Except not.

Harris isn’t a subpar meal that makes you sick for a little bit, but you’re fine in the long run. She is the candidate that will feed us today while kicking the can on bigger problems down the road. She’s the delicious tapeworm pork. She’ll keep the economy and war machine running so Americans can keep leading their comfy lives on top of the world for a few more years before collapse. This prolongs the damage caused by the petroleum state that we call America, which accumulates into massive climate impacts.

Trump is food poisoning that is a lot worse in the short term and for America specifically. Another Trump term is likely to lead to civil war and/or national collapse. America focusing inwards may be better for a world that America has been terrorizing and holding hostage with its massive military. America is funding genocides and producing more oil than any other nation in history. America has spent this century positioning itself as an enemy of habitability. If you realize that your survival threatens the world, shouldn’t you choose the poison for the good of others?

I suppose it all depends on how long we have until a collapse and ensuing paradigm shift under Harris (a short time will encourage me to vote for her) vs how dangerous the senile old man will be before we can overthrow him and build a new country. Harris is promising too much stability for what we need to replace; Trump is promising to be senile and easy to overthrow.

If Harris wants me to vote for her without hesitation, she needs to tell me how she plans to shut down the fossil fuel industry and the evil war machine. Trump is promising to run them stupidly and dangerously, and the ensuing damage may be better than keeping the planet-killing machine running. That’s the horrible decision of this “lesser of two evils” approach. I’d really rather vote to responsibly shut it down, but my options are either live comfortably while it destroys the earth or shove this stick between the spokes and hope that the damage of crashing is less bad than if we keep going.

That said, I already voted for Harris, because that’s where my judgement lands on this question. But it’s a serious question that needs careful consideration from everyone. This is a big and important election. Everyone should think very carefully and weigh the options. This is NOT an easy decision, and anyone who thinks it is has been drinking the kool aid of one side or the other.

In four more years, my judgement may land differently.

Ok, but what if it’s a choice between those moldy potatoes that are poison vs undercooked pork that’ll give you tapeworms like RFK Jr’s brain.

Surely the latter is the “lesser evil”. You get fed today, and maybe your immune system keeps you healthy tomorrow. Still a risky proposition!

But you could also demand that the pork gets cooked longer by adding some progressive policies like not supporting genocide, demilitarizing, and investing in a clean environment. I’d say that’s worth protesting for. Be a Karen, ask to see the manager, and demand your pork is cooked properly.

You don’t look happy as the past year closes. I don’t wish you a happy birthday this year. Too late. I wish that at the end of this year, you will be happier rolling into your next birthday. Good luck.

Yeah, I gave up reading at

it’s a shocking reminder that there are forces outside of the internet that still affect our digital lives.

It absolutely depends on the context.

They are!

Electromagnetically and gravitationally and chemically they act like stars.

Gas giant simulations are often performed by stellar codes such as mesa. Stellar physics and stellar simulations with fusion turned off. Morphologically, they are stars. We should move on from the cold war brain’s fusion chauvinism.

They are fundamentally different objects than planets. They have their own planetary systems. They’re stars, just unlit.

Juno gravity results imply Jupiter’s core is dissolved hydrogen plasma sludge, also known as the dilute core model. Kronoseismology (using saturn’s rings as a seismograph; Cassini read it like a DVD) implies the same is likely true for Saturn due to the discovery of g-mode waves mixing with the f-mode signal detected by ring occultations.

Yes.

Y dwarf stars are a mix of what was previously classified under those mass classifications.

dated July 1997 issue of the magazine

Here’s Jupiter on Wikipedia’s list of Y-class brown dwarves.

Jupiter and Saturn are in fact brown dwarves.

Stellar classes are OBAFGKMLTY, from most to least massive.

Jupiter and Saturn are brown dwarves, and fit many definitions of “star”.

They are both large enough to have developed a hydrogen plasma core furnace that dissolves the rock and ice that was once their core. They are more than just a hydrogen atmosphere, down to the core they’re a big ball of plasma undergoing all of the same physics as stellar tissue, except the pressure at the center isn’t enough to ignite fusion.

Uranus and Neptune, meanwhile, are likely too small for this, and maintain a fluid ice layer and rocky core beneath their hydrogen envelopes. There is not enough hydrogen for it to take over these worlds. Therefore, they are planets, not brown dwarf stars.

Jupiter and Saturn, however, have grown large enough for the hydrogen to have turned to plasma and dissolved and supplanted their cores with a plasma furnace.

The solar system has three stars. We are not too early to explore other star systems. We know of many planets around Jupiter and Saturn. The extraterrestrial planet with most earth-like atmosphere and surface geology that we know of is Titan, and it’s in our neighboring (sub) star system. Huygens and Juice and Europa Clipper and Dragonfly are humanity’s first missions to planets around other stars.

No factory default due to data corruption, so I uninstalled it as bloat. Then I wrote a few of my own to play with, but instead of dynamically assigning at boot I set up hotswapping.

I mean, why would you want to punch any wall.

But yeah, whoever went through this wall got lucky it wasn’t as solid as its facade.

The “it’s complicated” section surprises me.

Take two pieces of string with wooden knobs at the ends and hang them up together.

Put your arm between them and pull down quickly.

Repeat, and notice how a fraction of the time those wooden knobs may wrap around each other and become tied by a knot held by the downward force of your arm until you pull up which you can’t do if you’re hanging.

It’s the fourth amendment, Eric, not the first.

The best part is that when cornell sent out their email admonishing the action, the only example of violence they could cite was an officer’s bodycam getting bumped. It was a non-violent act of civil disobedience.

I don’t know if I can just accept that it’s not.

I know a lot of people who will be rightfully outraged if Trump wins. If Trump wins, it will be due to election interference and from stopping people from voting. He may win the electoral college, but is unlikely to win the popular vote. There are many reasons to see a Trump victory as illegitimate. If Trump wins there is a very strong chance of a civil war.

If Harris wins, there may be another Jan 6th-like action. Without Trump leading the MAGA movement, all that organized hate becomes a target for a more competent leader to harness. There is a chance that that might spiral into a larger conflict.

Remember when Bernie had a bird fly up to his podium during a speech?

Thank you, and I plan to.

As I said, I have a handful of strong cases to vote for Harris. I also had this one dissenting voice in me that was screaming to get expressed so I could look back at what I said and analyze it. Thanks for analyzing it with me. Doing this in public and with input from others helps me vet my ideas. I don’t have a social network anymore to talk about these things with. So much social cohesion broke down during the Trump years, and it hasn’t grown back well at all.

We don’t live in a unified country, and we need to be willing to say that we are broken so we can fix ourselves.

I’m not an accelerationist, and I’m not calling for civil war.

I just see that it’s coming.

I’m not an accelerationist. I’m a realist.

America is already dead.

A civil war is coming.

2025 will be another 2020 no matter what happens in November.

I don’t want the dead weight of a dead government on the side of democracy. I want the side of democracy to be free to invent something new. I don’t want a broken down old democracy fighting against a modern authoritarian. I want the authoritarians to be saddled with the complacency and inertia of the state. I don’t want the authoritarians to be free to invent something newer and more powerful that can bring our doddering democracy to its knees. Our government is old and has been stripped by Reagan/Bush/Trump. It is a liability to be running it.

People are about to die. A lot of them. I want democracy to have its best chance of coming out on top. That means that the people have to want it.