Von Braun had thousands of concentration camp inmates work on his rockets under horrible conditions. He should have been tried for crimes. Maybe we can name it New Himmler or New Goebbels.
I was there 2 years ago and was told it would open in a month. I seriously considered staying longer for a few weeks for the opening. I guess I am glad I didn’t.
I would love to see a new Newton with the same spirit of innovation but current tech. Current phones are so boring. No innovation, just slow evolution.
It really was way ahead of its time. I remember the handwriting recognition being excellent for the time, too. Meanwhile Palm forced its users to write each letter one at a time in a tiny box and requiring specific sequencing of each stroke too.
Newton had a modem module you could plug in and third parties had written web browsers for it, it basically was the first smart phone just without the phone.
Trying to imagine that level of innovation, but starting from present day tech, is very interesting.
I had the message pad 100 and a message pad 120. My handwriting improved, and it s recognition also improved. It was brilliant. I stored shopping lists and recipes on it. Although a lot of fun was made of the handwriting recognition, it was surprisingly good, and got better with use.
This whole process has shown again that a democracy can only function if everybody or at least most politicians act in good faith and respect the rules . If you constantly ignore boundaries, the whole things falls apart. I honestly have no idea how the US can return to some level of sanity. It just gets worse and worse. Lots of energy is being wasted on posturing and coherent long term policy is basically impossible. I really worry where this is going.
This whole process was the epitome of anti-democratic principles by design: the Senate is expressly an anti-democratic institution (wildly different levels of representation/power for different voters in different states), and the whole standoff centered on protecting the filibuster, which makes the anti-democratic senate even less democratic by allowing a tiny group within that tiny group to shut down the entire lawmaking process.
It's exactly what the founders, who all read Plato's Republic and its warnings about republics devolving into democracy, wanted.
Hard disagree, I think time has proven that the filibuster (or some process like it) is necessary as a stabilizing effect on democracy. Making legislation easier to block than pass makes it so that small swings in representation, say 51-49 to 49-51 can't produce massive swings in policy. The minority party being able to, with effort, stop certain pieces of legislation they find abhorrent by raising the bar to it passing is a good thing.
The Veto is also profoundly undemocratic in exactly the same direction and it's also a good thing.
It hasn't done a good job stabilizing for decades in this case. The power of the people was stripped unilaterally and none of these mechanisms stopped it.
Not clear on what we’re disagreeing about: yes, anti democratic mechanisms have a stabilizing effect on democracy. They accomplish this by thwarting democracy.
I’m not saying whether it’s good or bad, it is what it is, but these anti-democratic mechanisms are intentional.
The Senate is already an antidemocratic brake/stabilizer. Adding a brake to it is stultifying.
> so that small swings in representation, say 51-49 to 49-51 can't produce massive swings in policy
Exactly, and this is bad. Voters should all know that every vote matters. The current setup creates the false impression that both parties would fundamentally steer the ship the same way ("uniparty"). The path to a government that is more responsive to the needs of citizens involves allowing winning parties to actually govern.
I would argue that we want a more responsive, dynamic government that attempts to represent us. The filibuster is in direct direct opposition to all of that.
The GOP won the last national elections. They should be allowed to end SNAP, ACA, EPA, Labor Dept, NSF, Dept. of Education, FDA, all science grants, Medicaid, put armed military checkpoints on every city block, end legal immigration, and zero out federal funding to any school that is closed on the federal MLK Jr holiday[1]. (And to the extent that those things are not legal now, they have the votes to make them legal.)
And then in '26 and '28, voters should decide whether they agree with that vision for how the country should be run.
The result will be a much more responsive, dynamic system where Congress cares more about what we voters think.
1 - taken loosely from the 2024 GOP party platform and administration statements from this year
> The result will be a much more responsive, dynamic system where Congress cares more about what we voters think.
Or an overwhelming switch the other direction, just as chaotic and unpopular, continuing to swing back and forth every four years.
Who knows, maybe the overreach of the current party in power (even though "won the last national elections" meaning less than 50% of the cast vote, but that's another discussion) will cause a swing the other direction so hard that the opposition party gains a supermajority in congress. Things will be more stable in that case, if not universally popular, because well-crafted legislation is a good bit harder to reverse than executive orders.
IMHO - a step in right direction would be abolishing first-past-the-post voting system, together with electoral college. Finally USA could get a feel for multi-party system, instead of always voting for lesser evil. MAGA could be their own party, but they will need to deal with coalition instead of having total chokehold on all institutions of government.
Not sure how to break Senate and highly unequal representation it gives.
Though realistically I don't think this will ever be possible.
Same for me. I used to do desktop dev with MFC and WPF but these days you would be suicidal to build any app that needs to last for a few years on .NET. If totally needed, WPF is still the best bet. Otherwise I am pushing everything I can to the web.
Something being illegal only has a meaning if somebody prosecutes it and has the power to stop it. With the DOJ head’s main qualification being loyal to the president there is nothing that will be done.
My other concern is that Congress will spend the next few decades prosecuting, investigating and impeaching each other without doing anything useful for the country. I thought impeaching Trump while knowing that it would never succeed was a big distraction and basically show business. I would like to see much more focus on actual problems of citizens. Trump being in prison won’t improve my life.
The high level corruption is core reason why nothing can be done for actual problems of citizens. And the more corruption, the less will be done. Impeaching Trump would be first step toward word where lives of citizens can be improved.
What happened was the opposite and lives of citizens will be worst off.
It was known from the start that the impeachment wouldn't work. It was purely symbolic.
Instead of impeachment it would be much better to work on winning elections and then do what's good for the country. A good start would be to run decent candidates.
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