I think you attribute far more cleverness to them than they have. I don’t think they care if we’re concerned about their lack of morals or ideas. Why would they? All the information needed to know about that was publicly available before the election and it didn’t matter. The people who would care already know, and the people who wouldn’t… There’s no reason to distract them. Not that it matters, since they won and we can’t exactly change that.
I can assure you my snark here doesn’t reduce the amount of other conversations I’m having elsewhere. I can hold opinions on multiple topics at once. ;)

I wouldn’t put it past them to actually want this insanity. People said the same things about how talk of overturning Roe was just a distraction because it’s a “settled matter” and doing it would be insanity.

Imagine if they’re not actually playing 5 dimensional chess. Imagine if their platform is exactly what they say it is, and their dumb ideas are real. If they respond to claims they don’t have any ideas by saying they have the best ideas, and to claims of immorality by calling them lies and calling the accuser a pedophile.

I think people want them to be more clever than they are, because it means that people got duped, rather than their surface level idiocy being super appealing to a lot of people.

They don’t want to do that, those would both add solidly democratic senators, and likely permanently cost them the Senate.

Not like Canada and Greenland, which are notoriously conservative and would vote for Republicans consistently. Ignore the comparatively liberal policies, those aren’t related. Quebec and Greenland in particular are just chomping at the bit to jump on Republican mainstays like adopting English as the one true and official language of the US.

I would lean towards no. I’m me. I don’t consider the things that people seem to associate with their “inner child” to be exclusive to children, so I don’t feel a tension between my desire to act responsibly and my sense of wonder, joy, and playfulness.

Age isn’t a mask hiding the inner child, it’s a toolkit that helps them appreciate and engage with those things. My childish delight at birds flitting about the bird feeder is only enhanced by being able to buy my own, keep them filled, and the ability to understand more about everything that goes on with them. I have the experience and faculties to answer questions I have, which only deepens my appreciation for the “common” wonders we see everywhere. Experiencing more of life and it’s lows only makes the highs sweeter.

A child plus age and experience is an adult. You don’t need to lose the happiness to get there.

You need to think about what a backdoor looks like for different devices, and different functions of that device. “Backdoor” generally means a way to bypass security measures, but that entails can vary wildly in different contexts. For some things you can know because you can check to see if the hardware is doing what’s expected because the only meaningful backdoor would be local to the hardware.
For example, hardware based encryption systems can have their outputs compared against a trusted implementation of the same algorithm.

For cases where there isn’t an objective source of truth for “proper functioning”, or where complex inputs are accepted and either produce a simple answer (access granted/denied), or a complex behavior (logging login attempts and network calls are always expected) it can be harder to the point of impossibility to know that what’s being done is correct.
This is also the case for bugs, so it can actually be unclear if something is a backdoor or an error.
“Any sufficiently hair brained programming error is indistinguishable from an attack by a nation state threat actor”. (the goto fail bug is a great example of this. extremely dumb error every programmer has made, or a very well executed and sophisticated attack.

Ultimately, any system can be compromised by a sufficiently determined attacker. Security cannot be perfect, because at some point you need to trust someone.
The key is to decide how much you trust each system to handle whatever you need it to handle.
I trust my phone’s manufacturer as much or more than I trust the network provider. If I’m doing something naughty the person I’m communicating with getting snagged leads to me via the network and their device without needing to compromise my hardware. I choose to focus on the weak link: the people I talk with who might be unable to properly conduct a criminal conspiracy, and getting them up to speed.

Oh God, do people do that? Shouldn’t do that with any pan.

Toss a cup of water in the pan to deglaze it and scrape any crap up with your cooking tool. Dump the water in the sink and use some paper towels to wipe out any loose stuff.

This might be enough to clean it, but if not once it’s cool clean as appropriate. If it’s carbon or cast iron, reheat to cook off any water and wipe with a drop of oil you bring to smoking.

Inevitably leave on the stove until you need to use it next instead of putting it away properly.

Ah, true. That one’s become so ingrained for cooking in general that I don’t really think about it. Putpan on low/medium heat, toss in a bit of oil and let the heat get even then swirl the oil. Adjust heat to desired level and cook.

No, it doesn’t. But people think it does and will get really vocal about it if you, god forbid, get it super gross and need to rinse it out with some soap and water.

That’s why I specified that it was peer pressure, not necessity. :)

For your clothes dryer most definitely. Probably not great for the sheets either.

Carbon steel > cast iron. Lighter, basically the same heat properties, and you don’t get peer pressured into unnecessarily babying a lump of solid metal.

Seriously no reason to dote on either of them so much. Only real care you need to take is that they can rust, so don’t leave them wet. And don’t needlessly scrub them with chain mail or angle grinders, or you might need to take a few minutes fixing them with cooking oil and the oven.

He controls a propaganda machine that’s popular with an increasingly wide array of their constituents, and he’s personally popular with those same people. The only real thing an elected representative cares about is not being elected again, and musk is a threat of that to some elected representatives.

I figured it was more about fresh snow. :) fresh snow in the city is at least white, and pretty in a … Chaotic sense.

Heh, I like that.

It can definitely haul cargo, and we have much less use for the type of bombing that it does in modern times. It was still built as a strategic bomber.

The b-52 is a US long range strategic heavy bomber. It’s been in service for a very long time, and the reference seems to be that we’ll just keep updating it until it’s eventually also “new” and refreshed when the enterprise is being decommissioned.

If it’s not snowing, it’s still not green. It’s just grey. Grey is worse because at least the snow is pretty.

I believe filling out the divorce paperwork doesn’t actually make it happen, it’s just an application for divorce.
It has to be filed with the court and a hearing held to make sure it’s all good and then the judge does the thing and you’re divorced.
Mostly this is a rubber-stamping type situation, and the judge mostly makes sure that asset division is done fairly and any children are cared for.
If no one has objections, the money is simple and everyone agrees, and there’s no children the whole thing is relatively simple.

So filling out or destroying the paperwork doesn’t actually do anything.

They just wouldn’t believe it. They wouldn’t accept that it was real, and any investigation would either confirm that belief or be obviously political and corrupt.

I mean, you’re not wrong, just a hair off. It’s the most universally possible to implement.

Every version of every phone can support SMS, and no one worries that someone is spying on them when they get one.

SMS is a terrible solution, but it’s extremely easy to implement, and very accepted by people at large. That makes it all those things you mentioned, but it’s backed by a very legitimate motivation.

In other contexts this explains part of the popularity of federated signin systems, since users may not trust you, but they probably trust their email provider, and if you can piggyback off their MFA, you don’t have to hope the user will find you special enough to do the extra work.

Dedicated phone apps have a similar advantage, since you can leverage the phones built-in identity management.

Passkeys are currently being pushed very hard by security folks because, if done right, you can make the user more secure while making their sign-in process simpler, and letting them need to remember less and not install or manage anything.

You still have the ultimate issue of the atypical user who is valid and can authenticate, but for whatever reason has decided to only posess the dumbest of dumb phones, and can only accept SMS or phone calls.

It should have been a proper entitlement instead of worker funded.

If we fund it through general taxes instead of payroll, you have the wonderful effect where everyone is covered and the program can never go insolvent. When population dynamics result in a generation of retirees bigger than the current workforce you just need to change tax rates or deficit spend.

I mean, I just read through the platform of the Canadian conservative party and they’re pretty left by US standards.

True, but in the modern era so is aluminum, and I would have expected essentially everywhere to have updated by now since we’re more than a century into knowing lead and food don’t mix.