Space: Ivashov describes how the last working manned launchpad at Baikonur was accidentally destroyed due to poor maintenance. Russia in effect can no longer deploy men into space.

Its even worse for Russia on this point. Not only was that the only crewed launch pad to the ISS, its also the only one that Russia has to launch uncrewed resupply missions (called Progress cargo spacecraft) to the ISS. So the only cargo ships going to the ISS now are from the USA and Japan.

I’ve used Linux on desktop, servers, and embedded devices regularly, but my mobile laptop has always been Windows. There were just enough times when a commercial OS was the only working solution to something even if Linux was great for 95% of other things.

What was the real push for me was how bad Windows 11 was. I have simply opted-out. Not quite two months ago now, I’ve changed that. I bought a M2 Macbook Air and run Asahi Linux (Fedora Remix) as my primary with the ability to dual boot back to OSX if I need a commercial OS. I’ve only had to boot back to OSX one time (and it really was the only solution). Asahi on M2 isn’t perfect but I’m quite happy with it.

I like this approach. It is adding legitimacy back to the government. At no point in the future will anyone question the legitimacy executive orders that Mamdani resubmits because of Adam’s past criminal indictments.

The original book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (written in 1900) has been in the Public Domain for awhile. I’d love Street Fighter version with the main characters.

So they’re working on another RugPullCoin then?

i said i felt bad for the women who the anti abortion people affect, but my friend corrected me and said i meant “people who get pregnant”,

I think you could make a sound argument that anti-abortion people also negatively affect people that can’t get pregnant in a number of ways. One of the prime targets of anti-abortion people is the organization Planned Parenthood. While Planned Parenthood does offer abortion services, they also offer many healthcare related services around other health concerns.

• Planned Parenthood offers services for Menopausal women, who obviously can’t get pregnant
• Planned Parenthood also offers gender affirming hormone therapy for people that need it

So both of these groups are clearly people that can’t get pregnant, but are also negatively affected when anti-abortion people’s actions lead to a shut down of a local clinic serving these populations.

Its also possible we’ve reached the limits of the training data.

This is my thinking too. I don’t know how to solve the problem either because datasets created after about 2022 likely are polluted with LLM results baked in. With even a 95% precision that means 5% hallucination baked into the dataset. I can’t imagine enough grounding is possible to mitigate that. As the years go forward the problem only gets worse because more LLM results will be fed back in as training data.

If you run for the Racism Party™ as a person who has an anti-racist position, do you think you will be nominated? Maybe in an incredibly fringe case, but most of the time you will not be.

Well, I’m not sure why I’d even be running for a nomination to your “Racism Party™”, but I would be pretty unsurprised when I didn’t win.

And then what do you do when you’re not nominated?

I don’t understand why you’d have me running in that party in the first place so I don’t know what answer you’re fishing for here.

It’s literally a dogma by definition. Saying that you would do something as a matter of principle under all possible conditions without ever considering a different strategy is a dogma.

Why did you skip over the part where I showed consideration of how weak and bad the third party candidates are and the other strategy of not voting at all before arriving at the blue candidate?

It’s “you should vote for Democrats no matter what.” Even if they’re a genocidal fascist far-right freak who is going to do everything in their power to block an edge case like Mamdani from every making any positive change, we should apparently still support that.

Now you’re just straight up strawmanning.

Would you actually vote for them if they did or just shame people for not voting blue no matter who?

I actually have voted third party, and it got us the 2nd Iraq war. You’re welcome. So you can see when I advocate against weak third party votes, its because I don’t want a repeat of arguably the USAs first 21st century geopolitical catastrophe and millions of lives lost needlessly in Iraq.

Third parties in the USA have historically fielded pretty weak candidates.

Okay then field strong candidates.

Oh shit! So easy! Why didn’t I think of that?!

When I read your first post here, I saw your line of thought was pretty thin, but there might be something of substance there. I can see what I thought was substance in your post was a mirage. It was a mistake to waste my time engaging with you.

Have a nice day.

Because y’all demand people support the entire party. “Vote blue no matter who.”

You’re conveniently ignoring the entire primary voting process. During the primary you vote for the specific candidate among all running for the position in the party. Policy positions, experience, temperament do vary between the candidates. This is the chance to vote for, among many, that closest resembles your own choices. After the primary however, nearly any Democratic candidate would be preferable to a GOP one to most Democratic voters. So if your own preferred primary candidate doesn’t win the ticket to the general election, it is highly probable that the one that did win would be a closer fit than the GOP candidate. The “vote blue no matter who” isn’t dogma, its usually pragmatic advice. I doubt many left leaning voters that voted trump or withheld their vote feel their assistance in getting trump into office is helping their own policy positions.

