sylver_dragon

The new seasons have been lackluster. I think one of the main issues is that the show did a lot to wrap up the majority of the main character arcs prior to the cancellations. Fry and Leela are the central characters, often trading off the position as the audience stand-in. And there is basically zero room left for character growth. We know how the Fry/Leela love story arc ends, we’ve seen it. Kif and Amy have also hit the end of their main character arcs. They are married, have kids, and mostly are settled into domestic life. Bender is Bender. A core part of his character is his resistance to growth. So, even when they drop a backstory on him and try to give him growth, it just feels out of place. That only leaves background characters to work with. But, since it takes the focus off the main characters, it makes things feel like a money-grab spin-off.

All that’s left is the sort of 90’s sit-com style, “story of the week” where nothing really changes and we all learn whatever moral lesson the writers wanted to foist on us this week in 22-minutes, plus commercial breaks. We all want “more Futurama”; but, I think the problem may be that there isn’t “more Futurama”. The stories are done, we just keep hanging on because of nostalgia, and the producers keep making it because of money. There are going to be good bits here and there. But, what we are seeing is what we are going to keep getting.

I would add the admittance of China to the WTO as another proximate cause. And one which probably had more of a material effect than NAFTA; but, NAFTA had already become a GOP talking point and it just stuck. China’s entry to the WTO was also moved over the finish line by Bush II, though most of the ground work was laid by Clinton. So, it wouldn’t have had the same clean narrative as NAFTA. US Employment in manufacturing went into freefall in late 2000 and early 2001. This was also during a recession, so that is intermixed with the effects of those changes in international trade. But, even as the recession receded and the US entered an economic boom, leading up to the 2008 crash, manufacturing employment in the US either held steady or decreased slightly. It’s unsurprising that the same period saw a lot of offshoring of manufacturing to China. And this was also the period of Neoliberal economists pushing “comparative advantage” and how the US losing all those manufacturing jobs was a good thing.

So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
– Barack Obama, 2008

Once again, the format doesn’t work for me when the main topic is about a fad that nobody talks about anymore.

Ya, this is was a clear problem with the episode. Sure, all the NFT jokes were on point; but, given how much the issue has faded, it felt stale. I enjoyed the Bender story. But, I suspect this was a bit of grasping at straws. The best Futurama has been when the show focused on the characters. But, with a lot of the main stories about the characters wrapped up in previous seasons, there isn’t a lot for the writers to explore. So, we get a Bender backstory which was ok, I guess.

I’m still looking forward to the rest of the season. But, I can see the room for criticism.

No, because your vote won’t encourage investment in flipping the State. I agree that the current duopoly sucks. I was an ardent Bernie supporter and would very much like viable third parties. But, the DNC isn’t going to be looking at those third party votes. They need to believe that the Democrats have a chance of winning before they will invest in a State. If all they see are protest votes, then they won’t see a viable path to them winning and they will continue to ignore the State.

Ya, it sucks, but we really do need to just keep holding our nose and pulling the lever for the Democrat in the general election.

If you are in a deep red state, it will seem that your vote won’t matter. Because it mostly won’t. However, the way States vote changes over time. The closer the vote totals in a State, the more likely the National Democratic Party is to invest resources into building up and promoting candidates in those States. That sort of thing can shift the needle, if slowly. Keep in mind that California voted Republican from '68 to '88 (source) but shifted over time.

It sucks to vote and feel like you’re just pissing in the wind. But, each vote moves the needle just a bit more and maybe, eventually, things will swing.

Java is dying in the same way that Linux is winning the desktop war, it’s always going to happen “next year” but never “this year”. I spent a lot of years as a sysadmin and while I would have been quite happy to piss on the grave of Java, we always seemed to be installing some version of the JRE (though, usually not the latest version) on systems. There is just a lot of software which is built with it. This was especially true when dealing with US FedGov systems. Developers for the USG loved Java and we had both the JRE and JDK (because why not require the Development Kit for a user install?) sprinkled about our environment like pigeon droppings.

That said, don’t get too caught up focusing on one language. A lot of the underlying data structures and theory will transfer between languages. What you are learning now may not be what you end up working with in the future. Try to understand the logic, systems and why you are doing what you are doing, rather than getting too caught up on the specific implementation.

As a worker in the Cybersecurity space, it’s absolutely fantastic for job security.

Russia could do that. But, they are kinda busy trying to keep up with demand from their own forces. And that’s only going to get worse as they run out of mothballed Soviet shitboxes to reactivate.

And once you have found your specific collection of plugins that happen not to put the exact features you need behind a paywall but others, you ain’t touching those either.

And this is why, when I’m investigating phishing links, I’ve gotten used to mumbling, “fucking WordPress”. WordPress itself is pretty secure. Many WordPress plugins, if kept up to date, are reasonably secure. But, for some god forsaken reason, people seem to be allergic to updating their WordPress plugins and end up getting pwned and turned into malware serving zombies. Please folks, if it’s going to be on the open internet, install your fucking updates!

