It’s not a matter of knowledge, it’s a matter of what they want.

One may desire to be advantaged/superior to some others, and particularly nice and easy if race or gender is a convenient shorthand for knowing who is ‘in’ and ‘out’, as long as you are in the ‘in’ group of course.

So life is just plain easier if women are just supposed to sit there and please them. If the ‘natural order’ justifies that convenience, then one may be attracted to that thought. To the extent fairness and equality makes their life harder, they are inclined to be upset at that obstackle. It’s convenient if the legal and labor world gives their race preferential treatment, and other groups are left desperate enough to do whatever they need done but don’t want to do, and scared enough of the government to not get “uppity”.

Sometimes overt evil, sometimes more subconscious manifesting as being very receptive to narratives that correlate with those feelings.

I have this comforter I bought at a consignment sale for 15 dollars years ago. Every day I revel in how much I like it.

I think the counterpoint is that it seems not that common for one and only one con man to milk this voting base. Trump seems to be special in that he has nearly a monopoly, where as others would probably be in stronger competition and stuck splitting the populace.

Ok, I didn’t recognize that in some states she did manage to only lose by a 20% margin, which is still a huge margin and I still wouldn’t call that “almost”.

“almost” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. I think she never got more than 20%, which is insane for any challenger to someone “incumbant-like”, but she didn’t come close to almost beating him.

I suspect that if he loses again, maybe the republican party gets actually serious about rebuking him, like they kind of did after January 6th for a minute, and then maybe a bit more after their embarrassing 2022 results.

On the downside, he’s relatively unknown on the national stage.

On the upside, it’s a natural progression, he served as governor for a full term and the timing is right to move on to the next political field.

To add to your points, he’s a democrat who won the same exact elections in a state that Trump also won both times, a state that simultaneously elected republican supermajorities and a republican lieutenant governor while still electing him. A straight white southern man who is about as nonthreatening to GOP sensibilities as you can get without actually being a republican.

A non-duopoly choice is a 3rd Party candidate, Jill Stien, Green Party.

Reading her platform, I’d say it’s a no go for me.

Two bullet points back to back are “Have the UN Security Council hold Israel accountable” and at the same time “end the UN Security Council”. So which is it, use the UNSC to hold Israel accountable or the UNSC is a bad thing?

Also on her platform, disband NATO and stop giving Ukraine aid. If we do this, then Ukraine and Russia will just hug it out and everyone will be happy. A few unrealistic things like this where it’s way too optimistic and paves the way for things to go horribly wrong.

Then there are the good intentions, but bad consequences ideas. Pay reparations to third world countries for climate. Historically, “just dump money and resources” has been tried and you just give those to regional warlords that will make things worse. Need a more thought out engagement plan than that.

Broadly some decent domestic policy goals, but pretty impractical foreign policy ideas.

They employ a lot of this strategy (the ads, the ‘subscribe to Microsoft 365 today’ ‘your computer is at risk to ransomware because you aren’t paying us for onedrive’). Except the “loss” part. In fact, I think it’s rare nowadays to find a “loss” leader, they seem to have settled around at worst “barely profitable” in business. Too many loss leaders had pretty terrible business outcomes, so it seems to be an unpopular thing to expose your business the risk of going negative margin at any significant scale. Like this disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener

I seemed to touch a nerve to even imply Microsoft ever has compatibility issues…

Yes, you can get “modern” and give Microsoft continual money, yes, that was the whole point.

As to no alternatives, well, there are. FreeIPA is pretty squarely an Active Directory equivalent. The challenge is that if you have both Microsoft and non-Microsoft infrastructure, you have to use Microsoft management for both because Microsoft will only interoperate with the Microsoft solution. Once you have any Microsoft, then the only option for an all encompassing solution gets automatically locked down to only Microsoft.

Since you probably are employed by Microsoft or a Microsoft focused business partner, your perspective may be a bit skewed.

That’s not the question though, they may have backwards compatibility as a sacred cow, but the theme of their changes as of 8 and newer has broadly been more about trying to force other Microsoft agendas rather than trying to just make a better product.

Though I have had some older titles that work better with wine, or even older where I need dosbox to run it.

Their objectives went south around windows 8.

They screwed up execution before, certainly, and in never was a huge fan, but they were at least trying to make what they sincerely thought was a intrinsically good desktop experience until 8.

