Anecdotally, it has made things worse. The shopping bags were already being reused as garbage bags, now I have to buy rolls of single use plastic bags instead. Worse, those tote bags are everywhere now, and so much less ecological.

So what you are saying is it’s not the immigrants that are arriving that is the problem, it’s what happens to them once they are here?

Shocker.

Such an LLM would have the “knowledge” of almost every

Most human knowledge is not written down. Your premise is flawed to the core.

Yes and no. A lot of people are misinformed. It’s easy to say not being misinformed is the responsibility of the individual, just like recycling plastic is the responsibility of the individual consumer. Reality is a bit more nuanced. Misinformed people often simply don’t have access to good information or critical thinking skills to not be duped. Many others are straight up vulnerable to manipulation, through fears etc.

Democracy only works if people are informed. I think the American system has failed catastrophically to inform ordinary people.

Governments are the product of the people. There is no divine or natural laws that triggers “an election”. A government is simply created from thin air when a group of people (any group of people) get together and say: fuck the old system, we are putting that in the trash and signing a new social contract.

Of course, there’s virtually never unanimity of agreement over this social contract in one geographic area, so that social contract is only as binding as the force used to put it in effect.

Realistically, 6 months+ of government shutdown in the US will likely cause a collapse of the USA as a single unified federal entity, since the federal government effectively rots. At that point, all bets are off. A fracture of the US is very possible.

This is how the United States of America turns into the States of America.

Here’s the thing. Y’all sitting around waiting for the institutions to do their job. Y’all waiting for the institutions to do the right thing. But y’all institutions have been corrupted, so they ain’t gonna do anything. It’s up to you, the people to clean up house now, by sending a strong message. And it doesn’t take that much to take action. There is incredible power in the people and in collective action. But for now it is locked away in tepid comfort. That comfort won’t last though. It never does under tyranny.

Hard times make hard men, hard men make soft times, soft times make soft men, soft men make hard times <- we are here.

Your insight is accurate, but also as ephemeral as the assumption about the state of the world that came before it. The wheel will move forward yet again, starting with hard times hardening you.

People rather lie to themselves than face hard truths. It’s in human nature, and itself explains a lot of the evils of the world. But facing those hard truths is also liberating. The sooner we accept these human flaws, the sooner we can get back to that experiment of progress.

I think the design philosophy is that each tile represents no more than a single entity at a time, and compact enough that you can arrange the entities in a section to represent a device, room or group.

In your example, perhaps the room also has a humidifier and/or heater. So in reality, the room temperature entity isn’t truly tightly coupled with the fan. The heater and or humidifier are also a part of the whole.

With tiles, you are in complete control to arrange groups of entities that represent a larger whole, in whatever scope you like.

I don’t think you understand what being squeezed is like. There is no fighting back when you have no options.

Hate to break it to you, but for the first time, the younger generation skewed Trump. In fact every demographic skewed Trump. This cancer is affecting all of society, not just a single demographic.

I’m using off-the shelf CT-clamps with an ESP. Obviously it’s a fair amount more work, but it’s cheaper than a commercial solution, fully offline and no subscriptions, you know exactly what you are getting, and you can build a solution that is just the right size for your application, and infinitely modifiable if your needs change.

Surely the SVGO package can be compiled into a browser bundle.

I might look into this myself…

Does this support SVG, i.e. SVGOMG/SVGO? If not, that’s a glaring omission.

The US cutting off the rest of the world first does the exact opposite of this. No matter how big the US is, there’s not a chance in hell the US can both compete with China and antagonize the rest of the world at the same time. This is pure fantasy.

Priced out of circuses? My dude, social media is the new circus, cheaper and more accessible than ever. No need for bread when we can control and distract the masses by pulling on the algorithm levers at no cost.

Bread and circus. The dial on the circus went up (social media) so the powerful can now steal the bread (goods).

It’s all just more of the same.

I’m sure attacking states is going to make the USA a stronger union, especially as it isolates itself from the world.

That’s called the free market, you communist pig.

For very thin veneers, very sharp shaves or block planes with months or years of practice or specialized machinery are probably the way to go to minimize waste.

A table saw with a thin kerf blade is probably the most practical approach, if you don’t have months to dedicate to this project. I remember someone doing something similar for a guitar build at a local maker space.