like to cherry pick stats and use the ones that favor their viewpoint is a known thing, AND it also does NOT mean the stats they choose not to push do not exist. If both sides paid more attention to each other instead of closing their eyes and plugging their ears, they'd each have to confront the stuff they like to ignore and thus would both have to align more closely to reality.

Now, having said that, I note that you are clearly a partisan of the left in need of facing some of the stuff you chose to ignore, so I'll point out just a bit to get you thinking...

1. California's government is in total Democrat control by more than super-majority status, and this report claiming economic success is from Democrat governor Gavin Newsom's office. He's almost certainly running for President in 2028. This is hardly some objective and unbiased source; it's like Trump offering a glowing report on his successes - I suspect you'd question any of HIS claims...

2. California is VERY DEEPLY in debt. The state is more deeply in debt than any other, more than many other states combined. The state also has immense unfunded liabilities with no plan to pay for them - hardly the stuff of economic success. If you're more deeply in debt than everybody else AND you've agreed to pay nearly unlimited amounts in the future with no plans for how to get the money, it takes real nerve to claim to be the best. The state is currently running a $68 BILLION dollar deficit... so while it currently taxes its residents higher than most other states it will still spend $68000000000 more than it takes in this year.

3. Only one state (Nevada) has a worse unemployment situation than California - not likely for an economy supposedly in the top 4 globally.

4. California's supposedly impressive economy does not get its GDP numbers from making stuff. The leading contributors to the numbers are: real estate, finance, health care, and government (NOT even high tech as I personally had assumed). The state likes to hide this a bit by separating out education from government in their stats, but the vast majority of education in the state is government run. California is a beautiful state with amazing topography and weather, so the real estate part of its GDP is ALWAYS huge and not in any way tied to politics, left or right. The California mix of contributors to what it calculates as GDP are NOT economically healthy and certainly do not compare to an independent nation.

The vast majority of California's supposed economic success has no effect on the average citizen... Apple may indeed be in California and record its economic activity as part of California's GDP, but much of Apple's economic activity is physically located elsewhere. Same for many other entities whose numbers are accounted for in the GDP numbers. Counting numbers from entities like this is deceptive, since it seems to indicate economic activity within the state while the activity is actually not in the state. This "news" item about California's supposed amazing success is just a partisan political press release which Republicans will [not surprisingly] reject and Democrats will [to their detriment] embrace, potentially creating an even greater confusion for them about why their party is at historic lows in popularity [as I said before: BOTH sides need to pay better attention to each other's arguments].

Comparing a GDP of a STATE (which is not run like a nation) to a the GDP of an independent nation is not a sane thing, no matter if you are on the political left or the political right. These entities are not analogs, and when it's done, it's usually done for domestic US POLITICAL arguments rather than for some constructive purpose. Again: my point here is NOT partisan (BOTH sides need to learn from this and change) and my choice of points to make was driven by your choice to push a left-leaning argument. California is messed up under Democrat Newsom, and it was screwed up under Republican Schwarzenegger - and BOTH made big boasts about the state's GDP.

given that you repeat it like some quasi-religious mantra without a shred of evidence... but then I saw you seem to refer to Fark as a source for anything serious and I immediately recognized your mental illness... probably good that you posted as a self-identified anonymous coward.

Basic logical problems with your claim of 7 million stolen votes:

1. Democrats, not Republicans, controlled the federal government during the 2024 election cycle.

2. Republican power brokers HATE Trump and his supporters and would never cheat on his behalf. Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz for example supported Kamela.

3. Democrats, not Republicans, controlled the vote counting in the most populated states in 2024.

4. NOBODY in the vote counting systems of the nation (in most states it's staffed by Democrat volunteers and union members) was going to inject fake votes for Trump or block legit votes for the Trump opponent, so any claim HIS votes are fake is obviously bogus. Therefore, everybody admits Trump got the number of votes he got in 2016, in 2020, and in 2024 and any numeric issues in any of these races fall on the Hillary, Joe, or Kamela totals.

5. Republican demands for voter ID have not resulted in people being required to show ID to vote in most places, and where this DID happen (*cough* Georgia *cough*) Democrat turnout went UP not down.

6. Any restriction on foreign citizens or dead people voting should not suppress any votes unless you're admitting that Democrats get the votes of foreigners and the dead...

