Advantageous geography has allowed the US to fall upward in success throughout its existence. It’s as simple as that, no joke. By sitting on a mountain of natural resources and having no formidable enemies in the western hemisphere, the US was the default player to take center stage post WW2. Europe was decimated and America funded the war. Bam, the US gets success in spite of its thoroughly racist and regressive culture. Their position (and hubris) became too entrenched for there to ever be a legitimate contender. We might get to witness a changing of the guard now though, we’ll see how much damage 47 does.

FDR era is an incredible circumstance though. The past North’s failure to reconstruct the South led to all kinds of strategic chess moves that ultimately saw the D and R parties swap. The liberals had to put aside the racism problems for a bit so they could unfuck the economy. It was probably the best that the progressives could have hoped to achieve given their challenges.

All said as an American. So we’re not all morons. But it’s a sticky, uphill battle. I’m not sure if it’s fixable without a big change to the world order. Thanks for the question!

Yeah I hear you. There are truly very few options for work where you can be absolutely certain that no line can be drawn to enabling violence. Some are more obvious, blatant, and intentional than others.

I always forget about that. Do you think that reflects more on Elon or SpaceX employees?

Can you explain further? How is SpaceX’s goal to murder people? That feels misplaced and I’d love understand what you mean!

NASA’s mission is to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research. I’ll support any model that enables those principles. They paved the way in the 60s and that’s enabled others to succeed. Isn’t that the highest form of achievement? Look at what SpaceX has done with their massively reusable Falcon 9. The space shuttle flew 135 missions over 40 years; that’s about 3 a year. There’s been 453 Falcon 9 flights (134 in 2024 alone) and a single Falcon 9 stack has been reused 26 times… all of those achievements happened within a span of 15 years. I think it’s safe to say that they’ve mastered the rocket. You’re just seeing the R&D phase of their new one …which has the added spectacle of some rapid unscheduled disassemblies that we get to witness 😉

The world’s a pretty crazy place right now. If we put aside personalities and politics for a moment and focus on the engineering achievements, SpaceX is doing groundbreaking work. A few explosions here and there are part of the R&D process — they’re just big and obvious enough that they’re easy for us to spectate. Given the success of their Falcon 9 platform, that’s a cost they can easily eat and a risk enticing enough to take. NASA engineers a generation ago were similarly breaking ground on their frontier, be it orbiting the moon or preventing fires in space by avoiding free floating graphite particles 😉

How do you feel about content like this? It’s long form, informative, and hobbyist.

Or this guy who generates customer leads to his interior design business?

I find takes like this unfortunate. I learned SO much on TikTok. Accounts like gatenerd, jerrythink, kellyscleankitchen, softpourn, publicopinion, hankgreen, alexisanddean, thelawsayswhat, kylascan, and countless interior designers, architects, chefs, and all the others I can’t recall.

There is no other platform like TikTok where you can get drawn in not just in minutes watched, but in knowledge gained. Wish you shared my experience.

Yep. It’s pretty nuts how much they can push over copper. And remember that just having a coax cable at your house doesn’t mean it’s copper the whole way back to the ISP.

What do you think Trump will do in Israel now?

I believe you when you say you’re trying to help your Arab community. That’s the right thing to do. What you should spend some time considering is the opportunity for progress you take away by declaring the Harris platform not good enough. The opportunity for a less-than-worst outcome for Palestine has now exited the room. Have you considered what Trump will do? Have you considered how the world react when that happens? If feels like you haven’t given consideration for the now what.

We as a nation lessen our ability to make those type of influential impacts on foreign affairs when we elect unpredictable and egotistical leaders. Put your own mask on before you help others. As long as we keep infighting like this, the Christian nationalists will continue to win. FPTP is strategic voting and strategic voting only. This type of division foments and spreads and it is so crucial that we instead focus on supporting empathic leaders who can evolve and iterate their platform for the greater good. You stopped paying attention to her campaign if you didn’t see that. But it goes back to the nuance of the situation in a post-inflationary economy, and unfortunately the incumbent historically has always lost. The first chance at harm reduction was for the GOP to not choose Trump. The second chance was to buck with history and reelect the incumbent party.

Prepare for Gaza to be handed to Israel under Trump. Same with Ukraine to Russia. And we’re only talking about the tangible situations without even considering the soft power impacts of putting him back in power. That’s the world order risk, and you can choose to “win” the battle (spoiler: you won’t) but it will forfeit all future ones (e.g. Korea, Taiwan, who knows what else domestically). You can’t choose to criticize one platform by one measure yet use a different measure for the other. Trump is objectively worse if you care at all about genocide, and therefore yes you as a candidate do demand the vote of others who think the other is worse. FPTP demands strategic voting. You vote for the person that aligns closest with you. You do your neighbors poorly when you decide to vote based on a single issue, so I think your observations about her campaign say more about you than it does about her.

Just to be super clear, yes we were watching different candidates then. The country needs to walk a very nuanced path if we want to continue the recovery started by the Fed (interest rates) and Biden (IRA and CHIPS). Don’t get me wrong: Biden deciding to run for reelection was the worst possible decision he could have made. The second worst: dropping out 107 days from the election. I’m sure the private discussions about his decision were passionate, but of course she’s not going to publicly lay her boss out like that. That’s not realistic to expect her to undermine any progress Biden. You privately disagree and publicly commit. You do that until the circumstances change. The DNC is absolutely to blame. Not Harris though. It was as good as it could have been given the duration.

And then there’s the elephant in the room: she does not exist in a vacuum. We had a front row view to a horribly misogynist, criminal, fascist wannabe since (checks notes) 2015. People comparing these 2 and selecting to risk the world order just to save their regressive social views are also to blame. Because remember: all economists agree how dangerous his plan is.

Well let’s be real honest with ourselves here. Her platform was fine and her campaign was executed very, very well. But she had only, what, 107 days to pull it off? Economists agree that her platform would have the best impact on the country, but she or anyone who would have taken her place were all swimming upstream against inflation. And since we’re being honest here, we both recognize that the Fed, not controlled by the executive branch, are the ones responsible for righting the ship. And Biden did everything he could from his chair up to and including working across the aisle in GOP majority house, and only failed when Trump intervened for sake of an election year talking point.

The map is the outcome, but it’s not evidence of any campaign tanking. She is intelligent, empathetic, and very well spoken. But the settling dust is indicating that the outcome was driven by a number of factors beyond her control.

Trump is representative of the systemic issues America has left unresolved

Him and literally every other politician, so thanks for defining politics for us. The problem is that enough people think he’s the right solution. Oh boy are they wrong.

Remember, the universe for those stats are only voters which account for less than half of the total US population.

What evidence are you using to support your belief that she tanked? That’s a surprise to me and I’d like to understand more.

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There’s actually legal reasons why publications would pay special care to their word choice like this. The difference between seeming violation and violation comes down to hard proof. Whether we like Elon’s sideshow or not, if there is a defendable claim that his post didn’t violate (e.g. new policy that allows it was approved internally but not yet published publicly), NYT could land themselves in a lawsuit that they have a chance of losing. Then ask yourself how many stories do they publish a day? The risk starts to add up quick.

So the word seeming is doing some heavy lifting there. If you ignore the ass covering, they did still report truth on something important.