People will call this sort of thing performative since the legislation will be dead in the water, but you’re spot on. An important part of politics is virtue signaling. You’re telling your supporters what you stand for and that you’re at least trying.

Whether it’s progressive or moderates doing so, it’s an important political tool, and sometimes the only tool at their disposal. Showing people you’re willing to fight, even if you know you’re going to lose, is a big deal.

This is something I think about a lot. The best way to defeat fascism is within the process with democracy – because if we start playing by their rules to stop fascism, we prove them right in a sense. It’s preferable to actually letting fascism happen, but it would severely weaken our democracy.

If voting is not enough, then the next best option would be for Biden to pull his own Jan 6 and refuse to certify the results and call in Seal Team 6. And then after doing so, order his own arrest for violating our laws and norms. The only way to preserve democracy after taking steps outside of democracy is to fall on your own sword.

It’s like an alternate universe within the DC universe – the Joker goes too far and Batman snaps his neck. When he arrives at the police, he carries the Joker’s body and tells them to arrest him. Batman knew it was necessary to kill Joker, but he also knew he had to be held accountable for doing that. Any group which uses violence to end the fascist threat needs to turn themselves in afterwards to preserve peaceful democracy. It would be incredibly unfair to them, but it’s necessary to prevent a new normal of violent anarchy.

This isn’t a bad 4D chess move. Trick Republicans in Congress to heavily limit the power of the president to neuter this decision.

Biden isn’t going to say “yeah I’m thinking of dropping out”, nor will his campaign, even if they’re strongly considering it. It he does decide to step aside, it will be a sudden announcement with no forewarning.

I agree with your premise though. It isn’t impossible. We just need to collect data and do polling for like a week to understand how much the debate hurt Biden, and if there’s any good alternative options who have a better shot.

I think debates and townhalls are Biden’s best bet right now. He needs to show that it was just a bad night for him.

And if it wasn’t just a bad night, it’ll spur action to find a viable replacement.

It happens! The important part is review and learning from the mistakes.

Oh definitely. I just think their primary influence was on the size of the margin, not the actual outcome of the election. And it still benefits them, since they can say it was a 17% margin instead of like 3-5%.

It’s a 17% difference now. I’m honestly skeptical that AIPAC money is the big cause here. It seems like he had a lot of other issues that contributed to his loss. I was reading earlier that he didn’t really communicate or interface with his constituents much, while Latimer was a much bigger community presence.

This is a trend I’ve noticed actually. A lot of people who do take morally correct positions like to let their positions speak for themselves and not do as much communication or outside engagement. They want to let their moral high ground do the talking. And while their positions are laudable, their core job is to represent their constituents. If they ignore that, a loss isn’t surprising.

We all make mistakes. I once forgot to include gravity in a pressure drop calculation for a 100 ft vertical pipe as part of a steam drum system. I had to send an awkward email revising the design pressure I previously communicated out.

But hey, if we were perfect, we wouldn’t need peer review.

I have a little bit of experience with limit switches, but that’s really interesting. It certainly seems like an unusual system. I’m a lot more familiar with safety relays.

It really says something when even oil companies will design for these considerations but Tesla won’t.

I’ve unfortunately been working on process control strategies for almost a year now on new and novel applications for my company, so I’ve been intimately familiar with this. If it isn’t obvious, this isn’t my favorite professional area of interest hahaha.

Designating fail open and fail closed valves is so intrinsic to what I’ve been doing that I can’t imagine someone designing a car control system and not thinking about that at all.

It’s basic safety for industrial plants to designate powered equipment as “fail open” or “fail closed” or on/off. It’s shocking that this wasn’t applied to Tesla cars.

We really need an industry that performs industrial grade HAZOPs on consumer products and publishes a report for everyone to see.

Might be the doors are fail shut if anything happens… But that seems like the worst design ever.

Come to think of it, it’s basic design to designate features as fail closed/fail open on loss of power in an emergency, and you go with what’s inherently safe. It appears Tesla did not consider basic safety design. To no one’s surprise.

