption. They’re not selling the os, so the docs aren’t designed for anyone who isn’t already a user.

Valve on the other hand is paying people for documentation and good ux. That’s enough to significantly boost the quality.

It’s even still a valid course of action if there’s literally no interest in making the world better.
They’ve potentially found a way to make their nearly omnipresent e-commerce platform share a name with the operating system, which is coincidentally mostly developed by others. They get to associate their name with a few tens of billions of dollars of development effort for a fraction of the cost.

To be clear, this isn’t bad or anything. It’s quite literally what a lot of the people doing all that legwork want. It just doesn’t require any altruism from valve. They make money selling games, and they sell more games when people think it’s easier to play them. A desktop with the ease of a console is a big selling point for a lot of people.

Their streaming system works fine with desktop apps, and it already works with their VR setup on different headsets.

I’ve streamed desktop to a different headset. I was able to also do stuff like mounting an app in a picture frame on the wall of a little VR house.

Using the video player on desktop while streaming was a little jank, but since this is a proper desktop I imagine it’ll be easy enough to switch over and use a normal video player without streaming another computers video player.