If that’s something that regularly happens in the US, do you have any examples from the last decade, instead of three examples from 55-60 years ago?

To be fair, the dramatic nosedive in quality of GoT happened when they ran out of source material and had to wing it.

3-body problem is a finished trilogy, so it could all have the quality of the first seasons of GoT.

A dozen cosmere novels is what, four years of writing for him?

The last three third party candidates who won more than one state were Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and Theodore Roosevelt.

The first two won the south on account of regional anger at the civil rights movement.

Roosevelt split the vote. 50.6% of the country voted for the Republican candidate or a former Republican, but the Democrat won a landslide with only 41% of the popular vote and 81% of the electoral college vote.

The closest a third party candidate has ever come to winning is Breckenridge, who got 18% of the popular vote and 23.8% of the EC vote running as a Southern Democrat because the south didn’t like Stephen Douglas (who got 29.5% of the popular vote but only won a single state).

Voting third party basically doesn’t work. Any time its been significant, it’s just caused a spoiler effect.

I assume his point is that calling Manchin or Sinema “liberal” isn’t super accurate.

Essentially.

Medical ethics prevent actual medical professionals from participating in executions. So they make random prison employees do it. So it’s often botched.

She was kicked out due to complaints about her vaping and being loud.

Everything else came out afterwards when they double checked the tapes.

She’s a 37 year old divorced grandmother.

You’re essentially correct, there, but slightly off on a couple details. About a month before her divorce finalized, she was kicked out of a musical for vaping and being rowdy with her new boyfriend.

And memory bugs are only a subset of bugs that can be exploited in a program. Pretending Rust means no more exploitation is stupid.

This is facile.

According to Microsoft, about 70% of security bugs they see are memory safety issues.

Yes: if you introduce memory safety, there’s still those 30% of security bugs left. But, well, I’d rather worry about 30% of issues than 100%…

Similarly, I use libraries that eliminate SQL injections unless you really go out of your way.

Emacs is a bunch older than common lisp.

One of its more idiosyncratic design decisions was using dynamic scope, rather than lexical scope. They did add in per-file lexical scope, though.

It also just doesn’t implement a lot of common lisp’s standard library.

Emacs unfortunately uses Emacs lisp, not common lisp or scheme.

Crosswords have clues going across and down.

The words just use common letters so they’re things puzzle creators wish were real words. They’re not currently words.

That sounds a bit more like a nightclub.

I’d never want to live next to a nightclub, but living next to a tavern or pub would be fine.

Vav is a product of ashkenaszi pronunciations due to yiddish. Originally it’s Waw.

Vav has nothing to do with Yiddish.

The pronunciation shift occurred in a large number of groups that didn’t speak Yiddish, and shifts like that also aren’t uncommon cross-linguistically.

The exact same shift happened in Italian, as well: v in classical Latin made a w sound, but morphed to a v in most romance languages.

Pronunciation shifts don’t have to come out of influence of other languages, they just kinda happen normally on their own. Sometimes this causes spelling changes (such as the many Spanish words with an h that came from a Latin f, like hablo or hijo), other times it changes the sound of the letter, such as how the Greek phi went from an aspirated p to an f sound, or a j went from a y sound to an English j.

And the multiple names for God thing comes from Kaballah

Kabbalah talks about the multiple names of god, but the Torah itself uses a number of different names for god.

For that matter, look at Hebrew names. You have names like Matityahu (gift of god), Daniel (god is my judge), and eliyahu (god is my god), using different names of god. Why do biblical Hebrew names use both el and yahu to refer to god, if multiple names was a kabbalistic innovation?

Curb weight is the weight of the car itself, plus any gas, oil, etc it needs to function.

Gross weight is maximum weight the vehicle is designed to support. It’s the curb weight plus the payload capacity.

If a car has a curb weight of 3k lbs and a gross weight of 4k, it doesn’t weigh 4k lbs unless you have 1k lbs of passengers and cargo in it.

In areas that get cold, you can’t just use a heat pump. Residential heat pumps are only good to about 20 to 25f.

That was true a couple decades ago, but hasn’t really been true in a while.

A combination of inverters, variable speed compressors, vapor injection, and using slightly different refrigerants means there’s a number of cold climate heat pumps on the market that will heat down below -13°F.

Wood stoves often just have radiators or fans powered by heat differentials.

They’re more of a solution for small cabins than mcmansions, though

It’s not that there’s anything unnatural about water. It’s just not a remedy for anything but dehydration.

Corporations buy housing because they beleive its a good investment.

Right now, they’re right. But a lot of that is because it’s legally hard to build enough new housing to keep up with demand in many cities because most of their area is zoned exclusively for mcmansions.

Housing in the middle of nowhere being cheap if you can’t get a good job in the middle of nowhere.

Three year olds aren’t all that smart, but they learn in a way that ChatGTP 3 and ChatGPT 4 don’t.

A 3 year old will become a 30 year old eventually, but ChatGPT 3 just kinda stays ChatGPT3 forever. LLMs can be trained offline, but we don’t really know if that converges to some theoretical optimum at some point and how far away from the best possible LLM we are.