Unlike many nations, the United States is a designed thing. Designed things have an optimal, or natural, state/condition. Any deviation in the system is measured from that position. The founders thought long and hard and debated different structures and means of controlling power and limiting abuse and ultimately produced a design document, The Constitution of the United States. What our founders created, and the design document, establish what the "neutral" position is for the USA. Any attempt to use some other standard for left/right in America is deceitful and arbitrary - a game in overton window manipulation.

By the standards set by the founders of this nation, we no longer have ANY conservative party... everything here is left or far left. Indeed, today's GOP has positions on economics, the environment, social policy, etc that are far to the left of where DEMOCRAT president John F Kennedy was in 1960... and HE was to the left of where DEMOCRAT Franklin Roosevelt was in the 1940s.

When this nation was founded, the population was about 90% protestant Christian, about 10% Catholic, and a tiny minority Jewish, there were essentially no Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, etc. While there were no religious tests for FEDERAL positions, and there was no FEDERAL "established" religion, nearly every state had an established church and most had religious tests for office holders. The federal government had ZERO role in education, retirement, energy, the environment, labor, or healthcare and there were NO federal taxes on the people (federal income taxes did not start until 1913, shortly before the first World War). Up until the Civil War in the 1860s, the limitations on government spelled out in the Constitution were presumed to only apply to the federal government; each state had its own separate constitution limiting the powers of the state government. People thought of themselves as citizens of their STATE and rarely had contact with the federal government, which is why so many who fought for the North or the South in the Civil War fought contrary to their personal ideas about slavery... people thought "I'm a Virginian" or "I'm a New Yorker" and they fought on the side of their STATE... most changed to "I'm an American" in the aftermath of that bloody war. The federal government ran almost entirely on tariffs, meaning that its funding scaled with the level of international entanglements and the money was primarily paid by those choosing to import exotic stuff instead of using American labor, energy, and materials. There is no stretch of the imagination that can bridge the gap between where BOTH parties are today, and where our founders started things. For all the screams by Democrats that the GOP is trying to drag the nation to the right or trying to create some "white Christian nationalist" thing, there's no chance in hell that the modern GOP will ever drag the nation 1% back in the direction of where it was when it was founded - NOBODY is even proposing that. The modern GOP is, at best, a slight and poor handbrake on the leftward plunge to which Democrats are committed, they NEVER actually move the needle right, only bend it a little less left for a brief time every few decades.

It's sheer madness [or intentional misdirection] to claim that the people of today are to the RIGHT of the founding generations.

Harvard, for example, should be embarrassed to charge ANYBODY even a dime to attend... like most ivy league schools they hounded alums for donations for decades and at this point they are sitting on an endowment of over 53 BILLION dollars. They have no excuse for not being free for anybody admitted to study there.

The reasons they charge a sky-high tuition are simple: [a] they can. [b] it makes them seem even more exotic and desireable. [c] it helps them filter out the riff raff (they're too expensive for anybody they do not want attending)

It's all about the clubs the elites build for themselves. A Harvard degree is not generally better than a degree from any other decent college in terms of what the student will have learned; its actual value is in the reputation and the connections. A Harvard degree does NOT mean you're smarter or you learned some super-secret information, rather it means that Harvard decided to ADMIT you as a student - you have been certified by Harvard as a member of the elites, and you will have circulated among and met other elites. Once you're out of Harvard and in the real world, you'll get hired by other Harvard grads and eventually when you have arisen to a senior position you will hire Harvard grads. It's not unlike being a member of the masons.

For decades we have expected our high school kids to make life decisions based on conversations with high school staffers named "counselors" and those conversations have frequently added-up to: "follow your dreams, go deeply in debt, and don't think too deeply about the economic realities". Nobody seems to ask, "hey, counselor, did YOU think YOUR ideal career would be High School Counselor?". With their own lives and careers did they prove their wisdom in these areas? What qualifies these losers to counsel all the kids of our country?

I'm NOT endorsing YouTube influencers, just making the case that they're not necessarily much worse than what we have as an alternative.

The typical career counselor has no credentials superior to those of a typical YouTube influencer in analyzing the future to know how much money it's wise to borrow, which colleges are most likely to equip a student for the future, and what majors will likely pay the best in a decade or two. The number of people in the country currently struggling to repay student debts, and the number who were counting on Joe Biden to forgive those debts is enough evidence for the failure of the current model. We simply have far too many people in the US walking around with degrees the economy does not need, and thus does not sufficiently compensate for. Too many people "followed their dreams" and went with a major they wanted rather than one they (and the economy) needed.

be doing all our coding in the future. "Who needs programmers anymore" seems to be the new mantra in the corporate corner offices.