Windows 8 was when they had the fear of Android and iOS and the Microsoft phone os was failing on its own, so the mission for Windows 8 was to throw the desktop user experience under the bus for the sake of trying to bolster the phone platform, and maybe make PCs that were tablet like. Also seeing Apple and Google succeed with Internet account based access to the devices was a motivation to get people into an online ecosystem that would have the way to indefinite monthly payments and an app store where they could take a cut off all the application vendors’ revenue.

Such a purpose would inform the constraints. If we are just “the sims” on steroids, then all the deep physics are absolutely utterly faked and we are just “shown” convincing fakery. If it’s anthropological, then similar story that the physics are just skin deep. If it’s actually modeling some physics thing, then maybe we are “observing” real stuff.

But again, this is all just for fun. It’s not vaguely testable and thus not scientific despite the sciencey theme of it, just something to ponder.

Think the point is that there’s no good option known and an overly short runway to build momentum, and the likely option would be Harris, and she’s already the default option.

Instead of “Biden should step aside”, the calls should be more specific in what they affirmatively do want.

Same with rhetoric about “just any third party”, that’s so vague that no one should want that, as third parties are very different and in opposition to each other.

So calls for ‘not Biden’ or ‘just any third party’ are utterly useless except for screwing up chances for a D win, without any particular actionable agenda being advocated for.

First, this is not really science so much as it is science-themed philosophy or maybe “religion”. That being said, to make it work:

• We don’t have anyway of knowing the true scale and “resolution” of a hypothetical higher order universe. We think the universe is big, we think the speed of light is supremely fast, and we think the subatomic particles we measure are impossibly fine grained. However if we had a hypothetical simulation that is self-aware but not aware of our universe, they might conclude some slower limitation in the physics engine is supremely fast, that triangles are the fundamental atoms of the universe, and pixels of textures represent their equivalent of subatomic particles. They might try to imagine making a simulation engine out of in-simulation assets and conclude it’s obviously impossible, without ever being able to even conceive of volumetric reality with atoms and subatomic particles and computation devices way beyond anything that could be constructed out of in-engine assets. Think about people who make ‘computers’ out of in-game mechanics and how absurdly ‘large’ and underpowered they are compared to what we would be used to. Our universe could be “minecraft” level as far as a hypothetical simulator is concerned, we have no possible frame of reference to gauge some absolute complexity of our perceived reality.

• We don’t know how much we “think” is modeled is actually real. Imagine you are in the Half Life game as a miraculously self-aware NPC. You’d think about the terribly impossibly complex physics of the experiment gone wrong. Those of us outside of that know it’s just a superficial model consisting of props to serve the narrative, but every piece of gadget that the NPC would see “in-universe” is in service of saying “yes, this thing is a real deep phenomenon, not merely some superficial flashes”. For all you know, nothing is modeled behind you at anything but the most vague way, every microscope view just a texture, every piece of knowledge about the particle colliders is just “lore”. All those experiments showing impossibly complex phenomenon could just be props in service of a narrative, if the point of the simulation has nothing to do with “physics” but just needs some placeholder physics to be plausible. The simulation could be five seconds old with all your memories prior to that just baked “backstory”.

• We have no way of perceiving “true” time, it may take a day of “outside” time to execute a second of our time. We don’t even have “true” time within our observable universe, thanks to relativity being all weird.

• Speaking of weird, this theory has appeal because of all the “weird” stuff in physics. Relativitiy and quantum physics are so weird. When you get to subatomic resolution, things start kind of getting “glitchy”, we have this hard coded limit to relative velocity and time and length get messed up as you approach that limit. These sound like the sort of thing we’d end up if we tried simulating, so it is tempting to imagine a higher order universe with less “weirdness”.

Left half of my face black, right half of my face white. Then I could fight those no good people who have a black right side of their face and white left side.

Well now the question is why they don’t put an extra AA battery in the glove box.

if you can afford kids or not.

To amend that, if you are responsible and think you can’t afford kids and have the restraint and planning to select not to have children… there are plenty of people that can’t afford as many children as they have.

In fact of those that can “afford” kids easily, they are still more likely to stay at one or two.

Exactly, even if 7 billion people died, well there’s still a billion people. If 99% of people died, well there are still millions.

But that if that “idiot” does propagate, but so does everyone else, no skin off the species back. If the selective pressure returns, well then the others keep going.

This seems like an overblown concern. To prove it, I’m going to make a video putting my finger in the way as it closes and I’m sure it will be fine… /s