AnIndefiniteArticle

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Not only that, but having the entire executive branch come down to a single elected ticket is a clumsy and low-resolution choice for voters. Especially when you consider that there are only two tickets (blue and red) to vote for.

The position of the president is superfluous and should be eliminated. A president hires people to run the executive branch. That’s how senile Biden can be so effective. He hires well. The American people should be hiring (directly electing) the cabinet, the judicial branch, the top generals, the top ambassadors, etc. Those people could vote to approve/veto bills, or do other jobs currently reserved for the president. This would mean that our whole executive branch isn’t getting replaced every 4-8 years. I bet that if people were voting for each cabinet position independently, we would see a lot more specialized candidates running, and room for third-party break-ins to smaller positions. Each cabinet position is focused on specific issues that relate to that position. This gives voters more granular control over the executive branch. Have each position up for election on a staggered timeline so not everyone is up for election at once. Force the races to be focused on specific issues by making the election be about a specific department. Maybe AOC could win Labor Secretary, but that race shouldn’t have a foreign policy discussion. Maybe Bernie could run for Secretary of State as a referendum on pulling out of the Middle East. If we are electing people to specific jobs, we can focus on those jobs instead of all the other bullshit that the election cycle focuses on. Replace the presidency with a document/constitution that outlines the checks and balances, roles and responsibilities of each of these positions.

Right, all more reasons the streak in the image is too fast to be an AR bullet.

Thanks! With the information in the article you just linked, I am now very suspicious that this is a picture of the bullet, where I previously thought it was plausible from my low-precision estimate. From the article:

“If the gunman was firing an AR-15-style rifle, the .223-caliber or 5.56-millimeter bullets they use travel at roughly 3,200 feet per second when they leave the weapon’s muzzle,’’ Mr. Harrigan said. “And with a 1/8,000th of a second shutter speed, this would allow the bullet to travel approximately four-tenths of a foot while the shutter is open.”

Same procedure, but an AR-15 shoots a bullet faster than the speed for a generic bullet that I used, and the shutter speed was faster because it was a fancy NYT camera. 3200ft/s is almost exactly 1000m/s. The 1/8000s shutter speed is the fact that seems the most reliable, assuming that the photographer knew what setting their camera was on.

What I disagree with is that that streak is only 0.4 feet long. The average size of a human male head (brow to back of head) is about 20cm, or 8in per this image from Wikipedia. The streak from the bullet in the image is about twice the size of Trump’s head, or 40cm/16in. Due to projection effects, this is a lower bound on the path of the bullet during the 1/8000s exposure. This puts a lower bound on the speed of 3200m/s. This is over three times the velocity of an AR-15, at minimum. Either this was some super-high-powered rifle to fire the bullet that fast, the shutter speed is misquoted (or a misleading representation of the exposure time), or this isn’t picture of the bullet.

Thanks for providing the data to make me suspicious that this is an image of the bullet.

That isolated tweet with the pic doesn’t claim to be from NYT or a NYT photographer. I’ve never heard of this “spectator index”. Here is the AP collection of photos from the event.

If I do assume that’s a bullet, let’s test if the size of the streak makes sense. A bullet travels at about 750m/s. That streak (using Trump’s head for scale) is about 50cm long, or 1/2 meter. A 750 m/s bullet travels 1/2 meter in 1/1500 seconds. When you consider projection effects (we might not be looking with a line-of-sight perpendicular to the bullet’s trajectory), we expect the length and time used in my above calculations to be lower bounds, with the true answer probably being within about a factor of 3 of that bound. This means that this image only makes sense as a bullet if the shutter speed is between 1/1500 and 1/500 seconds. That lines up with this website’s recommendation of 1/1000 second exposure time for bright outdoor shots.

Either a very good fake that considered the kinematics, or this is a real image of the bullet.

Potato plants absolutely have flowers. Have you ever grown one? Be careful with the potato flowers and fruits. They are poisonous nightshade.

It only gets boiled down to pure sugar. You boil off or break down a lot of the aromatics and volatiles in the original sap to make syrup. It gets processed by boiling to concentrate the sugar and reduce the presence of the rest of what the tree was living on. Maple sap does not become “pure sugar” (maple syrup) until after it gets the good stuff processed out.

This Cleveland Health Clinic page on maple sap mentions the presence of abscisic acid, a plant hormone with anti-diabetic properties, and polyphenols that help you manage inflammation.

Yeah, I think that the media is reaching to show that Trump is also unfit after they spent so freaking out about the Biden debate.

The problem is that Trump is unfit for very different reasons than Biden is unfit.

Trump had some run-on sentences in those clips, and a lot of what he was saying was either false or terrible policy, but I understood every point that he was ineloquently making, even if I thought they were bad points.

Biden’s debate performance, on the other hand, had several moments where I don’t know what he was trying to say.

Trump in these clips changed topics within the scope of the larger argument that he was making: “America is broken and only I can fix it”. I disagree with his argument and several underlying pieces of evidence. He wandered between very different points without clearly transitioning. In spite of that, he was still coherent and I could immediately understand what he was saying.

