Aceticon

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It's a "publicly traded company", not a "public company" - so a company where anybody who has the money to do so can buy shares in it, not a company owned by the state (which can be States, Regions, Municipalities, the Central Government and so on).

Since a "public company" is one oned by the state, in a Democracy that means every citizen owns part of it and all have an equal share of ownership (via their electoral vote they chose directly or indirectly who manages the companies owned by the state), whilst a "publicly traded company" is only owned by some amongst the public (those who bought shares in it, which can only happen if they had the money to do so) and the sizes of each owner's stakes are highly uneven with a few owning far, far, FAR larger fractions of the company than the vast majority (so, not at all a democratic system).

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I read the comments here, starting from the perspective that merely being a "conservative" was no reason for defederation (I have a 1990s idea of what the word "conservative" means), then it turns out we're talking about people posting Nazi shit at will and it staying up, which definitelly justifies defederation and the "Nazi bar" label, but apparently (from his own participation here) the Admin of the instance is willing to ban the Nazi types and possibly the groups in that instance which were ok with Nazi posts.

If the admin does this, then I'm against defederation, if not then I'm in favour of defederation. Sadly I can't encode such a view in just a Yay or Nay metric (i.e. upvote/downvote), hence I will neither upvote nor downvote and instead am leaving my rationale here as a post.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

That second formula is for how much power gets dissipated in a resistance (hence the R in it) , not how much power travels through a line.

That said the previous poster was indeed incorrect - the required thickness of a cable through which a certain amount of power passes depends only on current, not voltage: make it too thin and it can literally melt with a high enough current and the formula of the power it is dissipating as heat that can cause it to melt is that second formula of yours and the R in that formula is inverselly proportional to the cross-cut area of the cable, which for a round cable is the good old area of a circle formula which depends on the square of the radius - in other words the thicker the cable the less current it can take without heating up too much or, putting it the other way around, the more current you want to safely pass through a cable the thicker it needs to be.

In summary, thinner cables heat up more with higher currents (and if they heat up enough they melt) because even pure copper has some resistance and the thinner the cable the higher the resistance. If you need to move Power, not current specifically (such as to charge something), you can chose more current or to have a higher voltage (because P = V x I), and chosing a higher current means you need thicker cables (because as explained above the cables would overheat and even melt otherwise) but a higher voltage doesn't require a thicker cable.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I've been very purposefully avoiding the US ever since the Patriot Act exactly because it became possible for the TSA to riffle through your electronics (even confiscate them) and do this kind of shit.

Then on top of that festering pit of autocracy which, by the way, nobody reversed in all this time, Trump added the risk of ICE detention and "free trip to El Salvador (to go check a mega prison there)".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

"As long as it's the right races doing it, they have our unwavering support"

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I'm thinking that maybe it's because, having spent years with a "if you're not with us then you must be with them" bubble, really believing it and actively using that "argument" against others, they suddenly find themselves is disagreement with the old us yet not because they agree with them.

That being so, their "I'm not political" is their way of coping with it.

Of course, as many are pointing out, everything is political, but given that these people for years believed a hyper-tribalist and ultra-simplified "it's either us or them" view of everything the idea that everything is politics might be a bit too far ahead for them who have just discovered the hard way that one can have beliefs about how things should be which are neither us nor them.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

And all this is without even taking into account the fall of the Earnings side of the P/E.

If Tesla sales keep falling that "correct" P/E or 10 won't be $19.57, it will be a lower number that keeps on falling along with the fall in sales because less sales means less earnings.

Even better: like all automakers Tesla has a lot of fixed capital costs which can't be easily shrinked (factories, equipment) so the fall in sales might actually push them below profitability since they will only be able to reduce costs in the short and mid term up to a point (it take time to sell a factory and the equipment in it)

If the company becomes unprofitable, it will need money from outside to keep going, and in an environment of quickly falling share prices that money is not going to come from outside investors and getting it from lenders using Tesla's own stock as collateral will be very difficult if not impossible.

A fast enough fall in sales right alongside a steep fall in stock price could bankrupt Tesla.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Yeah, well, what happened this election is the product of people like you not putting the effort which could have been done way back in the mid 2010 when the consequences of the policies chosen to "save the Economy" after the 2008 Crash were starting to get pretty obvious.

The Democrat Party has been using "lesser evil" as their core campaign strategy all the whole becoming increasingly evil since way back and this time around there wasn't even the excuse that a guy like Trump could never get elected because he already had been elected once before.

(Also and judging by how they're voting, Democrats have always been relaxed about the possibility of Trump in the White House, which would explain why they persisted in not moving an inch politically to accommodate anti-Genocide and broader Leftwing demands - for all their alarmist talk they were much more willing to lose the election to Trump than to lose AIPAC funding or their non-executive board memberships and speech circuit rewards for being friendly to certain very rich people).

For any sufficiently principled person, the policies of the Democrat party since way back when Obama decided to "save the Economy" after the 2008 Crash by protecting the Asset Owners whilst letting those who work for a living to rot should have been enough to prompt them to become politically active, or at least the first Trump victory should've. In fact it was the British version of such policies (as I was living in Britain at the time) that prompted me to become politically active about 8 years ago in a country which wasn't even my country of birth, even before the whole Brexit mess.

At the very least you should have been heavily criticizing the Democrat Party leadership during all this time, both on the evil things they did and the good things they refuse to do. An argument for withholding criticism can only really be made for the period during the electoral campaign, not for before and most certainly not for after it.