A perfect example of the primary system working pretty well is the recent New York Mayor’s race. A legacy previously elected Democratic governor ran and lost to the proudly open farthest left-leaning Democratic Socialist. That Democratic Socialist when on to win the general election for mayor of New York City.

If you do like a very specific Democrat, that doesn’t negate voting for a third party in places where the Democrat is awful. There is nothing built-in the USA’s system that would prevent it from getting seats to a third-party, and Canada is proof of that.

Third parties in the USA have historically fielded pretty weak candidates. For the 2024 Presidential election, the next most leftist candidate on the general election ballot was Jill Stein. Prior the run for President of the United States Steins highest held elected office was in 2005 she successfully won the election for one of the 7 Lexington Town Meeting seats (a small municipal office). If third party candidates want to be seriously considered, then I would recommend they start with smaller office positions to actually build a party that demonstrates is can govern.

I haven’t personally seen this POV for a number of years. The Canadian Blood Services center I liked to go to stopped taking whole blood. I don’t do apheresis so I haven’t been back. US Red Cross is not nearly as convenient to donate because they stopped doing walk ins.

US mentality is weird. Most countries we understand that a “party” stands for certain principles, and so if you don’t like the party, you vote for a different one.

You’re apply logic and rules from completely different nation’s systems and calling the US’s version “weird” because it doesn’t match how other countries do it?

It makes no sense to demand that the party change to accommodate the voter, that’s not the role of a party.

Perhaps in your country it isn’t, but in the US, it is. During the convention of the party, the party chooses its “planks” for its platform. These are chosen within the party itself, and they absolutely change. You can see the 2024 Democratic party platform here if you want to. Here’s the 2020 version.. As you can see there are some large differences. The GOP used to do this same process before it was consumed by the cult of trump.

The role of a party is to try and change the minds of the population to support the principles of the party. A party exists to convince the masses to accommodate them, not for the masses to accommodate the party.

In your system perhaps. Not in the US system. It doesn’t make the US system “wrong”. Does it have shortcomings? Absolutely, all systems do. Are these various shortcomings equal to each other? That’s subjective. I personally would like more aspects of European-style politcal parties, but not everything that I see with parties there. We, as humanity, have yet to find the objectively “best” system.

What’s even weirder is the Americans who delude themselves into believing the Democrats hold principles they literally do not. They are very open about being a neoliberal nationalist party, but I have encountered weird Americans who tell me things like Democrats all support universal healthcare / “Medicare for All”

I’m losing faith in your arguments because you’re painting a picture that all members of a party share the same beliefs. Again, maybe that’s an ideal from your own country’s party system, but it isn’t in the USA. I would be surprised even in your own party if you have universal agreement on all policy positions.

There are individual Democrats that support Medicare for All. Here’s one example:

Hilary Clinton, as First Lady at the time, lead the creation of the Clinton Healthcare plan of 1993. This was absolutely a universal national healthcare plan:

“The task force was created in January 1993, but its own processes were somewhat controversial and drew litigation. Its goal was to come up with a comprehensive plan to provide universal health care for all Americans, which was to be a cornerstone of the administration’s first-term agenda.”

Does this mean that every Democrat believes in universal healthcare? Of course not. But to claim that none do, as you are, is equally untrue.

Even here on Lemmy, criticizing Democrats by pointing out how they are right-wing can get you downvotes from weirdo Americans who are convinced they are a truly left-wing party.

You’re going to have to be more specific with an example post, because most of the downvoted posts I see close to this are “both sides are the same!” garbage. Also, I don’t believe many believe the US Democratic Party is “truly left-wing” as would be defined in, lets say, Europe.

On X, Mr Engel has popularised the idea of “heritage Americans”

Heritage Americans. So like the 6 Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy? Or possibly others in the region such as the Wendat or Lenape? No? Then the Algonquin tribes certainly, like the Ojibwe, Shawnee or the Miami. Not them either? My mistake, you must mean the Cherokee. Huh? The Navajo, Hopi, or Apache then? The Inuit?

Them: “No. You know…”

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. I appreciate it.

Have a happy new year!

You too!

If you want to vote by mail please do so as soon as you can and consider dropping it off at the counter where they will postmark it right away.

