Just a reminder, the “major questions doctrine” is bullshit, used by the partisan conservatives to ignore the plain text of a statute whenever they want to engineer an outcome. Don’t pretend that this is anything less than make-believe judicial bullshit.

I just want to tip my hat to Elizabeth Lopatto’s writing in this piece. I miss following her on twitter and had forgotten how spicy and on-target she can be. Good stuff.

The current Indian government has prosecuted or detained employees of foreign companies in the past for actions taken by the company. There is a real risk here.

I do think the Indian government has a point if you read the lawsuit. This is a ongoing lawsuit and the page taken down had info on it and a discussion page where people were talking about the ongoing lawsuit. The lawsuit says that this “…Complicates and compounds the issue at hand.”

Hard disagree. Ongoing lawsuits often have complicated issues, but are nonetheless topics of public concern. It’s sometimes inconvenient for governments and large corporations to have the public aware of the lawsuit and the underlying facts and issues, but that’s no reason to impose a gag order.

Frankly, whenever I hear a court give vague rationales like “complicates the issues,” I assume they judge just doesn’t like the criticism. That’s what it sounds like here.

Where’s your bike seat?

Mint

I see Mint as the more reasonable option that keeps 98% of the advantages of Ubuntu, with less of the crazy. I was a xubuntu user a decade ago, but have been very happy with Mint xfce since I switched.

If you’re ordinary and you never get enough sleep, I have just the place for you. New York’s hottest nap club is “Off to Dreamland!” Located in the heart of Queens at the corner of Sleep Street and Sleepytime Drive, this converted mattress store park was the ceremony spot for a lengendary nap taken by Adam Conover when he was a boy. This place has everything: body pillows, comforters, blankies, cuddle buddies, sleep masks, and CPAP machines. And be sure to hit the converted traincar section and lean your head on the shoulder of MTA Chair Janno Lieber, the celebrity sleeper in residence.

I didn’t get a paywall, but sometimes the WaPo does, and if so, here’s a paywall-free link: https://archive.ph/f4tti

Aviation biofuel is mostly a distraction. Any serious effort to decarbonize the transportation industry would focus on a scalable system, presumably high-speed rail.

(And whoever is thinking about being a smartass, don’t you dare come at me with bullshit about trans-ocean flights, they obviously can’t be take by train, but biofuel is still utterly incapable of supplying even only ocean flights. It’s not ever going to be a viable product. We’d be better off trying to scale up carbon capture than try to use all our arable land to grow crops for fuel.)

Don’t forget the huge energy savings (heating/cooling, transportation, infrastructure) by having denser housing. It isn’t just a measurement of “I can see trees,” but all the daily human activities that have a reduced environmental impact in denser development. It’s counter-intuitive, but rural areas that are “nearer to nature” are often worse for the environment.

There is probably a break-even point, I don’t think everyone living in skyscrapers is ecologically ideal and I wouldn’t want to live there anyway. But medium-density development with multi-unit (shared wall) buildings allows huge energy costs, while also making public transit more viable and providing a tax base that actually pays for its own infrastructure.

Thanks for the rec! I also love that you presume that there will be a next time, cuz, uh, that’s accurate. These little boxes are powerhouses, I probably want one for a TV set-top box now that all the TV boxes (Roku, Amazon Fire, even Android TV and soon Apple TV) are riddled with ads.

Beelink and Minisforum are legit

I wish I knew a lot of this when I first started shopping for a mini PC. I ended up with a Beelink model that I’m quite happy with, but it seems almost luck that I didn’t pick another one, and I would have liked a “reputable brand” search function.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MO9CUyuwf4

“. . . and you can put so much stuff in there, you wouldn’t even know!”

“What baby” 😆

Love love Hark! A Vagrant. And a lot of the other comics are way funnier, especially the historical ones. The comics about “marauding women on bicycles” (like this one) crack me up. I still think the “strong female characters” series is one of the funniest things ever.

I wish Beaton would keep doing Hark! A Vagrant, but given what her family went through and her sister’s misdiagnosis and death from cancer, I understand why she finished it up. Her graphic novel/memoir, Ducks, was one of the best books I read last year.

In case you’re wondering, the answer is “Definitely not.”

Not a surprise, but still somehow crushing. It’s a loss for us all.

Kinda, there was a progression to travel to different planets, etc. I mostly played it with friends and messed around, so I didn’t pursue it very far.

I think US military operations moved away from counter-insurgency to preparedness with conflicts with mechanized military forces that have actual air power, so a low-and-slow airframe wasn’t considered as necessary. That, and drones are filling a lot of the air coverage and surveillance gap (though no one on the ground will tell you there could ever be a complete replacement for the BRRRRRRRR of an A-10.)

As I understand it, the Armed Overwatch pick that would at least sometimes replace the A-10 for close air support is the OA-1K Sky Warden, which has 10 hard points, and a 7,257kg gross weight. I don’t know how to accurately calculate the Sky Warden’s weight budget, but it’s a little more than half of the gross weight of the A-10, so I’d guess it’s roughly half, or 3,500kg or so. Which is definitely a step down in terms of weight and ability, but I guess the hope is that it will be cheaper to fly and maintain, particularly since it’s based off the long-running Air Tractor AT-802 airframe. I think the other two planes in consideration, the EMB-314 Super Tucano and the AT-6B Wolverine, have fewer hard points (5 each) and lower maximum take-off weights (5,400kg and 2,948kg, respectively).