Trump was never the better alternative to Hillary.

Trump was the stalking horse of the Hilary campaign, via her Pied Piper Strategy.

He would not have even been on the ballot had she not sponsored his run.

Now we’re seeing the same dynamic in the LA mayor race, with the incumbent Karen Bass sending her donors to Spencer Pratt in order to keep a DSA rival off the final ballot.

Right up there with Google’s “Don’t Be Evil”.

Trying to bankrupt a children’s hospital because you’ve decided to launch a transgender witchhunt is comic book levels of evil.

Better than the alternative

The eternal problem with “Better than the alternative” is that it inevitably cuts both ways.

Keir Starmer was better than the alternative of Rishi Sunak.

And now I guess Nigel Farrage is better than the alternative of whatever hack Labour MP (probably Streeting) replaces Starmer.

Trump was the “better than” alternative to Hillary and then Harris just like Biden was forced down folks’ throats as the “better than” of another Trump term. From world leaders to city dog catchers, you’re constantly getting served up two shitty options and told to pick the least-worst one. And if you pick wrong (we somehow always do), the fanatics on the losing end of the spectrum scream at you for being the reason the country is falling apart.

Amazon’s service model, for example, is to twiddle the knobs to just under the point where the majority ragequit

I mean, I get Amazon Prime via their shopping service whether I want it or not. And half of their “library” such that it exists is just links out to other paid premium services. Nevermind their Netflix-esque habit of cancelling or delaying popular shows while churning out lots of AI slop to fill in the gaps.

There’s no strong incentive to drop Prime Shipping (because it’s dirt cheap and I still do plenty of retail shopping on Amazon). But I find myself going to their TV / Movies selection less and less frequently. Occasionally just pirate the Amazon show I already have access to out of convenience.

Can’t say the same of Netflix, though. Cancelled that shit a few years ago. Barely anything left worth pirating from it anymore.

Let me know when they find a way to get ads into the torrented copies of their shows.

Yeah, it’s crazy to find out a CIA operative would just lie to folks like that.

Compare like for like. How much more expensive are the detached single family homes in those downtown areas?

The townhomes down the street from the Ensamble stop on the Houston Red Line are selling for less than the condos a few blocks away

And India.

Building 5x the number of fossil fuel plants as nuclear plants.

If you believe nuclear is preventing climate change, you need to square these figures

The surprising climate fix that Democrats and Republicans both love

Landlords.

Nothing against single-family homes, but apartment buildings and condos are much more efficient for a number of reasons.

Communal structures have the benefit of efficiencies of scale but the difficulties of managing a shared social space. Consequently, they are attractive on paper but only really appealing when the financial benefits of dense urban living outweigh the perceived risks and costs.

Ideally, robust public transportation systems can get those apartment-dwellers anywhere they can’t walk to.

I got to watch the Red, Green, and Purple lines installed in downtown Houston, in anticipation of an Olympics that never arrived. One of the secondary consequences of these lines was a massive private investment in the old housing stock south of downtown. Within a decade, enormous high rise condos and dense urban living spaces were either refitted, expanded, or fully constructed from scratch all along the transit corridors.

But the rent in these units was significantly higher than what could be found on the perimeter - from my experience it was $500-$1500 more expensive than the cheaper units out on Westheimer and Beltway 8, with some downtown luxury units going for $2500 to $4500/mo more.

Meanwhile, on the condo side, you’re talking about 1200-2000 sqft units going for McMansion prices - $700k to $2.5M. Way outside the range of the average home buyer. Plus condo fees and taxes and higher utilities/groceries/etc. And good luck finding public education or childcare in the downtown districts.

If you were pulling a six-figure salary in a downtown office job, you could talk about living here. But I still know plenty of people commuting in all the way from Sugar Land or Katy or Spring, simply because a daily bus ticket or tollway pass was way cheaper than downtown rents. I also know more than a few junior professionals in their mid-20s who still live with their parents to save money.

So the ecological benefits are there. But the utility of these high rise units is heavily predicated on wages that match the sky high rents. The private sector demand for double-digit ROI makes all of these housing expansions of dubious benefit at scale. They might operate as a model for the future, but without public subsidies and rent caps, only the highest paid households are going to be able to participate.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has reportedly chosen a data analysis system from France

Okay, so they’re still doing mass surveillance on their citizenry. They’re just doing it with the Le Woke DeGuallist firm rather than the Based Trad Amerifascists

Excuse me, nobody outside of China is building new reactors

Love to listen to three hours of car ads on a five hour drive, while cruising around in a 2004 Honda Civic that I plan to keep driving for another decade.

“What if I explained the Green text joke as a tweet?”

Why build a nuclear power plant with your data center if you could just get power from the grid and drive up everyone else’s price too

The national grid has raw physical limits that many data centers already exceed.

Silicon Valley’s AI Boom Hits a Wall: Data Centers Are Built but Can’t Turn On

Power shortages and high costs are stalling new data centers, leaving the Bay Area behind faster-growing markets like Atlanta and Northern Virginia.

What do Atlanta and Virginia have access to that Silicon Valley lacks?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant

The joke of the Grok AI is how it’s generating power in one of the least cost efficient manners possible.

Musk is just burning a ton of short term capital to avoid lobbying Mississippi (fucking Mississippi, the most easy state to bend over a rail with lobbyists in the country) for a hard-line to the existing grid and some upgrades to capacity funded on the public dime.

That’s what you get to do as a trillionaire. Make stupid business decisions and then dump the turd onto your investors when they want to invest in your lucrative network of federal Pentagon contracts.

Article pitches this as either/or when it’s very obviously going to be more of one producing more of the other.

I do get tired of the “nuclear energy is better than climate change!” as though our voracious demand for cheap energy will neatly cap itself the moment we get X new nuclear facilities online.

But I also get tired of hearing people insist that nuclear energy is on the horizon, when nobody is building new plants. This is a vaporware technology. It isn’t in the production pipeline and there’s no reason to believe posting your Nuke-Love online will change that

The world would be a better place if everyone in the US treated these bigots and freaks as heavy handedly as Chinese citizens do

Most people find Houston, Texas to be hostile.

The Montrose area of Houston used to be one of the safest and liveliest Out LGBTQ communities in the country. It still has a large gay population, but the inflated real estate prices and over-development has driven lots of low income people elsewhere.

Just driving on Westheimer is enough to make rational people leave.

The traffic certainly sucks. But idk what you mean beyond that. Westheimer has a ton of cheap apartment housing and a huge multi-ethnic community of young professionals

It’s a great place to live when you’re straight out of college

And don’t ask what an Artisanal Miner is or why we’ve been importing so much of our rare earth material from a disputed territory between Congo and Rwanda.