It was bead enough when incompetent human programmers used unallocated memory or freed memory they were still using, but now we'll get to see the effects of "AI hallucinations"... oh, joy...

What could POSSIBLY go wrong? go wrong? go wrong? go wrong?...

They're admitting that the US only has one coal-fired power plant lacking modern emissions controls.

That's a massive improvement. The nation used to run substantially on coal and back then NONE of the plants had emissions controls.

I think we're not supposed to notice this admission.

Like most on the left, you seem to always see what's good for the rich urban jet-set as "good" and ignore completely the impacts on the ACTUAL poor [not the ones on posters and campaign materials] and the middle class. The rich can afford every damned boutique energy source and every bit of emissions you could possibly apply (except of course on their superyachts and jets). It's the poor who most need the cheapest forms of energy, and the cheapest form is COAL.

Get back to us when you find a plentiful power source that has both an up-front cost and an operating cost that are cheaper than coal, supplies that are domestic and more plentiful than coal, and therefore will provide the poor and middle class with electricity rates as low as coal can. DO NOT include costs for artificial barriers like lawsuits and bureaucratic regulation that the left applies to things it dislikes and not to the stuff it likes - these are dishonest distortions and of no benefit to the people needing cheap power. If the right was half as dishonest as the left, they'd put up all sorts of regulatory burdens on windmills and solar panels whenever they're in office and then scream about the mass destruction when the left later removed those rules. The right could demand studies on the toxic materials used in solar panels and wind farms, the bird strikes, the disruptions in natural air currents and possible global weather consequences, etc and slow that stuff down just like the left did with nuclear, making it artificially too expensive to consider.

The US grew to be the sole remaining superpower while running substantially on coal, so your idea that enabling a few coal plants to keep running for a couple of years endangers "401ks, the holders of US debt, NATO, the neighbors, anybody that expresses dissent..." is completely deranged and dishonest. In fact, these plants were operating while Obama was in the White House and I bet you were not ranting about him allowing them to operate and "fuck the 401ks, the stock market, the holders of US debt, NATO, the neighbors, anybody that expresses dissent..."

You guys really did break something in your brains when Trump rode that escalator in 2015. Get some help. He's just another President and will be gone in a few years, just like all the others of both parties who have come and gone and did things their opponents did not like.

including the sort who regularly attend the UN, all dream of the day when everybody on the planet will have to always carry a digital tracking device (cell phone with GPS and apps) which will be tied to a digital wallet, digital ID, and digital citizenship and travel documents. This will make ANYBODY trackable, oppressable, silenceable, cancelable, suppressable, etc.

Haven't been a "good boy" (in the view of your local dictator), well then no food, clothing, shelter, travel, lawyer, medical care, etc for you (your money instantly made worthless with a keystroke) and your identity erased (your passport and ID voided with a keystroke) and your ability to go anywhere eliminated.

This is a step into the darkest future humanity could ever imagine. People need to cling to, and demand their governments support, PAPER documents and anonymous untraceable PAPER and COIN money. It's fine to enable people to CHOOSE to have images of their documents in their phones and have authorities offer people the OPTION to show their paper that way when traveling etc, and fine to enable people to CHOOSE to have and use credit/debit cards and the OPTION to pay using them, but for basic human freedom to continue to exist, the all-digital push must be squelched.

So, now we're to presume that a bunch of very expensive spending at companies known for over-charging the government to do stuff that's not really needed and getting those cushy arrangements by having armies of lobbyists MUST have been valid because some congress long ago whose members we cannot even remember approved that funding and got it onto autopilot.... because THAT presumption allows us to presume that the Trump people are toxic/incopmentent/corrupt?

Really?

None of us here knows ANY of the details of these contracts, or the services supposedly being rendered, the bureaucrats and politicians involved, the arguments they used when originally targeting this spending, etc. Not any info in favor nor any opposed. What we DO know is that the defense and political establishments opposed this president, and opposed his defense sec, and opposed Musk and his team, making them the first outsiders to open the hood and take a look... and THEY tell us we have a mess of fluids leaking all over the place. Knowing that the department has been running rough and having trouble performing as expected, do we listen to the old boys network as they tell us to close the hood and keep driving as always, or do we give the guys who tell us we have a bad leak a chance to fix it?