This is how I felt about Roe being overturned several years ago. It would unleash hell on Republicans and make them incredibly unpopular, but it would not be worth the cost of women suffering.

And unfortunately, I was right. It has proved utterly disastrous to Republicans, but a lot of women have suffered. People have had to go through pain and experiences that no one should ever have to – except perhaps the conservative SCOTUS justices, Trump, and Republican senators.

Poor reading comprehension. Typical lib.

Once more, overcompensating way too hard and needlessly throwing around terms to try and make yourself look like an actual leftist. You know what the clearest sign of this is, liberal? Other than you basically going “no u”?

I never said a thing about the USSR lacking compassion to animals. Nor did I ever mention NASA nor make a judgment on which group was morally superior. That all came from you, because you felt the need to bolster your leftist “credentials”. But I see through it.

It’s not terribly surprising that both NASA and the USSR space program did awful things to animals. They were racing each other, moving quickly and breaking things. It would be too risky to test humans in incredibly novel technology like that, but they wanted data and results. So they tortured poor animals instead of taking the time to go more slowly and do safer tests. And let me be explicitly clear, both space programs are guilty of this and damnable for it.

What’s your next reply going to be, I wonder? Ignoring basically everything I said, and talking about more of NASA’s fuck ups, like “well we don’t know it doesn’t work” with Challenger? Sprinkling in some leftist terms to convince yourself you aren’t a liberal? Or will you totally pivot to something else and call me Clyde again?

Please, mix it up a bit this time. The formula is getting rather dull. There’s better ways to try and convince us you aren’t a liberal.

I think there’s something to be said for medium sized companies. I work for one that’s trying to grow and become much larger, but it’s decidedly not big. Our execs though actually seem like pretty cool people, and the CEO seems to be a legitimately good person. He’s generally been open and honest, and he’s told stories that make me think he does actually value employees as people.

He was talking about gay rights and the value of diversity during our weekly company forum the other day, and I asked him about our company’s support for DEI given the political pressure from conservatives to abandon it. He said he didn’t give a damn about them, and doing the right thing was more important. I don’t agree with everything he’s done – we’ve had layoffs, and morale isn’t great, and we’re totally broke – but I respect that he actually seems to mean what he says. And even when we had layoffs, executives and management weren’t safe either.

I think a lot of what it comes down to is the genuineness of leadership and how closely tied they are to rank and file employees. That’s easier at small and medium companies. Large companies also tend to attract greedy robber barons.

Yeah they’re pretty much the only group that seems to understand this. They have other struggles though with having greater appeal – mainly from what I can tell, there’s a lot of discord between different chapters.

That said, there actually is one socialist who did win a state legislature election, in Virginia. And they were able to get an insulin cap bill passed because they worked cooperatively with democrats.

This is the model that people need to follow if they want to move beyond Democrats and Republicans. This single socialist legislator in one state has done more than the entire green party combined.

That’s fair. The way I look at it is that executives curb what the employees actually believe and want to work on. I saw this at a petrochemical company that was part of a big oil company. Everyone was excited about sustainability projects and cutting emissions and renewable technology. The execs just didn’t give a shit and continued to push for oil and drilling. If workplaces were democracies, we’d see so much more wonderful things.

It takes a strong and wise person to admit they were wrong and change their mind for the better. I applaud you for that. Given how prevalent calling things gay was when I was a teenager, I think a lot of people changed their minds for the better when they realized their friends and family were gay. And then some realized they were also gay, funny enough.

I agree that we need more time before we institute any sort of policy or mandating, but I do think we should eventually do that.

It’s interesting, I think a lot of conservative beliefs come down to the idea that children cannot be autonomous people with their own beliefs. They don’t believe that a child can have an independent thought, and that whatever they say is indoctrination from parents or school. It says a lot about their worldview.

If someone fully believes in the independence of children to form their own thoughts and beliefs and opinions, I don’t see how they could support any sort of anti LGBT ban.