Biden answered a question about abortion by talking about how Trump thinks illegal immigrants kill little girls, allowing Trump to segue to that topic and not address overturning Roe V Wade. Several times in that debate, I didn’t know what point Biden was trying to argue.

I will vote for Joe, but pretending that Trump’s mental state has deteriorated to the same level as Biden’s is clearly a delusion. Trump had less mental acuity to lose, but it’s still there and still lying and rambling and meandering around a given theme, saying everything and anything to support it regardless of if it makes sense. Biden can’t seem to remember what he was talking about after a few seconds.

If you want to focus on Trump’s lack of fitness, this is the wrong way to do it. It’s entirely being framed around the ways that Biden is unfit. Within that framing, Biden always looks worse. Trump is unfit for other reasons, and we should focus on those until we have a candidate running against him with a bit more mental acuity.

Like junkies hooked on fossil fuels, heading for withdrawal.

We say “we just won’t increase our export capacity beyond the doubling already approved for construction.” Then our broken court system finds a way to do it anyway.

Not that gas-guzzling Biden would follow through on this, but couldn’t the president just destroy the permit applications and call it an “official act”?

It’s a spew into the universe. It might even be bad advice. I’m processing the possibility of Trump winning and Biden somehow being our choice on the other side trying to hold off the big “you’re fired” to American democracy. Three people have read it enough to upvote it, and maybe it helps them process it, too.

If he’s getting results cleaning up Trump’s mess, it’s because of his team. Showcase his team and all the work they’ve done. It’s his choice of cabinet members and Supreme Court nominations that we are voting for.

That and the military is all the president really does. Our system of military alliances are a mess. Joe inherited that and young people are demonstrating that they want to see that changed.

The moderate play is to showcase the people who a vote for Trump would fire. John Oliver’s piece on Schedule F hits on that well. This is an important core feature of why we want Joe.

He also needs to do something to adapt our foreign policy (which is the President’s core power) to the people’s desire to change our role on the world stage to a less violent one.

He needs both to win big for the dems. It doesn’t matter if he’s feeble and old if the election isn’t about him. It isn’t. This election is about the fundamental nature of what our country is. America has to confront its darkness and fix itself. Neutral isn’t an option when we’ve been going in reverse. Where are we going? Set a destination for what America should strive to be, and ask people to vote for that.

The circus format makes people want the big strong man barking out at the debates. We need the man intensely feeling the moment he’s in with looks of pain as he tries to process his predecessor’s ranting. We need to show the people and system of civil rights/service/reparations that a vote for Uncle Joe represents.

Trump 2 is the American Revolution finally ending with its version of a Napoleon moment. Hey: we held out a bit longer than the French!

Biden 2 is four more years of life support. Educate us on the people and their roles, Joe. Open up for democracy and new ideas to build a new America. We need to know what’s there in order to collectively imagine what could be. We need to know who else we are voting for when we vote for Joe. He needs to set the stage for people to feel like they are voting to build and protect an America that they want to live in.

Ultimately, we need some constitutional amendments to fix our broken government. Evolve past an enlightenment-era collapse pattern and into something that can last. Maybe run on a slate of amendments that a vote for Joe would endorse. Undo Citizens United, cement Roe, net neutrality, rank choice voting, etc. Make a list and have everyone agree that that is what we are voting for. If he wins with that pitch, he has a good argument for either congress or the states to ratify the amendments, or to call a convention if they don’t follow through. Let Trump write a list of amendments, too, and put it up to a vote. Joe’s Constitution vs Trump’s Constitution. Joe’s American vs Trump’s America. Actually, ending up with two constitutions up to a vote like that sounds like the start of civil war II: which states ratify which constitution to get behind which president. Maybe that’s just where we are headed, unless we can be convinced to use a civil way of negotiating for a new system. A civil way would be more responsive to nuance and less prone to bake-in of ideas due to backlash.

We need that next revolution, but first we need to set up a system of civil resolution to make sure that it doesn’t destroy us.

I don’t know those eyes I see in the bloodstained chrome

Jefferey Epstein didn’t kill himself.

Before he didn’t kill himself, he infamously ran some sex clubs.

These would be well-known examples representing a subset of what I would consider to be “problematic” sex clubs.

I would not want to be a part of a pride celebration where clubs like those have representation.

Pride is about throwing bricks at cops and celebrating our suppressed diversity, not the kinds of sex clubs that politicians go to. Pride is about tearing down hierarchies and problematic power dynamics, not fetishizing them. Or, at least, that’s my understanding of pride having never been to any sort of pride event. I know the history with stonewall and all of that, and that’s my picture of pride and what it should be.

The kinds of sex clubs that politicians go to are the only kinds of sex clubs of which I am aware, so I’m skeptical of sex clubs being represented at pride.

Obligatory boomer song

It’s June!

What kind of a “community” exists around kink? Or do you just mean the superset of communities like furries, and whatever else is out there? What’s the line between those and more problematic sex clubs?

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Fair, nails are extremely useful. They also contain a lot of bacteria that can ruin fermentation experiments. Other tools exist.

Both of these problems you had are why you should wear gloves and sterilize all equipment before fermentation experiments.

Eunice Newton Foote beat them to it.