I suspect Politico fixed it. When I first loaded the page, it had the same image you see in the thumbnail. And that’s was what prompted my comment. Looks like they updated the page and it’s now an appropriate image.

Story about Belgian F-16s.
Picture shows US F-35.
Guess the AI’s came for Politico’s editors first.

Unfortunately, yes. There have been a lot of efforts to shift the energy mix in the EU away from Russian oil and natural gas. But, the effort has been slow and has meant rising costs. Also, by removing Russian production from the supply side, prices will invariably increase. Ukraine does have to balance the damage that can do to foreign support, against their war aims. Personally, I think it’s pretty selfish of the EU and US to ask Ukraine not to strike those resources. It’s essentially the US/EU saying, “more of your people need to die, so we can save money.” It’s a really crappy thing to ask.

War is logistics. If the Russian war machine can be starved of fuel and money, the machine will grind to a halt. It’s just a question of, can Ukraine cause enough damage to Russia’s oil infrastructure fast enough to survive the advantages Russia has in manpower and equipment?

I mean, the US could do that, but it’s kinda pointless. Ukraine would just be buying them with money that the US Government gave them in the aid package. It would mean the US Treasury moving money from the “aid going to Ukraine” column to the “US DoD budget” column. Sure, some of the aid is structured as loans. However, the President has the power to forgive half of those loans by the end of the year and the next President will have the power to forgive the rest of those loans in 2026. Unless the war suddenly ends and Ukraine suddenly finds a shit-ton of money somewhere, those loans are just going to be forgiven. As there is just no way they will ever be paid back.

Handy Infographic from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO):
.

• Total Federal outlays: $6.1 Trillion
• Federal Social Spending
  • Social Security: $1.3T
  • Medicare: $0.839T
  • Medicaid: $0.616T
  • Income Security Programs: $0.448T
  • Total Social Spending: $3.203T

Math warning:

(3.203T / $6.1T) * 100% = 52.5%  

So, not quite the previous poster’s 55%, but pretty close. There is also an “Other” column which likely includes other social spending and may have gotten us to that number. But, it’s enough of a mixed bag, and way too much work, to try and pick it all out.

While the US could certainly adjust it’s spending in a lot of good ways, the idea that the US spends “nothing” on social programs is provably false. These numbers also get weird and much harder to pin down when we look at State level taxes and spending. Many years ago, I dug into education spending in the US. And while Federal Education spending is a drop in the bucket, the actual number is pretty large, because it’s considered a State responsibility and each State spends large amounts of money on it.

For example, my home State of Virginia budgets $29.9 Billion for “Health and Human Services” this Fiscal Year 2024 and $25.0 Billion for “Education”, those two line items eating up about 62% of the State budget.

Considering that Congress just (fucking finally) handed the President a whole lot of money in “Presidential Drawdown Authority”. I suspect the conversation is going to go a whole lot like:
US DoD: We bought all these former Soviet shit-boxes to prevent them being used by Russia and to build goodwill with Kazakhstan.
US President: Hey, look at all these former Soviet shitboxes the DoD has sitting in inventory. We don’t need these. I’m giving them to Ukraine who can find a use for them.

US Federal Law does NOT require that bills only deal with a single issue. So, a single bill could send aid to Ukraine, outlaw hats and declare Tuesday, “puppy kicking day”. And that would be fully within the US Constitutional method for passing Federal laws. All that matters is that the exact same text is passed in both The House of Representatives and The Senate and is then signed by The President. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff around it (veto process, and filibuster), but the ELI5 version is both houses of Congress pass the same bill and the President signs it and thus it becomes US Federal Law.

There will, of course, be a whole other process around the law being challenged in the Courts. ByteDance will undoubtedly challenge the TikTok ban in Court. And that will take years to fully wind it’s way through the system. And the courts may issue an injunction, preventing the law from being enforced, until the decision is made. Basically saying, “nope Federal Government, you cannot enforce this until we say so”. Personally, I would expect that in this case. So, don’t expect TikTok to leave the US any time soon. Note that, this can be done to part of a law (again, I would expect this) and not the whole law at once. So, this won’t imperil US aid to Ukraine, Israel or Taiwan. It just means that we’re likely to see the bounds of US Federal Government power tested a bit. Does the US Federal Government have the power to unilaterally kick a company out of the US? I’d bet on “yes”, especially with the ties to national security. But, I could easily lose that bet.

He just wants a bit more Living Space.

Yes, yes it has. And it’s directly because Russia engaging in exactly the type of expansionist wars NATO was set up to stop.

While embarrassing, the environment in which that happened was entirely different. You had Regan and Gorbachev actively working to improve relations. And no one was actively trying to blow up Soviet infrastructure. You’d think the Russian air defenses would be a bit more sensitive to small aircraft coming from Ukraine in this environment.