GreenSkree

The only time fuel is dumped by aircraft is during an emergency and either 1) needs to land somewhere unexpected and is far overweight for the runway, or 2) there is a situation where the landing is exceedingly dangerous and there's a need to reduce weight and potential fireball size (e.g. landing gear failures).

I think it's more about finding something that clearly gets under his skin.

Weird that name-calling is that thing, but I guess it makes sense given how much time he seems to spend crafting names for other people.

Exactly.

The right (and foreign powers) have been dumping tons of money to promote and prop up right wing influencers for years. There doesn't even seem to be a litmus test other than 1) will they move people towards our general direction, and 2) will they regurgitate talking points we toss to them.

The right have been reaping huge dividends from promoting people in this space. Influencers on the left exist, but are having a lot harder time without access to similar resources.

The takeaway isn't to do what the right is doing by promote sleezy influencers... but funding existing and successful influencers left of center, even if there isn't 100% alignment could have a big impact in this space and help level the field.

For everything the conservatives are bad at, they are somehow crazy good at messaging.*

Their ability to take a positive term, redefine it as something it isn't, and use it as a hammer is impressive. The reality of "getting rid of DEI" clearly means more discrimination and hiring/firing based on race/sex/etc, but they certainly framed it as "best candidate instead of minority preference".

This is a repeating trend. Fake news, Critical race theory, woke, cancel culture, marxism, radical left, et -- these are all good examples of the right redefining and hijacking terms or language. It wouldn't surprise me if they try to do it with the word "democracy" to mean something like "far left woke Democrat ideals".

* Just to clarify -- "good at messaging" just meaning that it's effective at being taken up and repeated by a subset of the population. How people listen to and trust the stuff is beyond me.

The point? I think he expected the world leaders to come bearing personal gifts and favors. Trade some of the US's global position and power for his own personal wealth and power? I don't have proof, but it would be on-brand for Trump.

He's also surrounded himself with yes-men and crazy people (e.g. Navarro). He clearly has an elementary understanding (at best) of economics. Money good. China bad. Money go to China bad (trade imbalance). Tariffs keep money here.

Combine all that with the fact that he never admits responsibility for anything. When China pushed back, he retaliated. When they stopped participating, it leaves us in a stalemate that I believe will hurt us a lot more than them.

So, I think the trade imbalance is the justification. The goal is likely just personal power for Trump. But he doesn't really know what he's doing, doesn't care to learn, just thinking he's the greatest being in existence and everything bad is not his fault.

Yeah. Outrage now doesn't mean outrage when it matters. Things will look very different in 4 years and conservatives always seem willing to fall in line.

And Gavin Newsom started a podcast and is cozying up to crazy right wingers.

This hasn't been true at any of the places I've worked.

There's always been some pressure from management, usually through project managers or business users, for urgency around certain features, timelines, releases, etc. Sometimes you'll have a buffer of protection from these demands, sometimes not.

One place I worked was so consistently relentless about the dev team's delivery speed that it was a miserable place to work. There was never time to fix the actual pain points because there were always new features being demanded or emergency fixes required because most code bases were a wreck and falling apart.

If I remember right, super delegates were the main reason Bernie lost the nomination.

And beyond this, solving the problem is just the baseline. Solving the problem well can take an immense amount of time, often producing solutions that appear overly simplistic in the end.

I recently watched a talk about ongoing Java language work (Project Valhalla). They've been working on this particular set of performance improvements for years without a lot to show for it. Apparently, they had some prototypes that worked well but were unwieldy to use. After a lot of refinement, they have a solution that seems completely obvious. It takes a lot of skill to come up with solutions like that, and this type of work would be unjustly punished by algorithms like this.

2024 voters: InFlAtIoN tOo HiGh! TrUmP bEtTeR fOr ThE eCoNoMy!!1

Washington Post, but yeah.