You do realize that you have no more evidence for your position that these contracts might be valid and good (zero evidence cited) and thus your "argument" has no substance with which to push-back on the arguments by Hegseth and the administration (and the earlier poster), right? One thing we DO know with certainty is that the pre-Hegseth and pre-DOGE DoD has been unable to pass even a basic bookkeeping audit in DECADES and that members of congress from BOTH parties have used their power to force all sorts of pork into the pentagon budgets ever since WWII. At this point, as a taxpayer, I am entitled to the presumption that ALL government spending in ANY department that cannot pass even a basic audit is at best incompetently wasteful and at worst criminally fraudulent.

I'd personally cheer this cutting involving these contractors no matter who and from which party did it.

Incidentally, nice sideswipe hit on "cutting Medicaid" (which has nothing to do with this). Anybody hearing "they're cutting Medicaid!" panics and thinks patients will be hurt... but that's not in the plans at all. The cuts in the Medicaid budget, like lots of other cuts being proposed will require a nod from congress and they're proposed cuts to waste in those PROGRAMS and the management thereof, NOT legitimate benefits payouts.

they virtue signal with orders to average folks that cannot be fulfilled and will make no difference.

No amount of ANY of these "green" policies in the UK will have ANY impact on the global temperature, even assuming the concept of "global temperature" is valid and significant. The delta in greenhouse gas emissions caused by any such changes in the UK, a small country (apologies to UK folks here, but it's true) will simply be overwhelmed by the huge number of new coal plants coming online in china, the new ICE cars rolling onto the streets in China and India, etc. It's simply a matter of SCALE, something most people are not good at wrapping their brains around. There are about 68 million people in the UK, and as a baseline their energy is already greener that the energy use of the people of China or India. China has a population of about 1.4 billion, and India has a population of about 1.4 billion. It's not even just about the massive population imbalance; China and India have become heavily industrialized in a rather dirty way; neither country has the same environmental standards for their manufacturers or power generators. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why they have such huge price advantages in manufacturing.

There's a particularly nasty immorality at play when politicians enforce policies onto their own average citizens that they KNOW full-well will have ZERO net positive impact, but will cost those citizens a lot of time and/or money, just so that those politicians can posture themselves as "good people". Every time these politicians ramp-up their environmentalism and raise the costs to average people for energy "just a little" there are elderly people in subsequent winters who, facing the need to choose between buying food and their meds and paying for home heating end up cutting back on the home heating and then freezing to death.

by using spice-fueled guild navigators to fold space... ahhh the things you can accomplish with imaginary technology.

The real problem with this recurring promise of faster travel using nuclear fusion is that, ever since the 1930s it has always been "only 30 years away". The predicted date seems to scoot a little to the left or right depending on the year of the prediction, but it's always about 30 years (long enough for the predictor to be retired before the prediction is falsified). The cause of this is simple: we're talking about a MASSIVE amount of energy and there are simply too many unknown unknowns involved. It's not just that we need some particular unobtanium to solve the problems (the Apollo moon project had several of those issues and the funds and research could be applied and those unobtaniums could be obtained). In the case of controlled nuclear fusion, we do not even know what unobtainiums are needed and the folks involved have never been able to openly admit this for fear of damaging the project of their careers... so decade after decade they promise "real soon now" and get generation after generation of politicians to gamble some taxpayer money on the research that promises unlimited clean energy.

Actually, Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson had a simple way to provide fast transport of massive ships and cargo between planets in the 1950s using nuclear fission, which would have easily scaled and translated to fusion long ago with their Project Orion but of course THAT method was scary because it used the one form of fission (and fusion) which we had fully mastered - nuclear explosions.

No, not financial or political corruption, rather the sort of corruption evidenced by decomposition or decay or rust.

When Microsoft first got going on the PC, people willingly and eagerly bought each new version of DOS. Each version had big improvements, and the price of the upgrade was easy for anybody to justify. When Microsoft rolled out Windows, some people ran to buy it so they could have a computing experience like they saw Mac users having. That initial Windows sucked, so lots of folks did not make the jump, but enough did to encourage Microsoft to roll out a better release. By the time they hit version 3.1 Windows was good enough people eagerly moved to it and DOS fell into the history bin. With version 3.11 Microsoft added networking, so people rushed to buy that upgrade. Windows 95 similarly was a good enough step to cause people to run to it on their own. Same for Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP (let's not discuss Windows Me...). My point is that up through Windows XP, people saw increased value in nearly every DOS or Windows version and they VOLUNTARILY upgraded, making Microsoft filthy rich. This is no longer the case. New versions of Windows do not add any actual value that the average user can name, so Microsoft must FORCE people to buy the next version.