Truly principled people who only voted Democrat because they felt they had no other option are right now laying it out thick on that party's leadership for what they did, are doing and are refusing to do, not coming out to defend them.

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All that said, political activism is something you start investing in sooner rather than later, because even local changes require a lot of people to change their minds and that takes time to make (plus if a movement against them starts growing sitting politicians will take note and might change the way they act), so you start now, not spend the next couple of years wallowing in helplessness only to get to the next election, be faced with an almost-Fascist Democrat candidate all over again and claim "there's nothing we could have done, we just have to vote for this one to stop the pure-Fascist candidate".

You don't just have to help the public become aware of certain things, you have to find those who feel like you, organize and start trying things out to spread awareness even before even truly starting to change public perception of certain subjects and Democrat party representatives, so it takes years, not months.

The worst that can happen is that nothing comes out of it, but then again you might make a difference if you do try, whilst if you don't try anything at all, nothing is exactly what you'll achieve and in a few years' time you'll be repeating a variant of the very same claims of helplessness you're making now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_the_United_States_drone_strikes#Approvals_of_drone_strikes

However, in the pre-strike review, Obama "embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties" that effectively counted "all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."

This, by the way, means that in that link of yours, counts for combatant deaths is almost certainly counting "combatants" in Obama's very special way, and ditto for all other reports of combatant deaths from the Obama era.

So you're either an useful idiot for believing the numbers, massaged by adjusting the meaning of the words, of the political propaganda from the Obama era (and changing the meaning of words to massage the numbers is a doublespeak technique in the same way as Trump redefining of words, just less brazen and more indirect) or you're so tribalist you're basically a sociopathy and are knowingly defending with falsehoods a guy who ordered the deaths of thousands of people.

The former is excusable, the latter is not.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

I'm sorry but in over 2 decades of observing US politics from outside as I saw the country go from what I admired as a kid in the 80s into a shit show, I've seen a ton of "mild when it could've been heavy" regression being celebrated as "good" and a lot of one step forward and two steps back, but never any actual real, sustained progress.

Sure, you can claim that, for example, Clinton's economic boom after he tore down the Glass-Steagal Act was "progress", as long as you ignore the other consequences of it, namely the 2008 Crash, and the Recession after it and rise in inequality and collapse of social mobility.

If you use the traditional technique of sleazy politicians of claiming successes as theirs and failures as somebody else's, they're all making progress, but if you look at the trend line on things like inequality it's been consistently getting worse, just slower at times.

And no, that's not all you have: you can become politically active and along with other similarly minded people start trying to take back the Democrat Party at the local level - start supporting non-AIPAC bough candidates in the next Congressional and Senatorial Primaries, do leafleting campaigns reminding everybody of the evil-doing of many of the sitting Democrat Congressmen and Senators (their voting record is open and them receiving money from AIPAC is known for many). At a national level it's hard for non-billionaire individuals to move public opinion but at local level it's a lot easier.

After all, most polls seem to show that the actual Democrat voter mainly have good values, so it seems to me that it's the Democrat Political Leadership who are misaligned with the principles of the Democrat Party voters, no doubt because they can run their campaigns on "vote lesser evil" and there will be an over-abundance of people spreading the message that "We must vote for so that the more evil candidate does not win, there is no other option" all the while the evil Democrat candidate won't move in the slightest to not be evil.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

Your link is for something else altogether than the campaign of murder by predator drone that Obama conducted in Pakistan, which if remember it correctly included blowing up a whole wedding to get to 1 man.

Frankly I don't care if he was the worst, the 2nd worst or the 3rd worst: the problem is that he still signed the orders for quite a lot of outright murders (no due process involved) and since I'm not a member of his political tribe and thus don't have a special moral discount for the chiefs of the tribe, his campaign of murder by drone puts him in the "Evil" category right alongside the rest.

Then there is the whole part of how he chose to save the Finance Industry after the Crash (which, me being in the Industry in London at the time, observed with quite a lot of attention).

But hey, cheers for quoting Goebels to defend a guy who ordered a campaign of murders in Pakistan: it's always pretty special when an American Neoliberal quotes Nazis to the rest of us to defend their own tribe's murdering leaders.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (9 children)

Has there been progress in the US since way back in Reagan's time?!

Because at so many levels, from inequality and the collapse of social mobility to widespread civil society surveillance and support for Genocide abroad, the US has been constantly regressing for decades both under Democrats and Republicans.

I mean, the last actual American President passing measures that one could call "progress" was JFK. Even Obama was the President that ordered the highest number of drone murders whilst in office of all and decided that the way to save the economy after the 2008 Crash was to protect asset owners and large financial institutions - the rich, not the rest - resulting in the steep increase in social inequality and final collapse of social mobility in the US of the last decade, and which created the fertile ground for the growth of support for the likes of Trump.

From my viewpoint as an European, you're just defending a slower regression, which is understandable but it ain't "progress" (last chance at that was Bernie Sanders and his primary was very overtly torpedoed by the DNC), and it's also understandable that others with strong moral convictions and even personal reasons connected to America's continued descent into evil aren't supporting any evil in America, even the "lesser" one that slows down the regression a bit.

You would have been absolutelly right if this election was indeed progress vs regression, but it wasn't, it was one Genocide-endorsing candidate who chose to try to attract far-right votes by getting cozier with the likes of the Cheney family versus a Genocide-endorsing candidate who is openly a far-right populist - two forms of evil differing mainly in delivery style and how fast do they want to go rightward - you blaming people for chosing "none of the above" is pure tribalism.

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