Even then you have to request it. The term you need to ask for is “hand canceling”. The USPS worker will take a handheld ink stamp and mark over the postage stamp with the received date. That letter is now “processed” as received by the post office.

While the discovered source is bad, its not as bad as where my mind went initially for the source of the Cs137:

I had wondered if it was Fukishima contaminated water discharge:

"TEPCO anticipates that the ongoing release of wastewater, currently exceeding 1.3 million metric tonnes, will span approximately 30 years. "

I think we’ll have to agree to disagree. Often times if I see an interesting question in the comments, I am glad for it, because that was the insight I needed to want to read the article and answer it.

Just reading comments without the article? I have no issue with that at all, and do that myself.

For me that isn’t annoying unless the commenter is getting something wrong that is talked about in the article, and doubles down on it.

How do you, as the commenter yourself, know you aren’t getting something wrong without reading the article?

I feel like each post is an invitation to discuss the general topic

How do you know what the general topic is without reading the article?

If you feel like that is disrespectful, I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think it is that disrespectful.

Maybe disrespectful is too strong a term. Let me amend that; I lose respect for the poster when they’re asking a question that is answered in the article. I sometimes write off engaging with them further in that thread because they’re clearly not even doing the most basic of tasks to be a part of the conversation.

But plenty of interesting conversations can happen in the comments (like this one) that have almost nothing whatever to do with the article!

I’ll do this too on occasionally, if I can clearly tell we’re not discussion the article topic, but its a gamble on my part and if someone smacks me down because it is article topical, I fully own that and apologize knowing its my fault.

When my wife and I break down and go to an AMC theater we always plan to arrive 30 minutes after the “start time”. We still catch a trailer or two before the movie actually starts.

The second most recent movie I saw was also at an AMC, and I discovered that AMC now no longer does: Commercials, Trailers, Feature

Now its: Commercial, Commercial, Commercial, Trailer , Commercial,Trailer, Commercial, Trailer, tease of Feature, Commercial, Commercial, Trailer, Commercial, Feature

For the past 15 years or so I’ve intentionally avoid trailers and find I enjoy the resulting movie more. This last AMC movie had the gall to include a trailer for the movie I was sitting in.

We just found an “art house” theater about 30 minutes away

There is are a couple theaters like this in town, but they are quite a drive and one has as problem of being located in a busy urban area with expensive pay-parking.

I get where you’re going here and I do the same as far as reading, but before I post I make it a point to actually read the article. Otherwise I may be forming and asking questions clearly already addressed or are completely divorced from the actual topic because I lack the articles context.

I feel it is part of the mutual respect with other posters to not waste their time asking questions already answered (in the article) or derailing the conversation because I don’t know what conversation I’m in.

Nowadays, iOS sees just as many vulnerabilities as every other popular OS.

I’m no Apple fanboy but Apple security is more than the OS. Since they also produce all of the hardware, it means they can do things at the hardware level and either make available or restrict things to the OS that Windows cannot do because Microsoft doesn’t control all the hardware makers.

I’m posting this in Asahi Linux on an M2 powered Macbook. Its been an interesting experience learning not only the benefits of this as a hardware platform, but also its limitations from the FOSS point of view.

please learn to comprehend - i did not ask for examples i asked for why they are allowed.

I didn’t give you a single example to answer all of your questions. You don’t even know enough to form the right questions yet. That’s why I told you to pick up a history book.

yes you have lots of heroes and good guys and volunteering when needed is indeed important.

Thats not the takeaway from the example I gave. Its that war is murky. Geopolitics is a constant moving narrative. Its that principle can be more important than civil statute. Its that a nation of immigrants doesn’t immediately divorce itself from its prior ethnic affiliations.

i do not trust the US to not pull the rug out from these guys.

That is indeed a possible risk. You’re going to be shocked to learn about American citizens that fought for Germany in WWI, and were welcomed back to American with no hard feelings.

so … how is this legal and allowed

“allowed”? Which unit of the US government do you see chasing US citizens into a warzone to stop them?

and what happens when the US turns its back on ukraine?

Again, history book. There is no one answer. History has examples of it going both ways and no consistent answer as to what the future holds.

So again, pick up a history book and look at how prior examples of this play out for not only US citizens, but also other citizens in other nations that we in the USA drew our legal inspiration from.

Along with the reading of history, if you could check your arrogance at the door, that would be appreciated too. Starting from a place Ignorance is no crime as long as you’re looking to learn. It is possible to engage in conversations without being an asshole.