When a company can force its customers to buy new versions, it does not take them much time to realize they no longer need to provide their "customers" [AKA hostages] with any increased value, and then there's no need to innovate. It's just like the big defense contractor who gets hooked on cost-plus contracts and no longer needs to innovate and has no actual competition. This is not good for the company nor for the "customers". It's a corrupting pattern.

By your reckoning, if somebody is shooting at you with a semi-automatic rifle, nothing is happening... but if you shoot back at them with a pistol, YOU have started a war? Interesting.

Remember: Trump's tariffs, no matter what you think of him, just objectively, are a RESPONSE to long-standing one-sided tariffs. China has a long-standing tariff of 67% on US goods, whereas the US was letting Chinese products into the US essentially without tariffs (The US imposed NO tariffs on goods from China if the individual package coming in was worth less than $800 (the "de minimis exemption") ) which is how things like Temu and Ali were working. This is also part of why everybody in the US gets their short-run circuitboards made in China.

The primary point of the new tariffs is to get people who've been benefitting from decades of high tariffs against the US to lower those tariffs and make the global marketplace more of an ACTUAL free trade thing than it has long been. As long as the traditional free traders dishonestly ranted about "free trade!", but ignored the imbalance, it allowed SOME people (like corporate execs and investors) to make out well, but middle class workers were watching numerous factories shutting down and millions of those jobs disappearing. There are small towns all across America where some factory was THE main employer, but then the company got bought and its new owners moved production to China, or it simply could not compete with China's low wages and manipulated currency and thus shut down. Many such towns have become hopeless places where the standard of living collapsed and substance abuse rose, while the wealthy in DC and NYC ignored it all and watched their stock portfolios swell. This is one reason why Americans can no longer live comfortably on the income of one wage earner - those manufacturing jobs were the backbone of the middle class, providing good wages for people who often had an education of a BA/BS degree or less.

Now, in the case of several countries, like Mexico and china, the tariffs are about more than just a gross trade imbalance from decades of massively unbalanced tariffs but also include things like facilitating illegal immigration and facilitating the flow of drugs (which kill more Americans every year than were killed in the entire Vietnam War) into the country. The tariffs may or may not be a way to deal with these issues but are seen by the administration as leverage to get attention and cooperation on these matters.

The problem these countries have is that many of them have such such trade surpluses with the US that the pain for them is unavoidably worse no matter what they do, short of lowering their own tariffs. China's move, for example, raising its tariffs on US goods imported to China is a joke...there's not much going in there, but it'll automatically cause the new tariffs on Chinese goods to go up further, since they're pegged to China's rate on US goods. One would have thought the Chinese leaders were smart enough to understand that, but apparently not.

all in the same package. There's something really wrong with the current generation of coders at some of the biggest software projects and firms. They are in big cities with fast computers, fast internet connections, unlimited data storage, etc which blind them to the constraints many ordinary folks have, and this is combined with market dominance which convinces them they can ignore the consumer and force their preferences onto people. There's ZERO concern among these people for anybody who lacks a constant, inexpensive, highspeed internet connection or for anybody who has security reasons for allowing no such connections. How is a person at a remote site with no internet connection to install and use Windows 11? How is anybody operating a PC in an environment where no internet connection is permitted supposed to run Windows 11? [crickets].

I'd like to say that this is a great opportunity for Linux and BSD, but there are far too many people involved in these projects who are constantly pushing in the same direction, making it harder to install and maintain these operating systems without a constant highspeed internet connection. When I first installed Slackware many years ago I started with a stack of floppies and the entire process was self-contained. The scheme would have worked perfectly on a Mars colony. Later, installs of Linux were from CDs or DVDs that contained EVERYTHING; any package you needed that was not part of the default install was on an optical disk and you could install it. At the end of the install all was well and no internet connection was needed. Now, one often downloads a less-then-complete install that does its magic and then goes to the internet to finish up, or to "check for updates" (which are inevitably found and downloaded and installed) before a system is complete... sort of. The odds are then fairly high that some packages you expected were not included in the particular distro and will need to be fetched using some partially-functional software installer/updater...

As long as Linux and BSD are plagued by some of the same thinking afflicting the modern version of Microsoft, they wont be able to be the obvious alternative to the Microsoft obnoxiousness.