https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/joe-biden/?ex_cid=abcpromo

Looks like he’s at ~38% approval, ~58% disapproval.

For what it’s worth, the ipsos poll here is a bit of an outlier compared to other recent polls.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/

Yeah. Power plants are nowhere near 90% efficient.

It’s worth emphasizing, though, that they’re still way, way more efficient than car engines are.

Also, regenerative breaking saves a lot of energy. Basically, instead of using the motor to increase the cars speed, you use it as a generator to recharge the battery.

Ok, I’ll bite.

How many people do you think shopped at your grocery store?

On average, how much food do you think they each wasted per week at home?

How much food per week did your store waste?

How typical do you think these numbers are nationwide?

Look at figure 2.

Consumption isn’t 50%, but it’s the largest single bar in that chart - significantly so.

You can argue, sure. But people have actually studied this, and you’re factually just plain wrong.

You’ve seen the centralized waste. But you haven’t picked through a neighborhood’s worth of trash cans to put that centralized waste into the larger decentralized context.

The government spends hundreds of billions on infrastructure every year.

Have we fixed potholes permanently?

Also, $8 billion is a bit less than $24 bucks per person in America. Do you really think $24 is enough to permanently solve hunger in a country? Do you think that another $5/person is reasonable, a few years later?

Almost half of food waste is people buying food that they let go bad before they eat it.

That’s substantially a price problem, in that people are more willing to let a cheap banana spoil than a prime rib or lobster. Food being cheap makes people more willing to let it expire.

But fixing residential food waste by making food more expensive would make hunger worse.

Keep in mind: the largest source of food waste is residential. The second largest source is restaurants.

Food waste is bad for the environment, sure. But the rent being too damn high is a lot more of the reason why people go hungry than me letting a bagged salad in my fridge go bad.

Although it’s been used for a fairly wide array of algorithms for decades. Everything from alpha-beta tree search to k-nearest-neighbors to decision forests to neural nets are considered AI.

Edit: The paper is called

Avoiding fusion plasma tearing instability with deep reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning and deep neural nets are buzzwordy these days, but neural nets have been an AI thing for decades and decades.

Precisely three third party candidates have won any EC votes in the last century: George Wallace, Strom Thurmond and Robert La Follete. Follete won Wisconsin, and the other two unsurprising only won states in the deep south.

The likely “best case” scenario would be something like the 1912 election, which was essentially a three way race between former Republican president Teddy Roosevelt running third party against the incumbent Republican Taft, and the Democratic challenger, Willson.

Willson won 41.8% of the popular vote, and 81% of of EC vote. Taft got 23% of the vote, and managed to carry Vermont and Utah. Roosevelt got 27% of the vote, and carried 6 states. Eugene Debs didn’t win a single state with his 6% of the vote - and its worth noting that the last time a third party candidate did as well as Debs was Perot, back in 96.

A majority of the country voted for a current or former Republican president, yet the election was a land slide for the Democrat in the EC.

Because of the structure of the EC, third parties are either irrelevant protest votes (such as the south protest voting for segregationists) or they blow up in your face. Why would this time be different?

Edit:

One significant problem with a pro-Palestinian third party revolt against Biden is that Democratic support for Palestinians isn’t anywhere near high enough for a universal revolt against Biden on that issue. It’d just be begging for a repeat of 1912.

Netanyahu’s poll numbers are pretty rock bottom among Democrats, but a majority of older Democrats see Israel as a legitimate state with an unfortunately far right current government that’s going too far in their current war against a terrorist organization. They’re not looking for a free Palestine that stretches from the river to the sea.

Suppose one year you spend $60k, but only earned $50k. You lost $10k.

The next year, you spend $57k, and earned $53k. You lost $4k, and your losses narrowed by $6k.

Disney+ lost 1.3 million subscribers in the final quarter of 2023 amid a hefty price hike that went into effect last fall, but managed to narrow its streaming business’ losses by $300 million during the October-December period.

That doesn’t really sound like it backfired to me. They lost subscribers but made more money.

Yeah, projects also exist in the real world and practical considerations matter.

The legacy C/C++ code base might slowly and strategically have components refactored into rust, or you might leave it.

The C/C++ team might be interested in trying Rust, but have to code urgent projects in C/C++.

In the same way that if you have a perfectly good felling axe and someone just invented the chain saw, you’re better off felling that tree with your axe than going into town, buying a chainsaw and figuring out how to use it. The axe isn’t really the right tool for the job anymore, but it still works.

C is not how a computer truly works.

If you want to know how computers work, learn assembly and circuit design. You can learn C without ever thinking about registers, register allocation, the program counter, etc.

Although you can learn assembly without ever learning about e.g. branch prediction. There’s tons of levels of abstraction in computers, and many of the lower level ones try to pretend you’ve still got a computer from the 80s even though CPUs are a lot more complex than they used to be.

As an aside, I’ve anecdotally heard of some schools teaching Rust instead of C as a systems language in courses. Rust has a different model than C, but will still teach you about static memory vs the stack vs the heap, pointers, etc.

Honestly, if I had to write some systems software, I’d be way more confident in any Rust code I wrote than C/C++ code. Nasal demons scare me.

Right tool for the job, sure, but that evolves over time.

Like, years back carpenters didn’t have access to table saws that didn’t have safety features that prevent you from cutting off your fingers by stopping the blade as soon as it touches them. Now we do. Are old table saws still the “right tool for the job”, or are they just a dangerous version of a modern tool that results in needless accidents?

Is C still the right tool for the job in places where Rust is a good option?

Fixing the two party system in the house can be done piecemeal by states, because states run their own house elections.

Fixing the two party system in the presidency requires either an amendment or an interstate pact.

Because what the constitution says is that if no single candidate gets a majority in the electoral college’s FPTP election, then the president is whichever candidate the US house prefers.

There would have been a pretty big difference between Ford inditing Nixon after Watergate, and Nixon running again with the promise of inditing political rivals in retribution.

It’s good to hold politicians accountable for their actual crimes, and bad to have a politically motivated kangaroo court.

The main problem is just that getting a product from a one-off in a lab to a cost-competitive mass-market product is hard and can take a lot of time, to say the least.

For example, Don Sadoway initially published about a molten metal battery in 2009. He gave a Ted talk in 2012. They’ve run into assorted setbacks along the way and are apparently just starting to deploy the first commercial test systems this year.

It’s less that these breakthroughs are bullshit, and more that commercializing these things is hard. The articles about the breakthroughs are often bullshit, though, or at least way too rosy.

That doesn’t quite work.

Trump’s lawyers argument is that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution on any official act, even if that official act is illegal or unconstitutional; that the only remedy is impeachment.

The judge brought up ordering seal team 6 to assinate a rival as an example of an obviously illegal official act. Trump’s lawyers response was “obviously he’d be impeached, but yeah, I guess if he weren’t he’d be immune from prosecution”.

Shooting Trump at the debate would be a prosecutable private action, according to Trump’s lawyer. What Biden would have to do is to tell seal team 6 “If Trump gets on this stage, shoot him”.

I mean, it’s not something he himself said, so they don’t even really need to do that.

Basically, what happened was his lawyer was arguing that the only remedy for official actions taken by a president is impeachment; they can’t be prosecuted in court aside from that.

The judge said “a president ordering seal team 6 to assassinate a rival is an official act, yes?” Trump’s lawyer said “He’d quickly be impeached for that!”, then when pressed more, something about Marbury v Madson presupposing something or other, then finally when pressed for a yes or no as to whether he’d be immune from prosecution, said “qualified yes”.

The whole exchange is pretty bad and worth a listen.