KoboldCoterie

This is a shit take. This ruling is not saying "Trump did nothing wrong", this is specifically saying "States cannot unilaterally decide to remove federal election candidates from ballots", which I completely agree with. As others have noted, it would open the doors to so much bullshit if this were allowed.

The SC could come out tomorrow and say "We're disqualifying Trump", this doesn't preclude that.

Okay so I'm just going to open myself up to ridicule here; my understanding of comparing numbers using orders of magnitude might be wrong, and if it is, I would like to know that. So on that note, I don't think that's how OOM comparisons work, and I'd be very interested to be corrected if I'm wrong.

You could accurately say that 2.1B has 2 more orders of magnitude than 73M does (7 vs. 9), but I believe when you're directly comparing two numbers and saying that one is "x orders of magnitude larger than y", that doesn't work. You wouldn't say that 10 is an order of magnitude larger than 9... that would be very misleading; 90 is an order of magnitude larger than 9. In fact, that claim would be off by... approximately an order of magnitude.

1 order of magnitude larger than 73M is 730M; 2 orders of magnitude larger is 7.3B, as you note, but... wouldn't you look upward to say a number is in the same order of magnitude, not lower? So since 2.1B is approximately 29x larger than 73M, it would be 1 OOM larger (and only becomes 2 OOM larger at 100x)?

To look at it another way:

73M x 10^1 is a lot closer to the correct value than 73M x 10^2, so even if the correct method is to round to the nearest OOM, it wouldn't beecome 2 OOM larger until 73M x 50, or 3.650B.

Again, it's quite possible that my understanding is incorrect because... this doesn't come up in every day conversation much, so if I'm wrong, please correct me!

But it also refers to “a staggering 73 million daily active users”, which I wouldn’t really say is a staggering number in $current_year when other social networks have orders of magnitude more.

Well, there's definitely no social network with "orders of magnitude more"... Even if that's only 2 orders of magnitude, that's almost the entire population of the world.

So this made me curious and best I can find there seem to be only a few social media platforms that even have 1 order of magnitude more:

• Facebook, with 2.1 billion DAU as of Q4 2023

• Youtube, which has 2.7 billion monthly active users (I'm speculating that it has at least 730 million DAU based on that number)

• WhatsApp (which wikipedia notes has 2 billion MAU and had 1 billion DAU when it had 1.3 billion MAU, so presumably it's around 1.5 billion DAU now)

DAU is a pretty rare statistic to find reported on, so it's hard to say if there are others.

They're way ahead of you.

Answered this below, but it was based on a quick google search and the estimate provided by an organization in my state that's promoting heat pumps and other energy efficient appliance solutions. Based on what other folks are saying, it sounds like their estimate is just grossly high.

Can you show me where you're getting those figures? I was basing my estimate on a quick google search of prices, and the estimate provided for air-source heat pumps here. (MassSave is an organization that promotes energy efficient and climate friendly appliance solutions in Massachusetts), which seems to suggest $22,000 is an average cost, which is in line with the other estimates I was finding. ($10-$20k to buy the unit and $15-$30k including installation.)

Edit: To be clear, I'm not trying to be contrary or argumentative; I've been looking into heat pumps as a possible option for us for years and if they've become justifiable from a cost perspective, I'd love to get those details.

The 23-year-old recently purchased a condo in Streeterville as an investment, with plans to renovate the unit and either sell or rent it out.

That line right there tells you basically all you need to know about this person's opinion. "Doom spending" isn't what's keeping the vast majority of 23 year olds from purchasing a condo as an investment.

The power company here keeps pushing heat pumps, but it frequently gets down below freezing and often below 0F during the winter, and my understanding is that heat pumps just can't efficiently keep up with that, if at all, so supplementary heat is still needed. Is that no longer the case? "Every American" includes a lot of people in that same situation.

The article cites that it would save the average American $550 a year on utilities, so when you consider that it costs ~$15-30k to have a heat pump installed, we're looking at a 27-55 year break-even point.

It makes sense for new construction but they seem to be advocating for retrofitting existing homes, and I just don't see how they're making the claim that it's economically viable. It'd take some mega subsidies to make that possible for most people, I think.

With good reason, unfortunately. :(

Wouldn't things like torrenting records and "movie piracy websites" used fall under fifth amendment protections? They're being asked to provide a record of the piracy they've committed.

You certainly broke through the propaganda.

But I also constantly hear from Americans that it’s impossible to turn it around, that candidates who support these common sense moves are unelectable and that there is nothing they could ever do about it.

Have we broken through the propaganda, though? Shit, just look at the pushback around Obamacare (which while certainly not ideal was the best public option health care we've had available in my lifetime) - there was so much negative press that people just didn't have any idea how it was actually benefitting them. There's an old Facebook thread that gets posted from time to time with someone railing against Obamacare while not even realizing they were using it to get coverage.

Even in countries with the bare minimum of democratic guarantees and no money you would have the mother of all endless riots under these circumstances.

I think the biggest thing that a lot of folks from outside the US - especially those in Europe - don't understand is just how big this country is. We are around 96% as large as the whole of Europe, with about half the population. The BLM protests was the most widespread activism we've managed that I can remember, and that was squashed pretty easily. It's incredibly difficult to get a significant part of the US to coordinate on anything activism-related, and that's really what it would take to make a difference, I think.

What you're talking about is what I'm talking about, too. In my experience, though, (with two different Windows based handhelds, one of which was a GPD Win, though an earlier model than the one being discussed in this article,) it works sometimes. I'd say it had maybe an 85% success rate, but that other 15%, it wouldn't resume, or if it did, the game would crash, and a 15% chance of losing my progress is just not something I'm willing to deal with. I've had 1 case with the Steam Deck where it did not successfully resume mid-game, total, since getting one just under 2 years ago.

I've looked at reviews of a bunch of other similar products but this ended up being a major complaint about all of them. Which one do you have, out of curiosity?