I’m afraid it’s way more important to most US voters than it is to you or I.

What are your thoughts? Do you think there’s a liberal female candidate that could beat the GOP challenger in 2028?

You can put whichever woman you want there on the top of the ticket — they will lose every time in the current landscape of the US. We need a different strategy for now.

I’m really sorry to say that AOC stands a snowball’s chance in hell. Look around and ask yourself whether this country would ever, ever, EVER elect a woman. It’s really that simple. It’d be great if we lived in a more progressive country, but we’re going to have to be crafty clever to get what we want. Nominating a woman for the highest office of our land is a choice we can keep making, but we’ll keep losing and the GOP will continue to erode the country.

Yep — because she is a woman, people with create reasons why they can’t vote for her. Hilary and Kamala were both fine politicians. Most that did not vote for either of them are just afraid to confess they’re real beliefs, so they just pick a narrative and run with it because it makes them appear more sophisticated than a “I hate women” statement.

That’s disappointing. Leading is very different from protesting, and it remains unclear whether Sawant has learned the difference. And if she can’t regularly show up to city council meetings, why should anyone believe she would be able to work with other federal representatives? She’s chaos in a bottle, and that’s no way to govern.

Oh you won’t find much disagreement from me there, and you clearly care deeply. What we have in our infrastructure is hard to change and so despite better alternatives, we have to look at what options are available and cost effective. For that reason, red light cameras and speed bumps are appropriate solutions in an Americanized roadway until we figure out to fund and deploy the big boys you really want. After all, Americans understand punishment way better than they do public transport!

Hello! The consequence for going too fast over a speed bump is you get jostled around a bit and you decide how much of that you can tolerate. The consequence of running a red light can either be nothing or a collision. Red light cameras add an incentive for you to avoid a potential collision. We can have speed bumps and cameras :)

Would you feel better if 100% of the revenue collected from red light infractions went back to better road infrastructure?

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 😉

Thanks for single-handedly maintaining the connections to local events in this community! It’s nice seeing things that aren’t just copy-paste headlines I could’ve seen in plenty of other outlets 🙂

I have a difficult time separating the Elonverse from all the incredibly cool shit SpaceX keeps doing. I have to constantly remind myself that I’m following it for the engineers that are pioneering breakthrough tech and that it has nothing to do with Mr. Elmo. How you walk that tightrope when you’re a policymaker must be even more challenging.

It’s a bad line for sure. I watched and read through the follow-up quotes and I think this bit is important to read along with it:

“The mayor was not praising them, he was referencing they have an objective reputation as leaders in technology and innovation, and that it is a danger they are in the president’s orbit,” Housen said. “He certainly doesn’t agree with their politics, which is why he highlighted this through concerns around the actions coming out of DC like significant staffing cuts impacting cybersecurity and the degradation of protections and questions over access to personal data.”

Could’ve been foot-in-mouth syndrome, and I think the concerns he shared about federal layoffs support his real intent. I know it’s easy to see red right now, and that’s why it’s important to distinguish the real problems.

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.